One Major Effect of Drinking Ice Cold Water, Says Science - "drinking cool water has been proven to specifically help with assisting in rehydration more so than other temperatures... Along with drinking it, cold water has been proven to also help athletes in workout recovery. One study from the Human Kinetics Journal found that a 10-minute cold shower immediately after an exercise session can assist with hydration status. Plus, a 10 minute cold shower (also known as "cold water therapy") has been shown to help athletes to feel less sore and less fatigued, according to the European Journal of Applied Physiology.,. In ayurvedic medicinal practices, it has been stated that drinking ice cold water is actually bad for your body's overall digestion. This specific claim states that drinking cold water can constrict your blood vessels, resulting in your body's inability to absorb certain nutrients and vitamins, and food. Drinking warm water is also a cultural practice for many, where the claim is that warm water can help with speeding up the digestion process and can even be good for your gut health."
The Space Race: Everything You Wanted To Know | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "It would have been such a vast conspiracy, it would have been more expensive than actually going to the moon to keep this thing a secret. And then you also have to make the argument, which is if the US is covering up its lunar hoax program, how did they keep the Soviets from finding out? Because this would have been the propaganda coup of the century. The Soviets, publicly, they do praise American space technology. But whenever something goes wrong with the American space program, the Soviets send condolences, but then they say, look, this is the American obsession with propaganda, they just want to, you know, this is the Imperialist world doing these schemes, and they need to, this is what's happening. So the Soviets would have leapt on that. And I think that the truth would have outed, I mean, look at the Pentagon Papers, look at the, these people within the US state in the 1970s, who reveal information. But anyway. The reason I think this is so prevalent is that when it comes to historians, that the point is not to debunk these ideas, it's to try and understand them. And conspiracies, I think the best definition of them is that they're a strategy for people who are powerless to make sense of the world, in a way that centres them and gives them a sense of power’"
Daily Life In Ancient Egypt: Everything You Wanted To Know - HistoryExtra - "‘You think, wow, that is such a long time. I think it maybe helps put it into perspective. If you remember that Cleopatra, who was the last Queen of Egypt, is actually closer in time to us than she was to the building of the pyramids.’...
‘What was LGBTQ culture like in Ancient E-, I suppose we should just say, was there any?’
‘Well, obviously, there would have been people who were different from the accepted norm. But it's never mentioned. This is the thing. There's no sense that this was in any way considered wrong. But there's no sense that it was in any way considered at all, if you see what I mean, we're lacking the evidence. We have two tombs, which both seem to show two men in a close relationship. But this relationship is never explained. So they could be partners, but they could equally well be brothers and it's been suggested that they're twins. Apart from that we really, really don't know. But this again, is because of the evidence that we have. That it mainly comes from tombs and within the tomb, they’re showing a very stereotypical way of life. You're not, we're not always getting the full flavor of, what a well rounded life would be like...
We also know that they took their cats when they went hunting, whether the cats are actually very good at retrieving. If you had a throwing stick and you threw it and brought down a bird, whether the cat would actually bring it back to you rather than eat it, I don't know. Anyway, that so we have cats in daily life as pets and they seem to be loved and members of the family. But I think we have to separate that out from the vast number of cat mummies that we have. But cat mummies tend to date from the later part of the Dynastic period. And they're associated with the cult of the goddess Bast or Bastet, because she can be represented as a cat. Now she's not the only god or goddess that can be represented as an animal. And we have to be very careful here. The Greeks and Romans interpreted this as just basically very simple animal worship, that they were worshipping a cat. And they're not. It's not like that. It's much more complicated than that. And it's difficult because it's never explained to us. But what we think is happening that this Goddess is represented in the form of a cat because it embodies many of her characteristics. But they don't necessarily in their heads think of, of this goddess as being either a cat or a human with a cat head. But when they have to represent her that is the closest that they can get. So they show it that way, but they don't necessarily think of her that way. Anyway, she’s strongly connected with cats, so people who would go to her cult center, there would be a zoo of cats there, and they would be able to buy a mummified cat to offer to the cat goddess. And this is what they did. They did it to other gods as well. For example, Thoth, who can be an Ibis, if people visited his temple in Middle Egypt, they would buy an ibis Mummy, a bird Mummy, and they would, they would then donate it. And they would put in a catacomb. with with with lots of other ibis mommies. It's why we have so many animal mummies. So these cat mommies that we have the majority of them are not pets, they’re cats that were specially bred to be sacrificed for for the goddess and and yeah, I know. It's odd, isn't it? It's, it's not what we do today, I think. But it seems an odd way of respecting a cat to kill a cat. But that's how it happened’"
Those who promote "LGBTQ history" will be very upset and will start inventing "forgotten" "LGBTQ history". All people who share tombs must be lovers and cannot be relatives
Toby Wilkinson On The Golden Age of Egyptology | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "Another great event that had been planned for the opening of the Suez Canal. And that was the official opening of the Royal Opera House in Cairo. The ruler of Egypt saw himself is great moderniser, he wanted to ape the great capitals of Europe. And what better way to do it than to build an opera house in the French style. And what better way to inaugurate the Royal Opera House than to commission an opera with an ancient Egyptian theme, thus rather neatly uniting those threads of of Egypt past, present and indeed future. And who better to commission for the scenario of that opera than the leading Egyptologist at the time, Auguste Mariette. And so Mariette came up with this storyline for the opera that will become Aida. He did more than that. He also planned the costumes, and the set for the first performance of Aida. Drawing on his intimate knowledge of Egyptian antiquities, he came up with an extraordinary array of sets and costumes and props modeled on the latest discoveries from the sands of Egypt. The only problem was that these were all being manufactured back in Paris, and relations between France and Prussia were getting pretty hot in 1869. They eventually led to the Franco Prussian war. And this prevented the export of those props and stage sets in time for the opening performance at the Royal Opera House. So they had to fall back on another Verdi opera Rigoletto for the opening night. And it wasn't until 1871 that Aida received its first performance. So Aida goes down in history as as the great opera with an ancient Egyptian theme, but it was intimately bound up not only with the rediscovery of ancient Egypt, but with the new self image of late 19th century modern Egypt... Mariette… He is buried, not in a cemetery, not in a churchyard, but actually in the grounds of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. And here is his sarcophagus in ancient Egyptian style, surmounted by a statue in very 19th century style. So, again, blending the old and the new...
I'm now going to read from Carter's journal. From that day, the 26th of November, 1922.
‘Candles were procured—the all important tell-tale for foul gases when opening an ancient subterranean excavation. I widened the breach and by means of the candle looked in, while Lord. C., Lady E., and Callender with the Reises - the Egyptian foreman - waited in anxious expectation. It was some time before I could see, the hot air escaping caused the candle to flicker, but as soon as my eyes became accustomed to the glimmer of light the interior of the chamber gradually loomed before one, with its strange and wonderful medley of extraordinary and beautiful objects heaped upon one another. There was naturally short suspense for those present who could not see. When Lord Carnarvon said to me ‘Can you see anything?’, I replied to him ‘Yes, it is wonderful.’
Well, if that doesn't sound quite familiar, extract, it's because when Carter came to write up his journal, as the publication of the tomb of Tutankhamun, he had the assistance of a ghostwriter. A professor of English literature at Cairo, who helped him polish his prose a little and add a little more panache and excitement. And so what was published is the more famous account, and here it is.
‘At first, I could see nothing. The hot air escaping from the chamber, causing the candle flame to flicker. But presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist. Strange animals, statues, and gold. Everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment, an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by, I was struck down with amazement. And when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand suspense any longer, enquired anxiously, can you see anything? It was all I could do to get out the words: Yes. Wonderful things.’"
Levi Roach On The Forged Texts Of The Middle Ages | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Few regions in world history can rival medieval Europe for the sheer scale of forging. So that's quite an exciting comment, we need to find out what's going on. So drop us into it, who was forging what?’
‘So what we're talking about is largely religious establishment. So religious houses like monasteries and cathedrals, forging above all documents, legal documents that we call charters, particularly securing them rights over property, or often also rights to preferential treatment, so sometimes rights them to remove them from the authority, say, of the king or of their local bishops, if we're dealing with monasteries, or smaller religious houses.’
‘And is this a wide European thing, or specifically British, where is the main geographical areas?’
‘It's something we see across Western Europe, and indeed, pretty much anywhere where we have rich documentary records, and people are valuing charters, people are also forging them. So we can sort of see a growth in tandem of the use of the written word over the Middle Ages. And then the recourse to forgery because the more people value written documents, the more likely people are to forge them. A bit like in the modern world, people frequently forge currency. So it's, it's a sign of the value that's accorded these documents.’
‘And when is this going up? What's the, what's the heyday?’
‘So the heyday is almost certainly what we might call a long 12th century from about, say, 1050, up till about 1200, 1250. But it's something that we can see as early in many regions as the ninth or 10th centuries, and continues in some form or another, right through the Middle Ages...
‘We use as a basis records that we are 100% sure are authentic. And we compare contemporary documents to other contemporary documents to sort of slowly establish a picture of what a good pucker document from any given period would be. And the kind of best scenario we have there is these documents that survive in their original format. So rather than in later copies, that gets a bit trickier. But when we have a document that survives in its original format, or what purports to be its original format, we can then take a look very closely at its features. And the things we're looking at are things like script, is a key indicator there. Because handwriting changes over time, it does even in the modern world, and a trained palaeographer, somebody who studies the script can normally date a hand within 50 years easily, sometimes even more narrowly. So if something is produced later, we can often tell because it has later forms of handwriting and even if you try to imitate earlier forms, and we see this, good forgers are aware that script changes over time, you're unlikely to be able to do so consistently across a long document. So you might manage a word or two, but if you continue, the concentration is too great. You get what we call fakers palsy. The concentration is simply cannot hold up for an entire document. So at various points, you will either slip back to your native forms, or there will be a very clear instability of the script. Because you're looking at something else constantly back and forth and trying to copy it. It's not kind of fluid writing, as if you're writing naturally. So script is one absolutely key feature. Other things we look at are more general aspects of the documents. So elements of layout. Again, that changes over time. Conventions change slowly but subtly for these documents. We'll also look at formulation, after script. And this is particularly important if we only have a document and a later copy. Again, styles of Latin formulation, what things are in and out in terms of terms and terminology, change over time. And again, a forger will often, simply by accident, import one or two, may only be one or two little bits, but of his own native assumptions of the kind of documentary world in which he or she normally lives. Finally, we would look very closely at things like the seal, if it's a sealed document, because seals are very hard to forge, accurately. And indeed, the very best forgers will often try to detach a seal from an authentic document and then reattach it to another document. But again, that normally does some kind of damage to the seal. So the the best truly authentic documents are in a contemporary hand, contemporary formulation, with a clearly authentic seal...
Occasionally, we see the reverse, though, so called hyper archaism, where somebody knows they need to make these things like older but they get it wrong and go too old...
Perhaps in a more fundamental way, the thing that most appeals to me about forgeries is that they allow us to see the concrete hopes, dreams and concerns of people of the period. Because forged documents are by their nature, not really bound by historical reality, these are our clearest insights into actually, what people wanted the world to be like. Their own kind of deepest desires, what Carl Lizer (sp?) famously called the ought world of the Middle Ages. So what did people think about when they tried to imagine these kinds of worlds. So in that sense, it's almost a bit like the way that things like science fiction can give modern historians insights into periods and their preoccupations. Through that what people are forging, we get a much better idea of what their social, religious, legal and other concerns were because those documents aren't constrained by facts. They aren't constrained by awkward circumstances. They give them that opportunity to kind of write history as it ought to have been, rather than as it necessarily was.’"
How archery gave men an edge in battle of the sexes | News | The Times - "Researchers in America say that women and children could hunt with the spear-throwing devices that preceded bows quite as effectively as men. However, they could not achieve equal mastery of archery, which requires greater upper body strength. The switch to the bow, they argue, would have changed the status of women, acting as a catalyst for sex and age-based divisions that persist in society today. The transition from hunting with atlatls — weighted sticks used to throw light spears or darts much further than by hand alone — occurred about 10,000 years ago in Europe and at different times elsewhere. It is normally ascribed to the bow’s greater accuracy and faster reload rate, giving hunters the opportunity to target smaller and faster game. This would have allowed a broader diet and freed people from having to hunt together for safety in numbers when taking on prey such as mammoths. That was not necessarily a good thing, according to academics. In research published in American Anthropologist, Brigid S Grund, of the University of Wyoming, cites modern sporting trials where women and older children wielded the atlatl as effectively as men. She argues that prehistorically it would have functioned as a societal “equaliser”. The throwing devices have been found widely in women’s burials."
Gender and age equality is better than having enough to eat so you don't starve to death, and having fewer people die when hunting. Equality is when everyone is equally miserable
Hoarding brothers walled themselves off for 40 years - "two wealthy brothers – Homer and Langley Collyer – moved into a three-story brownstone at Fifth Avenue and 128th Street in Harlem, where they would soon develop a reputation as New York's most renowned recluses and hoarders. They were rarely seen outside the home for the next 40 years. Newspaper reports from the time said Langley – who cared for his blind, feeble brother – would come to a window occasionally and would infrequently creep out at night to shop. They were rumored to have subsided primarily on oranges, bread and peanut butter. Their boarded up, three-story mansion -- it had no phone nor doorbell -- was crammed from floor to ceiling with myriad items, including books, furniture, musical instruments, at least 12 antique pianos, a Ford Model T, stacks of yellowed newspapers and advertising posters, the jawbone of a horse and booby traps set up in corridors, hallways and secret passageways to trap would-be intruders... "Homer's eyes began to dim in 1933. Spurning all medical aid, the brothers locked themselves inside the old house with ... a medical library of 15,000 volumes. Their father, long-dead, was a physician. Langley fed his brother 100 oranges a week and whiled the hours away memorizing 2,500 piano compositions. He said he read by the light of a kerosene lamp. The brothers listened to a homemade radio set, powered by a generator assembled from junked automobile parts. Gas, lights and the telephone had been disconnected years before. The last outsider known to have seen Homer was a police sergeant, John Collins, who entered the dusty, decaying mansion four years ago to investigate reports that Langley was living with his brother's unburied corpse. "The room was dark and pitch," Collins said in the story. "I turned on my flashlight and there was Homer sitting like a mummy on a cot. "I am Homer L. Collyer, lawyer," the old man said to Collins. "I want the number of your shield and your name. I'm not dead. I'm paralyzed and blind."... "police found the body of the blind, crippled Homer Collyer, 75"... the body of Langley was found in one of his own booby traps, his feet and legs gnawed by rats. His body was located in the room where his brother was found dead. Homer's official cause of death was listed as heart disease, but it had appeared he'd also suffered from malnutrition... the fact his limbs had been gnawed by rats indicated he must have died before Homer. "The hunt for Langley had spread to nine states while his body lay within a few feet of that of his blind brother to whom he had devoted his life. "In their frantic efforts to hide from the world, the brothers had lined their house with booby traps, piling mounds of old crates and newspapers in complicated mazes. The body, covered with a four-foot thickness of long-accumulated debris, was beside an old-fashioned trunk. "From the position of his body, police said they were convinced he was crawling through one of the many tunnels under the junk in the house when his own trap was sprung on him and he was buried.""
Part One: Siege Machine - "While the trebuchet was in principle a simple machine, in reality it required knowledgeable engineers to achieve such devastating results. The counterweight trebuchet functions by converting the potential energy of the counterweight into the kinetic energy of the projectile, however, realistically trebuchets only achieve 10%-70% of their theoretical maximum potential energies. Why is this? Experimental Archaeologist Tanel Saimre declares that “the trebuchet is a complicated machine and thus can only be fully understood through practical experience.” This statement was proved by Conquistador Hernan Cortes in his 1521 siege of Tenochtitlan; with ammunition running low, he and his crew decided to construct a trebuchet with which to continue the siege, however, its first and only shot went straight up and crashed down, destroying the machine"
Is It Wrong to Crave Praise? (NSQ Ep. 23) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "‘Here's one dimension that has been studied, which is beginners versus experts. And this research asks the question, is it different if you're at the beginning of an endeavor than when you're well into it and pretty good, whether you are receptive to positive feedback or negative feedback. And the findings of a series of experiments suggests that at the beginning of an endeavor, you need a lot of positive feedback, you do need a lot of praise, because your confidence is a little shaky, and you haven't committed yet. Imagine that the very, very beginning of your journalism career if all you got was critical, negative feedback’
‘Tell, that could be a useful signal then that you're in the wrong place.’
‘Yeah, fair, that doesn't mean necessarily that we should praise everybody at the beginning so that they stay in it, because you know, maybe they need to exit out. But from a motivational perspective, when you have not yet gotten your sea legs, it's very hard to get pushed around like that. Now, the experts tend to actually benefit from the opposite, which is a lot of critical negative feedback. And there, it's not just information. But it's also motivational, because you realize that there's more distance that you need to go.’
DUBNER: I also just think that, look, criticism varies a lot in how useful it is, depending, again, on the realm. For instance, if you critique my worldview, or the way that I interact with people, that may be close to impossible to change. So that critique is not very useful, and I will resent you. If, however, you critique something specific and actionable — if I’m trying to learn to code, or try to play a sport, or master some kind of technique, that’s useful. And I want to know what I’m doing wrong. I think a lot of this comes down to: how correctable is the thing that you are critiquing? And I think there’s a lot of gray area."
Why Do We Hoard? - Freakonomics - "DUBNER: Something like 25 percent of all fire deaths involve hoarding... I’ve seen one study that found that hoarding is responsible for a quarter of all what they call “avoidable fire deaths.”"
Which Gets You Further: Talent or Effort? - Freakonomics - "DUBNER: Now, I should say, the acronym should not be confused with the aptonym... So, “nym,” like “demonym” or whatever, it has to do with naming. So, New Yorker is the demonym for someone who lives in New York. An aptonym is when you have a name that actually reflects who you are or what you do. So in the olden-olden days, many names reflected your occupation.
DUCKWORTH: Like miller.
DUBNER: Miller, Tailor, etc. But I like to find aptonyms in real life, people who are named what they do. My favorite ever was a fact-checker at a magazine whose name was Paige Worthy.
DUCKWORTH: You know what. And no joke, I had an obstetrician-gynecologist named Dr. Breast, and it was an unending source of amusement. Every time I had an appointment, I got a little chuckle.
DUBNER: We once ran an open thread on Freakonomics, the blog, back in the days when people blogged, and we asked for good aptonyms. And I would say that about 80 percent of them were either gynecologists or urologists, and some dentists. There was an insurance salesman named Justin Case, I recall. But here, this is my favorite from our open thread. So, this was a case where a reader wrote to tell us of an Idaho court case about expected privacy in a public-restroom stall. And this was in relation to the case of Larry Craig. Do you remember that? He was a U.S. senator who was found soliciting sex in an airport restroom in Idaho. So, this was somehow connected to that case. So, the defendant was arrested for obscene conduct after an officer observed him through a four-inch hole in a stall partition, masturbating in a public restroom. This court determined that the defendant, whose name was Limberhand, had a legitimate expectation of privacy in the restroom stall, notwithstanding the existence of the hole. So, yes, the man in the stall caught masturbating was named Limberhand, or Limberhand the Masturbator. I guess L.T.M. If you want to go for the initialism."
Does Psychotherapy Actually Work? - Freakonomics - "DUBNER: So, there’s a new working paper by a trio of economists. It’s called “The Comparative Impact of Cash Transfers and a Psychotherapy Program on Psychological and Economic Well-being.” In other words, what is more helpful for a population: giving them psychotherapy or giving them money?
DUCKWORTH: Okay. What did they find?
DUBNER: Well, they find— So, I should say this was a project in rural Kenya. They write that, “One year after the interventions, cash transfer recipients had higher consumption, asset holdings and revenue, as well as higher levels of psychological well-being, than control households.” Meaning the ones that didn’t get cash.
“In contrast, the psychotherapy program had no measurable effects on either psychological or economic outcomes, both for individuals with poor mental health at baseline and others. The effects of the combined treatments are similar to those of the cash transfer alone.” In other words, psychotherapy, for this population at least, didn’t help at all. Giving people money helped them on psychological dimensions as well as economic dimensions."
What Does It Mean to Be a “Good” Man? - Freakonomics - "DUBNER: In sports, cheating to win is not considered bad form.
DUCKWORTH: What?!
DUBNER: Okay. There are different degrees of cheating. But, let’s say, if you watch a given N.F.L. play, a passing play, there is almost always a hold on an offensive lineman that is rarely called. So, that is a form of cheating. Every receiver that tries to get free of a cornerback is trying to push off. Every cornerback is trying to grab the jersey. Cheating in the service of winning in sport is generally not considered bad form. However, if in sport, you cheat to lose — if you throw a game, if you fix a match, like the 1919 Chicago Black Sox, or the famous C.C.N.Y. basketball team, I think it was in 1951 or something — if you do that, you will be forever consigned to a deep circle of sporting hell. In team sports, you’re expected to push your advantage as far as you absolutely can. And if you don’t go at least a little bit over the line — Mark Grace, a baseball player, once reportedly said, “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.” So there, you are trying to win. And it’s a zero-sum game. That’s really different than, let’s say, your kids or my kids sitting now in online classes. So, here’s my question to you as a professor. Who’s winning, who’s losing in that circumstance?"
Do Good Deeds Invite More Bad Ones? - Freakonomics - "DUBNER: Pooper-scooper laws... they came into effect in New York City, I think this was the 1970s. These laws were opposed by animal rights groups, including the A.S.P.C.A... Dog adoption in New York had risen a lot in response to the rise of crime. A lot of people got dogs, because they were scared of crime. And the A.S.P.C.A. thought that if people were required to pick up the dog poop, that they would just abandon their dogs. Like, “No way I’m touching the poop.” That position did not win that day, though, and the pooper-scooper laws went into effect. And yet, as we can tell from this poop-angel story with which I began this conversation, there is still a problem of some recalcitrant owners who don’t pick up... football helmets were introduced for one reason, which was to prevent skull fracture, because that happened in football in the early days. They became so good as a technology — the football helmets did —so good at letting a football player feel almost indomitable, that they began to use the helmet as a weapon against the other players... If I am able to buy flood insurance, I’m more likely to move into an area that is likely to flood"
How Does Facing Death Change Your Life? - Freakonomics - "DUBNER: For all the things that people worry about in the world — especially all the things they worry about dying from — to me, the no-brainer that we don’t think about as much as we probably should is car crashes, because if you just look at the numbers in the U.S., it’s around 35 to 40,000 a year. That’s people, humans, every year. Globally, 1.3 million people a year get killed in car crashes. And interestingly, this year, what would you suspect would happen in the Covid year — 2020, let’s call it — in the U.S., in terms of traffic crashes and deaths?
DUCKWORTH: Okay, because I’m married to somebody who’s slightly obsessed with this topic, I think I know. But let me test my knowledge. I think there’s been less traffic, but paradoxically, more deaths.
DUBNER: Exactly. So, these numbers aren’t firm yet, but there’s an estimated 42,000 people in the U.S. died in motor vehicle crashes. So, that’s an 8 percent increase over 2019. And again, 2020 wasn’t an entire pandemic year, but let’s make that rough comparison. But, the amount of travel was 13 percent fewer miles traveled. So, this 8 percent increase in deaths is really more like a 24 percent increase if you look at per-miles traveled. And I think what’s happened is that with so much less traffic there are more people driving really fast and recklessly — and maybe also very, very high and very, very drunk."
What Separates Humans From Other Animals? - Freakonomics - "DUBNER: So, Angela, I recently came across a paper in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, which I was so charmed by that I asked you to read it so we could talk about it. It’s called “Acquisition of a Joystick-Operated Video Task by Pigs.”
DUCKWORTH: How could I forget?"
What’s the Secret to Making a Great Prediction? - Freakonomics - "DUCKWORTH: Yeah, this study that he did, which is really one of the big studies to happen in the last 20 or so years, was that experts’ predictions are really only very slightly better than throwing darts at a dartboard. So, why is it that they’re so confident? It may be that, first of all, many experts are making, quote unquote, “predictions” in hindsight. So, they are the Monday morning commentary on what happened at the Sunday football game, and we turn to the experts for an explanation but, of course, in hindsight, everything is 20/20. The other reason, I think, confidence ends up becoming a hallmark of commentators whom we assume to be experts at what they do is because, if it were not for that confidence, we wouldn’t be listening to them. And there might be a weak-positive correlation between the confidence in your judgment and its accuracy. So, when we, for example, go and ask a waiter, “What’s the best dish on this menu?” If the waiter very confidently says, “You must get the chicken salad on a croissant — hands down, it’s fantastic!” Most people, including me, would be more inclined than if the waiter were like, “Eh, I don’t know, but maybe the chicken salad?”
Do You Really Need a Muse to Be Creative? - Freakonomics - "DUBNER: You can certainly find people who burned fast and bright and lived a purely creative life. The psychologist Dean Simonton — he looked at an interesting question around the relationship between creativity and mental health, because there is this — I don’t know if you want to call it a cliche of the tortured artist. So, he looked at the prevalence of mental illness in different types of creative people. Let’s see, visual artists and writers were on the high end of the scale, with poets the most pronounced. 87 percent of poets experienced some kind of mental disorder. Now, that sounds, maybe, shockingly high, but you have to consider, the general population, it’s about 46 percent of Americans... But here’s what was really interesting to me. He also measured scientists and found that they had a considerably lower tendency for a mental disorder, about 28 percent. And he found that if you include all creative people in this tally — so, from poets to scientists, that they actually have lower rates of mental illness than noncreative people. In fact, he argues that creative behavior is a marker for good mental health. So those are not all people just waiting for the inspiration. Those are people who have learned how to work, acquiring knowledge, acquiring skills and so on, and then being able to be creative because you’ve done the work. And I think that’s what scares a lot of people, is realizing how much work you have to do in order to get hit with that creative burst."
Why Is Academic Writing So Bad? - Freakonomics - "DUCKWORTH: Daniel Oppenheimer, who is one of my favorite psychologists, he’s at Carnegie Mellon University. He has this paper that’s about this very question. When we read somebody’s writing, and it’s got all these fancy words with lots of syllables and hyphens, like, “Ooh, this is really hard to understand” — do we think that the author is smarter than we are or stupider than we are? This is the title of the paper: “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly.” And, in fact, what Danny finds is that the more complex the text, the less we think that the author was a smarty-pants. And so, we are doing ourselves damage reputationally, while also just spreading bad writing in the world, by doing that. You know what I say to my students? I say to them, “Write like Hemingway, not like Faulkner.” Like, “The man saw a fish and the fish was good. Jack and Jill ran up the hill.” Those are beautiful sentences and they cannot easily be improved."
Suzanne Gluck: “I'm a Person Who Can Convince Other People to Do Things” - Freakonomics - "LEVITT: I say, “Don’t write a book. Please don’t write a book. For sure don’t write a book if your reason for writing a book is you want people to read it.” I say, “If you’re going to enjoy the process, if you’ve got an idea, a book burning inside of you that you need to let out, then by all means go ahead and write that book, if you’re going to be happy at the end of the day if nobody reads it.” But I think that people who start out on book writing with the idea that they’re going to get famous or they’re going to be best sellers or they’re going to do this or that, I think the chances of that happening are so low that it really leads to disappointment so often. My mother wanted nothing more her entire life to be a bestselling author. And my whole life growing up, she sent out packages of manuscripts to agents like you and was always frustrated by it."