think or thwim

This was recorded from the Bob and Tom Show in 2001: Link

:: Why, that’s delightful

Neurologist and Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition, V.S. Ramachandran, makes an excellent point at Beyond Belief 2006.

Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman have been continuing with their theme that you probably damage your kids by telling them they are smart. I think today’s post at Po’s blog is particularly good.

They start by wondering why studies focus on people with high self esteem or low self esteem. Why do they ignore all the people with middle self esteem? Shouldn’t a realistic self view be the goal? From their article:

You may have heard about the studies that found people with high self-esteem are smarter, more beautiful, and more successful in their personal relationships than us poor schlumps with low self-esteem. But those studies asked people to rate their self-esteem and then asked them to rate their own intelligence, beauty, relationship skills, etc. And if you think about it, it shouldn’t come as too terrible as surprise to learn that the people who thought highly of themselves said they were golden in each of those areas.

But when subsequent researchers asked third parties to rate high and low self-esteem people in terms of beauty, high self-esteem people were no more likely to be considered beautiful. IQ tests revealed they weren’t any smarter. And college students said that high-self-esteem students weren’t better roommates. Actually, it was the low-self-esteem students who were. Low self-esteem people assume you don’t like them, so they work harder to be friendlier – they take suggestions for change more seriously, etc.

The post was called You’re Ruining My Self-Esteem! – Part 1, so it appears there’s more to come.

This 2001 PBS Frontline is something everyone should watch. It shows how corporations find what’s cool, sell it to the masses, and move on.

I wonder how this worked out.

:: Subtraction

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From Douglas Adams | How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

:: Kevin Kelly

AskaNinja uses a mall food court analogy explain the same thing.

Find out more and sign the petition at SaveTheInternet.com

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, claims that a core group of about 1000 people has submitted most of the edits. However, Aaron Swartz recently did a little research, and found that Wales is right if we measure number of edits, but not if we measure amount of content contributed.

From the article:

When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

And when you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Writing an encyclopedia is hard. To do anywhere near a decent job, you have to know a great deal of information about an incredibly wide variety of subjects. Writing so much text is difficult, but doing all the background research seems impossible.

On the other hand, everyone has a bunch of obscure things that, for one reason or another, they’ve come to know well. So they share them, clicking the edit link and adding a paragraph or two to Wikipedia. At the same time, a small number of people have become particularly involved in Wikipedia itself, learning its policies and special syntax, and spending their time tweaking the contributions of everybody else.