Jefings

Clippings from The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir (P.S.) (Josh Kilmer-Purcell)

Jef — Mon, 14 May 2012 23:02:11 +0000

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The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir (P.S.) (Josh Kilmer-Purcell)
- Highlight on Page 39 | Loc. 658-59 | Added on Wednesday, October 26, 2011, 12:08 PM

which was one of the biggest pitfalls of a life in advertising. If you start buying your own bullshit, you risk becoming management material.
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The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir (P.S.) (Josh Kilmer-Purcell)
- Highlight on Page 70 | Loc. 1053-55 | Added on Wednesday, October 26, 2011, 02:33 PM

“I can’t believe you did this after I clearly said no.” “If after nine years together you still haven’t learned that I don’t listen to you, then you clearly deserve what you get.” I crossed my arms, content with such a logical argument.
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The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir (P.S.) (Josh Kilmer-Purcell)
- Highlight on Page 70 | Loc. 1060-62 | Added on Wednesday, October 26, 2011, 02:34 PM

“Why didn’t you wait until we could talk about this more?” “Because you would’ve have said no again. I’m not stupid.”
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The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir (P.S.) (Josh Kilmer-Purcell)
- Highlight on Page 135 | Loc. 1963-64 | Added on Thursday, October 27, 2011, 01:50 PM

For true Martha-philes, the real spirit of Christmas is giving or, more specifically, giving up every moment between Thanksgiving and New Year’s in pursuit of beating baby Jesus at his own game.
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The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir (P.S.) (Josh Kilmer-Purcell)
- Highlight on Page 142 | Loc. 2079-81 | Added on Thursday, October 27, 2011, 02:07 PM

I’ve always thought that one of the signs of true adulthood is when you realize that you spend each Christmas trying to relive childhood memories that never really happened in the first place.
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The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir (P.S.) (Josh Kilmer-Purcell)
- Highlight on Page 208 | Loc. 3024-25 | Added on Thursday, October 27, 2011, 04:49 PM

“It’s fine that one strives for beauty, but if one only finds it in perfection, then it will remain forever hidden.
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The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir (P.S.) (Josh Kilmer-Purcell)
- Highlight on Page 213 | Loc. 3081-82 | Added on Thursday, October 27, 2011, 04:53 PM

As far as I’m concerned, the whole point of being with the same person for many years is not so that he or she can finish your sentences, but so that you rarely have to start one to begin with.
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The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir (P.S.) (Josh Kilmer-Purcell)
- Highlight on Page 278 | Loc. 3980-82 | Added on Friday, October 28, 2011, 12:40 PM

There is no one story about anything that happens in the world. This is what people forget when they read nonfiction essays, journalism, or memoirs. Every second of every day, our heads are filled with millions of conflicting emotions and decisions. Compiled over a lifetime—or even a single day for that matter—it’s impossible to have a truthful, accurate, and concise record of anything we do.
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The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir (P.S.) (Josh Kilmer-Purcell)
- Highlight on Page 279 | Loc. 3997-98 | Added on Friday, October 28, 2011, 02:20 PM

Truth isn’t beauty. It isn’t even always true. Truth is nothing more than consistency of message. I learned that from advertising.

The Prague Cemetery (Umberto Eco)

Jef — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 00:08:54 +0000

when I was old enough to understand, he reminded me that the Jew, as well as being as vain as a Spaniard, ignorant as a Croat, greedy as a Levantine, ungrateful as a Maltese, insolent as a Gypsy, dirty as an Englishman, unctuous as a Kalmyk, imperious as a Prussian and as slanderous as anyone from Asti, is adulterous through uncontrollable lust—the result of circumcision, which makes them more erectile, with a monstrous disproportion between their dwarfish build and the thickness of their semi-mutilated protuberance.
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Graft together a Frenchman and a Jew (perhaps of German origin), as you do with plants, and you end up with what we have now, the Third Republic.
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Civilization will never reach perfection until the last stone of the last church has fallen on the last priest, and the earth is rid of that evil lot.
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People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.
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Someone said that women are just a substitute for the solitary vice, except that you need more imagination.
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I realized that the most irritating aspect of a murder is hiding the body, and it must be for this reason that priests tell us not to kill, except of course in battle, where the bodies are left for the vultures.
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A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.”

Notes from You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)

Jef — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 13:48:14 +0000

THE MISCONCEPTION: You are a rational, logical being who sees the world as it really is. THE TRUTH: You are as deluded as the rest of us, but that’s OK, it keeps you sane.
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THE MISCONCEPTION: You know when you are being influenced and how it is affecting your behavior. THE TRUTH: You are unaware of the constant nudging you receive from ideas formed in your unconscious mind.
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THE MISCONCEPTION: You know when you are lying to yourself. THE TRUTH: You are often ignorant of your motivations and create fictional narratives to explain your decisions, emotions, and history without realizing it.
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How do you separate fantasy from reality? How can you be sure the story of your life both from long ago and minute to minute is true? There is a pleasant vindication to be found when you accept that you can’t. No one can, yet we persist and thrive. Who you think you are is sort of like a movie based on true events, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The details may be embellished, but the big picture, the general idea, is probably a good story worth hearing
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THE MISCONCEPTION: Your opinions are the result of years of rational, objective analysis. THE TRUTH: Your opinions are the result of years of paying attention to information that confirmed what you believed, while ignoring information that challenged your preconceived notions.
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Confirmation bias is seeing the world through a filter.
The real trouble begins when confirmation bias distorts your active pursuit of facts.
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In science, you move closer to the truth by seeking evidence to the contrary. Perhaps the same method should inform your opinions
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Hindsight Bias THE MISCONCEPTION: After you learn something new, you remember how you were once ignorant or wrong. THE TRUTH: You often look back on the things you’ve just learned and assume you knew them or believed them all along.
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Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy THE MISCONCEPTION: You take randomness into account when determining cause and effect. THE TRUTH: You tend to ignore random chance when the results seem meaningful or when you want a random event to have a meaningful cause.
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Anywhere people are searching for meaning, you will see the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. For many, the world loses luster when you accept the idea that random mutations can lead to eyeballs or random burn patterns on toast can look like a person’s face.
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You see patterns everywhere, but some of them are formed by chance and mean nothing. Against the noisy background of probability things are bound to line up from time to time for no reason at all. It’s just how the math works out. Recognizing this is an important part of ignoring coincidences when they don’t matter and realizing what has real meaning for you on this planet, in this epoch.
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Procrastination THE MISCONCEPTION: You procrastinate because you are lazy and can’t manage your time well. THE TRUTH: Procrastination is fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking.
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This is sometimes called present bias—being unable to grasp that what you want will change over time, and what you want now isn’t the same thing you will want later.
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Thinking about thinking—this is the key. In the struggle between should versus want, some people have figured out something crucial: Want never goes away. Procrastination is all about choosing want over should because you don’t have a plan for those times when you can expect to be tempted. You are really bad at predicting your future mental states. In addition, you are terrible at choosing between now and later. Later is a murky place where anything could go wrong.
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Faced with two possible rewards, you are more likely to take the one that you can enjoy now over one you will enjoy later—even if the later reward is far greater.
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Hyperbolic discounting makes later an easy place to throw all the things you don’t want to deal with, but you also overcommit to future plans for the same reason. You run out of time to get things done because you think in the future, that mysterious fantastical realm of possibilities, you’ll have more free time than you do now. One of the best ways to see how bad you are at coping with procrastination is to notice how you deal with deadlines.
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Procrastination is an impulse; it’s buying candy at the checkout. Procrastination is also hyperbolic discounting, taking the sure thing in the present over the caliginous prospect someday far away. You must be adept at thinking about thinking to defeat yourself at procrastination.
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The now-you may see the costs and rewards at stake when it comes time to choose studying for the test instead of going to the club, eating the salad instead of the cupcake, writing the article instead of playing the video game. The trick is to accept that the now-you will not be the person facing those choices, it will be the future-you—a person who can’t be trusted. Future-you will give in, and then you’ll go back to being now-you and feel weak and ashamed. Now-you must trick future-you into doing what is right for both parties.
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Normalcy Bias THE MISCONCEPTION: Your fight-or-flight instincts kick in and you panic when disaster strikes. THE TRUTH: You often become abnormally calm and pretend everything is normal in a crisis.
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No matter what you encounter in life, your first analysis of any situation is to see it in the context of what is normal for you and then compare and contrast the new information against what you know usually happens. Because of this, you have a tendency to interpret strange and alarming situations as if they were just part of business as usual.
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you can become enveloped in a blanket of calm when terror enters your heart. Psychologists refer to it as normalcy bias. First responders call it negative panic. This strange counterproductive tendency to forget self-preservation in the event of an emergency is often factored into fatality predictions in everything from ship sinkings to stadium evacuations.
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Normalcy bias is refusing to believe terrible events will include you even though you have every reason to think otherwise. The first thing you are likely to feel in the event of a disaster is the supreme need to feel safe and secure. When it becomes clear this is impossible, you drift into a daydream where it is.
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Introspection THE MISCONCEPTION: You know why you like the things you like and feel the way you feel. THE TRUTH: The origin of certain emotional states is unavailable to you, and when pressed to explain them, you will just make something up.
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Believing you understand your motivations and desires, your likes and dislikes, is called the introspection illusion. You believe you know yourself and why you are the way you are. You believe this knowledge tells you how you will act in all future situations. Research shows otherwise. Time after time, experiments show introspection is not the act of tapping into your innermost mental constructs but is instead a fabrication. You look at what you did, or how you felt, and you make up some sort of explanation that you can reasonably believe. If you have to tell others, you make up an explanation they can believe too. When it comes to explaining why you like the things you like, you are not so smart, and the very act of having to explain yourself can change your attitudes.
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The Availability Heuristic THE MISCONCEPTION: With the advent of mass media, you understand how the world works based on statistics and facts culled from many examples. THE TRUTH: You are far more likely to believe something is commonplace if you can find just one example of it, and you are far less likely to believe in something you’ve never seen or heard of before.
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more available a bit of information is, the faster you process it. The faster you process it, the more you believe it and the less likely you become to consider other bits of info.
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you use the availability heuristic first and the facts second. You decide the likelihood of a future event on how easily you can imagine it, and if you’ve been bombarded by reports or have filled your head with fears, those images will overshadow new information that might contradict your beliefs.
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The Bystander Effect THE MISCONCEPTION: When someone is hurt, people rush to their aid. THE TRUTH: The more people who witness a person in distress, the less likely it is that any one person will help.
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In a crowd, your inclination to rush to someone’s aid fades, as if diluted by the potential of the group. Everyone thinks someone is going to eventually do something, but with everyone waiting together, no one does. other studies have shown it takes only one person to help for others to join in. Whether it is to donate blood, assist someone in changing a tire, drop money into a performer’s coffers, or stop a fight—people rush to help once they see another person leading by example.
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The Dunning-Kruger Effect THE MISCONCEPTION: You can predict how well you would perform in any situation. THE TRUTH: You are generally pretty bad at estimating your competence and the difficulty of complex tasks.
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Bertrand Russell once said, “In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
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Charles Darwin said it best: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
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As someone moves from novice to amateur to expert to master, the lines between each stage are difficult to recognize. The farther ahead you get, the longer it takes to progress. Yet the time it takes to go from novice to amateur feels rapid, and that’s where the Dunning-Kruger effect strikes. You think the same amount of practice will move you from amateur to expert, but it won’t.
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Apophenia THE MISCONCEPTION: Some coincidences are so miraculous, they must have meaning. THE TRUTH: Coincidences are a routine part of life, even the seemingly miraculous ones. Any meaning applied to them comes from your mind.
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In pareidolia, you see shapes like clouds or tree limbs as people or faces. Apophenia is refusing to believe in clutter and noise, in coincidence and chance. Apophenia most often appears in your life when you experience synchronicity.
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When you connect the dots in your life in a way that tells a story, and then you interpret the story to have a special meaning, this is true apophenia.
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apophenia isn’t always a bad thing. You need a sense of meaning to get out of bed, to push forward against the grain. Just remember that meaning comes only from within.
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More often than not, apophenia is the result of the most dependable of all delusions—the confirmation bias. You see what you want to see and ignore the rest.
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Brand Loyalty THE MISCONCEPTION: You prefer the things you own over the things you don’t because you made rational choices when you bought them. THE TRUTH: You prefer the things you own because you rationalize your past choices to protect your sense of self.
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So what creates this emotional connection to stuff and the companies who make doodads? Choice. Those people who have no choice but to buy certain products, like toilet paper and gasoline, are called “hostages” by marketers and advertising agencies. Since they can’t choose to own or not to own the product, they are far less likely to care if one version of toilet paper is better than another, or one gas station’s fuel is made by Shell or Chevron.
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It’s the choosing of one thing over another that leads to narratives about why you did it, which usually tie in to your self-image.
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There are a number of cognitive biases that converge to create this behavior. The endowment effect pops up when you feel like the things you own are superior to the things you do not.
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Another bias is the sunk cost fallacy. This is when you’ve spent money on something you don’t want to own or don’t want to do and can’t get it back. For instance, you might pay too much for some take-out food that really sucks, but you eat it anyway, or you sit through a movie even after you realize it’s terrible.
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You eventually settle on one option, and after you make your decision you then look back and rationalize your actions by believing your television was the best of all the televisions you could have picked. In retail, this is a well-understood phenomenon, and to prevent buyer’s remorse they try not to overwhelm you with choice. Studies show that if you have only a handful of options at the point of purchase, you will be less likely to fret about your decision afterward. It’s purely emotional, the moment you pick. People with brain damage to their emotional centers who have been rendered into Spock-like beings of pure logic find it impossible to decide things as simple as which brand of cereal to buy.
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The Argument from Authority THE MISCONCEPTION: You are more concerned with the validity of information than the person delivering it. THE TRUTH: The status and credentials of an individual greatly influence your perception of that individual’s message.
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When you see the opinions of some people as better than others on the merit of their status or training alone, you are arguing from authority.
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The Argument from Ignorance THE MISCONCEPTION: When you can’t explain something, you focus on what you can prove. THE TRUTH: When you are unsure of something, you are more likely to accept strange explanations.
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Put simply, this is when you decide something is true or false because you can’t find evidence to the contrary. You don’t know what the truth is, so you assume any explanation is as good as another.
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The Straw Man Fallacy THE MISCONCEPTION: When you argue, you try to stick to the facts. THE TRUTH: In any argument, anger will tempt you to reframe your opponent’s position.
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It works like this: When you get into an argument about either something personal or something more public and abstract, you sometimes resort to constructing a character who you find easier to refute, argue, and disagree with, or you create a position the other person isn’t even suggesting or defending. This is a straw man.
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The Ad Hominem Fallacy THE MISCONCEPTION: If you can’t trust someone, you should ignore that person’s claims. THE TRUTH: What someone says and why they say it should be judged separately.
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The Just-World Fallacy THE MISCONCEPTION: People who are losing at the game of life must have done something to deserve it. THE TRUTH: The beneficiaries of good fortune often do nothing to earn it, and bad people often get away with their actions without consequences.
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When you hear about a situation you hope never happens to you, you tend to blame the victim, not because you are a terrible person but because you want to believe you are smart enough to avoid the same fate. You inflate whatever amount of responsibility the victim may bear into something bigger, something you would never do.
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The just-world fallacy helps you to build a false sense of security. You want to feel in control, so you assume as long as you avoid bad behavior, you won’t be harmed. You feel safer when you believe those who engage in bad behavior end up on the street, or pregnant, or addicted, or raped. You want the world to be fair, so you pretend it is.
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The Public Goods Game THE MISCONCEPTION: We could create a system with no regulations where everyone would contribute to the good of society, everyone would benefit, and everyone would be happy. THE TRUTH: Without some form of regulation, slackers and cheaters will crash economic systems because people don’t want to feel like suckers.
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The Ultimatum Game THE MISCONCEPTION: You choose to accept or refuse an offer based on logic. THE TRUTH: When it comes to making a deal, you base your decision on your status.
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Subjective Validation THE MISCONCEPTION: You are skeptical of generalities. THE TRUTH: You are prone to believing vague statements and predictions are true, especially if they are positive and address you personally.
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subjective validation, which is a fancy way of saying you are far more vulnerable to suggestion when the subject of the conversation is you. If a statement is ambiguous and you think it addresses you directly, you will boil away the ambiguity by finding ways to match the information up with your own traits.
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Cult Indoctrination THE MISCONCEPTION: You are too smart to join a cult. THE TRUTH: Cults are populated by people just like you.
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Groupthink THE MISCONCEPTION: Problems are easier to solve when a group of people get together to discuss solutions. THE TRUTH: The desire to reach consensus and avoid confrontation hinders progress.
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It turns out, for any plan to work, every team needs at least one asshole who doesn’t give a shit if he or she gets fired or exiled or excommunicated. For a group to make good decisions, they must allow dissent and convince everyone they are free to speak their mind without risk of punishment. True groupthink depends on three conditions—a group of people who like one another, isolation, and a deadline for a crucial decision.
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The research shows that groups of friends who allow members to disagree and still be friends are more likely to come to better decisions. So the next time you are in a group of people trying to reach consensus, be the asshole. Every group needs one, and it might as well be you.
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Supernormal Releasers THE MISCONCEPTION: Men who have sex with RealDolls are insane, and women who marry eighty-year-old billionaires are gold diggers. THE TRUTH: The RealDoll and rich old sugar daddies are both supernormal releasers.
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The Affect Heuristic THE MISCONCEPTION: You calculate what is risky or rewarding and always choose to maximize gains while minimizing losses. THE TRUTH: You depend on emotions to tell you if something is good or bad, greatly overestimate rewards, and tend to stick to your first impressions.
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The tendency to make poor decisions and ignore odds in favor of your gut feelings is called the affect heuristic. It is always getting between you and your best interests, and it starts when you make a snap judgment about something new.
The more something seems to benefit you, the less risky it seems overall. When you see something as good, the bad qualities are played down. When you see something as risky, the harder it becomes to notice the benefits.
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Dunbar’s Number THE MISCONCEPTION: There is a Rolodex in your mind with the names and faces of everyone you’ve ever known. THE TRUTH: You can maintain relationships and keep up with only around 150 people at once.
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No human institution can efficiently function above 150 members without hierarchies, ranks, roles, and divisions. Dunbar’s most recent research suggests even power-users of Facebook with 1,000 or more friends still communicate regularly with only around 150 people, and of that 150 they strongly communicate with a group of less than 20.
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Selling Out THE MISCONCEPTION: Both consumerism and capitalism are sustained by corporations and advertising. THE TRUTH: Both consumerism and capitalism are driven by competition among consumers for status.
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the paradox of consumer rebellion—everything is part of the system. We all sell out, because we all buy things.
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Having a dissenting opinion on movies, music, or clothes, or owning clever or obscure possessions, is the way middle-class people fight one another for status. They can’t out-consume one another because they can’t afford it, but they can out-taste one another.
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You would compete like this no matter how society was constructed. Competition for status is built into the human experience at the biological level.
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Self-Serving Bias THE MISCONCEPTION: You evaluate yourself based on past successes and defeats. THE TRUTH: You excuse your failures and see yourself as more successful, more intelligent, and more skilled than you are.
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When you are doing well, you think you are to blame. When you are doing badly, you think the world is to blame.
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This gets even weirder when you let some time pass. All the dumb things you did when you were younger, all those poor decisions, you see them as being made by your former self. According to research conducted by Anne Wilson and Michael Ross in 2001, you see the person you used to be as a foolish bumbler with poor taste but your current self as a badass who is worthy of at least three times the praise.
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all of us think we are more competent than our coworkers, more ethical than our friends, friendlier than the general public, more intelligent than our peers, more attractive than the average person, less prejudiced than people in our region, younger-looking than people the same age, better drivers than most people we know, better children than our siblings, and that we will live longer than the average lifespan. (As you just read that list, maybe you said to yourself, “No, I don’t think I’m better than everyone.” So you think you’re more honest with yourself than the average person? You are not so smart.) No one, it seems, believes he or she is part of the population contributing to the statistics generating averages. You don’t believe you are an average person, but you do believe everyone else is. This tendency, which springs from self-serving bias, is called the illusory superiority effect.
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On average, everyone you know thinks they are more popular than you, and you think you are more popular than them.
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The Spotlight Effect THE MISCONCEPTION: When you are around others, you feel as if everyone is noticing every aspect of your appearance and behavior. THE TRUTH: People devote little attention to you unless prompted to.
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The Third Person Effect THE MISCONCEPTION: You believe your opinions and decisions are based on experience and facts, while those who disagree with you are falling for the lies and propaganda of sources you don’t trust. THE TRUTH: Everyone believes the people they disagree with are gullible, and everyone thinks they are far less susceptible to persuasion than they truly are.
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This sense of alarm about the impact of speech not on yourself but on others is called the third person effect. The third person effect is a version of the self-serving bias. You excuse your failures and see yourself as more successful, more intelligent, and more skilled than you are.
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Catharsis THE MISCONCEPTION: Venting your anger is an effective way to reduce stress and prevent lashing out at friends and family. THE TRUTH: Venting increases aggressive behavior over time.
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If you think catharsis is good, you are more likely to seek it out when you get pissed. When you vent, you stay angry and are more likely to keep doing aggressive things so you can keep venting. It’s druglike, because there are brain chemicals and other behavioral reinforcements at work. If you get accustomed to blowing off steam, you become dependent on it. The more effective approach is to just stop. Take your anger off of the stove.
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debunks the idea of redirecting your anger into exercise or something similar. He says it will only maintain your state or increase your arousal level, and afterward you may be even more aggressive than if you had cooled off.
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The Misinformation Effect THE MISCONCEPTION: Memories are played back like recordings. THE TRUTH: Memories are constructed anew each time from whatever information is currently available, which makes them highly permeable to influences from the present.
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Conformity THE MISCONCEPTION: You are a strong individual who doesn’t conform unless forced to. THE TRUTH: It takes little more than an authority figure or social pressure to get you to obey, because conformity is a survival instinct.
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“We are often not even aware when we are conforming. It is our home base, our default mode.” Shpancer says you conform because social acceptance is built into your brain. To thrive, you know you need allies.
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Extinction Burst THE MISCONCEPTION: If you stop engaging in a bad habit, the habit will gradually diminish until it disappears from your life. THE TRUTH: Any time you quit something cold turkey, your brain will make a last-ditch effort to return you to your habit.
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Once you become accustomed to reward, you get really upset when you can’t have it.
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Extinction bursts are a component of extinction, one of the principles of conditioning. Conditioning is among the most basic factors shaping the way any organism—including you—reacts to the world. If you get rewarded by your actions, you are more likely to continue them. If punished, you are more likely to stop. Over time, you begin to predict reward and punishment by linking longer and longer series of events to their eventual outcomes.
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There are two kinds of conditioning—classical and operant. In classical conditioning, something that normally doesn’t have any influence becomes a trigger for a response. If you are taking a shower and someone flushes the toilet, which then causes the water to become a scalding torrent, you become conditioned to recoil in terror the next time you hear the toilet flush while lathering up. That’s classical conditioning. Something neutral—the toilet flushing—becomes charged with meaning and expectation. You have no control over it.
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Operant conditioning changes your desires. Your inclinations become greater through reinforcement, or diminish through punishment.
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Just before you give up on a long-practiced routine, you freak out. It’s a final desperate attempt by the oldest parts of your brain to keep getting rewarded.
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Social Loafing THE MISCONCEPTION: When you are joined by others in a task, you work harder and become more accomplished. THE TRUTH: Once part of a group, you tend to put in less effort because you know your work will be pooled together with others’.
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If you know you aren’t being judged as an individual, your instinct is to fade into the background.
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This behavior is more likely to show up when the task at hand is simple. With complex tasks, it is usually easy to tell who isn’t pulling their weight. Once you know your laziness can be seen, you try harder. You do this because of another behavior called evaluation apprehension, which is just a fancy way of saying you care more when you know you are being singled out. Your anxiety levels decrease when you know your effort will be pooled with others’. You relax. You coast.
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The Illusion of Transparency THE MISCONCEPTION: When your emotions run high, people can look at you and tell what you are thinking and feeling. THE TRUTH: Your subjective experience is not observable, and you overestimate how much you telegraph your inner thoughts and emotions.
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Studies in the 1980s showed you are confident in your ability to see through liars, yet you are actually terrible at it. On the other side, you think your own lies will be easy to detect.
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When your emotions take over, when your own mental state becomes the focus of your attention, your ability to gauge what other people are experiencing gets muted. If you are trying to see yourself through their eyes, you will fail. Knowing this, you can plan for the effect and overcome it.
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If you are trying to communicate something complex, if you have vast knowledge of a subject and someone else does not, realize it is going to be difficult to get it across the gulf between your brain and theirs. The explanation process may become thorny, but don’t take it out on the other person. Just because that person can’t see inside your mind doesn’t mean he or she is not so smart. You don’t suddenly become telepathic when you are angry, anxious, or alarmed. Keep calm and carry on.
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Learned Helplessness THE MISCONCEPTION: If you are in a bad situation, you will do whatever you can do to escape it. THE TRUTH: If you feel like you aren’t in control of your destiny, you will give up and accept whatever situation you are in.
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If, over the course of your life, you have experienced crushing defeat or pummeling abuse or loss of control, you convince yourself over time that there is no escape, and if escape is offered, you will not act—you become a nihilist who trusts futility above optimism. Studies of the clinically depressed show that they often give in to defeat and stop trying.
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The average person will look for external forces to blame when he or she fails the midterm. People will say the professor is an asshole, or they didn’t get enough sleep. But depressed people will often blame themselves and assume they are stupid. Seligman called this your explanatory style. You see events affecting your life along three gradients: personal, permanent, and pervasive.
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Pessimism sits on one side of the gradient and optimism on the other. The more pessimistic your explanatory style, the easier it is to slip into learned helplessness.
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When you are able to succeed at easy tasks, hard tasks feel possible to accomplish. When you are unable to succeed at small tasks, everything seems harder.
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Embodied Cognition THE MISCONCEPTION: Your opinions of people and events are based on objective evaluation. THE TRUTH: You translate your physical world into words, and then believe those words.
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The Anchoring Effect THE MISCONCEPTION: You rationally analyze all factors before making a choice or determining value. THE TRUTH: Your first perception lingers in your mind, affecting later perceptions and decisions.
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Attention THE MISCONCEPTION: You see everything going on before your eyes, taking in all the information like a camera. THE TRUTH: You are aware only of a small amount of the total information your eyes take in, and even less is processed by your conscious mind and remembered.
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The problem with inattentional blindness is not that it happens so often, it’s that you don’t believe it happens. Instead believe you see the whole world in front of you.
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The fraternal twin of inattentional blindness is change blindness. The brain can’t keep up with the total amount of information coming in from your eyes, and so your experience from moment to moment is edited for simplicity. With change blindness, you don’t notice when things around you are altered to be drastically different than they were a moment ago. Reality, as you experience it, is a virtual experience generated by the brain based on the inputs coming in from your senses. You don’t get a raw feed from those inputs; instead, you get an edited version.
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Self-Handicapping THE MISCONCEPTION: In all you do, you strive for success. THE TRUTH: You often create conditions for failure ahead of time to protect your ego.
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Self-handicapping is a reality negotiation, an unconscious manipulation, of both your perceptions and those of others, that you use to protect your ego. Like its cousins sour grapes, in which you pretend you don’t want what you can’t have, and sweet lemons, in which you convince yourself something unpleasant is actually not so bad, self-handicapping is what psychologists call an anticipatory rationalization. Self-handicapping behaviors are investments in a future reality in which you can blame your failure on something other than your ability.
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happier you are, the more likely you will be to seek out ways to delude yourself into maintaining your rosy outlook on life and your own abilities. Sad people, it seems, are more honest with themselves.
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Self-Fulfilling Prophecies THE MISCONCEPTION: Predictions about your future are subject to forces beyond your control. THE TRUTH: Just believing a future event will happen can cause it to happen if the event depends on human behavior.
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the stereotype threat. When you fear you will confirm a negative stereotype, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy not because the stereotype is true, but because you can’t stop worrying that you could become an example proving it.
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In social psychology, a version of the self-fulfilling prophecy called labeling theory shows how when someone believes you are a certain kind of person, you tend to live up to those expectations.
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A negative outlook will lead to negative predictions, and you will start to unconsciously manipulate your environment to deliver those predictions. Don’t go buying The Secret just yet. No, you can’t just want something to be true and have it become so, but you can avoid the opposite scenario, which might be just enough to improve your life.
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The Moment THE MISCONCEPTION: You are one person, and your happiness is based on being content with your life. THE TRUTH: You are multiple selves, and happiness is based on satisfying all of them.
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Your sense of self is just that—a sense. The person you imagine yourself to be is a story you tell to yourself and to others differently depending on the situation, and the story changes over time.
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The current self is happy when experiencing nice things. The remembering self is happy when you look back on your life and pull up plenty of positive memories.
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Consistency Bias THE MISCONCEPTION: You know how your opinions have changed over time. THE TRUTH: Unless you consciously keep tabs on your progress, you assume the way you feel now is the way you have always felt.
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One of the stranger facets of consistency bias is how it can be evoked on the spot. If you are primed to believe you are an honest person, you will then act as if you are.
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You experience this sort of instant consistency bias all the time. If you sign a pledge to be honest and trustworthy, you tend to follow through. If you agree ahead of time to do something you later don’t feel like doing, you do it anyway so you don’t feel inconsistent or appear so to others. In any situation where you are primed to think of yourself in a certain way, you will be more likely to engage in behavior that proves you are.
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The Representativeness Heuristic THE MISCONCEPTION: Knowing a person’s history makes it easier to determine what sort of person they are. THE TRUTH: You jump to conclusions based on how representative a person seems to be of a preconceived character type.
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When it comes to strangers, your first instinct is to fit them into archetypes to quickly determine their value or threat. These constructs are called the representativeness heuristic.
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The conjunction fallacy builds on your representativeness heuristic. The more things you hear about which match your mental models, the more likely they seem.
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Representativeness heuristics are useful, but also dangerous. They can help you avoid danger and seek help, but they can also lead to generalizations and prejudices. When you expect people to be a certain way because they seem to represent your notions of the sort of people in that category, you are not so smart.
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Expectation THE MISCONCEPTION: Wine is a complicated elixir, full of subtle flavors only an expert can truly distinguish, and experienced tasters are impervious to deception. THE TRUTH: Wine experts and consumers can be fooled by altering their expectations.
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The buildup to an experience can completely change how you interpret the information reaching your brain from your otherwise objective senses. Expensive wine is like anything else that is expensive: The expectation it will taste better actually makes it taste better.
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Recent research shows about 18 percent of people who own high-definition televisions are still watching standard definition programming on the set, but they think they are getting a better picture.
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Taste is subjective, which is another way of saying you are not so smart when it comes to choosing one product over another. All things being equal—you refer back to the advertising or the packaging or conformity with your friends and family. Presentation is everything.
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The Illusion of Control THE MISCONCEPTION: You know how much control you have over your surroundings. THE TRUTH: You often believe you have control over outcomes that are either random or are too complex to predict.
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most people engage in magical thinking to some degree, assuming their thoughts can influence things outside of their control.
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The Fundamental Attribution Error THE MISCONCEPTION: Other people’s behavior is the reflection of their personality. THE TRUTH: Other people’s behavior is more the result of the situation than their disposition.
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When you can’t check for consistency, you blame people’s behavior on their personality.
When you look for a cause for another person’s actions, you find it. Rarely, though, do you first consider how powerful the situation is. You blame the person, not the environment and the influence of the person’s peers. You do this because you would like to believe your own behavior comes strictly from within. You know this isn’t true though. You shift from introvert to extrovert, from brainiac to simpleton, from charismatic to impish—depending on where you find yourself and who is watching. The fundamental attribution error leads to labels and assumptions about who people are, but remember first impressions are mostly incorrect. Those impressions will linger until you get to know people and understand their situation and the circumstances in which their behavior is generated. Knowing this doesn’t mean you must forgive evil, but perhaps it can help prevent it.

Notes from We Are All Weird (Seth Godin)

Jef — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 23:50:36 +0000

The epic battle of our generation is between the status quo of mass and the never-ceasing tide of weird.
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The defining idea of the twentieth century, more than any other, was mass. Mass gave us efficiency and productivity, making us (some people) rich. Mass gave us huge nations, giving us (some people) power. Mass allowed powerful people to influence millions, giving us (some people) control. And now mass is dying.
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Matt Ridley reported on how much time (or work, or money, same thing) it cost us to buy light, a fundamental building block of our civilization. Twenty-two hundred years ago, you would need to work fifty hours to buy an hour of light from a sesame oil lantern. Today, you can buy an hour of clean, bright light in about half a second.
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We’ve been trained since birth to enforce the status quo. Our bias is to the many. To please the many. To sell to the many. To be organized to serve the many.

If you persist in trying to be all things to all people, you will fail. The only alternative, then, is to be something important to a few people.
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If you cater to the normal, you will disappoint the weird. And as the world gets weirder, that’s a dumb
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Anil Dash points out that there is no longer a canon—no longer a corpus of work that a culturally intelligent person could be counted on to have experienced. It’s possible to have never seen Star Wars or attentively listened to Beethoven being played live. It’s possible to not know the significance of Keith Hernandez or Keith Moon or Keith Olbermann.
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The key lesson: humanity and connection are trumping the desire for corporate scale.
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On close inspection, just about everybody is weird. And that’s the key: on close inspection. The reality of digital community is that people are now available for close inspection, and the ’Net allows us to keep all of them in focus at once.
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Average is for marketers who don’t have enough information to be accurate.
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I’ve started using the word “factory” to define any organizational effort that’s built around repeated interactions and mass. If you need a map and a manual, it’s probably because you’re creating are a problem, it’s probably because you’re doing factory work.
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Factories have their place.
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But factories don’t like weirdness. The challenge, then, is to figure out which side you’re on.
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As choice and self-determination continue to triumph, you can’t profit from it by pretending you’re not a mass marketer. You actually have to stop being a mass marketer.
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It’s true that we want to be part of a tribe. What’s not true is that it must be the uber tribe, the one and only mass tribe, the center of the curve. Our own little circle is in fact what we really want.
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The reason that classical music is endangered is simple: people who say they love classical music stopped buying tickets and records. We’re left with nothing but Beethoven’s greatest hits because the people who could show up and represent the edges would rather whine than show up.

Notes from Lying (Kindle Single) (Sam Harris and Annaka Harris)

Jef — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 22:09:31 +0000

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To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication.[2]
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People lie so that others will form beliefs that are not true. The more consequential the beliefs—that is, the more a person’s well-being depends upon a correct understanding of the world—the more consequential the lie.
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The intent to communicate honestly is the measure of truthfulness.
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But what could be wrong with truly “white” lies? First, they are still lies. And in telling them, we incur all the problems of being less than straightforward in our dealings with other people. Sincerity, authenticity, integrity, mutual understanding—these and other sources of moral wealth are destroyed the moment we deliberately misrepresent our beliefs, whether or not our lies are ever discovered.
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False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose.
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One of the worst things about breaking the law is that it puts one at odds with an indeterminate number of other people. This is among the many corrosive effects of having unjust laws: They tempt peaceful and (otherwise) honest people to lie so as to avoid being punished for behavior that is ethically
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Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship.
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By lying, we deny others a view of the world as it is. Our dishonesty not only influences the choices they make, it often determines the choices they can make—and in ways we cannot always predict. Every lie is a direct assault upon the autonomy of those we lie to.

Random notes from The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)

Jef — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 23:24:04 +0000

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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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I believe that the truth is out there but that it is rarely obvious and almost never foolproof. What I want to believe based on emotions and what I should believe based on evidence do not always coincide. I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. How can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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“Students that scored well on these [science knowledge] tests were no more or less skeptical of pseudoscientific claims than students that scored very poorly,” the authors concluded. “Apparently, the students were not able to apply their scientific knowledge to evaluate these pseudoscientific claims. We suggest that this inability stems in part from the way that science is traditionally presented to students: Students are taught what to think but not how to think.”7
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Highlight on Page 5 | Loc. 158-64 | Added on Friday, October 14, 2011, 07:39 AM

Why do people believe? My answer is straightforward: We form our beliefs for a variety of subjective, personal, emotional, and psychological reasons in the context of environments created by family, friends, colleagues, culture, and society at large; after forming our beliefs we then defend, justify, and rationalize them with a host of intellectual reasons, cogent arguments, and rational explanations. Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs follow. I call this process belief-dependent realism, where our perceptions about reality are dependent on the beliefs that we hold about it. Reality exists independent of human minds, but our understanding of it depends upon the beliefs we hold at any given time.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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The brain is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning. The first process I call patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. The second process I call agenticity: the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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We can’t help it. Our brains evolved to connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen. These meaningful patterns become beliefs, and these beliefs shape our understanding of reality.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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our evolved tribal tendencies lead us to form coalitions with fellow like-minded members of our group and to demonize others who hold differing beliefs.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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Since the brain does not perceive itself or its inner operations, and our normal experience is of stimuli entering the brain through the senses from the outside, when a neural network misfires or otherwise sends a signal to some other part of the brain that resembles an outside stimulus, the brain naturally interprets these internal events as external phenomena.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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What you believe is what you see. The label is the behavior. Theory molds data. Concepts determine percepts. Belief-dependent realism.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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once people commit to a belief, the smarter they are the better they are at rationalizing those beliefs. Thus: smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for nonsmart reasons.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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This is not at all how we form beliefs. What happens is that the facts of the world are filtered by our brains through the colored lenses of worldviews, paradigms, theories, hypotheses, conjectures, hunches, biases, and prejudices we have accumulated through living. We then sort through the facts and select those that confirm what we already believe and ignore or rationalize away those that contradict our beliefs.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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Although true pattern recognition helps us survive, false pattern recognition does not necessarily get us killed, and so the patternicity phenomenon endured the winnowing process of natural selection. Because we must make associations in order to survive and reproduce, natural selection favored all association-making strategies, even those that resulted in false positives. With this evolutionary perspective we can now understand that people believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe nonweird things.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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Anecdotal thinking comes naturally, science requires training. Any medical huckster promising that A will cure B has only to advertise a handful of successful anecdotes in the form of testimonials.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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Technically speaking, in Ono’s words, “superstitious behavior is defined as behavior produced by response independent schedules of reinforcer delivery, in which only an accidental relation exists between responses and delivery of reinforcers.” That’s a fancy way of saying that superstitions are just an accidental form of learning. This is patternicity.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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Patternicity is common across the animal kingdom.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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problem of obesity. In the natural environment, (A) sweet and rich foods are strongly associated with (B) nutritious and rare. Therefore, we gravitate to any and all foods that are sweet and rich, and because they were once rare we have no satiation network in the brain that tells us to shut off the hunger mechanism, so we eat as much as we can of them.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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levels of superstitious rituals rose with their levels of uncertainty. “We find magic wherever the elements of chance and accident, and the emotional play between hope and fear have a wide and extensive range,” Malinowski explained. “We do not find magic wherever the pursuit is certain, reliable, and well under the control of rational methods and technological processes. Further, we find magic where the element of danger is conspicuous.”
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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“feelings of control are essential for our well-being—we think clearer and make better decisions when we feel we are in control. Lacking control is highly aversive, and one fundamental way we can bolster our sense of control is to understand what’s going on. So we instinctively seek out patterns to regain control—even if those patterns are illusory.”
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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illusory correlation, the perception of a causal relationship between two sets of variables where none exists, or the overestimation of a connection between two variables. The illusory correlation effect is strongest when people form false associations between (X) membership in a statistically small group and (Y) rare and usually negative traits or behaviors. Trivially, for example, people tend to recall the days when they (X) washed their car and (Y) it rained; nontrivially, white Americans typically overestimate the rate that (X) African Americans are (Y) arrested.32
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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practice what I call agenticity: the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency. That is, we often impart the patterns we find with agency and intention, and believe that these intentional agents control the world, sometimes invisibly from the top down, instead of bottom-up causal laws and randomness that makes up much of our world.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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people with high levels of dopamine are more likely to find significance in coincidences and pick out meaning and patterns where there are none.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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This is indeed what they found. Subjects with higher levels of psychoticism were more creative but in less practical ways, and Abraham and her colleagues concluded that this was due to their capacity for “associative thinking” (finding associations between random things) instead of “goal-related thinking.”17 That is, finding new and useful patterns is good, finding new patterns everywhere and being unable to discriminate between them is bad.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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beliefs come first; reasons for belief follow in confirmation of the realism dependent on the belief.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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because the brain appears to process false or uncertain statements in regions linked to pain and disgust, especially in judging tastes and odors, this study gives new meaning to the phrase that a claim has passed the “taste test” or the “smell test.”38 When you hear bullshit, you may know it by its smell.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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This research supports what I call Spinoza’s conjecture: belief comes quickly and naturally, skepticism is slow and unnatural, and most people have a low tolerance for ambiguity.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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The scientific principle that a claim is untrue unless proven otherwise runs counter to our natural tendency to accept as true that which we can comprehend quickly.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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why does it matter that there is only one neural network for belief and disbelief rather than a believing neural network and a skeptical neural network? “It suggests that belief is belief is belief,” Harris noted without irony. “In my opinion, this has at least two consequences: (1) It further erodes the spurious distinction between facts and values. If believing that ‘torture is wrong’ and believing that ‘2 plus 2 makes 4’ are importantly similar, then ethics and science are importantly similar at the level of the brain. (2) It suggests that the validity of a belief depends on how it came to be—on the chains of evidence and reasoning that link it to the world—not merely upon a feeling of conviction.” So what? So plenty, Harris continued in his response to my query, because “the feeling of conviction is what we rely upon as consumers of beliefs—but clearly this feeling can become uncoupled from good reasons and good evidence in any domain (mathematical, ethical, etc.).”40 Hopefully, what can be decoupled from good reasons and good evidence can be recoupled through counterarguments with even better reasons and better evidence. That is, in any case, what all producers of scientific knowledge hope, which does, after all, spring eternal.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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Of course, no one is agnostic behaviorally. When we act in the world, we act as if there is a God or as if there is no God, so by default we must make a choice, if not intellectually then at least behaviorally. To this extent, I assume that there is no God and I live my life accordingly, which makes me an atheist. In other words, agnosticism is an intellectual position, a statement about the existence or nonexistence of the deity and our ability to know it with certainty, whereas atheism is a behavioral position, a statement about what assumptions we make about the world in which we behave.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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In 2003, Stanford University social psychologist John Jost and his colleagues published a paper in the prestigious journal Psychological Bulletin entitled “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” which was a synthesis of fifty years of findings published in eighty-eight papers encompassing 22,818 subjects that led the researchers to conclude that conservatives suffer from “uncertainty avoidance” and “terror management,” and have a “need for order, structure,” and “closure” along with “dogmatism” and “intolerance of ambiguity,” all of which leads to “resistance to change” and “endorsement of inequality” in their beliefs and practices.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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We regard political conservatism as an ideological belief system that is significantly (but not completely) related to motivational concerns having to do with the psychological management of uncertainty and fear. Specifically, the avoidance of uncertainty (and the striving for certainty) may be particularly tied to one core dimension of conservative thought, resistance to change. Similarly, concerns with fear and threat may be linked to the second core dimension of conservatism, endorsement of inequality.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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demonstrated that most people do not select a political party because it reflects their views; instead, they first identify with a political position, usually inherited from their parents, peer groups, or upbringing. Once they have made a commitment to that political position they choose the appropriate party and then follow the dictates of it.10 This is the power of political belief, and it shows in the very tribal nature of modern politics and the stereotypes of each tribe.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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research now overwhelmingly demonstrates that most of our moral decisions are grounded in automatic moral feelings rather than deliberatively rational calculations.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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We do not reason our way to a moral decision by carefully weighing the evidence for and against; instead, we make intuitive leaps to moral decisions and then rationalize the snap decision after the fact with rational reasons. Our moral intuitions—reflected in such conservative-liberal stereotypes—are more emotional than rational.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
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These examples show the power of what I call folk numeracy, a form of patternicity. Folk numeracy is our natural tendency to misperceive probabilities, to think anecdotally instead of statistically, and to focus on and remember short-term trends and small-number runs.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Highlight on Page 258 | Loc. 5143-47 | Added on Monday, October 24, 2011, 07:55 AM

Once we form beliefs and make commitments to them, we maintain and reinforce them through a number of powerful cognitive heuristics that guarantee they are correct. A heuristic is a mental method of solving a problem through intuition, trial and error, or informal methods when there is no formal means or formula for solving it (and often even when there is). These heuristics are sometimes called rules of thumb, although they are better known as cognitive biases because they almost always distort percepts to fit preconceived concepts. Beliefs configure perceptions.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Highlight on Page 258 | Loc. 5147-50 | Added on Monday, October 24, 2011, 07:56 AM

No matter what belief system is in place—religious, political, economic, or social—these cognitive biases shape how we interpret information that comes through our senses and mold it to fit the way we want the world to be and not necessarily how it really is; once again, the basis of belief-dependent realism.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Highlight on Page 261 | Loc. 5206-8 | Added on Monday, October 24, 2011, 08:05 AM

In a type of time-reversal confirmation bias, the hindsight bias is the tendency to reconstruct the past to fit with present knowledge.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Highlight on Page 263 | Loc. 5242-44 | Added on Monday, October 24, 2011, 08:09 AM

This heuristic is related to the hindsight bias. The self-justification bias is the tendency to rationalize decisions after the fact to convince ourselves that what we did was the best thing we could have done.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Highlight on Page 263 | Loc. 5254-55 | Added on Monday, October 24, 2011, 08:11 AM

smart people believe weird things because they are better at rationalizing their beliefs that they hold for nonsmart reasons.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Highlight on Page 263 | Loc. 5259-64 | Added on Monday, October 24, 2011, 08:14 AM

Social psychologist Geoffrey Cohen quantified this effect in a study in which he discovered that Democrats are more accepting of a welfare program if they believe it was proposed by a fellow Democrat, even if the proposal came from a Republican and is quite restrictive. Predictably, Cohen found the same effect for Republicans, who were far more likely to approve of a generous welfare program if they thought it was proposed by a fellow Republican.12 In other words, even when examining the exact same data people from both parties arrive at radically different conclusions.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Highlight on Page 264 | Loc. 5272-74 | Added on Monday, October 24, 2011, 08:15 AM

Our beliefs are very much grounded in how we attribute the causal explanations for them, and this leads to a fundamental attribution bias, or the tendency to attribute different causes for our own beliefs and actions than that of others.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Highlight on Page 265 | Loc. 5289-91 | Added on Monday, October 24, 2011, 08:18 AM

intellectual attribution bias, in which people consider their own beliefs as being rationally motivated, and an emotional attribution bias, in which people see the beliefs of others as being emotionally driven.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Highlight on Page 265 | Loc. 5301-3 | Added on Monday, October 24, 2011, 08:26 AM

The attribution bias of perceiving intellectual reasons for belief as superior to emotional reasons appears to be a manifestation of a broader form of self-serving bias through which people slant their perceptions of the world, especially the social world, in their favor.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Highlight on Page 266 | Loc. 5311-12 | Added on Monday, October 24, 2011, 08:30 AM

sunk-cost bias, or the tendency to believe in something because of the cost sunk into that belief.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Highlight on Page 267 | Loc. 5327-28 | Added on Monday, October 24, 2011, 08:33 AM

status quo bias, or the tendency to opt for whatever it is we are used to, that is, the status quo.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Highlight on Page 267 | Loc. 5340-45 | Added on Monday, October 24, 2011, 08:36 AM

Why does the status quo bias exist? Because the status quo represents what we already have (and have to give up in order to change), versus what we might have once we choose, which is far riskier. Why should this be? Because of the endowment effect. Endowment Effect The psychology underlying the status quo bias is what economist Richard Thaler calls the endowment effect, or the tendency to value what we own more than what we do not own.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Highlight on Page 268 | Loc. 5363-64 | Added on Monday, October 24, 2011, 08:38 AM

How beliefs are framed often determines how they are assessed, and this is called the framing effect, or the tendency to draw different
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Highlight on Page 268 | Loc. 5363-64 | Added on Monday, October 24, 2011, 08:38 AM

How beliefs are framed often determines how they are assessed, and this is called the framing effect, or the tendency to draw different conclusions based on how data are presented.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Highlight on Page 269 | Loc. 5389-92 | Added on Monday, October 24, 2011, 08:41 AM

Lacking some objective standard to evaluate beliefs and decisions—which is usually not available—we grasp for any standard on hand, no matter how seemingly subjective. Such standards are called anchors, and this creates the anchoring effect, or the tendency to rely too heavily on a past reference or on one piece of information when making decisions.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Highlight on Page 270 | Loc. 5403-6 | Added on Monday, October 24, 2011, 08:43 AM

fact that most of us notice more red lights when we are running late is an example of the availability heuristic, or the tendency to assign probabilities of potential outcomes based on examples that are immediately available to us, especially those that are vivid, unusual, or emotionally charged, which are then generalized into conclusions upon which choices are based.24
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Highlight on Page 271 | Loc. 5417-21 | Added on Monday, October 24, 2011, 08:45 AM

Related to the availability bias is the representative bias, which, as described by its discoverers, psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, means: “an event is judged probable to the extent that it represents the essential features of its parent population or generating process.” And, more generally, “when faced with the difficult task of judging probability or frequency, people employ a limited number of heuristics which reduce these judgments to simpler ones.”27
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Highlight on Page 272 | Loc. 5441-42 | Added on Monday, October 24, 2011, 08:47 AM

inattentional blindness, or the tendency to miss something obvious and general while attending to something special and specific.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Highlight on Page 276 | Loc. 5530-32 | Added on Monday, October 24, 2011, 10:49 AM

The bias blind spot is really a meta-bias in that it is grounded in all the other cognitive biases. It is the tendency to recognize the power of cognitive biases in other people but to be blind to their influence upon our own beliefs.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Highlight on Page 288 | Loc. 5758 | Added on Monday, October 24, 2011, 02:20 PM

“Eppur si muove,” “And yet it moves.”
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Bookmark on Page 288 | Loc. 5753 | Added on Monday, October 24, 2011, 02:23 PM

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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Highlight on Page 297 | Loc. 5925 | Added on Tuesday, October 25, 2011, 07:38 AM

I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Highlight on Page 311 | Loc. 6184-85 | Added on Tuesday, October 25, 2011, 08:14 AM

Arthur C. Clarke’s first law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Bookmark on Page 314 | Loc. 6229 | Added on Tuesday, October 25, 2011, 08:25 AM

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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Michael Shermer)
- Highlight on Page 342 | Loc. 6787-90 | Added on Tuesday, October 25, 2011, 06:51 PM

instead employ only negative evidence in the form of “if evolutionary biologists cannot present a natural explanation of X, then a supernatural explanation of X must be true.” Not so. The principle of positive evidence states that you must have positive evidence in favor of your theory and not just negative evidence against rival theories.

Random clippings from Don’t Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never- Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems (David Rakoff)

Jef — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 23:16:14 +0000

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Don’t Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never- Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems (David Rakoff)
- Highlight on Page 24 | Loc. 304-12 | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 12:48 PM

The general New York Times reader enjoys the privileges and plentitude of life in the world’s wealthiest country, so articles on rolling cigarettes out of pocket lint or recipes on salvaging that last bit of rotting pork would make no sense. But is it completely naïve to think that a squib in the same newspaper about ice cubes frozen from a river in the Scottish Highlands and overnighted to your doorstep—the perfect complement to your single malt—necessarily demands, if for no other reason than to preserve some vague notion of karmic balance, either a great big “April Fool’s!” scrawled across the top, or a prefatory note of apology that such a service even exists? Surely when we’ve reached the point where we’re fetishizing sodium chloride and water, and subjecting both to the kind of scrutiny we used to reserve for choosing an oncologist, it’s time to admit that the relentless questing for that next undetectable gradation of perfection has stopped being about the thing itself and crossed over into a realm of narcissism so overwhelming as to make the act of masturbation look selfless.
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Don’t Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never- Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems (David Rakoff)
- Highlight on Page 7 | Loc. 116-17 | Added on Tuesday, October 11, 2011, 07:02 AM

“Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? I mean, it’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”
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Don’t Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never- Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems (David Rakoff)
- Highlight on Page 172 | Loc. 2021-27 | Added on Thursday, October 13, 2011, 08:07 AM

And there it is, in a heartbreaking little nutshell, the thing that has been bothering me and that I have been trying to articulate for more than a year. Not to get too Henry Fonda in his final monologue in The Grapes of Wrath about it, but wherever there is a woman whose health is endangered because the right has outlawed a medical procedure, Guerriero and the Log Cabinites will be there. Whenever the puritanical hypocrisy of the FCC gives violence (and Rupert Murdoch) a free pass, while selectively demonizing sex, they’ll be there. And when the right continues to try to efface the separation between church and state, why, they’ll be there, too. Whether they like it or not. The connection between all these issues and gay rights is glaringly direct. If I can see it, why can’t Guerriero? What accounts for this myopia?
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Don’t Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never- Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems (David Rakoff)
- Highlight on Page 187 | Loc. 2195-96 | Added on Thursday, October 13, 2011, 08:37 AM

“Look at me, but for the reasons you used to!”
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Don’t Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never- Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems (David Rakoff)
- Highlight on Page 220 | Loc. 2584-85 | Added on Thursday, October 13, 2011, 02:03 PM

That libertarian myth of the Lone Wolf gets a little shaky when one turns on a working faucet, stands under a lit streetlight, or realizes that every one of us got here by driving vehicles filled with highly subsidized foreign oil along a governmentally maintained freeway system.

Random notes from Christ to Coke : How Image Becomes Icon (Martin Kemp)

Jef — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 20:40:31 +0000

I did not care for this book at all. There were moments of interest, but it did not seem to truly explore the issue of how an image becomes an icon. It seemed an excuse to follow some meandering chains of thought on the topics that the author found interesting. Not worth the time or expense of the read… in my humble opinion.
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If I have to give a definition of a visual icon, let me suggest the following. An iconic image is one that has achieved wholly exceptional levels of widespread recognizability and has come to carry a rich series of varied associations for very large numbers of people across time and cultures, such that it has to a greater or lesser degree transgressed the parameters of its initial making, function, context, and meaning.
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The primitive potency of the full face, frontally staring, has been utilized insistently in political and religious arenas over the ages. It is obligatory in passports and police photographs. It is perfectly adapted to giving visual form to the concept of the all-seeing God or ruler who wishes to transcend the normal limits of material vision.
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Christ in an Eastern Orthodox icon belongs in an eternal realm of an absolute presence rather than in the here and now of a portrait.
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Great art encountered in the flesh can produce sensations that go beyond visual stimulation. Somehow more seems to be involved than the eye and even the mind. The whole mind–body seems to be caught up in the process. The duality of mind and body as advocated in the seventeenth century by Descartes seems quite wrong at such moments. The same thing happens with great music, which has an undoubted somatic dimension, and with great drama and dance in which we seem within ourselves to mirror and ape what we are seeing.

Some Random Notes from my latest readings.

Jef — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 20:34:06 +0000

A Practical Guide to Racism (C. H. Dalton)
Stereotypes are a useful, if flawed, mechanism for surviving in a multicultural world, but racism is saying them out loud.
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To sum up, racism is the hatred of members of another ethnic group solely because of their race, and it is often informed by negative and untrue stereotypes. It’s okay to hate someone because of who they are, but hating them because of their ethnicity alone is racist.
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It’s not the Hispanics’ fault that they are willing to work harder for less than all the lazy, entitled American people living below the poverty line, but that doesn’t mean that we want them in this country. While there are some exceptional, talented Hispanics (e.g., Julio Iglesias, Enrique Iglesias, Julio Iglesias, Jr.), most of them are uneducated and criminally inclined. To add insult to injury, Hispanic lawbreakers are also more diligent and industrious than American criminals.
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Historically, the Jews have been the most consistently and ardently hated race in the world. And it’s because they killed Jesus.
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In the end, whites are more to be pitied than feared, whether they be urbane, educated New Englanders, or backward, borderline-retarded outlanders. They are bubbling, overflowing cauldrons of racial hatred, it is true, but most of that hatred is directed inward, and takes the form of guilt. And, really, haven’t they suffered enough?
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There are many superficial differences between Indians and Injuns. From their manners of dress to their attitudes, they seem at first glance to be entirely different races. It is only through the trained lens of science that we have found these two groups to be part of the same, overarching ethnicity. Now that we know that they are members of the same race, it is easy to see the overwhelming similarities between them. They are unmistakably alike in their physical traits, such as the redness of their skin and the wiry agility of their frames, as well as many of their less tangible qualities. For example, both groups make excellent sidekicks. Hadji was an able partner to Race Bannon, while the Injun Tonto served as the Lone Ranger’s sadomasochistic submissive for many years.
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My theory is that all of the differences between the two groups can be explained by their different habitats and cultural influences over the last few centuries. The Hindoos benefited for many years from the civilizing influence of their English rulers, and it shows. Not many races wear white slacks, or drink that much (non-hallucinogenic) tea. Despite their savage tendencies, this is clearly a people that has benefited from British rule, and their current success bears this out.
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The Hindoos eventually rejected their benevolent British overseers, but only after decades of idyllic life in the Empire. Injuns, on the other hand, never had this advantage. They rebelled against American culture from the start, and, when they failed, they simply removed themselves from modern life altogether. It is only in recent years that Injuns have made any attempt to integrate into American society, and only time will tell if they will be successful. If you removed their cultural and geographical influences, I believe that the apparent dissimilarities between Indians and Injuns would disappear. As it stands, Hindoos and Injuns are far more alike than we had previously realized.
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History and society may have treated them differently, but the Indians and the Injuns are, in fact, one and the same. And, perhaps one day, both will accept the full benefit of Western rule. It is important to remember that, while they may live filthy, subhuman existences, ungraced by the rule of law, Indians and Injuns are also wise in their own way. They are proud, brown peoples, with a deep, mystical understanding of both the spirit and the natural world. We can learn a lot from their vision quests16. and yoga trances. There is a nobility to these savages that we must not ignore.
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Blacks are peaceful and easygoing for the most part, because of their lives of social and economic privilege. But one thing’s for sure: They certainly are a musical people. Oh, and they fucking hate the Jews. Presumably out of penis envy.
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In conclusion, the Orange Menace is real and inevitable. While the ordinary Asian is relatively harmless, like ants they are a terrifying, unstoppable threat when amassed as one. Also, like ants, they are nuts for nougat.
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These inaccurate, frequently contradictory stereotypes come from a lack of familiarity with the Merpeople. I hope that this chapter has given the reader some insight into their physiology, their culture, and their reproductive rituals, and perhaps this newfound understanding will help lead to a greater understanding among the races. After all, we’re not really so different. From the waist up, Mermen can easily be mistaken for whites, just like Centaurs, Satyrs, and the Jews. Then again, the rest of the races aren’t filthy, fish-fucking freaks.
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The Arabs are responsible for much of what we think of as modern civilization, from government and architecture, to geometry, naval exploration, and shawarma.4. Unfortunately, the race’s most public figures are a marginalized extremist movement that is doing its best to blow all of that up. The key to combating extremist groups like al-Qaeda and the Taliban is to do everything we can to make all Arabs hate America. That way, those extremists groups won’t actually be so extreme, and we can fight a race war, rather than an ideological one. So far, U.S. foreign policy is doing an extraordinary job of making that dream a reality.
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Prejudice against the Gypsies is widespread, but not undeserved. They are a lying race of thieves and tricksters with only one thing on their mind: separating you from your money. That said, racial discrimination is never acceptable, and the Roma people have endured too much of it over the years. Perhaps, using outreach and understanding rather than hate, we can learn to understand and, eventually, control these subhuman criminals. Of course, like dogs and children, some races are simply unteachable. In the meantime, Gypsies have received reparations from some of their worst tormentors, in the form of boxes of free, brightly colored rags. While Gypsies are not allowed to open casinos, like the Injuns, police in most countries turn a blind eye to their illegal monte operations. They are de facto allowed to operate one-, two-, three-, and even four-card monte games, and Asian monte games in a separate room.

Random clippings from The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Simon Baron-Cohen)

Jef — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 20:32:49 +0000

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The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Simon Baron-Cohen)
- Highlight on Page 2 | Loc. 118-20 | Added on Saturday, October 01, 2011, 09:50 AM

How can humans treat other people as objects?b How do humans come to switch off their natural feelings of sympathy for another human being who is suffering?
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The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Simon Baron-Cohen)
- Highlight on Page 5 | Loc. 151-59 | Added on Saturday, October 01, 2011, 09:53 AM

The standard explanation is that the Holocaust (sadly, as we shall see, echoed in many cultures historically across the globe) is an example of the “evil” that humans are capable of inflicting on one another. Evil is treated as incomprehensible, a topic that cannot be dealt with because the scale of the horror is so great that nothing can convey its enormity. The standard view turns out to be widely held, and indeed the concept of evil is routinely used as an explanation for such awful behaviors: Why did the murderer kill an innocent child? Because he was evil. Why did this terrorist become a suicide bomber? Because she was evil. But when we hold up the concept of evil to examine it, it is no explanation at all. For a scientist this is, of course, wholly inadequate. What the Nazis (and others like them) did was unimaginably terrible. But that doesn’t mean we should simply shut down the inquiry into how people are capable of behaving in such ways or use a nonexplanation, such as saying people are simply evil.
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The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Simon Baron-Cohen)
- Highlight on Page 6 | Loc. 159-62 | Added on Saturday, October 01, 2011, 09:54 AM

As a scientist I want to understand what causes people to treat others as if they were mere objects. In this book I explore how people can treat each other cruelly not with reference to the concept of evil, but with reference to the concept of empathy. Unlike the concept of evil, empathy has explanatory power. In the coming chapters I put empathy under the microscope.
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The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Simon Baron-Cohen)
- Highlight on Page 6 | Loc. 165-67 | Added on Saturday, October 01, 2011, 09:55 AM

Empathy erosion can arise because of corrosive emotions, such as bitter resentment, or desire for revenge, or blind hatred, or a desire to protect. In theory these are transient emotions, the empathy erosion reversible. But empathy erosion can be the result of more permanent psychological characteristics.
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The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Simon Baron-Cohen)
- Highlight on Page 6 | Loc. 167-73 | Added on Saturday, October 01, 2011, 09:56 AM

The insight that empathy erosion arises from people turning other people into objects goes back at least to Martin Buber, an Austrian philosopher who resigned his professorship at the University of Frankfurt in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power. The title of Buber’s famous book is Ich und Du (I and Thou).5 He contrasted the Ich-Du (I-you) mode of being (where you are connecting with another person as an end in itself) with the Ich-Es (I-it) mode of being (where you are connecting with a person or object, so as to use them for some purpose). He argued that the latter mode of treating a person was devaluing. Figure 2: Martin Buber When our empathy is switched off, we are solely in the “I” mode. In such a state we relate only to things or
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The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Simon Baron-Cohen)
- Highlight on Page 7 | Loc. 176-77 | Added on Saturday, October 01, 2011, 09:56 AM

Treating other people as if they were just objects is one of the worst things you can do to another human being, to ignore their subjectivity, their thoughts and feelings.
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The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Simon Baron-Cohen)
- Highlight on Page 8 | Loc. 181-82 | Added on Saturday, October 01, 2011, 09:58 AM

But even if the person’s project is positive, worthy, and valuable, if it is single-minded, it is by definition unempathic).d
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The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Simon Baron-Cohen)
- Highlight on Page 14 | Loc. 248 | Added on Saturday, October 01, 2011, 10:12 AM

What is empathy? And why do some people have less than others?
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The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Simon Baron-Cohen)
- Highlight on Page 15 | Loc. 256-60 | Added on Saturday, October 01, 2011, 10:14 AM

But first we need a definition of empathy. There are lots of ways to define it, but here’s how mine begins: Empathy occurs when we suspend our single-minded focus of attention and instead adopt a double-minded focus of attention. “Single-minded” attention means we are thinking only about our own mind, our current thoughts or perceptions. “Double-minded” attention means we are keeping in mind someone else’s mind at the very same time.
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The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Simon Baron-Cohen)
- Highlight on Page 16 | Loc. 266-69 | Added on Saturday, October 01, 2011, 10:15 AM

So we can extend the definition of empathy as follows: Empathy is our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion. This suggests there are at least two stages in empathy: recognition and response.
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The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Simon Baron-Cohen)
- Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 271-72 | Added on Saturday, October 01, 2011, 10:16 AM

Empathy therefore requires not only that you can identify another person’s feelings and thoughts, but that you respond to these with an appropriate emotion.
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The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Simon Baron-Cohen)
- Highlight on Page 43 | Loc. 555-61 | Added on Tuesday, October 04, 2011, 08:32 AM

Zero degrees of empathy means you have no awareness of how you come across to others, how to interact with others, or how to anticipate their feelings or reactions. Your Empathy Mechanism functions at Level 0. You feel mystified by why relationships don’t work out, and your lack of empathy creates a deep-seated self-centeredness. Other people’s thoughts and feelings are just off your radar. This leaves you doomed to do your own thing, in your own little bubble, not just oblivious to other people’s feelings and thoughts but also oblivious to the idea that there might even be other points of view. The consequence is that you believe 100 percent in the rightness of your own ideas and beliefs, and judge anyone who does not hold your beliefs as wrong or stupid.
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The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Simon Baron-Cohen)
- Highlight on Page 51 | Loc. 640-43 | Added on Tuesday, October 04, 2011, 10:03 AM

The hallmark of borderlines is a constant fear of abandonment, emotional pain and loneliness, hatred (of others and of themselves), impulsivity, and self-destructive, highly inconsistent behavior. Jerold Kreisman and Hal Straus summarize borderlines in the title of their book I Hate You—Don’t Leave Me.93 This neatly sums up the contradictory behavior in borderlines.
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The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Simon Baron-Cohen)
- Highlight on Page 55 | Loc. 682-91 | Added on Tuesday, October 04, 2011, 10:08 AM

Borderlines, it turns out, are pretty common: In the general population they make up around 2 percent. Among those who turn up for counseling or psychiatric help, it is even more common: About 15 percent are borderline. Among people who commit suicide, about 33 percent are borderline. And in clinics for those with eating disorders, alcoholism, and/or drug abuse, Type B may be present in as many as 50 percent.94–96 The hallmarks of borderlines are self-destructive impulsivity, anger, and mood swings. (Appendix 2 contains a list of symptoms for borderlines.) Borderlines also tend to think in very black-and-white ways (so-called “splitting”), so that people are either “all good” or “all bad.” (This may be why borderlines can be particularly attracted to cults because the cult leader is seen by members as all good.) Borderlines are also very manipulative—for example, acting as if they are weak and helpless, or using sexual seduction, or threatening suicide to get attention. In terms of the two major components of empathy (recognition and response), it may be that Type Bs have difficulties in both—they are certainly failing to react to others with an appropriate emotion, and they may also have difficulty reading intentions and emotions in faces accurately.
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The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Simon Baron-Cohen)
- Highlight on Page 92 | Loc. 1120-21 | Added on Wednesday, October 05, 2011, 07:37 AM

is speculated that Type N may also derive from excessive admiration, excessive praise for their good looks or talents, overindulgence, and being over-valued in the absence of realistic feedback (by parents).
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The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Simon Baron-Cohen)
- Highlight on Page 95 | Loc. 1147-49 | Added on Wednesday, October 05, 2011, 07:41 AM

zero degrees of empathy does not invariably lead a person to do awful things to others. Having empathy difficulties may be socially disabling, but empathy is not the sole route to developing a moral code and a moral conscience that leads a person to behave ethically.
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The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Simon Baron-Cohen)
- Highlight on Page 95 | Loc. 1152-54 | Added on Wednesday, October 05, 2011, 07:42 AM

People with Asperger Syndrome are Zero-Positive for two reasons. First, in their case their empathy difficulties are associated with having a brain that processes information in ways that can lead to talent. Second, the way their brain processes information paradoxically leads them to be supermoral rather than immoral.
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The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Simon Baron-Cohen)
- Highlight on Page 109 | Loc. 1304-6 | Added on Wednesday, October 05, 2011, 08:04 AM

My definition of truth is neither mystical nor divine, nor is it obscured by unnecessary philosophical complexity. Truth is (pure and simply) repeatable, verifiable patterns. Sometimes we call such patterns “laws” or “rules,” but essentially they are just patterns.
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The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Simon Baron-Cohen)
- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 1392-97 | Added on Wednesday, October 05, 2011, 08:20 AM

Here we see the link between Systemizing and Empathizing Mechanisms: If you have a highly tuned Systemizing Mechanism, you are less focused on unlawful phenomena such as emotions, in part because of a need for precision. A highly tuned Systemizing Mechanism turns out to be an additional route to zero degrees of empathy. Whereas if your Systemizing Mechanism is tuned low, you can tolerate imprecision, but at Level 6, it is the opposite. Other people’s behavior is beyond comprehension, and empathy is impossible. When his colleague said to Michael the bell-ringer, “I have to go to my friend’s funeral,” Michael simply replied, “Okay. What time will you be back?”
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The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Simon Baron-Cohen)
- Highlight on Page 120 | Loc. 1429-31 | Added on Wednesday, October 05, 2011, 09:39 AM

The psychopath is aware that he is hurting someone because the “cognitive” (recognition) element of empathy is (largely) intact, even if the “affective” element (the emotional response to someone else’s feeling) is not. The person with classic (low-functioning) autism often lacks both of these components of empathy.