The KEW Acid Tests ask how Nature can inform the big questions humans ask. “Why are we here?”, “Who am I?”, and “What is our purpose” have puzzled humans for years – perhaps millennia. In the past 4,000 years or so, we have employed philosophy, religion, and science as mechanisms…
Tag: Psychology
The DNA Acid Test: The Problem and The Questions
What is the question!!!???? Say you are studying the effectiveness of a vaccine against some pathogen. What is the question? Too many times we get wrapped up in the specifics. The details. The minutia. We forget WHY we are doing this in the first place. In this case, I would…
Human Pros and Cons. We’re Not as Evolved as We Think.
As we conduct the great KEW acid tests I have to establish a baseline. In this episode I want to touch on a few elements of the ‘human personality’ and our ‘global value system’ that I think we can improve on. I think humans are great, but there are a…
Would You Rather Be Right, or Happy?
Remember the last time you were at a real life impasse? It’s a cruddy feeling. Especially with someone you love. It’s frustrating to disagree. To reach a moment where you realize there’s no way to resolve the tension in the air. A simple conversation becomes conflict. We understand that the…
Life is Supposed to Change: The Evolution Paradox
Everything about our ‘biological-ness’ is related to change. The developmental stages are all changes. We all grow bigger through life. We go through a brief period of fast growth, then switch over to a period of reproduction. These things are true for all life forms. We share, with ALL biology,…
I Run My Blog Like I Ran My Brewery
Which makes me a terrible business person I was a terrible business owner. At least from a capitalist viewpoint. My ‘mission statement’ was basically, “I make great beer. If you like great beer, you should try it!”. Seriously. That was it. Yes, we had a facebook page to share business…
Understanding Math to Live a More Informed Life: The Normal Curve
Are you familiar with the ‘bell curve’? It’s also called a ‘normal curve’, or a Gaussian distribution because it describes what statisticians call a ‘normal distribution’. Here’s the wikipedia definition: a probability distribution that is symmetric about the mean, showing that data near the mean are more frequent in occurrence…
You are You, and You are Me: A New World View
Do you put on your oxygen mask first? Then what? We help our kids, our partners, the people sitting next to us. But we don’t think too much about what to do next. We are sort of obsessed with taking care of ourselves. And some of us suck at it….
How Could I Be So Wrong While Being So Confident I Was Right?
You know you do it. You think you are right about something, only to find out you were incredibly, undeniably, 180 degrees wrong. It happens. To all of us. To all of us humans, anyway. We all think we’re right. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t have conviction. We’d be open….
Rugged Individualism or Unified Connection? Cooperation vs Competition
Do you enjoy friendly competition? Many of us do. Some say it brings out the best in us. Some thrive in an environment where other people push us to perform at higher and higher levels. I can appreciate friendly competition like this. But I rarely see it. And sometimes even…