Don't Overdo This!

One thing men love is to instruct women. If a woman wants to enchant a man, she is wise to play his pupil. Men fall for this.

Roger Ebert, "500 Days of Summer" (via)

Literature Explained

I don't think the content of the life experience should determine whether a person writes a memoir at all. At all! People's lives don't vary much in terms of interestingness; what varies is how perceptive the writer is.

Rhian Mellis, "Who Should Write a Memoir?"

Discrimination

Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation. But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.

Jonathan Haidt (quoted here)

So, What about Perfect Uncertainty?

[L]ogarithmically right is a good way of describing how one’s beliefs should be transformed to be a fair approximation of the truth. When you think you are right, you probably are — but logarithmically. Much less than you think.

Seth Roberts, "Logarithmically Right"

Why Is Truth Stranger Than Fiction?

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

Mark Twain

Central Heating

Many have suffered from being in a building where there was a centralized thermostat for the whole building (or the whole floor), with the predictable result that some rooms are way too hot or way too cold. (Sounds like a metaphor, watch for it…)

Things were even more extreme in the former Soviet Union, where there were centralized heating plants for a whole city, and the hot air would then be pumped out to individual homes and offices. So basically the whole city had one centralized thermostat.

What a nice and simple solution there is: give each room its own thermostat. First, there is automatic adjustment from the thermostat to keep it from being too hot or too cold. Second, the people in the room at any one moment can choose to adjust the thermostat according to their preferences.

William Easterly, "Skeptics and Thermostats" (via)

I Can't Believe Nixon Won

Smart, curious people consistently overestimate the economic impact of information technology, in part because it improves their own lives so much.

Tyler Cowen, "Paul Krugman's Predictions from 1998"

I Smell Policy Relevance

Beware too easily assuming that others would be better off if they were more like you.

Robin Hanson, "Less Mature with Age"

Film Explained

2001 is a nonverbal experience; out of two hours and nineteen minutes of film, there are only a little less than forty minutes of dialog. I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content. To convolute McLuhan, in 2001 the message is the medium. I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does; to "explain" a Beethoven symphony would be to emasculate it by erecting an artificial barrier between conception and appreciation.

Stanley Kubrick, interviewed by Eric Nordern for Playboy, reprinted as pp. 47-74 in Stanley Kubrick: Interviews, ed. Gene D. Phillips, pp. 47-48

"That is why developing small but healthy habits that over time will become automatic is so money."

It is a profoundly erroenous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle--they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

Alfred Whitehead (quoted here)

Is It True? If So, Is It a Common Ground Problem?

We often think of people with extreme views as more passionate about them than people with moderate views. But we make a mistake when we assume that this passion translates into an eagerness to discuss. People who study radicalization of, say, terrorists note that as the subject becomes more radical in ideology, his evangelical zeal diminishes. Radicals turn inward.

Eli Dourado, "The Lonely Radicals" (via)