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Javier E

We've Seen This Movie Before - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • If the bad act is committed by a member of a group you wish to demonize, attribute it to a community or a religion and not to the individual. But if the bad act is committed by someone whose profile, interests and agendas are uncomfortably close to your own, detach the malefactor from everything that is going on or is in the air (he came from nowhere) and characterize him as a one-off, non-generalizable, sui generis phenomenon.
  • The only thing more breathtaking than the effrontery of the move is the ease with which so many fall in with it. I guess it’s because both those who perform it and those who eagerly consume it save themselves the trouble of serious thought.
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    Attribution bias at work.
Javier E

Does Your Language Shape How You Think? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • it turns out that the colors that our language routinely obliges us to treat as distinct can refine our purely visual sensitivity to certain color differences in reality, so that our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language.
  • some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. You cannot simply say, as in English, “An animal passed here.” You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a statement is reported with the incorrect “evidentiality,” it is considered a lie.
  • For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a “prison house” that constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way. But surely it is a mistake to overestimate the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives. After all, how many daily decisions do we make on the basis of deductive logic compared with those guided by gut feeling, intuition, emotions, impulse or practical skills? The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies.
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    Fascinating follow-up to Sapir-Whorf.
Javier E

Building a Nation of Know-Nothings - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • It’s not just that 47 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush.
  • Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate. Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions. A growing segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama’s life. What’s more, this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary architects of the lies.
  • It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy.
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  • So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence? But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.
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    A major part of the US population now accepts denies basic facts, influenced by a deliberate partisan misinformation campaign tolerated by the press.
Javier E

A Reply To Jonathan Chait On Stimulus | The New Republic - 0 views

  • It is certainly true that a large majority of professional economists accept the view that “increasing spending or reducing taxes temporarily increases economic growth”—but that is very far from claiming that disputing it is largely a political campaign.
  • in a genuinely scientific field which has accepted a predictive rule as valid to the point that there is a true consensus—such that the only reason for refusal to accept it is crankery or, in Chait’s terms, “politics”—you don’t usually see: several full professors at the top two departments in the subject, when speaking directly in their area of research expertise, challenge it; 10 percent of all practitioners in the field refuse to accept it; and the two leading global general circulation publications in field running op-eds questioning it.
  • A great many leading economists may accept the proposition that enough stimulus spending will probably cause at least some increase in output for a short period of time in some circumstances, yet are still uncomfortable with the kind of stimulus spending strategy that is the actual subject of current political debate. In 2009, James Buchanan (1986 Nobel Laureate in Economics), Edward Prescott (2004 Nobel Laureate in Economics), and Vernon Smith (2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics) promulgated this statement: “Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance.”
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  • It is nerdy-sounding, but I believe critical to this discussion, to distinguish between measurement and knowledge. I made a very strong claim about measurement, and a very specific claim about knowledge. I claim that we cannot usefully measure the effect of the stimulus program launched in 2009 at all.
  • All potentially useful predictions made about the output impact of the stimulus program are non-falsifiable. Failure of predictions can be simply justified by this sort of ad hoc explanation after the fact.
  • This argument will always degenerate back into endlessly dueling regressions, because there is no ability to adjudicate among them via experiment.
  • It simply means that we have no scientific knowledge about this topic. Macroeconomic assertions about the effect of a proposed stimulus policy are not valueless, but despite their complex mathematical justifications, do not have standing as knowledge that can trump common sense, historical reasoning, and so on in the same way that a predictive rule that has been verified through experimental testing can.
  • When using stimulus to ameliorate the economic crisis, we are like primitive tribesmen using herbs to treat an infection, and we should not allow ourselves to imagine that we are using antibiotics that have been proven through clinical trials. This should not imply merely a different feeling about the same actions, but should rationally lead us to greater circumspection.
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    An incisive analysis of knowledge claims in economics, and Keynesian approaches.
Javier E

Op-Ed Columnist - A Case of Mental Courage - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Burney’s struggle reminds one that character is not only moral, it is also mental. Heroism exists not only on the battlefield or in public but also inside the head, in the ability to face unpleasant thoughts. She lived at a time when people were more conscious of the fallen nature of men and women. People were held to be inherently sinful, and to be a decent person one had to struggle against one’s weakness.
  • much of the media, and even the academy, is more geared toward pleasuring consumers, not putting them on some arduous character-building regime.
  • Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway once gave a speech called “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment.” He and others list our natural weaknesses: We have confirmation bias; we pick out evidence that supports our views. We are cognitive misers; we try to think as little as possible. We are herd thinkers and conform our perceptions to fit in with the group. But, in general, the culture places less emphasis on the need to struggle against one’s own mental feebleness. Today’s culture is better in most ways, but in this way it is worse.
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  • there’s a metacognition deficit. Very few in public life habitually step back and think about the weakness in their own thinking and what they should do to compensate.
  • Of the problems that afflict the country, this is the underlying one.
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    Today's culture abets mental feebleness.
Javier E

OUPblog » Blog Archive » While You Are/n't Sleeping - 1 views

  • In sleep the unconscious selects new experiences to save in memory, particularly new experiences that have an emotional charge.
  • If you worked hard to learn something new you will remember it better after a period of sleep than if you stay awake before you need to remember that new learning.
  • Nightmares are defined as a vivid dream with strongly negative emotion that wakes the sleeper abruptly, with a clear memory of the dream. The awakening aborts the natural process of down-regulation of negative emotion. Therefore the dream is not completed and the process will repeat until some other experience allows the downloading of the negative emotion to take place. That is why small children have more nightmares than grown-ups. To children many experiences are frightening until we develop more coping skills
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  • Is there a treatment for nightmares that keep repeating? Yes. There is a new medication that works well especially when paired with a psychotherapy that trains the person to identify what the negative emotion is in response to. What is the fear? Or the anger? Or humiliation? Once identified, the person must name the opposite emotion, and develop an image to represent that alternative. If the nightmare is one of fear of being attacked, the dreamer is instructed to create an image of the opposite emotion: for example, relief over an escape. So, to overcome a nightmare it is important that the dreamer: 1) Identifies why the nightmare was so strong that it woke them, 2) Name the opposite feeling, 3) Create an opposite image to represent that good emotion, 4) Practice that new image several times a day until it is easy to experience it at will. This image rehearsal is very successful with nightmares once the person feels “in charge”.
Javier E

Acupuncture, Real or Fake, Eases Pain - Well Blog - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Fake acupuncture appears to work just as well for pain relief as the real thing, according to a new study of patients with knee arthritis. The findings, published in the September issue of the journal Arthritis Care and Research, are the latest to suggest that a powerful but little understood placebo effect may be at work when patients report benefits from acupuncture treatment
  • The results don’t mean acupuncture doesn’t work, but they do suggest that the benefits of both real and fake acupuncture may have something to do with the way the body transmits or processes pain signals. Other studies have suggested that the prick of a needle around the area of injury or pain could create a “super-placebo” effect that alters the way the brain perceives and responds to pain.
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