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Psychology

Arthur Hatton’s SEO Guide to How to Get Rich in 10 Easy Steps

May 6, 2013
Discussion, Personal, Psychology
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Many people and celebs wonder just how to get rich in 10 easy steps.  Now you can too, with these 10 easy steps used by celebs such as Rihanna.

  1. First start out with lots of money like Warren Buffett.  It is essential to get rich quick while working from home.
  2. Invest in gold in 10 easy steps like Rihanna and Johnny Cash.
  3. Consider creating a viral video on YouTube and get up to 15 million hits like Katy Perry.
  4. Promote your website using SEO optimization with no money down.
  5. Remember that The Beatles vs. The Rolling Stones.
  6. Take the money and make it more numerous through smart investing with no money down.
  7. “Work from home” +no work +autotune
  8. “You have to spend money to make money”
  9. Don’t get discouraged depression lost hope no money
  10. Just be yourself Jesus loves you.
  11. I wrote this post to be satirical but I’m now realizing that spam on the Internet just isn’t funny.  In fact the Internet isn’t even funny.  You can’t even be meta about it.  Look at that junk – we have to wade through that crap every day.  Just joking about it actually just compounds the problem.  I’m sitting here literally looking through like 900 spam comments caught by Akismet on my blog.  Can people really sell stuff that way?  I guess they wouldn’t keep doing it if it didn’t work on some level.  But gosh, it’s just irritating.  And it’s irritating in a way that can’t even be funny, which is the worst kind of irritating.  The choice is between that stuff and inane image memes on Facebook – or go outside maybe.  And our generation just keeps plummeting deeper and deeper into the Internet, deceiving themselves into thinking that they’re establishing real human contact out there somewhere – but beyond a certain point you’re just taking yourselves away from the people and places you actually love – in real life.  We can’t find jobs, we’ve got student loans and enormous medical bills looming on the horizon, and Zuckerberg just keeps us glued to our computers, hoping to see that little red notification pop up so we can see if somebody we barely knew from high school “liked” our content-and-emotion-free status updates.  I wonder where this new digital age is taking us, and whether future digital-archaeologists will have to sift through 10,000 spam comments to find a genuine human interaction in the same way that archaeologists now sift through a hill-full of silt just to find a piece of pottery.
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Mandatory Philosophy Instruction

January 2, 2013
Personal, Philosophy, Psychology
1 Comment

The_Nantucket_School_of_Philosophy__1887I just saw someone make a comment online that high schools should have philosophy in their curriculum, and that it would increase standardized test scores.

I used to think that philosophy was all sophistry and dumb thought experiments, and didn’t pay it much attention. I think it was because I resented a field that 1) I didn’t understand at the time, 2) had such an esoteric language that it seemed impenetrable, and 3) was full of people that seemed very, very full of themselves. However, University of Kentucky required a symbolic logic class to all undergraduates, and that class went over logical fallacies, symbolic logic, and basic philosophy. I have to say that in hindsight that was one of the hardest, yet most important classes I ever took. It really did improve the way I thought about arguments, the way I engaged in discourse, and the way I viewed my own ability to think. It caused me to re-evaluate the assumptions I used to navigate the world. It also drove me to really pursue philosophy due to the realization that there’s no getting around it. They say that “If you say you’re not doing philosophy, you’re probably just doing it poorly,” and that is so true.

It especially made a difference when I started to study the theories behind psychology.  I had such a hard time trying to study consciousness from a purely Dennettian-type materialism (that seems to under-gird a lot of modern psychological theory).  It just didn’t work for me, and it was hard to deal with psychology without a real working theory of consciousness (Aristotle and Aquinas made this much easier for me).

The other cool thing about knowing a little philosophy is that it becomes easier to spot the overbearing people online who look like they know a lot but are really just bullies.

I don’t claim to be a philosopher or an expert or anything like that. In fact, the deeper I get in philosophy, the more I realize that I’m pretty much an idiot (my friends might note the marked decrease in online arguments I’ve gotten into since, say, 2006). But even a little formal training in logic and philosophy went a long, long way for me. I would totally support mandatory basic philosophy instruction for people in every field, and even in high school.

People Have No Integrity

March 21, 2012
Discussion, Psychology
4 Comments

On my Spring Break I hung out with some good friends of mine, and in a discussion about psychology and opinions, I said, “people have no integrity.” While in general I think that’s true, I also think I need to qualify that statement a bit, and since the guy I said it to reads this blog, I figured I’d expand a bit anyway.

When I say “people have no integrity” what I mean is that experimental psychology has shown over the last century or so that quite a bit of our mental life is inaccessible to us. In other words, the reasons why we hold the opinions we do and behave the way we do are partially due to a ton of mental factors that are outside our conscious awareness. When I see people bickering about politics, society, the economy, history, music, or religion (usually on Facebook), I am really thinking to myself that there are emotional reasons why people hold their opinions and argue about them. Read More