Culture
cortex | November 7, 2006Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore, has an op-ed in today's Times on the psychology of voters. I'm a big fan of Schwartz - The Paradox of Choice is a fantastic book, and will explain why those expensive jeans you're wearing are less satisfying than your old pair of Levis - but I'm not convinced by his editorial:
When you go into the voting booth, you're trying to decide whom to accept or whom to reject. Are you judging who the good candidate is or who the less bad candidate is?
The effort by each side to coat the opposition in slime has made many of us cynical, giving us…
cortex | November 6, 2006Over at the National Review, David Klinghoffer tries to argue that the Haggard affair "confirms some truths of the worldview he defended." (If so, it's hard to imagine what an evangelical preacher would have to do to not confirm the truths he preaches. Murder? Rape? Incest? Apparently, buying meth from a male prostitute isn't enough.) But here's Klinghoffer:
Gay advocates reason that because a man has a temptation to homosexuality, he has little moral choice other than to obey it. This view of morality goes back to Darwin, who reduced behavior to biologically determined instincts. In The…
cortex | November 6, 2006...Has officially been released. It weighs in at a hefty 8.6 billion pixels.
[Hat Tip: Katherine]
cortex | November 6, 2006Democracy depends upon the wisdom of crowds. However, it's no secret that most people aren't particularly well informed about the issues. Furthermore, the less facts people know, the more vulnerable they are to being misled by negative political ads and grotesque push polls.
So is it a good thing that the majority of the electorate won't vote tomorrow? Some (conservative) economists think so:
Timothy Feddersen and Wolfgang Pesendorfer wrote a 1996 article in the American Economic Review that is now on the cutting edge of explaining why people don't vote.
Feddersen and Pesendorfer suggest that…
cortex | November 6, 2006According to a new study in the Journal of Marketing, foods that we think are healthy taste worse. In one experiment, subjects were offered a mango lassi, an Indian yogurt drink that has the consistency of a milkshake. Subjects that were told the lassi was "unhealthy" liked the drink significantly more than those who were told the drink was "healthy".
This shouldn't be surprising. As I noted here, many experiments have now demonstrated the omnipresence of our subjectivity. If we expect a food to taste worse, then it will taste worse, even when compared to an identical product. Our…
cortex | November 3, 2006When the going gets tough, what do the tough do? Blame somebody else. There is something deeply disturbing about the inability of anybody in power to take responsibility for their mistakes. Over at Vanity Fair, many of the neoconservative architects behind the Iraq War - the same naive folks who declared it would be a "cake-walk" - now blame the failure of the war on Bush's incompetence. While I certainly don't want to defend Bush's competence, I sincerely doubt that the current miasma we find ourselves in is simply a result of poor follow through. Rather, I think the plan itself - the…
razib | November 3, 2006Q: Is it permissible for white men to rap?
A: There are no hadiths which state the prophet's opinion of white men rapping (P.B.U.H). But, we can apply our reason in light of the evidence to this question. In the year 1413 A.H. a white man produced a reggae themed "rap" single which force us to state that it is impermissible for a believing white man to rap. Additionally, it is impermissible for believers to listen to the rapping of a white kuffar rapper. This ruling does not apply to the white rapper Marshall Mathers, for a whom a special dispensation is granted due to the felicitousness…
cortex | November 3, 2006I was lucky enough to grow up just a short walk from the Griffith Observatory, the planetarium/museum that overlooks the sprawling Los Angeles Basin. (It is perhaps best known as a movie location in "Rebel Without A Cause".) For the last few years, the Observatory has undergone an extensive and expensive renovation. I have yet to see the re-do, but I can't wait. Edward Rothstein described the inside:
This reconstruction is most remarkable not for what has changed, but for what has stayed the same. And that is a radical approach in the world of science exhibitions.
The rotunda's ceiling holds…
cortex | November 3, 2006This depressing study from Science has gotten a lot of press, which is a good thing. The data really speaks for itself:
So what do we do? The scientists note that increased regulation has actually been effective, which is surprising since many environmentalists assume that fisherman don't actually obey regulations. (Boats on the open seas are hard to monitor, and international disputes can often neuter governmental regulations.)
The researchers analyzed nearly 50 areas where restrictions had been imposed to stop overfishing and found that, on average, the range of species in the water…
cortex | November 3, 2006Is that he tells the truth by accident. His joke was a Freudian slip with important policy implications. Alex Tabarrok explains:
John Kerry this week has been abjectly apologizing for his statements on Iraq and education. According to Kerry he intended to critique President Bush:
"Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq."
But what he said was:
"You know education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well…
razib | November 2, 2006Aisha points me to this new report about sexuality worldwide:
However, those reporting multiple partners were much higher in developed countries - up to a third of under 25s in some areas - whereas only a small percentage in Africa reported the same.
And among singletons, westerners were more sexually active as well.
Two thirds of men and women without a partner in African countries reported they had had sex recently, compared to three quarters of those in developed countries.
Damn...paleface be hittin' it.
cortex | November 2, 2006Maureen Dowd has a cute profile/interview of the Comedy Central duo in the new Rolling Stone:
I thought Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert might be a little nervous to meet with me. I was the real news commentator, after all, and they were the mock. They threw spitballs at presidents; I interviewed presidents before throwing spitballs at them. I had crisscrossed the globe to cover news stories, while these guys just put on dark suits and threw up imported backgrounds on a green screen. No doubt they would try to impress me with some weighty discussion about world affairs or the midterm elections…
cortex | November 2, 2006From the LA Times:
Paul Theodore Del Vacchio, now 41, is a gambler. In Riverside County Superior Court, a psychologist testifies that Del Vacchio fed his impulse-control disorder with online wagering, not caring about the win or loss, just the high of the bet.
This is why he stole half a million dollars from his employer, an Indian casino, Del Vacchio tells the judge. It was a compulsion. He needed to cover his losses.
Needless to say, the addiction defense didn't work: the Judge handed Paul Del Vacchio a four year sentence. If we aren't going to show mercy for crack addicts, then we…
cortex | November 2, 2006Apparently, a little gridlock is a good thing: the United States has never gotten involved in a conflict involving more than a week of ground combat when the branches of government are controlled by different parties. Economist William Niskanen explains:
From the dawn of the Cold War until today, we've had only two periods of what could be called fiscal restraint: The last six years of the Eisenhower administration, and the last six years of the Clinton administration, both intervals in which the opposition controlled Congress. Under Clinton, the average annual increase in spending was at…
cortex | November 1, 2006 Yourdiseaserisk.com is still a little slow - a recent WSJ article overwhelmed it with traffic - but I had great fun altering my lifestyle choices to see how they affected my risk for various catastrophic illnesses, such as stroke, heart disease, diabetes, etc. (It's like working for a life insurance company.) The site comes with good credentials, too: it was designed by the Harvard Center for Cancer Prevention. What have I learned so far? Nothing too surprising: not smoking and getting a basic amount of exercise drastically reduce your chances of getting just about every disease.
cortex | November 1, 2006Clifford Geertz, the founder of interpretative anthropology, passed away yesterday. To commemorate his body of work - The Interpretation of Cultures is a true masterpiece - I thought I'd offer up two of my favorite Geertz quotes:
"Believing with Max Weber that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning."
"Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less…
cortex | November 1, 2006TV on DVD - the opiate of the 21st century - has ruined movies for me. No matter what movie I watch, I can't help but be disappointed when the entertainment ends after just two hours. (And for this I spent $10?) The characters always feel underdeveloped, the plot too superficial. On the other hand, when I watch TV on DVD, when I curl up for several hours with the interns of Greys Anatomy, or the street dealers of The Wire, or the freaks and geeks of Freaks and Geeks, I end up forming serious emotional attachments. The characters develop depth and history; the plots are able to cultivate all…
cortex | November 1, 2006In honor of the start of basketball season, and to commemorate the surprising victory of my Kobe-less Lakers over the Suns, I thought I'd discuss my favorite science paper on basketball. (I did a similar thing to celebrate the beginning of the football season.)
The paper is by Amos Tversky (of KahnemanandTversky fame) and Thomas Gilovich. In 1985, Tversky and Gilovich analyzed "the hot hand" among NBA players. As every basketball fan knows, players are streaky: one minute they are in the zone and can't miss a shot, and the next minute every field goal attempt is ricocheting off the rim. But…
cortex | October 31, 2006So much for the body-brain duality. Researchers in the new PNAS claim that the sympathetic nervous system in depressed rodents causes a loss of bone mass. Treatment with anti-depressants rescues the situation.
These results define a linkage among depression, excessive adrenergic activity, and reduced bone formation, thus demonstrating an interaction among behavioral responses, the brain, and the skeleton, which leads to impaired bone structure. Together with the common occurrence of depression and bone loss in the aging population, the present data implicate depression as a potential major…
cortex | October 31, 2006This survey gives me hope: 78 percent of Americans support medical marijuana:
When Californians approved one of the first medical marijuana laws, in 1996, drug warriors were so convinced it would lead to a catastrophic spike in illegal use by teenagers that they sponsored a study to document the damage. But there was no catastrophe: after the law, marijuana use by teenagers actually declined in California.
In the decade since, as the Marijuana Policy Project documented in a recent study, popular support for legalized medical marijuana has increased in California and in virtually every other…