Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Pavlov was a scientist who conditioned a dog. Whenever he rang a bell, the dog expected food and its mouth started to water. The smartphone conditions human behavior in almost exactly the same way. Through our smartphones, we humans have become like Pavlov's dog. But it doesn't have to be that way. When we get a text, the sender knows we've received it. We feel some stress about that. We should be asking, "Am I the dog, or am I the master?"  If you no longer trust yourself, who is left to trust? We also get lots of spam calls, usually at just the wrong time. So recently I experimented with some of these phone apps that claim to block spam and unwanted calls. I tried a few and  finally settled on an app called "TrueCaller", but there are a number of other good ones. My criteria were simple: 1. If it's from somebody I have in my Contacts, let it go through, and show me a popup on my home screen that identifies the caller. 2, If it's ...

We identify ourselves as members of all sorts of tribes; our families, political parties, race, gender, social organizations. We even identify tribally just based on where we live (Go Yankees). Tribalism is pervasive, and it controls a lot of our behavior, readily overriding reason. Think of the inhuman things we do in the name of tribal unity. Wars are essentially tribalism. Genocides are tribalism - wipe out the other group to keep our group safe – taken to madness. Another example is the polarized way we argue about so many issues, and the irony that as we make these arguments we claim to be intelligent (smart, therefore right) yet we ignorantly close our minds to views that conflict with ours. Trump supporter? You're a Nazi! Research has found that the more challenged our views are, the more we defend them -- the more dogmatic and closed-minded we become...an intellectual form of "circle-the-wagons, we’re under attack" tribal unity. We are social animals. W...