Long Game

The 1980’s proceeded as expected with strengthening individualism and weakening institutions. The GI Generation Heroes began to depart from the scene. This steady, cautious, risk adverse generation that built American industry and finance were being pushed into retirement by the Baby Boomer Generation.

The delusion of the American populace cannot be underestimated. Their worshipping at the altar of materialism and adoration of Hollywood created pop culture was crucial to the societal delusion.

A country that had once produced its way to world domination degenerated into a paper kingdom run by Harvard MBAs, lawyers, tax accountants and central bankers.

The result was that the Crisis that arrived in 2005-2008 will be more painful and possibly fatal for the United States. The multiple wars of choice, immense housing bubble, stunning government deficits and unaddressed unfunded liabilities have created a nation weakened and unprepared for the harsh reality ahead. The Empire of Debt has reached epic proportions.

Americans are slowly coming to the realization that unbridled greed is not the same as capitalism.

Iran knows that ultimately, Turkey has far more resources and geopolitical advantages to be the true regional hegemon.

Our brains keep track of countless pieces of information that we will not usually even think about. Few people will explicitly keep track of the amount of different restaurants they've seen.

Thus, people asked to estimate the frequency of different causes of death underestimate the frequency of those that are underreported in the media, and overestimate the ones that are overreported.

like the person who was naively misapplying her statistical tools, the process which generates the answers is a black box to you.

Cases in which forgeries that intuitively appear real but later are discovered through analysis to be frauds are fairly common in the art world.

Intuition means different things to different people. To some it refers to a sudden flash of insight, or even the spiritual experience of discovering a previously hidden truth.

The idea that hunches can outperform reason is neither unique nor original to Malcolm Gladwell, of course. Most students and professors have long believed that, when in doubt, test-takers should stick with their first answers and "go with their gut." But data show that test-takers are more than twice as likely to change an incorrect answer to a correct one than vice versa.

The finding that people fail to notice unexpected events when their attention is otherwise engaged is interesting. What is doubly intriguing is the mismatch between what we notice and what we think we will notice.

If you believe you will notice unexpected events regardless of how much of your attention is devoted to other tasks, you won't be vigilant enough for possible risks.

In the vast majority of cases in which DNA evidence exonerated a death-row inmate, the original conviction was based largely on the testimony of a confident eyewitness with a vivid memory of the crime. Jurors (and everyone else) tend to intuitively trust that when people are certain, they are likely to be right.

To determine whether two events are truly associated, we must consider how frequently each one occurs by itself, and how frequently they occur together. With just one or a few anecdotes, that's impossible, so it pays to err on the side of caution when inferring the existence of an association from a small number of examples.

But more than a dozen large-scale epidemiological studies, involving hundreds of thousands of subjects, have shown that children who were vaccinated are no more likely to be diagnosed with autism than are children who were not vaccinated. In other words, there is no association between vaccination and autism. And in the absence of an association, there cannot be a causal link.

The kouros example is effective because it capitalizes on our tendency to generalize from a single positive association, leading to the conclusion that intuition trumps reason. But in this case, a bit of thought would show that conclusion to be unlikely, even within the confined realm of art fakery. Think about how often experts throughout history have been duped by forgers because intuition told them that they were looking at the real thing. It is ironic that Gladwell (knowingly or not) exploits one of the greatest weaknesses of intuition—our tendency to blithely infer cause from anecdotes—in making his case for intuition's extraordinary power.

Put another way: It's likely that 9 out of 10 marine species and 7 out of 10 land species went extinct.

So you've got massive volcanic eruptions, spewing tons of sulfur and greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. Billowing clouds cut plants off from life-giving light, and acid rain pours from the skies. The ozone layer is shredded. Then you've got this major asteroid impact, whose heat is so intense that it ignites forests. The burning trees release carbon dioxide and other toxins. The end result? A long-term transformation in the Earth's climate, similar to what environmentalists predict in a worst-case scenario for our near future if we continue to burn fossil fuels and release other toxins. Carbon dioxide levels rise, oxygen levels fall, and animals and plants die off by the millions.

Not all scientists agree that the asteroid impact caused the volcanic eruptions. Whether the volcanoes or the asteroid came first, it's certain that the Great Dying was caused by the buildup of carbon dioxide both in the sea and on land.

What does the Great Dying tell us about our place in Earth's current ecosystem? Most importantly it reminds us that our existence is short, contingent, and precarious.

Even if every LEED point is justly earned, however, the question isn't how the building performs the day you take the shrink wrap off, it's how it does 5 or 10 or 100 years down the line.