Truther

n. A person who believes that the U.S. government perpetrated or allowed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

http://www.wordspy.com/words/truther.asp

Latest research showing what bullshit artists wine critics are

Wall Street Journal -  A Hint of Hype, A Taste of Illusion
They pour, sip and, with passion and snobbery, glorify or doom wines. But studies say the wine-rating system is badly flawed. How the experts fare against a coin toss.

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