Hi all, and Happy New Year! It's been several months since I've managed to post anything on my website, but that's not because I've given up on this. Hardly! It's just because I've been far too busy with life and other outlets for my writing. In fact, 2023 is looking like a promising year for me. I mentioned in my last post about the Vienna Circle that my wife and I were planning to move to Vienna and that has gone off without a hitch. (It sure took a lot of work though!) After 10 weeks here, we're fairly settled in and I hope to get back to regular writing activities soon. I've also been doing a lot with my Evolutionary Philosophy Circle that's being run in David Sloan Wilson's Prosocial World, and I'll have a lot more to say about that very soon. But in the meantime, I've just published an article about "mental immunity" and I wanted to share it here along with some background.
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a two-part review of Andy Norman's new book Mental Immunity. (See the links for part one and part two.) Andy and I have been acquaintances for years and we had lots of other conversations about this review before and after I wrote it, and then he and I joined forces to help run the Evolutionary Philosophy Circle with David Sloan Wilson. In addition to that, Andy has been doing TONS of speaking, organizing, and promoting for his work on mental immunity (see his website for just a hint), which has included coordinating a series of essays about the topic being published in the online magazine This View of Life (TVOL for short). I'm not sure exactly how many essays are going to be part of this symposium (they're still gathering them), but so far six have been published and mine is the latest one.
The rest of these essays will be published about once a week over the next few months, so be sure to sign up to the TVOL newsletter if you want to catch them all. If there's something you'd particularly like to say about this issue, send me an email and we can discuss getting you published in this series as well. I'm also working on getting a discussion group going about this series, so be sure to follow along for more on that. In the meantime, here are the links to all of the essays. They are all meant to be standalone pieces so there's no need to read all of them or in any kind of order, although Andy's introduction is particularly useful. And if you get to mine, be sure to let me know what you think of it in the comments below. This is a really fascinating topic that is incredibly important in today's information environment, so I hope you enjoy it!
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a two-part review of Andy Norman's new book Mental Immunity. (See the links for part one and part two.) Andy and I have been acquaintances for years and we had lots of other conversations about this review before and after I wrote it, and then he and I joined forces to help run the Evolutionary Philosophy Circle with David Sloan Wilson. In addition to that, Andy has been doing TONS of speaking, organizing, and promoting for his work on mental immunity (see his website for just a hint), which has included coordinating a series of essays about the topic being published in the online magazine This View of Life (TVOL for short). I'm not sure exactly how many essays are going to be part of this symposium (they're still gathering them), but so far six have been published and mine is the latest one.
The rest of these essays will be published about once a week over the next few months, so be sure to sign up to the TVOL newsletter if you want to catch them all. If there's something you'd particularly like to say about this issue, send me an email and we can discuss getting you published in this series as well. I'm also working on getting a discussion group going about this series, so be sure to follow along for more on that. In the meantime, here are the links to all of the essays. They are all meant to be standalone pieces so there's no need to read all of them or in any kind of order, although Andy's introduction is particularly useful. And if you get to mine, be sure to let me know what you think of it in the comments below. This is a really fascinating topic that is incredibly important in today's information environment, so I hope you enjoy it!
- The Science of Mental Immunity Has Arrived by Andy Norman
- Cultural Immune Systems as Parts of Cultural Superorganisms by David Sloan Wilson
- The Analogy of/and Inoculation Theory to Mental Immunity by Josh Compton and Sander van der Linden
- Bad Ideas Recruit the Mind’s Immune System to Protect Themselves by Barry Mauer
- Changing a Belief Means Changing How You Feel: The Role of Emotions in Cognitive Immunology by Steven P. Gilbert
- Evolving My View on Mental Immunity by Ed Gibney
