October Book Log

[astrogirl2]

Seems like it's been kind of a weird month, book-wise. Weird, but productive. Or at least it would be, if I hadn't also gone on a month-long book-buying spree for reasons I do not entirely understand. Oh, well. Repeated themes this month include politics, history, violence, photography, the desert southwest, guys named Shaun who fight zombies,

Comments

[kalypso_v]

Brett Kahr was at my college! A friend and I cooked up a plan once to make him the star of a sitcom called Brett in which he was going to be a sort of Robin Hood sexual therapist, sleeping with the rich to subsidise his services to the poor. We told him about it and he was very enthusiastic.

[astrogirl2]

That's kind of hilarious! And I feel like I should add that, based on the impression given in his book, he does come across as a decent and intelligent guy, even if I have some real issues with the logic of his discipline. :)

[kalypso_v]

He was a nice guy! I do remember him going on about the Freudian symbolism of rowing vocabulary - like strokes and cox.

[astrogirl2]

Yeah, that sort of thing gets silly pretty quickly. :)

[jhall1]

And speaking of surprising, I am deeply bemused by the fact that so many British people seem to have sexual fantasies about the Royal Family. I truly had no idea.

Nor me! I'd like to assure you that I don't. :)

[astrogirl2]

I had British people rushing in to tell me that on LibraryThing, too. :)

[snowgrouse]

The problem with psychology is that it's pretty much *all* speculation and not hard science, isn't it? Actually, it often infuriates me how often speculation is presented as hard science when it comes to neurological/neurochemical stuff, too. Especially since every week there seems to be some new study aimed at "proving" some sexist bullshit, for instance. Or just about anything that just screams a cultural bias.

[astrogirl2]

It's certainly possible to do some actual science in the field of psychology, and most definitely in neurology, but it can be a bit difficult to sort the good science from the not-so-good science from the bullshit. And the media really, really do not help with that, because it constantly happens that some scientists will do a small, preliminary study with results that kind of suggest a conclusion but might actually mean something else is going on, and which nobody's replicated yet, anyway. And even if said scientists are very careful about stating all that -- which some of them are and some of them aren't -- you know that if it gets public attention what will get printed in newspapers and posted on websites is just "New Study Says X!" And as far as the "sexist bullshit" goes, a heck of a lot of that sort of thing, I think, is down to the fact that scientists will do studies that find that, say, on average women score a few percentage points better on some test, or men on average have slightly larger brain areas for Y, or whatever,

[snowgrouse]

I absolutely agree. So many decent studies get dumbed down when the results are published, or then you get this good old bias where only the bits that turned out as expected are published and other data is completely ignored. And when this is used to support a certain view (or a certain sponsor--hello, drug companies!), things get so ugly it's hard to find the real, useful results from underneath all the misinterpretations or outright propaganda

[astrogirl2]

or then you get this good old bias where only the bits that turned out as expected are published and other data is completely ignored.One thing that happens, along these lines, is that a lot of experiments never get reported, even in scientific journals, because they don't find whatever effect they're looking for. Like, well, we had this hypothesis, but we tried it and it didn't work, so never mind. Negative studies just don't seem nearly as interesting, but they can be just as informative as ones with positive results. Even more so, if there are three studies that report an effect and twenty that report none. If only those three positive ones get any attention, that's exceedingly misleading. And then, of course, when you get to the reporting, well, the experiment that suggests "Eating Peanut Butter May Help Fight Cancer!" or whatever may make headlines, but nobody is ever going to print the article that says "Scientists Investigate Further, Find That Peanut Butter Has No Effect on Cancer, After All." Or we'd be seeing those

[vilakins]

I must see if i can get hold of Full Moon and Annoying. Why do strangers on cell phones annoy us? Because they below at the things and force us to listen? The arrogance of that? Mind you I hate people I know and am talking to giving someone who rings them (landline or cell) higher priority.

If the sexual fantasies one is based on Freud, I'm staying well away.

[astrogirl2]

Full Moon might be difficult to find, as it's kind of an old book and may be out of print, but Annoying is brand new. According to the authors, cell phone conversations are intrinsically more annoying to overhear than face-to-face conversations precisely because they do force you to listen. It's a little easier to tune out a whole conversation, but when you only hear half of one, your brain keeps stubbornly trying to fill in the other half, whether you want it to or not.

I'd say the sexual fantasies one is half based on Freud and half based on reality. :)

[vilakins]

Did they cover fannish fantasies. :-)

[astrogirl2]

Not really, although there was one person who said she fantasized about Harrison Ford in his role as Indiana Jones. That got categorized under celebrity fantasies, which were covered. :)