Notes Towards Day 21: Cannibalizing or Socializing?

Notes Towards Day 21 of Food for Thought
The Choice to Cannabalize or Socialize?

I. You Tube on the Milgram Experiment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6GxIuljT3w

II. What was your reaction to
Jared Diamond's essay on the Donner party?
WHY did we ask you to read it?
What did you learn from it? What did you not get?
What relation does it have to your project?

III. My Reading Notes
a new idea about an old problem:
general rules about who is most likely to die
popular guidebook touting a shortcut
gross selfishness rampant
anyone try to draw conclusions from the facts in the roster?
women's striking advantage in part physiological
(smaller, with more fat reserves)
family members stuck together,
helped one another @ the expense of others
lethal effects of social isolation

can you re-write that story? tell it another way?
"foreground" other elements...?
(i.e.: reliance on the "expert"?)

IV. Try a thought experiment:
you are in plane crash in the mountains.
(If given the opportunity): would you eat your companions?
Extreme example, but as Diamond says @ the end of his article:
"ordinary life writ large."

Alive! story of 16 members of the Uruguayan Rugby team
who survived a 1972 airplane crash in the Andes mountains.

45 people on the plane, 12 died in the crash or shortly thereafter;
another 5 by the next morning, one more on the eighth day;
8 more in an avalanche two weeks later...

All of the passengers were Roman Catholic.
The survivors collectively made a decision to eat flesh
from the bodies of their dead classmates and close friends.

What would you have done? Why?
Are these ex-post-facto rationalizations or..?

More 'relevant' example: survivor shows?
how does one/would you "survive"?

an alternative to "social isolation"-->
The Cultural Commons (see Lewis Hyde,
featured in What is Art For? NYTimes this weekend...)

collaborative test-taking @ Penn Med School, etc.

V. testing out this theory w/ your final papers
(boring, predictable, all promising to
"research both sides and find a compromise")

Thursday's (very! important!) reading on
"The Ethical Dog and its Rational Tail"
will make it clear that rationalist decision-making models
aren't going to get you very far...

Tomorrow's posting re: relation of this article to your topic-->
By showing how moral judgments are ex-post-facto explanations
of moral intuitions, Haidt does a pretty good job of explaining "the futility of most moral arguments." How can you accomodate his research into your own upcoming search for an answer to an ethical dilemma? 

(In response to our boredom/
fear none of us will learn anything from
the projects you've proposed....)
Here's the new plan:
1. write topics on board-->
self-organize into small working groups
2. what do your projects have in common
(or what might they have in common?):
re-define your shared question
3. share your gut reactions
(both to the question itself & to the
process of finding an answer together)
4. split up the work: describe who will do what
5. submit that joint report by Friday @ 5 p.m.
(start doing for yourself
what I've been doing for you:
write your own self-evaluations:)
what needs doing?
what questions do you still have?
what's missing?
and how are you going to fill it in?
what additional research is necessary?
and who will do WHAT?

We'll workshop these drafts next Tuesday....

 
(workshop Lydia and Ilana's proposals today?)

 
-----
N.B.: Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel
why Eurasian civilizations have survived and conquered others:
gaps in power and technology originate in environmental differences
influence of geography amplified by various positive feedback loops

two major environmental advantages of Eurasia:
best natural endowment of crops and of domesticable animals
East-West axis provided a huge area with similar latitudes,
therefore climates--
easy for migrating populations to use
customary plants and animals in their new homes

Asian areas w/ major civilizations had
geographical features conducive to
the formation of large, stable, isolated empires
which faced no external pressure
to correct policies that led to stagnation
cf. Europe's many natural barriers
divided it into competing nation-states
competition forced the European nations
to encourage innovation and avoid technological stagnation...