Posts Tagged ‘cognitive biases’
July 3 Links! Accept No Substitutes!
* CFP for ICFA 2020: Expanding the Archive.
* Forgot to link this yesterday: If The Democratic Primary Field Was a University History Department.
* Cory Doctorow: What is it that makes some people vulnerable to anti-vax messages?
I think it’s the trauma of living in a world where there is ample evidence that our truth-seeking exercises can’t be trusted. That’s a genuinely scary idea, because if the truth is open to the highest bidder, then we are facing a future of chaos and terror, where you can’t trust the food on your plate, the roof over your head, or the school your child attends.
* ‘They Set Us Up to Fail’: Black Directors of the ’90s Speak Out.
* Medievalism goes to war with itself.
* Milwaukee County absolutely determined to destroy itself.
* In the world’s northernmost town, temperatures have risen by 4C, devastating homes, wildlife and even the cemetery. Will the rest of the planet heed its warning? Welcome to the fastest-heating place on Earth.
* Amazon destruction accelerates 60% to one and a half soccer fields every minute. Bolsonaro is the greatest crisis on the planet right now and everyone has agreed to just let it happen.
* ‘Families belong together’: Hundreds gather in Milwaukee to protest migrant detention centers.
* Watchdog Slams ‘Overcrowding’ At DHS Detention Centers.
* Another ICE detainee has died in custody.
* Whatever the merits of her criticism, when those in power are caught abusing that power in ways that are morally indefensible and politically unpopular, they will always seek to turn an argument about oppression into a dispute about manners.
* ‘Unprecedented in Our History’: One State Is on the Verge of Slashing Higher-Ed Funding, Leaving Public Colleges in a Panic. Alaska Governor’s “Unprecedented” Higher Education Cuts Could Shutter Entire Departments.
* Will Donald Trump’s Fourth of July Parade Break the Law?
* Must have absolutely broken their hearts: FBI claims it lost file on neo-Nazi website Stormfront ‘after a reasonable search.’
* The Single Most Reliable Recession Indicator of the Past 50 Years Has Officially Started Blaring.
* The madness of factchecking. The hits against Sanders this week are especially incredible even by factchecking’s already low standards.
* Teenager Accused of Rape Deserves Leniency Because He’s From a ‘Good Family,’ Judge Says.
* The Democrats Aren’t a Left-Wing Party — They Just Play One on TV. And a truly evergreen tweet.
* We had our time. The world belongs to the humanzees now.
* Why did octopuses become smart?
1001 Sunday Links
* Penn Gillette on three-card monty and graduate school in the humanities.
* Towards a taxonomy of cliches in Space Opera.
* “Use Tatooine sparingly” and other rules from the Star Wars style guide. io9 has a few other highlights.
* A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction.
* Inside Disney’s America, the doomed ’90s project that almost sunk the company.
* “The Contemporary” by the numbers.
* From a work in progress: Nomic and net.culture.
* Vice science faction: After the Big One.
* Alumnae vowed to save Sweet Briar from closing last year. And they did.
* Radical notion: College Presidents Should Come from Academia.
* Simon Newman, the college leader whose metaphor about drowning bunnies made him infamous in higher education, announced late Monday that he has resigned, effective immediately, as president of Mount St. Mary’s University. The Mount St. Mary’s Presidency Was a Corporate Test Case. It Failed Miserably..
* The only MFA program in the US that focuses on African American literature could close.
* UW slips out of top 10 in new public university ranking. Amid rough seas for UW System, wave of challenges hits UWM.
* UC Davis chancellor received $420,000 on book publisher’s board. The University of California paid hedge fund managers about $1 billion in fees over the last 12 years, according to a white paper study released by the university system’s largest employee union.
* A Field Test for Identifying Appropriate Sexual Partners in Academia. She Wanted to Do Her Research. He Wanted to Talk ‘Feelings.’
* “The GRE is like taking a cancer test that was invented in the 1940s.”
* Putting on a “Brave” Face: On Ableism and Appropriation in the Film Industry.
* Justice Dept. grants immunity to staffer who set up Clinton email server. What you need to know about Hillary Clinton’s emails. Did Clinton and Petraeus do the same thing? Clinton, on her private server, wrote 104 emails the government says are classified.
* The Libya Gamble: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Push for War & the Making of a Failed State.
* Clinton insiders are eager to begin recruiting Republicans turned off by the prospect of Donald Trump to their cause — and the threat of Sanders sticking it out until June makes the general election pivot more difficult. Inside the Clinton Team’s Plan to Defeat Donald Trump. Smart to announce it now!
* But, look, it’s not all Clinton negativity: Hillary Clinton promises to ‘get to the bottom of UFO mystery’ if elected, and ‘maybe send a task force’ to alleged alien prison Area 51.
* The Official Head Of The Democratic Party Joins GOP Effort To Protect Payday Lenders. Bernie Versus the Earthquake Industry.
* Republican Voters Kind Of Hate All Their Choices. 1927 flashback. Kasich May Have Cut Off Rubio’s Path To The Nomination. Trump gives supporters permission to be violent with protesters: If you hurt them I’ll defend you in court. Researchers have found strong evidence that racism helps the GOP win. ‘Not even my wife knows’: secret Donald Trump voters speak out. Is this a realignment? The rise of American authoritarianism. Awkward.
* The car century was a mistake. It’s time to move on.
* 2°C.
* Another piece on the end of Louisiana.
* I don’t know that the Melissa Click case is really the best example here, but there’s every reason to think body cameras will be used to serve police interests, not citizen interests.
* Lab tech allegedly faked result in drug case; 7,827 criminal cases now in question.
* Can a 3-year old represent herself in immigration court? This judge thinks so. Please watch my show Three Year Old Immigration Lawyer next fall on ABC.
* Did the Spanish Empire Change Earth’s Climate?
* The Flint Next Time: Fears About Water Supply Grip Village That Made Teflon Products. Flint is in the news, but lead poisoning is even worse in Cleveland.
* This Guy Spent Four Years Creating an Imaginary Reddit for 3016.
* Sci-Fi Hero Samuel Delany’s Outsider Art.
* Marquette in the news! Oh.
Sweetin’s autobiography begins with a very different two-word phrase. The first line ofUnSweetined, which Sweetin wrote (or rather told in bits to a ghostwriter) in 2009, is “fuck it.” She is referring to her attitude right before smoking meth and doing a plateful of cocaine, the night before she was scheduled to give a speech at Marquette University about her commitment to sobriety (she did give that speech in 2007, and she was high the entire time she was on stage).
* Over at Slate friend of the show Eric “The Red” Hittinger explains clearly and succinctly why rooftop solar power probably won’t ever challenge big utility companies.
* When People With Schizophrenia Hear Voices, They’re Really Hearing Their Own Subvocal Speech.
* This video shows what ancient Rome actually looked like.
* Steph Curry Is On Pace To Hit 102 Home Runs.
* Mysterious Chimpanzee Behaviour May Be Evidence Of “Sacred” Rituals.
* Here’s a silly thing I watched: “Great Minds with Dan Harmon,” 1, 2.
* Sports corner: Ivy League Considers Banning Tackling During Practice.
* A Believer interview with the great Andy Daly.
* A Plagiarism Scandal Is Unfolding In The Crossword World. Professional Bridge Has a Cheating Problem.
* The Enigmatic Art of America’s Secret Societies.
* Super-Intelligent Humans Are Coming.
* The astonishment that such things are “still” possible.
* The Retirement Crisis Is Getting Truly Scary.
* The Fact That None Of The 2016 Presidential Candidates Have A Space Policy Is Tragic.
* From the start, in 1967, “Trader Joe” Coulombe devised his “low-priced gourmet-cum-health-food store” with an “unemployed PhD student” in mind as the ideal customer.
* Reading from a statement while speaking with analysts, Chief Executive Officer Joel Manby said SeaWorld’s board of directors has “directed management to end the practice in which certain employees posed as animal-welfare activists. This activity was undertaken in connection with efforts to maintain the safety and security of employees, customers and animals in the face of credible threats.”
* What Mars Would Look Like Mapped by Medieval Cartographers.
* New York City Is in the Throes of a Häagen-Dazs Heist Epidemic.
* Thus, I conclude that in fact, Gygax’s strength scoring system is actually…pretty good! But only good for fighters, in a system like AD&D where we can reasonably assume that all fighter PCs have been training for 10+ years and are genetically super-gifted. However, if you’re Raistlin Majere from the Dragonlance Chronicles and are in all probability an underweight untrained or novice lifter of average height, then you are probably looking at a STR score of around 6-7. If you are a woman of my current weight and untrained, you are looking at a STR score of around 3-4. If you’re my current weight and train consistently for a couple of years, you can expect to have a score of around 8-9. Men and/or individuals with higher testosterone levels will have somewhat higher scores, but it is definitely out of the question that a 10-11 can represent an average strength in our society, though it may be in a farmer-dominant society where everyone lifts a lot of hay bales.
* Every Bryan Fuller Star Trek episode, ranked.
* Secrets of my success: Narcissistic Students Get Better Grades from Narcissistic Professors.
* The dialectic never stops turning: Hope is reactionary: it cocoons actuality in the gossamer of the tolerable, dulling the thirst for change. Despair is revolutionary: it grinds the knife-edge of the intolerable against the whetstone of actuality, sparking the will to change.
* We are the second best girls.
* 20 Cognitive Biases That Screw Up Your Decisions.
Tuesday Morning
* Well, it certainly doesn’t sound very jubilant: A group of long-term unemployed jobseekers were bussed into London to work as unpaid stewards during the diamond jubilee celebrations and told to sleep under London Bridge before working on the river pageant.
* The Watchmen sequel gets meta right off the bat.
* André & Maria Jacquemetton talk to Slate about “Commissions & Fees,” while Jared Harris talks to the New York Times. Big spoilers for the most recent episode, naturally.
* My case illustrates how success is always rationalized. People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck — especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don’t want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either.
* Adam Kotsko reviews one of the next books in my increasingly long “free time” reading queue, Red Plenty.
* From the too-good-to-check files:
A Dutch company has launched a reality television-type project to establish a human settlement on Mars by 2023.
Mars One, as the project is called, aims to bring a total of 40 astronauts to Mars between 2023 and 2033. Organizers say the astronauts will be expected to remain there permanently – “living and working on Mars the rest of their lives.”
Where do we sign up?
* Which Wisconsin? Lorrie Moore in the NYRoB.
* A new study shows “Women earn 91 cents for every dollar men earn—if you control for life choices.” The whole idea of “life choices” is itself essentially an argument-from-privilege, taking male experiences as neutral and unmarked and female experiences as a deviation from the norm—but women earn ten percent less even when you buy that line.
* ‘No surprise at all: ‘stand your ground’ defendants more likely to prevail if the victim is black.’ No one could have predicted!
* Pittsburgh, before smoke control.
* “Right of conscience” watch: NJ Doctor Would Reportedly Rather Let Patient Die Than Treat Him For ‘Gay Disease.’
* Special pleading watch: I can’t wait to find out why Minnesota’s big shift towards marriage equality doesn’t count as evidence for the bully pulpit, either.
* What happens when psychiatric hospitals disappear.
* And Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal takes an old-school sci-fi glimpse at the future of human evolution.
More on Japan
The news from Japan continues to be terrible, with Judit Kawaguchi reporting 10,000 people missing from just a single town in Miyagi prefecture.
Much of the Internet attention—probably too much—is now focused on the Fukushima nuclear reactor that has been poised on the brink of meltdown. A scary-looking explosion happened on-site early in the morning EST, but it appears to have been in another part of the complex and not affected core containment. One of the inspectors from Three Mile Island says all eleven of the shutdown nuclear power plants will likely be total losses, reducing Japan’s electricity-generating capacity by 20%.
Nonetheless, nuclear experts are still assuring us that the ongoing release of radiation will not be catastrophic. Typing those words reminds me that I feel about nuclear experts more or less exactly the way that Tea Party People feel about climate scientists—with the caveat that the lopsided financial incentives and structural/institutional biases that denialists imagine exist in climate science really do exist with respect to nuclear research, where spending from pro-nuclear industry and governmental sources dwarfs everything spent in the other direction. Japan’s nuclear industry in particular has not given the population much reason to trust it:
Over the decades, the Japanese public has been reassured by the Tokyo Electric Power Company that its nuclear reactors are prepared for any eventuality. Yet the mystery in Fukushima is not the first unreported problem with nuclear power, only the most recent. Back in 1996, amid a reactor accident in Ibaraki province, the government never admitted that radioactive fallout had drifted over the northeastern suburbs of Tokyo. Reporters obtained confirmation from monitoring stations, but the press was under a blanket order not to run any alarming news, facts be damned. For a nation that has lived under the atomic cloud of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, total denial becomes possible because the finger on the button is our own.
Hopefully, though, despite my distrust, the nuclear scientists are right on this, and injury to the people and environment surrounding Fukushima will remain at a minimum.
Sunday Night Links with Yoda, Clark Kent, and Banksy
* George Lucas, saved from himself: Yoda was very nearly played by a monkey in a mask.
* Christopher Cokinos argues in The American Scholar that geo-engineering is, as the saying goes, a terrible idea whose time has come.
* Self-serving egocentric rosy retrospection: How Republicans remember the 1990s.
* Bill and Steve’s GOTV video has gone viral with 45,000 views.
You Are Not So Smart
You Are Not So Smart is a blog slowly making its way through all your cognitive biases, with good posts on memory, Dunbar’s Number, Dunning-Kruger, and fines. Via Kottke.
Links for an Epic Post
* The Great Game: an experiment in interactive fiction. Looks pretty promising; I voted for “Lovecraftian/cosmic horror.”
* Secrets of pinball economics. Via Boing Boing.
* Fox News is totally going to get serious about not lying all the time.
* How to start reading comics. (Late-breaking addendum.)
* Characters for an epic tale.
* Frightening time-lapse map of unemployment in America.
* There’s a wonderful(ly destructive) cognitive bias at work in this pair of stories, the first on climate change and the second on unemployment: what looks at first like apocalyptic pessimism easily becomes the “new normal” once it comes to pass.
* The Henry Ford of heart surgery. Via Kevin Drum.
* Also from Kevin Drum: “At least it’s something”: U.S. to announce carbon-reduction benchmarks.
Friday Friday Megalinkdump
It’s Friday, and I’ve been saving some special links to mark the occasion.
* A 3-D exploration of Picasso’s Guernica. Via MeFi.
* 7 reasons why sci-fi book series outstay their welcome.
* The top twenty-five Batman stories of all time. That Dark Knight Returns only clocked in at #25 may surprise you, but once you know that it’s no real shock that Alan Moore takes the #1 slot for The Killing Joke, the story that saw Batgirl shot in the back by the Joker and confined to a wheelchair for life.
* The L.A. Times has an interview with Joss Whedon about Dollhouse. There’s been a lot of hype about this show lately—the news that it’s been given the post-24 timeslot, the news that there will only be five minutes of commercials per hour, a teaser clip at io9.com—so much hype, in fact, that I almost believe Fox isn’t planning to air the episodes out of order and then cancel it after 7 episodes. Almost.
#12 – Law of Phlogistatic Emission
Nearly all things emit light from fatal wounds.
#18 – Law of Hemoglobin Capacity
The human body contains over 12 gallons of blood, sometimes more, under high pressure.
#41 – Law of Xylolaceration
Wooden or bamboo swords are just as sharp as metal swords, if not sharper.
* Here’s part of the reason Americans have gotten and are getting so much fatter: portion sizes keep increasing and unit bias induces us to eat everything we’re given.
* Of course, the obesity epidemic affects more than just a single person’s quality of life.
* And via Matt Yglesias, David Brooks explores our Buddhist future. And yet my guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.
Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development. Matt makes the smart point the increased concentration of capital (economic, cultural, and otherwise) in China and India will likely accelerate this process greatly.
Twenty-six cognitive biases, at HealthBolt. To my mind a crucial cognitive bias was left off the list: the just world hypothesis (more here) which (as I’ve written before) is at the core of conservative politics in this country.
Gerry Canavan 