In chapter five of Haidt’s The Righteous Mind he defines a second principle of moral psychology: There’s more to morality than harm and fairness. To support this claim he did some research showing that people who grow up on Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies are statistical outliers on many psychological measures. Haidt conducted his research by asking University of Pennsylvania students about their thoughts on the dog and chicken question from the previous chapters, and he found that their responses were the “unusual” ones compared to the working-class individuals that he interviewed outside of McDonald’s. Haidt later stated that it has been shown that this “WEIRD” population is the least representative population you could study if you want to make generalizations about the human population, because “The WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world of separate objects, rather than relationships.”

I found this part about chapter five very interesting because it reminded me of the 2016 election. For most WEIRD people, or at least for me, it seemed as if Hillary would undoubtedly win the election and unfathomable to think of Trump winning. However, in my scope of the world, I was only paying attention to the fellow WEIRD population and following news sources that reported Hillary was the correct candidate. The media and the polls seemed to cover the WEIRD population and the “non-WEIRD” population was not well accounted for. It is clear in this case that the WEIRD population was not representative of the whole United States population, as many people clearly voted for Trump. After the election, I was obviously surprised and it made me realize how little I know about the American people outside of the WEIRD population and the way in which they think. After this chapter and the election, I am realizing how completely different one’s morals can be within the same country.

 Sylvia Molloy – “Translation as Queer Practice: A conversation with Sylvia Molloy

On Thursday, February 2nd I attended a speaker for my Spanish class. The talk was called “Translation as Queer Practice: A conversation with Sylvia Molly”. Despite it being a requirement for my spanish class, the discussion took place in english. Sylvia Molloy is a renowned Latin American scholar at New York University, translator, critic, and writer who has explored the issues of translation in text after text of a writing career that itself breaks apart the straightjacket of genres, disciplines, and institutionalized modes of reading. Molloy is fluent in three languages and has translated thousands of documents, but explained how translation is a deviant process. She went through her processes of translating and I found it interesting because I had never really thought in depth about the series of steps it takes to translate. Molloy says she starts by pretending to write in a different language to trick herself, so that the language is “infected” by the other language. She stressed the importance that translation is not a replica, because if it were, it would be repetitive. Instead, translating is an untidy exercise and is not amenable to rules.

I find the topic of translation an interesting one, as a Spanish minor I go back and forth between Spanish and English often. It is frustrating when you cannot figure out the translation between the two languages, and often times you find yourself with a completely different translation than what you started with. The implications of translating can be severe, as we have seen in recent news the differences between people and their languages has caused a lot of tension. Molloy also touched on translation in the past, and how it used to be much more complicated when no one knew each other’s languages and they had to figure out how to communicate. I think in this day and age we take communication for granted, technology being the culprit of most of the ungratefulness that has fostered among us, we have the access and ability to communicate when and almost wherever we want.