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Why Is Bob Herbert Boring? - T. A. Frank
Proposes and disposes of some theses on why liberal columnist Bob Herbert doesn't get more attention.
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ince I've examined two theories of blame—it's Bob's fault; it's Washington's fault—and found both to be partly wanting, that leaves another possibility: it's the world's fault. Or, at least, it's the fault of human nature. Sadly, history and science make a compelling case that most of us are, indeed, hard-pressed to give a damn. -
In 2005, the psychologists Deborah A. Small, George Loewenstein, and Paul Slovic found the limits of human compassion to be even more irrational and constrained. In their study, students at a university in Pennsylvania were paid five dollars to complete questionnaires on technology. Enclosed with the questionnaire was a seemingly unrelated letter soliciting donations to a hunger relief organization in Africa.
The study's first conclusion was what the researchers had expected: people are more compassionate when they are told about a specific victim. When respondents were asked to donate money to help feed a seven-year-old African girl named Rokia, they contributed more than twice what they did when just confronted with general statistics on hunger.
But then things got surprising. When Rokia was presented with the statistics, the donations fell by nearly half. Worse still, when the authors asked one set of subjects to perform mathematical calculations and the other set of subjects to describe their feelings when they heard the word "baby," the subjects who'd done math gave only about half as much to Rokia as the ones who'd thought about babies. Apparently, just thinking analytically makes us stingier. The authors of the study concluded that "calculative thought lessens the appeal of an identifiable victim."
Overcoming Bias : How Wrong Can We Be?
This all seems to add up to a consistent expert consensus that humans quite often, perhaps even usually, just don’t know why they do what they do. And this is extremely disturbing, as it calls into question our own opinions about why we do what we do.
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Thus the practice of academic economics implicitly accepts that people often, perhaps even usually, do things for reasons other than the reasons they give.
Consider also that something similar holds in sales and marketing. The rationale a marketer gives for why an ad or other product strategy works usually differs quite a bit from the reasons people give for why they like an ad or a product. Similarly, the reasons dating and other relation consultants give for why their suggested strategies help people like or respect you are often quite at odds with the reasons people give for why they like or respect others.
Breaking Habits for Fun and Profit | No Map. No Guide. No Limits.
They go on to cite the work of Ben Fletcher, a British psychologist and business consultant. In his work helping managers become more flexible and tolerant, Fletcher found that while the managers could understand and accept the need to change the way they interacted with subordinates, they could rarely actually do so. Fletcher’s theory? That people are so conditioned to act the same way every day, that much of our behavior—even what we know is bad behavior—is habitual.
Less Wrong: Why You're Stuck in a Narrative
Essentially, the narrative fallacy is our tendency to turn everything we see into a story - a linear chain of cause and effect, with a beginning and an end. Obviously the real world isn't like this - events are complex and interrelated, direct causation is extremely rare, and outcomes are probabilistic. Verbally, we know this - the hard part, as always, is convincing our brain of the fact.
The Unreliability of Naive Introspection - Eric Schwitzgebel
We are prone to gross error, even in favorable circumstances of extended reflection, about our own ongoing conscious experience, our current phenomenology. Even in this apparently privileged domain, our self-knowledge is faulty and untrustworthy. We are not simply fallible at the margins but broadly inept. Examples highlighted in this essay include: emotional experience (for example, is it entirely bodily; does joy have a common, distinctive phenomenological core?), peripheral vision (how broad and stable is the region of visual clarity?), and the phenomenology of thought (does it have a distinctive phenomenology, beyond just imagery and feelings?). Cartesian skeptical scenarios undermine knowledge of ongoing conscious experience as well as knowledge of the outside world. Infallible judgments about ongoing mental states are simply banal cases of self-fulfillment. Philosophical foundationalism supposing that we infer an external world from secure knowledge of our own consciousness is almost exactly backward.
The Weedy Garden of Familyhood « Easily Distracted
On the other hand, I think he’s missing something new about contemporary middle-class childhood. Sometimes, yes, it’s about ferrying the kids between contained, safe experiences. But also, I think that a lot of middle-class family life is now about the simultaneous adventures of children and adults, that children and adults are sharing far more of their experiences.
Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood - The New York Review of Books
There are reasons for all of this. The helmeting and monitoring, the corralling of children into certified zones of safety, is in part the product of the Consumer Reports mentality, the generally increased consciousness, in America, of safety and danger. To this one might add the growing demands of insurance actuarials and the national pastime of torts. But the primary reason for this curtailing of adventure, this closing off of Wilderness, is the increased anxiety we all feel over the abduction of children by strangers; we fear the wolves in the Wilderness.
Humans prefer cockiness to expertise - life - 10 June 2009 - New Scientist
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From the start, the more confident advisers found more buyers for their advice, and this caused the advisers to give answers that were more and more precise as the game progressed. This escalation in precision disappeared when guessers simply had to choose whether or not to buy the advice of a single adviser. In the later rounds, guessers tended to avoid advisers who had been wrong previously, but this effect was more than outweighed by the bias towards confidence.
The findings add weight to the idea that if offering expert opinion is your stock-in-trade, it pays to appear confident. Describing his work at an Association for Psychological Science meeting in San Francisco last month, Moore said that following the advice of the most confident person often makes sense, as there is evidence that precision and expertise do tend to go hand in hand. For example, people give a narrower range of answers when asked about subjects with which they are more familiar (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, vol 107, p 179).
Relevant History: The Evil Futurists' Guide to World Domination
so now it's time for the next project: The Evil Futurists' Guide to World Domination: How to be Successful, Famous, and Wrong.
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Be certain, not right. People love certainty. They crave it. In experiments, psychologists have shown that "[w]e tend to seek advice from experts who exhibit the most confidence – even when we know they haven’t been particularly accurate in the past." We just can't resist certainty.
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Claim to be an expert: it makes people's brains hurt. In a remarkable new study, Jan Engelmann and colleagues used fMRI to observe the brains of people who received expert advice during a financial simulation. They found that subjects thought differently about their decisions when they received the advice-- even if it was bad advice-- than when they worked on their own. As the researchers put it, "one effect of expert advice is to 'offload' the calculation of value of decision options from the individual’s brain."
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Less Wrong: What's In A Name?
The name letter effect is your subconscious preference for things that sound like your own name. This might be expected to mostly apply to small choices like product brand names, but it's been observed in choices of spouse, city of residence, and even career.
Just-world phenomenon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The just-world phenomenon, also called the just-world theory, just-world fallacy, just-world effect, or just-world hypothesis, refers to the tendency for people to want to believe that the world is "just" so strongly that when they witness an otherwise inexplicable injustice they will rationalize it by searching for things that the victim might have done to deserve it. This deflects their anxiety, and lets them continue to believe the world is a just place, but at the expense of blaming victims for things that were not, objectively, their fault.
Stumbling and Mumbling: Justice & public opinion
Now, I don’t mean to disrepect the JRF’s research here. All I’m saying is that there’s no reason to suppose that public opinion about justice should coincide with what is actually just. After all, if it did we could ditch 2500 years of political philosophy and use opinion polls instead.
PublicEye.org - Website of Political Research Associates - Toxic to Democracy Conspiracy Theories, Demonization, & Scapegoating
"Right-wing pundits demonize scapegoated groups and individuals in our society, implying that it is urgent to stop them from wrecking the nation. Some angry people in the audience already believe conspiracy theories in which the same scapegoats are portrayed as subversive, destructive, or evil. Add in aggressive apocalyptic ideas that suggest time is running out and quick action mandatory and you have a perfect storm of mobilized resentment threatening to rain bigotry and violence across the United States."
Fouling Up Is Fundamental | Psychology Today Blogs
The problem lies so deep in the fabric of our perception that it has earned an impressively general label: the Fundamental Attribution Error. Originally identified through the work of Ned Jones and Lee Ross in the 1960s, this quirk of human assumption appears robustly in study after study. In outline, it works like this: we assume that other people behave as they do because that is their nature; we ourselves, however, behave as we do because we have assessed the situation and logically chosen a course. We alone respond to changing circumstance; others simply are the way they are.
Stumbling and Mumbling: Doubts about democracy
There’s a conflict between liberty and democracy.
The problem here, though, is that the public’s preferences might be systematically irrational; contrary to the optimism of wisdom of crowds thinking, their errors might not cancel out.
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