What I’ve Been Reading

The thing that makes the tragedy of commonsense morality so tragic is the intensity with which you just know that They are deeply wrong. 

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“It is no more appropriate to say things like characteristic A is more influenced by nature than nurture than... to say that the area of a rectangle is more influenced by its length than its width.”

- Donald Hebb 

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky.

No kidding ! This is the best non-fiction book I have ever read in decades.

• It’s great if your frontal cortex lets you avoid temptation, allowing you to do harder, better thing. But it’s usually more effective if doing that better thing has become so automatic that it isn’t hard. 
• Many of our best moments or morality and compassion have roots far deeper and older than being mere products of human civilization. 
• Individual no more exceptional than rest of us provide stunning examples of our finest moments as humans. 

It’s impossible to summarize this book so here is simple yet profound last two thoughts from Sapolsky:

• If you had to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be “it’s complicated.” Nothing seems to cause anything; instead everything just modulates into something else. Scientists keep saying, “We used to think X, but we realize that ...” Fixing one thing often messes up ten more, as the law of unintended consequences reigns. On any big, important issue it seems like 51 percent of scientific studies conclude one thing, and 49 percent concludes the opposite. And so on. Eventually it can seem hopeless that you can fix something, can make things better. But we have no choice but to try. And if you are reading this, you are probably ideally suited to do so. You’ve amply proven you have intellectual tenacity. You probably have also have running water, a home, adequate calories, and low odds of festering with a bad parasite disease. You probably don’t have to worry about Ebola virus, wardlords, or being invisible in your world. And you’ve been educated. In other words, you’re one of the lucky humans. So try.   

• Finally, you don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.