TOK Friends

In recent decades, behavioral economics has been the economics profession’s runaway growth area. Scholars in this field work largely at the intersection of economics and psychology, and much of their attention has focused on systematic biases in people’s judgments and decisions.

Paradoxically, our prediction errors often lead us to choices that are wisest in hindsight. In such cases, evolutionary biology often provides a clearer guide than cognitive psychology for thinking about why people behave as they do.

the brain has evolved not to make us happy, but to motivate actions that help push our DNA into the next round. Much of the time, in fact, the brain accomplishes that by making us unhappy. Anxiety, hunger, fatigue, loneliness, thirst, anger and fear spur action to meet the competitive challenges we face.

Common readers—which is to say the great majority of people who continue to read—read for one purpose and one purpose only. They read for pleasure. They read to be entertained. They read to be diverted, assuaged, comforted, and tickled.

Reading, where it exists at all, has largely become an unprofitable wing of the diversion industry.

it's not only the division of experience between hard labor and empty leisure that now makes reading for something like mortal stakes a very remote possibility.

privacy is in turn the basis of a person's capacity for friendship and intimacy. [People] who lose the guarantee of privacy also eventually lose the capacity for making friends.

What is unsettling is that so many of us are voluntarily declining this right to privacy, and opening up our lives to a vast consortium of various, and often spurious, acquaintances: "Facebook friends."

Aside from the basics -- relationship status (whether listed or unlisted, have a look at the photo albums -- you'll know), age, school and other categories such as employment, by reading between the lines you will discover a wealth of information about poor Joe's hapless existence: his income, the details of his social life, if he got fat(ter), if his Grandma/dog/dealer died, what he's eating, the movies he likes, the movies he doesn't like, if he got dumb(er), if he's getting any, if he's a drunkard, if he drives a Camaro, if he voted for Obama (he didn't), if he watches Glenn Beck (he does), etc. etc. etc. It is likely that you will be able to determine, in a very real sense, the nature of Joe's current existence, warts and all.

Observations of planets, the Moon and particularly the shifting orbits of the Lageos research satellites had convinced astronomers and physicists that Einstein’s predictions were on the mark. Nevertheless, scientists said that the Gravity Probe results would live forever in textbooks as the most direct measurements, and that it was important to keep testing theories that were thought to be correct.

Empty space in the vicinity of Earth is indeed turning, Dr. Everitt reported at the news conference and in a paper prepared for the journal Physical Review Letters, at the leisurely rate of 37 one-thousandths of a second of arc — the equivalent of a human hair seen from 10 miles away — every year. With an uncertainty of 19 percent, that measurement was in agreement with Einstein’s predictions of 39 milliarcseconds.

the new media flatter us with attention—with our own personal ring tones and media feeds. Everything is addressed to us.

the public sphere has hollowed out the private sphere. People no longer defend the solid, private domain that is one’s own from the onrush of images and sensation. Instead, the self becomes liquid, a series of presented images. “The harder one tries to experiment with successive tentative approaches and to laboriously patch up successive public images, the less likely seems the prospect of reaching the self-assurance and self-confidence whose promise triggered all those exertions.”

Contemporary life is moodiness, the immediate feeling of the moment. Experience no longer comes tinged with feeling; it comes as feeling and often, it seems, without regard to its cognitive and/or active content.”

Raised in both Tokyo and Silicon Valley, Mr. Ito was part of the first generation to grow up with the Internet. His career includes serving as a board member of Icann, the Internet’s governance organization; becoming a “guild master” in the World of Warcraft online fantasy game; and more than a dozen investments in start-ups like Flickr, Last.fm and Twitter. In 1994 he helped establish the first commercial Internet service provider in Japan.

He was also an early participant in the open-source software movement and is a board member of the Mozilla Foundation, which oversees the development of the Firefox Web browse, as well as being the co-founder and chairman of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that has sought to create a middle ground to promote the sharing of digital information.

“You embrace serendipity and you pivot as you go along this longer term arc. That’s the way I have lived my life. I’ve jumped around in terms of career and geography,” he said. Mr. Ito, who maintains a home outside of Tokyo, became a resident of Dubai at the end of 2008 to gain a better understanding of the Middle East. He said that was part of his desire to understand intellectual property issues internationally and to become what he described as a “global citizen.”

people who meditate frequently behave in a more rational manner than non-meditators, and they do so because different parts of their brain take charge of certain kinds of decisions.

in the Ultimatum Game, you only get one shot, and the smart move is to take the free money. Punishing greed serves no purpose there, but people do it consistently.

Meditators began rejecting offers at the same point, but the rate of their decline leveled off around 50% for very poor offers (18:2 and 19:1), while the control group kept dropping. In other words, they were less willing to punish greedy behavior, and more willing to behave rationally by accepting unfair offers.

As the American population has grown more diverse, sizes have become even less reliable. Over the years, many brands have changed measurements so that a woman who previously wore a 12 can now wear a 10 or an 8, a practice known as “vanity sizing.”

Take a woman with a 27-inch waist. In Marc Jacobs’s high-end line, she is between an 8 and a 10. At Chico’s, she is a triple 0. And that does not consider whether the garment fits in the hips and bust. (Let’s not get into length; there is a reason most neighborhood dry cleaners also offer tailoring.)

The sizing variations are a big contributor to $194 billion in clothing purchases returned in 2010, or more than 8 percent of all clothing purchases, according to the National Retail Federation.

the data explosion is also an enormous opportunity. In a modern economy, information should be the prime asset — the raw material of new products and services, smarter decisions, competitive advantage for companies, and greater growth and productivity.

Is there any real evidence of a “data payoff” across the corporate world? It has taken a while, but new research led by Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggests that the beginnings are now visible.

studied 179 large companies. Those that adopted “data-driven decision making” achieved productivity that was 5 to 6 percent higher than could be explained by other factors, including how much the companies invested in technology, the researchers said.

“NO one knows what I like better than I do.”

This statement may seem self-evident, but the revolution in information technology has created a growing list of exceptions. Your grocery store knows what you like to eat and can probably make educated guesses about other foods you might enjoy. Your wireless carrier knows whom you call, and your phone may know where you’ve been. And your search engine can finish many of your thoughts before you are even done typing them.

Here is a guiding principle: If a business collects data on consumers electronically, it should provide them with a version of that data that is easy to download and export to another Web site. Think of it this way: you have lent the company your data, and you’d like a copy for your own use.

The religions that thrive have exactly what “The Book of Mormon” ridicules: communal theologies, doctrines and codes of conduct rooted in claims of absolute truth.

Rigorous theology provides believers with a map of reality.

Rigorous theology allows believers to examine the world intellectually as well as emotionally.

The conservative movement has long believed that major institutions of mainstream American life—the media, the courts, science and academia—are irredeemably corrupted by liberal bias. It has responded by creating its own, alternative reality, ideologically consistent but full of falsehood. For years, the Republican Party has benefited from a base sealed in an epistemological bubble. Now it’s finding out that when you encourage people to cut themselves off from reality, you can’t always dictate when it’s time to let in a little bit of truth.

Numbers and rankings are everywhere.

“Numbers make intangibles tangible,” said Jonah Lehrer, a journalist and author of “How We Decide,” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). “They give the illusion of control.”

“We want to quantify everything,” he went on, “to ground a decision in fact, instead of asking whether that variable matters.”

He almost failed his first calculus course. But he trained himself to break down complicated tasks and practice them until things that initially confused him became second nature. He went on to do a Ph.D in mathematics.

This path is more common than we imagine. Research on experts – whether in chess, cello or computer programming – indicates that natural ability is less a predictor of success than effort and deliberate practice. A big part of what we call “giftedness” is “task commitment” – and that can be encouraged.

Jump’s approach follows in the Socratic tradition. “Socrates was a master of introducing concepts incrementally through a series of questions,” he says. “To do Socratic inquiry the questions have to be very well designed. People don’t recognize in math how difficult it is to design those questions so that the whole class can answer them.”

“There’s going to continue to be innovation with new, powerful data around the plumbing of the human body,” Mr. Jacobs said. “What everyone is starting to realize is that it’s great to collect data, but somebody needs to make sense of all of this data.”

public views are probably less fact driven than we'd like to think. They're more like mass impressions, with feeling, logic, and "truth" leading individuals to answer polls, express views to other people, and vote (or not vote) in ways that connect them to morally and emotionally significant universes, as much as to agreed upon "facts."

It also persists out of reasonable agnosticism and empirical skepticism. If a rational person hasn't investigated Obama's birthplace, or read news stories written by those who have, he/she logically would say "I don't know" when asked if Obama was born here.