Friday, September 28, 2007
Corruption as measure of difference
The next idea about differences in human groups
Supportive evidence for Steven Pinker’s idea that groups of people do develop differently
Some time ago I tried to find some evidence for ranking of nations. I collected a lot of data from internet, my studies, my own experiences with several nations where I worked, and a lot of statistical data from www.nationmaster.com. My assumption was that there is a real ranking of nations, but I was unable to define prices rank to every single nation, rather I made groups of 20 nations and grouped nations into such higher groups, well knowing that the nations in such a group do differ but it I felt it too difficult to define the precise differences and precise ranking of every state or nation.
I ranked into the first group countries like most of the west European countries, Germany, France, UK, Spain, Holland, Belgium, but also Finland, Norway, Sweden, also Italy, USA, Japan, Austria, Switzerland, than English speaking countries, New Zealand, Australia, Canada. I left the last three places for countries about which I have too little evidence, like some of the rich OPEC-countries.
For the Czech Republic I made the estimate that it lies in the group between 70 and 90. Just today I have received email about propensity to get corrupted, that means how much corrupt a country is. The least corrupt nations are Finland and New Zealand, Russia is on place 143, on place 72 there are countries like Mexico, China, India and Brazil. For me this constitutes next small evidence that my estimates about the Czech Republic are good scientific guesses, The Czech Republic seems really to take the position somewhere between place 7o and 90.
The problems between Czechs and Germans are mostly problems that arise from the fact that these two countries border with each other but their ranks are far away from each other, Czechs approximately in the group 70 to 90 and Germans in the group of the first 20 nations in the world, so the smallest possible difference between these two nations is minimally 50 places, might be even higher, maybe 70 0r 80 places. This is too much and members of these nations have usually “emotional”, that means unconscious problems with each other.
Here I would like to mention the model of Axelrod about spreading of information between members of one group and members of two different groups that exactly hits the problem of countries that are relatively far away from each other but border with each other geographically, like Germany and Czechs or USA and Mexico.
One of many aspects of why members of one nation have problems with the culture of the other nation is the urge of comparing hierarchy in human society, and that occurs within one group as well as among groups, where the members of different groups function as representatives of their group.
Try to think of that and read the link about corruption, it is interesting.
http://www.economist.com/daily/chartgallery/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9834636
Supportive evidence for Steven Pinker’s idea that groups of people do develop differently
Some time ago I tried to find some evidence for ranking of nations. I collected a lot of data from internet, my studies, my own experiences with several nations where I worked, and a lot of statistical data from www.nationmaster.com. My assumption was that there is a real ranking of nations, but I was unable to define prices rank to every single nation, rather I made groups of 20 nations and grouped nations into such higher groups, well knowing that the nations in such a group do differ but it I felt it too difficult to define the precise differences and precise ranking of every state or nation.
I ranked into the first group countries like most of the west European countries, Germany, France, UK, Spain, Holland, Belgium, but also Finland, Norway, Sweden, also Italy, USA, Japan, Austria, Switzerland, than English speaking countries, New Zealand, Australia, Canada. I left the last three places for countries about which I have too little evidence, like some of the rich OPEC-countries.
For the Czech Republic I made the estimate that it lies in the group between 70 and 90. Just today I have received email about propensity to get corrupted, that means how much corrupt a country is. The least corrupt nations are Finland and New Zealand, Russia is on place 143, on place 72 there are countries like Mexico, China, India and Brazil. For me this constitutes next small evidence that my estimates about the Czech Republic are good scientific guesses, The Czech Republic seems really to take the position somewhere between place 7o and 90.
The problems between Czechs and Germans are mostly problems that arise from the fact that these two countries border with each other but their ranks are far away from each other, Czechs approximately in the group 70 to 90 and Germans in the group of the first 20 nations in the world, so the smallest possible difference between these two nations is minimally 50 places, might be even higher, maybe 70 0r 80 places. This is too much and members of these nations have usually “emotional”, that means unconscious problems with each other.
Here I would like to mention the model of Axelrod about spreading of information between members of one group and members of two different groups that exactly hits the problem of countries that are relatively far away from each other but border with each other geographically, like Germany and Czechs or USA and Mexico.
One of many aspects of why members of one nation have problems with the culture of the other nation is the urge of comparing hierarchy in human society, and that occurs within one group as well as among groups, where the members of different groups function as representatives of their group.
Try to think of that and read the link about corruption, it is interesting.
http://www.economist.com/daily/chartgallery/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9834636
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
What is racism
Racism and Steven Pinker
A time ago I read an article about Steven Pinker who was said to have said approximately the following words:” different groups of humans developed differently.” I must admit here that I have not read the original text by Pinker, so I cannot give any guarantee for its correctness. Pretty soon Pinker was criticized for these words and accuse of being racist and a Nazi.
I was shocked and tried to find out what was wrong with this statement and counterstatement. The fact is that Steve pinker is right, people really do developed differently, depending in what group of people they are. Evidence is absolutely overwhelming; just have a look at different nations, or even at different layers of one nation. The problem many people have is that sometimes the differences are huge and striking so that hardly anybody can see them, and sometimes the differences are so subtle that nearly nobody can notice. Therefore people usually notice and speak only of the large differences, e.g. language.
A question what is wrong with saying that people develop differently, well, the answer is that some simple minded people may take this as evidence for racism. But what exactly is racism and what it is not? Saying that nation or other groups of people develop differently, is merely saying that there are some people who develop in on certain direction than the others or they develop faster. But racism must include also the feeling of hatred. Otherwise it is only a mere statement that is absolutely neutral in feelings and only highly scientific.
If the mere statement that people develop differently should be witch-hunted under the apron of racism, then, of course, every teacher at every school all over the world would have to be racist, and all the governments that run education would have to be also charged as racist. The explanation is simple: every teacher always gives some grades, which means some students will get As and some Bs etc. This is a mere act of evaluating the level of development of these students.
If all governments and all teachers are not racists then, of course, the statement that people develop differently in different groups cannot be a racist statement either.
So why are there people who say such thing? It seems that only those people take such statement as a racist one who either cannot differentiate between racism and evaluation, or people who suffer from a stupid idea that all people are equal.
Well, people are not equal in one sense and are equal in another sense. People are equal as a biological art different from dogs, elephants, ants, flies or monkeys. Inside of the group of humans only we have differences. People differ from one another inside of the biological group of people. If it were not so, then everybody would have to be in prison for murder, as we have murders among us, but thanks God we differ and not all of us are murderers. Some people are gay but not all of us are gay, we differ again.
These differences are the huge ones, the striking ones that basically anybody can see, and therefore basically no one has any problems in seeing them. But if the differences are more subtle or even showing us that our own position in the hierarchy of human group is pretty low we try to make statements that all people are equal as this statement push is us higher in the hierarchy.
Typically, Nazis and communist maintained this statement because they were mostly coming from lower levels of human hierarchy; therefore saying we are all equal pushed them higher. One can see this still in the behavior of working class people in the east Europe that used to be communist-reigned and proletariat was politically put over intelligentsia.
So to make some sort of conclusion on the words that people are not equal: they are and they are not, it depends. If people are consider as biological group then they are equal, when considered as one sole group and compared to each other within this group they are not the same and not equal. If we were, then every human being would have to be a terrorist, which is obviously nonsense.
So Steven Pinker is no way a racist, as no teachers are racist, the mere evaluation misses the aspect of hatred and therefore it cannot be racist, and racism must involve evaluation linked with hatred. Some people should think a bit before opening their mouths.
A time ago I read an article about Steven Pinker who was said to have said approximately the following words:” different groups of humans developed differently.” I must admit here that I have not read the original text by Pinker, so I cannot give any guarantee for its correctness. Pretty soon Pinker was criticized for these words and accuse of being racist and a Nazi.
I was shocked and tried to find out what was wrong with this statement and counterstatement. The fact is that Steve pinker is right, people really do developed differently, depending in what group of people they are. Evidence is absolutely overwhelming; just have a look at different nations, or even at different layers of one nation. The problem many people have is that sometimes the differences are huge and striking so that hardly anybody can see them, and sometimes the differences are so subtle that nearly nobody can notice. Therefore people usually notice and speak only of the large differences, e.g. language.
A question what is wrong with saying that people develop differently, well, the answer is that some simple minded people may take this as evidence for racism. But what exactly is racism and what it is not? Saying that nation or other groups of people develop differently, is merely saying that there are some people who develop in on certain direction than the others or they develop faster. But racism must include also the feeling of hatred. Otherwise it is only a mere statement that is absolutely neutral in feelings and only highly scientific.
If the mere statement that people develop differently should be witch-hunted under the apron of racism, then, of course, every teacher at every school all over the world would have to be racist, and all the governments that run education would have to be also charged as racist. The explanation is simple: every teacher always gives some grades, which means some students will get As and some Bs etc. This is a mere act of evaluating the level of development of these students.
If all governments and all teachers are not racists then, of course, the statement that people develop differently in different groups cannot be a racist statement either.
So why are there people who say such thing? It seems that only those people take such statement as a racist one who either cannot differentiate between racism and evaluation, or people who suffer from a stupid idea that all people are equal.
Well, people are not equal in one sense and are equal in another sense. People are equal as a biological art different from dogs, elephants, ants, flies or monkeys. Inside of the group of humans only we have differences. People differ from one another inside of the biological group of people. If it were not so, then everybody would have to be in prison for murder, as we have murders among us, but thanks God we differ and not all of us are murderers. Some people are gay but not all of us are gay, we differ again.
These differences are the huge ones, the striking ones that basically anybody can see, and therefore basically no one has any problems in seeing them. But if the differences are more subtle or even showing us that our own position in the hierarchy of human group is pretty low we try to make statements that all people are equal as this statement push is us higher in the hierarchy.
Typically, Nazis and communist maintained this statement because they were mostly coming from lower levels of human hierarchy; therefore saying we are all equal pushed them higher. One can see this still in the behavior of working class people in the east Europe that used to be communist-reigned and proletariat was politically put over intelligentsia.
So to make some sort of conclusion on the words that people are not equal: they are and they are not, it depends. If people are consider as biological group then they are equal, when considered as one sole group and compared to each other within this group they are not the same and not equal. If we were, then every human being would have to be a terrorist, which is obviously nonsense.
So Steven Pinker is no way a racist, as no teachers are racist, the mere evaluation misses the aspect of hatred and therefore it cannot be racist, and racism must involve evaluation linked with hatred. Some people should think a bit before opening their mouths.
conscious and non-conscious attention in humans
Here you may want to read quite an interesting article about new discoveries about human perception
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070925090253.htm
Non-conscious Visual Attention System Identified In Humans
Added Tooby: "Many people think that experience is the only thing that makes us what we are. What this tells us is that the evolved organization of the mind matters, even in determining what we pay attention to. And that's surprising to conventional thought."
Well, people might be shocked that experience is not the only thing we are shaped by. But a question: what it is adaptive pressure in savannah and how did our ancestors adjust to their environment? Well, by experience. So what Cosmides and Tooby have found is nothing but imprinted and condensed experience.
There is nearly endless row of experiences getting stored in living organisms as they adapt to their surroundings, when the surrounding conditions change in a way then organisms can feel it only by experiencing many failures when using – unconsciously – the stored experiences of their ancestors.
Each next experience, sufficiently repeated many times, may give rise to a new storage of this experience and will be passed over to the next generation. But it does not mean that the old information stored gets deleted. The new information just might be only added to the biological memory space of organism, in that way equipping the organism with two pieces of information, the old one and the new one as well.
Some information might prove as useless and these will be deleted, therefore we have normally no tails as dogs. The question here might be how organism can know whether some information is not needed anymore and some is. There are many hypothetical attempts to explain this, some of them go to the level of quantum world inside a cell.
So what have Cosmides and Tooby actually discovered? Well, they discovered that people as a specific type of biological entity are capable of storing information in the form of behavioral algorithm that helped our human ancestors to survive many thousands of years ago. Somehow I believe we had known that already before. So it is not surprising at all. What is positive about this discovery is that we have another piece of evidence supporting this notion of getting adjusted to surroundings by training, by manifold repetition of certain situation and responses to it and being able to store this information and pass it over to the next generation. And it is good to have further evidence for this idea.
There are many activities of human body that run unconsciously. It is not only that of noticing animals. Driving a car produces the same behavior. If someone drives a car for the first time , he or she is shocked the conscious system of processing information totally overloaded and therefore these first-time drivers display typical signs of being in high stress, their eyes are wide open, their hand firmly on the steering wheel and going maximally 30. If a driver have repeated driving many times his brain shifted the processing of information acquired from frontal cortex to limbic system and these reaction are much faster, unconscious, automated, therefore such driver can go 100 or even 130 and have no signs of stress, actually even at this speed such a driver is capable of smoking in the car or listening to music or follow interesting news on radio.
In very distant future, when we have been driving cars for millennia we even might be able to pass this information down to our children so that they will be born and can drive car immediately. This might be similar to the ability of acquiring speech. Every baby is born equipped with the ability to learn a language, whatever language. This might be due to fact that the ability to use language is relatively young in humans, and therefore babies are born only with general ability to learn language and not with the ability to learn specific language of their parents. This also might be the case in future, if there will be no children produced by couples having different mother tongues. This condition might be really difficult to fulfill. And therefore we might expect that human children will be for many next future generations born only with ability to learn whatever language.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070925090253.htm
Non-conscious Visual Attention System Identified In Humans
Added Tooby: "Many people think that experience is the only thing that makes us what we are. What this tells us is that the evolved organization of the mind matters, even in determining what we pay attention to. And that's surprising to conventional thought."
Well, people might be shocked that experience is not the only thing we are shaped by. But a question: what it is adaptive pressure in savannah and how did our ancestors adjust to their environment? Well, by experience. So what Cosmides and Tooby have found is nothing but imprinted and condensed experience.
There is nearly endless row of experiences getting stored in living organisms as they adapt to their surroundings, when the surrounding conditions change in a way then organisms can feel it only by experiencing many failures when using – unconsciously – the stored experiences of their ancestors.
Each next experience, sufficiently repeated many times, may give rise to a new storage of this experience and will be passed over to the next generation. But it does not mean that the old information stored gets deleted. The new information just might be only added to the biological memory space of organism, in that way equipping the organism with two pieces of information, the old one and the new one as well.
Some information might prove as useless and these will be deleted, therefore we have normally no tails as dogs. The question here might be how organism can know whether some information is not needed anymore and some is. There are many hypothetical attempts to explain this, some of them go to the level of quantum world inside a cell.
So what have Cosmides and Tooby actually discovered? Well, they discovered that people as a specific type of biological entity are capable of storing information in the form of behavioral algorithm that helped our human ancestors to survive many thousands of years ago. Somehow I believe we had known that already before. So it is not surprising at all. What is positive about this discovery is that we have another piece of evidence supporting this notion of getting adjusted to surroundings by training, by manifold repetition of certain situation and responses to it and being able to store this information and pass it over to the next generation. And it is good to have further evidence for this idea.
There are many activities of human body that run unconsciously. It is not only that of noticing animals. Driving a car produces the same behavior. If someone drives a car for the first time , he or she is shocked the conscious system of processing information totally overloaded and therefore these first-time drivers display typical signs of being in high stress, their eyes are wide open, their hand firmly on the steering wheel and going maximally 30. If a driver have repeated driving many times his brain shifted the processing of information acquired from frontal cortex to limbic system and these reaction are much faster, unconscious, automated, therefore such driver can go 100 or even 130 and have no signs of stress, actually even at this speed such a driver is capable of smoking in the car or listening to music or follow interesting news on radio.
In very distant future, when we have been driving cars for millennia we even might be able to pass this information down to our children so that they will be born and can drive car immediately. This might be similar to the ability of acquiring speech. Every baby is born equipped with the ability to learn a language, whatever language. This might be due to fact that the ability to use language is relatively young in humans, and therefore babies are born only with general ability to learn language and not with the ability to learn specific language of their parents. This also might be the case in future, if there will be no children produced by couples having different mother tongues. This condition might be really difficult to fulfill. And therefore we might expect that human children will be for many next future generations born only with ability to learn whatever language.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
LINGUISTICS case one
A bit of comparative linguistics in practical life
The teacher wrote on the blackboard ...
The teacher wrote on the blackboard: "I ain't had no fun in months," then asked the class, "How should I correct this sentence?" Little Johnny raised his had and replied, "Get yourself a new boyfriend."
This joke was delivered to me by Arcamax, they sent a kind of newsletter with jokes everyday. But what struck me was the perfect demonstration of wrong English grammar, that is commonly spoken among less educated people. In every nation, in every language we can see something that I call “native-speaker mistakes”.
I can see it in German where I could hear this sentence: “ich war mit die Kinder” which is totally wrong as there is a preposition for the use of dative but instead nominative is used. But it is considered normal in spoken language. Czechs do this usually with endings; that means they use improper endings of words.
Back to our example of “…I ain´t had no fun….” There are several mistakes as the correct sentence should sound like this :…” I have had no fun…” first the present perfect tense must be used, second the word “ain´t ” is colloquial negative form, second ain´t and no would mean double negation that cannot be used in English.
This should show to all people who study English that English as every language in the world is based on feelings of people and that the correct grammar must be learned, as many people used improper grammar that – for some reason- appears more normal to them.
The teacher wrote on the blackboard ...
The teacher wrote on the blackboard: "I ain't had no fun in months," then asked the class, "How should I correct this sentence?" Little Johnny raised his had and replied, "Get yourself a new boyfriend."
This joke was delivered to me by Arcamax, they sent a kind of newsletter with jokes everyday. But what struck me was the perfect demonstration of wrong English grammar, that is commonly spoken among less educated people. In every nation, in every language we can see something that I call “native-speaker mistakes”.
I can see it in German where I could hear this sentence: “ich war mit die Kinder” which is totally wrong as there is a preposition for the use of dative but instead nominative is used. But it is considered normal in spoken language. Czechs do this usually with endings; that means they use improper endings of words.
Back to our example of “…I ain´t had no fun….” There are several mistakes as the correct sentence should sound like this :…” I have had no fun…” first the present perfect tense must be used, second the word “ain´t ” is colloquial negative form, second ain´t and no would mean double negation that cannot be used in English.
This should show to all people who study English that English as every language in the world is based on feelings of people and that the correct grammar must be learned, as many people used improper grammar that – for some reason- appears more normal to them.
Monday, September 10, 2007
Dawkins and his book The God Delusion
I start getting tired of constant creating accounts in order to be able to write some comments on somebody’s texts. So, I just put the link here where I found some criticism of the book “The God Delusion”, written by Dawkins, that is severely criticized especially in the USA.
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1189355192.shtml
Whatever against Dawkins I read, I must laugh about. Dawkins is one of the smartest men on this planet nowadays. Mostly people who try to criticize him, usually only feel being offended, as they were taught something else and they BELIEVE this something else. But there is no scientific evidence proving existence of God. Scientific evidence means one must be able to repeat the experiment hundred times and always get the same result. We have never had this in religion. Just recall the history what religion is about: scientists were burned when they came with a new idea, now these people do not have the power of burning such man like Dawkins, but the FIGHT against such men is a constant battle waged by people on lower level. What I mean here is hierarchy in human society. No one likes to be down or having the feeling of being pushed down. When somebody was taught to believe in God and now somebody else writes that all people who believe in God have problems with their logical thinking, these people then feel offended, being pushed down and so they fight back, using whatever means they can find, even a lie. Don’t forget that these people were able to kill just only because of different idea, and they killed in the name of God. Well, well, isn’t it somewhat strange?
My simple advice would be: don’t fight Dawkins and his ideas, do much better thing: try to understand, study and se for yourself. Sciences needed to understand Dawkins are many. Here only a short list : biology, memetics, semiotics, linguistics, ethology, evolutionary psychology, sociology, neurology, normal psychology, quantum mechanics, physics, chemistry, genetics, epigenetics, mathematics, statistics and many others………..when you have mastered them all and you still believe in God then I can tell you the following:
Son being a communist and father capitalist some 50 years ago in the USA, father said to his son: ”If somebody doesn’t believe in communism and he is in his 20´s, then there is something wrong with his heart, if he still believes in communism in his 30´s, then there is something wrong with his head.”
In order to understand this fully you need to know what amygdala is and the limbic system, what functions they have as opposed to frontal cortex, and how they influence us.
It is difficult to understand what Dawkins says for a simple reason, other people know much less and their ability to think has also not properly developed. So go and study, then you will understand, understand the difference between science and belief, they are not the same. It makes me sad when I still read texts that reveal how right I am about their ability to think strictly logical at cognitive level and not at emotional level guided by their feeling of being offended.
When you look properly that is exactly what these people say and write here, they feel offended, offended by truth. Funny people, or maybe normal, depends how we take it.
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1189355192.shtml
Whatever against Dawkins I read, I must laugh about. Dawkins is one of the smartest men on this planet nowadays. Mostly people who try to criticize him, usually only feel being offended, as they were taught something else and they BELIEVE this something else. But there is no scientific evidence proving existence of God. Scientific evidence means one must be able to repeat the experiment hundred times and always get the same result. We have never had this in religion. Just recall the history what religion is about: scientists were burned when they came with a new idea, now these people do not have the power of burning such man like Dawkins, but the FIGHT against such men is a constant battle waged by people on lower level. What I mean here is hierarchy in human society. No one likes to be down or having the feeling of being pushed down. When somebody was taught to believe in God and now somebody else writes that all people who believe in God have problems with their logical thinking, these people then feel offended, being pushed down and so they fight back, using whatever means they can find, even a lie. Don’t forget that these people were able to kill just only because of different idea, and they killed in the name of God. Well, well, isn’t it somewhat strange?
My simple advice would be: don’t fight Dawkins and his ideas, do much better thing: try to understand, study and se for yourself. Sciences needed to understand Dawkins are many. Here only a short list : biology, memetics, semiotics, linguistics, ethology, evolutionary psychology, sociology, neurology, normal psychology, quantum mechanics, physics, chemistry, genetics, epigenetics, mathematics, statistics and many others………..when you have mastered them all and you still believe in God then I can tell you the following:
Son being a communist and father capitalist some 50 years ago in the USA, father said to his son: ”If somebody doesn’t believe in communism and he is in his 20´s, then there is something wrong with his heart, if he still believes in communism in his 30´s, then there is something wrong with his head.”
In order to understand this fully you need to know what amygdala is and the limbic system, what functions they have as opposed to frontal cortex, and how they influence us.
It is difficult to understand what Dawkins says for a simple reason, other people know much less and their ability to think has also not properly developed. So go and study, then you will understand, understand the difference between science and belief, they are not the same. It makes me sad when I still read texts that reveal how right I am about their ability to think strictly logical at cognitive level and not at emotional level guided by their feeling of being offended.
When you look properly that is exactly what these people say and write here, they feel offended, offended by truth. Funny people, or maybe normal, depends how we take it.
