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sanderk

How Anchoring Bias Psychology Affects Decision Making - 0 views

www.verywellmind.com/-is-the-anchoring-bias-2795029

psychology brain science Bias decision making

shared by sanderk on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Psychologists have found that people have a tendency to rely too heavily on the very first piece of information they learn, which can have a serious impact on the decision they end up making.
  • In one example, participants spun a wheel to select a number between 0 and 100. The volunteers were then asked to adjust that number up or down to indicate how many African countries were in the U.N. Those who spun a high number gave higher estimates while those who spun a low number gave lower estimates. In each case, the participants were using that initial number as their anchor point to base their decision.
  • You read online that the average price of the vehicle you are interested in is $27,000 dollars. When you are shopping at the local car lot, the dealer offers you the same vehicle for $26,500, which you quickly accept—after all, it's $500 less than what you were expecting to pay. Except, the car dealer across town is offering the exact same vehicle for just $24,000, a full $2,500 less than what you paid and $3,000 less than the average price you found online.
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  • Since your initial research indicated that $27,000 was the average price, the first offer you encountered seemed like a great deal. You overlooked further information, such as the possibility that other dealers might have lower prices, and made a decision on the information you already had, which served as an anchoring point in your mind.
  • Imagine that you are trying to negotiate a pay raise with your boss. You might hesitate to make an initial offer, but research suggests that being the first one to lay your cards down on the table might actually be the best way to go. Whoever makes that first offer has the edge since the anchoring effect will essentially make that number the starting point for all further negotiations. Not only that, it will bias those negotiations in your favor. That first offer helps establish a range of acceptable counteroffers, and any future offers will use that initial number as an anchor or focal point.
  • How much television should your children watch each day? If you watched a great deal of TV as a kid, it might seem more acceptable for your kids to be glued to the television for hours each day.
katherineharron

CNN Poll of Polls: Trump's approval up amid coronavirus concerns - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump's approval now averages higher than his approval rating has been at any point in CNN's polling during his presidency, as 47% approve and 48% disapprove rating of his handling of the presidency, according to CNN's Poll of Polls.
  • Trump's handling of the coronavirus outbreak averages higher approval, standing at 52%, while disapproval stands at 45%.
  • His average approval for handling the coronavirus outbreak is sharply improved from CNN's first measure of that rating earlier this month, when 41% said they approved and 48% disapproved.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Polling has historically shown a rally effect for presidents facing a crisis, where approval ratings rise whenever the nation faces a serious challenge. The recent increase in Trump's numbers may be due to that effect, but some presidents have seen higher increases, for example, President George W. Bush's numbers after the 9/11 attacks increased about 40 percentage points.
blythewallick

Better sleep habits lead to better college grades: Data on MIT students underscore the ... - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...191001083956.htm

psychology research knowledge brain science education

shared by blythewallick on 19 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Two MIT professors have found a strong relationship between students' grades and how much sleep they're getting. What time students go to bed and the consistency of their sleep habits also make a big difference. And no, getting a good night's sleep just before a big test is not good enough -- it takes several nights in a row of good sleep to make a difference.
  • 100 students in an MIT engineering class were given Fitbits, the popular wrist-worn devices that track a person's activity 24/7, in exchange for the researchers' access to a semester's worth of their activity data
  • One of the surprises was that individuals who went to bed after some particular threshold time -- for these students, that tended to be 2 a.m., but it varied from one person to another -- tended to perform less well on their tests no matter how much total sleep they ended up getting.
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  • "What we found at the end of the day was zero correlation with fitness, which I must say was disappointing since I believed, and still believe, there is a tremendous positive impact of exercise on cognitive performance," Grossman says.
  • "When you go to bed matters," Grossman says. "If you get a certain amount of sleep -- let's say seven hours -- no matter when you get that sleep, as long as it's before certain times, say you go to bed at 10, or at 12, or at 1, your performance is the same. But if you go to bed after 2, your performance starts to go down even if you get the same seven hours. So, quantity isn't everything."
  • those who got relatively consistent amounts of sleep each night did better than those who had greater variations from one night to the next, even if they ended up with the same average amount.
  • The overall course grades for students averaging six and a half hours of sleep were down 50 percent from other students who averaged just one hour more sleep. Similarly, those who had just a half-hour more night-to-night variation in their total sleep time had grades that dropped 45 percent below others with less variation. This is huge!"
Javier E

Data on inbred nobles support a leader-driven theory of history | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...eader-driven-theory-of-history

history leadership genetics research

shared by Javier E on 01 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • a recent working paper by Nico Voigtländer and Sebastian Ottinger of the University of California at Los Angeles argues that leaders’ impact can indeed be isolated—thanks to the genomes of kings like Charles.
  • In theory, each round of inbreeding should have made monarchs slightly stupider—and thus worse at their jobs. This yields a natural experiment. Assuming that countries’ propensity for incest did not vary based on their political fortunes, the periods in which they had highly inbred (and probably dim-witted) leaders occurred at random intervals.
  • The authors analysed 331 European monarchs between 990 and 1800. They first calculated how inbred each ruler was, and then assessed countries’ success during their reigns using two measures: historians’ subjective scores, and the change in land area controlled by each monarch. The authors only compared each ruler against their own country’s historical averages.
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  • The change in their land areas tended to be about 24 percentage points greater under their least inbred rulers than under their most inbred ones.
  • Sure enough, Spain’s tailspin under Charles was predictable. Countries tended to endure their darkest periods under their most inbred monarchs, and enjoy golden ages during the reigns of their most genetically diverse leaders.
  • the study’s finding—rulers who preside over setbacks tend to be relatively unintelligent—has timeless implications.
  • Javier E on 01 Jan 22
     
    The authors analysed 331 European monarchs between 990 and 1800. They first calculated how inbred each ruler was, and then assessed countries' success during their reigns using two measures: historians' subjective scores, and the change in land area controlled by each monarch. The authors only compared each ruler against their own country's historical averages.
Emily Horwitz

Long Prison Terms Eyed as Contributing to Poverty - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-contributing-to-poverty.html

human sciences economics prison poverty

shared by Emily Horwitz on 20 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Emily Horwitz on 20 Feb 13
     
    A very eye-opening (albeit very long) article about the devastating effects that a stint in prison can have on a family. The article noted that many men who are sent to jail are often given sentences that are too long, so that, by the time they are released, they are way past the average age for committing crimes, and have missed out on valuable life experiences that could have aided them in getting a job. As a result, many of these men find it difficult to get a job, falling into a cycle of poverty, and perhaps, again, to crime. Additionally, for those who have spouses and/or children, time in prison can drastically harm the economic status of a man's family; without the extra income, these families may become homeless, as did the woman, Ms. Hamilton, in the article. Especially intriguing to me was the racial implications of the article; the author pointed out that African-American men are more likely to be incarcerated than they are to have a job, if they did not receive a high school diploma. In terms of TOK, this article showed that all the facets of the human sciences are related - from social problems to economic problems, times in prison can have a devastating effect on not only the jailed man, but his family as well.
Javier E

Here is the news - but only if Facebook thinks you need to know | John Naughton | Opini... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...s-publishers-feeding-the-beast

media algorithm facebook social media news power influence

shared by Javier E on 16 May 16 - No Cached
  • power essentially comes in three varieties: the ability to compel people to do what they don’t want to do; the capability to stop them doing what they want to do; and the power to shape the way they think
  • This last is the kind of power exercised by our mass media. They can shape the public (and therefore the political) agenda by choosing the news that people read, hear or watch; and they can shape the ways in which that news is presented.
  • For a long time, Google was the 800lb gorilla in this domain, because its dominance of search determined what people could find in the unimaginable wastelands of cyberspace
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  • search could be – and was – personalised, because Google’s algorithms could figure out what each user was most likely to be interested in, and therefore what kinds of information would be most relevant for her or him. So, imperceptibly, but inexorably over time, we have come to live in what Eli Pariser christened a “filter bubble”.
  • Before the internet, our problem with information was its scarcity. Now our problem is unmanageable abundance. So now the scarce resources are attention and time, over which a vicious war has broken out between traditional media and the internet-based upstarts.
  • YouTube has a billion users, half of whom access it via mobile devices. The average time spent on the site is 40 minutes. Facebook now claims to have 1.65 billion monthly active users, who spend on average 50 minutes a day on its services. So if Google is an 800lb gorilla, Facebook is a megaton King Kong.
  • Competition for attention and time is a zero-sum game that traditional media are losing. In desperation, they are trying both to appease Facebook and to harness its hold on people’s attention
  • In doing so, they have entered into a truly Faustian bargain. Because while publishers can without difficulty ship their stuff to Instant Articles, they cannot control which ones Facebook users actually get to see. This is because users’ news feeds are determined by Facebook’s machine-learning algorithms that try to guess what each user would like to see (and what might dispose them to click on an advertisement).
  • when you ask – as Professor George Brock memorably did – whether Mark Zuckerberg and his satraps understand that they have acquired editorial responsibilities, they look blank. Facebook is not a publisher, they explain, merely a “platform”. And, besides, no humans are involved in curating users’ news feeds: it’s all done by algorithms and is therefore neutral. In other words: nothing to see here; move on.
  • Any algorithm that has to make choices has criteria that are specified by its designers. And those criteria are expressions of human values. Engineers may think they are “neutral”, but long experience has shown us they are babes in the woods of politics, economics and ideology.
lenaurick

Your Facial Bone Structure Has a Big Influence on How People See You - Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...nfluence-on-how-people-see-you

brain influence research science psychology

shared by lenaurick on 12 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • New research shows that although we perceive character traits like trustworthiness based on a person’s facial expressions, our perceptions of abilities like strength are influenced by facial structure
  • A face resembling a happy expression, with upturned eyebrows and upward curving mouth, is likely to be seen as trustworthy while one resembling an angry expression, with downturned eyebrows, is likely to be seen as untrustworthy.
  • wider faces seen as more competent.
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  • For those of us seeking to appear friendly and trustworthy to others, a new study underscores an old, chipper piece of advice: Put on a happy face.
  • the relevance of facial expressions to perceptions of characteristics such as trustworthiness and friendliness.
  • for those faces lacking structural cues, people could no longer perceive strength but could still perceive personality traits based on facial expressions.
  • An analysis revealed that participants generally ranked people with a happy expression as friendly and trustworthy but not those with angry expressions.
  • rank faces as indicative of physical strength based on facial expression but graded faces that were very broad as that of a strong individual.
  • In the first variation, for faces lacking emotional cues, people could no longer perceive personality traits but could still perceive strength based on width
  • perceptions of abilities such as physical strength are not dependent on facial expressions but rather on facial bone structure.
  • As might be expected, participants picked faces with happier expressions as financial advisors and selected broader faces as belonging to power-lifting champs.
  • Most of the participants found the computer-generated averages to be good representations of trustworthiness or strength — and generally saw the average “financial advisor” face as more trustworthy and the “power-lifter” face as stronger.
  • he findings suggest facial expressions strongly influence perception of traits such as trustworthiness, friendliness or warmth, but not ability (strength, in these experiments).
  • facial structure influences the perception of physical ability but not intentions (such as friendliness and trustworthiness, in this instance)
  • this new work reveals how perceptions of the same person can vary greatly depending on that person’s facial expression in any given moment
  • The findings above come with a big caveat: Only male faces were shown to subjects.
  • Studies of facial width and height in females have shown mixed results, so presenting study subjects with a mix of male and female faces would have yielded inconclusive results.
  • In our everyday lives this study and others make clear that although we might try to influence others’ perceptions of us with photos showing us donning sharp attire or displaying a self-assured attitude, the most important determinant of others' perception of and consequent behavior toward us is our faces.
lenaurick

6 degrees of separation is too much - Facebook says we're all 3.5 degrees apart - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...ds-study-degrees-of-separation

science research knowledge social media

shared by lenaurick on 31 May 16 - No Cached
  • A well-known theory holds that most people, at least in the US and perhaps in the world, are six degrees of separation away from each other. Pick a random stranger anywhere in the country, the theory goes, and chances are you can build a chain of acquaintances between the two of you in no more than six hops.
  • The idea of "six degrees of separation" rests on a scientific foundation that's dubious at best. But Facebook, because its users give it access to possibly the richest data set ever on how 1.6 billion people know and interact with each other, set out to prove it with a statistical algorithm.
  • The average Facebook user is three and a half degrees of separation away from every other user, and the social network's post tells you your own distance from everyone else on the site.
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  • Mark Zuckerberg is 3.17 degrees of separation from all Facebook users.
  • The typical Facebook user has 155 friends, but only describes 50 of them as friends in real life, according to a 2014 study from the Pew Research Center. Thirty-five percent of people have Facebook friends they've never met in person.
  • The original "six degrees of separation" experiment required people to know each other fairly well: They had to be on a first-name basis, at a time when society was slightly more formal, in order for the connection to count.
  • About one-third of the documents eventually reached the stockbroker, after a chain of, on average, six people — the six degrees of separation. It's a small world after all, Milgram concluded.
  • She found instead that Milgram's conclusions rested on a shaky foundation, and that class and race divided Americans more than his original paper admitted. The majority of Milgram's letters didn't make it to the Boston stockbroker. And further experiments that factored in class and race suggested that making connections across those barriers was even more challenging
  • While middle- and high-income people were able to find their targets regardless of their household income, low-income people could only connect with other low-income families, Kleinfeld wrote in a 2002 article in the journal Society.
  • The correct interpretation of Milgram, she argued, was not the optimistic conclusion that we're all only a few degrees of separation away. Instead, it's that there are still barriers that are insurmountable.
  • But the real divide is between people who are on Facebook and those who aren't on the internet at all. Facebook users make up about 62 percent of American adults but 72 percent of all internet users. Americans without the internet are disproportionately older, rural, and less educated. As Facebook users get closer, they might be becoming ever more isolated.
sissij

You Really Can Judge People by the Company They Keep | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...thought-about-your-personality

psychology brain science science

shared by sissij on 13 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • There is an old adage, “take stock of the company you keep”.
  • As it turns out, we are more tolerant of people who have similar negative personality traits as us.
  • This tendency was strongest, however, in one trait above all: antagonism. With the connection being most prominent for the the trifecta of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism.
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  • Now, antagonistic people didn’t claim to like these traits in other people. They rated them as traits of average likability in other people, but this was much higher than the resounding disapproval of the trait given by people who did not claim to be antagonistic. A person with a generally negative trait will tend to tolerate their own trait in others.
  • Questions remain with this data, all of the subjects self-reported their tendencies to these personality traits. Would a person who doesn’t know they are antagonistic still think of it as an average trait? Were the subjects honest? The study also only asked about likability, there was no inquiry into if they would interact with people who had those traits.
  • sissij on 13 Apr 17
     
    There is a old saying in China says that animals gather by species, human gather by interests. Basically, it is saying that people with similar interest or characteristics tends to hang out together. There is another old saying in China saying that if you always hang out with bad people, you will eventually turn bad as well. This means that people around you can change you to behave like them. I think this phenomenon in human society is reasonable and follows the logic of revolution because human are social animals. In order to get along with a group, you have to either find a group of people that are just like you or change yourself to fit in that group of people.
Javier E

Chris Hayes Has Arrived With 'Up' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hayes-has-arrived-with-up.html

discourse Habermas TV partisan issues conversation

shared by Javier E on 23 Jun 12 - Cached
  • In less than a year on television (and with a chirpy voice, a weakness for gesticulation and a tendency to drop honors-thesis words like “signifier” into casual conversation), Mr. Hayes has established himself as Generation Y’s wonk prince of the morning political talk-show circuit.
  • “He is never doctrinaire,” Mr. Leo said in an interview. Both punk fans and “Up” fans are “suspicious of any authority,” he said, and appreciate that Mr. Hayes “is always willing to challenge his own assumptions, and the received wisdom on both sides of the aisle.”
  • Social media, in fact, have played an unusually important role in driving traffic to the program, an MSNBC spokeswoman said. About 45 percent of the visitors to the program’s Web site, which contains complete episodes, linked through sites like Facebook and Twitter. In April, those users spent an average of 51 minutes on the site each visit.
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  • “Up” comes off as a rebuke to traditional cable shout-fests like CNN’s late “Crossfire.” Thanks to its early weekend time slot, the program has the freedom to unwind over two hours each Saturday and Sunday. Guests are encouraged to go deep into the issues of the week, and not try to score cheap-shot points to win the debate.
  • “The first and foremost important rule of the show: we’re not on television — no talking points, no sound bites,” he said, his hair still a bed-head tangle and his suit collar askew. “We have a lot of time for actual conversation. So actually listen, actually respond.”
  • An hour later, as the cameras rolled, Mr. Hayes and his guests waded thigh-deep into an analysis of private equity and whether it is bad for the economy. At a table of wonks, Mr. Hayes, who studied the philosophy of mathematics at Brown, came off as the wonkiest as he deconstructed the budgetary implications of tax arbitrage. Opinions were varied and passionate, but there was no sniping, no partisan grandstanding.
  • “I like t
  • he fact that it’s dialogic, small-d ‘democratic,’ ” Mr. Hayes said of his show. “We’re all sitting at t
  • Since Dec. 26, it has been No. 1 on average in its Sunday time slot on cable news channels among viewers ages 18 to 34, according to Nielsen figures provided by the network.
  • Ms. Maddow said on her program that “Up” was “the best news show on TV, including this one.” “Chris is the antidote to the anti-intellectual posing that has characterized the last decade in cable news,”
  • “No one else in cable is even trying long-form, off-the-news-cycle dives like him — let alone succeeding at them as he is. He’s giving the network Sunday shows a run for their money.”
  • As a student at Hunter College High School in Manhattan, he aspired to write. “My dream when I was 14,” he said, “was someday I could have a David Levine caricature of me in The New York Review of Books.”
Javier E

Does Technology Affect Happiness? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

bits.blogs.nytimes.com/...es-technology-affect-happiness

online children adolescent emotion happiness development research results social

shared by Javier E on 27 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • How is technology affecting their happiness and emotional development?
  • The answer, in the peer-reviewed study of the online habits of girls ages 8 to 12, is that those who say they spend considerable amounts of time using multimedia describe themselves in ways that suggest they are less happy and less socially comfortable than peers who say they spend less time on screens.
  • Among the crucial questions that the researchers were not able to answer is whether the heavy use of media was the cause for the relative unhappiness or whether girls who are less happy to begin with are drawn to heavy use of media, in effect retreating to a virtual world.
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  • on a basic, even primitive level, girls need to experience the full pantheon of communication that comes from face-to-face contact, such as learning to read body language, and subtle facial and verbal cues.
  • The fact that the study was based on an online survey gave pause to some academics. While they said the paper raised good questions, they also expressed concern about giving it too much weight, given that the researchers were not able to follow up with the survey subjects to get important context, including their family circumstances, income or ethnicity.
  • The researchers found that the average amount of media use by the girls surveyed was 6.9 hours per day, a figure that included reading as well as screen time. The average amount of time spent in face-to-face social settings was 2.1 hours, a figure that did not include classroom time.
  • Ms. Gray said, she worries that her daughter, who is using Facebook more, is playing out her social life online sometimes without the benefits of the full emotional range that comes from face-to-face interaction.
Javier E

I Was Wrong, and So Are You - Magazine - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...8713

confirmation bias economics research

shared by Javier E on 14 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • The proper inference from our work is not that one group is more enlightened, or less. It’s that “myside bias”—the tendency to judge a statement according to how conveniently it fits with one’s settled position—is pervasive among all of America’s political groups. The bias is seen in the data, and in my actions.
  • we tabulated the average number of incorrect answers for each ideological group. On average, those who described themselves as progressive (or “very liberal”) got 5.3 of the 8 questions wrong, liberal 4.7, moderate 3.7, conservative 1.7, very conservative 1.3, and libertarian 1.4. These were the results published in Econ Journal Watch and broadcast in The Wall Street Journal.
  • You may have noticed that several of the statements we analyzed implicitly challenge positions held by the left, while none specifically challenges conservative or libertarian positions. A great deal of research shows that people are more likely to heed information that supports their prior positions, and discard or discount contrary information.
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  • Psychologists would count this tendency as a manifestation of “myside bias,” or “confirmation bias.”
  • A full tabulation of all 17 questions showed that no group clearly out-stupids the others. They appear about equally stupid when faced with proper challenges to their position.
  • Consistently, the more a statement challenged a group’s position, the worse the group did.
  • Education had very little impact on responses, we found; survey respondents who’d gone to college did only slightly less badly than those who hadn’t.
  • the fact that a college education showed almost no effect—at least for those inclined to take such a survey—strongly suggests that the classroom is no great corrective for myside bias. At least when it comes to public-policy issues, the corrective value of professional academic experience might be doubted as well.
Duncan H

How About Better Parents? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-how-about-better-parents.html

education parenting

shared by Duncan H on 21 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • “Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all. The performance advantage among students whose parents read to them in their early school years is evident regardless of the family’s socioeconomic background. Parents’ engagement with their 15-year-olds is strongly associated with better performance in PISA.”
  • “students whose parents reported that they had read a book with their child ‘every day or almost every day’ or ‘once or twice a week’ during the first year of primary school have markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents reported that they had read a book with their child ‘never or almost never’ or only ‘once or twice a month.’ On average, the score difference is 25 points, the equivalent of well over half a school year.”
  • “even when comparing students of similar socioeconomic backgrounds, those students whose parents regularly read books to them when they were in the first year of primary school score 14 points higher, on average, than students whose parents did not.”
  • Duncan H on 21 Nov 11
     
    What do you think of the points Friedman makes? Do you think this PISA test is a good evaluator of student performance?
Javier E

Chick-fil-A is Bad For Your Political Health | Patrol - A review of religion and the mo... - 0 views

www.patrolmag.com/...easons-to-eat-more-chick-fil-a

liberalism politics economics boycott responsibility

shared by Javier E on 01 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • The premise is that politics and economics are separate realms, and we are “creating a culture” of division by dragging politics into such things as economic transactions. One could hardly better encapsulate the reality we live under, where economics have completely replaced politics. That’s pretty much the definition of classical liberalism: true politics, where human values are disputed, are expected to be sublimated by economic transactions.
  • The winner is the corporation, which can now reap the profits of a society where no human value is allowed to be more important than a business deal. (If you question that orthodoxy, you’re likely to be labeled a “radical” or a “partisan,” or better yet, just “too political.”) This ideology owes its entire existence to the need for capitalists to keep human values out of the way of the market. Above all, it must keep politics a dirty word, because people who know what politics are and how to use them can cause trouble for capitalists very quickly.
  • our commercial and our political lives are already completely intermeshed, because under the current regime we basically only have commercial lives. The only political power to be had in the United States is money, and even if you don’t have enough to make a corporation hurt, how you consume is one of the few expressions of political will open to the average citizen. They may not have enough money to shake the economy, and may not even when pooled with a large group of like-minded people. But a visceral awareness that money is politics is an excellent first step toward the average person realizing his or her political agency and taking responsibility for it.
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  • Even if the corporatization of our society is so complete that it is objectively impossible to avoid giving money to entities that are at that very moment working to undermine our political freedoms, every religious and ethically-minded institution should be urging those under its influence to be aware and resist wherever possible.
  • In sum, you should absolutely be supporting corporations that put human values ahead of profit, and doing your best to keep your dollars away from ones that exploit workers and try to obstruct democracy, whether directly by stripping workers of their rights or indirectly by supporting the exclusionary social fantasies of religious reactionaries.
Javier E

Study: Your friends really are happier, more popular than you - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-happier-more-popular-than-you

friends paradox friendship

shared by Javier E on 15 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • it turns out social networks are not at fault: Your friends really are richer, happier and more popular than you, according to a depressing new study from researchers in Finland and France.
  • This little mobius strip of a phenomenon is called the “generalized friendship paradox,” and at first glance it makes no sense. Everyone’s friends can’t be richer and more popular — that would just escalate until everyone’s a socialite billionaire.
  • The paradox arises because numbers of friends people have are distributed in a way that follows a power law rather than an ordinary linear relationship. So most people have a few friends while a small number of people have lots of friends. It’s this second small group that causes the paradox. People with lots of friends are more likely to number among your friends in the first place. And when they do, they significantly raise the average number of friends that your friends have. That’s the reason that, on average, your friends have more friends than you do.
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  • Essentially, the “generalized friendship paradox” applies to all interpersonal networks, regardless of whether they’re set in real life or online.
  • Whenever we interact with other people, we glimpse lives far more glamorous than our own.
Javier E

Don't Ask Your Doctor About 'Low T' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...k-your-doctor-about-low-t.html

testosterone aging

shared by Javier E on 05 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • A FUNNY thing has happened in the United States over the last few decades. Men’s average testosterone levels have been dropping by at least 1 percent a year
  • Testosterone appears to decline naturally with aging, but internal belly fat depresses the hormone further, especially in obese men. Drugs like steroids and opiates also lower testosterone, and it’s suspected that chemicals like bisphenol A (or BPA, commonly found in plastic food containers) and diseases like Type 2 diabetes play a role as well.
  • Clinical testosterone deficiency, which is variously defined as lower than 220 to 350 nanograms of testosterone per deciliter of blood serum, can cause men to lose sex drive and fertility. Their bone density often declines, and they may feel tired and experience hot flashes and sweats.
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  • prescription testosterone doesn’t just give your T level a boost: it may also increase your risk of heart attack. It can add huge numbers of red blood cells to your bloodstream and shrink your testes. In some men, it increases aggression and irritability.
  • In addition to the cardiac risks, prescription T can mean a permanent shut-off in men’s own, albeit diminished, testosterone production. In other words, once you start, you may well be hooked for life.
  • Used clinically since 1937 and approved by the F.D.A. since 1953, testosterone is now administered in at least five forms, including patches, gels and injections
  • a large study published in the journal PLoS ONE found that, within three months, taking the hormone doubled the rate of heart attacks in men 65 and older, as well as in younger men who had heart disease. The Food and Drug Administration has begun an investigation.
  • men should address the leading cause of the problem. Losing weight is a tried and true way to naturally boost testosterone levels. According to findings presented at the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society in 2012, obese men who lost an average of 17 pounds saw their testosterone levels increase by 15 percent. In general, a man’s waist should be half his height.
  • At the end of the day, eating more of the right foods and fewer junk foods improves mood and energy — which may be the only fix many men need.
Javier E

Typists who clear 70 wpm can't even say where the keys are | Ars Technica - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...nt-even-say-where-the-keys-are

learning skills explicit knowledge knowledge typing

shared by Javier E on 15 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • The majority of typists couldn’t tell you how they type if they tried, according to a study published in October in the scientific journal Attention, Perception, and Pschyophysics. The finding comes from a body of typists who averaged 72 words per minute but could not map more than an average of 15 keys on a QWERTY keyboard.
  • The basic theory of “automatic learning,” according to Vanderbilt University, asserts that people learn actions for skill-based work consciously and store the details of why and how in their short-term memory. Eventually the why and how of a certain action fades, but the performative action remains. However, in the case of typing, it appears that we don’t even store the action—that is, we have little to no “explicit knowledge” of the keyboar
  • Typing is a learned skill, like many learned skills, for which the details are forgotten. But the authors compare it less to playing chess than spending money: you don’t need to know which way the head on the coin faces, just the particular sizes and shapes
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  • That something as integral to typing as the location of the keys is a forgettable detail is surprising, if consistent with the idea that daily exposure to something and explicit knowledge of that thing don’t go hand in hand.
Javier E

Love People, Not Pleasure - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-love-people-not-pleasure.html

happiness pleasure love materialism fame sex wealth psychology

shared by Javier E on 22 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Fame, riches and pleasure beyond imagination. Sound great? He went on to write:“I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: They amount to 14.”Abd al-Rahman’s problem wasn’t happiness, as he believed — it was unhappiness
  • Happiness and unhappiness are certainly related, but they are not actually opposites.
  • Circumstances are certainly important. No doubt Abd al-Rahman could point to a few in his life. But paradoxically, a better explanation for his unhappiness may have been his own search for well-being. And the same might go for you.Continue reading the main story
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  • As strange as it seems, being happier than average does not mean that one can’t also be unhappier than average.
  • In 2009, researchers from the University of Rochester conducted a study tracking the success of 147 recent graduates in reaching their stated goals after graduation. Some had “intrinsic” goals, such as deep, enduring relationships. Others had “extrinsic” goals, such as achieving reputation or fame. The scholars found that intrinsic goals were associated with happier lives. But the people who pursued extrinsic goals experienced more negative emotions, such as shame and fear. They even suffered more physical maladies.
  • the paradox of fame. Just like drugs and alcohol, once you become addicted, you can’t live without it. But you can’t live with it, either.
  • That impulse to fame by everyday people has generated some astonishing innovations.
  • Today, each of us can build a personal little fan base, thanks to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like. We can broadcast the details of our lives to friends and strangers in an astonishingly efficient way. That’s good for staying in touch with friends, but it also puts a minor form of fame-seeking within each person’s reach. And several studies show that it can make us unhappy.
  • It makes sense. What do you post to Facebook? Pictures of yourself yelling at your kids, or having a hard time at work? No, you post smiling photos of a hiking trip with friends. You build a fake life — or at least an incomplete one — and share it. Furthermore, you consume almost exclusively the fake lives of your social media “friends.” Unless you are extraordinarily self-aware, how could it not make you feel worse to spend part of your time pretending to be happier than you are, and the other part of your time seeing how much happier others seem to be than you?Continue reading the main story
  • the bulk of the studies point toward the same important conclusion: People who rate materialistic goals like wealth as top personal priorities are significantly likelier to be more anxious, more depressed and more frequent drug users, and even to have more physical ailments than those who set their sights on more intrinsic values.
  • as the Dalai Lama pithily suggests, it is better to want what you have than to have what you want.
  • In 2004, two economists looked into whether more sexual variety led to greater well-being. They looked at data from about 16,000 adult Americans who were asked confidentially how many sex partners they had had in the preceding year, and about their happiness. Across men and women alike, the data show that the optimal number of partners is one.
  • This might seem totally counterintuitive. After all, we are unambiguously driven to accumulate material goods, to seek fame, to look for pleasure. How can it be that these very things can give us unhappiness instead of happiness? There are two explanations, one biological and the other philosophical.
  • From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that we are wired to seek fame, wealth and sexual variety. These things make us more likely to pass on our DNA.
  • here’s where the evolutionary cables have crossed: We assume that things we are attracted to will relieve our suffering and raise our happiness.
  • that is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. She doesn’t really care either way whether you are unhappy — she just wants you to want to pass on your genetic material. If you conflate intergenerational survival with well-being, that’s your problem, not nature’s.
  • More philosophically, the problem stems from dissatisfaction — the sense that nothing has full flavor, and we want more. We can’t quite pin down what it is that we seek. Without a great deal of reflection and spiritual hard work, the likely candidates seem to be material things, physical pleasures or favor among friends and strangers.
  • We look for these things to fill an inner emptiness. They may bring a brief satisfaction, but it never lasts, and it is never enough. And so we crave more.
  • This search for fame, the lust for material things and the objectification of others — that is, the cycle of grasping and craving — follows a formula that is elegant, simple and deadly:Love things, use people.
  • This was Abd al-Rahman’s formula as he sleepwalked through life. It is the worldly snake oil peddled by the culture makers from Hollywood to Madison Avenue.
  • Simply invert the deadly formula and render it virtuous:Love people, use things.
  • It requires the courage to repudiate pride and the strength to love others — family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, God and even strangers and enemies. Only deny love to things that actually are objects. The practice that achieves this is charity. Few things are as liberating as giving away to others that which we hold dear.
  • This also requires a condemnation of materialism.
  • Finally, it requires a deep skepticism of our own basic desires. Of course you are driven to seek admiration, splendor and physical license.
  • Declaring war on these destructive impulses is not about asceticism or Puritanism. It is about being a prudent person who seeks to avoid unnecessary suffering.
charlottedonoho

Inbox Zero vs. Inbox 5,000: A Unified Theory - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...394031

multitasking sense perception technology

shared by charlottedonoho on 28 May 15 - No Cached
  • This has led me to a theory that there are two types of emailers in the world: Those who can comfortably ignore unread notifications, and those who feel the need to take action immediately.
  • Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at University of California, Irvine, has explored just this sort of question. A few years ago, she ran a study in which office workers were cut off from using email for one workweek and were equipped with heart-rate monitors; on average, going cold turkey significantly reduced their stress levels.
  • After interviewing several people about their relationship with email, Mark has noticed that, for some people, email is an extension of autonomy—it's about having control.
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  • “It takes people on average about 25 minutes to reorient back to a task when they get interrupted,” she says. Yes, that includes even brief interruptions, like dashing off a quick response to an email, and it often takes so long to get back on task because the project you start doing after handling an email often isn’t the same as the one you were already doing.
  • I happen to like Mark’s theory, but I also think there’s another urge that fuels the nagging feeling that comes with unread messages: Immediately reading and archiving incoming emails is just like checking a box on a to-do list and clearing out unread stories in an RSS feed. In other words, the appeal of these behaviors lies in the illusion of progress that they foster.
  • Jamie Madigan, a psychologist who writes about video games, thinks the arrival of a notification might be similar to the accrual of virtual loot. Email, in other words, might not be just a task, but a game.
charlottedonoho

Public and Scientists' Views on Science and Society | Pew Research Center - 0 views

www.pewinternet.org/...s-views-on-science-and-society

science health sense perception knowledge gap

shared by charlottedonoho on 28 May 15 - No Cached
  • Science holds an esteemed place among citizens and professionals. Americans recognize the accomplishments of scientists in key fields and, despite considerable dispute about the role of government in other realms, there is broad public support for government investment in scientific research.
  • 79% of adults say that science has made life easier for most people and a majority is positive about science’s impact on the quality of health care, food and the environment.
  • At the same time, both the public and scientists are critical of the quality of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM subjects) in grades K-12.
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  • Compared with five years ago, both citizens and scientists are less upbeat about the scientific enterprise. Citizens are still broadly positive about the place of U.S. scientific achievements and its impact on society, but slightly more are negative than five years ago. And, while a majority of scientists think it is a good time for science, they are less upbeat than they were five years ago.
  • While a majority of the public sees U.S. scientific achievements in positive terms, the share saying U.S. scientific achievements are the best in the world or above average is down 11 points to 54% today, compared with 65% in 2009.
  • The largest differences between the public and the AAAS scientists are found in beliefs about the safety of eating genetically modified (GM) foods.
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