On 8/17/05, d.brin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: /in the interests of brevity, much cut.... > To this end, I have corresponded for years with experts in several > fields, suggesting certain lines of investigation. (I'm not shy.) And > now... you are all invited to drop in and view An Open Letter To > Researchers In The Fields Of Addiction, Brain Chemistry And Social > Psychology. > > Paste in this address: http://www.davidbrin.com/addiction.html ... > and feel free to tell your biologist pals. I cannot think of any > single scientific result that might do more to help heal society and > empower the pragmatists, while marginalizing screeching dogmatists of > every stripe. .... /more cut
Your idea is pretty interesting: my sense of it is that you are proposing that politics these days are not rational, and that the reason (or a major contributing reason) is that public discourse has been warped by extreme ideologues, who have thrived and (like a warped Gresham's Law) driven out better, more moderate sensible commentators, by hooking into the consumer's reward feedback loops using self-righteousness. I had wondered what plausible mechanisms there existed to explain that most disagreements in politics are dishonest; have you by any chance seen one of Robin Hanson's papers, entitled "Are Disagreements Honest?" In it they pretty persuasively show that most arguers are irrational, and suggest countermeasures: http://hanson.gmu.edu/deceive.pdf or, in Google-ized html versions: http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:DKPRjOn9YOoJ:www.gmu.edu/jbc/Tyler/deceive.pdf+&hl=en http://tinyurl.com/akr4d ~Maru _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
