Political Yuck Factor
This week, I stumbled upon a curious tidbit that tickled my brain, one of those insights that feels like it should have been obvious all along. It turns out that if something makes you feel “yucky,” you’re more likely to lean towards conservative views. Yes, your gag reflex might just predict your political persuasion.
The more revolted you are by germs, the more you crave order and tradition—like tidying up your room, but for society. So, if you’re easily irked by those with different political views, consider this: both sides are less driven by moral high ground and/or intellectual rigour and more so by their neuro circuitry.
Like it or not, we’re all just slaves to our instincts. So be kind to one another, my friends—after all, we are just playing out the script our brain handed to us. [Cognition and Emotion: An Orderly Personality Explains the Link Between Trait Disgust and Conservatism]
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Olympic 100m
Let me pose a question: at the 1924 Paris Olympics, what was the time for the men’s gold medal winner in the 100m sprint? Remember, this was a century ago, when athletes weren’t professionals, trainer technology was from the dark ages, and nutrition was more guesswork than science.
Answer: 10.6 seconds, set by a British man, Harold Abrahams (who later became a lawyer!). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Abrahams). The world record is still held by Usain Bolt at 9.63 seconds, set in 2012 in London.
So after all that human endeavor, we’re just one second faster than a century ago. It begs the question: are we at peak human? Across the recent Olympics, only a few world records were set this time.
My instinctive and no doubt unpopular response to this new knowledge: what a waste of human optimisation! It’s a bit like the development of the smartphone—each new iteration initially felt like a quantum leap forward, but now, my iPhone from several models ago, does almost everything that the latest version can.
Perhaps in some domains, we’ve simply hit the ceiling.
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My Ickiness for Cricket
I could never quite put my finger on why cricket, didn’t speak to me—until I learned this week that, until the early 1960s, gentlemen used to be the batters and laborers used to be the bowlers. Worse still, batters and bowlers had separate changing rooms and separate entrances to remind everyone of their place!
My lifelong “yuck” response to cricket—which I thought came from a deep-seated conviction that all people are equal—might have less to do with intellectual reasoning and more with how my brain is wired. This nugget of history only confirmed my suspicions that the game was never quite as gentlemanly as it pretended to be. I’ll stick with football, thank you very much.
