Dopey for ideas

Dopaminergic Aesthetics, Jonah Lehrer
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/10/dopaminergic_aesthetics.php

“The world is full of possibilities, and it is our dopaminergic feelings that help us choose between them…ne of the innovations of the human brain is that dopamine also evaluates abstract ideas…Evolution essentially bootstrapped our penchant for intellectual concepts to the same reward circuits that govern our animal appetites…The purpose of pleasure, then, is to make it easier for the pleasurable sensation – the delicious taste, the elegant idea, the desired object – to enter the crowded theater of consciousness, so that we’ll go out and get it…Aesthetics are really about attention…If attention is like a spotlight, then these drug makes the filament burn brighter. The end result is that we can’t look away.”

ACH – quick video intro

Pretty slick

You’re biased, I’m not

We’re biased to think that we are less prone to biases than others. 
http://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/28/3/369

Three studies suggest that individuals see the existence and operation of cognitive and motivational biases much more in others than in themselves. Study 1 provides evidence fromthree surveys that people rate themselves as less subject to various biases than the “average American,” classmates in a seminar, and fellow airport travelers. Data from the third survey further suggest that such claims arise from the interplay among availability biases and self-enhancement motives. Participants in one follow-up study who showed the better-than-average bias insisted that their self-assessments were accurate and objective even after reading a description of how they could have been affected by the relevant bias. Participants in a final study reported their peer’s self-serving attributions regarding test performance to be biased but their own similarly self-serving attributions to be free of bias. The relevance of these phenomena to naïve realism and to conflict, misunderstanding, and dispute resolution is discussed.

Rational Irrationality

“The real reason that capitalism is so crash-prone”
Yet another take on the real explanation for the GFC – behavior that is individually rational can be collectively irrational.  Prisoners Dilemma and all that. 

More analysis please

“The problems that we face today, both big ones in society like the current health care debate and smaller ones like strategic business decisions, do not exist because we lack information, but because we don’t understand it. They can be solved only by developing skills and tools to make sense of information that is often complex. In other words, the major obstacle to solving modern problems isn’t the lack of information, solved by acquiring it, but the lack of understanding, solved by analytics.”

Stephen Few, http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=621

Brand Power

“We Japanese have a weakness for brands,” said Ryuko Nishimura, 43, a homemaker from Kuroishi, a three-hour drive away. “It makes the tuna taste two or three times more delicious.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/world/asia/20tuna.html

Slippery Slopes

Lots of good examples in a series of posts on James Fallows’ blog.

Even birds can do it

Here’s what happened. Shigeru Watanabe (a psychologist at Keio University in Tokyo and possibly a man in league with the birds) set up a nefarious experiment. Watanabe showed children’s paintings to pigeons; a panel of adults had deemed each work either good or bad. He trained the pigeons to distinguish between them with a system of tasty rewards. When the pigeons pecked correctly, he gave them some seed. Later, he presented 10 paintings to the birds they had never seen. Five of these paintings had been deemed good by humans, five bad. The pigeons recognized the good paintings as “good” twice as often as they recognized the “bad” paintings. In short, they came off as pretty good critics. There are those (names withheld) writing for major publications who might do markedly less well. Given these results, Watanabe claims, “pigeons are capable of learning the concept of a stimulus class that humans name ‘good’ pictures.”
http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article08260902.aspx

Nope – never said it

“For a salutary reminder of how easy it is for well-known “facts” to be no such thing, even when they are often repeated in print, consider some of the entries in “They Never Said It”, a compendium of misquotations published in 1989. Sherlock Holmes never said “Elementary, my dear Watson” (or anything like it). “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture’, I reach for my revolver” is a line from a play, not a quote from Hermann Goering. “Let them eat cake” began life in Rousseau’s “Confessions”, not the mouth of Marie-Antoinette. Voltaire never said “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” And there is no reason to think Abraham Lincoln ever said “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time”—though it is evidently true that you can fool a lot of people for a long time with the aid of books. The quip “Too much checking on the facts has ruined many a good news story” has long been attributed to an American newspaper magnate, Roy Howard; needless to say, it appears to be an invention.”
http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/anthony-gottlieb/facts-errors-and-kindle

Kings and Cisterns

“As so often happens when I feel melancholy, as I did after going through the incident I will describe, I found myself thinking of the story about the king and the water that makes people crazy. According to the story, a certain king, having received word from a local sage that a great rain would bring water that would make all people crazy, decided to gather as much of the existing water as he could before the rains came. He collected that water in private, covered cisterns, reasoning that, as king, he should remain sane even if everyone else went crazy. When the rains came as predicted, the people began to act in unaccountable ways. The king went down among them and tried to tell them what had happened, but they took him for a lunatic and threatened him with blows. So he retreated to his cisterns, there to sit for some days, drinking the bittersweet waters of sanity. This went on for some time, until finally, deciding that truth was not its own reward, the king decided to go down among the people and drink the new water, abandoning his palace and his cisterns — and, as it turned out, his reason, for he soon began acting just as madly as his subjects, forgetting about his cisterned water, his sense of dignity, and the sage. The people, when in their newfound lunacy they regarded him at all, took him for a madman who had been miraculously cured.”

Tim Lyons, Cisterns, http://www.vocabula.com/2009/VRSept09Lyons.asp