dots and loops

• The Psych Files Podcast | Episode 139: Blaming the Victim in Reverse – the Justice Motive
  Lately I've been interested in what some call the Just World Hypothesis, which is the idea that somehow reality is inherently Just. This is an idea that people have been struggling with since at least the time of the Book of Job. The eastern idea of Karma neatly handles the problem, as does the idea of an afterlife, with both a Heaven and Hell, and a Purgatory where one can do time to insure the scales of justice are properly balanced before moving on.

  Surely this deep need for justice is behind the cycles of revenge and retribution we see throughout history and in the world today.

• Windows 7 tip: (elevated) command prompt anywhere
  Why doesn't anybody bother to tell us these things?

The Brain Science Podcast had an interesting episode devoted to the subject of free will and I think it helped clarify for me some of the concepts. The variant of free will in question is a traditional and spiritually informed one, whereby our actions originate in some unassailable kernel of the self. Some people consider the workings of the frontal lobes to be free will, but that is a weaker notion.

The podcast helped me to conceptualize the issue in terms of causation. I’ll outline two different stances, one spiritual and the other materialistic. I won’t pretend to get either right. It’s interesting to note up front that historically there have been theological stances which do not believe in free will, Calvinism being one example. I think the issue partly being the difficulty in reconciling individual free will with the idea of God’s omnipotence. continue reading

This morning on the way to work I listened to a Planet Money podcast about ex-drug dealer Freeway Rick Ross. The planet money team wanted to get his responses and opinions regarding the economics of drug dealing, to test how well they match up with economists predictions. All of this was very interesting, of course, but while listening to Freeway Rick describe the life and times of a L.A. crack dealer I suddenly realized that for Rick, dealing drugs put him in the highly desirable state called flow by positive psychologists. Rick, who spent a while in jail and is now out on parole, says there is nothing else he would rather do than be a drug dealer, and while I can’t help thinking this betrays a shortcoming of imagination, it is hardly surprising considering how much flow he achieved in his former job, where he was essentially CEO of a thriving business.

Anyway, I haven’t read much about flow but I imagine it’s an idea that is not typically called upon to illuminate the motivations and psychology of those striving for goals that don’t match up with societies.