Every couple of weeks a reader asks me (through email) whether it is OK to link to one of our posts. Absolutely! Linking makes us more available to more readers. Further, linking to our posts makes our site more visible on Google and other search engines. Therefore, if you see a Dangerous Intersection…
A short and sobering post on Huffpo by Thomas De Zengotita.
In Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes (1982), Frans de Waal discusses reconciliation, but he's not talking about human beings who are making up after fighting. Rather, de Waal is describing the reconciliation he has observed in communities of chimpanzees: Sometimes the maneuver is fairly obvious. Within a minute…
According to our president, here is the lesson about Iraq that America learned from Vietnam: "We'll succeed unless we quit." Keith Olbermann doesn't see it that way.
Jason’s post about conspiracies reminded me of several books that support Jason’s argument.
The first book is How We Know What Isn’t so: the Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life, by Thomas Gilovich (1991). Gilovich points to a number of experiments demonstrating that people strive to find order in the world where there is none. We don’t find random distributions easy to process. Rather, we allow our imaginations to run wild on randomness:
With hindsight it is always possible to spot the most anomalous features of the data and build a favorable statistical analysis around them. However, if properly trained scientist (or simply a wise person) avoids doing so because he or she recognizes that constructing a statistical analysis retrospectively capitalizes too much on chance and renders the analysis meaningless. . . . unfortunately, the intuitive assessments of the average person are not bound by these constraints.
Here’s another good example of people finding order where there isn’t, on Mars.
People are also “extraordinarily good at ad hoc explanations.” Our motives and fears ignite our imaginations:
…Once a person has misidentified a random pattern as a “real” phenomenon, it will not exist as a puzzling, isolated fact about the world. Rather, it is quickly explained and readily integrated into the person’s pre-existing theories and beliefs. These theories, furthermore, then serve to bias the person’s evaluation of new information in such a way that the initial belief becomes solidly entrenched. . . . people cling tenaciously to their beliefs in
