NPR
Santa Cruz words:
While driving to work and listening to Morning Edition, a woman from the Annenberg center (which I still don’t know what they do, other than sponsor Morning Edition…) was talking about the roles of the wife in Presidential campaigning. I wasn’t paying too much attention until she started using words that caught my attention.
When I moved to Santa Cruz I started noticing a lot of people using certain words that I’d heard before, but never heard people use so often in regular speech. The woman this morning on the radio used the word “juxtaposition” and then referred to something as “problematic” — everything was problematic in Santa Cruz (well during Zami! meetings anyways). She then said something about “stereotypical gender roles”.
As I drove I found myself anxiously awaiting hearing about a “dichotomy” and I was really hoping she would somehow work in a reference to “dialectical materialism”, it would have made my day.
Marketplace:
Then the Marketplace Morning report came on. I used to hate Marketplace, until I realized how funny the host Kai Ryssdal is. He doesn’t do the morning report, but its only 10 minutes long so I deal with it. All the stories about the credit crunch, housing bubble, mortgage crisis, etc bore me a little bit but every once in a while there is a story that really interests me. Lately this guy Dan Ariely has been on a few times, talking mostly about behavioral economics, a field that both fascinates me and scares the hell out of me at the same time. The guy is obviously smart and funny in a nerdy sense of humor way.
He wrote this book called Predictably Irrational, that I’m going to try to fit into my reading list somewhere. I think its really important for people to understand the forces that influence their decisions, wants and perceptions of needs. I see a huge benefit to being able to analyze the causes of wants and perceived needs, especially in a capitalist sense. Marketers are really good at making us think that certain things they’re selling will improve our lives, which is hardly ever the case. As consumers if we can determine why we have a desire to purchase something we can make a better decision as whether that thing is truly needed.
I don’t think all of this is strictly economic, economics is just one application where it is being developed currently (which could be because many people have a major incentive in that field to learn more about it, so they can get better at selling you shit you don’t need). An economics student friend of mine always talks about the other aspects of economics and applying economic ideas and terms to other aspects of life.
A few weeks ago I heard an interview with an economics grad student who is analyzing brain activity to determine how we make choices, specifically how we choose to buy something. I see this as both amazingly cool and terribly frightening. It all seems to be related to the eliminative materialism I spent so much time studying in school. I’m fascinated with the idea of how physical brain activity causes/controls/or relates to mental states.
I read an article in the New Yorker a year or so ago, which was a year or so since I’d graduated, about Patricia and Paul Churchland, the article isn’t available online, just the abstract, but if I remember right they talk about eliminative materialism, and the idea that one day we’ll be able to link physical brain activity with mental thoughts and actions. At one point they talk about how they believe that in the future scientists will be able to predict with certainty the future actions of humans based on brain states/activity. They even go so far as to say that they think/hope that in the future criminals will be “caught” based on brain activity before even committing a crime, and if the science associates brain activity with actions with 100% certainty this shouldn’t be a problem. I really didn’t like that when I read it, maybe its was growing up reading too many distopian-future science fiction books, maybe its the romantic belief in free will (or even chaos) over pure determinism. I’m not sure, its just a scary idea.
The ideas they’re talking about on Marketplace are still pretty abstract, and they might not be identical to the philosophical ideas I’m familiar with, but they are more of a practical application of at least two similar ideas/theories.
