Tue Jun 30 13:55:41 EDT 2009 - We will meet Wednesday Evenings at 7pm at Integrative Healing Center and Spa 1180 Northern Boulevard, Suite 200, Manhasset, NY 11030. The first meeting will be this Wednesday July 1st.Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:39:25 -0700
I watched this.
While a plague threatens the city of Shiloh, Silas receives omens that lead him to the source of treachery within his kingdom.
Last watched: June 30, 2009 Added: June 13, 2009 Air date: June 13, 2009 Duration: 43:02 Rating: 4.9 / 5.0 Last viewed at 8:39PM on Jun 29, 2009
Tue Jun 23 15:30:15 EDT 2009 - Looking for parents of toddlers in the Plainedge area who are interested in getting together for playdates at parks, backyards, etc. Totally Casual, no obligations or fees.Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:39:00 -0700
Daniel Coffeen has a podcast lecture series that looks at perception. Most of the lectures focus on the work of Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Bergson. The lecture series can be found at the following:
"Pay no attention to the beagle [snoring] under the blanket.
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Wed, 27 May 2009 05:25:00 -0700
In a recent paper published in the online journal Evolutionary Psychology, researchers present results from two studies showing that "men were more likely than women to judge that their partners would commit sexual infidelity in the future".
I have previously criticized the current state of evolutionary psychology, as a field, both for the myopic range of research that seems largely limited to questions of human sexuality and sex differences, and for a formulaic adherence to a route adaptationist paradigm of explanation, more interested in why-questions (and so vulnerable to just-so storytelling) than how-questions. The article that inspired this post demonstrates both weaknesses, but that is not what I wish to focus on today.
Entitled "Sex Differences in Perceptions of Infidelity", the paper provides a basic rationale for hypothesizing that men would be more inclined to false positives--detecting sexual infidelity on the part of partners where there is none--than would women. It then goes on to present the findings of two studies where young men and women in heterosexual relationships were asked to indicate how likely they believed it was that their partners would cheat on them in the future. The wrap-up then reiterates and elaborates on the hypothesis, arguing for a number of strategies (some of which could be argued to be highly influenced by cultural norms) that men might use to mitigate anticipated infidelity.
There are a number of methodological issues with these studies. The confounding influence of self-esteem and level of commitment of subjects, for starters, neither of which is controlled for. i.e., if the men in the study were less confident as to their ability to retain the interest of their partners (internal rather than external causation), or alternatively, if the same young men were less emotionally committed to their relationships (as a function, for example, of gender-specific developmental patterns in intimacy formation) than were the young women in the same study--such factors might be predicted to produce results similar to those found in this study.
Were this merely a judgement task involving static, objectively-defined stimuli controlled by the researchers, personality and developmental factors would not necessarily come into play. However, by posing questions to their subjects about the likelihood of intimate third-party future actions, these studies have entered the domain of dynamic subjective experience and capacities individually inherent to their subjects, and so personality factors that moderate relationship stability and longevity and the developmental histories of both the subjects and each their respective heterosexual relationships come to the fore. That such variables may correlate highly with gender may be informative, but that does not mean that gender is a proximally caustive factor in the outcome on bias measures, or that the behavioral strategies the authors argue follow from said biases are ultimately gender-specific.
However, the more profound issue here is one of theory. The authors discuss their work as addressing questions of perception, which they synonymize with detection, but the studies are presented as measurements of inter-group differences in judgments, intended to identify bias in the estimation of the likelihood of future events (or, as the authors term it rather melodramatically, suspicion). Such a conflation of conceptual realms--perception, detection, judgment, bias--leads us nowhere.
To be clear, bias is properly the domain of studies in judgment, which include estimation of the likelihood of future events, insofar as research increasingly demonstrates that biases, operating out of limbic rather than cortical regions of the brain, direct our judgment in ways that call into serious question the schools of rational choice theory and bounded rationality.
However, judgment is not perception nor detection. A suspicion that one's partner will be unfaithful in the future is not the same thing as perceiving infidelity in the present. Likewise, elsewhere I have made a distinction between perception (an understanding of episodic sensory phenomena) and detection (the elevation to awareness of immediate salient stimuli). Suspicion may prime an individual to perceive a partner as unfaithful, or to detect cues or signals of infidelity in their environment, but as bias is distinct from judgment, so "suspicion" is distinct from perception and detection.
How we experience others in our social environment, and what acts and events in that environment we recognize as potentially meaningful, are undoubtedly shaped by biases, some of which may very well owe more to evolutionary-selected reproductive strategies than to cultural context, but to equate such heuristic biases with the experience that is perception is not only theoretically unsound, it reflects poorly on a field of inquiry struggling to overcome strong objections to its scientific grounding.
Wed, 27 May 2009 09:22:12 -0700
"During my time in Maryland, I've had the good fortune to be kept company by my best friend's beagle, Toby. With a penchant for microwave popcorn, and a peculiar affinity for digging his way under blankets whenever the opportunity presents itself, Toby has quickly become my second best friend.
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Fri, 22 May 2009 10:32:42 -0700
"Heading down to Maryland to visit with a high school friend for a time. Wifi on a bus--who would'a thunk‽
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Mon, 11 May 2009 13:44:03 -0700
"You know the life insurance commercials with the guy with the old coin jar? Well, I've been keeping a similar rainy day fund. Today I rolled up all the 5¢ and 10¢ coins from the jar and deposited them at the bank.
Where's a Woolworth's general merchandise table when one wants one?"
Sun, 10 May 2009 19:50:38 -0700
"Finished the consolidation into storage unit this week. Wall hangings were among the last things to be packed away.
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Fri, 01 May 2009 12:10:17 -0700
"My retrenchment into a storage unit continued apace this week.
I picked up an unexpected hitchhiker during one run. Perhaps this little fellow was appreciating the breeze on a hot day as I wheeled the cart down West John Street.
The nice thing about Ikea furniture is how compactly it packs once dismantled.
Actually, today, I'm taking a break from moving, attending a conference on the developing architectural scene in India. "
