Fourteen Examples of Systemic Racism in the U.S. Criminal Justice System
The biggest crime in the U.S. criminal justice system is that it is a race-based institution where African-Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people. Saying the US criminal system is racist may be politically controversial in some circles. But the facts are overwhelming. No real debate about … Read more
Jonathan Haidt and the Five Moral Senses
University of Virginia moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt delivered a talk on new advances in his field last week. The video and a transcript have been posted by Edge.org. Haidt whips us through centuries of moral thought, recent evolutionary psychology, and discloses which two papers every single psychology student should have to read. I’ve been arguing … Read more
Awe and the Machine… and machine-made helplessness
Today we are less likely to feel awe in the presence of our machines than we are to experience what historian Jacques Barzun called “machine-made helplessness.” Visiting the Paris Exhibition in 1900, the American writer Henry Adams saw something so remarkable he compared its influence to that of the Virgin Mary. It was a hall … Read more