bodhi tree swaying

Scientific American has a very interesting and challenging article on how difficult it can be to bring about personal change. It’s worth reading the entire article, but here’s the handy digest (you know, just in case that resolution to stop skimming the surface of articles isn’t working out for ya).

• Studies of personality development often focus on traits such as extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism and openness to new experiences. In most people, these traits change more during young adulthood than any other period of life, including adolescence. Openness typically increases during a person’s 20s and goes into a gradual decline after that.
• This pattern of personality development seems to hold true across cultures. Although some see that as evidence that genes determine our personality, many researchers theorize that personality traits change during young adulthood because this is a time of life when people assume new roles: finding a partner, starting a

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Apparently it’s World Philosophy Day (or maybe it recently was — I’m not too clear), and the BBC has four philosophical problems, posed by David Bain of the University of Glasgow (my alma mater) to help you exercise your mind:

1. SHOULD WE KILL HEALTHY PEOPLE FOR THEIR ORGANS?

Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be ok painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?

Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he’ll release you.)

If in this case you should kill one to save …