I’m definitely right-brained overall, but I recognize that logic and reason must be the basis for one’s political-economic views. Obamanomics (and perhaps Chomskyism) is a perfect example of the inanities one can produce by substituting logic and economic law with “creativity” and intuition.
So while I have a ridiculously big imagination, I realize that it sometimes has to take a backseat to logic. This is what the right-brained leftists don’t understand.
I’d say the OP is correct: libertarians as a whole (especially Austrians) are probably more left-brained than right. Nothing wrong with that.
And this is just a guess, but I predict that market anarchists tend to be at least slightly more right-brained than minarchists.
Yeah a lot of those trigger words can mean different things to different people. Eg. The Stuff about Chaos, do I assume they mean anarchy? I think I did - so I answered accordingly.
I answered it honestly, it’s just that the test sucks balls and misinterprets / cannot comprehend my answers to it’s question. It gives an attribution to an alternate side, when it should be the other. That’s my take anyway.
| Right Brain | |||||||||||||| | 56% |
| - | - | - |
| Left Brain | |||||||||||| | 50% |
It’s funny because I assumed by chaos they meant central planning.
Exactly. lol
But what side should that go on? And do the authors think “anarchy” is chaos…
Furthermore, is there even really a divide? Seems to me the “we only use 10% of our brains capacity” is a myth. When you get shot in the head, they don’t go, “ohh, don’t worry, you’ve still got 90% left”. It all works in unision.
Same false divide of left / right as with micro and macro? /probably wayy of base.. lol
Not to be a party pooper, but, as fun as these novelty tests are, the science behind them is gimmickry.
For one thing, the popular conception of left brain/right brain lateralization is far too simplistic. Brains are generally too flexible for simple “math and logic on that side; language and draftsmanship on the other” rules. Just the overlap in those few categories alone should probably be a red flag that the separation of those functions can’t be that neat and pat neurologically. The link below is a fair discussion although it still sounds more confident than it should.*
For another thing, even though I feel like a big wet blanket pointing it out, the personality tests of the Myers-Briggs type are vocabulary tests. I have taken them, scored them, and seen the advisory materials for using them. They rely on people not knowing various senses of the words used in the questions. (That is, they rely heavily on words like “discriminating”, “subjective”, and “intuition” having common meanings that differ from the meanings one might encounter if one has read more extensively.) So people who might choose one answer for a particular question, would change their minds and pick another if they knew that another word had an additional meaning which was a more accurate description of their attitude.
Just to point out an example of how misleading such words can be even outside of personality tests, I once read a rather lengthy essay by a professor of mathematics (!) going on about how “intuitionist logic” might actually make mathematics a kinder, gentler discipline, or words to that effect, when he clearly did not have any idea what intuitionist logic** really is, and was simply going by the word “intuitionist”, which to him seemed to mean “fuzzy and less rigorous”.
Again, as I said, I understand that these novelty tests are great fun and all, but there is a danger of taking the underlying assumptions they make too much to heart and placing too much weight upon ill-defined distinctions.
*A few years ago, I remember a discussion of a study which seemed to indicate that among, as I recall, male Turkish speakers, much of the syntax was a right hemisphere function - of course, the study was of only a small subset of said speakers, and the person who brought it up couldn’t give me the details of the methodology or the percentages involved, and now I can’t find the darned thing. (It is often the way with cognitive science studies. Sometimes one even sees claims that a study showed the precise opposite of the actual conclusion in the paper. Dennett makes that mistake about an old psychological study on the innate fear of snakes in primates and monkeys. He didn’t bother to read the original and got the conclusion backwards in a bit of revisionist confirmation bias. Rather amusing by-product, Nussbaum, another philosopher, later used Dennett’s mistaken example in an unrelated argument. You would think with all the graduate students at their disposal, they could have at least dug up the original study to check that it actually did show what they wanted for their arguments.)
**In point of fact, intuitionist logic is, if anything, more demanding than classical logic because many of the laws of negation do not obtain in intuitionist logic, making it more a sort of a “macho logic” (as in, “ha, I don’t need no stinking law of excluded middle! Watch me do it in the modal logic, S4! With one hand tied behind my back too. QED!”)
Sounds good to me. Close thread?
True, the complexity of our brains can not be confined …but I still have fun making them [:P]