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MeaningofLife.tv videos — October 2018
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Oct 28, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- Minding Emotions: music edition
- The emotional shift between minor and major chords
- Examining tonal dissonance in Western music
- When melodies become “pregnant with meaning”
- Why we find beauty in disharmony
- Rami: Social class and culture imbue music with meaning, too
- Is music hardwired in humans?
- How practicing art and music hones the eye and the ear
Oct 23, 2018 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Max Read
- Viewing the Trump-Kanye meeting through the lens of mental illness
- The shared traits that make Trump and Kanye irresistible to the media
- How online news and social media created the “attention economy”
- Did reality TV remake reality?
- Jake and Logan Paul: brothers, YouTube superstars, and possible sociopaths
- How social media helps people with mental illness
Oct 14, 2018 —
Colin Pugh & Alex Guerrero
- Alex explains “lottocracy,” a system using random selection to choose politicians
- Does democracy have to mean voting?
- Democratic systems as forms of technologies
- Imagining many legislatures, each devoted to a single issue
- Capture and accountability in elections
- How would randomly selected politicians learn about policy?
- Leveraging collective knowledge for political decisions
- Alex: Elections encourage short-term focus and tribalism
Oct 12, 2018 —
Robert Wright & John Bargh
- John’s book on unconscious motivations, Before You Know It
- Why thinking about the flu makes you more opposed to immigration
- Are ethnic and gender stereotypes self-fulfilling prophecies?
- The Protestant work ethic as a core part of American psychology
- Don’t resist temptations. Avoid them!
- How to use an “implementation intention” to get things done
- How have John’s famous lever-pulling experiments held up over time?
- Is the “replication crisis” really a crisis?
Oct 10, 2018 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Lauren Oyler
- What is it about social media that’s so depressing?
- Twitter, the unpopular website that elites love
- Is what happens on social media real or fake?
- Is @laurenoyler the same as Lauren Oyler?
- How everything in life became “toxic”
- Do all online communities eventually become toxic?
- The moral challenge of social media
Oct 5, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Lama Surya Das
- Is Buddhism a philosophy or a religion?
- Surya Das: “I’m enlightened enough for now”
- Attachment, aversion, and “original goodness”
- Is an enlightened person by definition a moral person?
- Not-self and Emerson’s “transparent eyeball”
- The Dzogchen approach to enlightenment
- Surya Das: Trump has the spark of Buddha nature (and so do you)
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