motivated unreasoning

Psychologists have a term for this: “motivated reasoning,” which Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale, defines as “when a person is conforming their assessments of information to some interest or goal that is independent of accuracy”—an interest or goal such as remaining a well-regarded member of his political party, or winning the next election, or even just winning an argument. Geoffrey Cohen, a professor of psychology at Stanford, has shown how motivated reasoning can drive even the opinions of engaged partisans. In 2003, when he was an assistant professor at Yale, Cohen asked a group of undergraduates, who had previously described their political views as either very liberal or very conservative, to participate in a test to study, they were told, their “memory of everyday current events.”

The students were shown two articles: one was a generic news story; the other described a proposed welfare policy. The first article was a decoy; it was the students’ reactions to the second that interested Cohen. He was actually testing whether party identifications influence voters when they evaluate new policies. To find out, he produced multiple versions of the welfare article. Some students read about a program that was extremely generous—more generous, in fact, than any welfare policy that has ever existed in the United States—while others were presented with a very stingy proposal. But there was a twist: some versions of the article about the generous proposal portrayed it as being endorsed by Republican Party leaders; and some versions of the article about the meagre program described it as having Democratic support. The results showed that, “for both liberal and conservative participants, the effect of reference group information overrode that of policy content. If their party endorsed it, liberals supported even a harsh welfare program, and conservatives supported even a lavish one.”

privacy versus power

great pictures

The nature of democracy

From Znet

The media therefore presents gossip not in spite of American democracy, but to enhance and preserve a certain conception of it: one that involves spectators, not participants; public ratification, not public decision making. It is antithetical to a participatory economy and the idea of self-governance, and displays a striking commitment to reactionary ideology, despite illusions of an independent press. The issue at hand is and will always be whether or not the media is free, but will remain unresolved as long as the media is responsible for the gossip that debases public life.

William E. Shaub is a violin performance major at the Juilliard School of Music in Manhattan and the editor of TheFBM.com.

 

How true. Yukie says that in Japan scandals are more about connections to unpopular groups or money scandals. At least that appears to have some political relevance...though it rarely does...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/sunday-review/hard-truths-about-disclosure.html?hp

To illustrate how few people actually read its terms and conditions disclosure, the online retailer Gamestation, on April Fools’ Day 2010, replaced the usual text with what it called an “immortal soul clause,” which read: “By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 anno Domini, you agree to grant us a non-transferable option to claim, for now and forever more, your immortal soul.” Eager to get on with their online purchase, 88 percent of customers clicked the box to sell their souls. (The 12 percent who opted out were rewarded with a cash credit for their diligence.)

factorial functionSSSSS

Abstract. The Gamma function of Euler often is thought as the only function which interpolates the factorial numbers n! = 1,2,6,24,.... This is far from being true. We will discuss four factorial functions
the Euler factorial function n!,
the Hadamard Gamma function H(n),
the logarithmic single inflected factorial function L(n),
the logarithmic single inflected hyper-factorial function L*(n).

We will show that these alternative factorial functions posses qualities which are missing from the the conventional factorial function but might be desirable in some context.

how big of a mammal are we operating at?

rest state 100 watts

as a social animal...15,000

more than biggest mammal blue whale