A Curious Little Blog

I read a lot about people concerned with our "divisive" political culture in this country (the U.S.).  This is particularly interesting because it is almost always used as a criticism.  One almost never hears someone say that his own party is deepening the political divisions in the country; it is always the other side.  In other words, the problem of divisiveness is used in a divisive way. It may seem natural that people would see the other side as the source of the problem, but compare this to issues like military armament.  It is not difficult to find people urging unilateral disarmament on their own governments, as though the military problem would disappear if one side had no way to defend itself.  On the other hand, I have yet to hear someone urge his party or faction to stop using divisive language even if the other side continues to take advantage of it.  Arguably this was the tack Hilary Clinton was taking in her presidential campaign when she repeatedly said, &quo

I mean the title of this post to convey the idea that humans are never satisfied; each time one desire is quenched, another arises, so we are in a constant state of anticipation.  My thoughts came in direct response to what I read in Schopenhauer, and, by projection, to the general Buddhist approach to psychology.  I was surprised to find that a Google search on "human desire is never satisfied" actually brought back mainly Christian sites, chiefly in reference to Proverbs 27:20:  "Hell and destruction are never full; so the eyes of man are never satisfied" (KJV).  Not that it should be surprising that this subject is present in Christianity as in other religions and philosophies.  In fact, the nature of human longing is central to any study of man.  It is what I think of as the problem of motivation, which indicates that I approach it largely from the other direction:  how to convince myself or someone else to do something, not how to deal with the fact that I alwa

While I was visiting Thailand last year, I came across a sign for the Monoceros Resort.  I was interested because I wrote a post on this blog nearly six years ago about the surprising fact that the mythical horse creature with a single horn is almost always called the unicorn, not the monoceros, in spite of almost all other mythical animals having names deriving from Greek. So I was shocked to find this resort going by the name of "Monoceros" instead of the more common "unicorn."  Well, I was almost as much shocked to find a resort with either name in rural Thailand as I was of anything else.  It is not hard to find via a Google search, and in fact appears to be a popular resort , at least for Swedes.  It was a small sign and I had no chance to get a picture of it, but you can see their logo below, and it does appear to be some sort of unicorn.  (I don't know what else it would be with that name; perhaps it could have been named after the constellation.)

There is a staple of a certain kind of movie in which two people who are basically opposite of each other are forced to spend time together because of one circumstance or another.  They start off hating each other, but by the end of the movie they have become tolerant of one another, maybe even friends.  Does that happen in real life? I think it does.  Consider married couples, for instance.  Studies show that couples in arranged marriages are no less happy than those who chose their own spouse.  There could be several reasons for this phenomenon.  The fact that married couples go through so many shared experiences is certainly one of them.  "Shared experience" is a sort of psychological buzzword, but I have found that it is a powerful force in my own life.  It's something that you can look back on and talk about, and some time that you probably experienced similar emotions with another person.  I have even read that taking a date to a scary movie is a good strategy, b

Some time not too long ago, maybe 30 years or so, psychologists discovered that people value things they already have over things they don't have.  One big experiment took place in a classroom where students were given coffee mugs and asked how much they would be willing to sell them for.  Let's say the average was $5 (though I don't remember exactly).  They then asked students how much they would buy the identical mug for, and the average was $2.  So here was a mug that students valued at $5 when they owned it, but only $2 when they didn't own it, which is contrary to economic theory that identical things should have identical value.  They called "the Endowment Effect." The Endowment Effect seems like an amazingly good thing for society.  It makes everyone happier with what he has than what he doesn't have.  In other words, the net happiness of everyone is higher when they all own things because they will value their things beyond their utility.  If you