Category: ideas

Daniel Kahneman: “The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in … culture. Facts that challenge such basic assumptions – and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem – are simply not absorbed.”

“Some view umpires as, in essence, instruments, somewhat outdated, for measuring baseball facts. … Others, however, think of umpires as, in effect, a special class of player in the game. … These two distinct ideas about umpiring correspond to what are really very distinct philosophies of the game” – External Realism and Internal Anti-Realism.

“The paper ‘Can Apparent Superluminal Neutrino Speeds Be Explained as a Quantum Weak Measurement?,’ published by arXiv, is getting some notice on Twitter. Not because of its analytical argument, which, for all we know, may well be elegant, and artfully defended, but for its abstract.”

“It is extremely difficult for most of us to believe that our political or economic system is inherently corrupt,” says NYU psychologist John Jost. “Because of our immense psychological capacity to justify and rationalize the status quo, human societies are very slow to fix system-level injustices and to enact substantive changes.”

Confirmation bias. The framing effect. The sunk-cost fallacy. “Let’s call it the effect effect: Reduce whatever you’re talking about to a single, italicized phrase, so much the better for tapping into a network of TED talks and Radiolab broadcasts, and then repeat, repeat, repeat.”

“More than half of all employed people worldwide work off the books. And that number is expected to climb over the next decade.”

“A team of anthropologists have shown that orangutans may have the ability to learn socially and pass these lessons down through generations – evidence that culture in humans and great apes has the same evolutionary roots.”

“People fuss about punctuation not only because it clarifies meaning but also because its neglect appears to reflect wider social decline. And while the big social battles seem intractable, smaller battles over the use of the apostrophe feel like they can be won. Yet the status of this and other cherished marks has long been precarious. The story of punctuation is one of comings and goings.”

“We now live in a world where information is potentially unlimited. Information is cheap, but meaning is expensive. Where is the meaning? Only human beings can tell you where it is. We’re extracting meaning from our minds and our own lives.”

“Cars of yesteryear (if we accept yesteryear to mean the 1960s through the early 1980s) were often painted in bright, popping colors–supersaturated pigments in hues that don’t appear on most modern vehicles.” Why?