Dan Baum (a staff writer for The New Yorker ’til his firing in 2007) has been revealing details about his tenure on his Twitter account. In addition to discussing some day-to-day workings of The New Yorker, he’s also provided some great advice for aspiring writers.
Baum has compiled his tweets in a much more readable format on his site; fantastic reading for so many reasons.
via Kottke
I’d like to class myself as a fairly rational being, but we all have our transgressions, right? So are we all maybe a bit superstitious?
To answer this, Richard Wiseman offers this common thought experiment from Bruce Hood’s new book, Supersense:
Imagine that you only have two objects in your house:
1) A £10 watch that was given to you by your partner and therefore has sentimental value.
2) Another watch that’s worth £1000 but has no sentimental value.Your house catches fire, and you only have time to save one watch. […] Which watch you would save?
If you think that the £10 is somehow imbued with the essence of your partner then you are being superstitious. Of course, you might argue that it simply reminds you of the good times the two of you have had together. Fair enough, but how would you feel if I replaced it with a watch that was absolutely identical (same scratches, markings, etc)? This replacement watch would have exactly the same memory-inducing properties, but most people reject the idea, saying they want THEIR watch. Again, this is irrational.
Of course, this assumes that sentimentality (while irrational) == superstition.
It does however remind me of a more interesting thought experiment about our irrationality when it comes to saving money when purchasing items of different prices (e.g. we’ll travel a significant distance to save £20 on a £40 coat, but not to save £20 on a £12,000 car).
The former via @sandygautam
Foreign aid to Africa has turned the continent into a ‘giant welfare state’ and is one of the direct causes for the rise in poverty rates from 11% to 66% in recent times.
This is according to African author and economist Dambisa Moyo as she adds her voice to the growing group of learned economists calling for an end to foreign aid to Africa.
An interview with Moyo, for the magazine Guernica, offers a new way to look at foreign aid and its impact on the receiving country and peoples.
I think the whole aid model is couched in pity. I don’t want to cast aspersions as to where that pity comes from. But I do think it’s based on pity because based on logic and evidence, it is very clear that aid does not work. And yet if you speak to some of the biggest supporters of aid, whether they are academics or policy makers or celebrities, their whole rationale for giving more aid to Africa is not couched in logic or evidence; it’s based largely on emotion and pity.
I can’t write a better leading sentence than David already has: “In an article encouraging us not to use genetic tendencies for racist ends, William Saletan offers a possible genetic answer [to the question, Why are there so many black athletes?]”
One example is the RR variant of ACTN3, a gene that affects fast generation of muscular force and correlates with excellence at speed and power sports. The opposite variant of the gene is called XX. Tests indicate that the ratio of people with RR to people with XX is 1 to 1 among Asians, 2 to 1 among European whites, and more than 4 to 1 among African-Americans.
I initially thought that this was just going to be another superfluous variation on the 10,000 hours theme (from Malcolm Gladwell’s latest, Outliers).
OK, so while it actually is that, David Brooks’ look at how to forge modern creative genius is still fairly interesting.
Coyle describes a tennis academy in Russia where they enact rallies without a ball. The aim is to focus meticulously on technique. (Try to slow down your golf swing so it takes 90 seconds to finish. See how many errors you detect.)
By practicing in this way, performers delay the automatizing process. The mind wants to turn deliberate, newly learned skills into unconscious, automatically performed skills. But the mind is sloppy and will settle for good enough. By practicing slowly, by breaking skills down into tiny parts and repeating, the strenuous student forces the brain to internalize a better pattern of performance.
I particularly liked this anecdote:
According to Colvin, Ben Franklin would take essays from The Spectator magazine and translate them into verse. Then he’d translate his verse back into prose and examine, sentence by sentence, where his essay was inferior to The Spectator’s original.
An interesting learning method… reverse engineering something you consider excellent or perfect, reconstructing it yourself and finally examining the two end products.
Retailers aren’t in sales; they’re “in the perception business”, says Jonah Lehrer while discussing how we perceive goods of varying prices, especially discounted goods.
Consumers typically suffer from a version of the placebo effect. Since we expect cheaper goods to be less effective, they generally are less effective, even if they are identical to more expensive products. This is why brand-name aspirin works better than generic aspirin, or why Coke tastes better than cheaper colas, even if most consumers can’t tell the difference in blind taste tests. “We have these general beliefs about the world⎯for example, that cheaper products are of lower quality⎯and they translate into specific expectations about specific products,” said [Baba Shiv, a neuroeconomist at Stanford]. “Then, once these expectations are activated, they start to really impact our behavior.”
I suppose this goes some way to explaining why some magazines are gaining readers despite increasing their subscription rates (The Economist, for example).
The latter via Kottke
Tongue-in-cheek, but parts of this ring true: the basic laws of human stupidity.
I particularly liked the discussion about the ‘perfect bandit’.
Could living abroad, (or more specifically, adapting to a foreign culture) enhance creativity? Researchers conducting a series of novel and interesting tests (including the candle box functional fixedness test) are starting to suggest so.
Across these three studies, the association between foreign living and creativity held even after controlling for personality variables. In other words it wasn’t just that time abroad was a marker for having a creative personality. Another consistent finding was that travelling abroad had no association with creativity – only living abroad did. […]
The researchers cautioned that longitudinal research is needed to more fully test whether and how living abroad is linked with enhanced creativity, but they said their findings made a good start. “It may be that those critical months or years of turning cultural bewilderment into concrete understanding may instill [creativity]”.
Update: The Economist has their own take on the research.
Was the Chicxulub impact really the K–T extinction event that caused the extinction of (non-avian) dinosaurs?
Well… probably, yes.
However, if you don’t know the background you can do a lot worse than Ethan Siegel’s comprehensive yet succinct account of what wiped out the dinosaurs.
via Seed
