Laughter Through Tears

I bear a completely irrational and disproportionate hate for the psychology textbook I'm reading right now, and it's making it hard to complete my assignment. Maybe it's because this chapter reads so much like a terrible new age pop-sci book about relationships and the power of lurve. For crying out loud, you do not need a freaking biology degree to know that there are no feelings in the heart. It's an organ that pumps blood. No, I do not accept that this is a metaphor. No, you are a psychologist dammit, and you should by now know for a fact that feelings live inside the brain.

Grumpy materialist is grumpy.

So this history channel documentary about neuroscience was actually pretty interesting, but then they switched from talking about athletic skill and body memory to talking about ESP, "sixth senses" and John Edward. Yeah. They recorded his brainwaves.

Bad scientist! No cookie.

Maybe I'm underreacting for once, but I think this whole ordeal is hilarious. A couple of hackish pseudo-scientists come up with a leading survey about women and slashfic. They are trying to figure out how women's brains are "hardwired". Like most evo-psych, it's lulzy and unscientific as fuck, because they make all sorts of assumptions, reach conclusions before they start their research, use dubious data-gathering methods, and generally ignore a whole lot of variables and factors.

Evo-psych in general is disappointing to me, because while it could be used to learn new and interesting things about cognition and survival, and ways in which human minds (plural!) have or have not caught up to the rapidly changing environment we create for ourselves. Instead it is used as a crummy figleaf under which a bunch of over-privileged man-children try to excuse their bad behavior. "Honey, sure I was leering at your fifteen year old niece, but evolution made me do it! Look, it's science!" I suspect that the fallacy at the root of this is the idea that "evolution is magic" or rather, that evolution works. I will have to go into detail at a later date.

Regarding EP, I think Volcanista wrote something about it that I want to link (regarding my disappointment, above). I cannot find the post, though. Maybe it was a comment to Kate or Shakesville.

In other and less exciting news, yesterday I finally gave up on my ailing earphones and got a new set for 89.77 NIS. I was wondering if not getting the cheapest set, for once, might make them last a little longer. I'm not hopeful, but at least they come with a windup case to keep the cord connections from dying too soon.