Quick Hits for Wednesday
Published June 27th, 2007Just some minor thoughts I guess:
- CNN recently covered “The Secret” - they got some skeptics opinions, and they make a whole lot of sense. Cancer survivors? Sexual assault victims? Holocaust prisoners? It’s your fault - your negative thoughts attracted bad things!
- Yahoo finally does something to get a bit of a leg-up on google. They’ve integrated flickr photos into their image search! Google’s best response is to integrate picasa web photos, but that service is inferior to flickr. Excellent move for Yahoo.
- Ed Brayton, one of my favorite bloggers, writes on why the Judicial Branch is his favorite. And what can I say? I pretty much agree with everything he lays out in this post. Adding “Under God”to the pledge is a violation of the separation of church and state when children in public schools are expected, through either institutional or social pressure, to recite it. And any Supreme Court test you can apply will agree.
- If you’ve read The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon (or if you’re familiar with Flowers for Algernon), you will be interested to read that autism has been corrected in lab rats. We’re getting close to some very difficult ethical dilemmas. The book really deals with them well.
i have to admit that i haven’t read the book “the secret”. only seen the 90 minute dvd. overall, it is an interesting theory and i still see no harm in positive thinking; but to blame things that are not part of your own locus of control like the holocaust on the law of attraction? that is just ridiculous! now i want to look at the book and see if it really does say that! grrr…
j.j.
I don’t think the book specifically says those things, but I’m sure it heavily hints in that direction.
–For example, the book dismisses conditions such as a genetic predisposition to being overweight or a slow thyroid as “disguises for thinking ‘fat thoughts.’ ” And during times in which massive number of lives were lost, the book says, the “frequency of their thoughts matched the frequency of the event.”–
Fat thoughts lead you to be fat. That’s ridiculous. I’m thin because I think thin? Absurd. More lives are lost because people in a situation where people are dying are upset about people dying? Sorry, that’s not a negative feedback loop, that’s just insanity. As Jack White says, you can’t take the effect and make it the cause! You can make the logical leaps here. If you think negative thoughts about being attacked, you will attract attackers.
–Worry can be healthy. Planning for the worst and hoping for the best is far more helpful than just saying “think positive and you’ll be rich!”–
Exactly. Sometimes bad stuff happens to good people. Sometimes a LOT of bad stuff happens to really good people. It has nothing to do with attracting it. Much of our existence is out of our control, the key is to learn what you can control and what you can’t. A lot of people confuse the categories.
Life is complex, strategies for dealing with life should be similarly nuanced. This is why I’m OK with one-on-one therapy, I encourage it, but broad-based systems are largely either mumbo-jumbo or simply no good. Groupthink is ultimately harmful. Everyone is different, and people of all mentalities fail and succeed in life.
In other yahoo news:
They just rejected two any censorship proposals.
Technically it was the shareholders that voted it them down, but the board opposed it and the way the voting was set up was very biased against the proposals. How disgusting.
Of course, its not just Yahoo that is complicit with Chinese censorship. Google, Microsoft and others are also guilty, but as far as I know, Yahoo is the only one which is documented as being directly involved in the imprisonment of a dissident.
any=anti-