Monday, September 10, 2007

More-on conservatives

The fundamental reason that I have a blog is that stuff used to occur to me, or pique my interest, and I'd choose an acquaintance or family member pretty much at random and send them an impromptu essay. In order to save my loved ones from the vicissitudes of my musings, I just decided to make them public. I realized I had a problem when I sent out a mass email regarding the Berkeley study that conservatives couldn't handle integrative complexity, which played into a theory I was developing that they simply couldn't see feedback loops and systemic effects.

Following up on that:
Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because ... their brains work.
Well, OK. The ellipses should read 'of how.' But, still.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yes, for some odd reason, philosophical musings tend to turn people off. I suspect this is a more American trait.

I've suspected recently that conservativism versus liberalism is really a continuum on a scale representing the time required to incorporate new information into a revised world view.

This, of course, says nothing about the quality of the information, so conservativism can actually be useful.

However, this does explain why people tend to get more consevative as they get older. It's simply a manifestation of the calcification of their brains, rather than a reflection of any particular acquired wisdom.

Nice systems and feedback view though. More in future musings?