Thoughts From the Center: 2018

LIST OF POSTS

SITII 1

SITII 2

SITII 3

SITII 4

SITII 5

SITII 6- Hypnosis Works

SITII 7- A Little Back Story

SITII 8 Learning

SITII 9 Imprinting

SITII 10 Imprinting 2

SITII 11 The Halo Effect

SITII: Happiness: What Science Says About It
SITII 4 Problems With Republican Ideas
SITII Military Spending is a Racket
SITII- Personality Matters Less Than Politics- The George Bush Rule
SITII Love-ability
SITII 32: Voter Fraud-- Mostly Republicans Do It
SITII: Viral News Flash---- No Mother Ever Brought Home a Penguin
SITII: Economic Stimulus
SITII: Criticism doesn't work as well as everyone thinks it does

Stuff I Think is Important: 1

March 15, 2008 at 1:30pm

Recently I was playing the question game with a friend of mine and he challenged me with this question: "what are the ten most important things you've learned?"

The first thing I said is this:

Paying attention to the words someone uses is often less important than paying attention to their body language. Body language is very difficult to lie with.

To say this is a truism, a cliche. But if you pay attention to it during conversations and you learn to use your own, you will be halfway toward what people describe as charisma.

Just ask Barack Obama.

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Stuff I Think Is Important: 2

March 17, 2008 at 10:12am

The thing is. I tend to get screwed in business deals. Why? Because taking great pride in being easy to please puts me in a tough spot when it comes to negotiating.

I'm just not the sort of person to fight over small details.

However, if you do want to understand business persuasion, the tactics salesmen will use on you, the tactics friends will use to manipulate you, the tactics your parents have been using on your your entire life, you will be amazed when you read Robert Cialdini's work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini

When you read him, it will sound obvious, but if you try to use a few of these things, you will realize that these principles are subconscious. They influence people far, far more than they know.

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Stuff I Think Is Important: 3

March 18, 2008 at 2:24pm

Ok. The first two things covered body language and common persuasion tactics. So I think I'll give a little bit of background about my overall thought process.

I used to be very, very interested in this question, "how do you convince someone to do what needs to be done?"

As a teacher, the relevance of this is obvious. In everyday life, perhaps it is less so. However, just today I learned of a good friend who is messing around with a shallow, manipulative woman that he supposedly has stopped talking to. This friend has a chronic problem: he puts sex with questionable women above other commitments in his life. The world is full of selfish, unreasonable people like that. So how do you deal with them?

Unfortunately, I don't think there is anything that you can do to reason with a guy like that. However, some skilled therapists disagree.

Here are some of the tactics they use to try to break through verbal defenses with their patients. These verbal defenses are always related to some irrational or dangerous behavior.

These verbal tricks to distract the subject and change the topic, sometimes help people get out of their mental habits. These are tools for trying to change irrational beliefs.

What Cialdini is to business, Sleight of Mouth is to conversational therapy.

So I give you, Sleight of Mouth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleight_of_mouth

As always, reading it is of little use in itself. Practice will reveal results. These tools are occasionally very helpful but often fail. I like knowing about them. I think it gives me more options in a difficult conversation.

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Stuff I Think is Important: 4

March 20, 2008 at 12:55pm

I have this friend who is a nice guy on some levels.

However, he is a total lunatic. He is an ok guitar player (a 3-4 on a 1-10 scale) and a poor singer (2-3 on a 1-10 scale).

He would tell you that he is really close to being able to go out and play shows around town for cash. He thinks he is a good singer and a good guitar player. He is sadly, hilariously, wrong.

This stupid belief leads him to hardly practice his guitar playing. When he does practice, he is always "performing," playing a song from start to finish, never doing the work of practicing one lick over and over until he gets it right.

This means that he often partially screws up parts of songs while playing. Of course, he doesn't think the audience minds, but they do.

And he will not play a show and get the audience to clap anytime soon.

He is an example of a cognitive bias. They are common. They are real. And they are probably, some of the biggest reasons you made crappy decisions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

(These biases and limiting beliefs are just the sort of things meant to be addressed by Sleight of Mouth. However, I'm not up to the challenge is this case. When I deal with unreasonable people, I get frustrated, and Sleight of Mouth only works when you maintain an inner calm.)

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Stuff I Think is Important: 5

March 22, 2008 at 10:18am

To recap the first four. I've brought up a few basic tools for communicating with difficult people.

1. Body Language
2. Cialdini's Six Weapons of Influence
3. Sleight of Mouth
4. Cognitive Biases

When I first wrote a bit about body language, I wrote it because I was struck by the fact that people often wildly undercut their meaning.

For instance, tutors who sit hunched over a book are sending a message to students that says, "I am busy. Do not bother me."

For instance, a speaker who shifts his position and gestures frequently while speaking, distracts from the meaning of his words. The information from the body gets processed while the words get less attention.

There are lots of general lessons that can be taken from a study of body language. Particularly when trying to deal with an authory figure or to project authority.

Now I'll go a step further and explain a specific technique that's hard to do.

If there is anyone is your life that is difficult to communicate with, trying mirroring them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirroring_(psychology)

This is a difficult trick to do because it requires an insane amount of attention to carry on a full speed conversation and do this at once.

However, mirroring works. When a conversation is in sync, both members of the conversation notice. It is a pleasent background feeling of mutual understanding.

In my life, I try to do this consciously when I'm in one on one conversations with students. And I notice it often happens effortlessly around people I get along with.

If you actually want to try to help anyone with a limiting belief or a cognitive bias, you'd be insane not to try this as a first step.

If you need someone to hear what you are saying, and get it, this is clearly the first step.

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Stuff I Think Is Important 6- Hypnosis Works

March 25, 2008 at 1:19pm

Hypnosis works. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnosis

Well. To be precise, it works for some things and it works very well. I view hypnosis as a simple technique for entering altered states of consciousness. I think hypnotists are people that have learned to gain enough trust and relaxation from others that the others let them guide them into an altered state of consciousness.

I have seen this work in person a number of times. Most spectacularly, I saw a performance of a stage hypnotist named J Medicine Hat that was dynamite.

After that show, I decided to do my research. Here are the facts. People tried to brush off hypnosis as a myth for a long time. Everyone knew that some people like yogis could meditate until they felt no pain, etc, but almost noone credible could demonstrate an ability to bring others into altered states like that.

Then Milton Erickson arrived. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Erickson Whatever else can be said about it, this guy got amazing results very quickly. Then psychiatry had to take it seriously, and they still do.

Some people are clearly more hypnotizable and some people are better at inducing hypnosis than others. Some people use it for things it has been proven effective for and some people do not. I make no claim that it really can control people, and I would be incredibly embarrassed to try to put someone else in a trance. However….

I use it on myself regularly when I exercise. Quite simply, I use a mental procedure to cause my mind not to notice the fatigue of my body. This works only for cardio workouts like bike rides or running. Just as pain can be reduced/ ignored using hypnosis, so can general muscle fatigue. For me, running is an out of body experience, and so are many repetitive chores that I don’t intrinsically enjoy.

It’s a tool with limited uses, but it’s a tool that I’m glad I found out about.

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Stuff I Think is Important: 7 (A little back story)

March 28, 2008 at 12:24pm

As far as psychology and recorded history are concerned, there is a whole lot of dispute.

One thing that isn't in dispute is human learning.

There are various predictable stages that human beings go through when learning a task.

These stages go from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence, then from conscious incompetence to conscious competence.

And after that, some experts get to the level of unconcsious competence.

This is the source of the cliche, ignorence is bliss. Over and over, people start out unaware of their lack of skill in a particular endeavor. Then something happens to them, they realize it, and they become depressed.

In fourth grade, it happened to me. At the time, I was busily kicking ass in school and making it very obvious to anyone who cared to look that I wanted to be the smartest kid in school. (I read the Hobbit in first grade while my classmates were reading the Berenstein bears.)

Then I was called into another teacher's class unexpectedly.

It seems that the teacher said the phrase, "noone knows everything, " and someone called out from the back, "I think Jeff Cook does!"

So I was called into the room and asked a number of simple trivia questions, and that day I realized that I had terrible social skills.

I went from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence that day. I decided, then and there, that I needed to work harder than other people in order to relate, to make friends, and communicate.

Of course, my plan was a miserable failure. At the time, my best idea was to become a people pleaser rather than a smug brainiac.

However, years later, I think I've learned a few things. That's the basic theme of what I'm typing here.

That's why I find this stuff important.

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Stuff I Think Is Important: 8

March 29, 2008 at 12:47pm

There are only a few ways that human beings learn things.

As a part of natural human growth and development. – These things happen within a critical time period. Walking, Talking, Sitting Up. These things also involve certain psychological milestones like the things Erich From talks about. In a certain sense, many personality traits are learned in this way.

As the unconscious result of repeated activity – Over time, a person will usually improve at any task they perform repeatedly. At first, new bartenders are clumsy at their job. After a few months, their motions are smooth and efficient, (more poetic by far than any flashy Cocktail style trick if you ask me.)

This type of learning requires two things. It happens when a person receives feedback and the person does not ignore that feedback. In the case of the bartender, the feedback is either complaints from customers, or, more likely, the realization that the faster he or she makes drinks, the more money the bartender will take home.

This kind of learning isn’t noticed typically. Some other examples would include becoming a better driver, a better listener, a better conversationalist, a better kisser, a better cook. Since the changes are small and take place over time, the person often realizes they have gotten better when someone tells them.

But Jeff,

You’re thinking, “many people never become a better driver, a better listener…”

That’s true. It’s easy to ignore feedback.

Ignoring the feedback usually takes one of three forms.

1.Discredit the messenger. - If someone tells you you’re a bad kisser, and you say, “maybe you’re the bad kisser!” back, you just discredited the messenger. If your family tells you that you’re lasagna recipe sucks, and you think, “they have terrible taste in food,” and then you keep the same lasagna recipe, you just discredited the messenger.

(I apologize for the completely unintended similarity of the last two sentences to Jeff Foxworthy’s You Might Be a Redneck Jokes. It was an accident. Those responsible have been waterboarded.)

2.Being actually unaware.- Daydreamers of the world. I am looking in your direction. Driving, Listening, Conversation. These are three that require attention to notice the feedback that is there. Cooking requires it too come to think of it. Zen monks talk about mindful eating for a reason.
3.Changing the subject.

The other two methods of human learning are conscious/deliberate learning, and imprinting. Of those two, imprinting is clearly the most fun, and I’m not just saying that because it has more to do with sex.

Imprinting isn’t just about sex. Imprinting is also about religion, about ancient taboos and modern brainwashing techniques. I think that imprinting is what keeps most therapists in business.

Imprinting is the reason I won’t eat mushrooms on my pizza anymore.

But more on that later. I’ve got to go for now.

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Stuff I Think Is Important 9- Imprinting (1)

April 1, 2008 at 11:37am

Once when I was in college, I developed a crush on a girl in about 10 minutes.

Here's how it happened. I was in a Spanish class with a girl named Gwen. She was cute, but she sat across the room from me, so I never talked to her.

However, one day I happened to arrive at class about 10 minutes early. When I sat down on the floor outside the class door, Gwen arrived and promptly sat down next to me.

For the next ten minutes, we talked about something I can't remember at all. I remember having a great time talking to her, but little else.

Our classmates arrived. Our teacher did her thing; then we left.

Until that night, everything was normal. I was hanging out at a frat party on my campus, rather intoxicated, and then I saw her.

I felt surprised to see her out at a frat party, but I thought little else of it until I felt a tap on my shoulder later that night.

"JEFF!" Gwen practically shouted. "I think you ROCK." And then she lept into my arms and kissed me for about thirty seconds.

My head was spinning. I had no idea what was going on, but the next thing I knew, the kiss stopped, and she looked me in the eye.

"Have a great nght," she said. "That was a good kiss."

Then she walked away, and I couldn't help thinking about her for days.

This is an example of imprinting. There are more to come.

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Stuff I Think is Important: 10 - Imprinting (2)

April 3, 2008 at 9:22am

I hate mushrooms.

By that I'm not referring to the psychedelic kind or the poisonous kind. Those I simply avoid.

I'm talking about the kind that hides under the sauce in my pasta, the kind that masquerades as a sandwich in upscale delis.

I'm talking about the kind that lurks under the cheese on a pizza.

I'm talking about that specifically. A pizza almost killed me once.

You see, I make bad decisions when I'm intoxicated, and one of these decisions during college involved eating a mushroom pizza that had been in the fridge way too long.

Three hours later. I learned of my mistake, but I was more concerned with getting in trouble for drinking than I was for my own health.

Bad move, I spent the next 6 hours laying on the floor of a bathroom, periodically rising to dry heave, lucky to have suffered nothing worse.

Now I'm sure you're wondering...
Why is this anything more than a story of Jeff being stupid? What does this have to do with imprinting?

Simple. If I try to chew any type of mushroom and that taste hits my tongue, I immediately begin to gag and dry heave again. I mean literal gagging with tears in my eyes.

If the flavor is disguised, I'm fine. But my body has never forgotten that pizza I ate over ten years ago. (My friend Todd had a similar experience with clan McGregor whiskey. He can't even sip the stuff without becoming ill.)

This is imprinting. This is one of many examples where a single powerful experience changes the way your mind organizes its perceptions forever.

Now for those of you who are spiritually minded, I invite you to think about this.

The thing that Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, and Moses all seem to have in common is that they weren't always miraculous people.

(There is good reason to believe this is true of Jesus. However, please forgive me if that offends.)

One day, these four were relatively normal people, then something happened to them, and they were transformed. They became people so unusual, so different than those around them that they changed the course of the world.

The poor son of a carpenter, an illiterate, a spoiled prince, and a shepard had something happen to them and they became four of the most amazing people in recorded history. Think about that.

I think it was imprinting.

I wan't to say even more, but I've gone on too long already.

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Stuff I Think is Important: 11 - The Halo Effect

April 4, 2008 at 9:20am

In about thirty minutes I'm going to the gym to lift weights and do other painful things to my body.

Why?

It's called the halo effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

And it is one of the most depressing things I've ever learned in a psychology class.

Basically, one positive trait about a person (especially the one noticed first) causes people to irrationally upgrade their evaluations of the person's other traits.

Basically, well dressed and attractive people are thought to be better at things than they really are. (This works for other positive things too, but the beauty bias is the one that freaks me out.)

Here's some info from the research. (I got it from the Complete Idiots Guide to Body Language)

But the halo effect extends way beyond physical beauty. We tend to think that sports superstars actually know the tastiest beer or the coolest cars. We believe that Hollywood movie stars can help us select the best political candidates or mobile phone plans. The scariest thing about the halo effect is how mindless it is. It biases all of us, but we aren’t aware of the illogic of our responses.
Lots of body language operates the same way. It is natural to like warm, friendly people, but because of the halo effect, friendly, attractive, or socially skilled people get the job because the boss can’t tell real warmth or attractiveness from competence. –p.33

Even in the lowest elementary school years, teachers believe that handsome, clean and neatly dressed students are smarter than their less attractive classmates. –p.52 (ACK!!!!! Son of a bitch.)

We believe that pretty people have nicer personalities even though there is no research that suggests that personality and looks are meaningfully correlated. –p.52

Researchers have shown that, even controlling for other factors, good-looking defendants were less likely to be convicted than their unattractive counterparts. . . . Even when they are convicted, sentences tent to be lighter for more attractive, better-dressed defendants. –p.53

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So given this fact about psychology, it's tempting to bitch, but I hate that kind of response. My impulse is to use this to my advantage as much as I can.

So I'm off to the gym. And this weekend, I'm revamping my wardrobe.

Wish me luck.

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Stuff I Think is Important: 12 More From Body Language Research

April 7, 2008 at 10:06am

So, I began this little tour of ideas that have changed my life with a short discussion of body language.

But I'm not sure I gave enough detail to do it justice.

Think about body language like this. Oral language has been around for about 10,000 years, give or take. It is unique to the human species.

Body language, however, is the primary way that animals communicate. It has millions of years of evolutionary history behind it. It is hard wired into our brains, but almost completely absent from our consciousness. We note the effects of body language, not the body language itself.

It human beings, body language basically breaks down into a bunch of sub catagories. It includes, eye contact, touch (or lack of touch), arm position, hand position, leg positions, spacial relationships, and emblematic gestures.

In my last post, I wrote about the halo effect, focusing on the beauty bias. I focused on the beauty bias because I'm not beautiful, and it therefore pisses me off. (I am somewhere in the middle of the beauty scale)

Here's the good news. The halo effect works almost as well for a person with warm and powerful body language as it does for beautiful people.

So, my suggestion is this, take some time to master body language. It will take lots(!!!) of work, and it will change your life.

Oh, and one more suggestion, if you are ever in the presence of an attractive person who has mastered body language, RUN AWAY.

Seriously. Run.

Here are some helpful links, some more scientific than others.
http://www.positivityblog.com/index.php/2006/10/27/18-ways-to-improve-your-body-language/
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/3123.html
http://changingminds.org/explanations/behaviors/body_language/body_language.htm#Control
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_language

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Stuff I Think is Important 13- Turn Taking

April 8, 2008 at 10:55am

My father has a habit which has always driven me a little bit batty.

He says, whenever my family gathers as a group, very frequently, "let's talk about something that everybody at the table can participate in."

When I was growing up, this annoyed me because it meant that my interests, hobbies, and friends were not fit topics for conversation in my household.

Clearly, my mom and dad would not be able to converse intelligently about my friend John Weiman, for instance.

Instead, this maxim eventually led our family to restrict its conversation to food, short summaries of daily events, and discussions of future chores and responsibilities that the children had.

I disliked this because I felt my father was faking an interest in being polite, so he could talk about his favorite topics and silence other topics.

However, there is something to be said for his maxim. Although I think it was applied hamfistedly, he was on to something, namely the fact that participation creates interest.

Noone can interestedly listen to conversation for more than an certain amount of time unless they are participating (or feel able to participate).

This is common knowledge to teachers, but a whole lot of people have no concept of turn taking in conversation.

Those who are aware of it are always more fun to talk to.

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Stuff I Think Is Important- 14 There are no villians.

April 9, 2008 at 9:40am

Villians exist in stories. They do not exist in the real world.

Atrocities exist in the real world. Easily preventable genocides exist. Easily preventable diseases kill millions in developing coutries each year. Starvation exists, (and estimates say that it could be wiped out within 20 years if the US alone used 3 percent of its bomb budget on it, but I digress... ).

Evil people do not exist.

The people who do evil things, upon examination, always turn out to be one of two options, "mentally ill" or "fairly normal people who pursued what they saw to be their self interest, who did what they had to do" (the accounts of men who interviewed "monsters" overwhelmingly support this. Psychology agrees)

"Evil people" are selfish, not evil.

It kind of makes you wonder about basing our economy on the hope that individuals selfishly looking out for themselves will gradually improve society through their competition. Competing doesn't fill me with love for my competitors. How about you?

(And by the way, corporations are sociopaths. They make it easy for people to abdicate moral responsibility for extreme selfishness.)

Selfishness is natural, like arsenic, like a black mamba, like the ice age that wiped out the dinosaurs. It isn't selfishness that is bad.

It is selfishness unchecked by moral conscience, peer disapproval, or economic regulation that is bad.

That, my friends, is the non-fairy tale version of what evil truly is.

We call people villians because it makes a good story.

But that's what it is. It's a story.

There are no villians.

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Jeff Cook I wanted to say a bit more about mental illness, but I didn't want to go on and on in the main note.

(First of all, I need to state that I use mental illness in a non-technical sense. My psychiatrist friend would be on my ass if I forgot to mention i...See More

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10y

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Amelia Fulbright Re: the note on villains, I think I pretty much completely agree. I think we all have the potential to turn into so-called "villains," if we don't consistently choose love and kindness over greed or self-interest. When I worked as a chaplain in a men...See More

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10y

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Jeff Cook Re: Exchanging words. I love that this little website makes that possible. I'd like it to continue, (but I know you are busier than me!). If you ever have any words, sermons, poems or songs you'd like to share, I'd love to hear em.

Re: The s...See More

Re: The second thing.
Damn. I deleted the ex-girlfriends remark in the post because it was a joke and in bad taste! Forgive me. I forgot to delete the reference in the comment.

I think you could tell from the comment part that the original was meant as joke, (you always could take a joke), but I now want to retype the original so I can make my loving lack of seriousness totally clear. It came after, "evil people are selfish, not evil."

("Most terrorists are mentally ill, much like some of my ex-girlfriends. Grin.")

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Stuff I Think Is Important 16: The When Harry Met Sally Rule

April 11, 2008 at 11:48am

Harry Burns: You realize of course that we could never be friends.
Sally Albright: Why not?
Harry Burns: What I'm saying is - and this is not a come-on in any way, shape or form - is that men and women can't be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.
Sally Albright: That's not true. I have a number of men friends and there is no sex involved.
Harry Burns: No you don't.
Sally Albright: Yes I do.
Harry Burns: No you don't.
Sally Albright: Yes I do.
Harry Burns: You only think you do.
Sally Albright: You say I'm having sex with these men without my knowledge?
Harry Burns: No, what I'm saying is they all WANT to have sex with you.
Sally Albright: They do not.
Harry Burns: Do too.
Sally Albright: They do not.
Harry Burns: Do too.
Sally Albright: How do you know?
Harry Burns: Because no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.
Sally Albright: So, you're saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive?
Harry Burns: No. You pretty much want to nail 'em too.
Sally Albright: What if THEY don't want to have sex with YOU?
Harry Burns: Doesn't matter because the sex thing is already out there so the friendship is ultimately doomed and that is the end of the story.
Sally Albright: Well, I guess we're not going to be friends then.
Harry Burns: I guess not.
Sally Albright: That's too bad. You were the only person I knew in New York.

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When I heard this for the first time many years ago, I laughed. The reason is because I would often consciously seek out friendships with women I was attracted to with the idea that friendship could lead to romance.

After I got my head out of my ass, I had an even bigger laugh about the awe-inspiring stupidity of that idea.

Then time passed.

I decided that the real basis of all my friendships was common interests and mutual respect, so I pursued both male and female friendships with that in mind. However, since I had few female friends, I went out of my way to try to find more of them. I had noticed the habit that my female friends kept dating a male friend of mine, then leaving our circle when things went wrong.

An on I went, stumbling into and out of relationships, always on the lookout for people that shared my hobbies and my love of ideas.

Never once did I find myself attracted to one of my female friends. Never once did I try to kiss one. Never once did I even consider it.

And then, Matt Pryor, a beautifully perceptive son of a bitch, asked me this question.

"If one of these women showed up at your door tonight, and after you opened the door, she slowly closed the distance between you and kissed you, would you be excited about that?"

"Oh shit," I said.

"And haven't I heard you say that the most important thing you look for in a relationship is common interests?"

"Oh shit," I said.

"And why is it that you pursue female friends more often than male friends? Are you really trying to preserve some fifty-fifty friend ratio? Where does that idea come from?"

"Oh shit," I said.
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What interests me about this story is that I never noticed a feeling of attraction. I systematically ignored the underlying reality. I believed my own lies.

This is cognitive dissonance. The research about it will come soon.

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Jeff Cook Rereading this today makes me want to add this.

To any of my female friends, don't worry about the implications of this post. I'm better now.

Scout's honor. I'm better now.

(chuckle)

But if I wasn't, my point is that I probably wouldn't know.

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Jeff Cook

April 12, 2008

Stuff I Think is Important (a digression)

"I made a deal with God a while ago. If he kept forgiving me for all the times that I screw up and fail at being kind, then I'd promise to get furious at myself every time."

It's not that I beat myself up. It's not that I think I'm a bad person. It never goes to the point of making me unhappy. I decided that being too quick to forgive myself makes it harder to learn from my mistakes. (Obviously, this strategy can become a curse if over-used. However, I think most people under-use it.)

That emotional energy makes it certain that I wont forget, that I wont do nothing. I think the emotional energy drives me to change.

(And don't make to much of the earlier quote if you are curious about my religious ideas, either. I have a very unusual interpretation of religion that the way I talk does not make very clear.)

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Stuff I Find Important 18- Believing is Seeing

April 14, 2008 at 8:02pm

The same set of mechanisms that make it easy to survive make it hard to evolve. And I happen to think evolving is key to human happiness.

One example is the way our beliefs influence what we notice.

William James came up with/ first described the idea of selective attention as far as I can tell.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention

The concept is that, with limited capacity for attention, the brain scans everything and evaluates which to attend to, which to let into consciousness, in terms of a set of programs. (I believe this first level of memory is sensory memory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_memory )

These programs partially are survival programs from our animal nature. For example, we play the fight or flight game with every new creature that enters our field of vision. We test what we see against a mental set of possible threats. If we interpret a threat, our brain immediately, without conscious deliberation prepares us to fight or flee.

We pay large amounts of attention to things that move for this reason. People like myself don't even enter most of the inanimate objects in a room into consciousness.

Unlike the biological programs, there are other psychological programs that the human brain uses. These programs are based on basic survival needs, but they also are the outcome of culture, of conditioning, and past experience. The psychological programs are based on our beliefs.

Basically, to vastly oversimplify an area that psychology is in no distinct agreement about:

What the thinker thinks, the brain pays attention to. What the brain pays attention to, it remembers.

If the brain registers information that conflicts with what the thinker, thinks, then it ignores it or fails to remember it. If the brain registers information that agrees with the thinker, then it always brings it into short term memory and often brings it into long term memory.

In other words, we see only what we are prepared to see. UFO skeptics never see UFOs. Religious skeptics never see angels. Political ideologues never see good Democrats or good Republicans (if they are hard cord right or left wingers respectively).

This is why almost every ESP researcher does experiments that show the very real possibility of ESP and almost every ESP skeptic does experiments that show the very real impossibility of ESP.

This is why science, which is reputedly founded on experiment and fidelity to observation, takes so long to overturn old paridigms.

When those who were taught the old paridigm look at the new experiment, and see only the observations they are expecting. That's why Max Planck said this:

New scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Max Planck

This is why most innovations in poetry, mathematics, and other fields occur from men who are in their 20s and 30s. They are not so committed to a set of beliefs as to blind themselves to the novel, to the original, to the unprecendented.

The same set of mechanisms that made it easy to survive, make it difficult to evolve.

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Stuff I Think is Important: 19 - Believing is Seeing (2)

April 15, 2008 at 10:18am

Ok. I've been promising to drop a little bit of science to back up what I'm saying about cognitive dissonance, a part of the mechanism behind "believing is seeing."

So let me give you some quotes from Mistakes Were Made: But not by me, one of the most amazing books I've ever read. If you want to grow as a human being, you have to learn from mistakes, and this book is a very vivid reminder of how &*(#ing hard that is.
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It goes further than that: Most people, when directly confronted with evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or course of action but justify it even more tenaciously. Even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the mental armor of self-justification. –p.2
[Ever try to talk politics with a true believer from either side? Ever try to tell someone that they are wrong, that they did a bad thing?]

When researchers ask husbands and wives what percentage of the housework they do, the wives say, “Are you kidding? I do almost everything, at least 90 percent.” And the husbands say, “I do a lot, actually, about 40 percent.” Although the specific numbers differ from couple to couple, the total always exceeds 100 percent by a large margin. It’s tempting to conclude that one spouse is lying, but it is more likely that each is remembering in a way that enhances his or her contribution. –p.6

[This one goes into the “oh shit” department]
Indeed, even reading information that goes against your point of view can make you all the more convinced you are right. In one experiment, researchers selected people who either favored or opposed capital punishment and asked them to read two scholarly, well-documented articles on the emotionally charged issue of whether the death penalty deters violent crimes. . . . If the readers were processing information rationally, they would at least realize that the issue is more complex than they had previously believed and would therefore move a bit closer to each other in their beliefs about capital punishment as a deterrence. But dissonance theory predicts that the readers would find a way to distort the two articles. They would find reasons to clasp the confirming article to their bosoms, hailing it as a highly competent piece of work. And they would be supercritical of the disconfirming article, finding minor flaws and magnifying them into major reasons why they need not be influenced by it. This is precisely what happened. Not only did each side discredit the other’s arguments; each side became even more committed to its own. P.19-20

The more costly a decision, in terms of time, money, effort, or inconvenience, and the more irrevocable its consequences, the greater the dissonance and the greater the need to reduce it by overemphasizing the good things about the choice made. –p.22
[See Bush do this about the war: http://thinkprogress.org/2005/12/15/wmd-irrelevant/]

Riccardo Orizio interviewed seven other dictators [than Milosevic], including Idi Amin, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, Mira Markovic (the “Red-Witch,” Milosevic’s wife), Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic (known to his people as the Ogre of Berengo). Every one of them claimed that everything they did—torturing or murdering their opponents, blocking free elections, starving their citizens, looting their nation’s wealth, launching genocidal wars—was done for the good of their country. The alternative, they said, was chaos, anarchy, and bloodshed. Far from seeing themselves as despots, they saw themselves as self-sacrificing patriots. -p.205

Gosh, I could go on about this...

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Stuff I Think is Important 20: Believing is Seeing (3)

April 16, 2008 at 2:31pm

“Sometime, somewhere you take something to be the truth. If you cling to it so much, when the truth comes in person and knocks at your door, you will not open it.” -Buddha, p.47 (Buddhist Parables: Tales to Illuminate. )

Quotes from Mistakes Were Made
Is the brain designed to defend our beliefs and convictions? Fine—the brain wants to stock up on sugar, too, but most of us learn to enjoy vegetables. Is the brain designed to make us flare in anger when we think we are being attacked? Fine—but most of us learn to count to ten and find alternatives to beating the other guy with a cudgel. –p.223

Understanding how dissonance operates helps us rethink our own muddles, but it is also a useful skill for helping friends and relatives get out of theirs. Too often, out of the best of intentions, we do the very thing guaranteed to make matters worse: We hector, lecture, bully, plead, or threaten. –p.231

Pratkanis [a researcher in scams and victims] says, “A lecture just makes the victim feel more defensive and pushes him or her further into the clutches of the fraud criminal.” Anyone who understands dissonance knows why. Shouting “ What were you thinking?” will backfire because it means “Boy, are you stupid.” -p.231

Which I still, to be honest, don’t quite think I’ve ever done: lied. Unless I’m just rationalizing. Unless I’m some kind of psychopath who can rationalize anything and can’t even see the most obvious kinds of evil he’s perpetuating, or who doesn’t even care but wants to delude himself into believing he cares so that he can continue to see himself as a basically decent guy. –David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, p. 97. [not only psychopaths, Dave. It's everybody.]

The cognitive psychology component is fairly straightforward and seems accurate enough: people’s belief systems help to determine their experiences. To change your beliefs is to help change your response to life. This is certainly true. Although I cannot choose my sensations, I can choose how to think about them, and by consistently altering my beliefs and reframing my experience—perhaps from cynical to caring, or from pessimistic to optimistic, or from self-belittling to self-accepting—I can change the very nature of my outlook on life. . –Ken Wilber, Boomeritis, p. 335, c 2002.

This abrupt contradiction of a person’s reality-model is known, in psychology, as cognitive dissonance. Those subjected to it tend to become very flexible and agnostic or very rigid and schizophrenic. –Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger vol 1, p. 93, 1973. [He is a fundamentalist agnostic and too strong about it for my taste. For an example, read the following.]

My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence. The more certitude one assumes, the less there is left to think about, and a person sure of everything would never have any need to think about anything and might be considered clinically dead under current medical standards, where the absence of brain activity is taken to mean that life has ended. –Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger vol 1, p. ii, c1973. [Damn. He is funny though, isn't he?]

My perception contained a “maybe” but, conditioned by Aristotelian logic, I ignored this and my conception leaped to premature certainty. . . In experience, the feedback loop from perception to conception and back to perception operates so quickly, that we “see” what we think we should see and the maybe virtually never registers—until we re-train ourselves to register it. –Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology, p. 76. [All true except the ”conditioned by Aristotelian logic” part. It’s biology…]

Constant reminding ourselves that we do not see with our eyes but with our synergetic eye-brain system working as a whole will produce constant astonishment as we notice, more and more often, how much of our perceptions emerge from our preconceptions. –Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology, p. 44.

Since the brain does not receive raw data, but edits data as it receives it, we need to understand the software the brain uses. –Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology, p. 98.

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Stuff I Think is Important 20: Believing is Seeing (3)

April 16, 2008 at 2:31pm

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Stuff I Think is Important 21: Appreciation is a skill

April 17, 2008 at 12:41pm

I have lots of very primitive mental habits. One of them involves taste, as in taste in art, movies, music, or books. I'll explain....

I have unusual tastes.

By that I mean that I strive to learn how to like almost everything. I strive to learn to like difficult people, difficult subjects, unusual tastes and so on.

In college, I made a list of all the foods I disliked, then I went around to people I knew who liked these foods, and I asked them to cook for me. (I'll admit the allure of a free meal had something to do with it.)

In just this way I learned to like broccoli, asparagus, lima beans, fish, escargot, sushi, and a number of others I've probably forgot.

But finding a good recipe wasn't all it took to change my taste. I had to also change my mental thought process from "x is bad" or "y tastes awful" to "I haven't liked x or y in the past."

(I also had to fight the commonsense belief that "my taste is better than other people's taste." Most people operate on the premise that "if another person likes something that I don't, they are crazy.")

If you think "x is bad" or "I hate y," you will notice the parts of x or y that confirm those beliefs.Believing is seeing.

So after I changed a few of my beliefs about food and began talking differently (the key), I began to actually feel differently about these foods. Then I was prepared to try them and actually taste them.

The results of my experiment were delightful. Afterward, when my family argued ferociously over where to go to dinner, I now was able to say, "anywhere you choose I can find something I will like."

Then I applied the same concept to music, to movies, and to books.

Then I applied the same concept to religions, and the results were even more delightful. I began a relationship with a wonderful woman who wanted to be a minister, and I had no problem affirming her beliefs. (Although my attitude didn't help her affirm mine.)

However, lest you think I'm claiming to be some sort of holier than thou type, I feel compelled to point out my primative side.

This habit of trying to like everything means that I often find myself in the presence of someone trashing something I enjoy very much.

When this happens, my emotions react exactly as if they were making fun of one of my friends. I am tempted to attack the messenger as narrow minded. I am tempted to dispute the claim in intellectual debate. I am tempted to learn the tastes of the other and mock them. This is cognitive dissonance, and it is a stupid instinct.

Is it clear how ridiculous that is to everyone? Why should a person reporting their feelings have anything to do with me?

I'm going to have to do some work to retrain my responses. Maybe I'll go to a Republican party meeting...

Appeciation is a skill, a learned response.

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Stuff I Think is Important: what's coming up

April 19, 2008 at 5:55pm

I haven't had time to sit down and polish something to write in here for a few days.

So I thought I'd give a little preview of what I'm going to talk about next.

In no particular order, I'm going to cover.

"Why many people think (real) holy men are assholes"
"Power over people, how to get it and why you probably don't want it."
"Why words are magic. What books can do and what they can't."
"Being abnormal: why it sometimes sucks."
"Being abnormal: why it sometimes rules."
"Happiness, how to get it and make it stay (according to modern psychology)"

Ok. When I cover those, I promise to have citations, weblinks, and the best information that psychology, philosophy, and religion has to offer on em.

Until then, I want to say two things.

1. The most important word in my title is "think." I am a very stupid man, and I am wrong at least 5-10 times a day on unimportant things. If you read things I say and think I seem unbearably arrogant, remember that I'm a short balding man who probably earns less than the majority of you. I root for teams that don't win and long for things I don't have. I don't always treat people well, even those women I've loved dearly. (sorry about that. you all deserved better.) Clearly, it all needs a grain of salt, or a whole shaker of salt. I hope to make these ideas fun to read about, not in the hope others try em. If people do or don't, that's fine.

I just talk about stuff I've read and stuff I've tried that seemed to work. I used to be depressed. Now I'm not. I used to be very angry at the world. Now I'm not. I used to be very out of shape. Now I'm not. I used to be very screwed up. I still am very screwed up.

2. Someone brought up believing is seeing to me recently and asked what that said about religions. Nothing I've said about the effect of belief, namely that believing is seeing, should be interpreted as being against religion. Quite the opposite. The fact that belief comes before seeing is the reason I try so hard to follow the advice that all the major religions agree on. The fact that believing is seeing is the reason I say, "don't knock it till you try it."

If you wait for proof before following the advice, you wil never see a reason to change. If you try to change and then watch what happens, you might be surprised.

God knows I have been.

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Stuff I Think is Important 22: Humility is not a Virtue

April 22, 2008 at 10:00am

Humility is not a virtue, it's a technical requirement.

If you want to be intelligent
If you want to be generous
If you want to be a good musician
If you want to be a good listener
If you want to be good at anything at all

Humility is an absolute necessity.

Why? Because excellence in any field depends on receiving feedback, listening to it, and learning from it. Unless you are willing to accept the idea that you don't know very much, you will never ever know very much.

Human beings have a natural bias towards our own ideas and our own experiences. The bad news is that both are extremely limited. Most of us have lived in a very small social and intellectual comfort zone our whole lives. (I am very very much included in this.)

Most people get their ideas and values from their parents and, due to Robert Cialdini's idea about commitment and consistency pressures, they keep the vast majority of them.

The children of democrats grow up to be democrats. The children of agnostics grow up to be agnostics. The children of nudists grow up to be nudists.

(I forget the numbers on this, but it is a very high number, somewhere around fifty percent or greater for the first two examples. )

People that already know things are terrible listeners, and are incapable of learning.

Many people who look like they are listening are not listening because they don't feel they need to. They know how they feel about a subject and they trust their gut.

Many people who look like they are listening are really just waiting to speak.

So my friend Jeff Snow, who knows that all great guitar playing comes from natural talent and inspiration, doesn't listen when people tell him he is playing the wrong rhythm. What he does feels right and he trusts his gut. I just kicked him out of my band for this reason.

So my mother, who knows that her life experience as a housewife and mother has taught her the way the world works, gives no credence to other people's ideas. She stubbornly repeats how she feels over and over again, and she doesn't really understand how infuriating it is when she won't admit that others have a point. She says "the right thing" and she trusts her gut.

So my friend, who considers himself a kind and generous person, only helps other people when he has plenty of cash and free time. He signs online petitions and donates to charity. He, however, never goes to a soup kitchen or something similar, because meeting the truly needy freaks him out. He feels he is generous, and he trusts his gut. (This one is about me. Ouch. I just nailed myself with that one.)

So my friend, who thinks all Republicans are crazy, is awful at having political discussions with people because he quickly starts to display scorn for people who support Republicans. He feels they are idiots, and he trusts his gut.

People are incapable of listening when they're emotional. When people are emotional, they cannot listen. When people are emotional, all they can do is react.

(the reason for this has to do with the three major parts of the human brain and the way we are wired. The emotional system is more basic, and deeper that the rational thought and language system. When one is on, it supercedes the other.)

Humility is the antidote to excess emotions. It allows a person to hear a disagreement and learn from it. It allows a person to accept the fact that our guts are often full of shit, literally and metaphorically speaking.

Humility is not a virtue, it's a technical requirement.

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Comments

Amelia Fulbright You didn't tag me on this one...but I like it a lot. FYI...in the Greek New Testament, the word for humility, transliterated of course, is "tapeinoo." This tapeinoo is a technical requirement (I like your phrase.) for being open to the Spirit of Chri...See More

Manage

10y

Jeff Cook Humilty as a type of openness makes a great deal of sense to me.

The idea as humilty as a technical requirement is a quote from a Sufi writer, Idries Shah. The explanation/ expansion of the concept is all mine, but the inspiration for it (like ever...See More

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Stuff I Think is Important 23: What is a Fact, Why is a Guess

April 24, 2008 at 10:34am

"I can't believe Michael did that. He was trying to stir up some shit just to cause problems."

"Barack Obama made a surprise appearance on the Colbert Report on the same night Hillary Clinton made just such an appearance, trying to undercut any effect Hillary's appearance might have on young voters."

"In 2002 and 2003, George Bush was trying to deceive the American people into connecting Al-Qaeda and Iraq."

This post is still about humility, despite the title.

One of my pet peeves is the amount of time that people talk about things that they don't know as if they do.

Why? They trust their guts, and their guts are full of shit.

Human beings never have had, and never will have the ability to learn the intentions of others.

Even when a trustworthy person is asked about his or her intentions, there is a huge pressure to paint a falsely rosy picture. (Cognitive dissonance) Adding to this problem, psychology research shows that unconscious forces have a lot to do with decision making, implying that many people are not conscious of their actual motives.

However, pretending that we do have that kind of access gives us an easy reason to call people names.

Take the earlier examples.

The boy in example one clearly did something that was likely to cause conflict. Maybe he was too stupid to realize what might happen. Maybe he wanted to bring people together in order to heal tension rather than increase it.

Barack Obama clearly detracted from the effect Hillary Clinton's appearance might have had, but who is to say that the show's writers or the candidate's schedules might not have been the deciding factor.

George W Bush clearly deceived the American people into believing Iraq had a connection to Al-Qaeda, but who knows whether he was smart enough to know that his evidence was a cherry picked pack of lies?

What is a fact.
Why is a guess.

And there is a disturbing human tendency to guess in a way that demonizes people and organizations.

Socrates knew this ages ago when he argued that all human beings act in a way that intends on good. The problem is that their conceptions of the good are limited. (By selfishness and lack of insight.)

I'm convinced by Socrates on this one, so I guess I'm saying this:

If you think someone was trying to do wrong to you or someone else,

"you think you're smarter than Socrates??"

What is a fact.
Why is a guess.

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Stuff I Think is Important 24: Energy

April 26, 2008 at 10:21am

Yesterday, over coffee, someone reminded me
that energy can never be
created or destroyed.

"What about love?" I asked,
"I'm pretty sure I've destroyed some of that,"

"Isn't it energy?"

I said,
as I laughed
and I ordered
Another espresso.

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I was looking for an old poem yesterday, and I came across that one. Like most poems, I advise you not to take the idea too seriously. (Like everything I say, I'd advise you not to take it too seriously.)

The presentation is usually more important than the content in poetry. (Hafiz and Rumi are notable exceptions. The psalms are quite possibly another. Zen Riddles and the Tao de Ching are definitely another)

The thing about energy in reality is that it either moves or transforms. It never dies. We take in energy from the food we intake and the situations we encounter. The things we want give us energy, and the wanting is a kind of energy.

The natural world is full of energy, primarily directed toward survival. Without consciousness, this is the only option.

With consciousness, a new possibility shows up. All 5 of the major religions, either explicitly or implicitly, seem to realize that much of our energy as human beings is still occupied in the survival game as I think of it. (In modern society within the first world countries, it's closer to call it the pleasure game, but in Africa I challenge you to call it that.)

Food, drink, sex, thought, family and carreers are where the majority of the biological and psychological energy of people is directed.

So every single one of the five major religions has come up with rules of self denial, ways to refocus the energy of traditional pursuits.

Basically, they all seem to know that biological energy unused by sex (a release of energy/tension), unused by eating (a task that first depletes energy, before regaining more of it through the digestive process), usused by substance abuse (which makes us happy, then tired),

and mental energy usused by worry, unused by constant striving to get ahead, unused by regret, unused by grudges....

All five religions seem to know that the energy in question has to go somewhere.

And all five of them seem to believe that mankind has another kind of energy, a type that has to be awakened or tuned in to.

This is spiritual energy. And it is no surprise that a vast majority of people have no idea it exists, if in fact it does exist. I sure don't know about it from experience.

According to all five of the world religions, it is as if God is whispering to us, but we can't hear if we are talking, if we are thinking about something else, if we live in a noisy place without quiet spaces.

So it is not that self-indulgence is bad. It is good. Very very good.
It merely prevents another possibility.

And I speak to you as someone who does not follow any of the five world religions, who does not follow those rules of self-denial.

I just think that I've figured out what they are getting at.

Energy can never be created or destroyed. When it cant go to the typical places, it goes to a different one.

Buddha, Moses, Mohammed, and Jesus (if you don't believe the virgin birth story) were very normal people for a large portion of their lives.

Then something happened to them and they became the sort of people that changed the lives of all the people they met.

Energy can never be created or destroyed. When it can't go to the typical places, it goes to a different one.

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(On a pompousness scale of 1-10, I'd give that one a ten.

I'm off to start a day of shopping, drinking, and (hopefully) sex.)

Grin.

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Stuff I Think is Important 26: Power- How to get it.

April 30, 2008 at 12:40pm

Yesterday I told an anedcote about a friend of mine who really was unsure of what he had that a woman might want.

I told him, simply put, that he had eyes and ears. If you use them to give someone attention and respect, they will certainly like you. You will stand out from a crowd.

But it occurs to me as I reread this that my friend probably didn't get the answer from me that he was looking for.

If I asked him, I think what he probably wanted was to know how to get dates and to get laid.

If that was what he wanted, I'm a lousy guy to ask. I don't date much. The reason for that is I deliberately avoid doing the things it takes to get and maintain power in a relationship.

Don't believe me. Take it from Tom Brady.

"Dates? "Whatever you do, keep 'em short. You can't let them know you're that interested. I try to get this across to my best friend. He's really into this girl, but I keep telling him she's got to leave that date thinking, What's wrong with me?"

Power is basically all about manipulation and insincerity.

Unfortunately, people want what they have to fight for, what they can't get very much of. The wanting creates excitement, tension. (Sometimes fights in relationships are to increase the excitement)

The way to get and maintain power in a relationship is to give them exactly what they want (when and only when) they give you what you want.

Oh wait. I was going to talk about getting a date, not power in a relationship. Since i starting talking about dates, I'll go back to it.

The art of getting a date (or lots of them) is simply to take a look at yourself honestly, and then sell yourself the way advertisers do with a product, namely in a manipulative/deceptive way. That's why some call it having "game."

Conceal the negative, call attention to the positive. Mirror the woman's body language and conversational style. Mirror her values. Use language carefully. But be careful not to give the impression that you'd like to go out with her. Give the impresion you're the kind of man she'd like to go out with.

And by all means you have to isolate that person from their friends if you want her to be more than your friend. A person's friends aren't impressed by the way a guy looks at her or listens to her. They see his looks, his job, and the way he treats them. They judge based on the way he makes them feel, not on the way he makes her feel.

The problem with all that is the same problem that advertising has: It works. (It assumes that a person cannot be trusted to know the facts and make a choice.)

Because it works, it leads to people buying useless shit and pursuing useless relationships.

Because it works, people don't stop to notice that it encourages the absolute lowest parts of human nature. It requires a total lack of concern with the question of "what does this person need, and can I give it to them?"

Because it works, it lowers the respect men have for women and women have for men.

Because it works, the best product gets beaten out by the best marketing.

Because it works, our government is full of clever men who lack empathy instead of men of insight and conscience.

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Power. That's how to get it, and why you hopefully don't want it.

That's also why guys like me don't date much. I tend to simply be honest and hope to find someone compatible. Most people want excitement, not compatibility, just like most people want taste rather than nutrition.

My personal opinion is that it is better to choose slowly and think carefully about who I spend time with. And when I find someone I like, I do my best to make sure she sticks around.

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Stuff I Think is Important 27: The 48 Laws of Power

May 1, 2008 at 8:15pm

I wrote a little bit about why getting power is often distasteful.

Here are some excerpts from Robert Greene's The Laws of Power, a book that examined the diaries of successful politicians, gentlemen, con men and scholars in order to find what they did to get power and maintain it.

Here is what he says:

The 48 Laws of Power
Robert Greene

1. Never outshine the master
2. Never put too much trust in friends, learn how to use enemies
3. Conceal your intentions
4. Always say less than necessary.
5. So much depends on reputation—guard it with your life.
6. Court attention at all cost.
7. Get others to do the work for you, but always take credit
8. Make other people come to you—use bait if necessary
9. Win through your actions, never through argument.
10. Infection: avoid the unhappy and unlucky.
11. Learn to keep people dependent on you.
12. Use selective honesty and generosity to disarm your victim
13. When asking for help, appeal to people’s self-interest, never to -------------------their mercy or gratitude.
14. Pose as a friend, work as a spy
15. Crush your enemy totally
16. Use absence to increase respect and honor
17. Keep others in suspended terror: Cultivate an air of __________unpredictability
18. Do not build fortresses to protect yourself—isolation is dangerous
19. Know who you are dealing with—do not offend the wrong person
20. Do not commit to anyone
21. Play a sucker to catch a sucker—seem dumber than your mark
22. Use the surrender tactic: transform weakness into power
23. Concentrate your forces
24. Play the perfect courtier
25. Re-create yourself
26. Keep your hands clean
27. Play on people’s need to believe to create a cult-like following
28. Enter action with boldness
29. Plan all the way to the end
30. Make your accomplishments seem effortless
31. Control the options: Get others to play with the cards you deal
32. Play to people’s fantasies
33. Discover each man’s thumbscrew
34. Be royal in your own fashion: Act like a king to be treated like __________one.
35. Master the art of timing
36. Disdain things you cannot have: ignoring them is the best revenge
37. Create compelling spectacles.
38. Think as you like, but behave like others
39. Stir up waters to catch fish
40. Despise the free lunch
41. Avoid stepping into a great man’s shoes
42. Strike the shepherd and the sheep will scatter
43. Work on the hearts and minds of others
44. Disarm and infuriate with the mirror effect
45. Preach the need for change, but never reform too much at once
46. Never appear too perfect
47. Do not go past the mark you aimed for; in victory, learn when to ___________stop
48. Assume formlessness

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Pick up a bee from kindness and learn the limitations of kindness. –Sufi proverb, p.12

Men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit, because gratitude is a burden and revenge a pleasure, Tacitus, c AD 55-120, p.12

One should not be too straightforward. Go and see the forest. The straight trees are cut down, the crooked ones are left standing. –Kautilya, Indian philosopher, third century b.c., p.211

If Machiavelli had had a prince for a disciple, the first thing he would have recommended him to do would have been to write a book against Machiavellism. –Voltaire, p.322

When you go into society, leave behind your own ideas and values, and put on the mask that is most appropriate for the group in which you find yourself. Bismark played this game successfully for years—there were people who vaguely understood what he was up to, but not clearly enough that it mattered. –p.323

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Stuff I Think is Important 27: The Media

May 5, 2008 at 9:59am

The media has a bias, and it's not liberal or conservative. The media has a corporate bias.

Since the media is in the business of selling audiences to advertisers, it seeks to attract
1. the largest possible audience and/or
2. the audience that has the most disposable income.

If investigative journalism costs more money than celebrity pieces, then it is on the chopping block.
If discussions of issues get lower ratings that scandal hunting, then it is on the chopping block.
Any questions?

This is a problem, a mega problem. This means news programming is likely to be supportive of the views and interests of the affluent. This means news programming will support public opinion in order to attract the widest audience.

Corporation's rights are also very unlikely to be questioned, when the questioner is a massive multinational conglomerate.

I am saying that the media has a strong systemic bias toward corporate interests, not that exceptions don't exist.

And it is scary that public opinion in this country is formed largely by the media.

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Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to totalitarianism. --Noam Chomsky

"Six firms dominate all American mass media. Each is a subsidiary of a larger parent firm, some of them basically operating in other industries. The six parent firms are General Electric, Viacom, Disney, Bertelsmann, Time Warner, and Murdoch’s News Corp. Bertelsmann is based in Germany and Murdoch’s News Corp in Australia, the other four in the United States." –Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, p.x., New Forward for the 2000 edition.

"The basic strategy in designing programs on commercial television and cable is not primarily what perceived as the highest needs and wants of an audience, but what is perceived as most likely to attract advertising." –Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, 1988, p.8.

"Who does the media serve? They deliver first and foremost for their stockholders—major media in the United States can be enormously profitable. To maintain that profitability, they serve the major corporate interests that bankroll so much of the media with fat advertising checks. To avoid regulation in the public interest, they serve a political class that returns the favor by giving media conglomerates free access to the public’s airwaves while routinely removing barriers to the expansion of corporate control over communications."
– Robert McChesney and John Nichols, Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media, p. 26, c 2002.

"Considerable research points to the fact that the “social values” of love, family, and friendships outrank “material values” of economic security and success in providing the basis for a happy life and self-esteem. Yet markets are ill equipped to address social values except to exploit them, often perversely, in advertising messages to sell commodities." –Robert McChesney, Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy, p.47.

In a three minute stretch between commercials, or in seven hundred words, it is impossible to present unfamiliar thoughts or surprising conclusions with the argument and evidence required to afford them some credibility. Regurgitating welcome pieties faces no such problem. –Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions, p. 10.

It is normal for all large business to make serious efforts to influence the news, to avoid embarrassing publicity, and to maximize sympathetic public opinion and government policies. Now they own most of the news media they wish to influence. –Ben H Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, 1988, p.26.

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Stuff I Think is Important 28: The Media (2)
May 7, 2008 at 10:21am
Here are links to some cases where the fact that the media is corporate caused either censorship of the news, punishment of accurate reporting, or advertising described as news.

Read it and weep folks. Then laugh at anyone who says the significant bias in news is because journalists are liberal or the owners are conservative.

If the company is a for profit corporation, the only explanation you need to explain decision making is profitability.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thank Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting for these lovely lists.

Fear and Favor 2007

Fear and Favor 2006

Fear and Favor 2005.

And thank Project Censored for these beauties

Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007

Top Censored Stories of 2008.

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Stuff I Think is Important: 29 The marketplace of ideas...

May 9, 2008 at 11:54am

Imagine if you will, this scenario.

You have a small number of super rich individuals, and a system that benefits them at everyone else's expense.

You also have a huge number of individuals who are finding it impossible to get ahead in this system. Many of these individuals are super intelligent.

You also have a democracy.

Do you think that
a) the intelligent individuals will use their intelligence to convince others that the system is flawed, changing that system through the democratic process.

or
b)the intelligent individuals will get hired by the super rich to defend their system, thus vastly enriching the intelligent ones and dooming the rest.

In an economic understanding of things, the super intelligent will always choose option b.

Option B is to work in public relations, the ideological press or to take work at a think tank.

(Note: Here I'm only talking about well funded, pro-business examples of these. There are underfunded conscience based ones as well.)

Option A is not even an option is a society where only the super rich have access to the mass media and the mass media are for profit corporations. Only those topics pleasing to the audience and advertisers will be permitted.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thus, those ideas that support the rich and the powerful will always be well funded, well defended, and prestigious.

Thus, those ideas will be opposed by people of conscience with poor funding, less statistical evidence, and less mainstream credibility.

Thus, you are not going to hear what really needs to be said,

"The system is rigged and we are all being robbed."

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Stuff I Think is Important 23: What is a Fact, Why is a Guess

April 24, 2008 at 10:34 AM

PS. Did I Mention Hypnosis is Real?

May 13, 2008 at 9:54am

Contrary to what you probably think you know about hypnosis, it can be done very quickly and can be used to convince someone to do something they normally wouldn't--like, say, giving away their wallet, phone, and keys to a stranger (English mentalist Derren Brown). What's happening here is known as a handshake induction, a technique pioneered by American psychiatrist Milton Erickson (someone I've mentioned before). There are other methods of rapid induction hypnosis. These methods, along with techniques of verbal suggestion, are used by practitioners of Neuro-linguistic programming, a field which some have associated with Mr. Brown's performances, though he denies it. I wonder, though, how he manages to get a cashier at a dog track to pay out on a losing ticket?

[This is from the truly fascinating website metafilter.com
originally posted by flotson]

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Sincerity

May 15, 2008 at 1:41pm

"The most important thing in life is sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made." -George Burns

I have never met anyone who would prefer an insincere yes to a sincere no.

Those who say maybe when they mean "I'm almost sure the answer is no" aren't all that much better.

Insincerity makes it hard for people to learn from their mistakes.

The problem with insincerity has two sides.

The first problem is that it betrays the lack of respect the speaker has for the listener. An insincere yes sends the message that, to borrow from Nicholson, "you can't handle the truth." It assumes immaturity on the listener's part and never gives him/her a chance to prove otherwise.

The second problem with insincerity relates to the speaker. An insincere speaker is either concerned with pleasing the listener or afraid of upsetting the listener. In both cases, that person has a problem. Neither one of those is a desirable trait.

People who know these things like to point out that some people really cannot handle the truth. Some people react terribly when told bad news.

My response to that argument is that people deserve several chances to change before this can be assumed. However, if you meet one of those people who can't handle disappointment, run away from them.

But I will admit that sometimes a person must deal with the people who can't handle the truth, people that cannot be avoided. Many people call them "bosses."

In that case, I offer this advice.

"When a great king rides through town, the wise peasant bows respectfully and silently farts."-Ethiopian proverb

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Edit

Stuff I Think is Important 30: PS. Did I Mention Hypnosis is Real?

May 13, 2008 at 9:54 AM

[This is from the truly fascinating website metafilter.com

originally posted by flotson]

Stuff I Think is Important: Love

May 29, 2008 at 10:51am

Somebody around here really needs to set the record straight about this stuff.

If you want a good sample of what our culture says about it, start here.

However, my advice is forget the myths and get the facts.

Chemistry
Biological models of sex tend to view love as a mammalian drive, much like hunger or thirst.[9] Helen Fisher, a leading expert in the topic of love, divides the experience of love into three partly-overlapping stages: lust, attraction, and attachment. Lust exposes people to others, romantic attraction encourages people to focus their energy on mating, and attachment involves tolerating the spouse long enough to rear a child into infancy.

Lust is the initial passionate sexual desire that promotes mating, and involves the increased release of chemicals such as testosterone and estrogen. These effects rarely last more than a few weeks or months. Attraction is the more individualized and romantic desire for a specific candidate for mating, which develops out of lust as commitment to an individual mate forms. Recent studies in neuroscience have indicated that as people fall in love, the brain consistently releases a certain set of chemicals, including pheromones, dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin, which act similar to amphetamines, stimulating the brain's pleasure center and leading to side-effects such as an increased heart rate, loss of appetite and sleep, and an intense feeling of excitement. Research has indicated that this stage generally lasts from one and a half to three years.[10]

Since the lust and attraction stages are both considered temporary, a third stage is needed to account for long-term relationships. Attachment is the bonding which promotes relationships that last for many years, and even decades. Attachment is generally based on commitments such as marriage and children, or on mutual friendship based on things like shared interests. It has been linked to higher levels of the chemicals oxytocin and vasopressin than short-term relationships have.[10] In 2005, Italian scientists at Pavia University found that a protein molecule known as the nerve growth factor (NGF) has high levels when people first fall in love, but these levels return to as they were after one year. Specifically, four neurotrophin levels, i.e. NGF, BDNF, NT-3, and NT-4, of 58 subjects who had recently fallen in love were compared with levels in a control group who were either single or already engaged in a long-term relationship. The results showed that NGF levels were significantly higher in the subjects in love than as compared to either of the control groups.[11]
[thanks wikipedia]
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Love is not a biological instinct, not an evolutionary imperative, but a feat of the imagination which thrives on difficulty. –Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of Love, p. 118.

When two people find each other attractive, their bodies quiver with a gush of PEA (phenylethylamine), a molecule that speeds up the flow of information between nerve cells. An amphetamine like chemical, PEA whips the brain into a frenzy of excitement, which is why loves feel euphoric, rejuvenated, optimistic, and energized, happy to sit up talking all night or making love for hours on end. Because “speed” is addictive, even the body’s naturally made speed, some people become what Michael Liebowitz and Donald Klein refer to as “attraction junkies,” needing a romantic relationship to feel excited by life. The craving catapults them from high to low in an exhilarating, exhausting, cycle of thrill and depression. Driven by a chemical hunger, they choose unsuitable partners or misconstrue a potential partner’s feelings. – Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of Love, p. 165.

Evolution hands out a blueprint for the building of the house of one’s life, but, as with a house, much depends on the skill and experience of the builders; the laws and codes of society; the features or quality of the materials; not to mention the random effect of tornadoes, landslides, or floods; plumbing catastrophes; and the caprices of inspectors, supervisors, hooligans, or neighbors. How we love is a matter of biology. How we love is a matter of experience. –Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of Love, p. 151.

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Happiness: What science says about it.

July 1, 2008 at 11:33am

Note To those of you who are mob wars friends of mine:
I sometimes write notes about books I read and smart ideas. Please ignore em or hide them if they're not your thing.

One of the things I read the most is psychology. The specific experiments they do are fascinating, and psychologists have taught me some of my best tricks for dealing with difficult people.

Here's a little about happiness:

About 50% of one's sadness depends on one's genes. This is shown by studying identical twins, and learning that their happiness is 50% correlated even when growing up in different houses.

10-15% is a result of various measurable variables, such as socioeconomic status, marital status, health, income, and others.

The rest of the variance does not have a discernible cause.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

One of the leading researchers in happiness is a guy named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He studies the experience of flow, moments where a person is totally absorbed in the task at hand. These moments are the types of events that most people describe as the happiest parts of their lives.

Ever been "in the zone" while playing a game?
Ever been "in the groove" while playing music?
Ever been in a conversation that just "clicked"?

Mihaly thinks that all of these are experiences of flow. He has been studying it for years (with an interesting method) and he thinks there are certain facts that he's learned.

1. There is no magic formula to create it, since everyone is different. There are some common elements that all people report in flow experiences.

2. Flow experiences are based on tasks of appropriate difficulty.

3. Flow experiences are self-chosen, intrinsically motivated.

4. Flow experiences typically involve an activity with clear goals.

5. Flow experiences involve a reduction in self-consciousness.

Now here are some quotes from Mihaly's book Finding Flow

We can be happy experiencing the passive pleasure of a rested body, a warm sunshine, the contentment of a serene relationship. These are also moments to treasure, but this kind of happiness is very vulnerable and dependent on external circumstances. The happiness that follows flow is of our own making, and it leads to increasing complexity and growth in consciousness. -32

As we have seen earlier, human beings feel best in flow, when they are fully involved in meeting a challenge, solving a problem, discovering something new. Most activities that produce flow also have clear goals, clear rules, immediate feedback—a set of external demands that focuses our attention and makes demands on our skills. -66

This suggests that hobbies are about two and a half times more likely to produce a state of heightened enjoyment than TV does, and active games and sports about three times more. -67

Most of us hoard attention carefully. We dole it out only for serious things, for things that matter; we only get interested in whatever will promote our welfare. The objects most worthy of our psychic energy are ourselves and the people and things that will give us some material or emotional advantage. -123

The first step is to develop the habit of doing whatever needs to be done with concentrated attention, with skill rather than with inertia. Even the most routine tasks, like washing dishes, dressing, or mowing the lawn become more rewarding if we approach them with the care it would take to make a work of art. -127

"It is as if evolution has built a safety device in our nervous system that allows us to experience full happiness only when we are living at 100%--when we are fully using the physical and mental equipment we have been given."

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
I like this guy's ideas a bunch, but it does make me wonder about my love of daydreaming. More about him later.

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Edit

4 Problems with Republican Party Ideas

August 27, 2008 at 12:19pm

1. They believe the law of unintended consequences (the idea that government can't control something complex like an economy) is true for domestic policy, then they ignore it for foreign and military policy.

In other words...
It's not foolish to think we can topple a government and turn a dictatorship into a democracy, but it is foolish to think we can regulate business in a way that could benefit Americans.

2. They believe welfare for people is a bad thing but they believe welfare for corporations (i.e. bailouts, tax breaks not tied to specific public goods) is good for America.

3. They believe sexual behavior is more important than intelligence or professional competence. Noone would doubt Bush's fidelity to his wife, so therefore his fidelity to the Constitution is unimportant.

In other words, they think a man who doesn't cheat in his relationships, won't cheat at his place of employment. (Yeah, right....)

4. They believe in small government, but they support a military budget which is the very hallmark of big government. (We spend as much as the REST OF THE WORLD COMBINED. We have 5 percent of world population and 50 percent of its military spending) Half of your taxes go to war funding and war related research. Unneccesary wars are far worse that welfare checks that go to lazy people. Welfare checks don't kill anyone. Welfare checks are less than a fraction of a percent of military waste.

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Military Spending is a Racket

August 19, 2008 at 11:52am

This is the biggest secret of politics. So I'm going to state some facts which will make you want to yell "BULLSHIT!" What I ask is that you give me a chance to back up my point. The most reliable source about this is the CIA Almanac and Book of Facts. However, the best presentation is here.

1. The United States spends as much on its military every year, year after year, as the rest of the world combined.

2. There are no credible miltary threats to the United States. Those countries with miltiaries that are a conceivable threat would never turn their military against us.

3. We use our military to protect our economic interests, and we invent military justifications in order to convince the American people of the necessity of war. It's not just that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident (1 of 2 supposed attacks) didn 't happen and we were fairly sure of that at the time. That is what started the Vietnam War. (I saw this on a history channel special. The rest of this comes from a 2005 NSC document)More here.

The CIA http://fareedzakaria.com/ARTICLES/newsweek/061603.html">knowingly lied about Russia's military in order to justify our huge defense budgets, just like they did about invading Iraq. During the Cold War, the CIA knew Russia has 200 long range missles and falsified information to say that they had many more, causing us to build more and more useless missles to keep up.

Before Pearl Harbor, our government took a number of steps (like an oil embargo) that we were fairly certain would provoke Japan to attack us. Internal documents released by our government show that. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson wrote in his diary on November 25, "to maneuver them [Japan] into the position of firing the first shot." (That's a true quote!")

In the US war with Mexico, we marched American soldiers into Mexican territory, claiming we were on our soil. Then we started a war with them. when they attacked us. We took California as part of the peace treaty.

Although there are some conservative historians who would disagree with the previous interpretations, (the previous example is the most hotly disputed), all of these things are a pattern. A habit of being manipulated into war and war spending, two things which are profoundly not in our best interests.

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Personalities Matter Less than Policies- The George Bush Rule

September 3, 2008 at 11:36am

We elected George Bush twice because he was far more likable than his opponents.

The people who vote that way are stupid.

The policies a candidate supports are far more important than the feeling we get from their personality. The personality is how we feel about that candidate. The policies are how electing that candidate will change all of our lives.

Unfortunately, only a small percentage of people know enough to understand the fine points of policy.

Those people are called "readers."

Because the media is what it is, and because the American people are what they are, the most important parts of this campaign are underreported.

Since policy takes a sustained bit of attention (a minimum of 15 minutes or so), news networks focus on candidates personalities and their campaign strategies far more than what they want to do for the country.

That's a shame. Because lots of idiots vote with very little idea of the actual policies they are supporting.

Do yourselves a favor. Look at factcheck.org and find out what each person supports. Don't just listen to an ad and decide.

I keep talking to people about this election who don't have any idea what McCain's or Obama's policies are.

That's just stupid people.

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Stuff I Think is Important PS HYPNOSIS IS REAL

Contrary to what you probably think you know about hypnosis, it can be done very quickly and can be used to convince someone to do something they normally wouldn't--like, say, giving away their wallet, phone, and keys to a stranger (English mentalist Derren Brown). What's happening here is known as a handshake induction, a technique pioneered by American psychiatrist Milton Erickson (someone I've mentioned before). There are other methods of rapid induction hypnosis. These methods, along with techniques of verbal suggestion, are used by practitioners of Neuro-linguistic programming, a field which some have associated with Mr. Brown's performances, though he denies it. I wonder, though, how he manages to get a cashier at a dog track to pay out on a losing ticket?

[This is from the truly fascinating website metafilter.com

originally posted by flotson]

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Journalists are as dumb as the rest of us.

August 26, 2010 at 10:39 PM

Here is the second dumbest thing I've heard this month.

"Rose's sin -- gambling -- is worse than using steroids because his impact on the integrity of the games he managed was a surer thing. Bonds could have been steroid-addled and still struck out a zillion times instead of smacking home runs so hard the ball seemed to go smearing across the night sky like a white streak of greasepaint. Clemens could've been juiced to the gills and still thrown his fastball all the way to the backstop again and again rather than nip the corners of the plate."

[from

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/commentary/news/story?page=howard/100826]

The impact of gambling on the game is more sure than steroids??? That statement will get this guy eligible for the George Bush hall of intelligence.

Reality Check. If you gamble on the game, you may or may not let that impact your decision making. It is extremely likely that gambling impacts the integrity of the game, but it isn't certain.

If you use steroids, every time you use your arm or your leg, you have damaged the integrity of the game.

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Todd Hare What's the dumbest thing you've heard this month?

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Kurt Johansen Unless your goal is the SNL all drug sports... Then steroids just brings the game one step closer to perfection. http://www.dailymotion.com/.../x7msb2_saturday-night-live...

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John Weiman look at ricRick Sanchez, Nancy grace, lou dobbs. Those folks are way dumber than you joe. Trust me. I would have added Glenn Beck, but I think he is probably smart, he has referred to himself as "a rodeo clown" and acts like that to connect with Tea Baggers, Whom he controls with his majick pied piper Kazoo.

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Stuff I Think is Important: Love- Ability

January 8, 2009 at 1:06 PM

A few weeks ago I commented to someone that I've never had a one night stand. She looked at me as if I'd just said something adorable. "I think that's wonderful" she said.

"Don't give me too much credit. It's just that I had bad timing."

"What do you mean?"

"I fell in love before I had any idea how to seduce someone. Now the idea just bores me. Why do I deserve credit for that?"

-------------------------

Let's review. If God loves us all, it is reasonable to assume that everything is lovable. If everything is lovable, and we don't love it all, that's because we lack the ability.

Why do we lack this ability? Because we have desires, primarily for food, drink, shelter, and sex.

These desires are innate. (Love is not). They affect our emotions and send them surging back and forth. When you are hungry and someone walks by holding a cheeseburger, what happens? When you see a beautiful person when you are lonely, what happens?

Desires cause us to be at each other's throats. (Love does not). Two men cannot eat the same cheeseburger (they can only split it in half.) Two men cannot make love to the same woman at once (they can only....).

Well. You get the picture.

Desire is a shout and love is a whisper. And for a long time people don't hear the whisper.

And when you start to think of it like that you notice Moses and Jesus and Buddha and Krishna and Mohammed all say the same advice.

They say control your desires and be humble. Because if you do something wonderful will happen. You will hear the whisper, and the shouting will start to hurt your ears.

Desire is a shout, and love is a whisper.

And God is love, perhaps in a very literal sense.

Then again. Perhaps not.

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Stuff I Think is Important 32: Voter Fraud: Mostly Republicans do it.

October 22, 2008 at 8:41 PM

Something that lots of people don't know is this: several of the US Attorneys that were fired by Gonzalez were fired because they refused to bring charges of voter fraud against democrats without good evidence. David Iglecious is one major example.

This is a part of a long effort by Republicans. Basically, they believe that the more people vote, the worse it is for them. (PS. They are right. There are more poor people than rich, and the poor tend to vote Democrat.) Their response is to challenge as many voter registrations as possible.

In Florida in 2000, a firm removed 57,000 suspected felons from the voter rolls. Unfortunately, a very large number of them were improperly removed and Florida admitted to the mistake 2 years after the election. (Search Robert Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast for evidence.)

In Ohio is 2004, similar tactics were employed by Ken Blackwell, the Repub Secretary of State.

Basically, Democrats try to register as many voters as they can before each election. Republicans try to prevent as many people from voting as possible.

One of them leads to voter registration forms with bad info on them.

The other leads to preventing many citizens from exercising their right to vote.

Which is the real voter fraud?

(and if anyone doubts me about this, I can provide sources for my statements within 24 hours. )

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Stuff I Think is Important: Viral News Flash: No penguin was ever stolen from an aquarium by a child.

February 28, 2010 at 1:06 PM

I've been lying to people for the past four or five years.

I, who doubts everything to the point of being annoying, who studied cognitive dissonance the way most men study Meghan fox's butt, who could list the 6 major secrets of influence, 20 or so logical fallacies, and about 15 cognitive biases off the top of my head, have been telling a story that was just too good to be true.

There has never been a child that stole a penguin from an aquarium on a field trip. The story is a legend with some variations.http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/animalsinsects/a/penguin.htm

I was first told this as a rumor during some education class, and I repeated it as "a story I heard" for a while. However, at one point, I met someone who told me, with absolute certainty, that she worked with the teacher who had this happen. She had absolute confidence in the story, and the confidence changed my mind.

And ever since, I've been telling a ridiculous lie. I've been telling people I saw a magician actually saw a lady in half. I've been telling people that my uncle Moe in Indiana actually "got my nose."

Think about this when you see pundits making assertions with absolute confidence. The reason they do that isn't because it is good tv. The reason isn't because people with limited knowledge don't know any better.

Confidence makes ideas appear more trustworthy than they are. If someone makes bold statements with no doubt, they are not only arrogant. They are manipulating you. There intention doesn't really matter. Something about humans makes us over-react to confidence.

They are turning fuzzy and complicated reality into a good story, a story that you will tell to your friends and neighbors, a story you will take to the voting booth.

We are genetically programmed to care far too much about the confidence a person has when stating an opinion. Much like a nice suit or a fancy title, confidence gives fake credibility to bad ideas.

Or at least, that's what all the psychological research that I've read seems to agree on. Don't take my word for it. I made at least 40 mistakes yesterday alone.

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Stuff I Think is Important 33: 4 Problems with Republican Party Ideas

August 27, 2008 at 12:19 PM

In other words...

It's not foolish to think we can topple a government and turn a dictatorship into a democracy, but it is foolish to think we can regulate business in a way that could benefit Americans.

2. They believe welfare for people is a bad thing but they believe welfare for corporations (i.e. bailouts, tax breaks not tied to specific public goods) is good for America.

3. They believe sexual behavior is more important than intelligence or professional competence. Noone would doubt Bush's fidelity to his wife, so therefore his fidelity to the Constitution is unimportant.

In other words, they think a man who doesn't cheat in his relationships, won't cheat at his place of employment. (Yeah, right....)

4. They believe in small government, but they support a military budget which is the very hallmark of big government. (We spend as much as the REST OF THE WORLD COMBINED. We have 5 percent of world population and 50 percent of its military spending) Half of your taxes go to war funding and war related research. Unneccesary wars are far worse that welfare checks that go to lazy people. Welfare checks don't kill anyone. Welfare checks are less than a fraction of a percent of military waste.

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Stuff I think is Important: Lingerie and Language

December 9, 2008 at 3:31 PM

I was trying to explain what one of my classes was about recently, and I had this to say, "It's a class about the fact that meaning is context dependent."

He said, "why is that important?"

I said, "it keeps Victoria's secret in business for one."

He said, "wha.. [looking at me like I'm crazy] huh?"

I said, "why is clothing so important? The facts are the facts. A body is a flabby as it is, no matter what it's wearing, but what I notice, what I experience, depends on the context. Jeff Cook in a suit is sexy. Jeff Cook in a diaper is not."

I said, "I used to think it was silly that beautiful women had twenty or thirty different sets of lingerie. Now I get it."

The analogy is this. The world is our body. The way we talk about it is the clothing. If meaning is context dependent, and our sense of our experience is based on our sense of meaning, then the way we experience our life depends very much on the way we describe our lives.

Consider this. What's the difference between

A choice cut of top sirloin

and

A hunk of dead meat lopped off a castrated bull?

Answer: Whether we would pay 25 dollars for it at a restaurant.

Both sentences describe the exact same thing, but we experience it in a very different way.

Now apply that line of thinking to the way you talk about problems and challenges in your life. The way you describe them has a big impact on how you feel.

For example, I have an ex-fiancee, and I can tell you the way that I choose to tell that story has a big effect on the way that people experience me. I always choose to start that story with "she was a wonderful woman." This really plays a big role in the way I feel about her and about myself.

Ok. Now take exercise. Most of us are not in the shape we'd like to be in.

Consider how you explain that situation. Do you say it's because of your hours at work? (Well then you won't exercise until your job changes). Do you say it's because of your eating habits? (Well then you might change your eating habits.)

Or worst of all, do you say it's genetic? Explaining the situation in this way leaves you totally powerless over your circumstances. You will probably feel depressed, low energy, and ashamed whenever you think about it.

How we describe things is important.

How we explain things is important.

The world is a glass of water

and we often have no ability to change the amount of water.

However, we do have the ability

to see the glass as half full

and to use our words

to keep pointing out

that

half.

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Stuff I Think is Important 15- Cognitive Dissonance

April 10, 2008 at 12:51 PM

I am a selfish, dirty, gluttonous son of a bitch.

These things are all statements that a reasonable person could make about me. There are facts about my life that would support those conclusions.

No. Wait. I just chickened out there.

I am a selfish, dirty, gluttonous son of a bitch. I know I exaggerate. I do it on purpose.

Those things are all true statements about the way I live my life. They are probably true about a whole bunch of people. The "son of a bitch' part is something i made up. Ok. You've got me there.

Of course, I don't FEEL them to be true, but why is that?

Cognitive dissonance. I'll bring up the research later.

Stuff I Think is Important: Viral News Flash: No penguin was ever stolen from an aquarium by a child.

February 28, 2010 at 1:06 PM

I've been lying to people for the past four or five years.

There has never been a child that stole a penguin from an aquarium on a field trip. The story is a legend with some variations.http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/animalsinsects/a/penguin.htm

They are turning fuzzy and complicated reality into a good story, a story that you will tell to your friends and neighbors, a story you will take to the voting booth.

We are genetically programmed to care far too much about the confidence a person has when stating an opinion. Much like a nice suit or a fancy title, confidence gives fake credibility to bad ideas.

Or at least, that's what all the psychological research that I've read seems to agree on. Don't take my word for it. I made at least 40 mistakes yesterday alone.

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Andrew Brannan

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Kurt Johansen To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence. -- Mark Twain.

Hey, it's worked wonders for the GOP recently (presidential candidates confidently saying that evolution isn't true, global warming is a scam, and that Iraq definitely has weapons of mass destruction).

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Jeff Cook Kurt, I don't know for sure that is Mark Twain. But I do know for sure that it is brilliant! You made my da

To The Teachers Out There

April 8, 2012 at 9:42 AM

“This sentence is made of lead (and a sentence of lead gives a reader an entirely different sensation from one made of magnesium). This sentence is made of yak wool. This sentence is made of sunlight and plums. This sentence is made of ice. This sentence is made from the blood of the poet. This sentence was made in Japan. This sentence glows in the dark. This sentence was born with a caul. This sentence has a crush on Norman Mailer. This sentence is a wino and doesn't care who knows it. Like many italic sentences, this one has Mafia connections. This sentence is a double Cancer with a Pisces rising. This sentence lost its mind searching for the perfect paragraph. This sentence refuses to be diagrammed. This sentence ran off with an adverb clause. This sentence is 100 percent organic: it will not retain a facsimile of freshness like those sentences of Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe et al., which are loaded with preservatives. This sentence leaks. This sentence doesn't look Jewish... This sentence has accepted Jesus Christ as its personal savior. This sentence once spit in a book reviewer's eye. This sentence can do the funky chicken. This sentence has seen too much and forgotten too little. This sentence is called "Speedoo" but its real name is Mr. Earl. This sentence may be pregnant. This sentence suffered a split infinitive - and survived. If this sentence has been a snake you'd have bitten it. This sentence went to jail with Clifford Irving. This sentence went to Woodstock. And this little sentence went wee wee wee all the way home.”

― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Stuff I Think Is Important: Happiness: What science says about it.

July 1, 2008 at 11:33 AM

Note To those of you who are mob wars friends of mine:

I sometimes write notes about books I read and smart ideas. Please ignore em or hide them if they're not your thing.

One of the things I read the most is psychology. The specific experiments they do are fascinating, and psychologists have taught me some of my best tricks for dealing with difficult people.

Here's a little about happiness:

About 50% of one's sadness depends on one's genes. This is shown by studying identical twins, and learning that their happiness is 50% correlated even when growing up in different houses.

10-15% is a result of various measurable variables, such as socioeconomic status, marital status, health, income, and others.

The rest of the variance does not have a discernible cause.

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One of the leading researchers in happiness is a guy named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He studies the experience of flow, moments where a person is totally absorbed in the task at hand. These moments are the types of events that most people describe as the happiest parts of their lives.

Ever been "in the zone" while playing a game?

Ever been "in the groove" while playing music?

Ever been in a conversation that just "clicked"?

Mihaly thinks that all of these are experiences of flow. He has been studying it for years (with an interesting method) and he thinks there are certain facts that he's learned.

1. There is no magic formula to create it, since everyone is different. There are some common elements that all people report in flow experiences.

2. Flow experiences are based on tasks of appropriate difficulty.

3. Flow experiences are self-chosen, intrinsically motivated.

4. Flow experiences typically involve an activity with clear goals.

5. Flow experiences involve a reduction in self-consciousness.

Now here are some quotes from Mihaly's book Finding Flow

We can be happy experiencing the passive pleasure of a rested body, a warm sunshine, the contentment of a serene relationship. These are also moments to treasure, but this kind of happiness is very vulnerable and dependent on external circumstances. The happiness that follows flow is of our own making, and it leads to increasing complexity and growth in consciousness. -32

As we have seen earlier, human beings feel best in flow, when they are fully involved in meeting a challenge, solving a problem, discovering something new. Most activities that produce flow also have clear goals, clear rules, immediate feedback—a set of external demands that focuses our attention and makes demands on our skills. -66

This suggests that hobbies are about two and a half times more likely to produce a state of heightened enjoyment than TV does, and active games and sports about three times more. -67

Most of us hoard attention carefully. We dole it out only for serious things, for things that matter; we only get interested in whatever will promote our welfare. The objects most worthy of our psychic energy are ourselves and the people and things that will give us some material or emotional advantage. -123

The first step is to develop the habit of doing whatever needs to be done with concentrated attention, with skill rather than with inertia. Even the most routine tasks, like washing dishes, dressing, or mowing the lawn become more rewarding if we approach them with the care it would take to make a work of art. -127

"It is as if evolution has built a safety device in our nervous system that allows us to experience full happiness only when we are living at 100%--when we are fully using the physical and mental equipment we have been given."

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I like this guy's ideas a bunch, but it does make me wonder about my love of daydreaming. More about him later.

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Why teachers teach the wrong books...

May 27, 2009 at 2:36 PM

Until I was in high school, I hated English. I hated it with a passion. I talked trash to it, came up with elaborate plans to get around it, spread vicious rumors about it behind its back.
All the while I was reading between two and four books for fun each month, loving every second of it.
In tenth grade, I came to different realization. English teachers simply pick stupid books to read. They picked books that had nothing to do with my life, nothing to do with my interests.
This made it impossible for me to care about my work. It was only my parents constant threats that made me care about my grades.
At the time, I thought the English teachers knew this and didn’t care. I thought they selected books that they knew would bore us to tears because they thought, for some reason they never explained, that it would be good for us.
I was wrong. Most English teachers don’t know they pick horrible things to use in their classes. It is simple human psychology.
1. Cognitive dissonance- As an English teacher myself, I feel like I am a good judge of books. After reading one, I feel like I know how other people will react to it. After all, I am a book expert! I should be able to know what people will or won’t like, shouldn’t I?
a. This is the ego talking. I don’t know what other people will like because other people have different tastes and different experiences. I don’t know what’s good because my reactions to a book are based on my tastes and my experiences.
2. Flow- no matter what activity you study, people who practice it seem to enjoy a certain level of difficulty best. In order to enjoy something, it must be not too hard and not too easy. For experts in a task, they can only enjoy difficult examples. In other words, what I like depends on how good I am at it, as well as my tastes and experiences.
a. The people who are experts in reading tend to only believe difficult readings are classics.
b. The exception to this is books with historical significance.
3. Stereotypes- most teachers don’t spend much time hanging around people the age of students. Teachers spend time hanging out with adults. In addition, most teachers spend time hanging around people from the same culture. This means that teachers have to imagine what students will like based on stereotypes/assumptions about students. This requires a lot of work when designing courses, and all this work happens before the students have a chance to give feedback.
4. Pride of authorship- Once a teacher designs a course, the effort he/she put into course design makes it very difficult to judge the results fairly. Imagine asking yourself the question, “did I pick a bad book or are these just lazy/unintelligent students?” Too many people have too much pride to admit a mistake, even when student feedback makes it clear.
5. Principle of least effort- Teachers do not want to spend their free time reading new books and taking notes on them. Since we read and write for a job, there is little incentive to keep searching for new books to teach. This means that most teachers rely on what they already know or already have taught.

It’s easy to understand why this happens, and understanding why makes it easy to forgive. However, understanding why doesn’t help change people’s minds one damn bit.
Ego is a powerful thing, and it’s evil. It causes us to bore our students to tears.
I wish I could convince more teachers of that. I wish they were less in love with their favorite books and their own ideas.
Oh well.
What are you gonna do?

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Aaron Kerley

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Robin Brannan Um, teach, of course!!!

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Cyndi Brinsko Dennemann Be uncommonly good at teaching, as you are. Invite departure from the text.

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Love is a Drug

February 18, 2009 at 6:12 PM

I read a lot of books about communication, conversation, and people skills. Since education is a form of sales, these things are great sources of information. (After all, what I do for a living is meet a stranger, win him or her over, then I lead the conversation in the direction of my choosing. That's sales, plain and simple.)

Although many books about communication and conversation are written by people who I'd like to punch in the face, I recently read one that was chocked full of research studies and interesting scientific facts.

The most interesting? That love is a drug. http://people.howstuffworks.com/love7.htm

A primary hormone involved with the falling in love response in humans is called PEA. "Phenylethylamine: PEA is a neurotransmitter released by a region of the brain called the hypothalamus. Theresa Crenshaw, M.D., author of The Alchemy of Love and Lust, (Pocket Books; 1997) calls PEA "the molecule of love". It plays a part in the "falling in love" stage accompanied by feelings of euphoria. But PEA doesn't work alone when you are attracted to someone."

Love is a drug that wears off.
"Tragically, the effects of PEA seem to have a time limit. Researchers estimate the decay rate of the neurotransmitter at between 18 months and five years, which may explain why many relationships end in that time period..."

Here are some more quotes from Leil Lowdnes' book, How to Be A People Magnet

How do you define being an expert on friendship? If you define it as having more friends, it’s women. If you define it as being more sensitive to each other’s unspoken needs, it’s women. If you define it as genuinely liking their female friends better than anyone else in the world, it’s women. (One study showed many women like their best friends better than their husbands!) If you define it as talking about their friendships and admitting them more openly than the less gentle sex, it’s women. If you ask who is able to receive more comfort from their same-sex friends in later life, it’s women. –p.7

To find out precisely what qualities make people like us, the American Sociological Association conducted a vast study. The results? At the top of the list was having a positive optimistic personality and confidence in yourself. –p.20

Do I hear you asking, “Does that mean I should be narcissistic? Yes, a little. If you’re skeptical, please check out a study in the Journal of Sex Research on precisely this topic. It states that “Women’s relationship status is directly related to their own subjective view of themselves and their sexual self-esteem, not to their actual body size or the objective researchers’ rating of their physical attractiveness. In other words, if you feel beautiful and act like you are beautiful, it definitely magnifies your man’s view of your beauty. -60

A vast body of research called the equity theory (which I covered much more thoroughly in my book, How to Make Anyone Fall in Love with You) has shown beyond reasonable doubt that people make decisions about a potential love partner with all the reckoning that they would in buying a house or a horse.
What is the legal tender that counts in love? Equity theorists reduced it to six: looks, money, prestige, intelligence, personality, and character. They call it “the currency which buys a good partner.” --106

A man bonds not only to another man by doing thing they enjoy together, a man bonds to a woman by doing things he enjoys together. -117

In a study called “Can Men and Women Differentiate Between Friendly and Sexually Interested Behavior?” approximately eighty men and eighty women were shown films of a male and a female acting in either a friendly or sexually interested fashion. Men read a lot more sexiness into all the vignettes than women. --118

It has been shown that it is not our actual attractiveness, but our perception of our own attractiveness that plays the major role. In one study, ninety-nine people were told that they were being rated for attractiveness. Then researchers have them totally incorrect information. They told some of the lesser attractive people they had rated very highly and vice versa. (What a blow to your ego to think you’re attractive and then hear you’re a dud! However, far be it from me to argue the ethics of science.)
Then, in a supposedly unrelated experiment, the researchers told everyone to choose a partner for a task. Practically everyone chose a partner whom they thought was essentially just as attractive as they thought they had been judged to be, not as they really were. In fact, results showed that the opinion they had received about their own attractiveness was the primary factor that determined who they chose, especially when it came to choosing someone of the opposite sex. -136

Research has proved that people usually wind up with someone who is within a two-point range of themselves in attractiveness. -137

Anthropologist Helen Fisher found that in societies as varied as Russia, Egypt, South Africa, Venezuela, and Finland, divorces generally occur the year after the PEA disappears from their system, and the reality of two very different biological animals (male and female) having to deal with each other sets in. -162

The Social Organization of Sexuality found that the average American male has sex with six women over a lifetime, and the average American woman has only two lovers. When they counted noses on hanky panky, 75 percent of married men and 85 percent of married women had never put their nose on the same pillow with anyone but their spouse. -164

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Amelia Fulbright and Andrew Brannan

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Jeff Cook I need to check the timing on the last one. When that study happened matters.

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Aaron Kerley http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aztub_hMXTc

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Stuff I Think is Important: Sincerity

May 15, 2008 at 1:41 PM

"The most important thing in life is sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made." -George Burns

I have never met anyone who would prefer an insincere yes to a sincere no.

Those who say maybe when they mean "I'm almost sure the answer is no" aren't all that much better.

Insincerity makes it hard for people to learn from their mistakes.

The problem with insincerity has two sides.

The first problem is that it betrays the lack of respect the speaker has for the listener. An insincere yes sends the message that, to borrow from Nicholson, "you can't handle the truth." It assumes immaturity on the listener's part and never gives him/her a chance to prove otherwise.

The second problem with insincerity relates to the speaker. An insincere speaker is either concerned with pleasing the listener or afraid of upsetting the listener. In both cases, that person has a problem. Neither one of those is a desirable trait.

People who know these things like to point out that some people really cannot handle the truth. Some people react terribly when told bad news.

My response to that argument is that people deserve several chances to change before this can be assumed. However, if you meet one of those people who can't handle disappointment, run away from them.

But I will admit that sometimes a person must deal with the people who can't handle the truth, people that cannot be avoided. Many people call them "bosses."

In that case, I offer this advice.

"When a great king rides through town, the wise peasant bows respectfully and silently farts."-Ethiopian proverb

Stuff I Think Is Important: Why Karma is very, very hard for me to believe in.

March 15, 2009 at 9:00 AM

Many people I know believe in Karma, which strikes me as a spinoff of the idea of heaven and hell. Most of the people who believe it tend to use it as a motivational tool to do good things, which I why I never say the following to their face.

1. If you consider the men throughout history who are considered the best men, their lives are almost never filled with good luck. Jesus, Socrates, Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr.... Try a mental experiment and think of a name of someone that you think is a great man (or woman!).

When I do that, I notice that the normal people around them usually try to destroy them. (This makes me happy to be an ok, not a great man.)

2. The people who do believe that karma is a guiding principle of the universe think the common idea of karma is DEAD WRONG. The religious saints and mystics who first explained the principle in hinduism and buddhism made it clear that good leads to good and evil leads to evil, but the events in your life are not directly related to the karma caused by your actions.

In other words, if you treat a person well, they will treat the next person they see well. Your kind action leads to more kind action. Your kind action does not lead someone to come and give you a cookie..

3. The common idea of Karma seems to me to be stolen from Christianity. After all, how is it different from the idea of "good people get heaven on earth; bad people get hell on earth?" It strikes me like someone who knew the heaven and hell idea wanted to water it down and thought, "being punished eternally seems so scary. What if God does that during life instead? Hell, God is scary. What if there is a law of nature that does it?"

(Ok. That one is more about me than it is about Karma, but all I'm discussing is why I can't believe in it, not why it's wrong.)

4. The common idea of Karma also seems based on the desire to get a feeling of revenge without taking revenge. When one feels wronged, it is a sweet thought that the universe will do your punishing for you. It is a sweet thought that evil doers never get away with what they do.

But when I consider men that I consider to be evil doers, I find that very many of them get away with what they do.

And finally,

It seems hard for me to dispute the fact that it is a better thing to do something because it is right, than it is to do something because one expects to be rewarded. A belief in Karma seems to take away the first option, the option that most of my heroes seem to have taken.

Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.

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Kurt Johansen I too do not believe in Karma or Reincarnation. Remove those from the Buddhist Religion and Buddhism become one kick ass philosophy.

A Couple comments
2) That's very interesting; I came up with that same view of Karma... the only way I could read it so it made scientific sense. Do you have any references stating that this is how it was originally taught?

As far as reincarnation goes, I see it like this... Sadly, most people need an answer for death while they are alive. Inventing the concept of reincarnation was a brilliant way to satisfy that need, plus instill compassion in their followers. With an infinite past, that guy you currently want to punch in the face, in a past life was someone you loved... perhaps even your mother. Since all living things literally shared a loving personal history with you (in some past life) how can you hate any living thing? It also makes one less selfish and less wasteful -- since in future lives you will again be on this earth... so maybe it's not

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Kurt Johansen such a good idea to poison that stream or destroy that neighboring city -- you may need them in the future.

3) Buddhism predates Christianity by ~500 years... so it couldn't have gotten it from them. Jesus's teachings fit Buddhism to a T, but American Christianity doesn't put emphasis on the same things Jesus taught (eliminate your possessions, actions are actually important to get to God, essentially a very liberal message... even by today's standards). Instead they teach Paul's message that the only thing that matters is that Jesus existed, then died, then came back to life. They are very stern at reinforcing that actions don't actually matter; all that matters is that you accept Paul's message (of course they don't phrase it like that). If you are Mother Teresa but don't accept Paul's message... then No Heaven. This is also evident if you look at how un-liberal (un-Jesus-like) most of his American followers truly act. So relating Karma to Christianity I think is far from the mark.

Stuff I Think is Important: Economic stimulus

February 2, 2009 at 2:45 PM

Don't believe what they tell you about the economic stimulus package.

By this I mean the democrats. This is about helping the innocent victims of this economy more than it is about healing the economy itself.

All laws tend to have a pragmatic and an ideological component. This bill is no different. It is aimed largely at helping the victims of the economic disaster rather than helping the economy. That is an ideological move, not a pragmatic one.

The democrats believe that the bill will help the economy, but few economists believe that the current size and structure of the bill will be what the economy needs in order to quickly recover.

In other words, democrats are similar to republicans. In order to get something done, they need to please their political base, as well as give opponents a reason to vote for the bill. The base for democrats is the poor.

This is also why this stimulus package is similar to the Bush tax cuts that occurred several times during his presidency. Noone (other than some Repub fools) thought giving huge amounts of money to the rich would actually fix our economy or do anything but pile up debt. Most serious economists laughed at em. Still, that's what they told America.

What tax cuts for the rich are to republicans, spending on the poor is to democrats. This doesn't mean I'm equating the two. It means that both are based on sound principles but are often pragmatically ineffective. Tax cuts can do what repubs say and stimulus can do what dems say, but the gov't manages to pass sensible bills about either only rarely.

The difference is that there is a very large, well funded lobbying and PR organization to push tax breaks (which primarily benefit the rich). There is no such organization that pushes for economic stimulus.

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Thoughts From the Center

Saturday, June 23, 2018

Best of Doug Loves Movies

Monday, June 11, 2018

STUFF I THINK IS IMPORTANT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11

LIST OF POSTS

Stuff I Think is Important: 1

Stuff I Think Is Important: 2

Stuff I Think Is Important: 3

Stuff I Think is Important: 4

Stuff I Think is Important: 5

Stuff I Think Is Important 6- Hypnosis Works

Stuff I Think is Important: 7 (A little back story)

Stuff I Think Is Important: 8

Stuff I Think Is Important 9- Imprinting (1)

Stuff I Think is Important: 10 - Imprinting (2)

Stuff I Think is Important: 11 - The Halo Effect

Stuff I Think is Important: 12 More From Body Language Research

Stuff I Think is Important 13- Turn Taking

Stuff I Think Is Important- 14 There are no villians.

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Stuff I Think Is Important 16: The When Harry Met Sally Rule

Jeff Cook

Stuff I Find Important 18- Believing is Seeing

Stuff I Think is Important: 19 - Believing is Seeing (2)

Stuff I Think is Important 20: Believing is Seeing (3)

Stuff I Think is Important 20: Believing is Seeing (3)

Stuff I Think is Important 21: Appreciation is a skill

Stuff I Think is Important: what's coming up

Stuff I Think is Important 22: Humility is not a Virtue

Comments

Stuff I Think is Important 23: What is a Fact, Why is a Guess

Stuff I Think is Important 24: Energy

Stuff I Think is Important 26: Power- How to get it.

Stuff I Think is Important 27: The 48 Laws of Power

Stuff I Think is Important 27: The Media

Stuff I Think is Important: 29 The marketplace of ideas...

Stuff I Think is Important 23: What is a Fact, Why is a Guess

PS. Did I Mention Hypnosis is Real?

Sincerity

Stuff I Think is Important 30: PS. Did I Mention Hypnosis is Real?

Stuff I Think is Important: Love

Happiness: What science says about it.

4 Problems with Republican Party Ideas

Military Spending is a Racket

Personalities Matter Less than Policies- The George Bush Rule

Journalists are as dumb as the rest of us.

Comments

Stuff I Think is Important: Love- Ability

Stuff I Think is Important 32: Voter Fraud: Mostly Republicans do it.

Stuff I Think is Important: Viral News Flash: No penguin was ever stolen from an aquarium by a child.

Stuff I Think is Important 33: 4 Problems with Republican Party Ideas

Stuff I think is Important: Lingerie and Language

Stuff I Think is Important 15- Cognitive Dissonance

Stuff I Think is Important: Viral News Flash: No penguin was ever stolen from an aquarium by a child.

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To The Teachers Out There

Stuff I Think Is Important: Happiness: What science says about it.

Why teachers teach the wrong books...

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Love is a Drug

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Stuff I Think is Important: Sincerity

Stuff I Think Is Important: Why Karma is very, very hard for me to believe in.

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Stuff I Think is Important: Economic stimulus

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