Letters to the Editor
inverse_agonist
Published Letters: 8 Editor's Choice: 1
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if it quacks like a duck.....
[Read the article: Getting over happiness]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Stop the press! An academic psychologist discovered that life is hard and "people aren't living the ways they want to be living!" What we need are cute acronyms like "ACT" and indecipherable advice like "disentangle yourself from your mind." This advice helps with work performance, substance abuse, depression, anxiety, chronic pain, AND epilepsy!
This guy's minor celebrity status is an indicator of America's "spiritual crisis" as much as beer commercials are.
Also, becoming good at an "X Games sport" requires exactly the kind of discipline, perseverance, and maturity about pain that Hayes says our society lacks.
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Spread debate is good for you
[Read the article: The great debate]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I totally agree with temperance. I was a cross-X debater from 1998-2001 (although I didn't compete nationally). I share the same memories of Clinton disads and recognize our ambassador to Afghanistan as the author of "The Khalilzad Heg Good Card." I had three tubs full of expando files that I carried around plenty of campuses on an old dolly. I still can't stop flipping my pen.
The Washington State circuit of the time wasn't "radically libertarian" the way the circuit of a previous poster was. There was some of that, but ultra-left postmodernism was a lot more prominent. It was quite possible to win rounds using "queer theory" arguments. I won some rounds with a normativity affirmative, to give any current or former debaters an idea what the circuit was like about 5 years ago.
Impromptu speaking and the sorts of events described in the article also didn't get a lot of respect, although the circuit did have a lot of Lincoln-Douglas. "Individual Events" were something your coach made you do, not something important.
I was a "spread debater," and it was very annoying having judges with the attitude of Anonymous. Being able to speak clearly at such a high rate is a skill. We all spent lots of time in our bedrooms reading really fast with pens in our mouhs so that we learned to articulate. I am still able to take notes faster than most people, due to my experience debating in this way. A specialized debate vocabulary evolved to facilitate taking notes ("flowing") while people are speaking that quickly, and it is even possible to do a "stand up 1AR." In a good round of "spread debate," arguments don't get "dropped" and everything is argued in detail.
Although I'm not currently doing anything policy-related with my life, debate has helped me tremendously with my paper-writing skills.
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Give me a break......
[Read the article: Buddha on the brain]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]While Wallace claims to admire science for its rigor, he doesn't seem to understand it. The purpose of science is to develop testable, naturalistic explanations of things. No explanation of the mind can assume that it is anything OTHER than an emergent property of the brain while still being a scientific explanation. Contrary to Wallace's assertions, there are scientific studies of mental imagery, recalling faces, autobiographical memory, and other "purely mental" processes. It takes all of 30 seconds on PubMed to discover this. These studies find different patterns of brain activation for different kinds of mental tasks, as one would expect. Brain scan studies are merely correlative, but the fact that drugs (physical objects with well-defined mechanisms of action) produce reliable changes in consciousness is strong evidence that consciousness has a physical component. I have yet to see any evidence that consciousness has a non-physical component.
When scientists talk about the brain, one can learn what they are talking about by doing some background reading. When Wallace says
"[t]he human psyche is in fact emerging from an individual continuum of consciousness that is conjoined with the brain during the development of the fetus."
I have no idea what that is supposed to mean, and I doubt he does, either.
I like to meditate. I find that my mood improves for a while after meditating, and I feel that meditating is a good use of my time, when I find the discipline to do it. That doesn't mean it's necessary for me to make anti-scientific statements that we'd all laugh at if they came from the Christian Right. In fact, a 2005 paper in Neuroreport by Lazar and colleagues found that extensive meditation experience increases the thickness of at least two cortical regions. Why doesn't Salon interview one of the authors of this paper, since they actually contributed something to the intersection of science and Buddhism?