Last week I discussed Philip Tetlock’s work that revealed the utter meaninglessness of punditry in The Illusion of Punditry. It is important to note that although professional pundits, on average, were less accurate than random chance, a few outliers actually performed well above average. Tetlock closely examined the variables associated with the distribution of accuracy …
Read more “Are You a Hedgehog or a Fox?”
Have you ever wondered what makes a pundit a pundit? I mean really! Is there pundit school or a degree in punditry? Given what I hear, I can only imagine that what would be conferred upon graduation is a B.S. of different, more effluent sort. I mean REALLY! I am certain that many of …
Read more “The Illusion of Punditry”
Over the last couple months I have submitted posts proclaiming the potency of intuition. One of my major resources has been Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Among Gladwell’s tenets, the most prominent was the power of intuition and its relative supremacy, in certain situations, over rational thought. I have also heavily …
Read more “Bad Blink – Good Gorilla?”
Believe it or not, freewill, to a large extent, is an illusion. For the most part, what you do, as you go through your day is based on decisions made outside of your conscious awareness. Many of these decisions involve a complicated and largely unconscious interplay among various brain regions that each struggle for control …
Read more “Retail Mind Manipulation”
For nearly as long as humans have been thinking about thinking, one of the most intriguing issues has been the interplay of reason and emotion. For the greatest thinkers throughout recorded history, reason has reigned supreme. The traditional paradigm has been one of a dichotomy where refined and uniquely human REASON pitches an ongoing battle …
Read more “What Plato, Descartes, and Kant Got Wrong: Reason Does not Rule.”
Recently, Fox News, aired a story posing the question as to whether Fred Rogers was evil. Why you may ask, would anyone use the word evil in reference to such a gentle man? They were suggesting that his you’re special message fostered unworthy self esteem and in effect ruined an entire generation of children. This …
Read more “Self Esteem on a Silver Platter”
The capabilities of our adaptive unconscious are really quite amazing. In an earlier post, entitled Intuitive Thought, I covered the general relative strengths of this silent supercomputer running outside of our awareness. It has long been believed that rational thought, the application of logic and reason, over intuition, is the key to a successful life. …
Read more “Emotion vs. Reason: And the winner is?”
“I saw it with my own two eyes!” Does this argument suffice? As it turns out – “NO!” that’s not quite good enough. Seeing should not necessarily conclude in believing. Need proof? Play the video below. As should be evident as a result of this video, what we perceive, can’t necessarily be fully …
Read more “You Can’t Trust What You See”
In my post entitled Intuitive Thought I mentioned that rational thought is slow and arduous. I also mentioned in Spinoza’s Conjecture that vague or confusing information is processed in a portion of the brain that also processes pain and disgust. Rational thought, it seems, is not all it’s cracked up to be. In fact we …
Read more “Rational Thought: Not all it’s cracked up to be.”
I just spent two weeks in Europe with my fellow adventurer and wife visiting the relics of times gone by. In the Louvre we peered upon works laid down well over two thousand years ago by Greek sculptors as well as by Roman, Middle Age, Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque artists. We admired the Impressionists …
Read more “A Vacation Without Essentialism? No Way!”