Purpose statement

This blog will provide a record of my activities while participating in the Pacific Century Fellows program; starting up Kuleana Micro-Lending; assisting Rep. Jessica Wooley, Common Cause Hawai'i and Voter Owned Hawai'i in their legislative initiatives; and working with the Clarence T.C. Ching PUEO (Partnerships in Unlimited Educational Opportunities) program. I've also included excerpts from books and magazines I've read, along with presentations and lectures I've attended that address relevant topics and issues.


Not everyone can be famous, but everyone can be great because everyone has the capacity to serve.
— MLK

Friday, June 17, 2011

David Brooks— The Social Animal: Decision Making

Rob and Julia

Rob, being a certain sort of man, took in most of what he wanted to know through his eyes. His male Pleistocene ancestors were confronted with the puzzling fact that human females do not exhibit any physical signals when they're ovulating, unlike other animals. So the early hunters made do with the closest markers of fertility available.

Men everywhere value clear skin, full lips, long lustrous hair, symmetrical features, shorter distances between the mouth and chin and between the nose and chin, and a waist-to-hip ratio of about 0.7.

...there is nothing that so enhances beauty as self-confidence.

...when the tip of the eyebrow dips, that means the smile is genuine not fake.

Women, in general, are less visually aroused than men, a trait that has nearly cut the market for pornography in half... (Women) are compelled to choose a man not only for insemination, but for companionship and continued support. And to this day, when a woman sets her eyes upon a potential mate, her time frame is different from his... There are more lemons in the male population than in the female population, and women have found that it pays to trade off a few points in the first-impression department in exchange for reliability and social intelligence down the road.

People rarely revise their first impression, they just become more confident that they are right.

Despite what you're read about opposites attracting, people usually fall in love with people like themselves... People generally overestimet how distinct their own lives are, so the commonalities seemed to them like a series of miracle... people who are getting to know each other subconsciously measure to see if their vocabularies mesh, and they adapt to the other person's level...90 % of emotional communication is non-verbal.

Words are the fuel of courtship. Other species win their mates through a series of escalating dances, but humans use conversation... the most frequent one hundred words account for 60% of all conversations. The most common 4,000 words account for 98% of conversations... a couple will exchange about a million words before conceiving a child.

...there's plenty of evidence that men fall in love more quickly, and subscribe more to the conviction that true love lasts forever.

...kindness is the most important quality desired in a sexual partner by both men and women.

The richer the man, the younger the woman he is likely to mate with. The more beautiful the woman, the richer the man. A woman's attractiveness is an outstanding predictor of her husband's annual income. (That makes me an outlier... :) )

Human culture exists in lareg measure to restrain the natural desires of our species.

...smell is a powerful way to read emotions.

...lack of emotion leads to self-destrictive and dangerous behavior. People who lack emotion don't lead well-planned logical lives... emotions measure the value of something, and help unconscioulsy guide us as we navigate through life

The brain is not separate from the body— that was Descartes' error. The physical and the mental are connected in complex networks of reaction and counter-reactions, and out of their feedback an emotional value emerges.

The brain states and bodily responses are the fundamental facts of an emotion, and the conscious feelings are the frills that have added icing to the emotional cake.

Reason and emotion are not separate and opposed. Reason is nestled upon the emotion and dependent upon it. Emotion assigns value to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations. The human mind can be pragmatic because deep down it is romantic.

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