By Erich Vieth on February 04th, 2009
Penn and Teller explain sleight of hand in three minutes
Penn and Teller’s explanation of sleight of hand is delightful. You get the whole lecture in about three minutes.
As entertaining as this video is, it could also serve to remind us of a set of principles by which humans deceive each others through fallacious and misleading arguments. Because we are creatures of limited attention and growing fatigue, we are vulnerable to cognitive misdirection much as we are vulnerable to prestidigitation.
For more on human attentional limitations, see here. Further, I have given considerable thought to the idea that much human decision-making could be explained in terms of attentional limitations. For more, see this paper I wrote in 1996.
- How to make a rubber hand magically turn into YOUR hand.
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- It’s like trying to explain how you can get “numbers from biscuits” or “ethics from rhubarb.”
Have you ever read any of Boyd’s work on the OODA Loop? It’s a little hard to find (unless you’re a Marine, they’ve more or less enshrined it) but it’s a simplified yet meaningful analysis of sentient rational decision making.
If you haven’t, a quick google search will find the presentations. Boyd never put his work in essay or book format, but it doesn’t really suffer from being in what amounts to PowerPoint.
If you have, or if you take the time to hunt and read, either the “Observation” or “Orientation” phase of decision making is where I think the attention span would come in.