The appalling vanity of Western feminists who think Margaret Atwood writes about them | The Spectator - "Atwood has been hailed for prophesying the terrifying totalitarian age of Trump. Actress Elisabeth Moss, who plays Offred, said that she couldn’t help but recognise the similarities between Trump’s America and the brutal regime in the story. Wait, has Donald really frozen women’s bank accounts and enacted laws so they could be compulsorily raped and forced to give up their babies to the ruling class? Well, maybe not exactly, but, you know, ‘chilling parallels’, ‘frighteningly relevant’, blah blah. With no greater self-awareness than Kylie Jenner, feminists in the US co-opted the handmaid’s penitential costume of scarlet robe and white head-dress as a symbol of the #MeToo movement and of protest against the threat to reproductive rights. ‘I wish Handmaid’s Tale was insane Game of Thrones shit and pure fantasy,’ lamented Moss. ‘I wish that were true. But it’s not.’ She’s right, of course — just not in the way she thinks. For females in Saudi Arabia, Taleban-controlled Afghanistan and Islamic communities much closer to home, Gilead is not a reading at the National Theatre that makes you feel pleasantly indignant before you pick up an avocado and herb salad wrap at Pret. It’s the hateful, oppressive place where they live. How can it be that western feminists read The Handmaid’s Tale without looking at a woman in a burka walking down the street and thinking: ‘Hang on, that’s what those bastards do to girls in Gilead?’ While women in Iran are thrown in jail daily for daring to remove the veil, their sisters in Europe and the US continue to be useful idiots for the fundamentalist brutes who try to keep them in the dark. Atwood is far too great and wise a novelist not to grasp this contradiction. In The Testaments, she writes of the futility of a girl making a complaint of rape because her voice ‘counts for little or nothing… even with grown women, four female witnesses are the equivalent of one male’. What else is that but a reference to sharia law, where a woman’s testimony is worth half of a man’s? The new novel’s depiction of teenagers ‘present at school and then one day not present… disappeared from their former life’ is clearly about forced marriage. Last year, the UK’s Forced Marriage Unit gave support to 1,764 cases — a 47 per cent increase on the previous year. Summer is high season for Muslim schoolgirls being sent ‘home’ to marry whiskery old goats, which is why police and the border force launched Operation Limelight at Heathrow in July to scan flights from ‘countries of prevalence’ for ‘abuse, female genital mutilation and breast-ironing’. Cutting off clitorises isn’t Booker-nominated dystopian fiction; it’s excruciating fact for British girls from Bradford to Bristol. And just look at Al-Hijrah school in Birmingham which is still segregating boys and girls despite a 2017 court of appeal ruling that it was unlawful. (‘Society is best served by separate spheres for men and women,’ says Commander Judd in The Testaments.) In January, Ofsted inspectors found the school would not allow girls to eat lunch until the boys had finished. I admire Atwood, not just for the enchantment of her prose, but for the courage of her often unfashionable convictions. She will turn 80 in November and doesn’t take any rubbish from snowflakes, riding out a social media backlash after voicing concerns about the #MeToo movement, calling for due process in the case of a former professor accused of sexual misconduct. ‘Their ideology becomes a religion,’ she wrote of the feminists who started a witch-hunt against her. ‘Anyone who doesn’t puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic, a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated.’ It was the coolest, most lethal response yet heard to these hideously over-heated times. I only wish that Atwood would tell her fans that she is not writing, primarily at least, about the way that Trump’s America could go in the future, but about how things are right now for females in repressive Islamic societies. We are so blessed compared to them. To don a red dress and white bonnet, to pretend their suffering is ours, to talk of tyranny, is the most appalling moral vanity."
Handmaid’s Tale -- Hulu Series Does Not Depict ‘Trump’s America’ - "According to a recent article in The New Republic, lo, have mercy, for great woes have apparently befallen me, a wide-eyed, unsuspecting resident of the Lone Star State: “Texas is Gilead and Indiana is Gilead and now that Mike Pence is our vice president, the entire country will look more like Gilead, too.” Sheesh. You’d think that, as a woman, I would have noticed the collapse of the world around me, but hey, it’s been a busy spring. I’ve had a packed social schedule, and as the old saying goes, you never notice the brutal rise of a women-enslaving dystopia when you’re attending a gala celebrating successful women entrepreneurs just a few blocks down from a clinic that cheerfully offers almost-free government-subsidized IUDs! Well, never mind. In wild-eyed national discussions like these, one could bring up several facts: the fact that Republicans, not Democrats, have championed over-the-counter birth control; the fact that Planned Parenthood could thrive on private funding if it lost the $500 million it finagles annually from taxpayers; or the fact that our new Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch, announced during confirmation hearings that he would “have walked out the door” if Trump had asked him to overturn Roe v. Wade. These facts, of course, will promptly be ignored. The Handmaid’s Tale hysteria, in short, is simply not serious. There are many things to worry about in the Trump era — personally, I might choose the various nukes bouncing around North Korea, but you can pick your own poison. It’s telling, however, that much of the feminist hand-flapping bounces right over Trump, landing on . . . wait for it . . . the mild-mannered Mike Pence. “Vice President Mike Pence’s refusal to have dinner with women who aren’t his wife, for example,” wrote Sophie Gilbert in The Atlantic, “smacks of the same kind of Puritanism that saw women condemned as witches and harlots just for the virtue of being born female.” Well. That escalated quickly. But there’s something infinitely more interesting going on beneath the surface of the great Handmaid’s Tale brouhaha, and it highlights one of the biggest, most baffling problems with modern feminism: the consistent insinuation that women have no personal agency. It is a theme that quietly underscores almost every panicked article about The Handmaid’s Tale. But perhaps Atwood puts it best, suggesting to the Times that America — a country where minors can get IUDs without parental consent in 21 states, while Republicans earn mass panic for suggesting that Planned Parenthood, an organization that paid its CEO $957,952 in 2014, doesn’t need taxpayer help — is on the verge of a Ceausescu-like regime where women are “forced” to have babies. This would be very scary, I suppose, if one were detached from reality and also didn’t know how babies are made. In the feminist world, babies just seem to “happen” to women; it’s almost as quaint as the stork. It also all takes place in an imaginary world where modern birth control and individual agency don’t exist... Weirdly, for all of their talk about women needing to “control their own bodies,” feminists often act as if women are helpless and completely incapable of doing so on their own — unless, that is, they’re guided by a large, expansive, paternalistic government. Good heavens. Forgive me, but for a moment, that almost sounded like The Handmaid’s Tale."
70% of M’sian Muslim women okay with men practising polygamy but not their own husbands - "Some 70 per cent of Muslim women in Malaysia are agreeable with men practising polygamy. However, only 32 per cent are agreeable to polygamy within their own marriage...
21 per cent of the respondents also agreed that a man could beat his wife on the grounds of nusyuz (disobedience). Grounds for beating that counted as disobedience, included:
Leaving the house without the consent of one’s husband,
Refusing to have sex with him,
Refusing to move with him,
Refusing to open the door for him,
Refusing to answer his calling.
The survey revealed that 97 per cent of respondents felt that a woman should be obedient to her husband... 92 per cent of the respondents also agreed that a woman can divorce her husband under any circumstances. Additionally, 57 per cent of respondents also saw the need to obey one’s husband as a challenge, especially if they were a mother...
With regard to the wearing of the hijab, The Malay Mail noted that the survey found contradictory results on the matter. These were:
90 per cent of respondents agreeing that it was mandatory for Muslim women to wear one,
62 per cent also believing that it was acceptable for a Muslim woman not to wear one, and
83 per cent feeling they had the right to choose whether or not to wear one.
However, the survey also found that a majority of the respondents said that they faced pressure to socially conform. On this matter, 80 per cent agreed that they faced challenges over social conformity, while 59 per cent stated that they had experienced moral policing and public shaming... Marina also noted that the interpretation of religion by the community has shifted to the right, FMT reported. She highlighted that things that used to be considered extreme had now become the norm in Malaysian society, such as wearing the hijab, donning the niqab and polygamous marriages. She further alleged that polygamous marriages had since become a status symbol for men in Malaysia and called out the politicisation of religion."
Actually this isn't inconsistent - it's like being pro-gay marriage without wanting to have a gay marriage yourself
In 'new Malaysia', race continues to cast a long shadow - "his government reversed its pledge to ratify a U.N. convention against racial discrimination following a backlash from groups who argued that it would dilute privileges Malays have enjoyed for decades."
Malaysia’s Halal Crisis - "The country’s Department of Islamic Development, known by its Malay acronym JAKIM, is the sole statutory halal certifier although it has neither fully operational forensic laboratories nor experienced staff, despite having enormous and mostly arbitrary power.Industry figures have told Asia Sentinel the agency is deeply corrupt, with bribes routinely charged to certify establishments and products as halal and with a long string of other problems that endanger the entire process of what should be serious attention to religious requirements but which has none of those characteristics... Traditionally in Malaysia, stalls, eateries, and restaurants were known to be halal through word of mouth. The surroundings and Islamic symbols on the walls with signs saying “bertanggung halal” were enough assurance. These businesses relied on community recognition. Any premises suspected of not being halal would just be boycotted by locals. It’s only been in the last decade that authorities have been pushing small businesses to seek halal registration. Today, only a small fraction of Malay sole proprietors and SMEs have gained halal certification. In addition, only a small proportion of international hotels and resorts have halal registration. SME owners and food and beverage managers of hotels say the major barrier to gaining halal registration is money. For many sole proprietors and SMEs who ran traditional businesses, the on-site infrastructure requirements were prohibitive and way beyond their financial means.A dark side to the halal certification process has cropped up, however, for a process millions of Malaysians take very seriously but know very little about. SME proprietors and F&B managers told Asia Sentinel that JAKIM officials routinely request cash payments above the statutory fees in order to guarantee registration. In addition, they say, Municipal Councils and the fire department also request cash payments above statutory fees to issue the necessary documents required by JAKIM in halal product and premises applications. According to one F&B manager, this practice is not just carried out by a few rogue officers. It appears endemic. One officer, the manager said, brought out his immediate superior to negotiate the payment. In another case, a Muslim Lebanese butcher from Australia was setting up a halal choice meat cut butchery in Kuala Lumpur for retail and distribution. A JAKIM official requested a RM50,000 payment for registration. Due to the company’s policy of not paying bribes due to the firm’s religious moral philosophy, investment in Malaysia was immediately aborted... bucking the system by complaining only leads to drastic consequences, like have their operating licenses suspended and being put out of business... JAKIM is using the halal certification system to impose its ideas and opinions on the Malaysian community. Just recently alcohol-free beer has been banned in Malaysia, even though these products are widely distributed and sold throughout the rest of the Muslim world. McDonalds Malaysia doesn’t allow customers to bring in cakes that have not been certified halal by JAKIM. Words like ‘chicken ham’, ‘beef bacon’, and ‘chicken char siew’ are not allowed to be used on products certified by JAKIM, even though similar culturally derived food names are certifiable in other countries... JAKIM’s certification lacks the supply chain tracking element that Thai exporters have perfected, called Hal-Q, and which leads the world with its Halal Science Centre at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, established in 1994. The center focuses on developing standards, a haram (forbidden in Islam) ingredient detection system for certification purposes, halal food production system development with a Halal-GMP-HACCP framework, and developing consumer information systems through Apps, as well as general halal research. The Hal-Q system has not just been widely accepted by Muslim businesses in Thailand but has been taken onboard as an industry standard by many multinational food manufacturers in Thailand. In addition, many Arab and European countries have also adopted this system and come to Thailand for training on Halal logistic management, putting Thailand more than a decade in advance of any system Malaysia has to offer. This has enabled Thailand to become one of the foremost Halal food manufacturers in the region today... halal certificate issued with a bribe involved under Islam is not halal."
Fuziah: Jakim yet to receive application for White Rabbit candy halal certification - "The Malaysian Islamic Development Department (Jakim) has yet to receive the application for halal certification of White Rabbit milk-flavoured candy imported from China.Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Fuziah Salleh said the importer of the popular candy should submit the application, which would eventually stop the debate over its halal status"
Strange, Halal certification is supposed to be optional
That Chinese Passport Story Sure Looks Like a Hoax [Update: It's Fake] - "Closer examination of the markings reveals that the "ink" remains constant in thickness. If you've ever dealt with MS Paint, these lines should be familiar."
Unpublished data from Stanley Milgram's experiments cast doubt on his claims about obedience - "many people were willing to engage in seemingly reprehensible behavior because they saw through the researchers’ cover story. Those who believed the cover story, on the other hand, tended to be more defiant... “Milgram publicly dismissed any suggestion that his subjects might have seen through the experimental deception and his work stresses his success in convincing his volunteers that the experiment was ‘real’ even though his unpublished research showed that this was not the case”"
Still nothing compared to Zimbardo's fraud
Also it has been replicated (qualified, but still), unlike Zimbardo
How millennials became a generation of homebodies - "The internet has given rise to a collective, public performance of solitude... even before the dawn of the self-care era, factors ranging from suburban sprawl to dual-income households contributed to a steep decline of community-minded activities in the US. As Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam explains in his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, by 2000, Americans were already throwing fewer dinner parties and joining fewer bowling leagues and bands and church groups. Life has been getting more insular for a good while. There’s an obvious reason for millennials to take pleasure in being at home: They’re exhausted, and they need a break. In that sense, the trend is in keeping with a value that Danish philosopher Svend Brinkmann calls the joy of missing out. In a culture where, “if we miss out on anything in this life, it’s seen as a kind of existential failure,” Brinkmann said in a Vox interview, we can wind up too overstretched and overwhelmed to enjoy our lives at all. He recommends opting out of the impulse to constantly seek out new experiences, and learning to find meaning in the mundane and routine."
The 'hearts' are the final straw: it's time to nationalise Twitter - "It’s infrastructure for basic communication, which is why people are so upset over the change to hearts: imagine if, instead of saying “OK” on the phone to a relative stranger, you were forced to say “I love you”. It’s that basic.Despite spinning the heart to existing users as a more “expressive” and “universal” symbol, Twitter has admitted the change is really about making the platform easier for new users... Like CB Radio, Twitter isn’t an end product. It’s infrastructure that plays too socially and politically useful a role to be left in the hands of investors and stockbrokers. Whether it’s through state nationalisation, some sort of global governance framework or a user maintained co-operative, it’s time to take Twitter out of the world of finance and put it firmly in the hands of the public – before it goes broke, or wrecks its user experience entirely, or both."
The Guardian never disappoints
L'origine de Bert
Tuesday, January 21, 2020
Monday, January 20, 2020
Links - 20th January 2020 (2)
Dr Iona Italia on Twitter - "Has J.K. Rowling figured out a way to break our cancel culture?"
"I often hear "cancel culture doesn't exist because *these* people were cancelled & are still successful." The people cited are always exceptions shielded from consequences by money or by many fans. The real test is: what happens with ordinary people when they are publicly shamed?"
What you stand to lose by not having sex with people with HIV - "Todd stated on his profile that he’s HIV positive. And when he messaged Carl, he wasn’t rude, but he simply responded, “Sorry, not quite what I’m looking for.” And with that, a relationship that would have changed both their lives disappeared into the ether. Mr Right was pushed right back out of the door."
Uhh
Good luck if the person's viral load suddenly surges
Christian banned from displaying banner proclaiming his beliefs vows to take his challenge to court - "For more than 20 years, he has displayed a banner proclaiming his Christian beliefs while preaching the Gospel at Speaker’s Corner.But last Sunday, at the nation’s historic home of free speech, two police officers told Roland Parsons he could no longer show his slogans and ordered him to remove them... He was told to take down his banner saying ‘The blood of Jesus Christ’ and a Biblical family tree going back to Adam and Eve. ‘How can these words be a crime?’ he said. ‘There is nothing inflammatory or disrespectful about them.’ Mr Parsons – who travelled to London from his Gloucester home with his wife Frances, 74 – was told he was in breach of Royal Parks regulations banning the display of printed material. But he says the police ignored other large notices displayed nearby."
NY Man Arrested for Cutting Wires to Red Light Cameras, Exposing Revenue Scheme - "Stephen Ruth cut the wires to traffic cameras at intersections where yellow light duration times were shortened to generate money for the county.The shortened duration times at the traffic lights generate $32 million for Suffolk County, which is why the county allows the practice to continue despite their own study showing they lead to an increase in accidents with injuries... Ruth had already been arrested in August for using a painter’s extension rod to point the cameras towards the sky... “I did it in order to save lives.” And after he cut the wires, he called the news to cover his act of civil disobedience, which resulted in his arrest after police received pressure from politicians... When he was in jail for his most recent arrest, a sheriff’s deputy even offered to bail him out. But after receiving attention from local residents and media, Ruth discovered a government entity mounted a camera outside of his home... Ruth said that a car tried to hit him head-on and narrowly missed his vehicle. Upon talking to neighbors, they described a similar vehicle with similar occupants staking out his house and lurking around his neighborhood. He said someone could be trying to kill him, although he said he could be wrong... If you think Ruth may be paranoid, consider the case of John Lang, a traffic-light scam whistleblower in Fresno, California who posted on Facebook that police were trying to kill him just days before he was found stabbed to death in his burned down house. Police ruled his death a suicide... The video below, shot by Ruth, shows the duration of a yellow light at an intersection with no cameras to be five seconds compared to the duration of a yellow light at an intersection with a camera to be three seconds... some cameras that were put up have been taken down after they fell short of daily contract-quota with Xerox to produce 25 citations, per camera, between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., which costs Suffolk County $2,132 per day, according to the Xerox contract with the county... the vast majority of cameras were placed in lower to middle class neighborhoods... Another vexing problem for Ruth is the coverage the issue has gotten from local news, specifically News12, which is owned by CableVision who provides the internet service to the cameras at the lights. When victims of the lights went to News12 about the deaths of their family members due to the shortened lights, News12 interviewed them, but never ran the story. And while other local media outlets report from Ruth’s point of view and most of the public’s, News12 has painted Ruth a criminal."
Homebuyers in China greeted by plastic lake on ground touted as ‘park views’ by developer - "Having been sold the concept of “high vegetation cover” and “park lifestyle”, as promised by the real estate developer, the public area that awaited their discovery was in reality covered in a blue plastic material to look like a lake with a small wooden bridge... The promotional material, referring to an ancient fable, reportedly said: “The days pass slowly, as if you’ve fallen into Peach Blossom Land.”... The surface, instead of grass, was covered with yellow mud and turf that no longer looked alive... This phenomenon of largely getting things about right is called “chabuduo” in China."
Victorian mother horrified after school tells son to write a suicide note - "her 16-year-old son had to write the note as a creative writing exercise in an English class this week.“They read a book, Jasper Jones,” she said.“They had to write a suicide letter to Jasper Jones regarding how they were going to die, why they were dying and what the reasons where; why they wanted to die and no longer live.”"
No wonder home schooling is so big nowadays
Prince Andrew: I didn’t have sex with teenager, I was home after Pizza Express in Woking - "The Duke of York claimed on Saturday night that he could not have had sex with a teenage girl in the London home of British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell because he was at home after attending a children’s party at Pizza Express in Woking... In a sometimes rambling and contradictory account of their friendship, which drew accusations of arrogance from viewers, the prince insisted he had not had sex with any women trafficked by Epstein in any of his properties... “If you’re a man it is a positive act to have sex with somebody,” the prince explained. “You have to … take some sort of positive action and so therefore if you try to forget it’s very difficult to try and forget a positive action and I do not remember anything.”... A photograph of the prince with his arm around Roberts’s waist has been widely circulated, but the prince repeatedly said in his Newsnight interview he had “no recollection of that photograph ever being taken”. He said the picture appeared to have been taken upstairs in Maxwell’s house, somewhere “I don’t think I ever went”. He suggested that, as a member of the royal family, he was “not one to, as it were, hug, and public displays of affection are not something that I do.” Photographs of the prince in embraces with various women swiftly emerged on Twitter... He explained that the reason why he hadn’t noticed young girls at Epstein’s house was that, as a member of the royal family, he was used to “members of staff walking around all the time” and so hadn’t interacted in a meaningful way with anyone he considered to be staff."
Prince Andrew says sex claims against him can't be true as 'he can't sweat' - "Prince Andrew has sensationally claimed he suffered from a medical condition which stopped him sweating.The Duke of York revealed the condition – which is known as anhidrosis – in a Newsnight interview with presenter Emily Maitlis, who questioned him over claims he slept with a 17-year-old girl in 2001.Virginia Giuffre, formerly known as Virginia Roberts, claims she was sex trafficked by billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and forced to have sex with the prince three times between 2001 and 2002.Ms Maitlis said Mrs Guiffre had been ‘very specific’ about meeting Andrew at the Tramp nightclub on March 10, 2001 – when she was 17 – claiming the duke was ‘profusely sweating’.But the duke said there was a ‘slight problem’ with that story as he was allegedly unable to perspire at the time... ‘…I didn’t sweat at the time because I had suffered what I would describe as an overdose of adrenaline in the Falklands War when I was shot at and I simply… it was almost impossible for me to sweat.’ He said it was only because he had ‘done a number of things in the recent past’ that he was able to sweat again... GP Jon Hall-Jones, who specialises in dermatology, said adrenaline is more likely to cause sweating, not stop it.He told Metro.co.uk: ‘Adrenaline is a hormone that stimulates the body as part of the fight or flight response.‘Sweating is part of this response that occurs because the sweat glands are responsive to adrenaline.’Professor John Hawk, a dermatologist at London’s King’s College and St Thomas’ Hospital, said trauma is ‘not a known cause’ of the condition after Andrew said it was brought on after being shot at during the Falklands War.He told the Express: ‘Most cases are inherited, which does not seem to be the case here.‘Other causes include heat stroke – which seems unlikely in the Falklands, severe dehydration, and certain medications including morphine could also cause it, but these are not likely.‘Maybe there was a supplementary event that happened which he cannot remember. Trauma is not a known cause of this condition.’"
Gilead Resembles an Islamic Theocracy, not Trump’s America - "Handmaid is about many things: Extreme misogyny, woman’s Inhumanity to woman (at which Atwood excels), and post-Orwellian totalitarianism. But it is also quintessentially about commercial surrogacy, a practice which has already been legalized in at least 20 American states, a transaction which is seen as “progressive.” Many feminists favor altruistic and commercial surrogacy. They, their daughters, their friends, including their gay male friends, may be infertile, unable to maintain a pregnancy, or are womb-less and may need the services of a birthmother surrogate. Such feminists are Gilead’s Serena Joy/Mrs. Waterford, a high-ranking Commander’s wife, just as much as they are Offred, their enslaved, fertile Handmaid.The real handmaids in America today are the birthmother-surrogates who, out of economic desperation, or in a psychological fugue state, agree to carry a child for an “intended” parent or parents. Their diets and medical care is as closely supervised as in Gilead and they are sometimes forbidden to even see the babies in the delivery room. Breastfeeding is not an option. In one case, armed guards prevented the birthmother from meeting her triplets in the NICU... Many feminists believe that a woman’s right to an abortion is dependent upon her right to sell or altruistically give away a baby she has borne; that doing so is not dangerous to the birthmother’s or the baby’s physical and mental health. However, viewing a woman as merely a vessel for property that contractually belongs to “intentional parents” is in direct conflict with the grounds for a woman’s right to an abortion. The embryo/fetus/developing child is part of the woman, it belongs to her because it is in her body. This fact gives her the right to terminate a pregnancy. If others claim this right, then what may stop the sperm donor, the state, the church, or the Wives and Commanders of Gilead from claiming custody and adoption rights?... I once lived in a harem in Afghanistan... When we landed in Kabul, officials smoothly removed my American passport—which I never saw again... Many Afghan women have mothers-in-law who beat them and treat them as despised servants. Mine never hit me or ordered me to cook or clean, but she tried to convert me to Islam every single day and tried to kill me by telling the servants to stop boiling my water and washing my fruits and vegetables. I got deathly ill... Forever after, I understood that barbaric customs are indigenous, not caused by foreign intervention; and that, like the West, Islam was also an imperial and colonial power, owned slaves, and engaged in gender and religious apartheid. I owe Afghanistan a great deal for teaching me this."
Ancient and active: are older staff in the workplace to stay? | Financial Times - "As people live longer so they will work longer. This is in part because governments cannot afford to pay pensions over extended lifespans and workers need to save more to fund their retirement. As mandatory retirement is phased out, many people will stay in work not just for money, but for social interaction and purpose. Over-50s in the US are predicted to make up 35.4 per cent of the workforce in 2022, up from 24.6 per cent in 2002... The influx of older workers could bring benefits: research suggests that mixed-generation teams are more effective than those made up of one generation. It also means that employers can retain skills... The company has found that over-50s want shifts that fit with their set lifestyle, while younger workers like the freedom to choose when they work. McDonald’s offers both and finds the generations’ work patterns are complementary. Generally, older workers are more steady and stay for longer, whereas younger people work for the summer and return to education in the autumn. The carmakers Porsche and BMW have adapted their production lines to the needs of older workers. At Porsche, employees can wear exoskeletons to help them with repetitive tasks and prevent strains. One of the greatest challenges older workers face is ageism, according to a report by the Milken Institute, a California think-tank. It found that older employees tend to be characterised as “slow, unmotivated and out of date”.In part, this is the legacy of the past. “When most jobs required brute strength, young people did outperform their older counterparts. But the physicality of work decreased with the transition from agricultural to service economies, and with it the importance of physical might.”One reason older workers tend to be self-employed is to avoid pervasive ageism... those leading training on a computer task had lower expectations for older workers and so provided lower quality training, compared with how they responded to younger trainees... Different experiences stop groupthink and encourage creativity. “The diversity of thought from mixing the fresh perspectives of youth, combined with the experience of age, can be quite powerful”... “It’s this ageing of our workforce, much more than the future risks of automation, that policymakers and employers should focus on.”"
Garth Leggatt on Twitter - "The fact that Gender Studies graduates cannot land a decent job after college is a testimony to how much of a failure of a system that capitalism is."
"Maybe - just maybe - someone who studies gender for four long years and STILL can’t tell the difference between men and women doesn’t inspire confidence in potential employers?"
How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did - "What Target discovered fairly quickly is that it creeped people out that the company knew about their pregnancies in advance... So Target got sneakier about sending the coupons. The company can create personalized booklets; instead of sending people with high pregnancy scores books o' coupons solely for diapers, rattles, strollers, and the "Go the F*** to Sleep" book, they more subtly spread them about...
'we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works'...
Those people chilled by stores' tracking and profiling them may want to consider going the way of the common criminal -- and paying for far more of their purchases in cash."
For the past 30 years, my job was to censor Channel 5 shows. It was stressful.
Heartbroken M’sian man, 81, closes free museum after customers keep stealing his antiques - "The owner of private mini-museum “Rumahku Muziumku” (My House, My Museum) in Melaka was forced to shut down his free museum after visitors kept stealing his antiques... two of the items stolen in September, a copper manicure bowl and an antique iron were being sold online... both he and his wife, Maznah Ali, 60, are not fully capable of spotting or catching some of these thieves due to various health issues... He made entry to his museum free as his intention is to showcase the antiques, not make money out of them. According to Nordin, he was not sad because of how much money he had lost. Instead, he was saddened to lose valuable antiques he had worked very hard, and long, to collect. Nordin said the antiques are almost irreplaceable and will be hard to find again"
"I often hear "cancel culture doesn't exist because *these* people were cancelled & are still successful." The people cited are always exceptions shielded from consequences by money or by many fans. The real test is: what happens with ordinary people when they are publicly shamed?"
What you stand to lose by not having sex with people with HIV - "Todd stated on his profile that he’s HIV positive. And when he messaged Carl, he wasn’t rude, but he simply responded, “Sorry, not quite what I’m looking for.” And with that, a relationship that would have changed both their lives disappeared into the ether. Mr Right was pushed right back out of the door."
Uhh
Good luck if the person's viral load suddenly surges
Christian banned from displaying banner proclaiming his beliefs vows to take his challenge to court - "For more than 20 years, he has displayed a banner proclaiming his Christian beliefs while preaching the Gospel at Speaker’s Corner.But last Sunday, at the nation’s historic home of free speech, two police officers told Roland Parsons he could no longer show his slogans and ordered him to remove them... He was told to take down his banner saying ‘The blood of Jesus Christ’ and a Biblical family tree going back to Adam and Eve. ‘How can these words be a crime?’ he said. ‘There is nothing inflammatory or disrespectful about them.’ Mr Parsons – who travelled to London from his Gloucester home with his wife Frances, 74 – was told he was in breach of Royal Parks regulations banning the display of printed material. But he says the police ignored other large notices displayed nearby."
NY Man Arrested for Cutting Wires to Red Light Cameras, Exposing Revenue Scheme - "Stephen Ruth cut the wires to traffic cameras at intersections where yellow light duration times were shortened to generate money for the county.The shortened duration times at the traffic lights generate $32 million for Suffolk County, which is why the county allows the practice to continue despite their own study showing they lead to an increase in accidents with injuries... Ruth had already been arrested in August for using a painter’s extension rod to point the cameras towards the sky... “I did it in order to save lives.” And after he cut the wires, he called the news to cover his act of civil disobedience, which resulted in his arrest after police received pressure from politicians... When he was in jail for his most recent arrest, a sheriff’s deputy even offered to bail him out. But after receiving attention from local residents and media, Ruth discovered a government entity mounted a camera outside of his home... Ruth said that a car tried to hit him head-on and narrowly missed his vehicle. Upon talking to neighbors, they described a similar vehicle with similar occupants staking out his house and lurking around his neighborhood. He said someone could be trying to kill him, although he said he could be wrong... If you think Ruth may be paranoid, consider the case of John Lang, a traffic-light scam whistleblower in Fresno, California who posted on Facebook that police were trying to kill him just days before he was found stabbed to death in his burned down house. Police ruled his death a suicide... The video below, shot by Ruth, shows the duration of a yellow light at an intersection with no cameras to be five seconds compared to the duration of a yellow light at an intersection with a camera to be three seconds... some cameras that were put up have been taken down after they fell short of daily contract-quota with Xerox to produce 25 citations, per camera, between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., which costs Suffolk County $2,132 per day, according to the Xerox contract with the county... the vast majority of cameras were placed in lower to middle class neighborhoods... Another vexing problem for Ruth is the coverage the issue has gotten from local news, specifically News12, which is owned by CableVision who provides the internet service to the cameras at the lights. When victims of the lights went to News12 about the deaths of their family members due to the shortened lights, News12 interviewed them, but never ran the story. And while other local media outlets report from Ruth’s point of view and most of the public’s, News12 has painted Ruth a criminal."
Homebuyers in China greeted by plastic lake on ground touted as ‘park views’ by developer - "Having been sold the concept of “high vegetation cover” and “park lifestyle”, as promised by the real estate developer, the public area that awaited their discovery was in reality covered in a blue plastic material to look like a lake with a small wooden bridge... The promotional material, referring to an ancient fable, reportedly said: “The days pass slowly, as if you’ve fallen into Peach Blossom Land.”... The surface, instead of grass, was covered with yellow mud and turf that no longer looked alive... This phenomenon of largely getting things about right is called “chabuduo” in China."
Victorian mother horrified after school tells son to write a suicide note - "her 16-year-old son had to write the note as a creative writing exercise in an English class this week.“They read a book, Jasper Jones,” she said.“They had to write a suicide letter to Jasper Jones regarding how they were going to die, why they were dying and what the reasons where; why they wanted to die and no longer live.”"
No wonder home schooling is so big nowadays
Prince Andrew: I didn’t have sex with teenager, I was home after Pizza Express in Woking - "The Duke of York claimed on Saturday night that he could not have had sex with a teenage girl in the London home of British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell because he was at home after attending a children’s party at Pizza Express in Woking... In a sometimes rambling and contradictory account of their friendship, which drew accusations of arrogance from viewers, the prince insisted he had not had sex with any women trafficked by Epstein in any of his properties... “If you’re a man it is a positive act to have sex with somebody,” the prince explained. “You have to … take some sort of positive action and so therefore if you try to forget it’s very difficult to try and forget a positive action and I do not remember anything.”... A photograph of the prince with his arm around Roberts’s waist has been widely circulated, but the prince repeatedly said in his Newsnight interview he had “no recollection of that photograph ever being taken”. He said the picture appeared to have been taken upstairs in Maxwell’s house, somewhere “I don’t think I ever went”. He suggested that, as a member of the royal family, he was “not one to, as it were, hug, and public displays of affection are not something that I do.” Photographs of the prince in embraces with various women swiftly emerged on Twitter... He explained that the reason why he hadn’t noticed young girls at Epstein’s house was that, as a member of the royal family, he was used to “members of staff walking around all the time” and so hadn’t interacted in a meaningful way with anyone he considered to be staff."
Prince Andrew says sex claims against him can't be true as 'he can't sweat' - "Prince Andrew has sensationally claimed he suffered from a medical condition which stopped him sweating.The Duke of York revealed the condition – which is known as anhidrosis – in a Newsnight interview with presenter Emily Maitlis, who questioned him over claims he slept with a 17-year-old girl in 2001.Virginia Giuffre, formerly known as Virginia Roberts, claims she was sex trafficked by billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and forced to have sex with the prince three times between 2001 and 2002.Ms Maitlis said Mrs Guiffre had been ‘very specific’ about meeting Andrew at the Tramp nightclub on March 10, 2001 – when she was 17 – claiming the duke was ‘profusely sweating’.But the duke said there was a ‘slight problem’ with that story as he was allegedly unable to perspire at the time... ‘…I didn’t sweat at the time because I had suffered what I would describe as an overdose of adrenaline in the Falklands War when I was shot at and I simply… it was almost impossible for me to sweat.’ He said it was only because he had ‘done a number of things in the recent past’ that he was able to sweat again... GP Jon Hall-Jones, who specialises in dermatology, said adrenaline is more likely to cause sweating, not stop it.He told Metro.co.uk: ‘Adrenaline is a hormone that stimulates the body as part of the fight or flight response.‘Sweating is part of this response that occurs because the sweat glands are responsive to adrenaline.’Professor John Hawk, a dermatologist at London’s King’s College and St Thomas’ Hospital, said trauma is ‘not a known cause’ of the condition after Andrew said it was brought on after being shot at during the Falklands War.He told the Express: ‘Most cases are inherited, which does not seem to be the case here.‘Other causes include heat stroke – which seems unlikely in the Falklands, severe dehydration, and certain medications including morphine could also cause it, but these are not likely.‘Maybe there was a supplementary event that happened which he cannot remember. Trauma is not a known cause of this condition.’"
Gilead Resembles an Islamic Theocracy, not Trump’s America - "Handmaid is about many things: Extreme misogyny, woman’s Inhumanity to woman (at which Atwood excels), and post-Orwellian totalitarianism. But it is also quintessentially about commercial surrogacy, a practice which has already been legalized in at least 20 American states, a transaction which is seen as “progressive.” Many feminists favor altruistic and commercial surrogacy. They, their daughters, their friends, including their gay male friends, may be infertile, unable to maintain a pregnancy, or are womb-less and may need the services of a birthmother surrogate. Such feminists are Gilead’s Serena Joy/Mrs. Waterford, a high-ranking Commander’s wife, just as much as they are Offred, their enslaved, fertile Handmaid.The real handmaids in America today are the birthmother-surrogates who, out of economic desperation, or in a psychological fugue state, agree to carry a child for an “intended” parent or parents. Their diets and medical care is as closely supervised as in Gilead and they are sometimes forbidden to even see the babies in the delivery room. Breastfeeding is not an option. In one case, armed guards prevented the birthmother from meeting her triplets in the NICU... Many feminists believe that a woman’s right to an abortion is dependent upon her right to sell or altruistically give away a baby she has borne; that doing so is not dangerous to the birthmother’s or the baby’s physical and mental health. However, viewing a woman as merely a vessel for property that contractually belongs to “intentional parents” is in direct conflict with the grounds for a woman’s right to an abortion. The embryo/fetus/developing child is part of the woman, it belongs to her because it is in her body. This fact gives her the right to terminate a pregnancy. If others claim this right, then what may stop the sperm donor, the state, the church, or the Wives and Commanders of Gilead from claiming custody and adoption rights?... I once lived in a harem in Afghanistan... When we landed in Kabul, officials smoothly removed my American passport—which I never saw again... Many Afghan women have mothers-in-law who beat them and treat them as despised servants. Mine never hit me or ordered me to cook or clean, but she tried to convert me to Islam every single day and tried to kill me by telling the servants to stop boiling my water and washing my fruits and vegetables. I got deathly ill... Forever after, I understood that barbaric customs are indigenous, not caused by foreign intervention; and that, like the West, Islam was also an imperial and colonial power, owned slaves, and engaged in gender and religious apartheid. I owe Afghanistan a great deal for teaching me this."
Ancient and active: are older staff in the workplace to stay? | Financial Times - "As people live longer so they will work longer. This is in part because governments cannot afford to pay pensions over extended lifespans and workers need to save more to fund their retirement. As mandatory retirement is phased out, many people will stay in work not just for money, but for social interaction and purpose. Over-50s in the US are predicted to make up 35.4 per cent of the workforce in 2022, up from 24.6 per cent in 2002... The influx of older workers could bring benefits: research suggests that mixed-generation teams are more effective than those made up of one generation. It also means that employers can retain skills... The company has found that over-50s want shifts that fit with their set lifestyle, while younger workers like the freedom to choose when they work. McDonald’s offers both and finds the generations’ work patterns are complementary. Generally, older workers are more steady and stay for longer, whereas younger people work for the summer and return to education in the autumn. The carmakers Porsche and BMW have adapted their production lines to the needs of older workers. At Porsche, employees can wear exoskeletons to help them with repetitive tasks and prevent strains. One of the greatest challenges older workers face is ageism, according to a report by the Milken Institute, a California think-tank. It found that older employees tend to be characterised as “slow, unmotivated and out of date”.In part, this is the legacy of the past. “When most jobs required brute strength, young people did outperform their older counterparts. But the physicality of work decreased with the transition from agricultural to service economies, and with it the importance of physical might.”One reason older workers tend to be self-employed is to avoid pervasive ageism... those leading training on a computer task had lower expectations for older workers and so provided lower quality training, compared with how they responded to younger trainees... Different experiences stop groupthink and encourage creativity. “The diversity of thought from mixing the fresh perspectives of youth, combined with the experience of age, can be quite powerful”... “It’s this ageing of our workforce, much more than the future risks of automation, that policymakers and employers should focus on.”"
Garth Leggatt on Twitter - "The fact that Gender Studies graduates cannot land a decent job after college is a testimony to how much of a failure of a system that capitalism is."
"Maybe - just maybe - someone who studies gender for four long years and STILL can’t tell the difference between men and women doesn’t inspire confidence in potential employers?"
How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did - "What Target discovered fairly quickly is that it creeped people out that the company knew about their pregnancies in advance... So Target got sneakier about sending the coupons. The company can create personalized booklets; instead of sending people with high pregnancy scores books o' coupons solely for diapers, rattles, strollers, and the "Go the F*** to Sleep" book, they more subtly spread them about...
'we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works'...
Those people chilled by stores' tracking and profiling them may want to consider going the way of the common criminal -- and paying for far more of their purchases in cash."
For the past 30 years, my job was to censor Channel 5 shows. It was stressful.
Heartbroken M’sian man, 81, closes free museum after customers keep stealing his antiques - "The owner of private mini-museum “Rumahku Muziumku” (My House, My Museum) in Melaka was forced to shut down his free museum after visitors kept stealing his antiques... two of the items stolen in September, a copper manicure bowl and an antique iron were being sold online... both he and his wife, Maznah Ali, 60, are not fully capable of spotting or catching some of these thieves due to various health issues... He made entry to his museum free as his intention is to showcase the antiques, not make money out of them. According to Nordin, he was not sad because of how much money he had lost. Instead, he was saddened to lose valuable antiques he had worked very hard, and long, to collect. Nordin said the antiques are almost irreplaceable and will be hard to find again"
Post ID: 7048215447379826758
Morality in the 21st Century: Jordan Peterson
BBC Radio 4 - Morality in the 21st Century, Episode 2: Jordan Peterson
"‘You've even hit the Chinese press with the wonderful headline: Jordan Peterson, in comparing humans to lobsters, has scored a victory over feminism, or somesuch.’
‘It’s not a very likely headline.’
‘I think, you know, to have produced a headline like that in the Chinese press tells us that you are somewhat unusual. Well, I would love if I may to ask you to retrace the journey that led to those subjects that began if I'm not mistaken by the big question you asked, which is what leads ordinary human beings to be participants in great acts of evil? It began, I think, with your reflections on the Holocaust, non communist Russia. What led from there to individual psychology?’
‘Well, I was obsessed with the cold war situation, the general insanity of the cold war situation which hasn't entirely resolved right?... The insanity of it was something that obsessed me. And I actually attempted to answer what I think was a postmodern question. That's how I look at it now. The Soviet types, and the, and the fascists, the Nazis, but we'll leave them out of this for now, had a particular story about the world. About what people were like and about where we should be headed. And the West had another story.
And I was very curious, were these just two equally arbitrary, entirely socially constructed stories at odds with one another, playing themselves out competitively, let's say with an approximately equal probability of victory on each side? Or was one story correct? And it wasn't obvious which one of those was going to be correct. And I think I went into it with an open mind, an exploratory mind.
What I found, as far as I'm concerned, is that the story of the West which is predicated on the primacy of individual sovereignty and grounded in a mythological representation of that, was not by any stretch of the imagination, arbitrary There was something about it that was correct. Correct metaphorically and correct pragmatically...
We have a neuro psychological system that's specialized for operation in the domain of order, unexplored territory, if you want to think about it from a biological perspective, but we have an entirely different neuro psychological system that operates when we don't know what we're doing, and in the domain of chaos or the unknown, and it seems to be associated primarily with right hemisphere function, linked to the emotional operations deep emotional operations, that the Russian neural psychologists identified as the orienting reflex.
And so the sense of meaning seems to emerge as a consequence of getting the balance between the known and the unknown. So if everything around you is [already] explored, then there's no reason to even be awake, everything is already taken care of, it's already been transformed into an automatized algorithm, even neurologically, there's no reason for you to be there.
And if everything is unknown, it's unbearable, like it will damage you psycho, physiologically, that's what happens when you are traumatized is too much becomes unknown at once. And so there's these border conditions of stratification and terror.
But in the middle of that, there's this domain that's associated with the experience of meaning. I think it's the same experience that you get when you listen to music with its balance of chaos and order, and the instinct of meaning…
What leads to authoritarian totalitarian state, the desire to eliminate the unknown and just live within a known… I think this was the intuition of Milton. When Milton described the satanic rebellion 400 years ago, it looked to me like that was a precursor, a symbolic precursor to the idea of the rise of totalitarian states. It's also embedded in the story of the Tower of Babel. And human beings build these massive structures that are what envision to reach to the heavens right to reach to the sky to replace everything, they're imposing order on on nature, which means essentially denying human freedom… something Dostoyevsky pointed out very carefully is that it's not obvious that that's what people want. We might want to contend with the unknown. Like there's an adventure in life that's independent of the security and maybe even set in opposition to the security and Dostoyevsky's take was that we were much happier and Kirkegaard as well, engaging in that adventure.’…
‘Is that what people find exciting about your work that you are giving them back a sense of responsibility, and hence of the possibility of life being that kind of adventure, in which you encounter meaning through your struggle with the unknown?’
‘That's, that's what it looks like to me. Like it's a retelling of the of the most ancient story, right, which is the hero's story, essentially. The confrontation with the dragon, let's say. And I think people know that. And I think they know their conscience tells them when they're not undertaking the struggle properly. And when, when I'm talking to audiences now, and they're about 60% men, I would say, between the ages of 20 and 40, although the demographics are are changing, as the talks continue.
And I talked to them about responsibility, and the fact that they have to look out for themselves and their family and their community and that they leave a hole in the world that's non trivial if they don't take on that responsibility and burden. The place is silent. Absolutely silent, and it happens every time. And it's it's the call to adventure. It's, in a sense, it's the same call that Abraham experienced when he was living in his mother's basement essentially, you know, 80 years old and had never gone out into the world. It's like, get the hell out there, there are things to do. You know, and and I think-’
‘It was actually, it was Moses who was 80 but-’
‘Well Abraham was, Abraham was, how old was Abraham?’
‘He was about 65.’
‘Okay, okay, well, he still spent too much time at home’…
‘You have succeeded in delivering what many might call a religious vision where religions themselves have failed in this very secular world. That's very interesting.’...
'A friend of mine, Jonathan Pageau said you accept death to stop being a slave to death, which is a pretty nice tension...
I'm a clinician, you know. Clinicians know, this isn't an issue of question. This is the problem with uneducated and foolish people make claims that are far outside their domain of competence. If someone's anxious and depressed, you do not over protect them. It makes it worse. Like, there isn't a clinical school in existence that disputes that as a fundamental axiom.
The way that you make people stronger is by helping them voluntarily confront what they're afraid of and avoiding. Behaviorists know that. Existentialists know that. The humanists know that. The psychoanalysts know that. It's the one thread apart from getting your story straight that runs through all the great clinical schools.
And the universities in the guise of protecting the mental health of their students are doing exactly the opposite. It's inexcusable. What the universities are doing is inexcusable on about seven different dimensions. They have a mass that the universities are corrupting the culture. It's, it's terrible. And they're doing it in part with all of this hyper protective idiocy, as well as their ideological indoctrinations.
And their lowering of academic standards and their continual raising of tuition fees. And the invitation especially in the US to take on unsustainable burdens of student debt with no escape through bankruptcy laws, their generation of a top heavy administrative structure, their inability to teach students to read or to write or to think or to speak.
It's, it's. I'm absolutely appalled as a member of the university about what's happened with the universities. I do believe like most Republicans in the United States now that the universities do more harm than good’
‘What about the claim that you might do more harm than good? In other words, it's clear that you have millions of very, very devoted followers. And that you could, and perhaps do sway their emotions and their feelings about life very powerfully. Do you, and of course, the more influential you are, the more potentially dangerous you can become, and there’s certainly people who see you as a threat to the view they have constructed of the world’
‘Well, I am a threat to the radical Marxist types. I am not on their side, in the least. I'm absolutely shell shocked by the fact that we've managed to agree collectively that what the Nazis did was unacceptable and being unable, partly because of the refusal of the intellectuals to contend with the problem, we've been absolutely unable or unwilling to draw the same lines on the radical left. I think there's no excuse for that. After the hundreds of, hundred million corpses we piled up in the 20th century.
So I am not an ally of the radical left. And so if they see me as a threat, then so much the better.
With regards to my potential effects, let's say you get the fans you deserve. Okay. So this is what happens to me when I walk around now in the world. Wherever I go, it doesn't matter if it's Australia or the United States or Canada, or England. Or Holland, for that matter. If I go out in the street, this is what happens every day.
Young person comes up to me, sometimes not so young, and says: I've been listening to your lectures. Can I give you a hug? They've really helped me. All the time. They don't come up and give me some political sermon. You know, none of that. It's just that they say: look, I was in a dark place, whatever that dark place might have been. And I'm really trying to get myself together.
And so. That's fine. That's what I want to have happen. People think, well, I'm doing more harm than good. Well, the people who think that have the motivation to think that. They don't have any evidence that it's the case…
Thinking about the people who are watching me as followers, is, it's not right conceptually. Because I don't know if you're following, so to speak someone and they're saying to you, establish your own territory, get your act together, start with what you can control. Well, in what way are they followers precisely? It's more like they're imitators of a, they're imitators of an individualistic creed, let's say. And, and I don't see that as fundamentally political. I see that as fundamentally theological’"
"‘You've even hit the Chinese press with the wonderful headline: Jordan Peterson, in comparing humans to lobsters, has scored a victory over feminism, or somesuch.’
‘It’s not a very likely headline.’
‘I think, you know, to have produced a headline like that in the Chinese press tells us that you are somewhat unusual. Well, I would love if I may to ask you to retrace the journey that led to those subjects that began if I'm not mistaken by the big question you asked, which is what leads ordinary human beings to be participants in great acts of evil? It began, I think, with your reflections on the Holocaust, non communist Russia. What led from there to individual psychology?’
‘Well, I was obsessed with the cold war situation, the general insanity of the cold war situation which hasn't entirely resolved right?... The insanity of it was something that obsessed me. And I actually attempted to answer what I think was a postmodern question. That's how I look at it now. The Soviet types, and the, and the fascists, the Nazis, but we'll leave them out of this for now, had a particular story about the world. About what people were like and about where we should be headed. And the West had another story.
And I was very curious, were these just two equally arbitrary, entirely socially constructed stories at odds with one another, playing themselves out competitively, let's say with an approximately equal probability of victory on each side? Or was one story correct? And it wasn't obvious which one of those was going to be correct. And I think I went into it with an open mind, an exploratory mind.
What I found, as far as I'm concerned, is that the story of the West which is predicated on the primacy of individual sovereignty and grounded in a mythological representation of that, was not by any stretch of the imagination, arbitrary There was something about it that was correct. Correct metaphorically and correct pragmatically...
We have a neuro psychological system that's specialized for operation in the domain of order, unexplored territory, if you want to think about it from a biological perspective, but we have an entirely different neuro psychological system that operates when we don't know what we're doing, and in the domain of chaos or the unknown, and it seems to be associated primarily with right hemisphere function, linked to the emotional operations deep emotional operations, that the Russian neural psychologists identified as the orienting reflex.
And so the sense of meaning seems to emerge as a consequence of getting the balance between the known and the unknown. So if everything around you is [already] explored, then there's no reason to even be awake, everything is already taken care of, it's already been transformed into an automatized algorithm, even neurologically, there's no reason for you to be there.
And if everything is unknown, it's unbearable, like it will damage you psycho, physiologically, that's what happens when you are traumatized is too much becomes unknown at once. And so there's these border conditions of stratification and terror.
But in the middle of that, there's this domain that's associated with the experience of meaning. I think it's the same experience that you get when you listen to music with its balance of chaos and order, and the instinct of meaning…
What leads to authoritarian totalitarian state, the desire to eliminate the unknown and just live within a known… I think this was the intuition of Milton. When Milton described the satanic rebellion 400 years ago, it looked to me like that was a precursor, a symbolic precursor to the idea of the rise of totalitarian states. It's also embedded in the story of the Tower of Babel. And human beings build these massive structures that are what envision to reach to the heavens right to reach to the sky to replace everything, they're imposing order on on nature, which means essentially denying human freedom… something Dostoyevsky pointed out very carefully is that it's not obvious that that's what people want. We might want to contend with the unknown. Like there's an adventure in life that's independent of the security and maybe even set in opposition to the security and Dostoyevsky's take was that we were much happier and Kirkegaard as well, engaging in that adventure.’…
‘Is that what people find exciting about your work that you are giving them back a sense of responsibility, and hence of the possibility of life being that kind of adventure, in which you encounter meaning through your struggle with the unknown?’
‘That's, that's what it looks like to me. Like it's a retelling of the of the most ancient story, right, which is the hero's story, essentially. The confrontation with the dragon, let's say. And I think people know that. And I think they know their conscience tells them when they're not undertaking the struggle properly. And when, when I'm talking to audiences now, and they're about 60% men, I would say, between the ages of 20 and 40, although the demographics are are changing, as the talks continue.
And I talked to them about responsibility, and the fact that they have to look out for themselves and their family and their community and that they leave a hole in the world that's non trivial if they don't take on that responsibility and burden. The place is silent. Absolutely silent, and it happens every time. And it's it's the call to adventure. It's, in a sense, it's the same call that Abraham experienced when he was living in his mother's basement essentially, you know, 80 years old and had never gone out into the world. It's like, get the hell out there, there are things to do. You know, and and I think-’
‘It was actually, it was Moses who was 80 but-’
‘Well Abraham was, Abraham was, how old was Abraham?’
‘He was about 65.’
‘Okay, okay, well, he still spent too much time at home’…
‘You have succeeded in delivering what many might call a religious vision where religions themselves have failed in this very secular world. That's very interesting.’...
'A friend of mine, Jonathan Pageau said you accept death to stop being a slave to death, which is a pretty nice tension...
I'm a clinician, you know. Clinicians know, this isn't an issue of question. This is the problem with uneducated and foolish people make claims that are far outside their domain of competence. If someone's anxious and depressed, you do not over protect them. It makes it worse. Like, there isn't a clinical school in existence that disputes that as a fundamental axiom.
The way that you make people stronger is by helping them voluntarily confront what they're afraid of and avoiding. Behaviorists know that. Existentialists know that. The humanists know that. The psychoanalysts know that. It's the one thread apart from getting your story straight that runs through all the great clinical schools.
And the universities in the guise of protecting the mental health of their students are doing exactly the opposite. It's inexcusable. What the universities are doing is inexcusable on about seven different dimensions. They have a mass that the universities are corrupting the culture. It's, it's terrible. And they're doing it in part with all of this hyper protective idiocy, as well as their ideological indoctrinations.
And their lowering of academic standards and their continual raising of tuition fees. And the invitation especially in the US to take on unsustainable burdens of student debt with no escape through bankruptcy laws, their generation of a top heavy administrative structure, their inability to teach students to read or to write or to think or to speak.
It's, it's. I'm absolutely appalled as a member of the university about what's happened with the universities. I do believe like most Republicans in the United States now that the universities do more harm than good’
‘What about the claim that you might do more harm than good? In other words, it's clear that you have millions of very, very devoted followers. And that you could, and perhaps do sway their emotions and their feelings about life very powerfully. Do you, and of course, the more influential you are, the more potentially dangerous you can become, and there’s certainly people who see you as a threat to the view they have constructed of the world’
‘Well, I am a threat to the radical Marxist types. I am not on their side, in the least. I'm absolutely shell shocked by the fact that we've managed to agree collectively that what the Nazis did was unacceptable and being unable, partly because of the refusal of the intellectuals to contend with the problem, we've been absolutely unable or unwilling to draw the same lines on the radical left. I think there's no excuse for that. After the hundreds of, hundred million corpses we piled up in the 20th century.
So I am not an ally of the radical left. And so if they see me as a threat, then so much the better.
With regards to my potential effects, let's say you get the fans you deserve. Okay. So this is what happens to me when I walk around now in the world. Wherever I go, it doesn't matter if it's Australia or the United States or Canada, or England. Or Holland, for that matter. If I go out in the street, this is what happens every day.
Young person comes up to me, sometimes not so young, and says: I've been listening to your lectures. Can I give you a hug? They've really helped me. All the time. They don't come up and give me some political sermon. You know, none of that. It's just that they say: look, I was in a dark place, whatever that dark place might have been. And I'm really trying to get myself together.
And so. That's fine. That's what I want to have happen. People think, well, I'm doing more harm than good. Well, the people who think that have the motivation to think that. They don't have any evidence that it's the case…
Thinking about the people who are watching me as followers, is, it's not right conceptually. Because I don't know if you're following, so to speak someone and they're saying to you, establish your own territory, get your act together, start with what you can control. Well, in what way are they followers precisely? It's more like they're imitators of a, they're imitators of an individualistic creed, let's say. And, and I don't see that as fundamentally political. I see that as fundamentally theological’"
Post ID: 1178672322532076267
Links - 20th January 2020 (1)
Egyptian Vats 5,600 Years Old Were For Beer Brewing - Scientific American - "this ancient beer would have tasted very different from what our modern palates are used to. The Egyptian beer makers did use malted wheat and barley in the brewing process. But no one had mastered carbonation yet. So the resulting brew was a flat, unfiltered malt beverage with a low alcohol content... The researchers found a high concentration of the amino acid proline, which is abundant in dates and some other fruits.“This result suggests that dates could have been used or incorporated in the beer, for flavor.”And maybe to add some sweet notes.Hops—which act as both a flavoring and a preservative—weren’t added to beer until medieval times. “The use of hops was unknown to the ancient Egyptians, and we think that they used phosphoric acid to preserve their beer.”The residues were indeed high in phosphoric acid, a product of barley grains added during the fermentation process. Phosphoric acid is often used today to prolong the shelf life of alcoholic beverages."
Lean Times, Plump Partners : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘Women don't really care about men… On the other end, they do care about all kinds of things like wealth and status. But barring that they don't care so much about how much a man weighs. The opposite is clearly not true the other direction. Men care a great deal about how much a woman weighs. And there the overwhelming relationship is that in poor places, men prefer women that are slightly heavier and in rich places men prefer women that are slightly thinner.’...‘In poor countries, they appreciate somebody who's heavy, because they actually have enough money to get food and in rich countries they prefer people who’re skinny because they have time to go to the gym?’
‘It’s something, the argument’s actually pretty close to that of all things... in like evolutionary terms, we seek what's best. And if you say oh my gosh, there's scarce resources, what matters most is starvation, then you look for the person who clearly is at lowest risk for malnutrition, that is the heavier person...
[On implications for evolutionary psychology] It is one of my favorite observations in that it is detected by anthropologists with no stake in the outcome, some more than 50 years ago, and only much more recently sort of the evolutionists stepped in to try to offer an explanation...
In the US, he shows that as the GDP fluctuates, so do Playmates’ centerfold body dimensions, basically, when times are lean in the US, playmates get a little bit more plump. When times are good, they get a little more thin’
‘Do they get as plump as people in regular society?’
‘No, they don't even come [close]’...
[On undergraduates] ‘Men who feel poor prefer a woman that weighs more than do men who feel rich.’
‘So it's not just a cultural variation, and not just a temporal variation, but actually you say at the moment you can get people to to feel more poor and therefore want more plumpy women and the opposite as well’"
This helps explain "socially constructed" beauty preferences
What's in a (Stock's) Name? : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘If you look at how difficult a stock’s name is to pronounce that predicts how well the stock will do initially after going public’...
'Long term, the stocks with easy to pronounce names do tend to do better. But it is not as strong an effect as other information such as profitability comes out, people start to pay more attention to that and less to more superficial factors like the name but the effect of the trends do hold long term... Politicians with easier to pronounce names do better in elections'"
The Case for Higher Gas Taxes : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘In the countries where they for a long time have this, like in Italy, it is relatively acceptable to raise the, more. You would think it would be easier to raise gasoline taxes where they are low, but it's easier when they are high.’
‘So once people get used to the idea that that taxes on gasoline are an acceptable way to control that, they're willing to accept it and they're willing to even take higher tax increases on that.’
‘Yes, you get lobbies always built around status quo... I even managed to interview one of the directors of Fiat once and I asked what Fiat thinks about gasoline taxes and to my great joy there was a an auto manufacturer who says we are very much in favor of a higher gasoline tax, otherwise they would buy BMW’"
Surprising Effects of Brain Drain : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘If they really leave and you don't hear back... as if they disappeared, still the source country could gain and this happens before migration. If people know that through past experience... people have to choose whether to go into study. Okay. So, in economics, we tend to think that you will take your decision to go into study if this is beneficial for you, basically, in monetary terms’
‘Okay. So you're saying when when people are planning what to do, if they think that what they're doing has returns, they will do it and if they think that it's immigration is a good thing. they will plan for immigration’
‘They look at this as a probabilistic thing. So they say, for example, I have 80 or 90% chance of staying in the country and maybe 10 or 20% chance of immigrating. But if you have just 10 or 20% chance to, to multiply your income by, by 10, okay, that would double your expected income, you know, this is enough to, to to drive certain amount of people to go into study. People that would not go to study without the option or the prospect of migration’
‘So what that would mean is people will try to get skills that are good for the country that they want to immigrate to... sometimes the skills they're trying to get are also good for the country that they're living’...
'Of course, if too many of them leave [that is] detrimental'"
Ovulatory Cycle Affects Earnings : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University; Brent Jordan, Department of Psychology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘When they're at their most fertile, right before they ovulate, they feel the best. They also appear more attractive to human males, so therefore they would make more money. What's important about that is up into this point of time, it was considered that human females didn't display their ovulation, that it was concealed, that only non human primates displayed their ovulation. This study showed that human females do display in a way.’
‘Wait, so you want to tell me that on different days of the month, they make actually more money?’
‘Exactly.’
‘When do they make the most money?’
‘Between days 10 and 12 of their ovulatory cycle... Right now currently, they don't know it at all. They're completely oblivious. So they make more money, but they're unaware they're making more money.’...
‘So you’re opening like consulting business for lap dancers to suggest to them when to work more and when to work less? Basically saying work twice as hard on these days and you can rest for three days on the other time?’...
‘They can basically double their earnings when they're ovulating when a male senses that’
‘Wow. And do we know if they they dance differently or they do different things or whether it's just a perception of the male?’
‘Well, it's the perception of the male but also they’re advertising. They're displaying. They're not aware of it. But when they're actually ovulating, they retain less water. So their muscles and things show a little bit better, they have a little bit more athletic ability, because they feel better. They kind of feel a little bit more upbeat. So it's a display, and they're probably a little bit more confident mentally. They're not aware of why that is. They just feel that way. They just feel better.’"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Tuesday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "[On F1 being carbon neutral] ‘Although the optics around Formula One always tend to focus on the racing cars themselves, the reality is that when you look at the environmental issues to do with Formula One, it's much more to do with things like air travel and freight and the 300,000 spectators coming to a race and what they do while they're at a race there. So there are a lot of things that can be done, that are very measurable and very clear, and frankly, not unique to Formula One. But something that Formula One can do that really will be able to make a change’
‘Isn't there an issue about credibility? Formula One's whole purpose, one of the things it does is it burns fossil fuels very quickly, and lots of them. The idea of being carbon neutral to me just sounds like window dressing, doing something that's not really at the heart of the enterprise at all.’
‘Well as I said, the kind of optics of Formula One tend to be problematic. The reality is that the 20 Formula One cars use less fuel in an entire season than a single Boeing 747 flight from London to Tokyo. So the reality is the quantity of fuel burnt is very low. And the Formula One engines today are hybrid petrol electric engines, and they're the most efficient fossil fuel burning internal combustion engines in the world. So the detail of Formula One is actually already impressive. And this initiative announced by Formula One is really a major step to taking the entire sport and making it carbon neutral by 2030’"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Friday's business with Rob Young - "‘There was a poll last year which suggested that economists are trusted less than the much maligned weather forecaster. Perhaps that's why economics is regarded by many as a bit of a joke. But can economics itself be funny? An unlikely festival of economics and comedy is now in its 10th year. Killconomics is underway in the Irish town of Kilkenny and is determined to show the dismal science can be a laugh’."
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Thursday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "‘A new proposal on equal pay. It says that if women are working with men who they think are being paid more, they should have a right by law to find out what those men are being paid. Good idea?’
‘So if I were going to implement something like this, and I'm not a politician, I’d probably use a system like Sweden's, which is anyone can look at anyone else's tax return. But the catch is is that person will know that you looked. And that system has worked fairly well in Sweden in terms of having a lower pay gap. It also works in terms of catching people who might be trying to evade tax. But I think just giving women the right isn't the answer. If we're going to give to someone you know, why not people who are minorities, why not old people, young people?’
‘So everybody's pace should be disclosable?’
‘I think all or nothing, will be my view.’...
‘Google has said that they would not use anybody's data, just like they said yesterday, of course, that they won't take anybody's health data with this new relationship they have with Ascension. The problem is that Google and many of the tech companies, particularly in Silicon Valley, have a really strong track record of saying they won't take data. And then later on, we find out that they did, sometimes by accident, sometimes deliberately. We saw this with Google and DeepMind, when they acquired DeepMind. They said they weren't going to take any of that data. And of course they did.’
‘And of course, we had the Facebook situation, Google will have access to data from your financial records, potentially your health records, all the stuff in their smart speakers, all the stuff from your search history, they would know more about you than you know about yourself, I suspect.’
‘Yeah, we're getting to this point where I think the way the companies will frame it is they're trying to create an ecosystem in which their customers would live. A regulator is going to quickly start to ask the question of when does an ecosystem become a cartel?’
‘We have to ask ourselves, are we moving into a world where it's going to be, you know, Google life, or Apple life or Amazon life?’
‘So you’ve got a situation where you have two or three Silicon Valley companies basically competing to run your life, and you choose which ecosystem you join’
‘Yeah. And you might even have some, some non US examples. You might have the Chinese companies that went as well, it's probably going to be about five to 10 global companies that all of us around the world would choose from’
‘It hasn't happened so much in Europe has it? We don't have Silicon Valley. We don't have the Googles and the Amazons, but we do have tougher regulators, I think, or at least regulators were much less comfortable with this kind of idea.’
‘And a population that's a little bit less comfortable with all of this data gathering, and collecting. So that's another question is will we see consumers and citizens push back? Will we see governments listen to that and empower regulators and finance them so that they can actually go after these firms? Issue enforcement guidelines, issue fines if need be, but also will we actually see firms really be challenged on the data that they're gathering? All they need is one big screw up to set all of this back.’"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Wednesday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "‘What we've seen on cookies, so called cookies on on the web where people are being asked to understand the policies on any website as to how cookies are used, in what way they're used and how data is used… When was the last time for example you refused to go on a website?’
‘When I turned down a cookie? No, I don’t think that’s something I've ever turned down.’
‘Right, exactly. And what happens is that on most of these sites, you get these long agreements, 16 page agreements or whatever, that if you sent to a lawyer would take about 30 days to go through. So it's completely impractical. What we have to do is to clearly articulate to consumers on an opt in basis. In other words, you choose to participate, what you are letting yourself in for, what your data will be used for. And then looking at the opposite, we're now starting to see the development of platforms where people can sell their data on a personal basis. For example, there was an article on the front page of the FT about somebody sitting on top of a bus, and by the time they got to the end of the bus journey, they paid for their bus trip by selling their data to one or two apps.’"
Andrew Yang, Asian stereotypes and the discomforts of reality | Spectator USA - "Andrew Yang has garnered criticism over the course of his presidential campaign for making self-deprecating jokes that reinforce Asian stereotypes. He has alluded to Asians’ hard work-ethic and love for math, even selling merchandise inscribed with the word ‘MATH’ on it — an acronym for ‘Make America Think Harder.’ It reached an apogee after the Democratic debate last week when Yang memorably quipped, ‘now, I am Asian, so I know a lot of doctors,’ before launching into his answer about how to fix healthcare.Many prominent Asian Americans, such as the former Planned Parenthood president Dr Leana Wen and the former governor of Louisiana Bobby Jindal, found it amusing. Others bristled at what they perceive as Yang perpetuating the ‘toxic trope’ of the model minority myth... the model minority myth lies in sharp contrast to reality — what everybody seems to know and feel is right — and the data appears to bear this out. According to Pew, Asian Americans are the highest-income, most highly educated and fastest-growing demographic in the US... close to 70 percent of Asian Americans think that a willingness to work hard will lead to success, which is one of the quintessential cornerstones of the American Dream narrative. While only 9 percent of the general American population thinks that their parents put too much pressure on their children, 39 percent of Asian Americans agree with the sentiment, bolstering the stereotype that landed Amy Chua, the Yale Law professor and ‘Tiger Mom’, in hot (and sour) soup... The Washington Post article cross-examining Yang’s alleged racial insensitivities quoted a study which found that white primary care physicians (PCPs) outnumbered their Asian counterparts by nearly 7:1, an attempt to negate Yang’s joke about the Asian proclivity for the medical profession... Asians make up only 5.4 percent of the US population compared to Whites at 73 percent. At this rate, we would expect to see the ratio of white to Asian doctors be 13.5:1, meaning that at 7:1, Asian PCPs are overrepresented almost twofold. The pushback against Yang is part of a larger milieu of discontent involving Asian Americans, from the lawsuit alleging that Harvard University limited Asian American admissions to the proposal by Mayor Bill de Blasio to abolish the standardized entrance tests for New York’s elite high schools in order to boost admissions for blacks and Hispanics at the expense of Asians and whites... what do we lose when we are compelled to gloss over differences in group outcomes and abstain from inquiring as to what might be the contributing factors? For starters, we lose the opportunity to learn lessons from the established norms and social behaviors from cultural groups that have been acquired and honed through the years. We also can’t help communities to improve and fix problems if we don’t identify them accurately first. Worse, ignoring these differences can lead to backfiring of policies that were crafted based on the erroneous assumption of complete uniformity between groups. Finally, when those who acknowledge these differences are dismissed as racist or this topic is publicly perceived to be illegitimate, people curious about the ‘inconvenient truth’ would begin to seek out rhetorical spaces where these conversations are permitted. Often, when driven underground, these spaces are filled with irresponsible actors such as racists who wouldn’t hesitate to exploit such facts to recruit others into their ideology."
Lean Times, Plump Partners : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘Women don't really care about men… On the other end, they do care about all kinds of things like wealth and status. But barring that they don't care so much about how much a man weighs. The opposite is clearly not true the other direction. Men care a great deal about how much a woman weighs. And there the overwhelming relationship is that in poor places, men prefer women that are slightly heavier and in rich places men prefer women that are slightly thinner.’...‘In poor countries, they appreciate somebody who's heavy, because they actually have enough money to get food and in rich countries they prefer people who’re skinny because they have time to go to the gym?’
‘It’s something, the argument’s actually pretty close to that of all things... in like evolutionary terms, we seek what's best. And if you say oh my gosh, there's scarce resources, what matters most is starvation, then you look for the person who clearly is at lowest risk for malnutrition, that is the heavier person...
[On implications for evolutionary psychology] It is one of my favorite observations in that it is detected by anthropologists with no stake in the outcome, some more than 50 years ago, and only much more recently sort of the evolutionists stepped in to try to offer an explanation...
In the US, he shows that as the GDP fluctuates, so do Playmates’ centerfold body dimensions, basically, when times are lean in the US, playmates get a little bit more plump. When times are good, they get a little more thin’
‘Do they get as plump as people in regular society?’
‘No, they don't even come [close]’...
[On undergraduates] ‘Men who feel poor prefer a woman that weighs more than do men who feel rich.’
‘So it's not just a cultural variation, and not just a temporal variation, but actually you say at the moment you can get people to to feel more poor and therefore want more plumpy women and the opposite as well’"
This helps explain "socially constructed" beauty preferences
What's in a (Stock's) Name? : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘If you look at how difficult a stock’s name is to pronounce that predicts how well the stock will do initially after going public’...
'Long term, the stocks with easy to pronounce names do tend to do better. But it is not as strong an effect as other information such as profitability comes out, people start to pay more attention to that and less to more superficial factors like the name but the effect of the trends do hold long term... Politicians with easier to pronounce names do better in elections'"
The Case for Higher Gas Taxes : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘In the countries where they for a long time have this, like in Italy, it is relatively acceptable to raise the, more. You would think it would be easier to raise gasoline taxes where they are low, but it's easier when they are high.’
‘So once people get used to the idea that that taxes on gasoline are an acceptable way to control that, they're willing to accept it and they're willing to even take higher tax increases on that.’
‘Yes, you get lobbies always built around status quo... I even managed to interview one of the directors of Fiat once and I asked what Fiat thinks about gasoline taxes and to my great joy there was a an auto manufacturer who says we are very much in favor of a higher gasoline tax, otherwise they would buy BMW’"
Surprising Effects of Brain Drain : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘If they really leave and you don't hear back... as if they disappeared, still the source country could gain and this happens before migration. If people know that through past experience... people have to choose whether to go into study. Okay. So, in economics, we tend to think that you will take your decision to go into study if this is beneficial for you, basically, in monetary terms’
‘Okay. So you're saying when when people are planning what to do, if they think that what they're doing has returns, they will do it and if they think that it's immigration is a good thing. they will plan for immigration’
‘They look at this as a probabilistic thing. So they say, for example, I have 80 or 90% chance of staying in the country and maybe 10 or 20% chance of immigrating. But if you have just 10 or 20% chance to, to multiply your income by, by 10, okay, that would double your expected income, you know, this is enough to, to to drive certain amount of people to go into study. People that would not go to study without the option or the prospect of migration’
‘So what that would mean is people will try to get skills that are good for the country that they want to immigrate to... sometimes the skills they're trying to get are also good for the country that they're living’...
'Of course, if too many of them leave [that is] detrimental'"
Ovulatory Cycle Affects Earnings : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University; Brent Jordan, Department of Psychology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘When they're at their most fertile, right before they ovulate, they feel the best. They also appear more attractive to human males, so therefore they would make more money. What's important about that is up into this point of time, it was considered that human females didn't display their ovulation, that it was concealed, that only non human primates displayed their ovulation. This study showed that human females do display in a way.’
‘Wait, so you want to tell me that on different days of the month, they make actually more money?’
‘Exactly.’
‘When do they make the most money?’
‘Between days 10 and 12 of their ovulatory cycle... Right now currently, they don't know it at all. They're completely oblivious. So they make more money, but they're unaware they're making more money.’...
‘So you’re opening like consulting business for lap dancers to suggest to them when to work more and when to work less? Basically saying work twice as hard on these days and you can rest for three days on the other time?’...
‘They can basically double their earnings when they're ovulating when a male senses that’
‘Wow. And do we know if they they dance differently or they do different things or whether it's just a perception of the male?’
‘Well, it's the perception of the male but also they’re advertising. They're displaying. They're not aware of it. But when they're actually ovulating, they retain less water. So their muscles and things show a little bit better, they have a little bit more athletic ability, because they feel better. They kind of feel a little bit more upbeat. So it's a display, and they're probably a little bit more confident mentally. They're not aware of why that is. They just feel that way. They just feel better.’"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Tuesday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "[On F1 being carbon neutral] ‘Although the optics around Formula One always tend to focus on the racing cars themselves, the reality is that when you look at the environmental issues to do with Formula One, it's much more to do with things like air travel and freight and the 300,000 spectators coming to a race and what they do while they're at a race there. So there are a lot of things that can be done, that are very measurable and very clear, and frankly, not unique to Formula One. But something that Formula One can do that really will be able to make a change’
‘Isn't there an issue about credibility? Formula One's whole purpose, one of the things it does is it burns fossil fuels very quickly, and lots of them. The idea of being carbon neutral to me just sounds like window dressing, doing something that's not really at the heart of the enterprise at all.’
‘Well as I said, the kind of optics of Formula One tend to be problematic. The reality is that the 20 Formula One cars use less fuel in an entire season than a single Boeing 747 flight from London to Tokyo. So the reality is the quantity of fuel burnt is very low. And the Formula One engines today are hybrid petrol electric engines, and they're the most efficient fossil fuel burning internal combustion engines in the world. So the detail of Formula One is actually already impressive. And this initiative announced by Formula One is really a major step to taking the entire sport and making it carbon neutral by 2030’"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Friday's business with Rob Young - "‘There was a poll last year which suggested that economists are trusted less than the much maligned weather forecaster. Perhaps that's why economics is regarded by many as a bit of a joke. But can economics itself be funny? An unlikely festival of economics and comedy is now in its 10th year. Killconomics is underway in the Irish town of Kilkenny and is determined to show the dismal science can be a laugh’."
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Thursday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "‘A new proposal on equal pay. It says that if women are working with men who they think are being paid more, they should have a right by law to find out what those men are being paid. Good idea?’
‘So if I were going to implement something like this, and I'm not a politician, I’d probably use a system like Sweden's, which is anyone can look at anyone else's tax return. But the catch is is that person will know that you looked. And that system has worked fairly well in Sweden in terms of having a lower pay gap. It also works in terms of catching people who might be trying to evade tax. But I think just giving women the right isn't the answer. If we're going to give to someone you know, why not people who are minorities, why not old people, young people?’
‘So everybody's pace should be disclosable?’
‘I think all or nothing, will be my view.’...
‘Google has said that they would not use anybody's data, just like they said yesterday, of course, that they won't take anybody's health data with this new relationship they have with Ascension. The problem is that Google and many of the tech companies, particularly in Silicon Valley, have a really strong track record of saying they won't take data. And then later on, we find out that they did, sometimes by accident, sometimes deliberately. We saw this with Google and DeepMind, when they acquired DeepMind. They said they weren't going to take any of that data. And of course they did.’
‘And of course, we had the Facebook situation, Google will have access to data from your financial records, potentially your health records, all the stuff in their smart speakers, all the stuff from your search history, they would know more about you than you know about yourself, I suspect.’
‘Yeah, we're getting to this point where I think the way the companies will frame it is they're trying to create an ecosystem in which their customers would live. A regulator is going to quickly start to ask the question of when does an ecosystem become a cartel?’
‘We have to ask ourselves, are we moving into a world where it's going to be, you know, Google life, or Apple life or Amazon life?’
‘So you’ve got a situation where you have two or three Silicon Valley companies basically competing to run your life, and you choose which ecosystem you join’
‘Yeah. And you might even have some, some non US examples. You might have the Chinese companies that went as well, it's probably going to be about five to 10 global companies that all of us around the world would choose from’
‘It hasn't happened so much in Europe has it? We don't have Silicon Valley. We don't have the Googles and the Amazons, but we do have tougher regulators, I think, or at least regulators were much less comfortable with this kind of idea.’
‘And a population that's a little bit less comfortable with all of this data gathering, and collecting. So that's another question is will we see consumers and citizens push back? Will we see governments listen to that and empower regulators and finance them so that they can actually go after these firms? Issue enforcement guidelines, issue fines if need be, but also will we actually see firms really be challenged on the data that they're gathering? All they need is one big screw up to set all of this back.’"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Wednesday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "‘What we've seen on cookies, so called cookies on on the web where people are being asked to understand the policies on any website as to how cookies are used, in what way they're used and how data is used… When was the last time for example you refused to go on a website?’
‘When I turned down a cookie? No, I don’t think that’s something I've ever turned down.’
‘Right, exactly. And what happens is that on most of these sites, you get these long agreements, 16 page agreements or whatever, that if you sent to a lawyer would take about 30 days to go through. So it's completely impractical. What we have to do is to clearly articulate to consumers on an opt in basis. In other words, you choose to participate, what you are letting yourself in for, what your data will be used for. And then looking at the opposite, we're now starting to see the development of platforms where people can sell their data on a personal basis. For example, there was an article on the front page of the FT about somebody sitting on top of a bus, and by the time they got to the end of the bus journey, they paid for their bus trip by selling their data to one or two apps.’"
Andrew Yang, Asian stereotypes and the discomforts of reality | Spectator USA - "Andrew Yang has garnered criticism over the course of his presidential campaign for making self-deprecating jokes that reinforce Asian stereotypes. He has alluded to Asians’ hard work-ethic and love for math, even selling merchandise inscribed with the word ‘MATH’ on it — an acronym for ‘Make America Think Harder.’ It reached an apogee after the Democratic debate last week when Yang memorably quipped, ‘now, I am Asian, so I know a lot of doctors,’ before launching into his answer about how to fix healthcare.Many prominent Asian Americans, such as the former Planned Parenthood president Dr Leana Wen and the former governor of Louisiana Bobby Jindal, found it amusing. Others bristled at what they perceive as Yang perpetuating the ‘toxic trope’ of the model minority myth... the model minority myth lies in sharp contrast to reality — what everybody seems to know and feel is right — and the data appears to bear this out. According to Pew, Asian Americans are the highest-income, most highly educated and fastest-growing demographic in the US... close to 70 percent of Asian Americans think that a willingness to work hard will lead to success, which is one of the quintessential cornerstones of the American Dream narrative. While only 9 percent of the general American population thinks that their parents put too much pressure on their children, 39 percent of Asian Americans agree with the sentiment, bolstering the stereotype that landed Amy Chua, the Yale Law professor and ‘Tiger Mom’, in hot (and sour) soup... The Washington Post article cross-examining Yang’s alleged racial insensitivities quoted a study which found that white primary care physicians (PCPs) outnumbered their Asian counterparts by nearly 7:1, an attempt to negate Yang’s joke about the Asian proclivity for the medical profession... Asians make up only 5.4 percent of the US population compared to Whites at 73 percent. At this rate, we would expect to see the ratio of white to Asian doctors be 13.5:1, meaning that at 7:1, Asian PCPs are overrepresented almost twofold. The pushback against Yang is part of a larger milieu of discontent involving Asian Americans, from the lawsuit alleging that Harvard University limited Asian American admissions to the proposal by Mayor Bill de Blasio to abolish the standardized entrance tests for New York’s elite high schools in order to boost admissions for blacks and Hispanics at the expense of Asians and whites... what do we lose when we are compelled to gloss over differences in group outcomes and abstain from inquiring as to what might be the contributing factors? For starters, we lose the opportunity to learn lessons from the established norms and social behaviors from cultural groups that have been acquired and honed through the years. We also can’t help communities to improve and fix problems if we don’t identify them accurately first. Worse, ignoring these differences can lead to backfiring of policies that were crafted based on the erroneous assumption of complete uniformity between groups. Finally, when those who acknowledge these differences are dismissed as racist or this topic is publicly perceived to be illegitimate, people curious about the ‘inconvenient truth’ would begin to seek out rhetorical spaces where these conversations are permitted. Often, when driven underground, these spaces are filled with irresponsible actors such as racists who wouldn’t hesitate to exploit such facts to recruit others into their ideology."
Post ID: 7308021376639739042
Sunday, January 19, 2020
Links - 19th January 2020 (2)
Experiments in Dating : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "We went through lots and lots of emails of online dating. And we found that it most of the email was incredibly boring. Much like speed dating, right? People just don't know what to talk about. And we had one game in which we didn't allow people to just freely chat. We gave them a list of 20 questions, and then they could ask, but the questions were all interesting, right? People ask about the weather, and where do you go to school? They want to really ask, what's your sexual fantasies? And how many partners have you had? And what did you break up from the last one?... And we allowed people to only ask those questions. And the other side of the equation could say, No, I don't want to answer this… But because it was permissible. If you think about it it could be a social coordination issue. You get people to a room, and you don't tell them what to talk about they’ll talk about the weather… You say you only can talk about personal intimate stuff, it's a better equilibrium…
‘In fact, we did tiers... There are different levels of personal questions and you can ask anyone you want any level, but when you do that the other person is allowed to ask you one from that category as well… When people are on a real date, what happens? And the answer is, there's a lot of awkward silence. And you're praying for something to happen in the environment. In some sense, both of you implicitly are saying, I hope the waiter dropped a drink. So I can say look at that bozo who dropped a drink or whatever'...
‘I also think that bars have, the reason they have loud music is that first of all people could stand closer to each other physically. So if I need to shout it your ear I can get closer to you physically and have a sense of intimacy.’
‘It also helps also, by the way, if you're looking away, I can touch you to get your attention.’
‘And I also think it masks awkward silence. It's okay to be quiet and just listen to the music’...
'There was a lot of research in psychology that for a long time said that when you have spousal issues, you should try to do active listening. And you should then say, yes, darling, and let's talk about it and let's understand it and so on. And just before assuming I get married, there was a paper that came out and said, this is actually not a good idea. That a much better strategy is to say, yes, dear, you're right. It turns out this all active listening, just kind of get people to brew the problem and discuss the more you say, yes, dear you’re right is much more effective.'
‘So I'll tell you one of my key insights that I have, I believe I've learned, about if, about actually anyone, especially if a woman is upset about anything in the world is, men often launch into problem solving mode. So a woman says this happened at work and the man says, I'm going to call the guy and I'm going to yell at him. And we're going to fix this. And that's exactly the wrong thing to do in these cases, you have to be heard before you do this. So I believe that the very best thing to say is, a woman will talk for quite some time, my wife, she's upset and all that you have to say next is that must have been very hard for you.’
‘Mmm, and it's working for you.’
‘I don't know... But it implies that you are listening very carefully. And you're empathizing. And you'd like to hear more’"
Pushing the Envelope : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘Popcorn... it comes in buckets. And these are large buckets. The average large bucket of popcorn has what, 6 cups I think of popcorn’
‘That’s the Canadian one did. The American ones are bigger’
‘I think you're right. I think it's probably got like eight or nine, eight or nine cups of popcorn. And the idea is a lot of people not just buy the stuff, but they eat it and eat all of it... me with my family of three plus friends struggle to finish one bucket, but lots of people actually consume the whole damn thing… why do people eat all of that stuff? When in fact, they know that it's not good for them?’
‘Well, it's available, and they paid for it already, no?’
‘Well, there is that. Plus the fact that there's absolutely nothing in the environment that questions why and when they should stop eating, right. So when you when you buy a bucket of popcorn, you make a meta decision to buy and to eat and you start eating and then you don't kind of stop at every 10 kernels and say, should I continue or not? You just go with the flow. Right? And so I said, is there a way in which we could intervene, create a flow or create a point at which people need to reevaluate that decision to continue eating popcorn. So what we did was we worked with a theater, with the concession stand. And did the following simple experiment. People came and asked for a bucket of popcorn. And the agent told them, Look, we don't have buckets, but I can give you the same popcorn in four bags... we kept track of how much popcorn people ate, and we asked them why they ate… we obviously found they ate a lot less. And they did that because what would now happen is that they will reach the end of a bag, and they will now need to decide that they wanted to open the next bag’...
‘When they bought the popcorn, they wanted to eat the whole thing. They bought a lot of it, but in the process itself, they basically stopped themselves... ‘We bring people in to gamble. We gave them gambling coupons... the one manipulation we did was the envelope manipulation. So what we did was we put all 100 coupons in one envelope, sealed it and gave it to them for some of the participants. For other participants, we took the same hundred coupons, divvied them up into 10 envelopes of 10 coupons each, again sealed them, and handed them out… people that had 100 coupons in one envelope tended to gamble about 56 of those away. The, I’d say there were about 20% of people that gambled the entire hundred coupons away. But when they had the 10 envelopes of 10 each, it turns out most of them opened one, two, perhaps one brave soul opened three. But then they exchanged the rest for cash and went home’"
Modifying Loss Aversion : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘Everybody has the same amygdala response but there's a orbital frontal cortex activity’...
‘We know from other lesion study that if you have a damage in this area you become extremely impulsive.’
‘So this area basically control your emotional, the role of emotional in your behavior and you’re saying that people who had more activity there behaved more like what?’
‘If they had more activity they will be more like Mr. Spock, like the character of a volcano [Ed: Vulcan]. So we didn’t find any true Mr. Spock’
‘So nobody was Spoke but what you're saying is that the emotional reaction is basically common to everybody. And the real question is can people modulate it? And the people who could suppress it by a frontal brain active activation actually behave a bit more like Homo Economicus’...
‘I guess I have a quite a lot of it to be an Italian, probably in compared with my English friends I seem to have a very little orbital frontal activation’"
Those Calculating Cabdrivers! : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘The people who had licensed the newer ones, had what's called a negative elasticity, which means wages go up, hours go down… They’re working a lot of hours when they weren't getting very many fares, like driving around, driving around trying to earn money. When they were getting lots of fares, you know, drop somebody off, somebody's hopping in the can, then they quit earlier because they hit their target faster.’
‘So in some sense when the weather is terrible, and they should be working, because there's nothing better to do, they actually did the opposite. When the weather was wonderful, and they could have spent a day off, they actually worked too many hours.’...
‘Basically, that's on the right track that they were, they were quitting on days, when they could have made a bunch more money continuing to drive. However, more experienced drivers exhibited essentially kind of a flat, they sort of created regular hours for themselves. So they were independent of wages.’
‘Okay, so they oh, regular hours. So they didn't care. They just basically moved to it. So they're not more rational, they just moved to a different irrational move’
‘They didn't move to a positive labor supply response. Although, by the way, in most studies, it's hard to find evidence that for males, that their overall amount of hours worked responds to wages, females do respond really strongly. So the finding of a zero response is actually the typical one. So experienced drivers were catching up to the norm, which is still a little bit puzzling, because you'd expect to see these positive responses. Working more when it really pays... We got hypothesis also from Max Weber, who writes about this, as well as Hicks, a famous labor economist. And they both talk about this idea that you know, if you cut a person’s ability to earn an hourly wage, they'll just work more hours’"
I'll Have What She's Having : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘What is this thing with the fat suits?’
‘Well, first off, we refer to them as the body prosthetics… they make people look larger than they normally would… [this example] takes our confederate, an actor, young woman who's normally a size 00, she's quite thin and quite trim and turns her into... she's like five feet tall and 100 pounds or something like that. And it turns her into someone that would have, that wears a size 16… If it was real she would look somewhere in the hundred and 70 pound range’…
‘There's been a lot of talk recently about about how the people that we dine with can influence what we eat.’
‘Like if they eat spicy food we eat spicy food?’
‘Or if they eat a lot we eat a lot, if they eat a little we eat a little, that sort of thing. But it's always been focused on on people, you know, in our families and our good friends and the people that we're choosing to dine with.’...
‘People have made some fairly controversial claims about how far that extends, even to the degree that you can be influenced by the amount of food that your friends are eating, even if they don't live in the same city… what we were interested in was more than just you know, what people that you know and care about are eating, how that's going to influence you. We wanted to look at what, how the influence of just totally random individuals on the streets sitting at tables beside you that you don't know, you've never interacted with, could they actually influence your eating behavior through their eating behavior?... the answer is yes. And dramatically so... Imagine you're going to the movies, and you stop at the snack bar on your way to the movies. There's someone in front of you in line, they order either a smaller amount of snack or a large amount… the basic result is that we order what others in our environment are ordering. So if they're ordering very little, we’ll order a little. If they're ordering a lot we will order a lot... we actually will consciously override that basic result, if the person in front of you is really large.’
‘So if they're very big, you don't order and they order a lot you don't order a lot... Is it because you say oh my goodness, this is what ordering a lot does to you, they become so fat. I don't want to do this’
‘Perhaps, perhaps. I think, you know, it also goes in the other way. If they order a little, you're not as inclined to order very little. So you'll take more like you would normally take than a very small amount.’
‘So maybe you say whatever they do, I don't want to do anything that they do, because it's clearly not not leading to good outcomes.’…
‘What we've been suggesting to everybody is that many of us are concerned that we don't want to eat with large friends. In fact, what you should be worried about is the skinny friend that eats a lot, because you'll just automatically do what they do’"
A Funny Thing Happened.... : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘The Catholic Church outsources prayer… the Catholic churches is not able to keep up with mass requests. And it appears to be the case that... there's a mass mass request... and they just don't have enough priests to keep up with the backlog.’
‘And they can’t just mix people together, like, pray for 150 people together at one time?’
‘They could, that would be, you know, that would be a very good solution. But given the sort of traditions of the church, it's one mass per request. There just happens to be a lot of Catholic priests in India… with a lot of time, and in need of need of money for their congregations.’
‘I see. So they basically send them the names over the internet and they pray for them remotely?’
‘Basically’
‘And is it as effective to have remote prayer as a near prayer?’
‘Well, according to the church, certainly right in God's eyes, you know, there's no differentiation’...
'The things that tend to be funny are when we're able to see them as a violation of some important principle. Well, at the same time seeing how the situation’s okay, and there's a lot of ways to make a situation okay. So just the fact that you know, something is a joke that is not real, conversely makes it funny and not offensive'...
'So the trick to humour is you want a violation, but you want to be happily far enough. So it's not offensive'"
‘In fact, we did tiers... There are different levels of personal questions and you can ask anyone you want any level, but when you do that the other person is allowed to ask you one from that category as well… When people are on a real date, what happens? And the answer is, there's a lot of awkward silence. And you're praying for something to happen in the environment. In some sense, both of you implicitly are saying, I hope the waiter dropped a drink. So I can say look at that bozo who dropped a drink or whatever'...
‘I also think that bars have, the reason they have loud music is that first of all people could stand closer to each other physically. So if I need to shout it your ear I can get closer to you physically and have a sense of intimacy.’
‘It also helps also, by the way, if you're looking away, I can touch you to get your attention.’
‘And I also think it masks awkward silence. It's okay to be quiet and just listen to the music’...
'There was a lot of research in psychology that for a long time said that when you have spousal issues, you should try to do active listening. And you should then say, yes, darling, and let's talk about it and let's understand it and so on. And just before assuming I get married, there was a paper that came out and said, this is actually not a good idea. That a much better strategy is to say, yes, dear, you're right. It turns out this all active listening, just kind of get people to brew the problem and discuss the more you say, yes, dear you’re right is much more effective.'
‘So I'll tell you one of my key insights that I have, I believe I've learned, about if, about actually anyone, especially if a woman is upset about anything in the world is, men often launch into problem solving mode. So a woman says this happened at work and the man says, I'm going to call the guy and I'm going to yell at him. And we're going to fix this. And that's exactly the wrong thing to do in these cases, you have to be heard before you do this. So I believe that the very best thing to say is, a woman will talk for quite some time, my wife, she's upset and all that you have to say next is that must have been very hard for you.’
‘Mmm, and it's working for you.’
‘I don't know... But it implies that you are listening very carefully. And you're empathizing. And you'd like to hear more’"
Pushing the Envelope : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘Popcorn... it comes in buckets. And these are large buckets. The average large bucket of popcorn has what, 6 cups I think of popcorn’
‘That’s the Canadian one did. The American ones are bigger’
‘I think you're right. I think it's probably got like eight or nine, eight or nine cups of popcorn. And the idea is a lot of people not just buy the stuff, but they eat it and eat all of it... me with my family of three plus friends struggle to finish one bucket, but lots of people actually consume the whole damn thing… why do people eat all of that stuff? When in fact, they know that it's not good for them?’
‘Well, it's available, and they paid for it already, no?’
‘Well, there is that. Plus the fact that there's absolutely nothing in the environment that questions why and when they should stop eating, right. So when you when you buy a bucket of popcorn, you make a meta decision to buy and to eat and you start eating and then you don't kind of stop at every 10 kernels and say, should I continue or not? You just go with the flow. Right? And so I said, is there a way in which we could intervene, create a flow or create a point at which people need to reevaluate that decision to continue eating popcorn. So what we did was we worked with a theater, with the concession stand. And did the following simple experiment. People came and asked for a bucket of popcorn. And the agent told them, Look, we don't have buckets, but I can give you the same popcorn in four bags... we kept track of how much popcorn people ate, and we asked them why they ate… we obviously found they ate a lot less. And they did that because what would now happen is that they will reach the end of a bag, and they will now need to decide that they wanted to open the next bag’...
‘When they bought the popcorn, they wanted to eat the whole thing. They bought a lot of it, but in the process itself, they basically stopped themselves... ‘We bring people in to gamble. We gave them gambling coupons... the one manipulation we did was the envelope manipulation. So what we did was we put all 100 coupons in one envelope, sealed it and gave it to them for some of the participants. For other participants, we took the same hundred coupons, divvied them up into 10 envelopes of 10 coupons each, again sealed them, and handed them out… people that had 100 coupons in one envelope tended to gamble about 56 of those away. The, I’d say there were about 20% of people that gambled the entire hundred coupons away. But when they had the 10 envelopes of 10 each, it turns out most of them opened one, two, perhaps one brave soul opened three. But then they exchanged the rest for cash and went home’"
Modifying Loss Aversion : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘Everybody has the same amygdala response but there's a orbital frontal cortex activity’...
‘We know from other lesion study that if you have a damage in this area you become extremely impulsive.’
‘So this area basically control your emotional, the role of emotional in your behavior and you’re saying that people who had more activity there behaved more like what?’
‘If they had more activity they will be more like Mr. Spock, like the character of a volcano [Ed: Vulcan]. So we didn’t find any true Mr. Spock’
‘So nobody was Spoke but what you're saying is that the emotional reaction is basically common to everybody. And the real question is can people modulate it? And the people who could suppress it by a frontal brain active activation actually behave a bit more like Homo Economicus’...
‘I guess I have a quite a lot of it to be an Italian, probably in compared with my English friends I seem to have a very little orbital frontal activation’"
Those Calculating Cabdrivers! : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘The people who had licensed the newer ones, had what's called a negative elasticity, which means wages go up, hours go down… They’re working a lot of hours when they weren't getting very many fares, like driving around, driving around trying to earn money. When they were getting lots of fares, you know, drop somebody off, somebody's hopping in the can, then they quit earlier because they hit their target faster.’
‘So in some sense when the weather is terrible, and they should be working, because there's nothing better to do, they actually did the opposite. When the weather was wonderful, and they could have spent a day off, they actually worked too many hours.’...
‘Basically, that's on the right track that they were, they were quitting on days, when they could have made a bunch more money continuing to drive. However, more experienced drivers exhibited essentially kind of a flat, they sort of created regular hours for themselves. So they were independent of wages.’
‘Okay, so they oh, regular hours. So they didn't care. They just basically moved to it. So they're not more rational, they just moved to a different irrational move’
‘They didn't move to a positive labor supply response. Although, by the way, in most studies, it's hard to find evidence that for males, that their overall amount of hours worked responds to wages, females do respond really strongly. So the finding of a zero response is actually the typical one. So experienced drivers were catching up to the norm, which is still a little bit puzzling, because you'd expect to see these positive responses. Working more when it really pays... We got hypothesis also from Max Weber, who writes about this, as well as Hicks, a famous labor economist. And they both talk about this idea that you know, if you cut a person’s ability to earn an hourly wage, they'll just work more hours’"
I'll Have What She's Having : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘What is this thing with the fat suits?’
‘Well, first off, we refer to them as the body prosthetics… they make people look larger than they normally would… [this example] takes our confederate, an actor, young woman who's normally a size 00, she's quite thin and quite trim and turns her into... she's like five feet tall and 100 pounds or something like that. And it turns her into someone that would have, that wears a size 16… If it was real she would look somewhere in the hundred and 70 pound range’…
‘There's been a lot of talk recently about about how the people that we dine with can influence what we eat.’
‘Like if they eat spicy food we eat spicy food?’
‘Or if they eat a lot we eat a lot, if they eat a little we eat a little, that sort of thing. But it's always been focused on on people, you know, in our families and our good friends and the people that we're choosing to dine with.’...
‘People have made some fairly controversial claims about how far that extends, even to the degree that you can be influenced by the amount of food that your friends are eating, even if they don't live in the same city… what we were interested in was more than just you know, what people that you know and care about are eating, how that's going to influence you. We wanted to look at what, how the influence of just totally random individuals on the streets sitting at tables beside you that you don't know, you've never interacted with, could they actually influence your eating behavior through their eating behavior?... the answer is yes. And dramatically so... Imagine you're going to the movies, and you stop at the snack bar on your way to the movies. There's someone in front of you in line, they order either a smaller amount of snack or a large amount… the basic result is that we order what others in our environment are ordering. So if they're ordering very little, we’ll order a little. If they're ordering a lot we will order a lot... we actually will consciously override that basic result, if the person in front of you is really large.’
‘So if they're very big, you don't order and they order a lot you don't order a lot... Is it because you say oh my goodness, this is what ordering a lot does to you, they become so fat. I don't want to do this’
‘Perhaps, perhaps. I think, you know, it also goes in the other way. If they order a little, you're not as inclined to order very little. So you'll take more like you would normally take than a very small amount.’
‘So maybe you say whatever they do, I don't want to do anything that they do, because it's clearly not not leading to good outcomes.’…
‘What we've been suggesting to everybody is that many of us are concerned that we don't want to eat with large friends. In fact, what you should be worried about is the skinny friend that eats a lot, because you'll just automatically do what they do’"
A Funny Thing Happened.... : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘The Catholic Church outsources prayer… the Catholic churches is not able to keep up with mass requests. And it appears to be the case that... there's a mass mass request... and they just don't have enough priests to keep up with the backlog.’
‘And they can’t just mix people together, like, pray for 150 people together at one time?’
‘They could, that would be, you know, that would be a very good solution. But given the sort of traditions of the church, it's one mass per request. There just happens to be a lot of Catholic priests in India… with a lot of time, and in need of need of money for their congregations.’
‘I see. So they basically send them the names over the internet and they pray for them remotely?’
‘Basically’
‘And is it as effective to have remote prayer as a near prayer?’
‘Well, according to the church, certainly right in God's eyes, you know, there's no differentiation’...
'The things that tend to be funny are when we're able to see them as a violation of some important principle. Well, at the same time seeing how the situation’s okay, and there's a lot of ways to make a situation okay. So just the fact that you know, something is a joke that is not real, conversely makes it funny and not offensive'...
'So the trick to humour is you want a violation, but you want to be happily far enough. So it's not offensive'"
Post ID: 5200898918793984831
Computer Files Are Going Extinct
Computer Files Are Going Extinct
"One thing I like about files is there’s a consistent way of interacting with them, no matter what’s inside. Those things I mentioned above — copying, sorting, defragging — I can do those to any file. It could be an image, part of a game, or a list of my favorite utensils. Defragmenter doesn’t care. It doesn’t judge the contents...
The quality of files on streaming services was good enough, available on more devices, and gave you access to all recorded music, not just the MP3s you happened to have on your computer. You didn’t need a carefully crafted collection of files on your hard drive anymore. You just needed a username and password to Spotify...
Apple doesn’t make it that easy to get to your files. Images are dumped into a big stream, sorted by date. Audio is somewhere in iTunes. Notes are… in a list? Apps are scattered around the desktop. Some of my files are in iCloud. You can email photos to liberate them from the iPhone, and through a convoluted method via iTunes, you can access some files within certain apps. But those files are transitory — cached, and may be deleted without warning. These aren’t like the carefully crafted files and folders on my computer.
On the Mac, iTunes sorts out your music files for you. They’re handled by the system. The interface displays the music to you and you can sort the files there. But if you look under the hood, at the files themselves, you see a rabbit warren of mess, weird names, and strange folders. “Don’t bother yourself with these,” the computer says, “I’ll handle this for you.” But I do bother myself with them.
I like being able to look at and access my files. But now the systems I use try to stop me from doing so. “No,” they say, “access them through these bespoke, proprietary interfaces.” I just want my file browser back, but now I’m not allowed it. It’s a relic of an earlier era.
Yet I can’t help missing those files and folders and the control I had with them...
The other day, I came across a website I’d written over two decades ago. I double-clicked the file, and it opened and ran perfectly. Then I tried to run a website I’d written 18 months ago and found I couldn’t run it without firing up a web server, and when I ran NPM install, one or two of those 65,000 files had issues that meant node failed to install them and the website didn’t run. When I did get it working, it needed a database. And then it relied on some third-party APIs and there was an issue with CORS because I hadn’t whitelisted localhost.
My website made of files carried on, chugging along. This isn’t me saying that things were better in the old days. I’m just saying that years ago websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies...
The unit of creation has moved from the file to the database entry.
In some ways, that doesn’t make a huge difference. The data is the same, just stored in a database rather than an HTML document. The URL could even be the same, just behind the scenes it fetches the content from a different type of data store. But the implications are much bigger. The content is dependent on a whole heap of infrastructure, rather than being able to stand on its own.
This almost seems to reduce the value of any individual creative act...
Online services have started violating what I thought was a fundamental tenet of digital file manipulation. When I copy a file from one place to another, the file I get at the end is identical to the one I started with. These are digital representations of data that can be copied exactly, bit for bit.
Yet when I upload photos into Google Cloud then download them again, the file I end up with is different from the one I started with. It’s been transcoded, re-encoded, compressed, optimized. Messed with...
When I AirDrop a video, there’s a long initial process where the iPhone is doing something. What is my little supercomputer up to? I’m suspicious. “You’re transcoding, aren’t you?” I accuse it. It’s only later, when I eventually get the file somewhere I can use it, that I find it’s been pushed and pulled so many times it’s a husk of its former glory...
I don’t like this shift from timeless content to what is newest. Now, when I visit websites, they promote to me the latest thing. Why should the content that is the newest be the most important? It seems so unlikely that something that was just created would happen to be better than everything created throughout all time... I miss the universality of files. The fact they can work anywhere, be moved around easily."
"One thing I like about files is there’s a consistent way of interacting with them, no matter what’s inside. Those things I mentioned above — copying, sorting, defragging — I can do those to any file. It could be an image, part of a game, or a list of my favorite utensils. Defragmenter doesn’t care. It doesn’t judge the contents...
The quality of files on streaming services was good enough, available on more devices, and gave you access to all recorded music, not just the MP3s you happened to have on your computer. You didn’t need a carefully crafted collection of files on your hard drive anymore. You just needed a username and password to Spotify...
Apple doesn’t make it that easy to get to your files. Images are dumped into a big stream, sorted by date. Audio is somewhere in iTunes. Notes are… in a list? Apps are scattered around the desktop. Some of my files are in iCloud. You can email photos to liberate them from the iPhone, and through a convoluted method via iTunes, you can access some files within certain apps. But those files are transitory — cached, and may be deleted without warning. These aren’t like the carefully crafted files and folders on my computer.
On the Mac, iTunes sorts out your music files for you. They’re handled by the system. The interface displays the music to you and you can sort the files there. But if you look under the hood, at the files themselves, you see a rabbit warren of mess, weird names, and strange folders. “Don’t bother yourself with these,” the computer says, “I’ll handle this for you.” But I do bother myself with them.
I like being able to look at and access my files. But now the systems I use try to stop me from doing so. “No,” they say, “access them through these bespoke, proprietary interfaces.” I just want my file browser back, but now I’m not allowed it. It’s a relic of an earlier era.
Yet I can’t help missing those files and folders and the control I had with them...
The other day, I came across a website I’d written over two decades ago. I double-clicked the file, and it opened and ran perfectly. Then I tried to run a website I’d written 18 months ago and found I couldn’t run it without firing up a web server, and when I ran NPM install, one or two of those 65,000 files had issues that meant node failed to install them and the website didn’t run. When I did get it working, it needed a database. And then it relied on some third-party APIs and there was an issue with CORS because I hadn’t whitelisted localhost.
My website made of files carried on, chugging along. This isn’t me saying that things were better in the old days. I’m just saying that years ago websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies...
The unit of creation has moved from the file to the database entry.
In some ways, that doesn’t make a huge difference. The data is the same, just stored in a database rather than an HTML document. The URL could even be the same, just behind the scenes it fetches the content from a different type of data store. But the implications are much bigger. The content is dependent on a whole heap of infrastructure, rather than being able to stand on its own.
This almost seems to reduce the value of any individual creative act...
Online services have started violating what I thought was a fundamental tenet of digital file manipulation. When I copy a file from one place to another, the file I get at the end is identical to the one I started with. These are digital representations of data that can be copied exactly, bit for bit.
Yet when I upload photos into Google Cloud then download them again, the file I end up with is different from the one I started with. It’s been transcoded, re-encoded, compressed, optimized. Messed with...
When I AirDrop a video, there’s a long initial process where the iPhone is doing something. What is my little supercomputer up to? I’m suspicious. “You’re transcoding, aren’t you?” I accuse it. It’s only later, when I eventually get the file somewhere I can use it, that I find it’s been pushed and pulled so many times it’s a husk of its former glory...
I don’t like this shift from timeless content to what is newest. Now, when I visit websites, they promote to me the latest thing. Why should the content that is the newest be the most important? It seems so unlikely that something that was just created would happen to be better than everything created throughout all time... I miss the universality of files. The fact they can work anywhere, be moved around easily."
Post ID: 2885621433083229308
Links - 19th January 2020 (1)
Coupons: Timing is Everything : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘Coupons are effective for a very different reason… different from just saving money… a lot of people, when they enter a store, they don't really know what they want to buy. And they are really trying to find some sort of a help, a guide to help them to decide what they were going to buy in the store… they actually find reasons to help them to decide what they were going to buy. So in particular, there was one experiment where we gave this coupons to people either just at the entrance to the store or inside the store…. we found that this coupon was very successful. A lot of people redeem the coupon when they received the coupon when they enter the store’...
‘Isn't this kind of standard economics that if you give people a discount, they will just spend more?’
‘Well, I mean, technically speaking, that shouldn't actually affect how much people want to spend, especially, you know, if the intention is actually to spend much more, right’...
‘If you gave people a discount by saying spend $3 get $1 off, people spend less than they would?’
‘Exactly’
‘And it's because they're stupid and not understanding and they could actually spend more and still get the dollar discount?’...
‘They’re really trying to find some sort of an anchor, if you will.’
‘Okay. So when people are coming into the store, they don't know how much they're going to spend, they look for some kind of rule. And this coupon is acting as a rule. And even if it's a rule that says spend $3, get $1 off, is all $3! Let me spend $3... But you said this, what happens when they come into the store? What happens if they're in the store a;ready?’
‘If they're in a store already, you know, this, people have already more or less decided, you know, what people are going to buy… even 30 seconds or a minute after they have stepped into the store. I mean, those coupons will still not be as successful if they received them at the entrance to the store.’
‘So if you give me a coupon before I enter the store, they're successful. If you wait until I enter the store and look around, presumably I made already some decisions and then I'm not influenced by the coupon?’
‘That's right... These customers, they go through a particular process, right? So over the course of the shopping, you know, the goals in the store actually becomes more and more concrete. Right. So that probably means that when you're trying to catch this customers and make them spend, then the best time to actually catch them is when their goals are still not concrete yet, which is at a time when they enter the store.’"
The Invalidity Of Interviews Arming The Donkeys podcast - "‘Random information made it worse but at the same time increased people's confidence’
‘The random interview as opposed to an accurate one didn't make people worse or better… any interview in this case made people worse off’"
Overcoming Overconfidence : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘We often think that men are more overconfident than women. Do you find evidence for that?’
‘We actually don't... all of the studies that we have conducted we have never found gender differences actually in overconfidence’"
How Money Grows : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "The fact that people think that money grows linearly over time rather than exponentially means that they think that they can wait to start saving later"
A New Use for Search Tools : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘We search, let's say, Chile… how many documents talk about Chile, how many of them talk about Chile and corruption’...
‘The fraction from that gives you and then you have a ratio of cheating to importance of the country.’
‘That's right. So let's say there's 1000 documents about Chile and five of them talk about corruption. It's five over 1000 for Chile... our measure of corruption correlates very highly with the gold standard of corruption with the Transparency International corruption index, the correlation is that something like point seven... There's a lot of things social scientists cannot observe and this allows them to observe it. So for example, even though there are ranking of corruption for countries, there is none for cities at the United States’ level. And so we could we compile the first index ever of corruption at the city level in the United States… if I remember correctly, Chicago [was high in the list], New Orleans, Los Angeles. San Diego, actually, it's pretty high... we think it can be used to control for all sorts of things in social science studies where you cannot observe a given variable. So let's say you want to control for how capitalistic different cities are... we've toyed around with the idea of trying to predict demand for it. So let's suppose the new PlayStation was coming up and you want to see how much how much buzz there is about the PlayStation in different cities... if you search sunshine in Seattle, there's a lot of articles about it. And there are articles about how much not sunshine there is in there. So you want to be careful about that’"
Taking Comfort in Change : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘The economic environment changes, my job changes, I move city, I'll have the same food that I've always had, because that's kind of at least one constant thing. And that's the theory that people have about what they will do’
‘That's right, they'll want mom's old meatloaf recipe, the common chocolate chip cookie, they'll surround themselves with familiar things, like you say in the areas that they can actually control.’
‘And do they actually do it when the time comes?’
‘No. And that's the interesting thing from my research is I found that people will predict that that's the way they'll behave. But then in choice, they don't… They actually choose more exotic new things. So the more people are in a state of upheaval or change, the more likely they are to choose an unfamiliar, exotic new option rather than their old favorite... I think it's because when we do a lot of changing we're in the state of, of constantly having to make new decisions and new choices. So we're open more to the new options in our environment, you can call it kind of a change mindset. And when we're in that mindset, we notice the new and we are a little more attracted to the new than than before.’"
Why Do Guys Give? : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘We have male and female subjects who are interacting with the robot. And so one prediction is it's a robot, nobody wants to give any money. Another prediction is maybe they'll give some money, but why would you care if a robot is male or female? It's not really male or female. It's a robot. But what Mikey's intuition was, is that I bet people will respond to this robot as if it were human in some sense. And then the question is, well how would men, male and female participants respond to a male and female robot?’...
‘So the guess, of course, is that men, men love women and they would give, if they think they have a chance with the robot, they'll give the robot more money.’
‘That's exactly right. So women don't care if the if the robot is male or female, they give a little bit to the robot. And men act as though just in case maybe the female robot will sleep with them. They better be extra nice to the female robot.’
‘Now, do men give more money in general?’
‘No. So in fact, men give less money to the male robot than women give to the male robot but they give way more money to the female robot.’
‘So the women basically don't distinguish’
‘You know, there was a paper a while ago that examined how long people wait when they drive off a parking spot when another car is waiting for them. So imagine you're parked in your somewhere and another car is waiting. And what they find is that men take longer when another car is waiting for them. Not if it's a good car, like men have respect for cars. Women take longer when somebody is waiting for them, regardless of what, what's going on, they don't discriminate’"
Monkeys' Consumer Choices : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘They go ahead, they learn how to shop for cereal, then they see a bulletin board for two weeks that is either McDonald's or Burger King. You switch it for two weeks to say the same thing. And then all of a sudden the same choice appears again… they see a bulletin board and they go for the same thing they've seen’
‘Very small effect. So if you compare it to the size of an effect about making McDonald's cheaper, so if you can get two pieces of cereal from McDonald’s… it's about a quarter of the size of a price change.’
‘Okay, but this is a big price change. I mean, if you talk about doubling the price, and this is a quarter of that it's basically as if you increase the price by 25 cents’...
‘However advertising works it's pretty dumb. These models that say it's all about the information and the price you're getting and so on, that can’t be what's going on in the monkeys. It can’t be something about brand loyalty and so on.’
‘Or at least it says that you don't need that. I mean that it works even at the dumber level... it even works at a very basic level. On top of it, you can have other effects as well.’"
Fowl Behavior Observed : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "[On homosexual necrophilia in ducks] ‘I took my camera, my notebook, my pencil and I I started to do what I was trained, observe and make notes. And it took a long time, this behavior went on and on till I had seen enough, up to 75 minutes... That's long, normally it's within a minute.’
‘Really. So this was not just a homosexual necrophilic duck. It was also a homosexual necrophiliac duck with some particularly impressive stamina like a professional athlete’
‘Well, I think it's a matter of getting no response and no feedback and just went on… I secure the dead duck because I'm a curator in the Natural History Museum. So I wanted to have the dead duck for our collection... It's a famous duck now. This is the first ever recorded victim of homosexual necrophilia. There's only one... I wanted to establish the if there was any family relationship between the two. Could be a father and a son or a grandfather and a [grand]son. But it was before the time of DNA analysis in birds. So we, I simply forgot to take semen samples and blood samples... What a shame’
‘Now these study became very, very famous. You've got a lot of press. Why, why do you think in particular this studies seemed to touch such an important nerve with society?’
‘Well, because necrophilia is taboo, but because there are ducks involved., it opens doors and everybody wants to hear the story and it's not dangerous because there's no humans involved.’...
‘And what about homosexuality Do you think that's also a part of that?’
‘Well it's kind of widely accepted now that there is homosexual behavior in all kinds of animals ranging from elephants to insects. So that's not the, that's not a real debacle’...
‘Do you feel that you would have gotten the same excitement if it was a heterosexual necrophilia?’
‘It gave a special flavor to the behavior.’"
How We Adapt : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘Adaptation... think of a massage. A massage is fantastic when it starts. And after five minutes, it's still good, but it's less so. You're getting used to it, if you will... one of the things that you can do to sort of sustain the enjoyability is to disrupt the experience, to put a little break in the middle so the massage goes for a few minutes, and it stops, then it comes back. And those disruptions make the experience feel more intense for a longer period of time... [but] everyone says, of course, I want to continuous massage...
‘Another thing I like about their paper is that they report that you never really get used to a death of a child. But you do get used to the death of a spouse. So kind of a sad perspective, right?’...
'One of our findings in it is basically when you import this to the idea of watching TV, you say, oh, the television program is great, but it'd be even better without these ads. And we argue that's at least in some circumstances, wrong, that TV ads because they disrupt it, make it better… they're locally annoying right? At any given moment you'd of course rather watch the show than the ad. But if I look over the last hour, how much did I enjoy my life, at least in our experiments, and again, we predict this would happen in a lot of situations, the ads make things look better because the program gets so much better. And that's the dominant experience over the last hour'...
‘He's dating a woman that's doing her medical residency. And the reason that makes his relationship work great, is she is just incredibly busy a lot of the time. And it means that there is no period where they spend five consecutive days together, it just isn't possible. And because of that, he's always thrilled to see her and she's always thrilled to see him.’"
‘Isn't this kind of standard economics that if you give people a discount, they will just spend more?’
‘Well, I mean, technically speaking, that shouldn't actually affect how much people want to spend, especially, you know, if the intention is actually to spend much more, right’...
‘If you gave people a discount by saying spend $3 get $1 off, people spend less than they would?’
‘Exactly’
‘And it's because they're stupid and not understanding and they could actually spend more and still get the dollar discount?’...
‘They’re really trying to find some sort of an anchor, if you will.’
‘Okay. So when people are coming into the store, they don't know how much they're going to spend, they look for some kind of rule. And this coupon is acting as a rule. And even if it's a rule that says spend $3, get $1 off, is all $3! Let me spend $3... But you said this, what happens when they come into the store? What happens if they're in the store a;ready?’
‘If they're in a store already, you know, this, people have already more or less decided, you know, what people are going to buy… even 30 seconds or a minute after they have stepped into the store. I mean, those coupons will still not be as successful if they received them at the entrance to the store.’
‘So if you give me a coupon before I enter the store, they're successful. If you wait until I enter the store and look around, presumably I made already some decisions and then I'm not influenced by the coupon?’
‘That's right... These customers, they go through a particular process, right? So over the course of the shopping, you know, the goals in the store actually becomes more and more concrete. Right. So that probably means that when you're trying to catch this customers and make them spend, then the best time to actually catch them is when their goals are still not concrete yet, which is at a time when they enter the store.’"
The Invalidity Of Interviews Arming The Donkeys podcast - "‘Random information made it worse but at the same time increased people's confidence’
‘The random interview as opposed to an accurate one didn't make people worse or better… any interview in this case made people worse off’"
Overcoming Overconfidence : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘We often think that men are more overconfident than women. Do you find evidence for that?’
‘We actually don't... all of the studies that we have conducted we have never found gender differences actually in overconfidence’"
How Money Grows : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "The fact that people think that money grows linearly over time rather than exponentially means that they think that they can wait to start saving later"
A New Use for Search Tools : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘We search, let's say, Chile… how many documents talk about Chile, how many of them talk about Chile and corruption’...
‘The fraction from that gives you and then you have a ratio of cheating to importance of the country.’
‘That's right. So let's say there's 1000 documents about Chile and five of them talk about corruption. It's five over 1000 for Chile... our measure of corruption correlates very highly with the gold standard of corruption with the Transparency International corruption index, the correlation is that something like point seven... There's a lot of things social scientists cannot observe and this allows them to observe it. So for example, even though there are ranking of corruption for countries, there is none for cities at the United States’ level. And so we could we compile the first index ever of corruption at the city level in the United States… if I remember correctly, Chicago [was high in the list], New Orleans, Los Angeles. San Diego, actually, it's pretty high... we think it can be used to control for all sorts of things in social science studies where you cannot observe a given variable. So let's say you want to control for how capitalistic different cities are... we've toyed around with the idea of trying to predict demand for it. So let's suppose the new PlayStation was coming up and you want to see how much how much buzz there is about the PlayStation in different cities... if you search sunshine in Seattle, there's a lot of articles about it. And there are articles about how much not sunshine there is in there. So you want to be careful about that’"
Taking Comfort in Change : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘The economic environment changes, my job changes, I move city, I'll have the same food that I've always had, because that's kind of at least one constant thing. And that's the theory that people have about what they will do’
‘That's right, they'll want mom's old meatloaf recipe, the common chocolate chip cookie, they'll surround themselves with familiar things, like you say in the areas that they can actually control.’
‘And do they actually do it when the time comes?’
‘No. And that's the interesting thing from my research is I found that people will predict that that's the way they'll behave. But then in choice, they don't… They actually choose more exotic new things. So the more people are in a state of upheaval or change, the more likely they are to choose an unfamiliar, exotic new option rather than their old favorite... I think it's because when we do a lot of changing we're in the state of, of constantly having to make new decisions and new choices. So we're open more to the new options in our environment, you can call it kind of a change mindset. And when we're in that mindset, we notice the new and we are a little more attracted to the new than than before.’"
Why Do Guys Give? : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘We have male and female subjects who are interacting with the robot. And so one prediction is it's a robot, nobody wants to give any money. Another prediction is maybe they'll give some money, but why would you care if a robot is male or female? It's not really male or female. It's a robot. But what Mikey's intuition was, is that I bet people will respond to this robot as if it were human in some sense. And then the question is, well how would men, male and female participants respond to a male and female robot?’...
‘So the guess, of course, is that men, men love women and they would give, if they think they have a chance with the robot, they'll give the robot more money.’
‘That's exactly right. So women don't care if the if the robot is male or female, they give a little bit to the robot. And men act as though just in case maybe the female robot will sleep with them. They better be extra nice to the female robot.’
‘Now, do men give more money in general?’
‘No. So in fact, men give less money to the male robot than women give to the male robot but they give way more money to the female robot.’
‘So the women basically don't distinguish’
‘You know, there was a paper a while ago that examined how long people wait when they drive off a parking spot when another car is waiting for them. So imagine you're parked in your somewhere and another car is waiting. And what they find is that men take longer when another car is waiting for them. Not if it's a good car, like men have respect for cars. Women take longer when somebody is waiting for them, regardless of what, what's going on, they don't discriminate’"
Monkeys' Consumer Choices : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘They go ahead, they learn how to shop for cereal, then they see a bulletin board for two weeks that is either McDonald's or Burger King. You switch it for two weeks to say the same thing. And then all of a sudden the same choice appears again… they see a bulletin board and they go for the same thing they've seen’
‘Very small effect. So if you compare it to the size of an effect about making McDonald's cheaper, so if you can get two pieces of cereal from McDonald’s… it's about a quarter of the size of a price change.’
‘Okay, but this is a big price change. I mean, if you talk about doubling the price, and this is a quarter of that it's basically as if you increase the price by 25 cents’...
‘However advertising works it's pretty dumb. These models that say it's all about the information and the price you're getting and so on, that can’t be what's going on in the monkeys. It can’t be something about brand loyalty and so on.’
‘Or at least it says that you don't need that. I mean that it works even at the dumber level... it even works at a very basic level. On top of it, you can have other effects as well.’"
Fowl Behavior Observed : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "[On homosexual necrophilia in ducks] ‘I took my camera, my notebook, my pencil and I I started to do what I was trained, observe and make notes. And it took a long time, this behavior went on and on till I had seen enough, up to 75 minutes... That's long, normally it's within a minute.’
‘Really. So this was not just a homosexual necrophilic duck. It was also a homosexual necrophiliac duck with some particularly impressive stamina like a professional athlete’
‘Well, I think it's a matter of getting no response and no feedback and just went on… I secure the dead duck because I'm a curator in the Natural History Museum. So I wanted to have the dead duck for our collection... It's a famous duck now. This is the first ever recorded victim of homosexual necrophilia. There's only one... I wanted to establish the if there was any family relationship between the two. Could be a father and a son or a grandfather and a [grand]son. But it was before the time of DNA analysis in birds. So we, I simply forgot to take semen samples and blood samples... What a shame’
‘Now these study became very, very famous. You've got a lot of press. Why, why do you think in particular this studies seemed to touch such an important nerve with society?’
‘Well, because necrophilia is taboo, but because there are ducks involved., it opens doors and everybody wants to hear the story and it's not dangerous because there's no humans involved.’...
‘And what about homosexuality Do you think that's also a part of that?’
‘Well it's kind of widely accepted now that there is homosexual behavior in all kinds of animals ranging from elephants to insects. So that's not the, that's not a real debacle’...
‘Do you feel that you would have gotten the same excitement if it was a heterosexual necrophilia?’
‘It gave a special flavor to the behavior.’"
How We Adapt : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘Adaptation... think of a massage. A massage is fantastic when it starts. And after five minutes, it's still good, but it's less so. You're getting used to it, if you will... one of the things that you can do to sort of sustain the enjoyability is to disrupt the experience, to put a little break in the middle so the massage goes for a few minutes, and it stops, then it comes back. And those disruptions make the experience feel more intense for a longer period of time... [but] everyone says, of course, I want to continuous massage...
‘Another thing I like about their paper is that they report that you never really get used to a death of a child. But you do get used to the death of a spouse. So kind of a sad perspective, right?’...
'One of our findings in it is basically when you import this to the idea of watching TV, you say, oh, the television program is great, but it'd be even better without these ads. And we argue that's at least in some circumstances, wrong, that TV ads because they disrupt it, make it better… they're locally annoying right? At any given moment you'd of course rather watch the show than the ad. But if I look over the last hour, how much did I enjoy my life, at least in our experiments, and again, we predict this would happen in a lot of situations, the ads make things look better because the program gets so much better. And that's the dominant experience over the last hour'...
‘He's dating a woman that's doing her medical residency. And the reason that makes his relationship work great, is she is just incredibly busy a lot of the time. And it means that there is no period where they spend five consecutive days together, it just isn't possible. And because of that, he's always thrilled to see her and she's always thrilled to see him.’"
Post ID: 3748487712813936037
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
