GPL Revisited (Asbestos underwear activated)

[Alex Martelli]

"Laura Creighton" <lac at cd.chalmers.se> wrote in message
news:mailman.989501536.31814.python-list at python.org...
    ...[snipped: very good, if maybe over-simplified, points
        about sampling-bias and the issue of self-sampling]...
> question ``Why do people care about the things that they care about?
> Why do we love some things and hate other things?''  You need a
> biologist and a psychologist and I don't know what else to go after
> that question -- it is an inter-disciplinary problem, and a tough one.

One good attempt at inter-disciplinary framing of this (with
strong roots in biology) is in Matt Ridley's "The Origins of
Virtue".  The book is very well-written and well worth
reading (I've never met anything by Ridley that wasn't),
but you may also get a good, though very concise, summary at
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Ithaca/4388/origins.html.
An insightful critique (offered by an economist -- it shows)
is at http://www.reason.com/9711/bk.hirshleifer.html.

Another relevant book, albeit its inter-disciplinary frame
may be adjudged weaker, is Timur Kuran's "Private Truths,
Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference
Falsification".  Dr. Kuran has the rare distinction of
being a well-respected scholar in both economics and
humanistic studies (specifically, Islamic Thought and
Culture), holding professorships in both fields at USC,
which is what gives his book its (albeit limited) inter-
disciplinary slant -- but economics dominates, so you'll
find good simplified mathematical models of why people
will _feign_ more extreme opinions than they in fact do
hold, but (to exaggerate a bit:-) not much more than
hand-waving about how such originally-feigned beliefs
come to be internalized and may "become true" in terms
of what people think about themselves.


Alex