Links - 27th January 2020 (2)

We're Only Fooling Ourselves : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘I can believe that I'm a nice person and I can do horrible things and you should think that if I do a horrible thing, I’ll think I'm a bad person now, but somehow we can interpret evidence and filter it to still think that we're great no matter what we do… you're cheating yourself. So if you think about so I definitely am motivated to convince you that I'm a nice person, even if I'm wrong. It's a little bit more curious that I'd be motivated to convince myself that I'm still a nice person, if I do a bad thing, because I may as well just accurately perceive who I am... [One theory is] that the best way to convince you of a lie, if I want to get something from you, and it's not really true, is to lie to myself... Imagine taking a test with the answers at the bottom. And you can glance at the answers whenever you like. Well, it turns out, you do a lot better on the test. The problem is, we then say how well are you going to do on another test, without the answers? And people should say, well, let me think here, wait a minute... If they're at all sensible, they would say to themselves, I wonder if my perfect score on that first test had something to do with having all the answers at the bottom, at least they’d correct a little bit and we find they don't correct at all. So they really self deceived... we even pay them to be accurate... no effect at all’...
'People who think better, that their partner is better than their partner really is are happier in their relationships. But that doesn't mean that it's better for your partner for you to think you're better than you are. So I think there's this interesting balance between the erroneous beliefs that are a little positive and having to deal, so it's nice if I think you're great. It's not so nice if I think I'm great and you have to wake up to me every morning'"

The Switching Type : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘Your interest in price or the degree to which you value getting a good deal was actually not related at all to switching. But what was related was locomotion. So customers who have a higher locomotion score are more likely to say that they will switch or more likely to have recently switched.’
‘So basically what's happening is that people who are switching the companies that are advertising price, but the people are switching are just the switching types. So is there a way to take switching types and get them to switch less? Is there a different type of message?’
‘So there is a message and what this research shows is that it's not necessarily about switching specifically, but it's about feeling like you're getting something done or being in motion, making progress towards goals. So we can give customers a way to feel like they're making progress without that progress being switching, then we can sort of appease them and make them feel like they're getting something done but letting them stay… we designed an email that had a little icon at the top that said, you've moved into your new house, you've unpacked but yet you still need to do this and switch back. And so we made them feel like they still needed to work on their to do list and actually make progress. And the thing that needed to be done was to switch back to this provider that they may have just switched from’"

Unconscious Decision-Making : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University; John W. Payne, Joseph J. Ruvane, Jr. Professor of Management and Marketing : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘People who went off and worked in the garden did better than those who thought for four minutes. But those people who thought for 25 seconds until they were you know, comfortable making a decision did every bit as well as the unconscious thought’...
‘It's not so much unconscious versus conscious [thought]. That if you ask people to think too much, then they can actually make a mistake. Is that?’
‘You can do bad conscious thinking. And when you do bad conscious thinking, you make bad decisions… We may study and study and study and a good example might be in some financial decisions, or college choice decisions, etc. And what we end up doing sometimes is because we overthink it, we start paying attention to irrelevant information as much as relevant information.’...
'Magnitudes mattered. So for example, if we gave you a lottery task, and it wasn't just whether you won money or didn't, but you could win $4 or 14… where the payoffs mattered the more, the magnitudes mattered the more, there we found that the conscious self actually outperformed the unconscious...
Most people read the first half of Blink, they don't read the second half of Blink. If you read the second half of Blink, he actually, to be honest and fair to Malcolm Gladwell, he actually points out the places where your gut can lead you astray. And it turns out that you got quick blink responses work well under certain circumstances. You get clear feedback, you get a lot of it. You can over time learn. And you then make a decision that there's some stability, in terms of decision how is mapped on to the decisions that you've learned from. If that's not true, your gut can lead you very much astray'"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, How dangerous is your food delivery? - "[On London] There are parts of the capital that drivers see as no go areas because they're known gang hotspots, but some of the apps make them hard to avoid"
I suppose No-Go Zones aren't a paranoid right wing conspiracy theory anymore. Especially coming from food delivery riders, who are largely (?) minorities

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Bakers: Earning a crust - "‘I feel a little bit shy to say that our bakery is doing fairly well. We have the advantage I guess, of having those primary ingredients being grown here in Canada, so I don't really import anything. So my costs are fairly low. Our major costs are rent and labor, to find people who are willing to start a shift at one o'clock in the morning. You can't pay them, you know, minimum wage and nor should you. And I definitely find versus restaurants, bakeries are very expensive to start up. You spend so many years just paying off equipment. The ovens are extraordinarily expensive. I would compare an oven to, you know, a high end luxury car’
‘And how do margins compare with running a restaurant?’
‘There's no comparison. You know, I'm not bringing in meat or fish. I don't have to buy cases of wine or have wine glasses, even if you're paying in our case for a bag of organic flour, $60 Canadian or $50 US. That bag of flour is going to make me quite a few loaves of bread. So versus a restaurant, a successful restaurant that's got a 4% margin per year of profit. You know bakeries are easily in the double digits.’…
‘Having three children at home I find that the hours lend itself very well to my family life versus the restaurants. I'll start generally between one and three o'clock in the morning, but I finish around two or three o'clock in the afternoon. So you know, a 12 hour day isn't uncommon. But I'm there for picking up my kids from school, doing the homework and having dinner… I don't think that this is necessarily a business for people who require eight to 10 hours of sleep a night… I would say on a good night I'm getting six hours.’"

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Why the prince left public life - "Across South Asia we use a lot of spices in food here and onions are something that reduce the intensity of those spice. It's a pungent vegetable that adds a distinctive taste to many of the dishes. That also, it's the vegetable that is available throughout the year because it's cultivated four times a year and you can store it up for months. So, on the days when you cannot afford or on the days when you cannot buy vegetable from the market, you can just use onion as a substitute"

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Trump impeachment hearings go public - "[On Bolivia] ‘This is now resembling the governments of old, i.e. European, white, not majority indigenous in what is still the one nation in the Americas that has a majority indigenous population.’"

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Turkey goes to war - "[Trump:] ‘We want to bring our troops back home. And I got elected on that. If you go back and look at our speeches, I would say we want to bring our troops back home from these endless wars.’...
‘Isn't bringing US troops home generally popular?’
‘Yes, it is. There's a saying in American politics that Republicans want a massive military and they don't want to send it anywhere. And Democrats want a small military and they want to send it everywhere’"

What’s the Difference Between English, Irish and Scottish Breakfast Teas? - "Breakfast teas are black tea blends intended to accompany a hearty, rich morning meal (think of the full English breakfast or fry-up) and are therefore more robust than afternoon tea blends. Because they are so strong, breakfast teas go well with milk. Breakfast tea blends made with Assam tea tend to have higher caffeine levels...
Irish breakfast tea has a strong Assam component, which gives it a more robust, malty flavor and reddish color...
Scottish breakfast tea tends to be the heartiest of the bunch, possibly due to Scotland’s soft water... It’s important to note that at no time has there been a standard formula for any of these blends. “One company’s English breakfast could be identical to another company’s Irish breakfast”"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Robert Burns - "He is writing an autobiographical letter, he describes how love and poesie [sp?] began together. And he tells the story about one of the plus sides of being on the farm, I think, was when he was working on the harvest at age 15. And by his side was a very attractive 14 year old, and he had worked out that in order to perhaps get some tender feelings from his co worker, he could, he could try a poem or a song. So he makes no secret of that. In fact, he's rather proud of it. But we also know that not much later than that he had a relationship with Elizabeth Patton, a servant girl. She became pregnant by him. And there was a scandal about that. He had to answer for that. In the Kirk. He didn't marry Elizabeth. By the time she had her baby, he was already interested in Jean Armor, who also became pregnant by him quite quickly. He also had a complication with Mary Campbell. We don't know quite what's happened there. It’s possible she was pregnant as well. So he was one of these, obviously very attractive man who didn't get really go for either/or, if there were plenty of opportunities."

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Rapture - "‘One of the interesting things to emphasize that was picked up in bits and pieces and several comments is that people coming to, you know, to hear about some of these ideas of dispensations and rapture for the first time would probably assume, this is very anti rationalist. And this is liable to come from and take hold amongst people who are not very educated and maybe socially deprived. But that's just not the history of the beginnings of dispensationalism. In Ireland, in Britain and America, this takes hold first amongst political elites, the most educated scholars, the leaders of mainline Protestant denominations, in the case of America. And in America takes root in New York and Chicago and Boston first, which is probably not the places that people would associate with this sort of thought now. And it's really not until after, into the post war era, that this thought is kind of abandoned by scholars and leaders of mainline denominations and political leaders in some countries, and becomes more of an anti intellectual movement of the people. That's a shift that takes place much later.’"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Rousseau on Education - "'He admits at one point that he enjoys the sister of the clergyman who's teaching him spanks him and he thinks that excites him as a boy. It's one of the things that he confesses to in his Confessions, one of his posthumously published works'
'Alright. Does that lead to anything?'
'Well it leads to a great deal because obviously to Rousseau,confessing your sins but not doing it in the manner of St Augustine is... the idea of confessing your sin is something that you need to do, but with the idea in the back of your mind that you're good'...
'He wasn't very keen on children reading books. He wanted them to experience the difficulties of life, making things, trying to make things, failing in things, playing, socialising and all that. At one stage he says 'I hate books'.... And he's not allowed to read a book... until he's 13 or so. And that's Robinson Crusoe to sort of teach you how to pull your life together from scraps'...
'In some ways, Rousseau's an author who is successful like many authors because the following generation completely misunderstands him. And turning him into an advocate of austere Republican morality, which is what the French Revolutionaries do and also an advocate of rebellion against contemporary society. The idea of a revolution in France, in Paris, which for Rousseau is just so beyond the pale, it's so corrupting, it would never, he would argue, it would never be conceivable. So they're going directly against Rousseau but they believe that he is the ultimate critic of existing society'"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Dorothy Hodgkin - "‘She's the only British woman to have won the Nobel prize. Why do you think she's not better known?’...
‘Marie Curie... is well known because she was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. I personally think she's an absolutely appalling role model. When people talk now about the need for role women, role models to encourage more women into science, [she’s] presented as someone who's always alone in the laboratory, who sacrificed her life, her interests to science. Dorothy Hodgkin, was, seems to me a very, very nice, warm, generous person. She had a family whom she absolutely adored. She was, she just got on with the work in a very quiet unassuming way. And for some reason, we like to have great geniuses, great heroes of science who, who was rather nasty, or who’ve got some scandalous story to tell. She, to me is the absolute role model of what a woman in science should be’"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow - "Napoleon completely misunderstood Alexander's position, both his strengths and his weakness. His weakness was that Tsardom was often characterized by the phrase autocracy tempered by assassination. And Alexander, in fact, had come to the throne in 1801, when his father had been assassinated, because he’d offended the elites in Russia by what seemed like capricious policy. And Alexander couldn't afford to offend the elite in the Guards Regiment, who were very patriotic and would not have tolerated coming to terms with Napoleon...
‘One might think it's a French army, it isn't. 40% of it’s French. The next largest national contingent would be various German contingents from the smaller German states and from Austria and from Prussia which have been compelled to send units in. So the German speakers would be roughly about a quarter, 20%. So it's still a 100,000 plus would be Polish speakers. And then you'd have other nationalities too: Italians, Spanish speakers, even a minority of Portuguese, people from the Balkans. It is a European army’
‘That must have been extraordinarily difficult to control.’
It is and that that becomes apparent really during the retreat. But even during the advance, it's an army of such a size that a single person sitting on a white horse hasn't got any oversight. And yet the kind of structures you get later on in the 19th century, of General Staff, what modern armies have, that doesn't exist in this period. So that's a real weakness, the command and control - rather the lack of it.’"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Treaty of Limerick - "‘I remember someone saying to me when I was studying history a number of years ago that had Mary lived as long as her sister and had the Tudor conquest of Ireland being a Catholic Tudor conquest, that all the Irish would have been roaring Presbyterians, you know, to be, just to be difficult.’"