“Thousands of people have altered long-held behavior overnight. Businesses are operating differently. The way people eat, shop and interact with each other has changed. And hundreds have been moved to fiery message-board debates about the proper role of government and at what point it’s gone too far.”
Category: ideas
The Reason For Our Weak Willpower? Our Weak Brains
“Knowing something is the right thing to do takes work — brain work — and our brains aren’t always up to that.”
Of Music And Choice
“Our results suggest that a principal mechanism whereby popularity ratings affect consumer choice is through the anxiety generated by the mismatch between one’s own preferences and the others’. This mismatch anxiety motivates people to switch their choices in the direction of the consensus.”
Always On – Study Says Kids Always Online
“The average young American now spends practically every waking minute — except for the time in school — using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device, according to a new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation.”
In US Schools, Foreign Language Instruction Fades (Except For One)
“Thousands of public schools stopped teaching foreign languages in the last decade … But another contrary trend has educators and policy makers abuzz: a rush by schools in all parts of America to offer instruction in Chinese.”
The Horticultural Parable And The Existence Of God
Two people return to a long-abandoned garden and find that a few of their old plants are still thriving amidst the weeds. One person says that some gardener must have been tending to the plants; the other says it’s all happenstance. The pair hide, watch and wait, but no gardener ever appears. But still the believer insists that there’s a gardener; the skeptic asks what the difference is between an invisible gardener and an imaginary one.
Clay Shirky Figures Out What’s Holding Women Back
“I’m worried … [that] not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. … They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so.” (What, doesn’t he know any opera singers?)
Screwing Up On A Test May Be Better Than Studying For It
Experimental psychologists are finding that making big, embarrassing mistakes on tests and quizzes can lead to more effective and thorough learning than simply getting answers right the first time. (“Fear and failure are good motivators.”)
The Truth About Newton And the Apple
It didn’t bonk him in the head. The scientist told his first biographer that when “the notion of gravitation came into his mind,” it “was occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself.”
The Connection Between Fame And Hypochondria
“Today we appear to have excelled the hypochondriac cultures of the past by elevating the morbidly self-involved to the level of paragon. Hollywood has long been the land of fixed teeth and busts, blurred hairlines and effaced waistlines. But fame increasingly consists in a state of almost constant near-collapse.”