What I’m Reading

Earlier today, I finished reading How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer, a book mainly about economic psy­chology, but also about the general concept of how we decide what to do on a moment-to-moment and day-to-day basis.

Most of us think that the best decisions are the ones we think through slowly, thoroughly, and carefully. Most of us believe that the more information we have about the elements of a choice we could make, the better our choice becomes. Even great philosophers like Socrates and Decartes believed this as well – that the way someone can live a near-perfect life is to supress impulses and think through every decision completely.

How We Decide argues that rational thought is not actually the best way to think through the decisions we make, and contrary to popular belief, impulses and emotional urges are extremely important when it comes to making some sorts of choices. Lehrer states that some choices are best thought through, like math problems, but other choices, like selecting what type of strawberry jam we want, are best left to our emotional minds. He states that if we think too analytically about things like picking strawberry jam or selecting a piece of artwork that we like, we’ll overanalyze unimportant details and end up making the wrong cohice.

I’ve read a lot about how important our emotions are if we interpret them properly, but How We Decide put together all the important points and supported them with great evidence to illustrate a complete and detailed picture. Lehrer cites what seems like hundreds of different sources of different experiments conducted by psychologists, sociologists, and economists that prove the point Lehrer is making.

I highly recommend everyone to read this book, even if psychology or economics might not be a point of interest. The information covered in this book can be applied to everyone’s life and could potentially help them change the way they make decisions for the better. Even just the vast amount of research and intriguing experiment results presented in this book makes it worth reading.

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Topic #149: Do you believe in life on other planets? Why or why not? Why do you think most alien races in most movies are so dangerous rather than friendly?

I don’t necessarily specifically believe in life on other planets, but I do think that there is life somewhere other than Earth.

Based on specific science only, I think that it’s very possible that we have not yet discovered an area that has an environment fit enough for some sort of life. In addition, this other life could be of a completely different type, which might actually thrive in cold, desolate places rather than vegetative, sunny places like Earth.

From the fourth dimension point of view (which is my scientific alternative to religion), there are different worlds owned by different four-dimensional creators that we have not yet been able to find because of time and dimensional restrictions. This life could be completely different than what we think of as life, but it would still be considered life if the four-dimensional creator chose to call it life.

I think that the media depicts aliens as hostile and dangerous beings because we have the impression that aliens might be intelligent enough to take over our planet. In order to defend ourselves, we see aliens as dangerous and malicious to justify our motivation to protect our land.