Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.
The problem with this kind of statement is that at first it sounds reasonable. Unfortunately, a lot of people stay with that only but if you dig deeper you’ll find there’s something wrong with it.
Mark Greenspan talks about the subtleties of the surveillance campaign on the Toronto subway at a presentation on the Toronto Ignite Conf 2010. What he notes is that the campaign sends subtle discrimination messages. And maybe this wasn’t done intentionally, but the messages are clearly there.
This pro-Science fake-poster (fake because it doesn’t exist) suffers a bit from that too. It’s the de-humanization process Greenspan talks about. You define a boundary to make a clear separation between you and them. You see some lunatic do something horrible and then you try to catalogue him into some group you don’t belong to.
That’s because we’re all scared of finding any humanity in someone who pulls that kind of monstrosity. We don’t want to be associated with them at all. So you end up having to profile an enemy. They dress a certain way, they have a certain belief or they do whatever thing which is different from you.
We want an enemy with a face. We don’t like thinking that evil is everywhere and it can jump out of nowhere. We need to group it into some box so as to makes it easier to recognize.
Well, Mr Science lovers, I have news for you: Religion doesn’t make someone evil and Science doesn’t make anyone a good person. Those are just beliefs and they do not make someone a psychopath or not.
In this world you can have Buddhists who don’t eat meat because they don’t want to hurt living creatures and you can get a genocidal mad man (like Hitler) who believes their race is superior because it’s a scientific fact – Yes, Hitler’s theory of Aryan Superiority was based on his literal readings of Darwin’s and Nietzsche’s work (one an Agnostic and the other one a fervent Atheist).
So next time you see someone trying to catalogue evil into a group, remember it’s just a trick some people use to stay in their comfort zone and it might trigger segregation (which will lead to all the conflicts we are used to reading about in news feeds every day).
“The hard part first” is a post I came across via Designer Depot. Now, there’s not research into it but as soon as you read it it makes complete sense. Basically, what Chris Coyier proposes is that when doing form design, we should put the actual action that the user requested first.
This might sound obvious at first and you might not know what the hell I’m talking about but think about the form for leaving a comment on certain websites. First thing you’ll get requested for are your details, and then you can leave a comment or send a message. We’ve been doing it like that for so long that we haven’t even questioned the way it works. What Chris suggests is that we put the actual comment box first and then we go into the annoying details which make the process more cumbersome. That way you commit to filling the form and, for whatever the reason, it seems like an easier experience.
Anyway, he has more examples in hist post so take a look.
