Friday, March 16, 2012

Links

Since on Monday, I'll be arriving in Santiago de Chile, and won't be in any shape to post, we'll just have to let Friday's child be full of links.

You are more awesome than a monkey wearing a tuxedo made out [of] bacon riding a cyborg unicorn

Tag Challenge

The quiz Dan Kahneman wants you to fail...

Peyton Manning gets a waiter fired, though it was the waiter's fault.

Sauce for the goose? In retaliation, female legislators try to regulate the gander's sauce, too. (Sorry about the "gander's sauce" thing. Ick.)

All of a sudden, Geithner and co. are Austrians? Markets are hard to regulate, and prices fluctuate because of uncertainty? Are we in bizarro world?

And, in an attempt to get the president to concentrate on being president, instead of just always campaigning:
Click on the image for an even more distracted image...

(Nod to SdM, Anonyman, Kevin Lewis, and the Blonde)

4 comments:

Andrew said...

The journalist gets Kahneman totally wrong in quiz question #2. He basically says that you shouldn't apply Bayes' rule to incorporate the information from the personality test.

This is not what Kahneman and Tversky argued at all:

http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~camerer/Ec101/JudgementUncertainty.pdf


It seems that every time a journalist writes about something I know even a little bit about, there is a glaring error. Am I to assume that all articles, including those on subjects I know nothing about, are substantively wrong? Sad.

Tom said...

Geithner is no Austrian. The price of gas is a "problem" only to a politician.

On the other hand, Obama could bring down the price of gas easily -- just by declaring that the U.S. would, on no account, use force against Iran nor support Israel doing so.

aub said...

@Andrew-
It seems that every time a journalist writes about something I know even a little bit about, there is a glaring error. Am I to assume that all articles, including those on subjects I know nothing about, are substantively wrong?

From Michael Chrichton's 2002 essay, "Why Speculate?"

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

...I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say.

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