Sunday, May 10, 2015
Lee's Korea Blog: Arisu - Seoul City Tap Water: If you live in the Seoul metropolitan area, chances are that your tap water is safe to drink. As quoted by the Office of Waterworks website...
Wednesday, March 18, 2015
Bill said, "I lead a volunteer organization. Talented people don't want to follow me anywhere. They want to cocreate with me the future. My job is to nurture the bottom-up and not let it degenerate into chaos." How did he see his role? "I'm a role model, I'm a human glue, I'm a connector, I'm an aggregator of viewpoints. I'm never a dictator of viewpoints."
"our role as leaders is to set the stage, not perform on it."
Tuesday, March 17, 2015
"We know that the variables in a woman's environment are much more likely to cause her to be angry than her hormones, but when she attributes anger to hormones, she's absolved of responsibility or criticism. "Oh, that's not who she is. It's out of her control." And while this can be a useful tool, it serves to invalidate women's emotions. When people respond to a woman's anger with the thought, "Oh, it's just that time of the month," her ability to be taken seriously or effect change is severely limited."
"So who else benefits from the myth of PMS? Well, I can tell you that treating PMShas become a profitable, thriving industry."
"Since 2002, Midol has marketed a Teen Midol to adolescents. They are aiming at young girls early, to convince them that everyone gets PMS and that it will make you a monster, but wait, there's something you can do about it: Take Midol and you will be a human being again. In 2013, Midol took in 48 million dollars in sales revenue."
Sunday, March 23, 2014
"The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality"
"Depression is the flaw in love.
There’s no such thing as love without the anticipation of loss. And that sector of despair can be the engine of intimacy."
"You don’t think in depression that you’ve put on a grey veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away – the veil of happiness, and that now you’re seeing truly."
"A lot of the time what they are expressing is not illness but insight. And one comes to think that what’s really extraordinary is that most of us know about those existential questions, and they don’t distract us very much."
Monday, November 25, 2013
Thursday, October 24, 2013
James Flynn argues that thinking in terms of the hypothetical has profound implications on education, employment, and ethics (including some very real contemporary issues such as racism).
"and it's a world where we've had to develop new mental habits, new habits of mind. And these include things like clothing that concrete world with classification, introducing abstractions that we try to make logically consistent, and also taking the hypothetical seriously, that is, wondering about what might have been rather than what is."
"Now, this dramatic change was drawn to my attention through massive I.Q. gains over time,and these have been truly massive. That is, we don't just get a few more questions right on I.Q. tests. We get far more questions right on I.Q. tests than each succeeding generationback to the time that they were invented. Indeed, if you score the people a century agoagainst modern norms, they would have an average I.Q. of 70. If you score us against their norms, we would have an average I.Q. of 130. Now this has raised all sorts of questions.Were our immediate ancestors on the verge of mental retardation? Because 70 is normally the score for mental retardation. Or are we on the verge of all being gifted? Because 130 is the cutting line for giftedness.
.....Now I'm going to try and argue for a third alternative that's much more illuminating than either of those"
"[Luria] found that [people before the scientific age] were resistant to deducing the hypothetical, to speculating about what might be, and he found finally that they didn't deal well with abstractions or using logic on those abstractions."
"So the tenor of education has changed. We are educating people to take the hypothetical seriously, to use abstractions, and to link them logically."
"In other words, they were fixed in the concrete mores and attitudes they had inherited. They would not take the hypothetical seriously, and without the hypothetical, it's very difficult to get moral argument off the ground."
"you can get moral argument off the ground, then, because you're not treating moral principles as concrete entities. You're treating them as universals, to be rendered consistent by logic."
"Now, I should say one thing that's very disheartening. We haven't made progress on all fronts. One of the ways in which we would like to deal with the sophistication of the modern world is through politics, and sadly you can have humane moral principles, you can classify, you can use logic on abstractions, and if you're ignorant of history and of other countries,you can't do politics. We've noticed, in a trend among young Americans, that they read less history and less literature and less material about foreign lands, and they're essentially ahistorical. They live in the bubble of the present. They don't know the Korean War from the war in Vietnam. They don't know who was an ally of America in World War II. Think how different America would be if every American knew that this is the fifth time Western armies have gone to Afghanistan to put its house in order, and if they had some idea of exactly what had happened on those four previous occasions. (Laughter) And that is, they had barely left, and there wasn't a trace in the sand. Or imagine how different things would be if most Americans knew that we had been lied into four of our last six wars. You know, the Spanish didn't sink the battleship Maine, the Lusitania was not an innocent vessel but was loaded with munitions, the North Vietnamese did not attack the Seventh Fleet, and, of course, Saddam Hussein hated al Qaeda and had nothing to do with it, and yet the administration convinced 45 percent of the people that they were brothers in arms, when he would hang one from the nearest lamppost."
"and it's a world where we've had to develop new mental habits, new habits of mind. And these include things like clothing that concrete world with classification, introducing abstractions that we try to make logically consistent, and also taking the hypothetical seriously, that is, wondering about what might have been rather than what is."
"Now, this dramatic change was drawn to my attention through massive I.Q. gains over time,and these have been truly massive. That is, we don't just get a few more questions right on I.Q. tests. We get far more questions right on I.Q. tests than each succeeding generationback to the time that they were invented. Indeed, if you score the people a century agoagainst modern norms, they would have an average I.Q. of 70. If you score us against their norms, we would have an average I.Q. of 130. Now this has raised all sorts of questions.Were our immediate ancestors on the verge of mental retardation? Because 70 is normally the score for mental retardation. Or are we on the verge of all being gifted? Because 130 is the cutting line for giftedness.
.....Now I'm going to try and argue for a third alternative that's much more illuminating than either of those"
"[Luria] found that [people before the scientific age] were resistant to deducing the hypothetical, to speculating about what might be, and he found finally that they didn't deal well with abstractions or using logic on those abstractions."
"So the tenor of education has changed. We are educating people to take the hypothetical seriously, to use abstractions, and to link them logically."
"In other words, they were fixed in the concrete mores and attitudes they had inherited. They would not take the hypothetical seriously, and without the hypothetical, it's very difficult to get moral argument off the ground."
"you can get moral argument off the ground, then, because you're not treating moral principles as concrete entities. You're treating them as universals, to be rendered consistent by logic."
"Now, I should say one thing that's very disheartening. We haven't made progress on all fronts. One of the ways in which we would like to deal with the sophistication of the modern world is through politics, and sadly you can have humane moral principles, you can classify, you can use logic on abstractions, and if you're ignorant of history and of other countries,you can't do politics. We've noticed, in a trend among young Americans, that they read less history and less literature and less material about foreign lands, and they're essentially ahistorical. They live in the bubble of the present. They don't know the Korean War from the war in Vietnam. They don't know who was an ally of America in World War II. Think how different America would be if every American knew that this is the fifth time Western armies have gone to Afghanistan to put its house in order, and if they had some idea of exactly what had happened on those four previous occasions. (Laughter) And that is, they had barely left, and there wasn't a trace in the sand. Or imagine how different things would be if most Americans knew that we had been lied into four of our last six wars. You know, the Spanish didn't sink the battleship Maine, the Lusitania was not an innocent vessel but was loaded with munitions, the North Vietnamese did not attack the Seventh Fleet, and, of course, Saddam Hussein hated al Qaeda and had nothing to do with it, and yet the administration convinced 45 percent of the people that they were brothers in arms, when he would hang one from the nearest lamppost."
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