cortex | September 22, 2008I'm now officially the most annoying backseat driver ever. I was annoying before, but ever since I read Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic (a great book) I've turned into a Mr. Know It All, offering pearls of wisdom on everything from how to merge (be selfish) to the ideal type of intersection (the roundabout). I've even started dispensing parking advice, which caused my girlfriend to kick me out of the car in the supermarket parking lot this weekend:
In the Wal-Mart parking lot, there was something else interesting about the two groups of parkers. More women opt to adopt the "cycling" strategy [this…
cortex | September 19, 2008David Foster Wallace on the increasing specialization of knowledge, or what I call the acronym boom:
Things are vastly more compartmentalized now than they were up through, say, the Renaissance. And more specialized, and more freighted with all kinds of special context. There's no way we'd expect a world-class, cutting-edge mathematician now also to be doing world-class, cutting-edge philosophy, theology, etc. Not so for the Greeks--if only because math, philosophy, and theology weren't coherently distinguishable for them. Same for the Neoplatonists and Scholastics, and etc. etc. (This is a…
cortex | September 19, 2008Wall Street sure is moody. Forty-eight hours ago we were on the verge of a financial apocalypse. Now, traders are engaging in record breaking market surges. While there certainly has been lots of news that helps explain these dramatic shifts, I wonder if a significant part of the movement is actually rooted in the raw emotions of investors.
In 2001, MIT professor Andrew Lo wanted to shed some light "on the longstanding controversy in economics and finance of whether financial markets are governed by rational forces or by emotional responses." He wired 10 currency speculators and stock…
cortex | September 18, 2008In the new Atlantic, Ross Douthat argues that porn is a moral slippery slope, and is part of the adultery continuum:
Yes, adultery is inevitable, but it's never been universal in the way that pornography has the potential to become--at least if we approach the use of hard-core porn as a normal outlet from the rigors of monogamy, and invest ourselves in a cultural paradigm that understands this as something all men do and all women need to live with. In the name of providing a low-risk alternative for males who would otherwise be tempted by "real" prostitutes and "real" affairs, we're…
cortex | September 18, 2008One of the most depressing things about an election cycle is the way it splits America into a series of demographic and ideological tribes. There's red states and blue states, whites and blacks, liberals and conservatives, hockey moms and soccer dads. Cultural commonalities are replaced with partisan differences. It's an ugly and unhealthy process, and it happens every four years.
But where do these tribal identities come from? It would be nice if these identities were mainly positive things, so that we chose a group based on "affirmational characteristics". In other words, I would belong to…
cortex | September 17, 2008What a bleak day on Wall Street. Although the financial contagion long ago spread beyond subprime mortgages, it's worth remembering that this all began when lenders decided that millions of people could afford loans that were actually unaffordable, at least over the long-term. Why did people accept these onerous loans? Why did they borrow more than they could possibly repay? The answer, I think, returns us to a basic cognitive flaw, built into the brain.
cortex | September 17, 2008Michael Ruhlman says to not waste money on store bought stock:
I cannot say this strongly or loudly enough: DO NOT use canned stock/broth. Use WATER instead. I repeat. You DO NOT NEED to buy that crappy can of Swanson's low sodium chicken broth! It will HURT your food. Use water instead. When that recipe says 1 cup of fresh chicken stock (or good quality canned broth), please know that your food, 90 percent of the time, will taste better if you use tap water instead of that "good quality" canned broth. Water is a miracle.
Last time I was doing a recipe for a book with one of the most…
cortex | September 17, 2008In response to my post yesterday which argued that Democrats and Republicans are both vulnerable to what's politely referred to as "motivated reasoning" - in other words, we're all partisan hacks - some commenters objected. They pointed out that the actual study I was discussing found that conservatives, perhaps due to their rigid beliefs, were especially vulnerable to such cognitive flaws. Here's a sample:
Imagine any other post like this generically. "A new study found something that supports my worldview! Haha. Except part of the conclusions undermine my worldview, so anecdotally I…
cortex | September 16, 2008Yesterday, we looked at some new research that found that when conservatives were exposed to evidence demonstrating the falsity of a partisan belief - such as a report demonstrating that Iraq didn't have WMD, or that lowering taxes doesn't increase government revenue - they became more convinced than ever that those beliefs were actually true. The scientists call this "the backfire effect".
The researchers argue that conservatives are particularly vulnerable to this cognitive flaw, as their beliefs tend to be more rigid and immutable. But I'm not so sure. As a liberal partisan hack, I'm very…
cortex | September 16, 2008How much can we learn about disease from studying genetics? A few months ago, Nature published an interesting article on the possible impossibility of ever finding the faulty genes behind many mental illnesses. Today, Nicholas Wade in the Times had an interesting article on the skeptical geneticist David Goldstein:
Goldstein says the effort to nail down the genetics of most common diseases is not working. "There is absolutely no question," he said, "that for the whole hope of personalized medicine, the news has been just about as bleak as it could be."
Of the HapMap and other techniques…
cortex | September 15, 2008I think this experiment helps explains a rather disturbing amount of our political discourse. What it neatly demonstrates is that the main reason so many campaigns traffic in dishonest allegations and pseudofacts is that, when it comes to voters, the facts don't really matter. Most of us are just partisan hacks:
Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not…
cortex | September 15, 2008Infinite Jest was one of those books that changed my life as a geeky adolescent and then proved to be rather unreadable a few years later. Nevertheless, I've always made a point of reading everything DFW ever wrote. I think of him whenever I cram a digression into a footnote, or delight in the scholarly look of an endnote shyly interrupting text. There aren't too many postmodernists who say things like this:
"We all suffer alone in the real world...True empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more…
cortex | September 15, 2008This makes me sad:
When gasoline prices shot up this year, Peggy Seemann thought about saving the $10 she spends weekly on lottery tickets.
But the prospect that the $10 could become $100 million or more was too appealing. So rather than stop buying Mega Millions tickets, Ms. Seemann, 50, who lives in suburban Chicago and works in advertising sales for a financial Web site, saved money instead by packing her lunch a few days a week, keeping alive her dreams of hitting a jackpot and retiring as a multimillionaire.
"With companies tightening and not giving cost-of-living increases, you have to…
cortex | September 15, 2008A few months ago, when it looked as if the financial maelstrom had mostly passed - after the Bear Stearns bailout, things calmed down - I decided to write an article about Read Montague and the weird habits of dopamine neurons. While these brain cells are often used to explain the computation of rewards, until I visited Montague's lab I had no idea that dopamine neurons could also help explain the perpetual cycle of boom and bust on Wall Street.
The experiment went like this: Each subject was given $100 and some basic information about the "current" state of the stock market. After choosing…
cortex | September 12, 2008I would love to watch this sport in person:
Goalball participants compete in teams of three, and try to throw a ball that has bells embedded in it, into the opponents' goal. They must use the sound of the bell to judge the position and movement of the ball. Games consist of two 10 minute halves. Blindfolds allow partially sighted players to compete on an equal footing with blind players.
Think, for a moment, about what an impressive cognitive feat that is. The rest of us depend almost entirely on our vision to localize objects in space. But these athletes have learned how to detect fast…
cortex | September 12, 2008Did you know that every time you eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch instead of a meat based sandwich you reduce your carbon footprint by more than two pounds? (I love it when environmentalism affirms my own habits.) That's about 40 percent of the savings that are achieved from driving a hybrid car. I'd also like to take this moment to endorse the Trader Joe's salted peanut butter made from unblanched peanuts. It's delicious.
cortex | September 12, 2008In recent days, there has been a lot of discussion about Sarah Palin's lack of experience in foreign policy. These criticisms all depend on the same assumption: that knowing more about foreign policy is always better. (Experience is typically used as a stand-in for knowledge, so when people say that you're inexperienced what they're really saying is you're ignorant.) But is that true? What is the payoff of expertise when it comes to political judgment?
Philip Tetlock has conducted the gold-standard study of political expertise. In the early 1980's, he picked two hundred and eighty-four people…
cortex | September 11, 2008I was living in Manhattan on 9/11. I can vividly recall the horrifying details of the day. I can still smell the acrid odor of burnt plastic and the pall of oily smoke and the feeling of disbelief, the sense that history had just pivoted in a tragic direction. Such vivid, visceral, emotional memories are known as flashbulb memories. They are defined by their cinematic feel, how they are dense with sensory detail. They also feel especially accurate: I'm completely convinced that my 9/11 memories are uncommonly precise, permanently etched into my hippocampus. But I'm wrong. My memories of 9/…
cortex | September 10, 2008Let's say I flash you a picture containing a mixture of blue and yellow dots for one-fifth of a second. You clearly don't have time to count the dots - you barely have time to register the image - but I ask you to guesstimate the ratio of blue to yellow dots anyways. Sounds like a pretty meaningless quiz, right? If anything, it would seem that I'm testing your visual cortex, or the ability of the brain to quickly make sense of its senses.
Well, a new paper in Nature argues that I'm actually testing your mathematical intuition. Furthermore, this intuition strongly correlates with your past…
cortex | September 10, 2008This makes me sad:
If ever there was a car made for the times, this would seem to be it: a sporty subcompact that seats five, offers a navigation system, and gets a whopping 65 miles to the gallon. Oh yes, and the car is made by Ford Motor (F), known widely for lumbering gas hogs.
Ford's 2009 Fiesta ECOnetic goes on sale in November. But here's the catch: Despite the car's potential to transform Ford's image and help it compete with Toyota Motor (TM) and Honda Motor (HMC) in its home market, the company will sell the little fuel sipper only in Europe. "We know it's an awesome vehicle," says…