Test Your Morality
That autism quiz seemed to go over like gangbusters so here’s another quiz for a lazy pre-holiday afternoon.
This is a scientific test sponsored by the BBC to help scientists with their science. It’s all highly scientific and not at all a dumb personality test that you take to see how you stack up against friends.
(Takes about a half an hour. Sign up for a throwaway log-in [BBC iD] required.)
I scored pretty middle of the road except for my below average sense of wrongness & disgust and my above average sense of avoidance. AKA I don’t think what you did is wrong, but I don’t want to associate with you either.
The wording of the results is a bit odd…
[Your low sense of wrongness] suggests that you are not very sensitive to actions that break your moral code, and you are quite tolerant things you don’t agree with.
I agree with the latter but can’t I be sensitive to others’ actions while having a broader moral code? If I don’t consider those actions wrong then, almost by definition, they don’t break my moral code.
Different factors such as religious belief and personal wealth can influence our attitudes to the action and behaviour of others.
Yeesh. That’s a loaded statement.
So! Who’s the best Flocker? Scientifically speaking.
Take The AQ Test
Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues at Cambridge’s Autism Research Centre have created the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, or AQ, as a measure of the extent of autistic traits in adults. In the first major trial using the test, the average score in the control group was 16.4. Eighty percent of those diagnosed with autism or a related disorder scored 32 or higher. The test is not a means for making a diagnosis, however, and many who score above 32 and even meet the diagnostic criteria for mild autism or Asperger’s report no difficulty functioning in their everyday lives.
I scored 26.
tweet of the day
Putting the caped crusader on the couch
From a New York Times Op-Ed published several weeks ago:
Comic books have long relied on mental disorders to drive their most memorable villains. Consider the Batman line, in which the Joker, Harley Quinn and other “criminally insane” rogues are residents of Gotham City’s forensic psychiatric hospital, Arkham Asylum.
Introduced in 1974, Arkham grossly confuses the concepts of psychiatric hospital and prison. Patients are called “inmates,” decked out in shackles and orange jumpsuits, while a mental health professional doubles as the “warden.” Even the antiquated word “asylum” implies that the patients are locked away with no treatment and little hope of rejoining society. [...]
Of course, DC Comics, and comic books in general, are hardly the only source of these stereotypes or the only contributors to discrimination. At the same time, they are widely consumed, whether in the original form or as story lines for movies, TV shows and video games. Modernized mental health depictions in the Batman titles alone would reach millions of people worldwide through its billion-dollar-grossing films and blockbuster video games.
That’s why DC Comics should seize the opportunity with The New 52 to move to the forefront in transforming mental health depictions in comics. To start, writers should stop overemphasizing a link between violence and mental disorders to explain criminal behavior.
dear clustrflock
S or M?
from the comments
One of my favorite books, Kiln People, is about a society where you can create clay copies of yourself to do various tasks (menial, dangerous) while you do something else, then at the end of the day you download their memories back into you. This got me into a really creepy conversation with a friend about the difference between experiencing something first hand and remembering something. If the memory is yours (these clay copies have your personality, tactile sensations, everything) what are you losing by not experiencing it? Each moment is fleeting, at what point does something become memory instead of experience? Your senses take a measurable amount of time to transmit information and your body to physically react to things. Something 1/100 of a second ago, something 1/10 of a second ago, something 1/2 a second ago, something 5 seconds ago?
I think a harder question might be: would you rather travel the entire world asynchronously by surrogate and inload the memories, or travel 1/100th or 1/1000th as much but experience it all first hand in real synchronous time? I’m not sure which I’d pick.
In a perverse way, his work for the government only encouraged his criminal behavior and pushed his wayward ambitions into the stratosphere
Only 25 years old, with little more than a high school education, Albert had created the perfect bubble, a hermetically sealed moral universe in which he made the rules and controlled all the variables — and the only code that mattered was the loyalty of his inner circle. He even had an insurance policy, one designed to keep him a step ahead of the federal agents charged with tracking cybercrime: For the past four years, Albert had been working as an informant for the Secret Service, helping federal agents to identify and bust other rogue hackers. His double life as a snitch gave him an inside look at how the feds try to safeguard the nation’s computer data — and reinforced his own sense of superiority. “Psychologically,” his sister later told a judge, “it was feeding an obsession that in the end would become my brother’s downfall.”
I felt like the outcome of the story was less interesting than the details, but if you’re fascinated by psychology, and crime, and the internet it’s still worth a read.
American Juggalo, directed by Sean Dunne
American Juggalo is a look at the often mocked and misunderstood subculture of Juggalos, hardcore Insane Clown Posse fans who meet once a year for four days at The Gathering of the Juggalos.
I found this in Andrew’s Stellar links, and was immediately pulled in. Even though it’s twenty three minutes, it’s video for the web that makes that irrelevant. Sad and beautiful. Highly recommended.
Update: There is some nudity, and drug and alcohol use, so be careful at work.
creepy photo illustration out of context
from the comments
When Mr. B. was on the travel soccer circuit, a bastion of the most intense of the intense and I am not talking about the players, a dad showed up all frantic one day and said his son had left open the freezer the night before. And all the meat had thawed so he had spent the morning throwing it all out, cleaning up and making a Costco run to replace the ruined provisions. The dad was out of breath and had just barely gotten the boy to the match in time. Someone, ahem, said, “Um, so, did you really have to replace ALL the meat by game whistle? Just you know curious.” The dad stared. He didn’t have an answer for that. So, again, what is this meat compulsion?
it’s complicated
From an article on literary, and other, deal-breakers in relationships, we get this insight into the complex male psyche:
Straight guys are often asked if they are “ass men” or “boob guys,” if they like skinny or curvy, if they prefer a big rack or a small rack, bush or no bush. And though it’s fun to claim allegiance to one camp or the other, I think the true answer is that we like attractive women who will sleep with us.
(via @tcarmody)
bananas
Reading this paragraph from an article on how retail stores prime shoppers to make particular choices, I couldn’t help feel I was being primed for a subconscious lesson in grammar.
Let’s take for example Whole Foods, a market chain priding itself on selling the highest quality, freshest, and most environmentally sound produce. No one could argue that their selection of organic food and take-away meals are whole, hearty, and totally delicious. But how much thought have you given to how they’re actually presenting their wares? Have you considered the carefully planning that’s goes into every detail that meets the eye?
What has happened to online writing? Matt Yglesias and Josh Marshall, both political writers I admire, often post with grammatical errors. Have we decided this medium doesn’t require the rigor of print? Are the errors part of the message? What bananas should I buy?
the legend of Mexican Coke
There are a number of pretty clear conclusions that can be drawn from these tests. To put it simply, when it comes to taste, there’s this simple relationship: Boosterism > Tasting = Feeling, meaning that while there are an equal number of people who are affected by the flavor of Coke as there are affected by the feel of the container, both of these groups are eclipsed once you add in knowledge of the product’s provenance. Those folks who prefer Mexican Coke (like myself), really just like the idea of Mexican Coke — whether it’s because they think real sugar is tastier/healthier than corn syrup, whether it’s because Mexican Coke is more expensive and harder to find, thus more valuable, whether it’s because of its exoticism, whatever the reason — strip away the Mexicanness of it, and suddenly it’s a lot less appealing.
Serious Eats did a series of taste tests pitting bottled and or Mexican Coke against the alternatives. I’ll leave you to read through to find out which combination people actually preferred, but the results are interesting at least as much for what they say about the subjective nature of our preferences.
Doubt is our product
How climate change denial equates to the tobacco industry.
tweet of the day
Why is it that how people perceive themselves to be seen should have such a profound influence?
So Chochinov tried to answer those questions. As a psychiatrist at the University of Manitoba in Canada, he did study after study trying to tease out exactly what troubled people most about dying. What he found was that what people found most assaulting and annihilating was this idea that who they were would completely cease to exist after their death. And so Chochinov decided to do something about it.
Smog, To Be of Use
(thanks, Tim)
headline of the day
Shmeat: It’s What’s for Dinner
from the comments
I believe it is possible to love others more than one’s self. Is that healthy? Perhaps not, but if it isn’t I have no idea of how one might define such health. The fact that I might long to die as quickly as possible doesn’t mean that I therefore long for everybody to join me. Knowing I am loved, I would set aside my choice (if able to do so). If I believed my presence burdened others in a way that outweighed potential pain caused, I would go.
A sad feature of suicide is that it can come to appear in one’s mind as an inviting doorway. A person can even begin to rely on the comfort that doorway represents. No bad thing in one’s life, then, is ever larger than those few steps required to reach that passageway. It’s seductive, and it generates a kind of empty courage — an ability to go blank in the face of danger. But sometimes that ability to be fearless generates, ironically, a pleasure in life that makes one want to hold onto it for a while. Hence my reference to Dostoyevsky’s story.
He was a master of pattern recognition, the man who bangs a drum so large that it’s only beaten once every hundred years
Kevin Kelly highlights passages from Douglas Coupland’s mini-biography of Marshall McLuhan:
“Terror,” he went on to say, is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time…. In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.
(thanks, Tim)
‘more than 75 percent of DNA exonerations involved cases of eyewitness misidentification’
Stuart Rabner, the Chief Justice for the New Jersey Supreme Court, wrote an opinion suggesting the legal standards for admissibility of eyewitness evidence should be modified.
It may seem shocking just how unreliable your eyes can be. The ruling cites studies that showed eyewitnesses picking the wrong person out of a lineup as often as they picked the right one, along with another study showing that even when witnesses are told the person might not be in the lineup, they’ll choose an innocent person about a third of the time. The reason is that our memories may seem vivid, they’re often not as accurate as we think they are. While lineups are constructed of similar looking individuals precisely to force the witness to think strongly about what they remember, this may result in witnesses unconsciously conforming their memory to the available choices.
The most complex part of eyewitness misidentification, though, is the fact that people who wrongly identify someone are often really confident they’ve made the right choice — and that confidence is persuasive in court.
everything you thought about creative thinking is wrong?
Their first experiment was straightforward, demonstrating that anger was better at promoting “unstructured thinking” on a creativity task, at least when compared to sadness or a neutral mood. The second experiment elicited anger directly in the subjects, before asking them to brainstorm on ways to improve the condition of the natural environment. Once again, people who felt angry generated more ideas. These ideas were also deemed more original, as they were thought of by less than 1 percent of the subjects.
The larger picture is more nuanced, and slightly more subtle, but you better get over there and fucking read it if you want to do well on your next project, slack ass.
Naked Toilet Paper
I’ve been thinking about this commercial a lot. We can talk about it in comments if you want.
notes for a potential screenplay
One thing that could be explored, other than the fractious nature of self, is the shifting patterns of human sexuality, fantasy, relationships, the dynamic of sexual interaction and need at a particular moment, and how contradictory that can appear or be from one experience to the next. Also the reverberation of that played out in memory and self-consciousness.
from the comments
I’ve been making my way through the entire archives of Paul Bloks in Prospect Magazine, where he wrote about his experiences as a neuropsychologist. While I can’t say that the introduction to this awesome field has made me doubt my recent choice of career change, I am sure that I’ll be closely following the research and developments by Bloks and those like him. Where psychiatry searches for drugs to mostly tamper unconventional psychological experience, the field of neuropsychology seems to hold space for the curiosity of human life. The ways we make sense of ourselves and the world around us, in relation to how operational our brains are. What I find myself asking is, what’s a fully operational brain? Aside from all the physical expectations of what should be included and excluded inside our skulls, how can there be a standard amidst our diversity? And if we decide, someday, on a criterion for brain performance, will we unwittingly be further subjugating the extraordinary or unorthodox among us?
