cojadate
The article claimed that noticing opportunities was a characteristic of lucky people. It did not say that lucky people were any more likely to be more risk-taking or credulous than other people.
Richard Wiseman's claims are in no way affected by the experiment you just mentioned, because games of pure chance are not affected by mindset. Most of life is affected by mindset.
One French critic wrote of 'It':
«Ça» fonctionne parce que «Ça» fait peur. Pendant plus de mille pages – Jean-Pierre Dufreigne, L'Express
Translation: 'It' works because "It" scares. Throughout over one thousand pages.
How wrong can a critic be?
Yes the horror element is great but it's not why 'It' works at all, not for me anyway. For me 'It' works because of its insights into human nature – it's use of fantasy to look unflinchingly at human nature at it's worst and it's most beautiful, to do justice to a world that is full of both evil and goodness, because every story overlaps with other stories overlapping with other stories, just like real life, because it's a morally uncompromising book which presents no hard and fast rules of morality, because it portrays children and childhood accurately, because it shows us a world where abuse, neglect and apathy are rife, come in many forms, and can be perpetrated by people for all kinds of reasons, sometimes wilfully, sometimes from neediness, sometimes from a self-deluded sense of righteousness, sometimes from lack of knowing anything better. Because it also writes about the power of love and the deep bonds people share without a shred of sentimentality. Because it's a fantasy, and yet it shows our world perhaps more accurately than any story I've ever read, watched or heard.
I particularly loved the theme of standing up to oppressors. Many stories have this element, but 'It' is so true to reality that the standing-up is more inspiring and powerful than in other works. Typically however, King has the wisdom to have a side-plot which shows how standing up to oppressors can go wrong, by way of brutal vigilantism and bloody revenge. It's this steadfast refusal to accept clichés and black-and-white worldviews of any kind which I particularly appreciate in King.
I don't know, maybe the best thing about it is that makes a giant telepathic space turtle seem like a perfectly plausible part of a novel characterized by gritty realism.
My second, not entirely unrelated, nomination is 'Psychology is About People' by HJ Eysenck. This is half a century old so I am sure there are now many better books saying much the same thing. But for me it was the culmination of a train of thought, which started when I came across the quote "wisest is she who knows she does not know" in Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World , which made me realize how little I know and how important it is to identify and question my own assumptions.
Psychology is About People is an attack on fuzzy thinking in the fields of public policy-making, social science and, above all, psychology (Eysenck was himself a psychologist). He demonstrates that pyschotherapy, at least in his time, was little more than storytelling which, when held up to the hard light of the experimental method, was almost always proven false. Likewise, he attacks governments for basing their social policies on similarly unexamined assumptions. These fields, especially psychology have all come a long way since Eysenck's time but it's still very easy to spot the kind of fuzzy thinking and refusal-to-question-assumptions everywhere you look.
I disagree with Eysenk in some of the conclusions he makes from his own research, but I think his general approach to knowledge and truth is fantastic. It certainly changed the way I think and has effected in me a permanent distaste for 'meta-narratives' of all kinds.
Re: first problem: I think a large number of fairly good comments probably IS a more valuable contribution than a small number of very good comments.
The second problem is more, er, problematic, but you could argue that good comments are popular articles deserve more karma, since these are comments on topics which people are really interested in – i.e. valuable insights on hot topics benefit more people than valuable insights on obscure topics, and are therefore more valuable contributions.
This article brings up two particularly interesting points for me.
Firstly, do performance measures increase productivity? Apparently, they actually decrease productivity, at least if productivity involves creative problem-solving: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html
Secondly, can standard corporations genuinely recognize and implement the 'human side' of management, as the article says they should. I would argue not. The standard corporation is owned by a large number of shareholders with no personal connection to the corporation and no interest in anything other than profiting from their shares. Because of this arrangement, it is inevitable that profit is the only value that counts in corporate management. If management adopts a 'touchy-feely' approach it can only be justified if this is found to increase profits, and it would do nothing to prevent their being discarded as soon as it becomes profitable to do so. A genuine recognition of the 'human side' of management would be a recognition that humans are ends in themselves, not means to an end. But in a standard corporate structure, employees are inevitably just cogs in a profit-making machine.
Churchill established it as a lynchpin of British foreign policy, as absolute and unquestionably valid as the old "maintain a balance of power in Europe", and it just seems to have stuck ever since, regardless of the costs.
But however fine-tuned the system, no point system is immune from gaming, and no-one can expect points to be any more than vague clue as to someone's true worth as a participant in the community.
"In 1946, for example, 34 percent of the Grant Study men who had served in World War II reported having come under enemy fire, and 25 percent said they had killed an enemy. In 1988, the first number climbed to 40 percent—and the second fell to about 14 percent. “As is well known,” Vaillant concluded, “with the passage of years, old wars become more adventurous and less dangerous.”"
It's a scary and uncertain world we live if we can't even rely on our own memories to tell us the truth. Makes me think I should keep a diary.
I was also slightly frustrated with the author's apparently uncritical acceptance of Vaillant's theory of adaptations. Any actual verifiable evidence for this theory?
"Strenuous defenses, I came to see, are no mere academic theme for Vaillant, who has molded his life story like so much clay. Consider the story of his father’s suicide and his own delight in going through the 25th-reunion book [of his father's school] as a 13-year-old. When I asked Vaillant if the experience of paging through the book had been tinged with sadness, he said, “It was fascinating,” and went on to describe his awe and wonder at longitudinal studies. If he were observing his own case, Vaillant himself would probably call this “reaction formation”—responding to anxiety (pain at grasping a father’s violent departure) with an opposite tendency (joy at watching men, quite like him, develop through time)."
Is "reaction formation" really the only explanation for this? It seems a very likely one but maybe Vaillant just has a brain which, due to its biological programming, doesn't react strongly to death. Maybe his fascination with the reunion book was simply because of his perplexity with the mystery of his father's death (as opposed to a way of substituting a painful emotion with a manageable one, as Vaillant's theory would have it).
I found this strange because at other points in the article, the author seemed aware of the gap between psychoanalysis as genuine science – unverifiable speculation and verifiable testing – and yet here we have a theory being talked about as if it were a proven fact.
And, finally, I liked this quote very much:
"Their lives were too human for science, too beautiful for numbers, too sad for diagnosis and too immortal for bound journals" - George Vaillant
Though I hope that doesn't stop people trying to bind them up in science, because it's the only way we'll ever know the truth about human nature.
In my opinion it goes like this:
* A bad idea is less than worthless
* Unoriginal good ideas are worthless
* Original but vague good ideas are worth very little
* Original and detailed good ideas are worth a lot, but still useless without fantastic excecution too
Combined with the apparent lack of explanation for bubbles, doesn't that meant there is a gigantic gaping hole in the entire theory?
I don't quite see why The General Theory was enough to convert Posner to Keynesianism.
Also, I think you oversimplify the ideas of Amazon, Google, Zappo and Facebook. I would argue that Amazon's idea was more "selling a massive range of books online via a simple interface" not just "selling books". And there are many variations of the "online community thing". The idea for Facebook wasn't the same as the idea for Friends Reunited and it's easy to see how that helped one to prosper and the other to fail.
Nothing in the article contradicts that, even if the article title implies it does. It was a really great article and I particularly loved the idea about assigning monetary value to your tasks. Unfortunately it's difficult for me to do at the moment since so many of my current tasks are based on all-or-nothing gambles.
The only elements of seriousness I can detect are in the snipe at pirates and the allusion to the struggles of the creative industries, but I think there are genuinely two sides to those stories so I find it hard to get worked up it.