Good Human Ate Conspiracy Prophet Friend
Is The Brain Good At What It Does by Christopher Chabris (New York Times): There are two different arguments about the brain being put forward in pop psychology books at the moment: a) the brain is awesome and capable of anything; and b) the brain is a rigged together pile of junk that mostly only works accidentally. So who’s right? The metaphor Chabris prefers is that it’s like a good iOS app - capable of awesome stuff, easy to update, but full of bugs. [via]
The King Of Human Error by Michael Lewis (Vanity Fair): Daniel Kahneman is one of a very small number of psychologists who’ve won a Nobel Prize. This is largely because there is no Nobel Prize for psychology - instead he and his friend Amos Tversky won the Nobel Prize for Economics for showing that people aren’t rational (something which seems incredibly obvious to anyone who isn’t an economist, I suspect). But Kahneman is an intriguing character - he says that his famous research program with Tversky was motivated by thinking “what’s something stupid I do? Is that normal?” And he’s apparently spent most of the years post Nobel Prize trying to disprove the research that won him the Nobel Prize. [via]
The Movie Set That Ate Itself by Michael Idov (GQ): Ilya Khrzhanovsky is making his very own Synecdoche, New York, except it’s more 1950s Moscow, USSR. And he has been making the movie since 2006. Extras are dressed up in period clothing - including the reporter and photographer from GQ - and are forbidden from using anachronistic words or talking as if the set isn’t actually real - Idov gets in a lot of trouble for doing so. [via]
Energy: Friend Or Enemy? by William D. Nordhaus (New York Review Of Books): A good overview here of the economics of energy; basically economists have realised that energy is the lifeblood of an economy - you can’t keep it running without expending energy. However, economists also now believe that the price of energy does not reflect its true cost, its ‘externalities’. For example, the money you pay in your electricity bill does not reflect the externalities of the coal power plant, as it pumps out carbon and sulfur - according to Nordhaus, that power should cost about 70% more. Of course, politicians don’t really like to tell their constituents that they should pay more on their electricity bill… [via]
Quack Prophet by Colin Dickey (Lapham’s Quarterly): So who was Nostradamus anyway? A Frenchman who started off as a quack, toting herbal remedies for various ailments, he gained stature in that field simply by not actually dying from the plague. Then, he decided he was going to become an astrologer and try to predict the seasons, which he apparently did quite well. From there he learned how to write obtuse prophecies that were specific enough to seem legit but obtuse enough that you could only really know after the fact. But people lapped it up, argues Dickey, because they wanted to know that there was some order in their shitty, unpredictable lives. [via]
A Conspiracy Of Hogs: The McRib As Arbitrage by Willy Staley (The Awl): Staley here wonders why McDonalds’ McRib, a sort of pork burger (that I don’t think we’ve ever had in Australia?), gets put on the menu and taken off so regularly. The reason? Profitwise, McDonalds are not so much a restaurant but a supply chain trying to capitalise on their investment in ingredients. And so the McRib goes on the market when the price of pork dips enough that McDonalds can make a good profit from it. [via]
-
czumikakoooo liked this
-
malicacid liked this
-
tomewing liked this
-
o-song posted this
