Do you mostly hang out with WEIRDos?

In their paper "The weirdest people in the world?", Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan argue that:

1. The scientific literature in the field of experimental psychology consists primarily of reports of experiments upon subjects who were handy and willing – namely, college undergraduates, who are "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD)".
2. "...WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers ... [in] domains ... includ[ing] visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ."
3. "...we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity."

No source is balanced.

We recently dined with lovely people who are aficionados of a television news show which they praised for its balance. However, we are skeptical that "balance" can come from any single source, whether on FOX News or on PBS. We believe that balance is something you have to make for yourself.

In the run-up to the American Presidential election in the year 2000, The Economist endorsed Mr. Bush, The Nation ran articles supporting the candidacy of Mr. Nader, and The New Yorker repeatedly swooned over Mr. Gore. Because we subscribed to all three weeklies, we had actual balance.

In his book 1988 book "Corruptions of Empire:Life Studies and the Reagan Era", Mr. Alexander Cockburn skewered one show's pretense of balance:

First the noun, then the adjective?

Although the word "quixotic" appears in Don Quijote itself (which was published in two volumes in 1605 and 1615), the Oxford English Dictionary gives the year of the word's first appearance in English as 1815, more than a century after "quixotism" (1688).

metafictional metasyntax (& hydration sources for pastoral personnel)

In the second volume of Don Quijote, it happens, from time to time, that both the eponymous hero and his squire, Sancho Panza, are recognized by people who have not met them before, but who know all about them, from having read the first volume of the novel.

Nonetheless, we were surprised to find, in the text, the word "Quixotic" – and spoken by Don Quijote himself! In Volume II, Chapter 67, he proposes to Sancho Panza that they become a pair of shepherds:

"I'll buy us some sheep, and everything else necessary for a pastoral existence, and I'll be 'The Quixotic Shepherd,' and you can be 'The Panzaic Shepherd,' and we'll wander over mountains and woods and meadows, in one place singing, in another mourning, drinking the rivers' crystal liquid, or perhaps the clear, clean streams', or perhaps that of the bountiful lakes."

What is the opposite of science?

"Don Quixote reads the world in order to prove his books."

– Michel Foucault

a matter of life and death

Just one sentence, attributed to China Miéville, from the profile on him in today's New York Times:

“I spent much of my youth soul-suckingly horrified by ‘Star Trek’ and not understanding why no one else could understand that it was a charnel ship manned by ghosts, because you die every time you teleport!”

not green plants at all

Fungi have no chlorophyll.

narrative / (meta-)fiction

Three chapter titles from Don Quijote (the first from Volume I; the second & third from Volume II):

• Chapter Seventeen – in which we continue telling the endless troubles experienced by our brave Don Quijote and his squire Sancho Panza, in the inn which, unluckily for him, our knight thought was a castle
• Chapter Sixty-One – what happened to Don Quijote, when he went to Barcelona, along with other matters truer than they are clever
• Chapter Sixty-Six – which deals with what any reader of these pages will see for himself, and anyone who has this read to him will hear

Indeed.

Ken Rockwell week.

We hope that you have enjoyed Ken Rockwell week here at NeuroCooking.

Did we mention that Mr. Rockwell is a valuable resource on photography?

Ken Rockwell is Wrong about Americans.

"...[people] who come here from elsewhere ... are amazed that Americans will sit around and complain while opportunities surround them, instead of getting off their butts and doing something to better themselves.

"Why do foreigners do so well ... while native Americans like me are more likely to sit around and complain ..."

– Mr. Ken Rockwell, 7/8/2010.

Mr. Rockwell is often right about photography – but he's wrong to deny the innovation, entrepreneurship, and initiative of the American people.

[Let's not even mention the irony of Mr. Rockwell calling himself a "native American".]