Sapolsky
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Spearthrower wrote:
Sadly, he uses quite an old, and somewhat boring style of teaching -
Spearthrower wrote:
- there are practically no visual aids at all, and they can communicate some of these ideas much more clearly than waving your hands around as you talk.
Animavore wrote:Sold after the first lecture.
I found his style engaging and his enthusiasm infectious.Spearthrower wrote:
- there are practically no visual aids at all, and they can communicate some of these ideas much more clearly than waving your hands around as you talk.
I thought he had all the visual aids he needed in his crude diagrams. Though I'm a hand-wavy type too, so I speak that organic sign language rather well.
EDIT: Actually I could listen to this in audio only.
Animavore wrote:He mentioned Chaos, by James Gleick. I was actually given that as a Valentine's gift by an ex- a few years ago just before we split up and as a consequence never read it.
I just literally dusted it off.
GrahamH wrote:Thanks for posting that. Very interesting.
Matthew Shute wrote:Excellent - thanks for posting these, Spearthrower.
Spearthrower wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&index=1&list=PL150326949691B199
Just found this on YT, so I thought I'd share.
John Platko wrote:Spearthrower wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&index=1&list=PL150326949691B199
Just found this on YT, so I thought I'd share.
That was awesome! Thanks.
Edit: (Here's a link to the lecture on religion that he decided to leave out of the online course:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WwAQqWUkpI
Spearthrower wrote:John Platko wrote:Spearthrower wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&index=1&list=PL150326949691B199
Just found this on YT, so I thought I'd share.
That was awesome! Thanks.
Edit: (Here's a link to the lecture on religion that he decided to leave out of the online course:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WwAQqWUkpI
John Platko wrote:
Yes. I think he's on thin ice when he starts using personality disorder descriptions like Schizotypal in scientific biological explanations because they are products of political systems and often incorporate the biases of the people who compile them.
John Platko wrote: And they are problematic to his own explanations. For example, Schizotypal describes a person who has trouble developing meaningful relationships,...
John Platko wrote:yet as Dr. Sapolsky explains the Shaman Schizotypal person may in fact be pillars of their society.
John Platko wrote:As I try to relate his descriptions to the people that have been important in my life, people like: Jesus, St. Francis, St Bernadette, etc.. they all have the air of crazy magical thinking around them, but when we examine how this affected their relationships with others it's obvious that it depends on who they were relating to.
John Platko wrote: Some liked them and related very well to them, others not so much.
John Platko wrote:Using personality disorder type descriptions doesn't capture that dynamic for me. And what are we to make of people who are attracted to people who display magical thinking, i.e. talking to people who others can't see, etc.? Should there be a personality disorder that describes them? Why isn't there? Too much politics involved in the DSM type descriptions I think for objective science. And Sapolsky seems a bit timid about this too, censoring his online course and all.
Spearthrower wrote:John Platko wrote:
Yes. I think he's on thin ice when he starts using personality disorder descriptions like Schizotypal in scientific biological explanations because they are products of political systems and often incorporate the biases of the people who compile them.
I can't see how that would be a problem when there's an obvious long-running interface between biology and sociology. From a pure definition, it wouldn't even matter what the political or social circumstances were because a schizotypal personality would be in contradiction to their political or social circumstances.
As you continue....John Platko wrote: And they are problematic to his own explanations. For example, Schizotypal describes a person who has trouble developing meaningful relationships,...
Regardless of the political or social circumstances, this definition would be unproblematic - it's just that 'meaningful' relationships would need to be clarified and consistent with the political and social circumstances.John Platko wrote:yet as Dr. Sapolsky explains the Shaman Schizotypal person may in fact be pillars of their society.
Being a pillar of society doesn't necessarily entail having meaningful relationships. The 'pillar of society' is the political and social circumstance already discussed, and it would be easy to offer examples from kings and nobility to religious leaders who have no 'meaningful relationship' with the members of their society if we were to clarify what meaningful meant there as being 'normal' human relations.John Platko wrote:As I try to relate his descriptions to the people that have been important in my life, people like: Jesus, St. Francis, St Bernadette, etc.. they all have the air of crazy magical thinking around them, but when we examine how this affected their relationships with others it's obvious that it depends on who they were relating to.
That's exactly consistent with what Sapolsky was saying, though. They had very close bonds with a select group of similar thinkers, but were at odds with much of society, or were segregated in some way from the rest of society. These people would be contemporarily a-typical.John Platko wrote: Some liked them and related very well to them, others not so much.
Again, an elect - a close knit group of supporters who share similar attributes, while otherwise at odds with the established order of things.
Schizotypal personality disorder is characterized by someone who has great difficulty in establishing and maintaining close relationships with others. A person with schizotypal personality disorder may have extreme discomfort with such relationships, and therefore have less of a capacity for them. Someone with this disorder usually has cognitive or perceptual distortions as well as eccentricities in their everyday behavior.
Individuals with Schizotypal Personality Disorder often have ideas of reference (e.g., they have incorrect interpretations of casual incidents and external events as having a particular and unusual meaning specifically for the person). People with this disorder may be unusually superstitious or preoccupied with paranormal phenomena that are outside the norms of their subculture.
John Platko wrote:Using personality disorder type descriptions doesn't capture that dynamic for me. And what are we to make of people who are attracted to people who display magical thinking, i.e. talking to people who others can't see, etc.? Should there be a personality disorder that describes them? Why isn't there? Too much politics involved in the DSM type descriptions I think for objective science. And Sapolsky seems a bit timid about this too, censoring his online course and all.
I think its right that he is cautious about it - it's not as well grounded as the rest of the course content, but is definitely his right as a professor to forward his own contentions and positions during the course - it's actually quite an important element of higher education's goals - but is probably not so well suited for general public consumption as he doesn't need the controversy from angry ignoramuses.
However, i think there's something there - maybe not very comprehensively researched yet, but it gels with other elements of history, such as geniuses tending to be reclusive and to struggle with personal relationships, for like-minded people to form isolated cliques when confronted with social adversity, and for the occasional happenstance that someone says something at apparently just the right time and is lauded for it where she'd have been castigated for it a generation earlier, or in a different contemporary setting. I'd say there's as much there about human psychology in general, and this is just one discernible thread of some of the oddities of our social behavior.
Spearthrower wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&index=1&list=PL150326949691B199
Just found this on YT, so I thought I'd share.
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