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Originally Posted by robm321 /img/forum/go_quote.gif
It's the New York Times - that's exactly what I expect from it and why I don't read it.
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The New York Times reported on an address given to the APA. The ideas espoused don't belong to the paper.
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I was watching Heroes last night and I heard a line paraphrasing an idea I'm familiar with, yet it irked me all the same:
The default scientific position is skepticism. I wish it were instead neutrality. Because skepticism is held in such high scientific regard, I think people tend to forget that it's possible to be skeptical and irrational at the same time. I had a psychology track early on in college, and I abandoned it because I think the field barely qualifies as a science. That doesn't mean I need to reject it or its theories out of hand. Many of them may be crap; I don't feel that this one is. Baumeister connects some truisms and interprets them. There's definitely room to disagree with his interpretation, but he doesn't generally speculate on speculation. If you disagree with his interpretation, please offer at least some kind of alternative. Be sure to take into account
what he's interpreting.
Quote:
Originally Posted by EyeAmEye /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Modern sentiment because I'm here to observe it. I don't speculate on the history of the species because I have no clue what drove the caveman, and neither do the experts who claim to know. From what I observe every single day, money and power are the primary motivation in both species (as can be evidenced quite obviously by men in many areas and by women who marry and/or are attracted to those with power and wealth). Those who deny such exists are those that feel power and wealth is unattainable (not an absolute, of course).
I read the document. It's babble, and pure speculation. Well argued and fleshed out, but babble all the same.
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You really think a biological creature evolved to seek out money and power just to have them for their own sake? You're going to have to flesh out your theory a little bit. So far it's reading pretty much like babble. Even if you could argue that simple money and power are prime motivators for both men and women in today's societies, by ignoring the human beings who made up most of the people who ever lived, and by ignoring every time period but your own, you've made your theory kind of useless.
Men and women both want money and power because that's what you observe. So? Then what? Among other things, it rules out the possibility that modern society has played a role in changing how humans operate. Are you really saying that reality is no more than what you and others can personally observe? And are you forgetting that there are tribal societies alive and kicking today?
Money and power are a means to an end, in terms of survival. What intricacies make up the complex gray area connecting money and power to survival may be up for grabs, but choosing not to speculate on them makes your theory no more robust than those of people who choose to speculate. And last time I checked, most scientific theories start with pure speculation. Speculation gets us somewhere. Not speculating, quite simply, doesn't.
Overall I fail to see how choosing to take less into account when making claims about existence makes those claims more worth having. I always thought ignoring data and phenomena, in scientific terms, was seeing what you want to see.
