Taleb is writing about truths that most people don’t really want to know. They want to think they know, and they want to act like they know, but deep down they don’t want to think all the way through to the logical conclusion.
Tag: psychology
Scale matters
The Tragedy of the Conversational Commons that comes from being able to hijack an audience to get attention for your own views becomes too persistently tempting when that audience is large. At large scale, John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory cannot be repealed.
Swarm Behavior
Recently, swarm theory has begun to move from the laboratory into the business and industrial world.
Dreyfus Model experiment
The Dreyfus Model is a model of skills acquisition that describes how people progress in their knowledge:
- Novice – Needs to be told exactly what to do. Very little context to base decisions on.
- Advanced beginner – Has more context, but still needs rigid guidelines to follow.
- Competent – Begins to question the reasoning behind the tasks, and can see longer term consequences.
- Proficient – Still relies on rules, but able to seperate what is most important.
- Expert – Works mainly on intuition, except in circumstances where problems occur
When we are involved in a discussion, guess the Dreyfus level of participants. Then, tailor the conversation to that. If you are the lower number one, bring the conversation to your level. Conversely, be sure you aren’t talking over the heads of the other participants.
why rules hurt experts
Memory Dampening
scientists were successfully able to “dampen” memories of rapes and accidents. Apparently, the subjects were less stressed out, and didn’t exhibit raised heart rates, when thinking of the trauma.
pretty crude still
Babies are tiny liars
Fake crying is one of the earliest forms of deception to emerge, and infants use it to get attention even though nothing is wrong. You can tell, as they will then pause while they wait to hear if their mother is responding, before crying again.
Brown’s human universals
By winnowing the literature of anthropology, Donald E Brown collected a list of some 200 ‘human universals’. I think trying to re-sort it in ‘evolutionary‘ order should be more instructive
Behavioral economics and poverty
Many activities — from over-eating, drinking, smoking — combine immediate gratification with delayed costs. It is no coincidence that the poor are much more prone to engage in such activities than the rest of the population.
Dunning-Kruger Effect
ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
evolution has its cruel ways. you’d think that would get people killed at a faster rate and select more for knowledge.
2018-06-28:
Interestingly, this effect not only applies to those with lower abilities thinking they are better but also to experts who think they’re not exceptional. That is, the least & most skilled groups are both deficient in their ability to evaluate their skills.
Ambient Intimacy
Ambient Intimacy is a term to describe that sense of connectedness that you get from participating in social tools online that allow you to feel as though you are maintaining and, perhaps in fact, increasing your closeness with people in your social network through the messages and content that you share online – be it photographs or text or information about upcoming travel.
all this social grooming may help us to raise dunbars number. and once we do, expect huge payoffs as previously zero-sum games become win-win. (for background, read nonzero by robert wright.)
Gregor J. Rothfuss 