To kick off 2015, I’ve compiled a list of 10 good facts you probably won’t hear on the news.
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Ponderings of science, philosophy, history, society, and many other topics
To kick off 2015, I’ve compiled a list of 10 good facts you probably won’t hear on the news.
View original post 235 more words
SelfAwarePatterns 
Thanks for the reblog!
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Thanks ‘SAP’, thanks Steve! I just recently read both:
‘Bad Is Stronger Than Good ‘, Baumeister et al 2001 http://assets.csom.umn.edu/assets/71516.pdf
… and:
‘The world is not falling apart’, Pinker/Mack 2014 http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/12/the_world_is_not_falling_apart_the_trend_lines_reveal_an_increasingly_peaceful.single.html
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Thanks amanimal. The Slate piece is interesting, along the lines of what Pinker has written in the last few years. I’ve found it strangely difficult to convince people that we don’t live in benighted times, that the broad sweeps of history (at least most of them) are moving in the right directions. I suspect part of it comes from a perception that admitting it might be, in some manner, turning a blind eye to the real evils of these times. But it seems to me that we can acknowledge both those evils (along with the need to fight them) and the overall improvements in the human condition.
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