Neuroscientists have looked really hard.
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Médicos del Mundo y la Sociedad Española de Salud Pública, entre otras, se unen al medio centenar de sociedades médicas que apoyan a los firmantes de la carta en ‘The Lancet’, que estudian ampliar la recogida de firmas al mundo científico y sanitario
People who identify as more attractive are more likely to also identify as conservative. On the contrary, those who are perceived as less attractive tend to be on the other side of the political spectrum.
This is at least what the next study conducted by researchers at the University of Illinois.
Reasons
In the study cited, measures of attractiveness were used through multiple surveys, and The relationship between attractiveness and political beliefs was examined. Controlling for socioeconomic status, more attractive individuals were found to be more likely to report higher levels of political efficacy, identify as conservative, and identify as Republican.
These findings suggest an additional mechanism for political socialization that has further implications for understanding how the body is intertwined with the social nature of politics.
Naturally, we are facing a correlation, and also in the face of self-perceived issues such as physical beauty or political orientation. However, we can launch some hypotheses that someone who is more attractive tends to be more conservative or Republican and someone who is less attractive tends to be more progressive or Democrat. For example, if you are physically more attractive you also have more self-confidence. More confidence means more self-sufficiency and more desire to follow the people in power.
Previous research shows that good-looking people are generally treated better, They achieve a higher social status and earn more money, which influences them to perceive the world as a fairer place than the ugly ones.. Social psychologists refer to this as the halo effect, or when positive traits influence a person's overall opinion of a person.
This blind spot prevents attractive people from seeing the need for government intervention, a central element of left-wing politics. According to one of the authors of the study, Peterson:
The best way to describe our results is that, if you take two individuals who share similar characteristics such as age, income, and education, but who differ in attractiveness, our results show that higher attractiveness correlates with being more effective and more conservative than the similar individual who is less attractive. This is not deterministic; all attractive people are not conservative and all unattractive people are not liberal.
Peterson and Palmer took data from the 1972, 1974, and 1976 American National Studies surveys that asked people to evaluate the appearance of others. These results were compared to the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study which focused on the physical characteristics of more than 10,000 high school students who were rated by others on their level of attractiveness. Given the greater social influence of attractive people, Peterson has noted that his findings could have deeper implications. Better-looking people 'may have political influence over others in their social networks, regardless of their actual levels of effective political knowledge.'
The opposite, Peterson said, is that 'those who are not blessed with good looks will be less likely to feel empowered, to participate in politics, to seek redress for grievances, or to exercise their political rights.'
If conservatives are more attractive than their liberal or left-wing opponents, Right-wing parties may end up with an advantage at election time.
Recent research suggests that conservative-leaning candidates in the United States and Europe are, in fact, objectively more physically attractive on average than their left-wing counterparts, which under some conditions leads to an electoral advantage.
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The news
The ugliest people tend to be progressive, the most beautiful people tend to be conservative.
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
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Marcelo Gleiser has become the first Latin American to win the Templeton Prize, which is awarded for 'contribution to the affirmation of the spiritual dimension of life'.
In an interview about the award, this Dartmouth College physics professor argued that atheism is 'inconsistent with the scientific method.'
What is atheism?
Literally, Gleiser argued this way:
I believe that atheism is incompatible with the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It is a statement, a categorical statement that expresses belief in disbelief. 'I don't believe, although I have no evidence for or against, I just don't believe.' Spot. It's a statement. But in science we don't really make statements. We say, 'Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against or for that.' And then an agnostic would say, look, I have no evidence of God or any kind of god (What god, first of all? The Maori gods, or the Jewish, Christian, or Muslim god? What god is that?). On the other hand, an agnostic would recognize no right to make a final statement about something he does not know.
Gleiser reminds us that we are on an 'island of knowledge' in the middle of an 'ocean of the unknown.' As knowledge advances, we become more aware of what we do not know.
Given all the times that scientists have said something was already certain and then it has been discovered that it was not so, it may well turn out that the statement 'there is no God' could end up being similar to saying, 'No balloon or airplane can fly in the future' a century ago. Similarly, skepticism of the statement 'X does not exist' is also important in science since 'X' might appear one day.
Atheism must be defined
Gleiser is right. But it does because it is defining skepticism and, by extension, atheism in a very restricted way.. Surely there are atheists and skeptics who reason that way, but atheism is also defined as "I don't think about this hypothesis because it doesn't help me solve the problems I face." That is to say, one is an atheist regarding God in the same way that one does not believe that one lives on a television set and is continually being deceived, or that one lives in a dream, or that a magician has put a spell on one and one knows nothing about the real world, or that even everything that appears in the movies is true but the government hides it.
To be agnostic would be to affirm that everything is possible. And that's obvious. Everything is possible. But admitting that everything is possible is not the same as introducing all possibilities (each and every one of them, to infinity) when reflecting on how the world works. Simply, trying to climb the mountain of knowledge step by step, proposing humble hypotheses that we can progressively verify. Proposing the hypothesis of God is simply looking at the summit, at the highest possible level of knowledge, and proposing a total explanation for everything. So, is there any greater display of audacity and ineffectiveness than proposing a hypothesis that explains everything?
Or put another way: atheists are also agnostics: of course they do not know with absolute certainty that God does not exist, just as they do not know anything absolutely. What atheism proposes is that it is a hypothesis that is too vague and daring, as well as impractical, asking if God exists, if there are four thousand parallel dimensions, or if in reality we are in an extraterrestrial circus entertaining the masses without being aware of it.
All of this is possible, but do we waste time solving it? No. First, we must falsify many other hypotheses that are much more plausible and, above all, accessible to our narrow space of knowledge.
Bertrand Russell He explained it very well with his famous teapot. While it remains true that humility can be a good thing, that we do not know what we do not know, and that it is impossible to prove the negative claim that 'God does not exist', Bertrand Russell reminds us that we can be rational in saying that we do not believe in something we cannot refute the existence of:
I must call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I don't think the existence of the Christian God is any more likely than the existence of the gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another example: no one can prove that there is not between Earth and Mars a porcelain teapot rotating in an elliptical orbit, but no one believes that this is probable enough to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God is equally improbable.
What Russell is saying is that the fact that a point asserted without evidence cannot be refuted does not mean that it is unreasonable to think that it is not true. Furthermore, Russell places the burden of proof on the person making the positive claim (God/the teapot exists) and not on the person who questions that statement.
The astronomer Carl Sagan He proposed a similar argument about the existence of a dragon in his garage in his book The World and Its Demons:
Suppose I seriously make such a statement to you. You'll probably want to check it out, see it for yourself. There have been countless stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity! 'Show me,' you say. I'll take you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle, but no dragon. Where is the dragon? you ask. 'Oh, she's here,' I reply, waving vaguely. 'I forgot to mention that she is an invisible dragon.' You propose spreading flour on the garage floor to capture the dragon's footprints. 'Good idea,' I say, 'but this dragon floats in the air.' Then, you will use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire. 'Good idea, but invisible fire has no heat either.' You will spray paint the dragon and make it visible. 'Good idea, but it's a disembodied dragon and the paint doesn't stick.' And so. Counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.
What's the difference between a floating, disembodied, invisible dragon that breathes fire without heat and no dragon at all? If there is no way to refute my argument, no conceivable experiment that counts against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? The inability to invalidate a hypothesis is not at all the same as proving it true. Claims that cannot be proven, claims immune to refutation, are truly useless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or exciting our sense of wonder.
Sagan, like Russell, holds that the burden of proof falls on the person making the claim. Since there is no evidence of the dragon, it is not unscientific to say that one does not believe the dragon is there.
Is it going too far to say that God does not exist? That depends on where you want to place the burden of proof and how much evidence (or lack thereof) is needed to make such a claim. Since we're talking about God (the most mind-blowingly supernatural thing we know of), perhaps we should ask for, at the very least, millions and millions of proofs and hundredweights of evidence. More than anything else we have been able to discover in the entire history of humanity. Because stating that God exists is as daring as saying that the parody exists Flying Spaghetti Monster Monster.
Or put another way: even award-winning physicists should study a little more epistemology.
Corollary proposed in the following video: don't believe in anything that hasn't been proven, and propose hypotheses that can be falsified (god is not one of them because we don't even know what he is, it's just a human word to refer to the unknowable):
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The news
Atheism is incompatible with the scientific method, according to this Templeton Prize-winning physicist
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
A group of economists from Yale University they have not found evidence about what The $600 weekly unemployment benefits that the US Congress authorized in March have reduced employment.
The study results directly challenge a claim frequently made by Republican lawmakers and members of the Trump administration that additional unemployment payments decrease people's desire to return to work.
CARES Act
The expanded CARES Act benefits, a $2.2 trillion stimulus package passed in March, will expire on July 31. And it's not causing a wave of laziness, as many think.
The findings of the cited study suggested that, taken together, the expanded benefits 'neither encouraged layoffs during the onset of the pandemic nor deterred people from returning to work once businesses began to reopen.'
The researchers noted that workers who received larger increases in their unemployment benefits relative to their wages did not experience larger declines in employment. after the enactment of the CARES Act.
The researchers used weekly data from Homebase, a company that provides scheduling and scheduling software to small businesses in the United States. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago found a similar trend, according to MarketWatch.
'Those currently receiving benefits search more than twice as hard as those who have exhausted their benefits,' said the study, which was published in June.
The Chicago Fed study also noted that unemployment benefits generally last six months and that people They are paid around 35% of their weekly salary on average.
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The news
The $600 unemployment benefits have not made people work less in the United States
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.