cognitive dissonance

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pages: 410 words: 114,005

Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn From Their Mistakes--But Some Do by Matthew Syed

Abraham Wald, Airbus A320, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, crew resource management, deliberate practice, double helix, epigenetics, fail fast, fear of failure, flying shuttle, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Dyson, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, luminiferous ether, mandatory minimum, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, publication bias, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, US Airways Flight 1549, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War

From reading exactly the same material, the two groups moved even further apart in their views. They had each reframed the evidence to fit in with their preexisting beliefs. Festinger’s great achievement was to show that cognitive dissonance is a deeply ingrained human trait. The more we have riding on our judgments, the more we are likely to manipulate any new evidence that calls them into question. Now let us take these insights back to the subject with which we started this chapter. For it turns out that cognitive dissonance has had huge and often astonishing effects on the workings of the criminal justice system. IV On March 20, 1987, a young girl was attacked in her home in Billings, Montana.

Imagine what it must be like to be confronted with evidence that they have assisted in putting the wrong person in jail; that they have ruined the life of an innocent person; that the wounds of the victim’s family are going to be reopened. It must be stomach churning. In terms of cognitive dissonance, it is difficult to think of anything more threatening. As Richard Ofshe, a social psychologist, has put it: “[Convicting the wrong person is] one of the worst professional mistakes you can make—like a physician amputating the wrong arm.”21 Just think of how desperate they would be to reframe the fatality. The theory of cognitive dissonance is the only way to get a handle on the otherwise bewildering reaction of prosecutors and police (and, indeed, the wider system) to exonerating DNA evidence.

In other words, the victim had had consensual sex with another man, but had subsequently been raped by the prisoner, who had used a condom.22 This is the domino effect of cognitive dissonance: the reframing process takes on a life of its own. The presence of an entirely new man, not mentioned at the initial trial, for whom there were no eyewitnesses, and whom the victim often couldn’t remember having sex with, may seem like a desperate ploy to evade the evidence. But it has been used so often that it has been given a name by defense lawyers: “the unindicted co-ejaculator.” It is a term that usefully captures the power of cognitive dissonance. Schulz quotes from a fascinating interview with Peter Neufeld of the Innocence Project: We’ll be leaving the courtroom after an exoneration and the prosecutor will say “We still think your client is guilty and we are going to retry him.”


pages: 254 words: 79,052

Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us Into Temptation by Chris Nodder

4chan, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, drop ship, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, game design, gamification, haute couture, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, late fees, lolcat, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Monty Hall problem, Netflix Prize, Nick Leeson, Occupy movement, Paradox of Choice, pets.com, price anchoring, recommendation engine, Rory Sutherland, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile

Provide reasons for people to use If you expect that users will be conflicted about the product or service you offer, provide them with many reasons they can use to resolve cognitive dissonance and keep their pride intact. Online, cognitive dissonance can be brought about by effects such as buyer’s remorse, in which the purchaser struggles to justify the high purchase price and their desire for an item in comparison to their subsequent feelings of the item’s worth. Sites help users resolve this cognitive dissonance by giving them reasons and evidence that bolster their satisfaction with the product (positive reviews; images of famous people using the product; and promises of hard-to-quantify benefits, such as social approval brought about by using the product) rather than letting them resolve the dissonance by returning the product.

Pride Saint Augustine quote: “Humilitas homines sanctis angelis similes facit, et superbia ex angelis demones facit.” as quoted in Manipulus Florum (c. 1306), edited by Thomas Hibernicus. Cognitive dissonance Leon Festinger proposed the theory of cognitive dissonance after he studied the aftermath of Dorothy Martin’s December 21, 1954, end of the world prediction. Yes, these predictions seem to happen with alarming frequency: Leon Festinger. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Illinois: Row, Peterson, 1957. Harold Camping quote: familyradio.com. Retrieved January 2012. Ig Nobel prize winners, by year: “Winners of the Ig Nobel Prize.”

They revolve around setting goals to reduce debt, to have “toy fund” money for frivolous expenditures, and simply being entertained: “Why not get paid for sitting at the computer, which I would be doing anyway?” Lots of these reasons appear to be justifications that attempt to remove the cognitive dissonance of doing something that isn’t actually particularly “worthwhile” in financial terms. And that fits in nicely with some findings from way back in 1959 when Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith found that in situations where there is cognitive dissonance between effort and return, people will be forced to create justifications for working so hard for a small reward, thus increasing their perceived value of the reward.


pages: 420 words: 98,309

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson

Ayatollah Khomeini, classic study, climate anxiety, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, false memory syndrome, fear of failure, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, medical malpractice, medical residency, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, placebo effect, psychological pricing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, sugar pill, telemarketer, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Many of the group's members, who had not felt the need to proselytize before December 21, began calling the press to report the miracle, and soon they were out on the streets, buttonholing passersby, trying to convert them. Mrs. Keech's prediction had failed, but not Leon Festinger's. *** The engine that drives self-justification, the energy that produces the need to justify our actions and decisions—especially the wrong ones—is an unpleasant feeling that Festinger called "cognitive dissonance." Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent, such as "Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me" and "I smoke two packs a day." Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don't rest easy until they find a way to reduce it.

The conservative columnist William Safire once described the "psychopolitical challenge" that voters face: "how to deal with cognitive dissonance."29 He began with a story of his own such challenge. During the Clinton administration, Safire recounted, he had criticized Hillary Clinton for trying to conceal the identity of the members of her health-care task force. He wrote a column castigating her efforts at secrecy, which he said were toxic to democracy. No dissonance there; those bad Democrats are always doing bad things. Six years later, however, he found that he was "afflicted" by cognitive dissonance when Vice President Dick Cheney, a fellow conservative Republican whom Safire admires, insisted on keeping the identity of his energy-policy task force a secret.

New York: Harper and Brothers, p. 11 (first quote), p. 120 (second quote). 10 Edward Humes (1999), Mean Justice. New York: Pocket Books. CHAPTER 1 Cognitive Dissonance: The Engine of Self-justification 1 Press releases from Neal Chase, representing the religious group Baha'is Under the Provisions of the Covenant, in "The End Is Nearish," Harper's, February 1995, pp. 22, 24. 2 Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter (1956), When Prophecy Fails. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 3 Leon Festinger (1957), A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford: Stanford University Press. See also Leon Festinger and Elliot Aronson (1960), "Arousal and Reduction of Dissonance in Social Contexts," in D.


pages: 204 words: 67,319

Psychopath Free (Expanded Edition): Recovering From Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other Toxic People by Jackson MacKenzie

cognitive dissonance

Only you can’t see this clearly because you’ve had lies about who you are and your part in this relationship pounded into your brain, over and over again. This creates cognitive dissonance, causing you to have doubts about ending it. Compounding this is the fact that in the initial phase of the relationship, they did an excellent job of idealizing and love-bombing you. The vicious circle then comes in to play, in that you cannot see clearly who they are and the cognitive dissonance won’t leave you until you’ve done some No Contact time. But it’s hard to feel at peace with your decision to go No Contact while the cognitive dissonance is wreaking havoc in your mind. What worked for me to end the cognitive dissonance: Well, I went through utter hell inside this mental tug-of-war for the first six weeks of No Contact.

How could someone who thought you were perfect be the very same person who intentionally hurt you? How could they go from obsession to contempt in the blink of an eye? It isn’t possible. There’s no way you dated a psychopath. They loved you. Right? Cognitive Dissonance What I’ve just described is a psychological phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance. It’s a state of mind where your intuition is telling you two competing things. It’s totally natural after a psychopathic relationship, because you’re used to repeatedly being told things—instead of seeing them with your own two eyes, or feeling them in your heart.

Plus, how could you forget those beautiful memories where you held hands as they said “I love you . . .” And that’s the danger of cognitive dissonance. It brings you back to the addictive love memories. It causes you to long for a broken dream, a manufactured lie. As you begin to work through these feelings, the diametrically opposed thoughts will become less and less extreme. But in the meantime, you are still very susceptible to their ongoing abuse. As long as you’re experiencing cognitive dissonance, make no mistake: they will be able to trick you again. All it takes is one sweet word to send you right back to the idealization phase.


pages: 289 words: 22,394

Virus of the Mind by Richard Brodie

Abraham Maslow, cognitive dissonance, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Gödel, Escher, Bach, joint-stock company, multilevel marketing, New Journalism, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy

They may be fooled by their own memetic programming! More on this in Chapter 9. 129 virus of the mind If you’re in a situation where you’re being rewarded for some behavior, think about what memes that operant conditioning is programming you with. Do they serve your purpose in life? Cognitive Dissonance Another programming technique is creating mental pressure and resolving it—cognitive dissonance. Why do high-pressure sales tactics exist even though people universally despise them? As with any “why” question in the world of memetics, the answer is: because the meme for it is good at spreading. Salespeople get infected with the high-pressure sales meme and go about acting on it, regardless of whether it’s the most effective means at their disposal.

There are two ways to release the pressure caused by cognitive dissonance: buy in or bail out. If you bail out, it’s likely to be because you’ve resolved the dissonance by creating a meme such as The salesperson is a jerk. But some people buy, creating instead a meme like I really want to buy this. Once you create that meme, it’s yours, and a smart salesperson will reinforce it by telling you what 130 How We Get Programmed a smart decision you’ve made and even calling a few days later and congratulating you on your purchase. Cognitive dissonance can be used to create a meme of submission and loyalty to whatever authority is causing the dissonance.

That creates an association-meme between the demonstration of loyalty and the good feeling caused by the release of pressure. With cognitive dissonance, people end up believing they have received something valuable, something deserving of their loyalty, when in reality all that has happened is that the people who were torturing them have stopped. Prisoners of war have been programmed to submit and be loyal to their captors through this method. One interesting result of research in operant conditioning on people is that it works better—creates stronger memes—to give the reward only occasionally than it does to give it all the time. That could be because withholding the reward adds cognitive dissonance to the operant conditioning.


The Little Black Book of Decision Making by Michael Nicholas

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, call centre, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Frederick Winslow Taylor, hindsight bias, impulse control, James Dyson, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, scientific management, selection bias, Stephen Hawking

It wouldn't be at all unusual if you need a lot more convincing that you too are susceptible to such enormous errors of judgment, would it? It turns out there is a name for the psychological tendency that is at work in such situations: “cognitive dissonance”. It refers to those times when there is a clash between different attitudes, beliefs or ideas which results in a state of internal tension. As this dissonance is unpleasant, the mind seeks to reduce the conflict between the two opposing thoughts, which is most easily achieved by altering one or the other of them. Cognitive dissonance has two dimensions: When there is a clash between an external idea or event and our internal model of the world. When an inner conflict exists between our own ideas.

Clearly, this isn't good news for anyone who likes the idea that we are essentially rational creatures. Indeed, if this applies you, you might well be experiencing some of your own cognitive dissonance right now, created by the conflict between two ideas: your comfortable misconception that your opinions are the result of years of rational, objective analysis and the modern understanding that, actually, you are rather emotionally driven, whether you realise it or not! I'm Right Because I Believe I Am When faced with contradictory evidence, the desire to side with what is most comfortable – cognitive dissonance – and to avoid ideas that are contrary to what we believe – motivated reasoning – produces a very strong tendency for us to do little more than to seek to confirm our existing beliefs.

Index adaptability adaptive change aircraft recognition Alvarado, Alejandro Sánchez ambiguity amygdala Antioco, John arousal artificial intelligence (AI) assumptions attention controlling the focus of frontal lobe inattention blindness meditation mindfulness neuroplasticity see also intentional attention attentional blink awareness bounded fear intentional attention levels of mindfulness prefrontal cortex see also self-awareness beliefs cognitive dissonance confirmation bias doomsday see also assumptions best practice Beyth, Ruth biases awareness of hindsight triggered by emotions see also confirmation bias big data blindsided, being “blink” versus “think” model Blockbuster Bohm, David Boston Consulting Group (BCG) bounded awareness brain attention balance brainwaves cognitive dissonance confirmation bias fear frontal lobe meditation mind and motivated reasoning neural seesaw neuroplasticity startle reflex stress threat response Triune Brain see also unconscious mind breathing Brehm, Jack cause and effect Challenger space shuttle disaster change adaptive complex systems increase in the pace of chaos chess cognitive dissonance communication complexity complex systems stress complicated systems conditioning confirmation bias conflicts of interest conventional wisdom Cook, David Covey, Stephen R.


pages: 291 words: 85,822

The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit by Aja Raden

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, intentional community, iterative process, low interest rates, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, sugar pill, survivorship bias, theory of mind, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa

You also don’t notice or don’t remember evidence contrary to your belief (no replies, no wires outside the office walls). Honesty bias with a chaser of confirmation bias creates the conditions in which we can be deceived, over and over, through our own willing participation, in large part because of our need to protect against something called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a state of untenable mental stress. It occurs when you try to hold two conflicting truths (or at least beliefs) in your mind simultaneously. You can’t do it. Really. You can’t. I mean, some people can, but they’re seriously atypical and you probably don’t want to know them. So, what happens when you have to process two conflicting beliefs?

There’s an entire emerging field of science looking at how difficult it is to change someone’s perception and emotional opinion of fact once they’ve accepted that something is fact, even after they’re provided with incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. What it mostly boils down to is more cognitive dissonance: they become incapable of processing new information, and more often than not they just can’t accept that the first fact was a lie—at least, not if they really bought it. The trajectory of confirmation bias (wherein you believe something and thus begin to see evidence for it everywhere you look) followed by cognitive dissonance (where you dig in your heels and believe something more the more it’s disproved) is a powerful emotional response and a form of recursive cognitive error that subverts objective reasoning.

One gets dumped in the idea shredder. And it actually doesn’t make a bit of difference which one is more factually accurate: you defend and protect whichever idea you need to be true in order not to have been wrong at some point. The psychological and neurological stress experienced during moments of cognitive dissonance are so great, you’ll believe anything to protect your preexisting mental paradigm. It’s why people refuse to hear proof of things like climate change or see clips of transgressions that they insist didn’t happen—in the event that they’ve already decided they don’t believe it. What Lustig did with the Eiffel Tower, Parker did with the Brooklyn Bridge, and Smith did with his telegraph to nowhere were obviously far less harmful than enticing hundreds of people onto a boat and sending them out to die in a jungle, but they were all still the same basic con that Gregor MacGregor pulled with the nation of Poyais: it’s known among con artists as selling thin air.22 The thin-air part is integral to the Big Lie, because by definition a Big Lie is not an exaggeration, misrepresentation, or misdirection about the truth; rather, it rests entirely on the absence of any sort of tangible reality and relies on your combined theory of mind and faith in objective reality to float it enough credit to be believed.


pages: 318 words: 73,713

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation by Cathy O'Neil

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, data science, delayed gratification, desegregation, don't be evil, Edward Jenner, fake news, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, microbiome, microdosing, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pre–internet, profit motive, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Streisand effect, TikTok, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, working poor

For those who haven’t adapted to new norms, these changes can be jarring. A natural response to a viral wave of shaming is anger and indignation. It is here that people enter the second stage of shame, denial. One hallmark of this stage is cognitive dissonance. I’m not a bad person, Permit Karen might think. And yet people are outside my door raging at me. I’m not a racist, and yet my community insists that I am one. I must deny it. Cognitive dissonance—holding two ideas that appear to contradict each other—can cause great emotional stress and lead to tortured logic. The term was minted in the 1950s by a social psychologist at the University of Minnesota, Leon Festinger, and two colleagues.

However, doing so usually involves an emotional journey, not unlike the passage through the stages of grief. The first stage is hurt. When shamed, whether for addiction, poverty, or illiteracy, people suffer and can feel worthless. And being denounced by millions on social media as a racist or a rapist can create cognitive dissonance, especially for people who consider themselves “good.” A natural response is to cast about for a way to turn off the pain. This leads them to hide the shame, or pretend it’s not there. Some even blame others, or seek out people nursing similar grievances. That second stage of shame, denial, leads to no end of hazards.

It enabled me not only to address the sources of my own shame but, more important, to delve into false assumptions I used to justify my own shaming actions. In the realm of shame, most of us are both victims and perpetrators. To avoid pain, or perhaps in response to pain, we habitually and automatically deflect it toward others. Both the diagnosis and the remedy, I found, are usually rooted in phony science, cognitive dissonance, and self-preserving flattery. In short, lots of unnecessary bullshit. We should wield this weapon more carefully. My purpose in writing this book is to shine a light on both the shame we’ve been subjected to in life and the shame that we heap on others, often without meaning to or even noticing.


Power by Shahida Arabi

cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, false memory syndrome, microaggression, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), traumatic brain injury, twin studies

This can make it difficult to pinpoint who the narcissistic abuser truly is—the sweet, charming and seemingly remorseful person that appears shortly after the abuse, or the abusive partner who ridicules, invalidates and belittles you on a daily basis? You suffer a great deal of cognitive dissonance trying to reconcile the illusion the narcissist first presented to you with the tormenting behaviors he or she subjects you to. In order to cope with this cognitive dissonance, you might blame yourself for his or her abusive behavior and attempt to “improve” yourself when you have done nothing wrong, just to uphold your belief in the narcissist’s false self during the devaluation phase.

It’s a huge trauma made out of a million tiny shocks that shatter the memory, erode the self and break your life into fragments. It’s psychological terrorism at its worst and confusing as hell at its best. It’s an unforgettable event (or rather, series of unfortunate events) that creates some memorable cognitive dissonance because it hits the core of everything you once believed about the world. It also doesn’t make any sense—why would the same person who claimed to love and care for you hurt you—over and over without a hint of empathy or remorse? In the narcissist’s world, it’s simply because they can. To understand why narcissistic abuse is so traumatic and problematic, consider that the very nature of it distorts everything we hold true about humanity.

Narcissistic abuse is rife with emotional neglect and unbelievable acts of murder and violence—only, most of it can never be traced back to the perpetrator because there may be no visible bloodshed. This type of abuse is brimming with psychological mind games, touched with a dash of intermittent sweetness to keep the victim constantly teetering over the edge of uncertainty and self-doubt. It is a relationship where the shadows of old scars dance with fresh wounds. When the cognitive dissonance about the abuser’s ever-shifting true identity mingles with self-doubt, a feeling of pervasive unworthiness lingers, an alienation that cannot be voiced aloud. When you’ve been psychologically and emotionally abused, there are no words that can describe the pain, no explanation that you can offer your friends and family without fearing they’ll look at you as if you’ve grown three heads.


pages: 288 words: 16,556

Finance and the Good Society by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market design, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, profit maximization, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social contagion, Steven Pinker, tail risk, telemarketer, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

If he should ever lift his nose out of the minutiae of his fascinating business and view its history whole, he would be forced to admit the sad truth that pitifully few nancial experts have ever known for two years (much less fteen) what was going to happen to any class of securities—and that the majority are usually spectacularly wrong in a much shorter time than that.4 Although Schwed’s book was anecdotal and presented no statistical evidence, it was an early and effective statement of the efficient markets theory. Cognitive Dissonance and Hypocrisy Cognitive dissonance, a term coined by social psychologist Leon Festinger, is a negative emotional response, a feeling of psychological pain, when something con icts with one’s stated beliefs—an emotional response that may lead to something other than a rational updating of the beliefs.5 In particular, when a person’s own actions are revealed to be inconsistent with certain beliefs, he or she often just conveniently changes those beliefs. Hypocrisy is one particular manifestation of cognitive dissonance, in which a person espouses opinions out of convenience and to justify certain actions, while often at some level actually believing them.

The evidence that Festinger and his successors presented is solid: cognitive dissonance is a genuine phenomenon and leads with some regularity to human error—or at times to what we would label sleaziness. And yet there remains skepticism about cognitive dissonance in many quarters, particularly among people who feel committed to the fully rational model of human behavior. Recently a new form of evidence has appeared in support of Festinger’s theory. It has been found that brain structure is fundamentally tied to cognitive dissonance. Neuroscientist Vincent van Veen and his colleagues put human subjects in an experimental situation in which they were paid or otherwise incentivized to lie about their true beliefs as they were observed by functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Importantly, those subjects with more activity in these regions showed a stronger tendency to change their actual beliefs to be consonant with the beliefs they were made to espouse.6 We thus have evidence of a physical structure in the brain whose actions are correlated with the outcome of cognitive dissonance, and that thus appears to be part of a brain mechanism that produces the phenomenon Festinger described based solely on his observations of human behavior. If hypocrisy is built into the brain, then there is a potential for human error that can be of great economic signi cance. A whole economic system can take as given certain assumptions, such as, for example, the belief in the years before the current nancial crisis that “home prices can never fall.” That theory was adopted by millions of people who would have experienced cognitive dissonance had they not done so, either because they were involved one way or another in a system that was overselling real estate or because they themselves had invested in real estate.


pages: 194 words: 59,290

The Covert Passive-Aggressive Narcissist: Recognizing the Traits and Finding Healing After Hidden Emotional and Psychological Abuse by Debbie Mirza

cognitive dissonance, Skype, Snapchat

I also know since you have all that as your core, you are going to come out of this just fine, even better then you could imagine. Keep going. We need people like you in this world. Don’t let this take you out. You are the cream of the crop. You are the type of person that makes this planet a better place. Thank you for being brave, for being you. Cognitive Dissonance Cognitive dissonance is when you hold two conflicting beliefs in your mind. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as “Psychological conflict resulting from incongruous beliefs and attitudes held simultaneously.” This is what makes covert narcissistic abuse so confusing and difficult. For so long you believed this person was kind and genuine.

When I say “worst form,” I do not want to minimize anyone else’s trauma when dealing with an overt narcissist or any other type of psychologically abusive personality. Abuse is abuse—it is horrific and always undeserved. My heart goes out to anyone who has and is experiencing anything that harms and devalues them. One reason covert narcissists are so damaging is because of cognitive dissonance. This is when you have two competing thoughts in your mind. You love your mom, spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend and thought they loved you the same. Yet when you look back, their behaviors are making you question your beliefs about them. As you research you begin to wonder, “Could this person really have been controlling and manipulating me for years, and I didn’t see it… or were things really my fault and I’m just overdramatizing my experience?”

As you research you begin to wonder, “Could this person really have been controlling and manipulating me for years, and I didn’t see it… or were things really my fault and I’m just overdramatizing my experience?” You have a solid belief that has been built up over years that this is a good person who cares about you, and at the same time, they are being incredibly cruel and controlling. The cognitive dissonance is dizzying and crazy making. The overt types of narcissists are obvious, in-your-face kind of people. They will let others know how great they are. When their mask comes off others around them roll their eyes and say, “Oh, yeah, he’s terrible.” On the other hand, covert narcissists are well liked.


pages: 317 words: 87,048

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

Some of those present camped out for weeks or even months, expecting something to happen imminently despite their many and repeated disappointments. It was only by the spring of 2022 that this most outlandish of Q-related subgroups finally began to dissipate, a full five months or so since the initial pronouncements. The group seemed to be displaying cognitive dissonance on a grand scale.15 ‘Cognitive dissonance’ is a psychological term for the discomfort that comes when two beliefs we strongly hold clash, or when a belief clashes with reality. If we have invested months of our lives – possibly losing jobs or relationships – in believing a conspiracy, and the moment of truth doesn’t come, we have two options.

The study, eventually published as the book When Prophecy Fails in 1956 by Minnesota University Press, and its methodology remain deeply controversial to this day, but it was from it that the concept of cognitive dissonance is taken. It’s a core psychological tenet we’ve already applied to QAnon’s supporters, but to explain how Q survived January 2021, it merits deeper examination. Cognitive dissonance refers to the discomfort we feel when our ideas or beliefs clash either with each other or with objective reality. This can be as simple as ‘I am a good person, but I have just stolen,’ or as specific as ‘I believe the world will end today, but it hasn’t.’

At the same time, Q and its variants provided far more flexibility and alternative theories than conspiracies of old. We have seen how Q bifurcated and reformed in the years after inauguration – but let’s just look at the first few days and weeks afterwards, and see how it follows much the same cognitive dissonance process as was first observed in Dorothy Martin and her followers in 1954. Election day dissonance If we are going to consider the full-scale cognitive dissonance in QAnon, we need to look at how the movement’s US followers in particular – who were all fanatical supporters of Donald Trump – could continue to believe in at least some part of the plan after 20 January.


pages: 407 words: 108,030

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations With Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason by Lee McIntyre

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon tax, Climategate, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crisis actor, different worldview, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, fake news, false flag, green new deal, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Shellenberger, obamacare, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, post-truth, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, selection bias, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steven Levy, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks

Their beliefs were my entrée, but my goal was to get them to talk about why they had them. Maybe I could ask them a question they’d never heard before. One that a scientist wouldn’t have any trouble answering. And then—rather than trying to change their mind directly—I could just sit back and watch while cognitive dissonance overtook them, as they grew increasingly uncomfortable when they couldn’t give me an answer.34 In his 1959 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper offers his theory of “falsification,” which says that a scientist always sets out to try to falsify their theory, not confirm it.35 In my book The Scientific Attitude, I developed a key insight from this, which is that—in order to be a scientist—you have to be willing to change your mind on the basis of new evidence.

For an excellent psychological study of some of the motivations and causal influences in conversion to Flat Eartherism, see Alex Olshansky, Robert M. Peaslee, and Ashley Landrum, “Flat-Smacked! Converting to Flat-Eartherism,” Journal of Media and Religion, July 2, 2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15348423.2020.1774257?scroll=top&needAccess=true. 34. One of the best introductions to the concept of cognitive dissonance can be found in Leon Festinger’s classic When Prophecy Fails (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), which is about a 1950s UFO cult that believed the Earth was going to end on a specific date, so they waited on a mountaintop for a spaceship to pick them up. After the appointed time came and went, instead of giving up their belief they instead turned to the idea that the faith of their tiny group was so great that it had saved humanity. 35.

Research has shown that for the most part, this is not even done at a conscious level.48 Perhaps this is why there is such a close kinship in our minds between someone who is “in denial” and someone who is a “denier.”49 We lie to ourselves as a means of more efficiently lying to others. Seventy years of social psychology has shown that satisfying the human ego is an important part of our behavior. And an integral part of this is maintaining a positive view of ourselves. This can account for those times when we resolve cognitive dissonance by telling ourselves a story we would prefer to believe over one that is true, as long as we can be the hero in it. It also involves making sure that we present a favorable image of ourselves to those in our social circle, whose opinions we care about. Thus, our beliefs and behavior are formed in a hothouse of self-opinion, as reflected back to us in the opinion of others.


pages: 662 words: 180,546

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

It would be odd if this had not been a major topic of exploration, since it speaks so directly to our images of ourselves and others. While there have been many modes and idioms in which the question has been broached, for the sake of brevity we shall describe but one: the attempt to comprehend these responses as a case study in the social psychological problem of cognitive dissonance. The father of “cognitive dissonance theory” was the social psychologist Leon Festinger. In his premier work on the subject, he addressed the canonical problem situation which captures the predicament of the contemporary economics profession: Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart . . . suppose that he is then presented with unequivocal and undeniable evidence that his belief is wrong: what will happen?

Indeed, he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting people.24 This profound insight, that confrontation with contrary evidence may actually augment and sharpen the conviction and enthusiasm of a true believer, was explained as a response to the cognitive dissonance evoked by a disconfirmation of strongly held beliefs. The thesis that humans are more rationalizing than rational has spawned a huge literature, but one that gets little respect in economics.25 Cognitive dissonance and the responses it provokes venture well beyond the literature in the philosophy of science that travels under the rubric of Duhem’s Thesis, in that the former plumbs response mechanisms to emotional chagrin, whereas the latter sketches the myriad ways in which auxiliary hypotheses may be evoked in order to blunt the threat of disconfirmation.

Predominantly, the long history of schooling, socialization, and past experience induces a stubborn inertia into cognitive processes. More commonly, people react to potential disconfirmation of strongly held views by adjusting their own understandings of the doctrine in question to accommodate the contrary evidence; this has been discussed in the social psychology literature under the rubric of “cognitive dissonance,” and in the philosophy literature as Duhem’s Thesis. Cognition sports an inescapable social dimension as well: people cannot vet and validate even a small proportion of the knowledge to which they subscribe, and so must of necessity depend heavily upon others such as teachers and experts and peers to underwrite much of their beliefs.23 And then there is a second major consideration relevant to our current conundrum, namely, the issue of whether most people who may subscribe to something like neoliberalism actually understand it to be constituted as a coherent doctrine with a spelled-out roster of propositions, or instead treat their notions as disparate implications of other beliefs.


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Duped: Double Lives, False Identities, and the Con Man I Almost Married by Abby Ellin

Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Burning Man, business intelligence, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, content marketing, dark triade / dark tetrad, Donald Trump, double helix, dumpster diving, East Village, fake news, feminist movement, forensic accounting, fudge factor, hiring and firing, Internet Archive, John Darwin disappearance case, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, meta-analysis, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, TED Talk, telemarketer, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

How did I miss this? One answer is the psychological construct of cognitive dissonance, which posits discomfort when someone is faced with inconsistent evidence and driven to resolve the discrepancy. Like when my cousin told her eight-year-old son that she got pregnant with him because of sperm that swam fast to the finish line, and in the next breath told him the stork dropped him off in her lap. How could both be true? They could not. Still, somehow he managed to accept both ideas. That’s cognitive dissonance. The theory of cognitive dissonance was developed in the 1950s by Leon Festinger, a social psychologist who believed that humans needed internal consistency.20 He argued that we become psychologically uncomfortable with any kind of irregularity, and so we do everything in our power to diminish this dissonance.

Peg Streep, “The Trouble with Trust,” Psychology Today, March 25, 2014, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/tech-support/201403/the-trouble-trust. 19. Telephone interview with author. 20. L. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957). 21. Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956). 22. Ibid., 3. 23. Thea Buckley, “What Happens to the Brain During Cognitive Dissonance?,” Scientific American, n.d., https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-happens-to-the-brain-during-cognitive-dissonance1. 24.

But Martin didn’t back down. Tomorrow, she promised. They’ll come tomorrow. Her followers stuck by her. In their 1956 book about the cult, When Prophecy Fails, Festinger and his coauthors concluded that “a man with a conviction is a hard man to change.” This applies to women, too, by the way.22 Cognitive dissonance is actually quite valuable, because it causes us to believe we have made intelligent, reasonable decisions.23 Our response is also called “motivated reasoning,” or motivated bias.24 It’s what we do when we seek out information that jibes with our previously held convictions. We discount anything that challenges our views.


pages: 199 words: 43,653

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal

Airbnb, AltaVista, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, dark pattern, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, framing effect, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, invention of the telephone, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, lock screen, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Paradox of Choice, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social bookmarking, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, the new new thing, Toyota Production System, Y Combinator

We see others enjoying them, try a little more, and over time condition ourselves. To avoid the cognitive dissonance of not liking something that others seem to take so much pleasure in, we slowly change our perception of the thing we once did not enjoy. • • • Together, the three tendencies just described influence our future actions: The more effort we put into something, the more likely we are to value it; we are more likely to be consistent with our past behaviors; and finally, we change our preferences to avoid cognitive dissonance. These tendencies of ours lead to a mental process known as rationalization, in which we change our attitudes and beliefs to adapt psychologically.

The homeowners’ greater willingness to place the large, obtrusive sign on their lawns after agreeing to the smaller one demonstrates the impact of our predilection for consistency with our past behaviors. Little investments, such as placing a tiny sign in a window, can lead to big changes in future behaviors. We Avoid Cognitive Dissonance In a classic Aesop’s fable, a hungry fox encounters grapes hanging from a vine. The fox desperately wants the grapes. Yet as hard as he tries, he cannot reach them. Frustrated, the fox decides the grapes must be sour and that therefore he would not want them anyway. The fox comforts himself by changing his perception of the grapes because it is too uncomfortable to reconcile the thought that the grapes are sweet and ready for the taking, and yet he cannot have them.

The fox comforts himself by changing his perception of the grapes because it is too uncomfortable to reconcile the thought that the grapes are sweet and ready for the taking, and yet he cannot have them. To reconcile these two conflicting ideas, the fox changes his perception of the grapes and in the process relieves the pain of what psychologists term cognitive dissonance. The irrational manipulation of the way one sees the world is not limited to fictional animals in children’s stories. We humans do this as well. Consider your reaction the first time you sipped a beer or tried spicy food. Was it tasty? Unlikely. Our bodies are designed to reject alcohol and capsaicin, the compound that creates the sensation of heat in spicy food.


pages: 577 words: 149,554

The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey by Michael Huemer

Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, framing effect, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Julian Assange, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Phillip Zimbardo, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Stanford prison experiment, systematic bias, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, unbiased observer, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Thus, the widespread belief in political authority does not provide strong evidence for the reality of political authority, since that belief can be explained as the product of systematic bias. 6.3 Cognitive dissonance According to the widely accepted theory of cognitive dissonance, we experience an uncomfortable state, known as ‘cognitive dissonance’, when we have two or more cognitions that stand in conflict or tension with one another – and particularly when our behavior or other reactions appear to conflict with our self-image.15 We then tend to alter our beliefs or reactions to reduce the dissonance. For instance, a person who sees himself as compassionate yet finds himself inflicting pain on others will experience cognitive dissonance. He might reduce this dissonance by ceasing to inflict pain, changing his image of himself, or adopting auxiliary beliefs to explain why a compassionate person may inflict pain in this situation.

Aronson, Elliot. 1999. ‘Dissonance, Hypocrisy, and the Self-Concept’. Pp. 103–26 in Cognitive Dissonance: Progress on a Pivotal Theory in Social Psychology, ed. Eddie Harmon-Jones and Judson Mills. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Aronson, Elliot, and Judson Mills. 1959. ‘The Effect of Severity of Initiation on Liking for a Group’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 59: 177–81. Aronson, Joshua, Geoffrey Cohen, and Paul R. Nail. 1999. ‘Self-Affirmation Theory: An Update and Appraisal’. Pp. 127–47 in Cognitive Dissonance: Progress on a Pivotal Theory in Social Psychology, ed. Eddie Harmon-Jones and Judson Mills.

Some believe that it is dangerous to undermine belief in authority. 6.1.2 The appeal to popular opinion Some believe that the rejection of authority is too far from common-sense political beliefs to be taken seriously. 6.2 The Milgram experiments 6.2.1 Setup Milgram devised an experiment in which subjects would be ordered to administer electric shocks to helpless others. 6.2.2 Predictions Most people expect that subjects will defy the orders of the experimenter. 6.2.3 Results Two-thirds of subjects obey fully, even to the point of administering apparently lethal shocks. 6.2.4 The dangers of obedience The experiment shows that belief in authority is very dangerous. 6.2.5 The unreliability of opinions about authority The experiment also shows that people have a strong pro-authority bias. 6.3 Cognitive dissonance People may seek to rationalize their own obedience to the state by devising theories of authority. 6.4 Social proof and status quo bias People are biased toward commonly held beliefs and the practices of their own society. 6.5 The power of political aesthetics 6.5.1 Symbols The state employs symbols to create an emotional and aesthetic sense of its own power and authority. 6.5.2 Rituals Rituals serve a similar function. 6.5.3 Authoritative language Legal language and the language of some political philosophers serve to encourage feelings of respect for authority. 6.6 Stockholm Syndrome and the charisma of power 6.6.1 The phenomenon of Stockholm Syndrome Kidnapping victims sometimes emotionally bond with their captors, as in the case of the Stockholm bank robbery. 6.6.2 Why does Stockholm Syndrome occur?


Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

The pernicious effects of confirmation bias and related models can be explained by cognitive dissonance, the stress felt by holding two contradictory, dissonant, beliefs at once. Scientists have actually linked cognitive dissonance to a physical area in the brain that plays a role in helping you avoid aversive outcomes. Instead of dealing with the underlying cause of this stress—the fact that we might actually be wrong—we take the easy way out and rationalize the conflicting information away. It’s a survival instinct! Once you start looking for confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance, we guarantee you will spot them all over, including in your own thoughts.

Once you start looking for confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance, we guarantee you will spot them all over, including in your own thoughts. A real trick to being wrong less is to fight your instincts to dismiss new information and instead to embrace new ways of thinking and new paradigms. The meme on the next page perfectly illustrates how cognitive dissonance can make things we take for granted seem absurd. There are a couple of tactical mental models that can help you on an everyday basis to overcome your ingrained confirmation bias and tribalism. First, consider thinking gray, a concept we learned from Steven Sample’s book The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership. You may think about issues in terms of black and white, but the truth is somewhere in between, a shade of gray.

Scott Fitzgerald once described something similar to thinking gray when he observed that the test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts at the same time while still retaining the ability to function. This model is powerful because it forces you to be patient. By delaying decision making, you avoid confirmation bias since you haven’t yet made a decision to confirm! It can be difficult to think gray because all the nuance and different points of view can cause cognitive dissonance. However, it is worth fighting through that dissonance to get closer to the objective truth. A second mental model that can help you with confirmation bias is the Devil’s advocate position. This was once an official position in the Catholic Church used during the process of canonizing people as saints.


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Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter, Emmanuel Sander

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gerolamo Cardano, Golden Gate Park, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, l'esprit de l'escalier, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, place-making, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, theory of mind, time dilation, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

a uniquely human capacity, and computers can only dream with impatience of that far-off day when they, too, will at last be able to perceive that two situations so different on their surface level are nonetheless “exactly the same thing”. In the meantime, though, they all pooh-pooh the interest of such a goal… How to Reduce Cognitive Dissonance in a Fox Æsop’s fox-and-grapes fable, more than two millennia old, insightfully anticipated some rather recent ideas. From the 1950’s onwards, thanks to the pioneering work of social psychologist Leon Festinger, the notions of cognitive dissonance and its reduction have been part of psychology, and they are direct descendants of the fable, which, in expositions of the theory, is often given as a quintessential example.

Thus, the fox is in a state of cognitive dissonance, since his desire to eat the grapes conflicts with his inability to reach them. He thus modifies one of the two causes of the conflict by denying that he wants to eat them. Since they are sour (so he says), they are no longer desirable, so his failure to reach them is no longer upsetting. Much as the concept once bitten, twice shy contains the essence of the modern psychological notion that a traumatic experience leaves lasting after-effects in its wake, so the sour-grapes fable contains the essence of the notion of reduction of cognitive dissonance, and more generally, the notion of rationalization, where a painful situation is rendered less painful by the unconscious generation, after the fact, of some kind of arbitrary and often unlikely justification.

For this reason, his fable not only has survived many centuries but it also anticipated developments in modern psychology. To see how the sour-grapes fable relates to the notion of cognitive dissonance in its full generality, one can cast the notion of disparagement of an unrealized yearning, which is the fable’s crux, as a special case of the more general notion of regaining a peaceful frame of mind by distorting one’s perception of a troubling situation, which is what the reduction of cognitive dissonance is all about. Equipped with this new category, we will far more easily and more rapidly recognize situations in which people spontaneously invent novel justifications, sometimes rather bizarre ones, in order to reconcile themselves with disappointing outcomes.


Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City by Richard Sennett

Anthropocene, Big Tech, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, open borders, place-making, plutocrats, post-truth, Richard Florida, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Yochai Benkler

Another track of cognition studies – dealing with contradictions – arrived at this same end. We owe this work to Leon Festinger, the psychologist who developed the modern understanding of ‘cognitive dissonance’. This term refers to a situation in which there are contradictory rules of behaviour, or rules which are confusing. How will the subject respond? Festinger was a man of the experimental laboratory, making use of animals – he preferred pigeons – but he was thinking always about the application of his findings to human beings. He recognized, though, that cognitive dissonance, a condition which he created for the pigeons, is a painful state that people create for themselves. Aesop’s fable ‘The Fox and the Grapes’ is a classic instance of this.

One way out of this bind, Festinger writes, is for ‘the person to try to reduce the dissonance and achieve consonance’. This mentality can mean that ‘when dissonance is present, in addition to trying to reduce it, the person will actively avoid situations and information which would likely increase the dissonance’. That’s the negative side of cognitive dissonance: the subject avoids its complexities whenever possible. The fox craves grapes but in time comes to lie about his craving: ‘I really don’t like grapes.’ Any ex-smoker will recognize this line.19, 20 There is also a positive way to respond to frustrating or contradictory experience. Knowing of my interest in complex environments, Festinger led me one day through a laboratory filled with caged pigeons trying to peer around obstacles hiding their watering tubes, or to make sense of feed troughs the experimenters had angled oddly.

Florian Znaniecki recognized that neophytes are made uncomfortable by the silence of a subject, and are tempted to jump in with statements like, ‘In other words, Mrs Schwarz, what you mean to say is…’. Znaniecki counselled, don’t put words in their mouths; to do so is the cardinal sin of sociology. Since the time of the Chicago School, techniques have evolved for spotlighting meanings which are left inarticulate or contradictory; listening for cognitive dissonances figures in the education of the modern ethnographer. The fact that a subject contradicts him- or herself cannot be taken as a sign he or she is stupid or ignorant; rather, following Bakhtin, it is the context of the speech act that is crooked and contradictory. Little would be gained by the interviewer saying, ‘Mrs Schwarz, you contradict yourself’; that makes the difficulty her problem rather than one of the situation she finds herself in.


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Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski Ph.d.

cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, delayed gratification, meta-analysis, nocebo, placebo effect, Skype, Snapchat, spaced repetition, sugar pill, the scientific method, twin studies

Cultural Context: A Sex-Positive Life in a Sex-Negative World Three Messages You Are Beautiful Criticizing Yourself = Stress = Reduced Sexual Pleasure Health at Every Size “Dirty” When Somebody “Yucks” Your “Yum” Maximizing Yum . . . with Science! Part 1: Self-Compassion Maximizing Yum . . . with Science! Part 2: Cognitive Dissonance Maximizing Yum . . . with Science! Part 3: Media Nutrition You Do You part 3 sex in action 6. Arousal: Lubrication Is Not Causation Measuring and Defining Nonconcordance All the Same Parts, Organized in Different Ways: “This Is a Restaurant” Nonconcordance in Other Emotions Lubrication Error #1: Genital Response = “Turned On” Lubrication Error #2: Genital Response Is Enjoying Lubrication Error #3: Nonconcordance Is a Problem Medicating Away the Brakes “Honey . . .

Or twice a week. Or more. Each time, the things you like will become a little more salient and the noise will get a little quieter. Maybe even consider telling someone else about what you see and what you like. Better still, tell someone who also did the exercise! It’s an activity that gets labeled cognitive dissonance because it forces us to be aware of good things, when mostly we tend to be aware of the “negative” things. Try it. 2. Ask your partner, if you have one, to have a close look. Turn on the light, take off your clothes, get on your back, and let them look. Ask them what they see, how they feel about it, what memories they have of your vulva.

But there’s growing evidence that disgust is impairing our sexual wellbeing, much as body self-criticism does, and there are things you can do to weed it out, if you want to. And that’s what I’ll talk about in the last section of this chapter. I’ll describe research-based strategies for creating positive change in both self-criticism and disgust: self-compassion, cognitive dissonance, and basic media literacy. The goal is to help you recognize what you’ve been taught, deliberately or otherwise, in order to help you choose whether to continue believing those things. You may well choose to keep a lot of what you learned—what matters is that you choose it, instead of letting your beliefs about your body and sex be chosen for you by the accident of the culture and family you were born into.


pages: 334 words: 109,882

Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed With Alcohol by Holly Glenn Whitaker

BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, cognitive dissonance, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, fixed income, impulse control, incognito mode, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, medical residency, microaggression, microbiome, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, Rat Park, rent control, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Torches of Freedom, twin studies, WeWork, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game

All this came together to dismantle my confirmation bias; drinking was no longer this precious wonderful thing, but a trap, and we were all in it. It was like learning that Santa Claus wasn’t real; once we know, we can’t go back. Carr’s book also smashed my cognitive dissonance into cognitive alignment. I was no longer of two minds: I desired to not drink, I believed not drinking could be fun and effortless, and I was excited for my nondrinking life to begin. When Carr instructed me to “never question the decision,” he was giving me the golden ticket for success—a way out of cognitive dissonance and a way out of battling myself. I decided not to drink, and I wouldn’t question it or need to use my willpower. If a friend called me on my way home from work when I’d had a bad day and asked me out for a drink, I wouldn’t need to think about whether I should or shouldn’t; I’d made up my mind to not drink, and I would uphold the decision.

If I had a dollar for every person in recovery who told me I needed to take responsibility for my actions and stop vilifying poor alcohol—or worse, ruining it for the people who “can” drink—I’d be a rich woman. We love to protect alcohol and our right to consume it, and to vilify people who can’t handle it. We venerate the substance; we demonize those who get sick from using it. BELIEVING THE LIE The engineered controversy born of Big Tobacco’s need to keep the public trapped in cognitive dissonance—first over whether the cigarette was to blame, or a few unfortunate people with bad genes, and eventually over whether the mounting scientific evidence could be believed, or if we needed more proof—is the same mechanism that’s being applied to alcohol today. Because of this co-opting of Big Tobacco’s strategy, we hold on to ideas that alcohol is bad for a fraction of the population instead of all of us, or that it’s a matter of drinking responsibly versus drinking irresponsibly.

Let’s say I believe that quitting alcohol is all but impossible, that people die trying to do it, or that people feel deprived without alcohol, or that their lives suck forever and ever amen—and I see this confirmed in the movies, or when Lindsay Lohan or Charlie Sheen ends up back in rehab, or when my friend’s mom is still going to meetings more than twenty years after she quit—then my belief about quitting alcohol being terrible and impossible is right, and I should probably not try to do it. We see what we want to see, or what we’ve been trained to see, and our beliefs are constantly reinforced. The second concept is cognitive dissonance, which is when we have two conflicting thoughts at the same time. It’s the devil on one shoulder, angel on the other. We may not like hangovers, or saying stupid things, or forgetting portions of our evenings, or having beer guts or purple teeth, or fucking people we don’t like. But we also love how booze helps us overcome our shyness and inhibitions, be the life of the party, connect intimately, be able to have sex, and relax.


pages: 338 words: 100,477

Split-Second Persuasion: The Ancient Art and New Science of Changing Minds by Kevin Dutton

availability heuristic, Bernie Madoff, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, credit crunch, different worldview, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, equity premium, fundamental attribution error, haute couture, job satisfaction, Jon Ronson, loss aversion, Milgram experiment, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trolley problem, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile

But there’s no magic at work here – rather, the hand of cognitive dissonance. Two incontrovertible and antithetical cognitions – ‘I have spent X amount on this particular purchase’ on the one hand, and ‘I don’t like it and can’t change it’ on the other – are forced to cohabit the same bit of brainspace until one of two things happens. They either get their act together and sort out their differences. Or one of them packs its bags. Nine times out of ten, they learn to get along. The Neurology Of Influence The effects of cognitive dissonance demonstrate quite clearly how the propositional aspects of belief are closely tied in with emotion. 9But a recent experiment conducted by Sam Harris and his colleagues at the University of California in Los Angeles goes one better – and shows how belief, emotion and influence are possibly tied up in the brain.

That there never had been a custom-built flying saucer. That the master plan to spirit them all off into the cosmos had never existed in the first place. And that the jobs, spouses and houses had all been abandoned in vain. 8Festinger’s exposé of Keech’s divinations precipitated an avalanche of research into the dynamics of cognitive dissonance. The flagship study, conducted by Festinger himself in 1959, did much to get things moving. The study consisted of three key ingredients: the obligatory cohort of students, a series of meaningless and mind-numbingly tedious tasks, and a downright whopper of a lie: the students had to perform the tasks and then rope in subsequent ‘participants’ (in reality, associates of the researchers) by claiming that they were actually interesting.

The students, in the absence of any other justification for their behaviour, were forced to internalise the attitude they were induced to express – and came, in so doing, genuinely to believe that the tasks they had performed were enjoyable. On the other hand, those in the $20 group had reason to believe there was external justification for their behaviour – they were in it for the money. No confusion there over job satisfaction. Why We Love The Things We Hate (Especially If We Can’t Get A Refund) The perils of cognitive dissonance should feature uppermost in the mind of any prospective persuader. Especially in situations where there’s a lot at stake and the person whom one is persuading has much to lose. Festinger’s study – these days considered a classic – provided, for the very first time, concrete evidence of something that we now take for granted: powerful gravitational forces deep within our brains keep the orbits of both belief and behaviour in close psychological alignment.


pages: 244 words: 73,700

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

barriers to entry, behavioural economics, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, classic study, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, financial independence, Girl Boss, growth hacking, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lockdown, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, multilevel marketing, off-the-grid, passive income, Peoples Temple, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Y2K

Among New Age types, I’ve also heard semantic stop signs come in the form of wily maxims like “Truth is a construct,” “None of this matters on a cosmic level,” “I hold space for multiple realities,” “Don’t let yourself be ruled by fear,” and dismissing any anxieties or doubts as “limiting beliefs.” (We’ll discuss more of this rhetoric in part 6.) These pithy mottos are effective because they alleviate cognitive dissonance, the uncomfortable discord one experiences when they hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time. For example, I have an acquaintance who recently got laid off from her job, and she was lamenting to me about how beside the point it felt when people responded to her bad news with “Everything happens for a reason.”

But her roommates and old coworkers didn’t want to think about those things, because doing so would make them anxious, suddenly hyperaware of the fact that life fundamentally bends toward entropy, which would conflict with their goal of appearing sympathetic. So they fed her a line—“Everything happens for a reason”—to simplify the situation and put everyone’s cognitive dissonance to bed. “It’s work to think, especially about things you don’t want to think about,” confessed Diane Benscoter, an ex-member of the Unification Church (aka the Moonies, an infamous ’70s-era religious movement). “It’s a relief not to have to.” Thought-terminating clichés provide that temporary psychological sedative.

One anonymous ex-Way member recalled a traumatic glossolalia experience from her childhood for the blog Yes and Yes: “When I was 12, I was . . . required to speak in tongues in front of everyone, and I was so shy I couldn’t do it,” she said. “The man hosting the class . . . put his face very close to mine and essentially bullied me into speaking in tongues.” The girl’s parents watched the interaction unfold from across the room, benumbed by cognitive dissonance. “I was crying,” she continued. “The man was inches from my face . . . using the language of love in the most terrifying, bullying way.” Say you’re a child like this Way International survivor was or one of the Jesus Camp kids, who grew up in an oppressive religious environment and only ever knew its language.


pages: 476 words: 134,735

The Unpersuadables: Adventures With the Enemies of Science by Will Storr

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, full employment, George Santayana, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jon Ronson, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Simon Singh, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, the scientific method, theory of mind, twin studies

A dark, opposing magic happens to our view of those who are on the ‘out’. But as damaging as it can be, we need prejudice. It is the shape of our models, the starting point for our guesses about the world. When our brains are told things that contradict their models, we often enter a state known as ‘cognitive dissonance’. In their book Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson describe this as ‘a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are inconsistent, such as “smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day”.

For their own candidate, however, ratings averaged closer to two, indicating minimal contradiction.’ But that was just the beginning. Westen also had his scans to consult. He wanted to know exactly what happened on the neurological level when new data arrived that conflicted with internal models; when their minds were blasted into a state of cognitive dissonance. As he expected, the unpleasant emotion was soothed away quickly. ‘But the political brain also did something we didn’t predict,’ he writes. ‘Once participants had found a way to reason to false conclusions, not only did neural circuits involved in negative emotions turn off, but circuits involved in positive emotions turned on.

Psychics, homeopathy, chiropractors, ghosts, God – they don’t believe a word of it and that is one of their favourite things to do. The fallibility of human belief is the base upon which the Skeptics build their activism. As bracingly incredible as it was to me, it is highly likely that the ordinary Skeptic would have discovered nothing new in the chapter that precedes this one. Confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, unconscious ego-bolstering and the many illusions of vision are their foundational texts, their Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Skeptics rely on the findings of science, rather than the dubious anecdotes of individuals, to inform them about the world. They are knights of hard intellect whose ultimate goal is a world free of superstitious thinking.


pages: 387 words: 110,820

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bread and circuses, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, market design, means of production, mental accounting, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, side project, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, washing machines reduced drudgery, working poor, yield management, zero-sum game

We fume over the mistreatment of animals by agribusiness but freak out at an uptick in food prices. We lecture our kids on social responsibility and then buy them toys assembled by destitute child workers on some far flung foreign shore. Maintaining cognitive dissonance is one way to navigate a world of contradictions, and on an individual basis there’s much to be said for this. But somehow the Age of Cheap has raised cognitive dissonance to a societal norm. On May 1, 2008, the New York Times ran a cover story in its Styles section headlined “Is This the World’s Cheapest Dress?: How Steve & Barry’s Became a $1 Billion Company Selling Celebrity Style for $8.98.”

Since these mall fees were essential to its survival, the company was required to expand continuously. In a sense, the company relied for its existence on a fully legal variation of a Ponzi scheme. Business plans like this are not built on a foundation of frugality. They are built on a platform of cognitive dissonance. Three months after boasting of their great success to the New York Times, Steve and Barry filed for bankruptcy. THRIFT MAY BE a bedrock American virtue, but it is no more branded into our DNA than it is branded into the DNA of any other culture. Benjamin Franklin, whose most famous homily translates roughly into “A penny saved is a penny earned,” confessed that thrift would elude even him were it not for Deborah, his frugal and hardworking wife.

The chronic disregard for workers’ rights in China’s foreign-invested private sector threatens wages and working conditions around the globe, including the hard-won gains of American workers. Labor scholar Robert Bruno, a political economist at the University of Illinois, has observed that most Americans tend not to think of themselves as “workers.” This demands some level of cognitive dissonance because most of us do work for a living. But in a society where salesclerks in discount stores are called “associates” and garbage collectors “sanitary engineers,” the term “worker” has lost meaning. Bruno is certain that this is no accident, and explained why in one of several conversations we had over many months.


pages: 913 words: 265,787

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apple Newton, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, feminist movement, four colour theorem, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gregor Mendel, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, income per capita, information retrieval, invention of agriculture, invention of the wheel, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lake wobegon effect, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Linda problem, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Necker cube, out of africa, Parents Music Resource Center, pattern recognition, phenotype, Plato's cave, plutocrats, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, Turing machine, urban decay, Yogi Berra

Darwin’s anti-Darwinism: Fridlund, 1992. 415 Voluntary and involuntary facial expressions, method acting, and the brain: Damasio, 1994. 415 Honest signaling in animals: Dawkins, 1976/1989; Trivers, 1981; Cronin, 1992; Hauser, 1996; Hamilton, 1996. 416 Emotions and the body: Ekman & Davidson, 1994; Lazarus, 1991; Etcoff, 1986. 417 Theory of mad love: Frank, 1988. 417 Marriage market: Buss, 1994; Fisher, 1992; Hatfield & Rapson, 1993. 419 Tactics for controlling self and others: Schelling, 1984. 420 Grief as a deterrent: Tooby & Cosmides, 1990a. 421 Self-deception: Trivers, 1985; Alexander, 1987a; Wright, 1994a; Lockard & Paulhaus, 1988. Self-deception and Freudian defense mechanisms: Nesse & Lloyd, 1992. 422 Split brains: Gazzaniga, 1992. 422 Lake Wobegon effect: Gilovich, 1991. 422 Beneffectance: Greenwald, 1988; Brown, 1985. Cognitive dissonance: Festinger, 1957. Cognitive dissonance as self-presentation: Aronson, 1980; Baumeister & Tice, 1984. Beneffectance and cognitive dissonance as self-deception: Wright, 1994a. 424 Argument between husband and wife: Trivers, 1985, p. 420. 424 Explaining Hitler: Rosenbaum, 1995. 7. Family Values 426 Greening of America controversy: Nobile, 1971. 426 Nineteenth-century Utopias: Klaw, 1993. 427 Human universals: Brown, 1991. 427 The thirty-six dramatic situations: Polti, 1921/1977. 427 Darwinian competitors: Williams, 1966; Dawkins, 1976/1989, 1995. 428 Homicide rates: Daly & Wilson, 1988.

When they are fooled in a fake experiment into thinking they have delivered shocks to another subject, they derogate the victim, implying that he deserved the punishment. Everyone has heard of “reducing cognitive dissonance,” in which people invent a new opinion to resolve a contradiction in their minds. For example, a person will recall enjoying a boring task if he had agreed to recommend it to others for paltry pay. (If the person had been enticed to recommend the task for generous pay, he accurately recalls that the task was boring.) As originally conceived of by the psychologist Leon Festinger, cognitive dissonance is an unsettled feeling that arises from an inconsistency in one’s beliefs. But that’s not right: there is no contradiction between the proposition “The task is boring” and the proposition “I was pressured into lying that the task was fun.”

But that’s not right: there is no contradiction between the proposition “The task is boring” and the proposition “I was pressured into lying that the task was fun.” Another social psychologist, Eliot Aronson, nailed it down: people doctor their beliefs only to eliminate a contradiction with the proposition “I am nice and in control.” Cognitive dissonance is always triggered by blatant evidence that you are not as beneficent and effective as you would like people to think. The urge to reduce it is the urge to get your self-serving story straight. Sometimes we have glimpses of our own self-deception. When does a negative remark sting, cut deep, hit a nerve?


pages: 280 words: 82,623

What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith, Mark Reiter

AOL-Time Warner, business process, cognitive dissonance, financial independence, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, knowledge worker, loss aversion, shareholder value, zero-sum game

No matter what Bill does, you’ll see it through a prism that confirms he’s a jerk. Even the times when he’s not a jerk, you’ll interpret it as the exception to the rule that Bill’s a jerk. It may take years of saintly behavior for Bill to overcome your perception. That’s cognitive dissonance applied to others. It can be a disruptive and unfair force in the workplace. Yet cognitive dissonance actually works in favor of successful people when they apply it to themselves. The more we are committed to believing that something is true, the less likely we are to believe that its opposite is true, even in the face of evidence that shows we may have chosen the wrong path.

It means turning that muscular commitment on its head. Easy to say, hard to do. The more we believe that our behavior is a result of our own choices and commitments, the less likely we are to want to change our behavior. There’s a reason for this, and it’s one of the best-researched principles in psychology. It’s called cognitive dissonance. It refers to the disconnect between what we believe in our minds and what we experience or see in reality. The underlying theory is simple. The more we are committed to believing that something is true, the less likely we are to believe that its opposite is true, even in the face of clear evidence that shows we are wrong.

In other words, now that you’ve said you’re sorry, what are you going to do about it? I tell my clients, “It’s a lot harder to change people’s perception of your behavior than it is to change your behavior. In fact, I calculate that you have to get 100% better in order to get 10% credit for it from your coworkers.” The logic behind this is, as I’ve explained in Chapter 3, cognitive dissonance: To recap, we view people in a manner that is consistent with our previous existing stereotypes, whether it is positive or negative. If I think you’re an arrogant jerk, everything you do will be filtered through that perception. If you do something wonderful and saintly, I will regard it as the exception to the rule; you’re still an arrogant jerk.


pages: 486 words: 148,485

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, car-free, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, cosmological constant, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Sedaris, desegregation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lake wobegon effect, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, mirror neurons, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, stem cell, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Tenerife airport disaster, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route

True, certainty cannot protect us from error, any more than shouting a belief can make it true. But it can and does shield us, at least temporarily, from facing our fallibility. The psychologist Leon Festinger documented this protective effect of certainty in the 1950s, in the study that gave us the now-famous term “cognitive dissonance.” Along with several colleagues and hired observers, Festinger infiltrated a group of people who believed in the doomsday prophecies of a suburban housewife named (actually, pseudonymed) Marian Keech. Keech claimed that she was in touch with a Jesuslike figure from outer space who sent her messages about alien visits, spaceship landings, and the impending destruction of the world by flood.

However much we might be prompted by cues from other people or our environment, the choice to face up to error is ultimately ours alone. Why can we do this sometimes but not others? For one thing, as we saw earlier, it’s a lot harder to let go of a belief if we don’t have a new one to replace it. For another, as Leon Festinger observed in his study of cognitive dissonance, it’s a lot harder if we are heavily invested in that belief—if, to borrow a term from economics, we have accrued significant sunk costs. Traditionally, sunk costs refer to money that is already spent and can’t be recovered. Let’s say you shelled out five grand for a used car, and three weeks later it got a flat tire.

“The flight attendant comes down the aisle.” David Sedaris, “Undecided,” the New Yorker, Oct. 27, 2008. “we must be fully committed.” Rollo May, The Courage To Create (W. W. Norton and Co., 1994), 20. The second quotation in this paragraph is from p. 21. In both cases, the italics are his. cognitive dissonance (FN). Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schacter, When Prophecy Fails (Torchbooks, 1994). CHAPTER 9 BEING WRONG The quotations from Anita Wilson and from the psychoanalyst Irna Gadd are from my interviews with each of them. Greg Markus. Marcus, G. B, “Stability and Change in Political Attitudes: Observe, Recall, and ‘Explain.’”


pages: 198 words: 57,703

The World According to Physics by Jim Al-Khalili

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, butterfly effect, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, gravity well, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, information security, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, post-truth, power law, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, supercomputer in your pocket, the scientific method, time dilation

Many who hold such views will always try to interpret and favour evidence in a way that confirms their pre-existing hypotheses. This is known as confirmation bias. Often, in the case of ideological beliefs, we also hear the term ‘cognitive dissonance’, whereby someone will feel genuine mental discomfort when confronted with evidence supporting a view contrary to their own. This potent combination of confirmation bias and the avoidance of cognitive dissonance works to reinforce pre-existing beliefs. So, trying to persuade someone in this frame of mind with scientific evidence can often prove to be a waste of time. Many people, facing an avalanche of widely different views through both the mainstream and social media, understandably find it difficult to know what to believe.

INDEX absolute zero, 102 Adams, Douglas, 5 AdS/CFT (anti–de Sitter/conformal theory correspondence; gauge/ gravity duality), 232–33 alpha particles, 101–2 Anderson, Carl, 103–4 Anderson, Philip, 47 Andromeda galaxy, 98 antigravity, 212–13 antimatter, 7, 13, 103–5 antiquarks, 96n1, 176n2 Anu (Sumerian god), 1 Archimedes, 16, 25 Aristotle, 16, 45, 57–58, 74, 77 artificial intelligence (AI), 161, 235, 240, 250, 255, 256–57 atomic clocks, 39 atomism, 16–17, 45 atoms, 15; composition of, 224; types of, 16–17 axions, 200 Banks, Joseph, 108 Bell, John, 126–27 beta radioactivity, 94, 96 Big Bang, 7, 32, 34, 98–101, 103, 150; cosmology model of, 179; in eternal inflation theory, 216; verification of, 269–70 binary data, 251 binary pulsars, 226 biology, 21, 111, 161, 236, 242–44 biomass, 151 biophysics, 242 bits, 251 black holes, 195, 221, 223, 233; entropy of, 279; evaporation of, 215, 220; formation of, 106; gravitational pull from, 72; Hawking radiation emitted from, 24, 220 block universe model, 68–69, 70–71, 79–81 Bohm, David, 136 Bohr, Niels, 122–23, 124, 125, 132 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 46 Born’s rule, 124 Bose-Einstein condensates, 226 bosons, 6–7, 13, 25, 93, 96–97, 181 Broglie, Louis de, 136 bubble universes, 217–18 Bullet Cluster, 197 butterfly effect, 157–58, 160 carbon, 106 celestial mechanics, 55 CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), 174, 228 chaos, 21, 160–61 chemistry, 21, 91, 236, 241–42, 256; quantum theory and, 9, 117, 173, 246 Classical Physics, 111–12 climate, 151, 240, 271, 272–73 cloud technology, 255 COBE satellite, 199 cognitive dissonance, 272 cold dark matter, 179, 200 colour charge, 95–96, 175–76 comets, 18 complexity, 21 complex systems, 161 computer science, 241, 246, 250–58 concordance model, 179 condensed matter, 232, 233, 236 confirmation bias, 272, 277 conformal cyclic cosmology, 215–16 conservation, laws of, 41 consistent histories interpretation, 127 conspiracy theories, 271–72 constrained minimal supersymmetry, 231 Copenhagen interpretation, xiii, 123, 125, 127, 128 Copernican (heliocentric) model, 4, 26–27, 126 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 27 Cosmic Background Explorer (Explorer 66), 199n2 cosmic inflation, 208–19, 276 cosmic microwave background (CMB), 34, 101, 197, 198–99 cosmological constant, 203 cosmology, 12 creation myths, 1 Crick, Francis, 243 CT (computed tomography), 246 curved spacetime, 64n2, 78, 82, 187, 234; dark matter and, 196; gravitational field linked to 72–73, 163, 170; inflation and, 209 dark energy, 7, 9, 193, 202–5, 210, 226, 276 dark matter, 7, 9, 42, 105–6, 179, 193–201, 231, 276 de Broglie–Bohm theory, 137 decoherence, 133, 135 Delbrück, Max, 243 Democritus, 16, 44–45 Descartes, René, 55, 57–58, 59–60, 74, 77 determinism, 155–58 diffraction, 114 Dirac, Paul, 13, 14, 103, 171–72 Dirac notation, 124 disorder, 21 DNA, 243, 249 Doppler effect, 63 double helix, 243 doubt, in scientific inquiry, 266–67, 274 dwarf galaxies, 197 dynamical collapse interpretation, 127 economics, 161 Einstein, Albert, xiv, 124, 222–23, 280; field equations of, 82, 129; light quanta hypothesized by, 112–13; Newtonian theory replaced by, 8, 36, 61; nonlocality and entanglement mistrusted by, 131–32; as philosophical realist, 130; photoelectric effect explained by, 29–30; thought experiments by, 56.


pages: 478 words: 126,416

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

Crashes occur (the accident rate on French roads is so high that a French transport minister notoriously appealed to his compatriots to drive ‘comme les anglais’). But an element of cognitive dissonance creeps into accounts of the crash. The accident victim blames someone else for his misfortune: usually with some justification. The accidents that result from tailgating are triggered by some other immediate cause – an obstruction on the road, a mistake by another driver. The same cognitive dissonance enabled many bankers to persuade themselves – and some others – that the global financial crisis was not caused by their imprudent behaviour.

By 2007–8 it became apparent that even the most senior tranche of a package of mortgages sold to people who were in default and whose houses were difficult to sell was likely to be worth very little. The story of that collapse has been told in detail in many places.6 Mozilo would settle charges levelled against him by the SEC with a payment of $67.5 million. With the cognitive dissonance of the tailgater, he would explain that the considerably larger amount he had received for his services as chief executive of Countrywide was justified by the profits that his company had reported from the sale of mortgages before the borrowers failed to pay them back. I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.

Carbolic Smoke Ball Company 61, 316n13 Carnegie, Andrew 52 Carney, Mark 288 Carroll, Lewis: Through the Looking Glass 111 ‘carry trades’ 129 Carville, James 248, 249, 252 Casablanca (film) 292 Cassano, Joe 120, 293 Cayman Islands 122 Cayne, Jimmy 90 Central Banks 43, 75, 98, 183, 184, 242–6 Chacoan civilisation 277 Challenger space shuttle 276, 327n3 Channel Tunnel 158 chartism 110 Chelsfield 158 Chequers country residence, Buckinghamshire 231 Chesterton 158 Chicago Board of Trade 17 Chicago Butter and Egg Board 17, 19 Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) 19–20, 23, 31 China, economic growth in 53, 69 Chinese Revolution (1949) 3 Citibank 51, 166, 186 Citicorp 33–4, 37, 38, 48 Citigroup 1, 34, 35, 48, 49, 51, 57, 59, 91, 124, 134–5, 138, 191, 242, 293, 300 Citizens United case (2010) 304 City of Glasgow Bank 292 City of London 1, 20, 262, 263, 266, 268, 303, 305 careers in 12, 15 a pre-eminent financial centre 13 staffing of 217 Civil Aeronautics Board 238 civilisations, collapse of 277 Cleveland, Grover 233, 237 Clinton, Bill 5, 57, 205 closet indexation 206 Coca-Cola 108 ‘code staff’ 266 cognitive dissonance 102, 152 coin-tossing game 96, 105 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 59–60, 63 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) 40, 63–4, 73, 101, 131, 244, 303 Collins, Senator S.M. 114, 117 commercial banks acquisitions 24 capital strength 28 investment banks within 22 payments system 25 public companies 30 short-term lending 25 structure of 30 commercial paper 163 Commerzbank 169 Commodity Futures Modernization Act (2000) 119 Commodity Futures Trading Commission 57, 288 Communist states 3, 39 company directors 84 competition 111–14 Confucius 270 Conrad, Joseph: Typhoon 233, 235 consumer debt 175 consumer protection 259–62 contactless payment cards 181, 186 corporate treasurer 164 corporation tax 266 correlation 96, 97–8 Corrigan, E.


pages: 536 words: 126,051

Emotional Ignorance: Lost and Found in the Science of Emotion by Dean Burnett

airport security, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, call centre, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, COVID-19, double empathy problem, emotional labour, experimental economics, fake it until you make it, fake news, fear of failure, heat death of the universe, impulse control, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, mirror neurons, neurotypical, New Journalism, period drama, pre–internet, Snapchat, social distancing, theory of mind, TikTok, Wall-E

After all, absorbing, processing, and retaining abstract information is vitally important, but often hard work for our brains, so anything that challenges the information they’ve laboriously accumulated is technically a threat, as it could potentially undo all that hard work and throw our understanding of the world into disarray. That’s why being presented with information that contradicts what we already think and believe often leads to a rapid negative emotional reaction, involving the experience of stress and psychological discomfort, known as cognitive dissonance.122 To stop this dissonance, we can either alter our emotional response to it and accept we’re wrong, or think about it more critically or cynically than we would more neutral things, allowing us to figure out reasons to reject it, and preserve our existing views and beliefs. It speaks to the powerfully fundamental nature of emotions that it’s often a lot easier to change what you think than it is to change what you feel.

., ‘Picture perfect: the direct effect of manipulated Instagram photos on body image in adolescent girls’, Media Psychology, 2018, 21(1): pp. 93–110. 44 O’Reilly, et al., ‘Is social media bad?’. 45 Quinn, K., ‘Social media and social wellbeing in later life’, Ageing & Society, 2021, 41(6): pp. 1349–1370. 46 Gentner, D. and A.L. Stevens, Mental Models (Psychology Press, 2014). 47 Brehm, J.W. and A.R. Cohen, Explorations in Cognitive Dissonance (John Wiley & Sons, 1962). 48 Marris, P., Loss and Change (Psychology Revivals): Revised Edition (Routledge, 2014). 49 Hertenstein, M.J., et al., ‘The communication of emotion via touch’, Emotion, 2009, 9(4): p. 566. 50 Radulescu, A., ‘Why do we walk around when talking on the phone?’, Medium, 13 October 2020. 51 Oppezzo, M. and D.L.

., ‘Confirmation bias: a ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises’, Review of General Psychology, 1998, 2(2): pp. 175–220. 120 Bolsen, T., J.N. Druckman, and F.L. Cook, ‘The influence of partisan motivated reasoning on public opinion’, Political Behavior, 2014, 36(2): pp. 235–262. 121 Nestler, S., ‘Belief perseverance’, Social Psychology, 2010, 41(1): pp. 35–41. 122 Brehm and Cohen, Explorations in Cognitive Dissonance. 123 Martel, C., G. Pennycook, and D.G. Rand, ‘Reliance on emotion promotes belief in fake news’, Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 2020, 5(1): pp. 1–20. 124 Brady, W.J., et al., ‘How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks’, Science Advances, 2021, 7(33). 125 Holman, E.A., D.R.


pages: 256 words: 60,620

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition by Michael J. Mauboussin

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, butter production in bangladesh, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Edward Thorp, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, information asymmetry, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, money market fund, Murray Gell-Mann, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, presumed consent, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, statistical model, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, vertical integration

Models based on past results forecast in the belief that the future will be characteristically similar to history. In each case, our minds—or the models our minds construct—anticipate without giving suitable consideration to other possibilities. When in Doubt, Rationalize Your Decision Cognitive dissonance is one facet of our next mistake, the rigidity that comes with the innate human desire to be internally and externally consistent.14 Cognitive dissonance, a theory developed in the 1950s by Leon Festinger, a social psychologist, arises when “a person holds two cognitions—ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions—that are psychologically inconsistent.”15 The dissonance causes mental discomfort that our minds seek to reduce.

So the exhausted members, led by Mrs. Keech, started calling newspapers, radio stations, and wire services. From then on, the cult opened up. “The house was crowded with the nowwelcome horde of newspaper, radio, and television representatives,” the scientists wrote, “and visitors streamed in and out the door.”18 While cognitive dissonance is about internal consistency, the confirmation bias is about external consistency. The confirmation bias occurs when an individual seeks information that confirms a prior belief or view and disregards, or disconfirms, evidence that counters it.19 Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist at Arizona State University, notes that consistency offers two benefits.


Adam Smith: Father of Economics by Jesse Norman

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial intermediation, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mirror neurons, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Veblen good, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working poor, zero-sum game

In general, according to Smith, the desired identity is of someone who is ‘lovely… or the natural and proper object of love’, and the judgement by the impartial spectator of what is lovely will always be as in the eyes of others. But what happens when such a person does something at odds with their identity—something that they know is not lovely in the eyes of others? The result, according to the great American social psychologist Leon Festinger, is cognitive dissonance: that is, a feeling of discomfort which encourages the individual to rationalize their action as having somehow been right all along. For Smith, this is seen in the excuses offered for infanticide in ancient Greece, that it ‘is commonly done, and they seem to think this a sufficient apology for what, in itself, is the most unjust and unreasonable conduct’.

To take a recent example, when it was shown that weapons of mass destruction did not exist in Iraq in 2003, and therefore that the stated rationale for the US-led invasion of Iraq had been groundless, supporters of the invasion generally did not accept this; instead they insisted that the war had been a success anyway, was justified for other reasons, had brought peace, had increased international security and the like. Festinger’s work on cognitive dissonance, and his earlier work on social comparison, sit at the heart of much modern social psychology; and they revisit ideas to be found in Adam Smith. But Smith’s work also hints at a deeper explanation for these phenomena. Recall that for Smith someone’s reputation or public character is part of their personal property, under what he calls the jus sincerae aestimationis, or right to an unspoiled reputation.

This private internal reputation can be a hugely useful asset in supporting someone’s belief in their value in the world, their will to make things happen and their resilience in the face of adversity. But it also leads directly to the patterns of defensive self-justification described by Festinger. Treating people’s core beliefs and moral identity as property assets, perhaps hard-won, in Smithian fashion makes it easier to understand their reluctance to give them up in the face of cognitively dissonant behaviour. But this approach can also help to explain many other kinds of behaviour as well. People who see themselves as rich in the assets of moral identity tend to behave in a more entitled way. They are more likely to ‘coast’, that is, to give themselves licence to misbehave in later situations, while those who see themselves as depleted may take up worthy causes: privately in an effort to renew their identity capital, or publicly to renew their reputation with others.


Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie

Albert Einstein, anesthesia awareness, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Black Lives Matter, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citation needed, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, hype cycle, Kenneth Rogoff, l'esprit de l'escalier, Large Hadron Collider, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, mouse model, New Journalism, ocean acidification, p-value, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine

The number 3.08 in my example was a deliberate choice, because it’s a notable one from the history of the GRIM test – and psychology research in general. In 2016, the psychologist Matti Heino applied the GRIM test to one of the most famous psychology papers of all time: Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith’s 1959 paper on ‘cognitive dissonance’13. This is the now widely known idea that forcing someone to say or do something inconsistent with their true beliefs will make them psychologically uncomfortable and they’ll do their best to alter those beliefs to make them fit with what they’ve been made to say or do. In the 1959 study, participants were made to complete some tedious, pointless tasks, such as endlessly twisting pegs around on a pegboard.

They’d reduced their dissonance, in other words, by making themselves believe they’d had fun.14 Alas, Heino’s use of the GRIM test showed that it wasn’t just the participants’ beliefs that were inconsistent – it was Festinger and Carlsmith’s numbers.15 They reported an average score of 3.08 for a sample of twenty people filling in a scale of 0-to-10, which as we just saw isn’t possible, alongside several other averages that failed the GRIM test. Cognitive dissonance is a remarkably useful concept that makes intuitive sense, and the experiment was clever and memorable. But would the thousands of researchers who’ve cited Festinger and Carlsmith’s study over the years have done so if they’d known it was riddled with impossible numbers?16 The story reminds us once more that even ‘classic’ findings from the scientific literature – the ones that you would hope had been examined most rigorously – can be wholly unreliable, with what should be the most important part, the numbers and the data, acting as mere window-dressing in service of an attention-grabbing story.

Carlsmith, ‘Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 58, no. 2 (1959): pp. 203–10; https://doi.org/10.1037/h0041593 14.  There was actually a third group, who were paid $20. They reported finding the task as tedious as did those who weren’t paid anything – supposedly because they had reduced their cognitive dissonance by thinking of all that nice money, rather than by altering their beliefs. 15.  Matti Heino, ‘The Legacy of Social Psychology’, Data Punk, 13 Nov. 2016; https://mattiheino.com/2016/11/13/legacy-of-psychology/ 16.  As of January 2020, the paper has over 4,200 citations, according to Google Scholar. 17.  


pages: 349 words: 99,230

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

Over time, this shared experience led essential workers to see themselves as a group, and they developed what social scientists often call “class consciousness”: an awareness of one’s class position relative to others in the social hierarchy, and a set of beliefs that help shape class-based organization. Class consciousness is not a simple recognition of fact but the outcome of a process, usually set in motion by a political struggle. During the pandemic, the cognitive dissonance between essential workers’ popular designation as heroes and their actual treatment as sacrificial servants inspired collective action and a distinct awareness of their class interests. At the same time, differences among essential workers strained unity on the front lines. The classic sociological dividing lines of race, gender, and immigration status were in some sense less significant barriers than were other pandemic-specific obstacles: mass unemployment, the ability to telecommute, occupation, political differences and voting behavior, and popular recognition of one’s essential status.

Why is it essential that someone says “Welcome to Walmart” every time a patron enters the store during a global health crisis? The answer is because Walmart, and in this case the government of Massachusetts, prioritized the business culture of the world’s largest boss over the health of workers and citizens. It was exactly this cognitive dissonance—of being both essential and sacrificial, simultaneously heroic and disposable—that was at the heart of the problem of defining what an essential worker really is. Scholar Benedict Anderson argued that nations form as “imagined communities.” The members of a particular region might not know each other or ever meet, yet “in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”24 Imagined communities don’t simply form automatically but emerge through shared norms, language, values, cultural codes, and common enemies.

Rather than resenting a system that denied paid leave to workers, her coworkers directed their frustration toward her. “In a way, I get it—I was avoiding some risks during my time off,” she said. “That’s what mattered most to all of us.” The pandemic ignited a frontline class consciousness, motivated in large part by the cognitive dissonance of being simultaneously celebrated as heroes and exposed to so much workplace risk. The language of being “essential” was almost always part of the rhetoric of protest. As I’ll explore in later chapters, these newly class-conscious workers mobilized and launched organized movements in diverse ways, profoundly reshaping labor politics and the fight for worker justice in America.


pages: 235 words: 62,862

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

“Tell him you disagree and he turns away,” Festinger continues. “Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.” It’s easy to scoff at the story of Mrs. Martin and her believers, but the phenomenon Festinger describes is one that none of us are immune to. “Cognitive dissonance,” he coined it. When reality clashes with our deepest convictions, we’d rather recalibrate reality than amend our worldview. Not only that, we become even more rigid in our beliefs than before.1 Mind you, we tend to be quite flexible when it comes to practical matters. Most of us are even willing to accept advice on how to remove a grease stain or chop a cucumber.

When just one other person in the group stuck to the truth, the test subjects were more likely to trust the evidence of their own senses. Let this be an encouragement to all those who feel like a lone voice crying out in the wilderness: Keep on building those castles in the sky. Your time will come. Long Was the Night In 2008, it seemed as if that time had finally come when we were confronted with the biggest case of cognitive dissonance since the 1930s. On September 15, the investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. Suddenly, the whole global banking sector seemed poised to tumble like a row of dominoes. In the months that followed, one free market dogma after another crashed and burned. Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, once dubbed the “Oracle” and the “Maestro,” was gobsmacked.

Joris Luyendijk, a journalist at The Guardian who spent two years looking under the hood of London’s financial sector, summed up the experience in 2013 as follows: “It’s like standing at Chernobyl and seeing they’ve restarted the reactor but still have the same old management.”13 You have to wonder: Was the cognitive dissonance from 2008 even big enough? Or was it too big? Had we invested too much in our old convictions? Or were there simply no alternatives? This last possibility is the most worrying of all. The word “crisis” comes from ancient Greek and literally means to “separate” or “sieve.” A crisis, then, should be a moment of truth, the juncture at which a fundamental choice is made.


pages: 239 words: 68,598

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning by James E. Lovelock

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, continuous integration, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Garrett Hardin, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Northern Rock, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, quantum entanglement, short selling, Stewart Brand, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, Virgin Galactic

I am not a contrarian; instead I greatly respect the climate scientists of the IPCC and would prefer to accept as true their conclusions about future climates. I do not enjoy argument for its own sake but I cannot ignore the large differences that exist between their predictions and what is observed. In human affairs we know that ‘he who hesitates is lost’; social scientists talk of ‘cognitive dissonance’, which the composer of the phrase, Leon Festinger, defined as the feeling of discomfort we feel when trying to hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously and the urge to reduce the dissonance by modifying or rejecting one of the ideas. It operates when we choose between two almost equal objects and, having chosen, invest our choice with superlative advantage over the alternative so that we can happily reject it.

We have to choose and then have faith in our choice; this applies to the jobs we take, how we vote, the purchases we make, and the marriages to which we commit ourselves. It applies also to a judge or jury, but it is worse than useless in science. However, scientists are human and we never entirely escape the pull of cognitive dissonance. The range of forecasts by the different models of the IPCC is so large that it is difficult to believe that they are reliable enough to be used by governments to plan policy for ameliorating climate change. It is a brave try at an exceedingly difficult scientific task and probably we are expecting too much from them: it would be wrong to expect the view of the panel to be truly authoritative.

This third component of my knowledge base has taught me that above all humans hate any conspicuous change in their daily way of life and view of the future. As Bertrand Russell put it, ‘The average man would rather face death or torture than think.’ The overwhelming wish to continue with business as usual applies far beyond the marketplace and may be a consequence of the cognitive dissonance I wrote about earlier. Business as usual is unfortunately how most of science is done even though we know that it has no place in science’s probabilistic world. For practical and administrative reasons we cannot suddenly change the direction of research of a large and expensive laboratory built around a costly assembly of instruments, computers and specialized staff; this may be part of the reason why our forecasts do not agree well with expectations drawn from the history of the Earth.


pages: 114 words: 30,715

The Four Horsemen by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett

3D printing, Andrew Wiles, cognitive dissonance, cosmological constant, dark matter, Desert Island Discs, en.wikipedia.org, phenotype, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker

And then they would think, ‘Oh, this is one of those cosmic shifts that Dennett and Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens are talking about. Oh, right! And they think this is somehow illicit.’ Just to create a little more awareness in them of what a strange thing it is that they’re doing. HITCHENS: I’m afraid to say that I think that cognitive dissonance is probably necessary for everyday survival. Everyone does it a bit. DENNETT: You mean tolerating cognitive dissonance? HITCHENS: No, practising it. Take the case of someone who’s a member of MoveOn.org.*4 They think the United States government is a brutal, militaristic, imperial regime. It crushes the poor and invades other people’s countries.


pages: 123 words: 32,382

Grouped: How Small Groups of Friends Are the Key to Influence on the Social Web by Paul Adams

Airbnb, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, David Brooks, Dunbar number, information retrieval, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Hawkins, mirror neurons, planetary scale, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, sentiment analysis, social web, statistical model, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, white flight

The larger number of choices were good for getting people’s attention, but were ultimately far worse for sales.2 In a study on how people select pension funds, when 95 funds were offered, about 60 percent of people participated, but when only 2 funds were offered, the rate of participation jumped to 75 percent.3 When Procter & Gamble reduced the number of Head & Shoulders products from 26 to 15, they saw a 10 percent increase in sales.4 Often it is better to offer fewer choices. Although we want more information, when we have two or more conflicting ideas in our head, we become overwhelmed. This is known as cognitive dissonance and we often experience it when shopping. When this happens, we often pick the option that matches our current beliefs, and disregard all other options without evaluating them properly. When we buy things, in particular expensive things, we often feel discomfort after the purchase because we’re not sure if the purchase was a good decision.

Yet, presenting them with evidence that what they currently do is a bad choice is one of the worst ways to change people’s behavior or attitude. At best, this has little influence, as we automatically ignore information counter to our beliefs. At worst, the conflicting evidence brings about cognitive dissonance, and because we don’t like to hold opposing views in our head, we become more ingrained in what we believed before. It’s incredibly hard to change people’s attitudes. It’s much easier to invoke behavioral change first, and then attitudinal change later. Changes in behavior almost always lead to changes in attitude.


pages: 397 words: 109,631

Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking by Richard E. Nisbett

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, endowment effect, experimental subject, feminist movement, fixed income, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Henri Poincaré, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Shai Danziger, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, William of Occam, Yitang Zhang, Zipcar

Pity the poor atheist if Pascal got the payoffs right in the event that God exists. Only a fool would fail to believe. But unfortunately you can’t just grunt and produce belief. Pascal had a solution to this problem, though. And in solving the problem he invented a new psychological theory—what we would now call cognitive dissonance theory. If our beliefs are incongruent with our behavior, something has to change: either our beliefs or our behavior. We don’t have direct control over our beliefs but we do have control over our behavior. And because dissonance is a noxious state, our beliefs move into line with our behavior.

Sanchez-Burks, “Performance in Intercultural Interactions at Work: Cross-Cultural Differences in Responses to Behavioral Mirroring.” 12. Goethals and Reckman, “The Perception of Consistency in Attitudes.” 13. Goethals, Cooper, and Naficy, “Role of Foreseen, Foreseeable, and Unforeseeable Behavioral Consequences in the Arousal of Cognitive Dissonance.” 14. Nisbett et al., “Behavior as Seen by the Actor and as Seen by the Observer.” 15. Ibid. 16. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought; Nisbett et al., “Culture and Systems of Thought: Holistic Vs. Analytic Cognition.” 17. Masuda et al., “Placing the Face in Context: Cultural Differences in the Perception of Facial Emotion.” 18.

Gilovich, Thomas, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky. “The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences.” Cognitive Personality 17 (1985): 295–314. Goethals, George R., Joel Cooper, and Anahita Naficy. “Role of Foreseen, Foreseeable, and Unforeseeable Behavioral Consequences in the Arousal of Cognitive Dissonance.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37 (1979): 1179–85. Goethals, George R., and Richard F. Reckman. “The Perception of Consistency in Attitudes.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 9 (1973): 491–501. Goldstein, Noah J., Robert B. Cialdini, and Vladas Griskevicius. “A Room with a Viewpoint: Using Social Norms to Motivate Environmental Conservation in Hotels.”


pages: 459 words: 103,153

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Wiles, banking crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Boeing 747, business logic, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, Deep Water Horizon, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial engineering, Firefox, food miles, Gerolamo Cardano, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Netflix Prize, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, PageRank, Piper Alpha, profit motive, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, web application, X Prize, zero-sum game

It would have been easy for someone of her stature to reject outright the critics’ views, refuse to change the show, lose her investors’ money, set back the careers of her young dancers, and go to the grave convinced that the world had misunderstood her masterpiece. Why is denial such a natural tendency? Psychologists have a name for the root cause which has become famous enough that many non-psychologists will recognise the term: cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance describes the mind’s difficulty in holding two apparently contradictory thoughts simultaneously: in Tharp’s case, ‘I am a capable, experienced and respected choreographer’ and ‘My latest creation is stupefyingly clichéd.’ This odd phenomenon was first pinned down in an ingenious laboratory experiment half a century ago.

Carlsmith, ‘Cognitive consequences of forced compliance’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58 (1959), 203–10. 252 ‘It means that the sperm found’: Carol Tavris & Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) (London: Pinter & Martin, 2008), p. 150. 252 Bromgard had spent fifteen years in prison: Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (London: Portobello, 2010), pp.233–8. 253 ‘One of the worst professional errors’: Tavris & Aronson, Mistakes Were Made, p.130. 253 ‘I didn’t promote myself as a star’: Twyla Tharp, Push Comes to Shove (New York: Bantam, 1992), p. 82. 253 ‘That experience remains intensely painful’: Tharp, Push Comes to Shove, p. 84. 253 ‘Bob and I had lost a baby’: Tharp, Push Comes to Shove, p. 98. 255 Naturally the subject usually chose: M. D. Lieberman, K. N. Ochsner, D. T. Gilbert, & D. L. Schacter, ‘Do amnesics exhibit cognitive dissonance reduction? The role of explicit memory and attention in attitude change’, Psychological Science, 12 (2001), 135–40. 255 ‘Happiness being synthesised’: Dan Gilbert at TED, February 2004, http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html 256 Taught Petraeus that everyone is fallible: David Cloud & Greg Jaffe, The Fourth Star (New York: Crown, 2009), p. 43. 257 ‘She didn’t try to console me’: Tharp & Reiter, The Creative Habit, p. 221. 257 The reviews are harsh but fair: Reviews by Hedy Weiss, Michael Phillips & Sid Smith, references above. 257 ‘All you need are people’: Tharp & Reiter, The Creative Habit, p. 229. 258 People with regular jobs tend to receive feedback: Andrew Oswald, ‘What is a happiness equation?’

., 55, 59, 71 catastrophe experts, 184–6, 191, 194–5, 208 Cave-Brown-Cave, Air Commodore Henry, 81, 83, 85, 88, 114 centralised decision making, 70, 74–5, 226, 227, 228; warfare and, 46–7, 67–8, 69, 71, 76, 78–9 centrally planned economies, 11, 21, 23–6, 68–9, 70 Challenger shuttle disaster, 184 Charles, Prince, 154 Chernobyl disaster, 185 Chile, 3, 69–72, 76, 148 China, 11, 94, 131, 143, 147, 150, 152 Christensen, Clayton, 239–40, 242, 245 Chuquicamata mine (Chile), 3 Churchill, Winston, 41–2, 82, 85 Citigroup, 205131 Clay Mathematics Institute, 110 climate change, 4, 20; carbon dioxide emissions and, 132, 156, 159–65, 166–9, 173, 176, 178–80; ‘carbon footprinting’, 159–66; carbon tax/price idea, 167–9, 178–80, 222; environmental regulations and, 169–74, 176, 177; ‘food miles’ and, 159, 160–1, 168; governments/politics and, 157–8, 163, 169–74, 176, 180; greenhouse effect and, 154–6; individual behaviour and, 158–63, 164, 165–6; innovation prizes and, 109, 179; methane and, 155, 156, 157, 159–60, 173, 179, 180; new technologies and, 94–5; simplicity/complexity paradox, 156, 157–8; Thaler-Sunstein nudge, 177–8; uncertainty and, 156 Coca-Cola, 28, 243 Cochrane, Archie, 123–7, 129, 130, 140, 238, 256 cognitive dissonance, 251–2 Cold War, 6, 41, 62–3 Colombia, 117, 147 complexity theory, 3–4, 13, 16, 49, 72103, 237 computer games, 92–3 computer industry, 11–12, 69, 70–1, 239–42 corporations and companies: disruptive technologies and, 239–44, 245–6; environmental issues and, 157–8, 159, 161, 165, 170–1, 172–3; flattening of hierarchies, 75, 224–5, 226–31; fraud and, 208, 210, 212–13, 214; innovation and, 17, 81–2, 87–9, 90, 93–4, 95–7, 108–11, 112, 114, 224–30, 232–4; limited liability, 244; patents and, 95–7, 110, 111, 114; randomised experiments and, 235–9; skunk works model and, 89, 91, 93, 152, 224, 242–3, 245; strategy and, 16, 18, 27–8, 36, 223, 224–34; see also business world; economics and finance cot-death, 120–1 credit-rating agencies, 188, 189, 190 Criner, Roy, 252 Crosby, Sir James, 211, 214, 250, 256 Cuban Missile Crisis, 41, 63 Cudahy Packing, 9 dairy products, 158, 159–60, 164–5, 166 Darwin, Charles, 86 Dayton Hudson, 243 de Montyon, Baron, 107–8 Deal or No Deal (TV game show), 33–5, 253 decentralisation, 73, 74–8, 222, 224–5, 226–31; Iraq war and, 76–8, 79; trial and error and, 31, 174–5, 232, 234 decision making: big picture thinking, 41, 42, 46, 55; consistent standards and, 28–9; diversity of opinions, 31, 44–5, 46, 48–50, 59–63; doctrine of unanimous advice, 30–1, 47–50, 62–3, 64, 78; grandiosity and, 27–8; idealized hierarchy, 40–1, 42, 46–7, 49–50, 55, 78; learning from mistakes, 31–5, 78, 119, 250–1, 256–9, 261–2; local/on the ground, 73, 74, 75, 76–8, 79, 224–5, 226–31; reporting lines/chain of command, 41, 42, 46, 49–50, 55–6, 58, 59–60, 64, 77–8; supportive team with shared vision, 41, 42, 46, 56, 62–3; unsuccessful, 19, 32, 34–5, 41–2; see also centralised decision making Deepwater Horizon disaster (April 2010), 36, 216–19, 220 Democratic Republic of Congo, 139–40 Deng Xiaoping, 1 Denmark, 148 Department for International Development (DFID), 133, 137–8 development aid: charter cities movement, 150–3; community-driven reconstruction (CDR), 137–40; corruption and, 133–5, 142–3; economic ‘big push’ and, 143–5, 148–9; feedback loops, 141–3; fundamentally unidentified questions (FUQs), 132, 133; governments and, 118, 120, 143, 144, 148–9; identification strategies, 132–5; microfinance, 116, 117–18, 120; Millennium Development Villages, 129–30, 131; product space concept, 145–8; randomised trials and, 127–9, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135–6, 137–40, 141; randomistas, 127–9, 132, 133, 135–40, 258; selection principle and, 117, 140–3, 149; SouthWest project in China, 131; success and failure, 116, 118–20, 130–1; Muhammad Yunus and, 116, 117–18 digital photography, 240–1, 242 Dirks, Ray, 211–12, 213 disk-drive industry, 239–40, 242 Djankov, Simeon, 135 domino-toppling displays, 185, 200–1 Don Basin (Russia), 21–2, 24, 27 dot-com bubble, 10, 92 Dubai, 147, 150 Duflo, Esther, 127, 131, 135, 136 Dyck, Alexander, 210, 213 eBay, 95, 230 econometrics, 132–5 economics and finance: banking system as complex and tightly coupled, 185, 186, 187–90, 200, 201, 207–8, 220; bankruptcy contingency plans, 204; Basel III regulations, 195; bond insurance business, 189–90; bridge bank/rump bank approach, 205–6; capital requirements, 203, 204; centrally planned economiepos=0000032004 >11, 21, 23–6, 68–9, 70; CoCos (contingent convertible bonds), 203–4; complexity and, 3–4; decoupling of financial system, 202, 203–8, 215–16, 220; Dodd-Frank reform act (2010), 195; employees as error/fraud spotters, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215; energy crisis (1970s), 179; evolutionary theory and, 14–17, 18–19, 174–5; improvements since 1960s, 215; inter-bank payments systems, 207; latent errors and, 209–10, 215; ‘LMX spiral’, 183–4, 189; narrow banking approach, 206–7, 215; need for systemic heat maps, 195–6; reinsurance markets, 183; zombie banks, 201–2; see also business world; corporations and companies; financial crisis (from 2007) Edison, Thomas, 236, 238 Eliot, T.S., 260 Elizabeth House (Waterloo), 170–1, 172 Endler, John, 221–2, 223, 234, 239 Engineers Without Borders, 119 Enron, 197–8, 200, 208, 210 environmental issues: biofuels, 84, 173, 176; clean energy, 91, 94, 96, 245–6; corporations/companies and, 159, 161, 165, 170–1, 172–3; renewable energy technology, 84, 91, 96, 130, 168, 169–73, 179, 245; see also climate change Equity Funding Corporation, 212 Ernst and Young, 199 errors and mistakes, types of, 208–10; latent errors, 209–10, 215, 218, 220 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), 188 European Union, 169, 173 Evans, Martin, 100 evolutionary theory, 6, 12–13, 15–17, 174, 258; business world and, 14–17, 174–5, 233–4; Darwin and, 86; digital world and, 13–14, 259–60; economics and, 14–17, 174–5; Endler’s guppy experiments, 221–2, 223, 239; fitness landscapes, 14–15, 259; Leslie Orgel’s law, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180; problem solving and, 14–15, 16; selective breeding and, 175–6 expertise, limits of, 6–8, 16, 17, 19, 66 extinction events, biological, 18–19 Exxon (formerly Jersey Standard), 9, 12, 188, 245 F-22 stealth fighter, 93 Facebook, 90, 91 failure: in business, 8–10, 11–12, 18–19, 36, 148–9, 224, 239–46; chasing of losses, 32–5, 253–4, 256; in complex and tightly coupled systems, 185–90, 191–2, 200, 201, 207–8, 219, 220; corporate extinctions, 18–19; denial and, 32, 34–5, 250–3, 255–6; disruptive technologies, 239–44, 245–6; of established industries, 8–10; government funding and, 148–9; hedonic editing and, 254; honest advice from others and, 256–7, 258, 259; learning from, 31–5, 78, 119, 250–1, 256–9, 261–2; modern computer industry and, 11–12, 239–42; as natural in market system, 10, 11, 12, 244, 245–6; niche markets and, 240–2; normal accident theory, 219; recognition of, 36, 224; reinterpreted as success, 254–5, 256; shifts in competitive landscape, 239–46; ‘Swiss cheese model’ of safety systems, 186–7, 190, 209, 218; types of error and mistake, 208–10; willingness to fail, 249–50, 261–2; of young industries, 10 Fearon, James, 137, Federal Aviation Administration, 210 Federal Reserve Bank, 193–4 feedback, 25, 26, 42, 178, 240; in bureaucratic hierarchies, 30–1; development and, 141–3; dictatorships’ immunity to, 27; Iraq war and, 43–5, 46, 57–8, 59–62; market system and, 141; praise sandwich, 254; public services and, 141; self-employment and, 258; yes-men and, 30 Feith, Douglas, 44, 45 Ferguson, Chris ‘Jesus’, 32 Fermi nuclear reactor (near Detroit), 187 Festinger, Leon, 251 financial crisis (from 2007), 5, 11, 25; AIG and, 189, 193–5, 215–16, 228; bankers’ bonuses, 198; banking system as complex and tightly coupled, 185, 186, 187–90, 200, 201, 207–8, 220; bond insurance business and, 189–90; collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), 190, 209; credit default swaps (CDSs), 187–9, 190, 194; derivatives deals and, 198, 220; faulty information systems and, 193–5; fees paid to administrators, 197; government bail-outs/guarantees, 202, 214, 223; Lehman Brothers and, 193, 194, 196–200, 204–5, 208, 215–16; ‘LMX spiral’ comparisons, 183–4, 189; Repo 105 accounting trick, 199 Financial Services Authority (FSA), 214 Firefox, 221, 230 Fleming, Alexander, 83 Food Preservation prize, 107, 108 Ford Motor Company, 46–7 fossil record, 18 Fourier, Joseph, 155 fraud, corporate, 208, 210, 212–13, 214 Friedel, Robert, 80 Frost, Robert, 260 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (musical), 248 Gage, Phineas, 21, 27 Galapagos Islands, 86, 87 Gale (US developer), 152 Galenson, David, 260 Galileo, 187 Galland, Adolf, 81 Gallipoli campaign (1915), 41–2 Galvin, Major General Jack, 62, 256 game theory, 138, 205 Gates, Bill, 110, 115 Gates, Robert, 59, 64, 78 Gates Foundation, 110 Geithner, Tim, 193–5, 196 GenArts, 13 General Electric, 9, 12, 95 Gilbert, Daniel, 255, 256 GlaxoSmithKline, 95 Glewwe, Paul, 127–8 Global Positioning System (GPS), 113 globalisation, 75 Google, 12, 15, 90, 91, 239, 245, 261; corporate strategy, 36, 231–4; Gmail, 233, 234, 241, 242; peer monitoring at, 229–30 Gore, Al, An Inconvenient Truth, 158 Göring, Hermann, 81 government and politics: climate change and, 157–8, 163, 169–74, 176, 180; development aid and, 118, 120, 143, 144, 148–9; financial crisis (from 2007) and, 193–5, 198–9, 202, 214, 215–16, 223; grandiosity and, 27–8; ideal hierarchies and, 46pos=00002pos=0000022558 >7, 49–50, 62–3, 78; innovation funding, 82, 88, 93, 97, 99–101, 102–3, 104, 113; lack of adaptability rewarded, 20; pilot schemes and, 29, 30; rigorous evaluation methods and, 29* Graham, Loren, 26 Grameen Bank, 116, 117 Greece, 147 Green, Donald, 29* greenhouse effect, 154–6 Gulf War, first, 44, 53, 65, 66, 67, 71; Battle of 73 Easting, 72–3, 74, 79 Gutenberg, Johannes, 10 Haldane, Andrew, 195, 258 Halifax (HBOS subsidiary), 211 Halley, Edmund, 105 Halliburton, 217 Hamel, Gary, 221, 226, 233, 234 Hanna, Rema, 135 Hannah, Leslie, 8–10, 18 Hanseatic League, 150 Harrison, John, 106–7, 108, 110, 111 Harvard University, 98–9, 185 Hastings, Reed, 108 Hausmann, Ricardo, 145 Hayek, Friedrich von, 1, 72, 74–5, 227 HBOS, 211, 213, 214 healthcare sector, US, 213–14 Heckler, Margaret, 90–1 Henry the Lion, 149, 150, 151–2, 153 Hewitt, Adrian, 169 Hidalgo, César, 144–7, 148 Higginson, Peter, 230 Hinkley Point B power station, 192–3, 230–1 Hitachi, 11 Hitler, Adolf, 41, 82, 83, 150 HIV-AIDS, 90–1, 96, 111, 113 Holland, John, 16, 103 Hong Kong, 150 Houston, Dame Fanny, 88–9, 114 Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), 101–3, 112 Hughes (computer company), 11 Humphreys, Macartan, 136, 137, 138–40 Hurricane aircraft, 82* IBM, 11, 90, 95–6 In Search of Excellence (Peters and Waterman, 1982), 8, 10 India, 135, 136, 143, 147, 169 individuals: adaptation and, 223–4, 248–62; climate change and, 158–63, 164, 165–6; experimentation and, 260–2; trial and error and, 31–5 Indonesia, 133–4, 142, 143 Innocentive, 109 innovation: corporations and, 17, 81–2, 87–9, 90, 93–4, 95–7, 108–11, 112, 114, 224–30, 232–4; costs/funding of, 90–4, 99–105; failure as price worth paying, 101–3, 104, 184, 215, 236; government funding, 82, 88, 93, 97, 99–101, 102–3, 104, 113; grants and, 108; in health field, 90–1, 96; large teams and specialisation, 91–4; market system and, 17, 95–7, 104; new technologies and, 89–90, 91, 94–5; parallel possibilities and, 86–9, 104; prize methodology, 106–11, 112, 113–14, 179, 222–3; randomistas and, 127–9, 132, 133, 135–40, 258; return on investment and, 83–4; skunk works model, 89, 91, 93, 152, 224, 242–3, 245; slowing down of, 90–5, 97; small steps and, 16, 24, 29, 36, 99, 103, 143, 149, 153, 224, 259–60; space tourism, 112–13, 114; specialisation and, 91–2; speculative leaps and, 16, 36, 91, 99–100, 103–4, 259–60; unpredictability and, 84–5 Intel, 11, 90, 95 International Christelijk Steunfonds (ICS), 127–9, 131 International Harvester, 9 International Rescue Committee (IRC), 137–8, 139 internet, 12, 15, 63, 90, 113, 144, 223, 233, 238, 241; randomised experiments and, 235–6, 237; see also Google Iraq war: al Anbar province, 56–7, 58, 64, 76–7; civil war (2006), 39–40; Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP), 77; counterinsurgency strategy, 43, 45, 55–6, 58, 60–1, 63–4, 65; decentralisation and, 76–8, 79; feedback and, 43–5, 46, 57–8, 59–62; FM 3–24 (counter-insurgency manual), 63; Forward Operating Bases (FOBs), 51–3, 57, 65; Haditha killings (19 November 2005), 37–9, 40, 42, 43, 52; new technologies and, 71, 72, 74, 78–9, 196; Samarra bombing (22 February 2006), 39; Tal Afar, 51, 52, 53–5, 61, 64, 74, 77, 79; trial and error and, 64–5, 66–7; US turnaround in, 35, 40, 46, 50–1, 53–6, 57–8, 59–61, 63–5, 78; US/allied incompetence and, 38, 39–40, 42–5, 46, 50, 64, 67, 79, 223; Vietnam parallels, 46 J&P Coats, 9 Jacobs, Jane, 87 James, Jonathan, 30 Jamet, Philippe, 192 Janis, Irving, 62 Japan, 11, 143, 176, 204, 208 Jay-Z, 119 Jo-Ann Fabrics, 235 Jobs, Steve, 19 Joel, Billy, 247–8, 249 Johnson, President Lyndon, 46, 47, 49–50, 60, 62, 64, 78 Jones, Benjamin F., 91–2 Joyce, James, 260 JP Morgan, 188 Kahn, Herman, 93 Kahneman, Daniel, 32, 253 Kantorovich, Leonid, 68–9, 76 Kaplan, Fred, 77 Karlan, Dean, 135 Kauffmann, Stuart, 16, 103 Kay, John, 206–7, 208, 215, 259 Keller, Sharon, 252 Kelly, Terri, 230 Kennedy, President John F., 41, 47, 62–3, 84, 113 Kenya, 127–9, 131 Kerry, John, 20 Keynes, John Maynard, 181 Kilcullen, David, 57, 60–1 Klemperer, Paul, 96, 205 Klinger, Bailey, 145 Kotkin, Stephen, 25 Kremer, Michael, 127–8, 129 Krepinevich, Andy, 45 Lanchester, John, 188 leaders: decision making and, 40–2; failure of feedback and, 30–1, 62; grandiosity and, 27–8; ignoring of failure, 36; mistakes by, 41–2, 56, 67; need to believe in, 5–6; new leader as solution, 59 Leamer, Ed, 132* Leeson, Nick, 184–5, 208 Lehman Brothers, 193, 194, 196–200, 204–5, 208, 215–16 Lenin Dam (Dnieper River), 24 Levine, John, 48–9 Levitt, Steven, 132–3 Liberia, 136–9 light bulbs, 162, 177 Lind, James, 122–3 Lindzen, Richard, 156 Livingstone, Ken, 169 Lloyd’s insurance, 183 Lloyds TSB, 214 Local Motors, 90 Lockheed, Skunk Works division, 89, 93, 224, 242 Lomas, Tony, 196, 197–200, 204, 205, 208, 219 Lomborg, Bjorn, 94 longitude problem, 105–7, 108 Lu Hong, 49 Lübeck, 149–50, 151–2, 153 Luftwaffe, 81–2 MacFarland, Colonel Sean, 56–7, 64, 74, 76–7, 78 Mackay, General Andrew, 67–8, 74 Mackey, John, 227, 234 Madoff, Bernard, 208212–13 Magnitogorsk steel mills, 24–5, 26, 153 Malawi, 119 Mallaby, Sebastian, 150, 151 management gurus, 8, 233 Manhattan Project, 82, 84 Manso, Gustavo, 102 Mao Zedong, 11, 41 market system: competition, 10–11, 17, 19, 75, 95, 170, 239–46; ‘disciplined pluralism’, 259; evolutionary theory and, 17; failure in as natural, 10, 11, 12, 244, 245–6; feedback loops, 141; innovation and, 17, 95–7, 104; patents and, 95–7; trial and error, 20; validation and, 257–8 Markopolos, Harry, 212–13 Marmite, 124 Maskelyne, Nevil, 106 mathematics, 18–19, 83, 146, 247; financial crisis (from 2007) and, 209, 213; prizes, 110, 114 Mayer, Marissa, 232, 234 McDonald’s, 15, 28 McDougal, Michael, 252 McGrath, Michael, 252 McMaster, H.R.


pages: 453 words: 111,010

Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, nudge unit, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spectrum auction, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

Across the world in 2017, more than 170 tonnes of coal were burned every second.19 The enormity of the climate-change problem and the negligible impact of individual actions are two themes that arise repeatedly in focus groups on public attitudes and are echoed by large corporations and governments.20 Together, they are probably the biggest obstacle to radical action to address climate change. But we should be suspicious: as ever when free-riding beckons, it is extremely tempting to let ourselves off the hook, to assume that individual contributions make no difference.21 The psychology of cognitive dissonance tells us that when the truth is uncomfortable, we often respond by falling into self-deception. This need not be due to selfishness: it may be that if I make an uncomfortable effort or sacrifice now, I will gain much more later. But this kind of self-control is hard to achieve. Psychologists have shown that thinking about an experience in the present will be more ‘salient’ – more vivid, more prominent in our minds – than the same experience in the future.

air travel, commercial, 63–4 Akerlof, George, 223, 237, 248 altruism, 150–51, 159, 162–4 game theory’s denial of, 31–2, 41, 42–3 misunderstanding of, 13–14, 25, 31–2, 41–3, 112, 178–9 as not depleted through use, 14 seen as disguised selfishness, 11–12, 25, 112, 178–9 Amazon, 155, 178, 208 American Economic Association, 257, 258 Angrist, Joshua, 249 antitrust regulation, 56–8 Apple, 222–3 Aristotle, 14 Arrow, Ken awarded Nobel Prize, 71 and blood donations, 14, 163 at City College, New York, 74–5, 91 collective preference, 73–4, 75–7, 78–82 and democracy, 72–4, 75–7, 78–83, 95, 97 framework presented as scientific, 81–2, 124–5 and free marketeers, 78–9, 82 Impossibility Theorem, 72, 73–4, 75–7, 78–83, 89, 97 and mathematics, 71, 72, 73–5, 76–7, 82–3, 97 and Mont Pèlerin Society, 9 preference satisfaction’, 80–82, 97, 124–5, 129 and Ramsey, 189 at RAND, 70–71, 72–3, 74, 75–6, 77, 78 top-secret-level security clearance, 71–2 ‘A Cautious Case for Socialism’ (1978), 83 ‘On the Optimal Use of Winds for Flight Planning’, 71 Social Choice and Individual Values (1951), 71, 72, 75–7, 78–80, 97 artificial intelligence, 214, 242 Atlas Economic Research Foundation, 7–8 Austen, Jane, 134 austerity policies, recent, 258 Axelrod, Robert, 41 Babbage, Charles, 222 baby-market idea, 61, 138, 145, 146 Bachelier, Louis, 193 Baird, Douglas, 58–9 bandwagon effect, 110 Bank of England, 96, 120, 185, 211–12, 258 bankers excuse/permission to be greedy, 1–2, 204, 238 and Keynesian economics, 5 performance as wholly relative, 204 quantification and recklessness, 213 rigged pay-for-performance contracts, 229–30, 238 role in 2007 crisis, 1–2, 57, 182, 192 as serial offenders over uncertainty, 201 see also financial markets Barro, Josh, 63, 64 Bateson, Gregory, 28 battery-chicken farming, 7 Baumol, William, 90–92, 93, 94 BBC, 48, 98 Beaverbrook, Lord, 157 Becker, Gary amoral understanding of crime, 137, 152 and citizenship rights, 146 and Coase, 69 Freakonomics followers of, 130, 134, 148–9, 156 and Friedman, 126, 131 hidden assumptions of, 130–31, 133–4 human capital idea, 149 and individualism, 134, 135–8 and maximization, 129–31, 133–4, 147 as outsider, 50 and Posner, 56 rejects need for realistic assumptions, 132, 133–4, 148 and sale of body parts, 147–8 sees poor health as just a preference, 135, 136, 140 sees values as mere tastes, 136–8, 140 theories as deeply controversial, 127–9, 130 theories as slippery, 129, 133–4 and ‘universality’ of economics, 125, 126–31, 133–4, 135–8, 147–8 version of ‘rational’ behaviour, 128–9, 135, 140, 151 De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum (with Stigler, 1977), 135–6 The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (1976), 130 The Economics of Discrimination (1957), 126–7 A Treatise on the Family (1981), 127–8, 130–31, 133 behaviourism, 154–8, 237 behavioural economics context and culture, 175–6 framing effects, 170–71, 259 and incentives, 160, 171, 175, 176–7 methods from psychology, 170–71 and Nudge, 171–2 and orthodox economics, 173, 174–5, 247, 255 and physics envy, 175–6 problems with, 173–5, 250–51 ‘self-command’ strategies, 140 theory of irrationality, 12, 171, 250–51 and welfare maximization, 149 Bell, Alexander Graham, 222 bell curve distribution, 191–4, 195, 196, 201, 203–4, 218–19, 257 Bentham, Jeremy, 102 Berlin, Isiah, 166, 167–8 Beveridge Report (1942), 4 Bezos, Jeff, 208 Black, Duncan, 77–8, 95 Blackstone (private equity firm), 235 black swans, 192, 194, 201, 203–4 Blinder, Alan, The Economics of Brushing Teeth (1974), 136 blood donors, 14, 112, 162–3, 164, 169, 176 Borel, Émile, 185* Brennan, William, 56 broadcasting, 48–50, 98 spectrum auctions, 39–40, 47, 49–50 Buchanan, James McGill, 8, 83–5, 87–8, 89, 95, 115 Buffett, Warren, 229, 230, 236 Calcraft, John, 120, 121 Cameron, David, 172 Caplan, Brian, The Myth of the Rational Voter, 245–6 carbon markets, 47, 65–7 Carlson, Jack, 141–2 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), 72, 77 cartels and monopolies, 101, 102, 103–4 Cheney, Dick, 232–3 Chicago, University of, 2, 4, 34, 40, 49–51 antitrust ideas, 56–8 Buchanan at, 84 and Coase, 49–52, 53–4, 55, 56–7, 61, 68–9, 132 Friedman’s dominance, 50, 132 law and economics movement, 40, 55, 56–63, 64–7 revolution of 1968 at, 56, 58–9 zero-transaction-costs assumption, 51–2, 68–9 Chicago law school, 55, 56, 58–9 child labour, 124, 146 China, 65 City College, New York, 74–5, 91 climate change average temperature rises, 205–6, 207 and carbon markets, 47, 65–6 ‘cashing in’ on carbon markets, 67 Coasean worldview on pollution, 65–7, 68 denialists, 8 ‘discount rate’ on future costs, 208–9, 212 discrimination against future generations, 208–9 and free-riding theory, 2, 99, 113–17, 120 Intergovernmental Panel on, 207 measurement in numerical terms, 206–11, 213 and precautionary principle, 211–12 premature deaths due to, 207–9 and Prisoner’s Dilemma, 27 Stern Review, 206, 209–10 threat to economic growth, 209 Coase, Ronald argument given status of theorem, 51–2, 67 awarded Nobel Prize, 52 background of, 47–8 and Chicago School, 49–52, 53–4, 56–7, 61, 68–9, 132 and created markets, 47, 65–7 dismissal of ‘blackboard economics’, 48, 54, 64, 67–9 on Duncan Black, 77 evening at Director’s house (early 1960), 49–51, 132 fundamental misunderstanding of work of, 51, 52–3, 67–9 hypothetical world invoked by, 50–51, 52, 54–5, 62, 68 as Illinois resident, 46–7 and Mont Pèlerin Society, 8 and public-sector monopolies, 48–51 and transaction costs, 51–3, 54–5, 61, 62, 63–4, 68 ‘The Nature of the Firm’ (1932 paper), 48 The Problem of Social Cost’ (1960 paper), 47, 48, 50–51, 52, 54–5, 59 cognitive dissonance, 113–14 Cold War, 18–19, 20, 21–2, 24, 27, 181 Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), 33–4, 140 and Ellsberg, 184, 197, 198, 200 and game theory, 18, 20, 21–2, 24, 27, 33–4, 35, 70, 73, 198 and Impossibility Theorem, 75–6 RAND and military strategy, 18, 20, 21–2, 24, 27, 33–4, 70, 73, 75–6, 141, 200, 213 and Russell’s Chicken, 33 and Schelling, 138, 139–40 Washington–Moscow hotline installed, 139–40 collective preference and Ken Arrow, 73–4, 75–7, 78–82 Black’s median voter theorem, 77, 95–6 Sen’s mathematical framework, 80–81 communism, 82, 84, 101, 104, 237 Compass Lexecon, 58, 68 Condorcet Paradox, 76, 77 conspiracy theories, 3, 8, 9 cooperation cartels, monopolies, price-fixing, 101, 102, 103–4 and decision-making processes, 108–10 and free-riding theory, 2, 101, 102, 103–10 office teamwork, 109–10, 112 older perspective on, 100–102, 108, 111, 122 and Scandinavian countries, 103 view of in game theory, 21–2, 23, 25–32, 36–8, 41–3 corporate culture and antitrust regulation, 57–8 changes due to Friedman, 2, 152 Chicago approach to regulation, 40 and climate change, 113, 114, 115 executive pay, 215–16, 219, 224, 228–30, 234, 238 Jensen and Murphy’s article, 229 ‘optimal contracting’/pay-for-performance, 228–30, 238 predatory pricing, 57 and tax evasion/avoidance, 105–6 cost disease, 90–92, 93, 94 Cowles Commission in Chicago, 78 CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers), 222 criminal responsibility, 111, 137, 152 Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), 33–4, 140 Damasio, Antonio, 14 data geeks, 248–50 ‘dead peasants insurance’, 124 decision-making processes, 108–10, 122, 170–71 ‘anchoring effect’, 212 authority figure–autonomy contradiction, 180 avoidance of pure uncertainty, 198–9 axioms (abstract mathematical assumptions), 198 Ellsberg Paradox, 184, 199–200 Ellsberg’s experiment (1961), 182–4, 187, 197, 198–200, 205 Linda Problem, 202–3 orthodox decision theory, 183–4, 185–6, 189–91, 193–4, 198–200, 201–2, 203–5, 211, 212–14 and the Savage orthodoxy, 190–91, 197, 198–200, 203 scenario planning as crucial, 251 Von Neumann’s theory of decision-making, 189, 190, 203 see also probability; risk and uncertainty democracy and Ken Arrow, 72–4, 75–7, 78–83, 95, 97 Black’s median voter theorem, 77, 95–6 and crises of the 1970s, 85–6 and economic imperialism, 145–7 equal citizenship principle at heart of, 145–6, 151 free-riding view of voting, 99, 110, 112, 115–16, 120–21 marketing by political parties, 95–6 modern cynicism about politics, 94–7 paradox of voter turnout, 88–9, 95–6, 115–16 paradox of voting, 75–7 politicians’ support for depoliticization, 96–7 post-war scepticism about, 78–9 and public choice theory, 85–6, 95–7 replacing of with markets, 79 Sen’s mathematical framework, 80–81 voter turnout, 88–9, 95–6, 115–16, 120–21 see also voting systems Dennison, Stanley, 13 dentistry, 258–9, 261 Depression (1930s), 3 digital technology, 68, 214, 222–3 data revolution, 247–50 and rising inequality, 215, 220, 242 Director, Aaron, 4–5, 49–51, 132 Disney World, 123 Dodd–Frank Act, 256 Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge (Lewis Carroll), 72, 77 dot.com bubble, 192, 201 Douglas Aircraft Corporation, 18 Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957), 86, 89, 95 Dr Strangelove (Kubrick film, 1964), 19, 35, 139 DreamTours Florida, 123 Drucker, Peter, 153 Dulles, John Foster, 20 Dundee School of Economics, 48, 77–8 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, The Visit of the Old Lady, 166 earthquakes, 194–5 Econometrica (journal), 77–8 economic imperialism arrogance of, 246–7 auctioning of university places, 124, 149–50 continuing damage wrought by, 151–2 and democracy, 145–7 emerges into the limelight, 130 Freakonomics, followers of, 130, 134, 148–9, 156 and inequality, 145–7, 148, 151, 207 markets in citizenship duties, 146 origins of term, 125 price as measure of value, 149, 150, 151 purchase of immigration rights, 125, 146 and sale of body parts, 123, 124, 145, 147–8 sidelining of moral questions, 125–9, 135–8, 141–5, 146–7, 148–9, 151–2, 207 value of human life (‘statistical lives’), 141–5, 207 welfare maximization, 124–5, 129–31, 133–4, 146–7, 148–9 see also Becker, Gary economic theory Arrow establishes benchmark for, 71 Baumol’s cost disease, 90–92, 93, 94 Coase Theorem, 45–7, 48–55, 56–7, 61, 63–6 and data revolution, 247–50 exclusion of by data geeks, 248–50 and financial markets, 9, 12–13, 182, 253 as focus of economics courses, 260 Kahneman and Tversky’s theory of irrationality, 12, 171, 250–51 of labour, 237 marginal productivity theory, 223–4, 228 Pareto efficiency, 217–18, 256* perfect competition, 103, 193–4 profit-maximizing firms, 228–9 rent-seeking, 230, 238 theory of motivation, 157–8, 164, 166–7, 168–70, 178–9 see also game theory; homo economicus; public choice theory; social choice theory economics accidental economists, 47–8 and Arrow’s framework, 78–9, 82 causes of growth, 223, 239 created markets, 47, 65–7 crises of the 1970s, 85–6 digital technology, 68, 214 efficiency as fundamental, 63, 64–5, 141, 153, 155, 193–4, 201, 211, 217–18, 255 empirical research as still rare, 247–8 extension into non-economic aspects of life, 40, 54–60, 65, 123–31, 132–4, 135–6, 145–50 gulf between reality and theory, 10–13, 31–2, 41–3, 51–3, 64–9, 86–9, 133, 136, 144–5, 228–30, 250–53, 260–61 history of, 260 lack of objective ‘facts’, 253 modern debate on, 9 and Olson’s analysis, 104 our love–hate relationship with, 3, 245 as partially self-fulfilling, 12–13, 14, 159, 253 percentage of GDP impact of climate change, 206–11, 213 positional goods, 239–41 Posner’s wealth-maximization principle, 57–63, 64–7, 137 predatory pricing, 57 principles for new relationship with, 251–61 privatization, 50, 54, 88, 93–4 rise of game theory, 40–41 Smith’s enlightened self-interest, 11 value of human life (‘statistical lives’), 141–5, 207 vocational role of, 260 see also behavioural economics; free-market economics economics, aims/pretensions to be science arrogance of, 205, 245–7, 258 Arrow’s framework presented as scientific, 72, 81–2, 124–5 attitude to value judgements, 10, 60–61, 64–9, 112, 136–8, 173–4, 204–5, 218, 247 claims of game theory, 21, 24–6, 28–9, 32, 34, 35, 38, 41 and data revolution, 247–50 desire for neutral science akin to physics, 9–10, 20–21, 34–5, 41, 116, 125, 132–3, 151, 175–6, 187–90, 212, 217–18, 246–56 desire for science of social control, 153, 154, 155, 164, 167 Friedman’s ‘The Methodology of Positive Economics’, 132–3 hidden political/ethical agendas, 10, 213, 253, 255–8 measurement of risk in numerical terms, 181–4, 187, 189, 190–94, 196–7, 201–2, 203–5, 212–13 natural experiments, 248–50 Pareto improvements, 217–18 and physics envy, 9, 20–21, 41, 116, 175–6, 212, 247 and public choice theorists, 88 quantification of all risks and values, 201–2, 203, 212–13 real world as problem for, 10–13, 31–2, 42–3, 51–3, 64–9, 86–9, 133, 136, 144–5, 228–30, 250–53, 260–61 ‘some number is better than no number’ mantra, 212–13 uncertainty as obstacle to, 190–91, 212–13 and use of mathematics, 9–10, 26, 72, 247, 248, 255, 259 use of term ‘rational’, 12 Von Neumann and Morgenstern’s grand project, 20–21, 24–5, 26, 35, 125, 151, 189 and wealth-maximization approach, 58, 60 economists advice to former Soviet Bloc nations, 257 conflicts of interest, 256–7, 258 data geeks, 248–50 economics curriculum reform needed, 259–60 errors and misjudgements, 13–14, 16, 132–3, 144–5, 256*, 257–8, 260–61 failure to explain ideas, 254–5 insularity of, 246–7 Keynes’ dentistry comparison, 258–9, 261 lack of ethics codes, 257–8 misunderstanding of altruism, 13–14, 25, 31–2, 41–3, 112, 178–9 need to show more humility, 258–9, 260–61 as not separate from economy, 251–3 and ordinary people, 245–6, 254–5, 258, 261 self-image as unsentimental and honest, 10 sneering descriptions of virtuous behaviour, 112 stating of the obvious by, 134, 259 education auctioning of university places, 124, 149–50 Baumol’s cost disease, 91, 92, 93, 94 incentivization as pervasive, 156, 169 value of, 150, 169, 170 ‘efficient market hypothesis’, 193–4, 201, 255 Einstein, Albert, 17, 22, 33, 213 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 19, 20, 231 Ellsberg, Daniel, 182–4, 187, 197–8 Ellsberg Paradox, 184, 199–200 and the ‘Pentagon Papers’, 200 probability experiment (1961), 182–4, 187, 197, 198–200 ‘Risk, Ambiguity and the Savage Axioms’ (paper, 1961), 198–9, 200 Engelbart, Douglas, 222–3 Engels, Friedrich, 223 English, Bill, 222–3 Enlightenment thinking, 11, 185 Epstein, Richard, 127 ethics and morality and autonomy, 164, 165–6, 168, 169–70, 180 bad behaviour redefined as rational, 12 and blame for accidents, 55, 60–61 and Coase Theorem, 46–7, 54–5, 56–7, 61, 63–6 Coasean worldview on pollution, 66–7, 68 as conditioned and limited by economics, 3, 10, 15, 43, 55, 60–61, 64–5, 179, 204–5, 218, 247 cooperative behaviour in game theory, 29, 30–32 core principles of current economic orthodoxy, 253 distinction between values and tastes, 136–8 economists’ language on virtuous behaviour, 112 inequality as moral issue, 242–3 influence of recent economic ideas, 1–3, 15–16 Keynes on economics as moral science, 252–3 law and economics movement, 40, 55, 56–63, 64–7 moral disengagement, 162, 163, 164, 166 morally wrong/corrupting incentives, 168–9 and Nash program, 25 Nudge economists, 173–4, 251 Posner’s wealth-maximization principle, 57–63, 64–7, 137 Puzzle of the Harmless Torturers, 118–19 Ramsey Rule on discounting, 208–9, 212 sale of body parts, 123, 124, 145, 147–8 sidelined by economic imperialism, 125–9, 135–8, 141–5, 146–7, 148–9, 151–2, 207 small contributions as important, 110, 114–15, 122 Smith’s enlightened self-interest, 11 value of human life (‘statistical lives’), 141–5, 207 see also altruism; free-riding behaviour European Commission, 96 Facebook UK, 99 fairness, 1, 149, 218, 228, 253 and Coase, 54, 55 and free-riding behaviour, 107 and game theory, 43 and incentives, 177, 179 and lucky geniuses, 221–3 and Posner’s wealth-maximization principle, 60, 61, 62 see also inequality family life, 127–8, 130–31, 133, 156 famine relief, 99, 114–15 Farmer, Roger, 259 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 48–9 Ferdinand, Archduke Franz, 185 financial crisis, global (2007–10) Becker on, 128–9 and bell curve thinking, 192, 193–4, 196, 257 ‘blame the regulators’ argument, 1–2 and financial economists, 9, 88, 260–61 persuasive power of extreme numbers, 181–2 and Posner’s wealth-maximization principle, 57 underlying maths of, 194, 195–6 financial markets Bachelier’s theory of speculation, 193 bell curve thinking, 192, 193–4, 195, 196–7, 201, 203–4, 257 benchmarking against the market, 204 Black Monday (1987), 192 deregulation of US banks, 194 derivatives, 253 dot.com bubble, 192, 201 East Asian crisis (1997), 192 and economic theory, 9, 12–13, 182, 253 economists’ ignorance of, 260–61 and First World War, 185 and fractals (scale-invariance), 194, 195–6, 201 orthodox decision theory, 190–91, 193–4, 201 persuasive power of extreme numbers, 181–2, 191, 192 and rent-seekers, 230, 238 rigged pay-for-performance contracts, 229–30, 238 First World War, 185, 210, 211–12 Fisher, Antony, 6–8 Forster, E.

., 202 Foundation for Economic Education, 7 Franklin, Benjamin, 178 Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner, 2005), 130, 148, 156, 160 free trade, 246, 255 freedom, individual, 1, 146, 150, 164, 250–51 Arrow’s view of, 82 and Isaiah Berlin, 167–8 and financial incentives, 167 Hayek’s view of, 5, 6, 89 and Nudge economists, 173 RAND’s self-image as defender of, 78 free-market economics appeal of, 125–6 Buchanan’s ideology, 84 core principles of current orthodoxy, 253 efficient-market hypothesis, 193–4, 201, 255 election of Thatcher/Reagan as turning point, 6, 216, 220–21 emergence and spread of modern ideas, 15–16 ethical influence of recent ideas, 1–3, 15–16 free-market zealotry, 84, 255, 257–8 and greed, 1–2, 196, 197, 204, 229, 238 Hayek sees as all of life, 8 influential thinkers behind triumph of, 8–9 and interests of the rich and powerful, 2–3, 8–9, 11, 15, 57–8, 221–2, 224, 228–31, 238 and Mont Pèlerin Society, 3–9, 13, 15, 132 and Olson’s analysis, 104 ‘ordinary people are stupid’ message, 86–7, 160, 175, 245, 251 price as measure of value, 149, 150, 151, 224 ‘public bad, private good’ mantra, 93–4, 97 research institutes and think tanks, 7–8, 15 revolution of 1968, 56, 58–9, 162–3 selfishness assumed as natural, 10–12, 13–14, 41, 86, 178–9 shock troops of at Chicago, 2, 4, 40, 49–51, 54, 55 as ‘universal’ way of thinking, 126–31, 132–4, 135–8, 145–50 free-riding behaviour ‘acceptable’ forms of, 106–7 and ‘bandwagon effect’, 110 and cartels, monopolies, price-fixing, 102, 103–4 and climate change, 2, 99, 113–17, 120 and cognitive dissonance, 113–14 contributions already made by others, 115 and decision-making processes, 108–10, 122 dodgy reputation of, 104–5 and fatalistic view of the world, 117 hidden assumptions about cause and effect, 111 and hippie countercultural, 100 illegally downloaded music, 2, 106, 107 and indirect effects of contributions, 115–16, 122 older perspective on, 99, 100–102, 108, 111, 122 and Mancur Olson, 103–4, 108, 109 Olson’s tipping point/threshold, 116, 119–21, 122 and Plato’s Republic, 100–101, 122 Puzzle of the Harmless Torturers, 118–19 and rational behaviour, 100–101, 102, 103–4, 107–8, 109–10, 115–16 reasons for doing your bit, 108–13, 122 responsibility arguments, 109, 110–11 shift in the status of, 99–100, 121–2 small contributions as important, 110, 114–15, 122 and Sorites paradox, 117–18, 119 and sovereign fantasy, 116–17 tax avoidance and evasion, 2, 99, 105–6, 112–13 and voting, 2, 99, 110, 112, 115–16, 120–21 ‘what if everyone did it?’


pages: 430 words: 111,038

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Etonian, European colonialism, food miles, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, period drama, phenotype, Rishi Sunak, school choice, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Shamima Begum, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

It is a narrative which is maintained today, with Michael Gove able to talk in an important speech about how we led the world in abolition, without mentioning that we also led the slave trade for decades beforehand. The most disturbing form of erasure, however, is presented in Walvin’s third case study: Thomas Thistlewood, a slave owner in Jamaica. What he demonstrates is not amnesia in a precise sense but the denial, or cognitive dissonance, which surely leads to amnesia. The man was nothing less than a sadist. When he bought his slaves, they were branded with ‘TT’ on their shoulder, renamed and their characteristics listed, and he kept detailed notes in his diary on what he did to them. This tells us that he once broke an English oak stick when beating a slave.

When Thistlewood left for another plantation, she gave him a gold ring and also visited him in his new post. Their relationship lasted thirty years, she had a son (Mulatto John) and when Thistlewood died in 1785 his will requested her manumission. It would be hyperbolic to say this man is typical of imperial Britons in any way. But his cognitive dissonance, his ability to compartmentalize, his refusal to accept the brutal reality of what he was doing even as he cultivated a sophisticated demeanour, echo a psychological pattern that is common in British approaches to slavery. You see it in the way The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography swerves away from the phrase ‘slave owner’ in favour of euphemistic expressions like ‘plantation owner’ and ‘West Indies merchant’, while slavery is described as possessing ‘considerable property in Jamaica’.

It is evident when you read historians describe slave owners as ‘adventurers’ and the slavery system as ‘plantation agriculture’, and use euphemistic terms such as ‘appropriation’ and ‘importation’ when they’re talking about theft, kidnapping and forced enslavement. And you see examples of such cognitive dissonance in British attitudes to empire in general. Such as when Jan Morris tells a story about ‘the young Mahdist commander Emir Mahmoud, captured by Kitchener at Berber in 1897’: ‘Chains were riveted around his ankles, an iron halter was put around his neck, his hands were bound behind him, and he was paraded in ignominy through town’ behind Kitchener, sometimes being dragged, sometimes running, being whipped when he fell.


pages: 255 words: 75,208

Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It by Gary Taubes

California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, Gary Taubes, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial

No wonder obesity is so rarely cured. Eating less—that is, undereating—simply doesn’t work for more than a few months, if that. This reality, however, hasn’t stopped the authorities from recommending the approach, which makes reading such recommendations an exercise in what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance,” the tension that results from trying to hold two incompatible beliefs simultaneously. Take, for instance, the Handbook of Obesity, a 1998 textbook edited by three of the most prominent authorities in the field—George Bray, Claude Bouchard, and W. P. T. James. “Dietary therapy remains the cornerstone of treatment and the reduction of energy intake continues to be the basis of successful weight reduction programs,” the book says.

But it then states, a few paragraphs later, that the results of such energy-reduced restricted diets “are known to be poor and not long-lasting.” So why is such an ineffective therapy the cornerstone of treatment? The Handbook of Obesity neglects to say. The latest edition (2005) of Joslin’s Diabetes Mellitus, a highly respected textbook for physicians and researchers, is a more recent example of this cognitive dissonance. The chapter on obesity was written by Jeffrey Flier, an obesity researcher who is now dean of Harvard Medical School, and his wife and research colleague, Terry Maratos-Flier. The Fliers also describe “reduction of caloric intake” as “the cornerstone of any therapy for obesity.” But then they enumerate all the ways in which this cornerstone fails.

That the official embrace of low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets coincided not with a national decline in weight and heart disease but with epidemics of both obesity and diabetes (both of which increase heart disease risk), should make any reasonable person question the underlying assumptions of the advice. But that’s not how people tend to think when confronted with evidence that one of their long-held beliefs is wrong. It’s not how we typically deal with cognitive dissonance. It’s certainly not how institutions and governments do it. For the moment, I’ll just say that the obesity/heart-disease link, combined with the obesity and diabetes epidemics that began more or less coincidentally with the advice to eat less fat, less saturated fat, and more carbohydrates, is a good reason to doubt that it’s the fat and the saturated fat that we have to worry about.


pages: 265 words: 75,202

The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism by Hubert Joly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, big-box store, Blue Ocean Strategy, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Brooks, do well by doing good, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), fear of failure, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, imposter syndrome, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, lockdown, long term incentive plan, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, old-boy network, pension reform, performance metric, popular capitalism, pre–internet, race to the bottom, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, risk/return, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, young professional, zero-sum game

Soon after, an even more direct message came from an employee survey, which showed that people reporting directly to me were not very invested in their work. That stung, especially since, as a whole, the company had quite good levels of employee engagement. I was gripped by what psychologists label cognitive dissonance: I believed I was doing great, yet the data showed I could do better. Cognitive dissonance is so uncomfortable that the typical reaction is to become singularly focused on reconciling the disconnect. Back then, I reconciled it by telling myself there was nothing wrong with me. And if there was nothing wrong with me, then the problem had to be them.

See also specific businesses call for action for, 233 finances of (see finances) leadership of (see leadership) purpose of, 4–5, 6–7, 51, 63–65, 233 (see also purposeful human organizations) stakeholders of (see customers; employees; shareholders; stakeholders; suppliers) work at (see work) Business Roundtable, 55, 75, 242n10, 242n14 Cales, Amber, 139–140 call for action for boards of directors, 234 for business education institutions, 235 for businesses, 233 for industry sector and community leaders, 234 for investors, analysts, regulators, and rating agencies, 235 for leaders, 232 overview of, 231–232, 236 Calvin, John, 26, 238n5 Canon, 86 capitalism in crisis, 4, 54, 240n1 financial incentives in, 126 leadership for next era of, 5–7 (see also leadership) reinvention of, 62, 65, 73, 74–77 social discord and, 4, 53–54 stakeholder capitalism, 74, 76, 231 Cargill, 111 Carlson, Curt, 224 Carlson Companies challenges as opportunities at, 201 exploring motivating forces at, 137, 222 incentives at, 125, 129 Joly’s departure from, 2 leadership at, 1, 160, 224 lifelong learning at, 191 participative process at, 174 perfectionism challenges at, 41 performance assessments at, 188–189 strategy at, 111, 174, 199 turnaround at, 111 values days at, 226 women in leadership at, 160 Carlson Nelson, Marilyn, 137, 160, 222 Carlson Wagonlit Travel challenges as opportunities at, 201–202 cutting costs not jobs at, 104–105 financial challenges for, 58 human connections at, 148–149, 151 participative process at, 174 perfectionism challenges at, 37, 39–41 positive environment at, 114 purpose at, 142–143 strategy at, 81–82, 174 women in leadership at, 160 work views at, 27 cathedrals, building, 31, 70–71, 73 Chanel, 89 Chaplin, Charlie, 19 Christensen, Clayton, 216–217, 218, 226–227 Churchill, Winston, 215 Cicero, 238n10 Circuit City, 2, 110 Citrin, Jim, 1–3, 13, 98, 195, 225 Clausewitz, Carl von, 201 coaching vs. training, 185–188, 191 Coalition for the American Dream, 91 codes of behavior, 154 codes of ethics, 144 cognitive dissonance, 40 commissions, 124–125, 127, 128 communities business connection to, 68, 72, 242n14 business support for thriving, 88–91 leadership in, 234 companies. See businesses Cook, Tim, 196 Covid-19 (coronavirus) pandemic agile work methods in, 176 business tied to community health in, 72 capitalism challenges in, 4 challenges as opportunities during, 202–203 human connections in, 149, 156 leadership during, 223, 227–228 purpose focus during, 204, 223 remote working in, 177 work-life balance in, 229 crisis response, 138–140, 223–224, 227.


The Simple Living Guide by Janet Luhrs

air freight, Albert Einstein, car-free, classic study, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, compound rate of return, do what you love, financial independence, follow your passion, Golden Gate Park, intentional community, job satisfaction, late fees, low interest rates, money market fund, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, telemarketer, the rule of 72, urban decay, urban renewal, Whole Earth Review

You’ll go through periods of spending less and enjoying the process, then you’ll splurge for no good reason, then revert to saving again. This is the typical process of change. After you ride up and down on these waves for a while, you’ll enter the phase known as cognitive dissonance. This is when you do something you know you shouldn’t be doing, but your human nature takes over and you do it anyway. When you reach this stage of awareness, you’re well on your way to really making changes in your life. Here is an example of cognitive dissonance. Say you suffer a heart attack. Before the heart attack, you rarely exercised and didn’t think much about it. After the attack, your doctor tells you that if you don’t do 30 minutes of cardiovascular work at least four times a week, you’ll wind up back in the hospital.

Your primal instincts take over and you rationalize why you must have it now, and why just this one little month and the next you won’t save your $50. You buy the coat. When you get home, if you are in the cognitive dissonance stage, you’ll feel guilty about your purchase. With sufficient guilt, you might return the coat and immediately march to the bank to deposit the money. Prior to cognitive dissonance, you would have shopped on automatic pilot and never given your purchase a second thought. In fact, you would have been very proud of yourself that you saved all that money by buying the coat on sale.

If you invest that $316 at 9 percent return (compound), you will have $8,500 in two years. If you keep going at the same rate, you will have $24,000 in five years. Voilà!—a down payment on a rental house, or a lump sum to invest in, say, the stock market, mutual fund, or what-have-you. Cognitive Dissonance As you begin to focus on the meaning of your life, you’ll likely find that you don’t need all of the things you once thought you needed in order to be happy. In fact, you’ll probably find that the less you have to worry about, rearrange, dust, and insure, the more freed up you are to pursue meaningful activities.


pages: 257 words: 84,498

Admissions: A Life in Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh

cognitive dissonance, country house hotel, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, fear of failure, Google Earth, invisible hand, nocebo, placebo effect, profit motive, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI)

Perhaps all that they wanted was the reassurance that if the end was to become particularly unpleasant, it could be brought to a quick conclusion and, in the event, their final days passed peacefully. But perhaps it was because, as death approached, they started to hope that they might yet still have a future. We develop what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’, where we entertain entirely contradictory thoughts. Part of us knows, and accepts, that we are dying but another part of us feels and thinks that we still have a future. It is as though our brains are hardwired for hope, or at least that part of them is. As death approaches, our sense of self can start to disintegrate.

My understanding of neuroscience means that I am deprived of the consolation of belief in any kind of life after death and of the restoration of what I have lost as my brain shrinks with age. I know that some neurosurgeons believe in a soul and afterlife, but this seems to me to be the same cognitive dissonance as the hope the dying have that they will yet live. Nevertheless, I have come to find a certain solace in the thought that my own nature, my I – this fragile, conscious self writing these words that seems to sail so uncertainly on the surface of an unfathomable, electrochemical sea into which it sinks every night when I sleep, the product of countless millions of years of evolution – is as great a mystery as the universe itself.

A sceptical consultant, with a row of medical students, looked in my ear and expressed some doubts. I can’t remember what was said, but I do recall trying to persuade myself that there really was a problem with my ear even though I knew that I was malingering. It was my first experience of cognitive dissonance – entertaining entirely contradictory ideas – and the importance of self-deception in trying to deceive others. I then discovered that music lessons for playing the trumpet were on the same day and at the same time as the swimming class with the vile ex-commando, so I took up the trumpet but did not get on with it.


pages: 330 words: 83,319

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder by Sean McFate

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, drone strike, escalation ladder, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, false flag, hive mind, index fund, invisible hand, John Markoff, joint-stock company, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, nuclear taboo, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technoutopianism, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero day, zero-sum game

Old Soviet wargames never achieved so much. War has moved beyond lethality. Today, all instruments of national power must be used, not just the ones that shoot. Nonkinetic weapons can be very effective in war, and cunning strategists can weaponize almost anything, including refugee waves. This causes cognitive dissonance for conventional warriors, who place their faith in firepower, a concept they call the “utility of force.” In doing so, they’re talking about the effectiveness of violence in conflict, and they rate it supreme. For them, the application of enough force can solve any problem. Such thinking led to the meat grinder of World War I and carpet-bombing during World War II.

Both Nisour and Haditha were comparable crimes, but people’s reaction could not have been more different: mercenaries are butchers, while soldiers make innocent mistakes. This is an irrational prejudice. Murder is murder, no matter what kind of warfighter pulls the trigger. When I point this out, some people grow hostile with the burn of cognitive dissonance. Even enlightened minds balk, so strong is the bias against private warriors. Now that I’m out of the industry, I’m often asked to talk about it in front of large audiences. My best questions come from general audiences, perhaps because they have little received wisdom on the topic and therefore a more open mind.

Federal Election Commission, 168 Civil affairs, 38, 41, 66–67 Civilian targets, 206–8 Civilian universities, strategic education in, 239–40 Clancy, Tom, 13–14, 21, 23 Clark, Ramsey, 226 Clausewitz, Carl von, 4, 29, 32, 96, 205, 220, 222, 235, 264n, 274n “CNN effect,” 202–3 Coercion, 96–97 Cognitive dissonance, 106, 122 COIN. See Counterinsurgency COINistas, 91, 93–95 Cold War, 21, 33–34, 188 containment policy, 78–79 Fulda Gap, 33, 103–4 “Collateral damage,” 64, 207 Colonialism, 95, 97, 98, 129, 177, 180 Confirmation bias, 48 Congo, 118, 127, 128, 150, 156–57, 182–83 Congressional Budget Office (CBO), 130–31 Conspiracy and deep state, 158–61 Containment policy, 78–79 Contract wars, 128–31 Control the narrative, 41, 66, 67–68, 108–13, 227 Conventional wars, 5–6, 25–42 modeling the future on past, 33–36 redefining war, 179–85 short history of, 30–33 transforming the military, 37–42 use of term, 29 Western way of war, 28–30 Conventional weapon systems, 37–38, 41 Corporations and politics (corporatocracy), 165–68 Corruption, 113, 148–49, 166, 174–75, 216 Counterinsurgency (COIN), 4, 83–102 First Jewish-Roman War, 83–90, 96 foreign legions, 98–102 Iraq War, xiii–xvi, 90–91, 93–95 successful strategies, 95–98 Countermessaging, 111–13 Crimea annexation, 3, 37, 64, 197–98, 203, 237 Cronkite, Walter, 225 Crusades, 74, 127, 144 Cuba, 211 Cultural dominance, 80 “Cyber,” 15 Cyberwar, 13, 14–17, 137–38, 214 Darfur genocide, 3, 146, 182 Dark arts, 203–6 David and Goliath, 223, 227, 229, 231, 233 Deception, 203–6, 211 Deep state, 158–69 Defense budget, 37–38, 41, 46, 47, 50, 102, 106–7, 445 Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental (DIUx), 50 Democracy, 80–81, 95, 165 Denigration campaigns, 108–9, 111–12, 215 Dereliction of duty, 263n DeWe Security, 136 Dick, Philip K., 51 Diplomacy, 31, 41–42, 71, 217 Discrediting, 111 “Domino effect,” 78 Double-crossing, 189 “Double government,” 163–64 “Drain the swamp” strategy, 96 Drones, 46, 235 Drug wars, 9, 134, 149, 153, 171–78, 180, 287n Dulles, John and Allen, 209 Dunford, Joseph, 237–39 Dunlop, John, 207 Durable disorder, 8–10, 33, 80, 150, 245, 247 DynCorp, 131 Economic dominance, 80 Egypt, 126, 162–63 82nd Airborne Division, 23, 34, 91–92 Eisenhower, Dwight, 166–67, 168, 209 Eleazar ben Yair, 89 Elizabeth I of England, 79 English Constitution, The (Bagehot), 163–64 Espionage, 204–5 Evro Polis, 134 “Export and relocate” strategy, 96–97 Extortion, 175, 178, 180, 187, 192 Extrajudicial killings, 93, 95 ExxonMobil, 136, 152, 155 Failed states, 147–50 Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt, 45 Fake news, 111 False-flag operations, 191, 213 False prophets, 12–17 Farrow, Mia, 146, 151, 154 Fawkes, Guy, 159, 160 First Jewish-Roman War, 83–90, 96 First Offset Strategy, 48 Fitzgerald, USS, incident, 52–54 “Flag follows trade” policy, 80 Florentine Republic, 123–24 Florus, 83–84, 86 “Fog of war,” 29, 205 Fonda, Jane, 226–27 “Force projection,” 65, 69, 80, 106 Forces Nationales de Libération (FNL), 118, 120 Foreign bases, 69 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, 216 Foreign legions, 98–102 “Forever wars,” 9, 74, 246 Fragile states, 148–49 Fragile States Index, 32 Franklin, Benjamin, 228 Freedman, Lawrence, 11 Freeport-McMoRan, 136 Free trade, 80–81, 165 French Foreign Legion, 99 French invasion of Russia, 230 Friedman, Milton, 180 FSB (Federal Security Service), 207 FUBAR, 71, 119 Fulda Gap, 33, 103–4 Fuller, John “Boney,” 20–21, 238 Future wars, 244–48 “Futurism,” 17 Futurists.


pages: 254 words: 81,009

Busy by Tony Crabbe

airport security, Bluma Zeigarnik, British Empire, business process, classic study, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, death from overwork, fear of failure, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gamification, haute cuisine, informal economy, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, loss aversion, low cost airline, machine readable, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, scientific management, Shai Danziger, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, the long tail, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple

No matter how convincingly I’ve argued my case, I am unlikely to have shifted your deep-seated beliefs or fears, formed and reinforced over a lifetime. There is a concept in social psychology called cognitive dissonance that can help here. It describes our desire for consistency between our beliefs and actions. If we consistently act in a way that is not in line with our beliefs, cognitive dissonance shifts our beliefs to align with our actions, which in turn ensures that these behaviors are sustainable, long-term. Let’s imagine you were trying to choose between a Ford F-Series and a Chevrolet Silverado.

What happens next is interesting: the longer, and the more strongly, you argue for Bonds, the more you begin to convince yourself that the famous left fielder for the Giants really was the greatest baseball player ever to play the game. This isn’t because of your brilliant arguments either; in fact, your opponent is becoming more convinced than ever that Babe Ruth was the best. This is because of cognitive dissonance: when we argue forcefully for something, our beliefs start to come into line with our argument. We’re more likely to persuade ourselves than our opposition! When you apply this to a negotiation, the risk is that the very act of arguing or “negotiating” based on different opinions, can actually drive both opponents further apart, thereby reducing the chances of reaching a workable agreement.


pages: 291 words: 80,068

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

Unlearning isn’t something we know how to do. Human forgetting is an automatic process, not one that we easily control. Yet unlearn we must, if we wish to reframe. This is especially the case when the new frame is seemingly at odds with the old one, when the new frame needs to overcome the cognitive dissonance that it causes. Such cognitive dissonance may happen in one’s mind, but it can also happen in a community, making it difficult to adopt a new frame. Switching frames in such a situation may require many people to refocus on an alternative frame. That may necessitate discussions, negotiations, and persuasion, which are time-consuming endeavors.

Anyone who has ever seen or played the game has been mesmerized by the sumptuous elegance of the imaginary world, at once minimalist, intricate, and elaborate. When one starts interacting with the stairs, stones, buttons, dials, and other graphical items, they turn out to be forms that cannot exist in real space but can be used in the virtual world. The cognitive dissonance between the reality we know and the virtual world we navigate is what makes Monument Valley so appealing. Humans are suckers for counterfactuals. Whether reading a book, playing a video game, or losing oneself in a daydream, these mental activities are not cognitive idling. Even a couch potato does more than just sit on the couch like a potato.


pages: 494 words: 116,739

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

But her general thrust remains much the same – in fact, she adds a few more ways in which technology will definitely improve the world, such as in the developing world. 18.Van Alstyne and Brynjolfsson (2005). 19.Selective exposure goes back to work by seminal psychologist Leon Festinger (1957), who posited the idea of cognitive dissonance – the discomfort people feel when presented with contradictory information. Selective exposure occurs when, in a bid to avoid cognitive dissonance, people tend to seek only information that confirms their beliefs. 20.Van Alstyne and Brynjolfsson (2005). 21.Stecklow (2005). 22.Mukul (2006); Raina and Timmons (2011). 23.A phablet is bigger than a smartphone, but smaller than a tablet. 24.That the digital divide is a symptom of other socioeconomic divides was astutely noted about telecenters by Economist (2005).

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 5(3):211–240, https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/app.5.3.211. Farmer, Paul. (2005). Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. University of California Press. Feenberg, Andrew. (1999). Questioning Technology. Routledge. Festinger, Leon. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press. Findlater, Leah, Ravin Balakrishnan, and Kentaro Toyama. (2009). Comparing semiliterate and illiterate users’ ability to transition from audio+text to text-only interaction. Pp. 1751–1760 in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’09).

See also Economics Carlin, George, 275(n8) Carr, Nicholas, 23 Caste system, 64, 139 Cause and correlation, 35 Censorship Arab Spring uprising, 33 Chinese Internet, 49–52 limiting technology use in the classroom, 119 Changing Lives (Tunstall), 270(n2) Character human maturation and, 161 learning, 165, 262(n29) strengths, 253(n20) See also Heart, mind, and will Charity compared with mentorship, 205 percentage of GDP, 269(n40) See also Nonprofit organizations; Poverty alleviation Charter schools, 62, 73, 239–240(n51) Check dams, 199 Children child-rearing, 192–193, 270(n1) commitment to save, 212–214 digital natives, 10–11 educational technology, 114–121 natural learners, 11 self-control, 265(n3) sexual abuse, 148, 257(n53) teaching and parenting, 202–203 text-messaging, 56 vaccines, 64–65 video games, 12, 114–115, 117, 122, 228(n20) See also Education and training China agricultural extension programs, 207, 273(n20) carbon reduction, 215–216 education, 13, 145, 229(n29) Internet censorship, 49–52 Max Weber, 176, 255(n7) one-child law, 205 PISA results, 229(n29) social media censorship, 23, 49–52 Toms Shoes manufacturing, 243(n31) See also Confucianism Choudhury, Abdul Mannan, 196–201 Civil Rights Act, 63–64 Civil society, Arab Spring and, 32–35, 37 Classroom management, 115–116, 118–119 Climate change, 23, 134, 215–216 Clinton, Bill, 49, 85 Clinton, Hillary, x, 35–36, 152 Coaching, 205 Cobb-Douglas function, 273–274(n25) Coerced partnership arrangements, 198, 205, 270(n1) Cognitive capacity, 28, 227(n10), 263(n43) Cognitive dissonance, 234(n19) Cognitive Surplus (Shirky), 230(n17) Cohen, Jared, 21, 229(n5) Cohen, Roger, 32–33 Cold chain of vaccine delivery, 65 Coleman, James, 145, 256(n42) Collective action. See also Self-help groups Collectivism, individualism and, 93 Colombia: One Laptop Per Child, 8 Communications Arab Spring suppression of, 33–34 cyberbalkanization, 47 history of technologies, 7–8 latent desires driving habits, 40–41 management, 44–46 personal and political interaction, 46–47 telecenters, 105 texting, 25, 56, 69, 235(n33) unintended consequences, 56 See also Mobile phones; Social media Community efforts.


pages: 677 words: 121,255

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

He then wrote it up as “Dianetics: A New Science of the Mind” and sold it to John W. Campbell, Jr., who published it in Astounding Science Fiction in 1950. Astounding indeed that anyone would accept such science fiction as fact, but such is the power of belief when coupled to a handful of powerful psychological principles. Consider cognitive dissonance, discovered by the psychologist Leon Festinger in 1954 when he joined a UFO end-of-the-world cult at the mountain top to record what would happen when the mothership failed to arrive at the designated midnight hour on December 21. Festinger saw this as an opportunity to study the phenomenon of mental tension created when someone holds two conflicting thoughts simultaneously: Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen?

., 14 Callahan, Tim, 115–116 Calvin, William, 289 Camus, Renaud, 30 Carlson, Randall, 314 Carroll, Sean, 117, 118, 121 Cassidy, John, 212–213 categorical imperative (Kant), 240 censorship, 1–9arguments against, 19–27 college students’ responses to controversial subjects, 64–78 hate speech, 28–37 Holocaust denial, 38–43 Principle of Interchangeable Perspectives, 78 Ten Commandments of free speech and thought, 7–8 trigger warnings and, 66–67 Center for Inquiry (CFI), 269, 271 Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), 250–251 Change.org, 33–34 Christakis, Nicholas, 154–156 Christchurch, New Zealand, massacre responses to, 28–37 Christian, Fletcher, 156–159 Christian values v. the US Constitution, 81–85 Churchill, Ward, 41 civilization free trade institutions, 249–251 how to get to Civilization,1.0, 251–253 influence of political tribalism, 243–246 pre-financial crisis world, 243 Types of civilization, 246–247 Clark, Kenneth, 299 classical liberalism, 136case for, 138–144 Clinton, Bill, 83, 253 Coase, Ronald, 201 Cockell, Charles S., 150–152 Coddington, Jonathan, 59 cognitive biases, 23–24 cognitive dissonance, 95–96 Colavito, Jason, 321 collective action problem, 198–201 college faculty political bias among, 75–76 college students consequences of left-leaning teaching bias, 75–76 drive to censor controversial subjects, 64–78 Free Speech Movement of the late 1960s, 64–65 Generation Z and how they handle challenges, 64–65 microaggressions, 68–70 provision of safe spaces for, 67–68 trigger warnings, 66–67 views on freedom of speech, 64–78 colleges avoidance of controversial or sensitive subjects, 25 causes of current campus unrest, 71–76 disinvitation of controversial speakers, 25 lack of viewpoint diversity, 75–76 speaker disinvitations, 70–71 ways to increase viewpoint diversity, 76–78 Collins, Francis, 60 Collins, Jim, 263–264 Columbine murders, 169 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), 271 communication microaggressions, 68–70 competitive victimhood, 132 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 280, 283 confirmation bias, 24, 316–318 conjecture and refutation, 8, 23 conscription as slavery, 1–2 conservatism, 134–136 conservatives Just World Theory, 255 Strict Father metaphor for the nation as a family, 193–197 consistency bias, 24 conspiracy theories Intelligent Design advocates, 55–63 contingency influence on how lives turn out, 258–264 Copernican principle, 120 Core Theory of forces and particles, 118 correspondence theory of truth, 305, 306 Cosmides, Leda, 238 Costly Signaling Theory, 208 Coulter, Ann, 13 Cowan, David, 263 Craig, William Lane, 104, 108–109 Craig’s Categorical Error, 109 Creation Science, 50 creationism freedom of speech issue, 44–54 level of support in America, 46 question of equal coverage in science teaching, 50–54 variety of creationist theories, 50–52 view of Richard Dawkins, 293–294 why people do not support evolution, 47–50 Cremo, Michael, 316 Crichton, Michael, 123 Cruise, Tom, 100 cry bullies, 77 cults Scientology as a cult, 96–98 culture of honor, 73 culture of victimhood, 73 Darley, John, 317 Darrow, Clarence, 52–53 Darwin, Charles, 280connection with Adam Smith, 203–205 development of the theory of evolution, 44–46 impact of the Darwinian revolution, 44–47 on science and religion, 90 On the Origin of Species, 104–105 problem of the peacock’s tail, 200 skepticism, 270, 287–288 Darwin Awards, 207 Darwin economy, 199–201 Darwinian literary studies, 306 Darwinian universes, 122 Darwinism misinterpretation for ideological reasons, 60–61 neo-Darwinism, 62 scientific questioning, 61–63 Dawkins, Richard, 55, 61, 87, 89, 104at the Humanity 3000 event (2001), 289–291 influence of, 287–289 on creationism, 293–294 on pseudoscience, 292–294 on religion, 287–289, 293–295 scientific skepticism, 291–295 sense of spirituality, 295–296 Day-Age Creationists, 51 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 139 Debs, Eugene V., 2 Declaration of Independence, 27, 72 Defant, Marc, 314 Del Ray, Lester, 95 delegative democracy, 149 Dembski, William, 49, 55, 63, 280 democracy delegative democracy, 149 direct democracy, 149–150, 153 freedom of speech and, 26 impact of cyber-technology, 153 representational democracy, 149 Dennett, Daniel, 87, 287 Denying History (Shermer and Grobman), 38, 42, 78 Descartes, René, 230 Deutsch, David, 287 devil what he is due, 8–9 who he is, 8–9 Diamond, Jared, 147–148, 208–209, 228, 314, 321, 322 Diderot, Denis, 270 direct democracy, 149–150, 153 Dirmeyer, Jennifer, 215 District of Columbia v.

United States, 1 Schopf, William, 62 Schumpeter, Joseph, 206 Schwarz, Benjamin, 277 science evolution–creationism controversy, 44–54 freedom of speech and inquiry, 19–27 impact of the Darwinian revolution, 44–47 questioning Darwinism, 61–63 scrutiny of ideas, 24–25 search for truth, 26–27 separation from religion, 62–63 Scientific American, 5, 62, 101, 103, 110, 254, 255, 259, 264, 311, 314 scientific and philosophical revolution (seventeenth century), 223emergence of Enlightenment humanism, 223–228 scientific creationism, 49 scientific humanism, 236 scientific naturalism, 236emergence of Enlightenment humanism, 223–228 Is-Ought fallacy, 228–235 scientific realism, 306 Scientology, 93–94characteristics in common with cults, 96–98 cognitive dissonance effects, 95–96 creation by L. Ron Hubbard, 95 genesis story, 94–95 origin myths of religions and cults, 101–102 public suspicion of, 99–101 threat from Anonymous group, 99–101 Scopes, John T., 48, 52 Scott, Eugenie, 55, 59–60 Second Law of Thermodynamics, 109, 237–238, 309–310 Second World War, 11, 49, 165 self-justification bias, 24 selfish genes, 106 Sharansky, Natan, 249 Sharman, Eleanor, 73 Shepherd, Lindsay, 303 Shrout, Derek, 171 Singer, Peter, 240 Sitchin, Zecharia, 315 Skeptic magazine, 21, 64, 77, 78, 93, 100, 110, 115, 161, 269, 272, 283, 285, 297, 300, 321 Skeptic.com, 181 Skeptical Inquirer, 271 skeptical movement influence of Paul Kurtz, 269–275 Skepticblog.org, 282 skepticism history of, 269–271 scientific skepticism of Richard Dawkins, 291–295 view of Charles Darwin, 287–288 Skeptics Society, 269, 272, 283 Skilling, Jeffrey, 61 Skousen, Mark, 284 slavery conscription as, 1–2 Smith, Adam, 61, 139, 203–205, 231, 243 Smith, Gary, 263–264 Smith, Quentin, 113 Smolin, Lee, 122 Snowden, Edward, 2 Snyder, Mark, 317 social contract, 240 social movements puritanical purging, 74–75 social spending extent in different countries, 140–142 importance for society, 140–142 societal health relationship to religiosity, 88 Socrates, 269 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 36 South Park, 95 Sowell, Thomas, 256–257 Sparks, John C., 251–253 Sparks’ Law, 253 species altruism, 106 Spencer, Richard, 13, 14 Spinoza, Baruch, 225, 240, 300 Standard & Poor’s, 206 Standard Model of elementary particles, 118 Star Trek, The Next Generation, 304 Starbucks, 136 Stark, Rodney, 96 start-up businesses chances of success, 262–264 status quo bias, 24 Stea, Jonathan N., 308 Stein, Ben Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (documentary film), 55–63 Stenger, Victor, 119, 123 Stern, Charlotte, 75 Sternberg, Richard, 57–59 Strict Father metaphor for the nation as a family, 193–197 string universes, 123 Strossen, Nadine, 13–14 Sulloway, Frank J., 45, 261–262 sunk-cost bias, 24 supernatural forces, 116–117 symbiogenesis, 62 Tarrant, Brenton, 29, 30–31, 33 Taunton, Larry Alex The Faith of Christopher Hitchens, 276–281 taxation, 203argument for wealth redistribution, 210–213 “sin taxes”, 201–202 Taylor, Jared, 13, 14 Taylor, John, 318–319 Ten Commandments of free speech and thought, 7–8 Terminiello, Arthur, 15 terrorism death rates compared to gun violence deaths, 191–192 The Age of Reason (Paine), 4 The Believing Brain (Shermer), 24 The Edge of Reason?


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The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do to Stop It by Matthew Williams

3D printing, 4chan, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic bias, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, gamification, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, Oklahoma City bombing, OpenAI, Overton Window, power law, selection bias, Snapchat, statistical model, The Turner Diaries, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, white flight

A recently initiated young man may ask himself, ‘Why did people I trust require me to endure having my penis mutilated to become a man?’ This constant search for an answer, over months and years after the ritual, creates deep symbolic meanings that are group-specific. The psychological theory of cognitive dissonance shows that people who go through unpleasant initiations end up more bonded to the group because they strive to rationalise why they accepted the challenge and why the peers they trust insisted upon it.36 Tentative conclusions include ‘I did it to prove my loyalty and commitment to the group’ and ‘They insisted we endure the pain to weed out the freeloaders.’37 In addition, extreme acts forced upon the uninitiated create a sense of shared trauma which comes to define them.

., ‘Neuroimaging “Will to Fight” for Sacred Values: An Empirical Case Study with Supporters of an Al Qaeda Associate’, Royal Society Open Science 6 (2019). 31. ibid. 32. H. Whitehouse, ‘Dying for the Group: Towards a General Theory of Extreme Self-Sacrifice’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41 (2018), 1–62. 33. E. Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse [The Elementary Forms of Religious Life], Paris: Alcan, 1912; L. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962. 34. F. J. P. Poole, ‘The Ritual Forging of Identity: Aspects of Person and Self in Bimin-Kuskusmin Male Initiation’, in Rituals of Manhood: Male Initiation in Papua New Guinea, ed. G. H. Herdt, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982; H.

Whitehouse, ‘Rites of Terror: Emotion, Metaphor, and Memory in Melanesian Initiation Cults’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 (1996), 703–15. 35. F. Barth, Ritual and Knowledge among the Baktaman of New Guinea, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. 36. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. 37. J. A. Bulbulia and R. Sosis, ‘Signalling Theory and the Evolution of Religious Cooperation’, Religion 4 (2011), 363–88; A. Cimino, ‘The Evolution of Hazing: Motivational Mechanisms and the Abuse of Newcomers’, Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011), 241–67; J. Henrich, ‘The Evolution of Costly Displays, Cooperation and Religion: Credibility Enhancing Displays and Their Implications for Cultural Evolution’, Evolution and Human Behavior 30 (2009), 244–60. 38.


pages: 1,239 words: 163,625

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Always strive to disentangle the facts of a situation from the elements of human psychology. Stress-Influence Tendency and Cognitive Dissonance Stress (n.): a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or very demanding circumstances. In the fast-paced world of the stock market, adrenaline tends to produce faster and more extreme reactions. Some stress can improve performance, but heavy stress often leads to dysfunction in our cognitive apparatus. One form of stress is cognitive dissonance. We experience this type of stress when we simultaneously hold onto two contradictory thoughts, beliefs, opinions, or attitudes.

Bias from consistency and commitment tendency. This bias causes us to remain consistent with prior commitments and ideas, even in the face of disconfirming evidence. This includes confirmation bias—that is, looking for evidence that confirms our beliefs and ignoring or distorting disconfirming evidence to reduce the stress from cognitive dissonance. We tend to double down on our failed efforts because of the sunk cost fallacy. The more time or money we spend on something, the less likely we are to abandon it. When we have made an investment, we tend to seek evidence to confirm that we made the right decision and to ignore information that shows we made the wrong one.

In November 2016, I sold my entire holding in SKS Microfinance (now known as Bharat Financial) because I believed that its microfinance business (which depended heavily on cash collections) would be adversely affected by the Indian government’s demonetization announcement and that it would result in a spike in SKS’s nonperforming assets. I was experiencing severe mental stress at the time, as SKS’s stock price was rapidly falling off a cliff. But what I did immediately after my sale of SKS’s stock exemplified cognitive dissonance at its finest. I deployed the sale proceeds into buying shares of Manappuram Finance because I had been closely following it over the past few months and had been enthused by the prospects of its fast-growing microfinance subsidiary. Fortunately, I realized my folly quickly and exited the stock at a minor loss.


pages: 936 words: 252,313

Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease by Gary Taubes

Albert Einstein, California gold rush, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, collaborative editing, Drosophila, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Gary Taubes, invention of agriculture, John Snow's cholera map, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, phenotype, placebo effect, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, selection bias, seminal paper, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, unbiased observer, Upton Sinclair

Now Reaven is saying not to eat high carbohydrates. We have to eat something.” “Sometimes we wish it would go away,” Silverman added, “because nobody knows how to deal with it.” This is what psychologists call cognitive dissonance, or the tension that results from trying to hold two incompatible beliefs simultaneously. When the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn discussed cognitive dissonance in scientific research—“the awareness of an anomaly in the fit between theory and nature”—he suggested that scientists will typically do what they have invariably done in the past in such cases: “They will devise numerous articulations and ad hoc modifications of their theory in order to eliminate any apparent conflict.”

And because dietary carbohydrates and particularly refined carbohydrates elevate blood sugar and insulin and, presumably, induce insulin resistance, the implication is that eating these carbohydrates increases heart-disease risk not only in diabetics but in healthy individuals. By this reasoning, the atherogenic American diet is a carbohydrate-rich diet. Hence, cognitive dissonance. The logic of this argument has to be taken one step further, however, even if the cognitive dissonance is elevated with it. Both diabetes and metabolic syndrome are associated with an elevated incidence of virtually every chronic disease, not just heart disease. Moreover, the diabetic condition is associated with a host of chronic blood-vessel-related problems known as vascular complications: stroke, a stroke-related dementia called vascular dementia, kidney disease, blindness, nerve damage in the extremities, and atheromatous disease in the legs that often leads to amputation.

This offers yet another reason to believe the carbohydrate hypothesis of heart disease, since metabolic syndrome is now considered perhaps the dominant heart-disease risk factor—a “coequal partner to cigarette smoking as contributors to premature [coronary heart disease],” as the National Cholesterol Education Program describes it—and both triglycerides and HDL cholesterol are influenced by carbohydrate consumption far more than by any fat. Nonetheless, when small, dense LDL and metabolic syndrome officially entered the orthodox wisdom as risk factors for heart disease in 2002, the cognitive dissonance was clearly present. First the National Cholesterol Education Program published its revised guidelines for cholesterol testing and treatment. This was followed in 2004 by two conference reports: one describing the conclusions of a joint NIH-AHA meeting on scientific issues related to metabolic syndrome, and the other, in which the American Diabetes Association joined in as well, describing joint treatment guidelines.


pages: 346 words: 92,984

The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health by David B. Agus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, autism spectrum disorder, butterfly effect, clean water, cognitive dissonance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Marc Benioff, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, microcredit, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, nocebo, parabiotic, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, publish or perish, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Salesforce, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

People who use motivated reasoning respond defensively to contrary evidence. They actively discredit such evidence or its source without logical or evidentiary justification. It’s confirmation bias to the extreme. Why do we defend obvious falsehoods? It can’t be just to always feel as if we’re right. Social scientists posit that our desire to avoid “cognitive dissonance,” as they call it, drives motivated reasoning. In other words, self-delusion feels good. Dan Kahan is a professor of law at Yale Law School. He explains a classic example of motivated reasoning by describing an experiment done in the 1950s when psychologists asked students from two Ivy League universities to watch a film that featured a set of controversial calls made by referees during a football game.3 The game happened to be between teams from their respective schools.

., 84 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, The, 178 Boston University, 47 Bowerman, Bill, 199 brain: decision making in, 227 sleep’s importance to, 208–10 brain cancer, 30 Brave New World (Huxley), viii, 159, 238 Brazil, 199 BRCA genes, 8, 21, 118 breast cancer, 8, 53, 55, 60, 61, 118, 171, 190, 211 genetic mutation and, 21–22 mastectomies and, 21–22 obesity and, 133 statin use and, 220 Breast Cancer Prevention Trial, 53 Brigham and Women’s Hospital, 84 Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, 23, 24 Broedel, Max, 73 Brown University, 58 Brunet, Anne, 63 bubonic plague, 95–101 Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 2 butterfly effect, 236–37 California, 5, 12, 47, 103 tobacco control program in, 237 California, University of: at Berkeley, 25 at Irvine, 3 at San Francisco, 3 Caltech, 102 Cambridge, University of, 125, 134 Cameron, David, 67 Canada, 4, 11 cancer, 41, 108, 128, 175, 215, 237 aggressiveness of, 53–54 alternative treatments for, 18 aspirin and, 216–17 chemotherapy for, 29 childhood, 6, 49, 170–71 context and, 13–14 diet and, 163 early detection and treatment of, 172 fitness and, 190–94 genetic mutations and, 14, 21–22, 50 genotyping of, 117–18 immunotherapy for, 28–33 inflammation in, 175–77 lifestyle and, 153, 168–69 measurement of success in treating of, 32–33 metastasis in, 60–62 molecular therapies for, 23–24, 49–50, 54–55 muscle mass and, 195 p53 gene and, 57–58 Peto’s paradox and, 57 plasma transfusions and, 5 precision medicine and, 115 radiation therapy for, 29 random mutations in, 169–74, 176 as runaway cell copying, 59 self-seeding in, 61 statins and, 218–20 treatment resistance in, 190–91 Watson supercomputer and treatment of, 88–89 see also specific types of cancer cardiovascular disease, 86, 121, 128, 147, 216 airport noise and, 92 risk factors for, 47 Carlson, Mary, 212, 213 Carnegie Mellon University, 214 CAR T cells, 29–30 CBS This Morning, 67 CCR5 gene, 24, 25 Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 212–13 Celebrex (celecoxib), 62 celiac disease, 113, 164 cell division, 5 cells: death of (apoptosis), 59 endoplasmic reticulum in, 40 oxidative damage to, 40 receptors on, 59 Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development (Duke University), 45 Center for Translational Neuromedicine (University of Rochester), 208 Center for Translational Research in Aging and Longevity (University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences), 194 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 47, 103, 133, 205 ceritinib (Zykadia), 53 change, self-assessment of, past vs. future in, 38–40, 39 chaos theory, 236–37 Charaka, 113 Charlottesville Neurology and Sleep Medicine, 204 checkpoint blockage therapy, 29–30 chemotherapy, 29, 60, 190–91 exercise and, 191, 192 Chicago, University of, 17 children, obesity and overweight in, 133 Chittagong University, 232 cholera, 234 cholesterol, 150, 195, 217, 219 dietary vs. blood, 162 online calculator for, 218 chronic disease, 128–29 age-related, 128, 136 diet and, 141–44 management of, 144–46 overweight and, 141 sleep habits and, 147 chronological age, 45, 46, 46, 47, 135–36, 232 circadian rhythm, 123, 138, 139–40, 148, 205 Circulation, 86 climate change, 159 Clinical Practice Research Datalink, 219 clinical trials, 52 double-blind, 53, 155 IRBs and, 52 randomized, 52–53 ClinVar, 9 coarse graining, 229–32, 230 cognitive abilities, 45, 46 cognitive dissonance, 159 Cohen, Jacques, 111–12 colds, 205, 214 Cold War, 94 Coley, William B., 27–29, 28, 33, 48 colitis, 121–22 Collins, Francis, 114, 118 colonoscopies, 93 Colorado, 47 colorectal cancer, 55, 123–24, 190, 217 statin use and, 220 Columbia University, 138 complex carbohydrates, 162 comprehensive metabolic panel (CMP), 151 Congress, US, 114, 237 context: adapting to new data in, 159 aging and, 45 baselines for, 150 changes in, 22 databases as, 83, 91–94 data mining and, 101 diet and, 163, 165 disease and, 13–14, 20 genes and, 14, 20–21, 118 health and, 48, 76–78, 84, 89–90, 91–94, 101, 113, 114–15, 117, 124–25 heart disease and, 22 identifying and optimizing, 135–52 lab tests in, 150–52 medical data and, 78–82 medical education and, 75 Cooper Center Longitudinal Study, 192 coordination, 45 Cornell University, 2 coronary artery disease, 151 cortisol, 123 counterfeit drugs, 10–11 C-reactive protein, 175 CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), 24–25, 26, 45 Critical Care, 222 Crohn’s disease, 25, 121 CTLA-4, 29–30 cystic fibrosis, 115–16 Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Vertex, 115–16 cytokines, 123 cytoplasm, 111 cytosol, 40 Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Profile program of, 118 Dannon, 235 Dartmouth College, 157 Darwin, Charles, 112 data, medical: context and, 78–82 individual’s role in collection of, 81 databases, medical, 82–83, 95 as context, 83, 91–94 security of, 88–89 data mining, 84–89, 92 context and, 101 infectious diseases and, 100–101 Davos, Switzerland, 161 Dawkins, Richard, 17 death, leading causes of, 129 death certificates, 96 decision-making, 225, 227–28 dehydration, 234 dementia, 5, 41, 90, 91, 151, 204, 210, 215, 221 see also Alzheimer’s disease depression, 122, 211, 215 exercise and, 186 Dhaka, 232 diabetes, 22, 24, 25, 47, 59, 108, 114, 123, 128, 147, 151, 166, 175, 186, 187, 188, 215, 221, 237 gut bacteria and, 120–21 incidence of, 120–21 diet, 22, 114 chronic disease and, 141–44 as contextual, 163 honesty about, 133–34 low-cholesterol, 162 low-fat, 162 moderation in, 144 research on, see nutritional studies weight and, 141 diphtheria, 161 disease: autoimmune, 85, 125, 175 context and, 13–14, 20 genetic markers for, 22, 113–14, 127 surrogate markers for, 127–28 see also chronic disease; infectious diseases; noncommunicable diseases disorders, inherited, newborn screening and, 12 DNA, see genes, genome DNA mismatch repair, 32, 57 docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), 182 dopamine, 211 Doudna, Jennifer A., 25 dreaming, 203 drug abuse, 22 drugs, see medications Duke Cancer Institute (DCI), 191 Duke University, 30 Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development at, 45 Dulken, Ben, 63 Dunedin Study, 45–47, 46 Dyerberg, Jorn, 182–83 Dyson, Esther, 173 Earls, Felton, 213 East Africa, 44, 107 Eat, Sleep, Poop (Cohen), 137 eating patterns, heart disease and, 138–40 Ebola, 18, 221–22 E. coli, 123 eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), 182 Einstein, Albert, 2, 223 Elder, William, Jr., 115–16 electrodermal response, 230–31 Elledge, Stephen J., 84 emotions, touch and, 214 emulsifiers, microbiome and, 121–22 “end of history illusion,” 38–40, 39 End of Illness, The (Agus), 18 endoplasmic reticulum, 40 endorphins, 211 energy levels, 149 England, see Great Britain environment, see context epidemics: global spread of, 103 prediction of, 103–4 epigenetics, 20–21 esomeprazole (Nexium), 86 esophageal cancer, 217 estrogen, 64 ethics: genome editing and, 24–25 medical advances and, 10, 24 technology and, 25–26 Europe, 77 European Journal of Immunology, 34 exercise, 21, 114, 140, 185–201 chemotherapy and, 191, 192 honesty about, 133–34 ideal amount of, 196–200 intensity of, 197–98 life expectancy and, 189–90 mortality rates and, 148 Exeter, University of, 157 “Experimental Prolongation of the Life Span” (McCay, Lunsford, and Pope), 2 experimental treatments, quicker access to, 56 Facebook, 27 fasting lipid profile, 150 feebleness, aging and, 43 fertility, aging and, 43 Field, Tiffany, 214 financial industry, information technology and, 89 Finland, 220 fish oil, 182–83 Florida, 103 flu vaccine: misinformation about, 157–58 public distrust of, 160 FODMAPs (fermentable oligo-di-monosaccharides and polyols), 164 Fodor, George, 183 food, safety of, 11 Food and Drug Administration, US (FDA), 2, 18, 51, 55, 56, 86, 111, 112, 127–28, 146, 182, 201 Accelerated Approval provisions of, 128 Foundation Medicine, 50 Framingham Heart Study, 47, 118 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, 169 free radicals, 208 fruit flies, eating pattern studies with, 138–40 fungi, 119 gait, 45 galvanic skin response (GSR), 230–31 gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), 86 Gates, Bill, 2 Genentech, 56 genes, genome, 45, 83–84 aging and, 20, 41 bacterial, 107, 119 context and, 14, 20–21, 118 DNA mismatch repair and, 32 expression of, 20–21, 125, 139 mitochondrial, see mitochondrial DNA sequencing of, 20, 23, 49–52, 112 SNPs in, 113–14 as switches, 41 viruses and, 119–20 genes, genome, editing of, 24–25, 45 ethics of, 102–5 genetically modified foods (GMOs), 18 genetic markers, 22, 113–14, 127 genetic mutations: aging and, 41 cancer and, 14, 21–22, 50 disease risk and, 9, 12 genetic screening, 103, 117, 137 flawed results in, 8–10 of newborns, 11–12 Georgia State University, 121 Gewirtz, Andrew, 121 Gibson, Peter, 164 Gilbert, Daniel, 38, 39, 40 Gillray, James, 161 Gladwell, Malcolm, 225, 227, 228 Gleevec (imatinib), 55 glial cells, 209 glioblastoma, 30 “Global Recommendations on Physical Activity for Health” (WHO), 187 gluten, debate over, 163–65 Goldstein, Irwin, 211 Google, 87, 88, 101 Google Flu Trends, 101 Grameen Bank, 232, 233–34, 235 Grameen Danone, 235 Graunt, John, 100 Great Britain, 96, 97, 100, 110, 155 Black Death in, 95–101, 98, 99, 100 Greatist.com, 200 Greenland, 182 Grove, Andy, 7, 7 growth factors, 59 gun violence, 91 gut: inflammation of, 120, 122 microbiome of, see microbiome H2 blockers, 86 habits and routines, 136, 137–41, 228, 237–38 see also diet; lifestyle choices Harlow, Harry, 213 Harvard Medical School, 84 Harvard School of Public Health, 142–43 Harvard University, 3, 23, 24, 37, 178, 186, 196, 212, 213, 216 hash tables, health care and, 87–88 Hawaii, 47 HDL cholesterol, 150 health: biological age and, 47 context and, 48, 76–78, 84, 89–90, 91–94, 101, 113, 114–15, 117, 124–25 family history of, 136–37 honesty about, 131–34 inflection point in, 8 lifestyle and, see lifestyle choices optimism and, 65–69 personal baselines for, 150 retirement and, 91–92 technology and, 37–70 health and fitness apps, 200 Health and Human Services Department, US, 103 health care: Affordable Care Act and, 69–70 hash tables and, 87–88 individual’s responsibility in, 12–13, 26, 70, 75, 78, 131–32 misinformation about, 14–15, 18, 19, 154, 157–58 politics and, 11–12 portable electronic devices and, 79, 90–91 Health Professionals Follow-up Study, 142–43, 217 health threats, prediction of, 103–4 heart: biological age of, 47–48 health of, 48 heart attacks, 76, 86, 182, 217, 218 heart disease, 59, 128, 150, 166, 175, 183, 186, 187, 215, 217, 221 context and, 22 diet and, 163 eating patterns and, 138–40 lifestyle choices and, 22 muscle mass and, 195 heart rates, 231 heart rate variability (HRV), 230 Heathrow Airport, 92 “hedonic reactions,” 38–40 heel sticks, 11–12 hemoglobin A1C test, 151 hepatitis B, 175 hepatitis C, 175 Herceptin (trastuzumab), 55 high blood pressure, 22, 188, 195 high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (CRP) test, 151 hippocampus, 214 Hippocrates, 71, 113, 122, 216 HIV/AIDS, 18, 24, 25, 59, 84, 127–28, 131, 159 Hoffmann, Felix, 215, 216 Holland, 41 Homeland Security Department, US, 103 homeostasis, 137–38, 140 Homo sapiens, evolution of, 107 honesty: about health, 131–34 nutritional studies and, 162 hormones, 219 hormone therapy, 201 Horton, Richard, 178 Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled (Hospital for Special Surgery), 28 house calls, 80 Houston Methodist, 86 “how do you feel” question, 231 hugs, 214 Human Genome Project, 113, 120 human growth hormone, 200 Human Molecular Genetics, 65 human papilloma virus (HPV), 161, 175 Hurricane Sandy, 84 Huxley, Aldous, viii, 6, 159, 238 Hydra magnipapillata, 42, 42 hyperglycemia, 122 hypertension, 125, 195, 203 IBM, 88–89 imatinib (Gleevec), 55 immune reactions, 5 immune system, 175, 190, 209, 211 aging and, 44 impact of hugs on, 214 immunotherapy, 28–33 polio virus and, 30, 31 incentives, 235–36 Indiana University Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing’s Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, 94–95 infant mortality, 87, 97 infants: genetic screening of, 11–12 premature, 87 infections, 175–76 infectious diseases, 129 antibiotic-resistant, 67–69, 68 data mining and, 100–101 inflammation, 34, 151, 174–77, 181, 187, 190, 195, 215–22 inflammatory bowel disease, 121 inflection points, 7–8, 7 influenza, 161 risks from, 157 vaccine for, see flu vaccine information, sorting good from bad, 19–20 information technology, financial industry and, 89 inherited disorders, newborn genetic screening and, 12 insomnia, 122 Institute for Sexual Medicine, 211 insulin, 56, 190 insulin sensitivity, 5, 87, 120, 122, 151, 195 insurance companies, off-label drugs and, 55 Intel, 7 International Agency for Research on Cancer, 170 International Prevention Research Institute, 180 intuition, 224–29 Inuits, 182–83 in vitro fertilization (IVF), three-person, 109–12, 110 Ioannidis, John, 178 IRBs (institutional review boards), 52 iron deficiency, 231 irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), 164 Islam, 234 Italy, 183 ivacaftor (Kalydeco), 115–16 JAMA Internal Medicine, 142, 143, 192, 196 Jenner, Edward, 160, 161 Jobs, Steve, 2, 23–24, 26, 49 Johns Hopkins Hospital, 71, 72, 128 Hurd Hall at, 74 Osler Medical Housestaff Training Program at, 73–75, 74 Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, 32 Johns Hopkins University, 23, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 215 Jolie, Angelina, 21 Jones, Owen, 43 Journal of Sexual Medicine, 211 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), 72, 114–15, 173, 201, 220, 221 Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, 154 Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 169 Journal of Urology, 168 journals, medical, misinformation in, 154, 179 J.

., 159 mental health, 145 portable electronic devices and, 90–91 metabolic syndrome, 121, 122 metabolomics, 188 metastasis, 60–62 Metchnikoff, Élie, 33–35, 33, 35, 48 Miami, University of, Miller School of Medicine at, 214 mice and rats: aging experiments with, 1–3, 3, 4 cancer treatment experiments with, 60–62 digestive tract experiments with, 120, 121–22 microbiome, 48, 85, 119–25 beneficial bacteria and, 33–34 diabetes and, 120–21 emulsifiers and, 121–22 gastric surgery and, 123 sleep and, 122–23 microfinance, 232–33 Middle East, 77 mild cognitive impairment (MCI), 203–4 Minnesota, 103 misinformation, medical, 153–84 anecdotal evidence in, 156 cognitive dissonance and, 159 media and, 153–54 in medical studies, 177–84 motivated reasoning and, 157–61 in peer-reviewed journals, 154 post hoc reasoning in, 156 sweeping statements in, 165, 166–69, 184 Wikipedia and, 154 Mississippi, 47 Missouri, 205 MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), 23, 24, 236 Mitalipov, Shoukhrat, 109 mitochondria, 106–8, 106, 119 mitochondrial diseases, 106, 106, 108–12 mitochondrial DNA, 106, 106, 107–8 mutations in, 107–8 replacement of, 109–12, 110 mitochondrial electron transport chain (mETC), 139–40 “Mitochondrial Eve,” 107 MMR vaccine, 156 moderation, in diet, 144 Monash University, 164 Montana, 3 mood, monitoring of, 149 morbidity, sleep habits and, 146–47 Morgan, Thomas Hunt, 138 mortality rates: aging and, 42–43 decline in, 6–7 exercise and, 148 sleep habits and, 146, 147 motivated reasoning, medical misinformation and, 157–61 motivation, 149 MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), 230 multimorbidity, 129 multiple sclerosis, 59 muscle mass, 194–96, 199 muscle strength, 45 mutation, see genetic mutations MyBabyFace (app), 87 Napoli, Mike, 202–3 National Cancer Institute (NCI), 53, 114, 196 National Cancer Institute Cohort Consortium, 189 National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, 47, 141 National Institutes of Health (NIH), 114, 117–18, 205 National Sleep Foundation (NSF), 206 natural immunity, 33–34 Nature, 41, 95, 121, 123 NCI-MATCH (Molecular Analysis for Therapy Choice), 117 near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), 66 Nedergaard, Maiken, 208–10 Neogest (app), 87 Neurology, 203 newborns: genetic screening of, 11–12 premature, 87 Newcastle University, 108 New England Journal of Medicine, 8, 9, 24, 32, 178, 183, 218 New Jersey, 111 New Mexico, 68 Newtown shooting, 91 New York, N.Y., 28, 116 New York Academy of Medicine, 2 New York Cancer Hospital, 28 see also Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center New York University, 204 New Zealand, 45, 46 Nexium (esomeprazole), 86 night blindness, 235 NIH Human Microbiome Project, 120 Nike, 199 Nobel Peace Prize, 232 Nobel Prize, 33, 34, 102 “nocebo” effect, 165 noncommunicable diseases, premature deaths from, 130, 131, 132 Northeastern University, 68 Northwestern University, 41 Norton, Larry, 60–61, 62 Nottingham, University of, 87 Nurses’ Health Study, 142–43, 216–17 nursing college, 235 nutritional studies, 161–69 honesty and, 162 lack of reliable data from, 162–63, 164 Nyhan, Brendan, 157, 158, 160 Obama, Barack, 11, 114, 115, 117 obesity and overweight, 22, 47, 121, 122, 123, 147, 188, 194, 215 breast cancer and, 133 chronic disease and, 141 honesty about, 132–34 obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), 122 Obstetrics & Gynecology, 132–33 Olser Library of Medicine (McGill University), 73 omega-3 fatty acids, 182–83 omeprazole (Prilosec), 86 “On Lines and Planes of Closest Fit to Systems of Points in Space” (Pearson), 95 Only the Paranoid Survive (Grove), 7 open-access model, 179 opioids, 145 optimism, health and, 65–69 Oregon, University of, 199 Oregon Health & Science University, 109 Ornish, Dean, 166–68 Osler, William, 15, 37, 71–73, 72, 73, 75, 126, 145, 153, 223 Othello (Shakespeare), 202 Ottawa, University of, 183 overweight, see obesity and overweight Oxford University, 216 oxidative stress, 175 oxytocin, 211 p53 gene, 57–58 pain relievers, risks of, 145–46 Paleo diet, 142, 163 parabiosis, 1–4, 3, 21 parasites, spread of, 103 Parkinson’s disease, 59, 108, 163 pattern recognition, 227 PD-L1, 29–30 Pearson, Karl, 95 Pediatric MATCH, 117 Pediatrics, 133 pelvic bone cancer, 176 Pennington Biomedical Research Center, 192 Pennsylvania, University of, 73, 75 Perelman School of Medicine at, 208 perceptual intuition, 228–29 personalized medicine, see precision medicine Peto, Richard, 57 Peto’s paradox, 57 PET (positron-emission tomography) scan, 230 pharmaceutical industry, 166 drug prices and, 56–57, 115–17 public distrust of, 18, 19, 69, 157 pharmacogenomics, precision medicine and, 115 phenylalanine, 12 phenylketonuria (PKU), 12 Philosophical magazine, 95 physical activity, 140 physicians: house calls by, 80 public distrust of, 17–19, 157 pit latrines, 234 Pittsburgh, University of, 196, 214 placebos, 53 plaques, 183 plasma transfusions, 4–5 plate discipline, 204 Plato, 185 PLOS Medicine, 178 pneumonia, 161 polio virus, in immunotherapy, 30, 31 Pope, Frank, 2 population growth, technology and, 27 portable electronic devices, health care and, 79, 90–91 Post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy, 156 precision medicine, 8, 20, 36, 102–25 art vs. science in, 112, 118 cancer treatment and, 115 context and, 114–15, 117 cost of, 56–57 historical roots of, 113 pharmacogenomics and, 115 technology and, 37–70 Precision Medicine Initiative, 114, 117 “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”


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The Power of Passive Investing: More Wealth With Less Work by Richard A. Ferri

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Madoff, book value, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, correlation coefficient, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, implied volatility, index fund, intangible asset, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, money market fund, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Sharpe ratio, survivorship bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

This group was deemed to be more knowledgeable about investment matters than the architects. They overestimated their past performance by 3.4 percentage points.9 The overall results are consistent with the theory of cognitive dissonance. Investors would rather alter the facts than admit they have no special investment skills. This makes it difficult to fix flawed investment strategies. Selective Memory as a Profession Wall Street has turned cognitive dissonance into a business model. Have you ever heard a brokerage firm ever say they were wrong about an investment recommendation? Their analysts say they were early or late on a call, but never wrong.

Van den Assem, Guido Baltussen, and Richard H. Thaler, “Deal or No Deal? Decision Making under Risk in a Large-Payoff Game Show,” American Economic Review 98, no. 1 (March 2008): 38–71. 8. Calmetta Coleman, “Beardstown Ladies Fess Up to Big Goof,” Wall Street Journal, Mar. 18, 1998, cl. 9. William N. Goetzmann and Nadav Peles, “Cognitive Dissonance and Mutual Fund Investors,” Journal of Financial Research 20, no. 2 (1997): 145–58. 10. John Maynard Keynes. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936; repr., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1964), 148. 11. Richard H. Thaler, “Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 1, no. 1 (1980): 39–60. 12.


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No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy by Linsey McGoey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, American Legislative Exchange Council, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, cashless society, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, effective altruism, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, germ theory of disease, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Leo Hollis, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school choice, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators

During the 1980s and 1990s, the field received approximately $20 billion in subsidies from philanthropic foundations and governmental aid. A report from the consultancy firm Monitor has stressed that before the field was financially promising, ‘subsidies in the form of grants, soft loans, and guarantees from philanthropists and aid donors’ were key to the field’s growth.37 A curious sort of cognitive dissonance is at play here. Microfinance advocates often berate governments for placing regulatory caps on interest rates – and yet all admit that without government support the field would have withered long ago. As Lester Frank Ward presciently observed, those who decry state interference are typically the same people whose capital and investment choices depend on state support.38 It is now over a century since Ward wrote those words.

The website notes that from 1994 to 2006, Bill and Melinda donated more than $26 billion, resulting in savings of 8.3 per cent, or just over $2 billion. And yet, is a gift from the Gates Foundation to a highly profitable company really the best use of money that, if it had been taxed as income rather than placed in a trust, could have benefited federal or state relief programmes? The cognitive dissonance I’ve described above – the continued insistence that new entrepreneurial movements are playing a revolutionary role in global poverty reduction despite the lack of clear evidence – is the truly distinctive aspect of social entrepreneurship. Unlike ideas of corporate social responsibility which were popular in the 1980s and 1990s – and which often had an aura of expiation about them, implying that socially oriented philanthropy was needed to make amends for corporate abuses – the new social investors believe that business success is evidence of social value.

Thiel bankrolled much of the Tea Party darling Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign, and he serves as chair of the board of Palantir, a firm specializing in intelligence-gathering and data-mining solutions for the US government’s defence community. Thiel is also a steering committee member of the Bilderberg Group, the crown jewel of elite international meetings – a Bilderberg invitation makes a Davos invite look like coffee at the local Walmart.16 Thiel and his fellow philanthrocapitalists exhibit the same cognitive dissonance, the same double-mindedness, as the Mont Pelerin enthusiasts who succeeded in shaping government policies in the name of laissez-faire non-interference. They wilfully entrench the market dominance of actors shown to have been complicit in market distortions, such as Goldman Sachs, even as they lament the way that ‘marketplace imperatives’ direct health investment where it is least needed.


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Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

., “Associação Saúde Criança: Trying to Break the Cycle of Poverty and Illness at Scale,” Harvard Business School Case 419-048, 2018. 28 Battilana et al., “Associação Saúde Criança.” 29 Casciaro, Gino, and Kouchaki, “Learn to Love Networking,” 104–107. 30 This act of convincing ourselves our behaviors are moral when they are not is one way we overcome cognitive dissonance by adding a consonant cognition. See Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957). 31 “Princess Diana: A ‘Modern’ Mother Who Ripped Up the Rule Book,” HistoryExtra, November 3, 2020, https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/princess-diana-mother-parenting-william-harry-mother-son-relationship/. 32 David Eagleman, Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain (New York: Pantheon Books, 2020). 33 Jamil Zaki, The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World (New York: Crown, 2019). 34 C.

Norton, 2011), 77. 64 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (New York: Start Publishing LLC, 2013). 65 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Thomas E. Hill, trans. Arnulf Zweig (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 66 Yong Huang, “Confucius and Mencius on the Motivation to be Moral,” Philosophy East and West 60, no 1. (2010): 65–87. 67 Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford University Press, 1957). 68 Eliza Barclay and Brian Resnick, “How Big Was the Global Climate Strike? 4 Million People, Activists Estimate,” Vox, September 22, 2019, https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/9/20/20876143/climate-strike-2019-september-20-crowd-estimate. 69 Wilson, On Human Nature, 163. 70 Peter L.


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The Internet of Money by Andreas M. Antonopoulos

AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global reserve currency, information security, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, Marc Andreessen, Oculus Rift, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, QR code, ransomware, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, the medium is the message, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, underbanked, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

I don’t have a Swiss bank account in my pocket. I have a Swiss bank, with the ability to generate 2 billion addresses off a single seed and use a different address for every transaction. That bank is completely encrypted, so even if you do unlock the phone, I still have access to my bank. That represents the cognitive dissonance between the powers of centralized secrecy and the power of privacy as a human right that we now have within our grasp. If you think this is going to be easy or that it’s going to be without struggle, you’re very mistaken. 3.10. Bitcoin, the Zombie of Currencies If you read anything about bitcoin, you’ll see the very same things that they said about the internet in the early '90s.

When people hear that message, maybe the next day they come to one of these meetups and they meet a dentist who owns bitcoin, an architect who owns bitcoin, a taxi driver who uses bitcoin to send money back to their family—normal people who use bitcoin to give themselves financial power and financial freedom. Every time that message is broken by cognitive dissonance, bitcoin wins. All bitcoin really has to do is survive. So far, it’s doing pretty well. 3.11. Currencies Evolve In the new network-centric world, currencies occupy evolutionary niches. They evolve, like species, based on the stimulus they have from their environment. Bitcoin is a dynamic system with software developers that can change it.


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Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything by Peter Morville

A Pattern Language, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Black Swan, business process, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Computer Lib, disinformation, disruptive innovation, folksonomy, holacracy, index card, information retrieval, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kanban, Lean Startup, Lyft, messenger bag, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Project Xanadu, quantum entanglement, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single source of truth, source of truth, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, zero-sum game

And we routinely use a handful of “kinesthetic image schemas” as short-cuts.xxxviii Figure 2-22. The experiential basis of metaphors. There’s nothing wrong with using metaphors, provided we’re aware of their source, and realize they contain baggage that shifts from intent to interpretation. Using “department head” may induce cognitive dissonance in an organization that’s flipped the org chart by practicing servant leadership. Isn’t the head on top, like the upper class? Our corporeal experience is embodied in language and subtly changes how we think. This occurs all the time in our use of binary oppositions. In-Out, Up-Down, Front-Back, Self-Other, Us-Them, More-Less, Male-Female, True-False, Fact-Fiction, Public-Private, Open-Closed, Yes-No, Hot-Cold, Reason-Emotion, Mind-Body, Man-Nature, Love-Hate, Win-Lose, Good-Evil While there are no opposites in nature, we use dualism to create order and make sense of experience.

After the Gates Foundation spent $2 billion to replace large schools with small ones and realized only modest gains, Gates publicly concluded they’d made an expensive mistake, and decided to switch direction. In Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), we’re reminded such honest admissions are refreshing because they’re so rare. The main problem isn’t that we aim to deceive others; it’s that we fool ourselves. The engine of self-justification is cognitive dissonance, the state of tension that occurs when we hold ideas or beliefs that are psychologically inconsistent. If a “good person” does a “bad thing” self-deception kicks in. And, if on opposite sides of a decision, time will tear us apart. Imagine two students with similar attitudes and abilities who struggle with the temptation to cheat on a test.


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I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are by Rachel Bloom

4chan, call centre, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, COVID-19, gentrification, imposter syndrome, Snapchat, telemarketer

Maybe to some sort of magical womb tree along with every other fetus whose mom is currently masturbating. They are safe in the tree, guarded by asexual fairies, until their moms cum, after which point the fetuses are free to reenter the womb. Having a baby inside me just does not compute with pleasure. They are two different and disparate things. Yet, I don’t feel this cognitive dissonance regarding sex during pregnancy. Sex, after all, is what makes babies in the first place. It’s natural and beautiful and, during pregnancy, it’s the only time in my life I’ve ever been able to stomach the label “making love.”* But I don’t extend the same sentimentality to when I’m gettin’ down to a Pornhub video called “Schoolgirl slut sucks cock to get an A.”

No one wants to know who in the group hasn’t seen Citizen Kane. 9. Back to Disneyland again. The entirety of Splash Mountain / parts of Small World / half of the Jungle Cruise is racist. I have no idea what to do about it, but it does need to be verbally acknowledged at some point on each ride. The discussion around this cognitive dissonance must last twice as long if everyone in your party is white.* 10. If English is your native language and you always mix up “their” and “they’re,” then YOU ARE NOT A RAVEN-CLAW. 11. If I’m showing you one of my many childhood home movies (again, there are seventy-two of them), please do not comment on the action until I press pause. 12.


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Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

“Altruistic Punishment in Humans.” Nature 415:137–40. Feld, Scott L. 1981. “The Focused Organization of Social Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 86 (5):1015–35. Ferdows, Kasra, Michael A. Lewis, and Jose A. D. Machuca. 2004. “Rapid-Fire Fulfillment.” Harvard Business Review 82 (11). Festinger, Leon. 1957. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Fiorina, Morris P., Samuel J. Abrams, and Jeremy C. Pope. 2005. Culture Wars? The Myth of a Polarized America. New York: Pearson Longman. Fischhoff, Baruch. 1982. “For Those Condemned to Study the Past: Heuristics and Biases in Hindsight.” In Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, ed.

Mehta. 2002. “Studying Rare Events Through Qualitative Case Studies: Lessons from a Study of Rampage School Shootings.” Sociological Methods & Research 31 (2):174. Harford, Timothy. 2006. The Undercover Economist. New York: Oxford University Press. Harmon-Jones, Eddie, and Judson Mills, eds. 1999. Cognitive Dissonance: Progress on a Pivotal Theory in Social Psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Harsanyi, John C. 1969. “Rational-Choice Models of Political Behavior vs. Functionalist and Conformist Theories.” World Politics 21 (4):513–38. Hayek, Friedrich A. 1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”

See Nickerson (1998) for a review of confirmation bias. See Bond et al. (2007) for an example of confirmation bias in evaluating consumer products. See Marcus (2008, pp. 53–57) for a discussion of motivated reasoning versus confirmation bias. Both biases are also closely to related to the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1957; Harmon-Jones and Mills 1999) according to which individuals actively seek to reconcile conflicting beliefs (“The car I just bought was more expensive than I can really afford” versus “The car I just bought is awesome”) by exposing themselves selectively to information that supports one view or discredits the other. 16.


pages: 323 words: 95,939

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

If anything, the story that the television news was telling ended up more accurate than the one President Johnson’s staff was feeding him. The cognitive dissonance between the stories we were trying to tell ourselves about who we were as a nation and a people began conflicting with the stories that we were watching on TV. In a world still organized by stories, news about Vietnam atrocities and Watergate crimes can only mean there are bad people who need to be punished. This cognitive dissonance amounted to a mass adolescence for America: the stories we were being told about who we were and what we stood for had turned out to be largely untrue.

This activates the mirror neurons in our brains, feeding us a bit of positive reinforcement, releasing a bit of dopamine, and leading us further down that line of thought. Without such organic cues, we try to rely on the re-Tweets and likes we get—even though we have not evolved over hundreds of millennia to respond to those symbols the same way. So, again, we are subjected to the cognitive dissonance between what we are being told and what we are feeling. It just doesn’t register in the same way. We fall out of sync. We cannot orchestrate human activity the same way a chip relegates tasks to the nether regions of its memory. We are not intellectually or emotionally equipped for it, and altering ourselves to become so simply undermines the contemplation and connection of which we humans are uniquely capable.


pages: 320 words: 96,006

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin

affirmative action, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, edge city, facts on the ground, financial independence, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, post-work, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Results Only Work Environment, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, union organizing, upwardly mobile, white picket fence, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

“I started to think about it,” she said, lounging back on her friend’s couch, putting her socked feet up on the coffee table. “What do I need a man for? I don’t need him financially. I don’t need him to do activities. I have lots of friends here. So fuck it.” One problem I had with our conversation was the cognitive dissonance produced by the difference between the voice and the person: The distinctive thing about Sabrina is her effortless, natural beauty. It’s hard to describe her physically without resorting to Nancy Drew–era clichés such as “youthful” and “fresh.” She is half Asian, with creamy skin and long black hair and clear green eyes.

In fact, they are seen as violating some essential quality of femininity—warmth, maternal instinct, communal feeling. Deep down we—men and women both—are not gender blind. We still expect women to act one way and men to act another. More than that, men and women both resist thinking any differently because it causes too much confusion and cognitive dissonance. We can glimpse the massive paradigm shift just on the horizon but we are not quite ready for it—a resistance that will fade as more and more women reach visible positions of power. IN 2008, at a time when Citigroup was becoming a model of big bank failure and corruption, its top executives held their regular Monday morning meeting.

., 92, 153 Center for American Progress, 49, 124 Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, 20 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 19, 200 Central California Research Laboratories, 170 Chasing Stars (Groysberg), 203 Cheers (television show), 56 Chicago, University of, 185, 251 Business School, 216, 218 Chicopee (Massachusetts), 179 Child care, 14, 54, 218, 221–22, 224, 242, 264 government options for, 244 jobs in, 9, 118, 124 China, 5, 166 China Post, The, 239 Christians, 97 evangelical, 92, 284n Chung, James, 107 Chung, Vivien, 251–52 Citigroup, 205 Civil rights, 132, 148 Civil Rights Commission, U.S., 146 Civil War, 128 Clerical schools, 120, 130 Clovis (California), 169 Coal (television show), 87 Cognitive dissonance, 33 Cohen, Bernard, 68 Cold War, 152 Colorado, 170 Colombia, 55, 81, 237 Color Me Flo (Kennedy), 65 Columbia University, 119 Business School, 200 Comedy Central, 126–27, 143 Competition, 52, 174, 244 academic, in Korea, 232–33 for college admissions, 160 in traditional societies, 174, 188–89 Confucianism, 233, 234, 257 Congress, U.S., 205 Cookie magazine, 11 Coontz, Stephanie, 51 Cooper, Hannah, 113–17, 119–20, 123–24, 126–27, 130, 141–43 Cornwell, Patricia, 176 Cosby, Bill, 90 Cosmopolitan magazine, 31, 40 Creal, Cameron, 156 Creative Korea party, 249 Crime, violent, 175–85 against women, decline in, 19, 176, 182 committed by women, 176–78, 184–85 Daily Beast, The, 219, 228 “Dancing on My Own” (song), 44 Dating sites, 52, 255 Daum, Meghan, 31 Delahunty, Jennifer, 158–59 Deloitte Consulting, 141, 226 Delta Kappa Epsilon, 17 Democratic Party, 148 Denney, Leandra, 88 Denny’s, 179 Despentes, Virginie, 238, 256 Diana Chronicles, The (Brown), 228 Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Kinney), 190 DiPrete, Thomas A., 159 Divided Labours (Browne), 174 Divorce, 39–40, 49, 66–68, 94, 98, 101, 269 in Asia, 6, 238, 255 of breadwinner wives and unemployed husbands, 51, 81–82 and career opportunities for women, 152–53, 157 custody of children after, 125 financial impacts of, 68, 91, 283n murder as alternative to, 170, 172 regional differences in rates of, 92 Doctors, female, 59, 117, 132, 255–56 specialties chosen by, 118, 140 Domestic violence, 14, 170, 183 Drew, Ina, 202–3 Druggists’ Bulletin, 129 Drug Topics magazine, 131 Duke University, 43 Dunham, Lena, 43 Dushane, Melodi, 179 eBay, 224 Ebony magazine, 89 Economist, The, 253 Ecuador, 55 Edge City (Garreau), 133 Edin, Kathryn, 92–93 Education Department, U.S., 161, 224 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 41, 63 Eliot, George, 163 Eliot, Lise, 161, 174 Ellis, Bret Easton, 173 El-Scari, Mustafaa, 89–90 Empowerment, 30, 38, 45, 190 EMTs, 264 Engineers, 13, 54, 73, 80, 108, 150, 196 England, Paula, 24–25 Enlightened Power (Gergen), 199 Ericsson, Ronald, 11–13 Ernst & Young, 226 Erotic capital, 30, 37–38 Esteve, Albert, 237–38 Evans, Harry, 228 Evans, Jenelle, 179 Ewha University, 232–33, 239 Facebook, 181, 195, 197, 215, 224, 225, 230 Faludi, Susan, 9 Farber, Henry, 86 Farrell, Warren, 69, 72 Fast-food restaurants, female violence in, 179 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 176 Fels, Anna, 217 Feminism, 11, 12, 14–15, 21, 50, 60, 65–66, 75–76, 155, 182, 233 accusations against, 160 career opportunities and, 115, 124, 129, 152, 198, 215, 219 changing cultural norms in response to, 175 erotic capital and, 30 in Iceland, 202 motherhood and, 75–76, 93, 125 second-wave, 58 sexual norms and, 37–38, 41 Title IX complaints filed by, 17 in views of murders by women, 178 Financial planning, 118 Fiorina, Carly, 219 Fisher, Helen, 266 Flaubert, Gustave, 118 Flexibility, workplace, 140 Florida, Lottery, winners in, 94 Florida State University, 42 Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 12 Food preparation, 118, 124 Forbes magazine, 205 Forensic pathology, 118 Fort Lauderdale (Florida), 81, 180 Fortune 500 companies, 81, 198 Fortune magazine, 205 Fox Television, 225 France, 117, 237, 251, 252 Frankel, Lois, 34, 209 Franklin, Bernard, 154, 156 Friedan, Betty, 53 From Chivalry to Terrorism (Braudy), 266–67 Fulbright scholarships, 255 G.I.


pages: 319 words: 101,673

The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness by Suzanne O'Sullivan

cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, epigenetics, meta-analysis, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, social contagion, traumatic brain injury

I would also suggest this feeling was so compelling, they struggled to let go and risk thudding back to normality. The community’s ability to disregard the inconvenient truths that sonic weapons don’t exist and sound doesn’t damage the brain was also an example of a common response to the experience of cognitive dissonance. This refers to the discomfort we feel when faced with information that doesn’t match a strong belief. Such is the feeling of unease created by cognitive dissonance, it often sees us rationalize what may at first seem like an irrational opinion or choice. False beliefs, like the certainty of the existence of a sonic weapon, are at the heart of the development of many functional disorders.

Psychosomatic and functional disorders break the rules of every other medical problem because, for all the harm they do, they are sometimes indispensable. There are simply not enough words to express everything a person feels. The complexity of human emotions cannot be distilled into something rational and well thought-out for every person in every situation. Cognitive dissonance exists, as do moral dilemmas, inconceivable choices, inequality and despair. Life will always find a way to set traps that seem impossible to escape. People are not machines, making decisions from algorithms, logical and free of emotion, so perhaps we need release valves and coping mechanisms, face-saving ways of addressing conflict and grappling with ambivalence.


pages: 198 words: 52,089

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It by Richard V. Reeves

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, desegregation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, knowledge economy, land value tax, longitudinal study, meritocracy, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, positional goods, precautionary principle, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working-age population, zero-sum game

The problem is that many of these efforts are likely to run into the solid wall of upper middle-class resistance, even those that simply require a slightly higher tax bill. A change of heart is needed: a recognition of privilege among the upper middle class. That’s one reason I have written this book, in the hope that it can help to hold up a mirror. Some of us in the upper middle class already feel a degree of cognitive dissonance about the advantages we pile up for our own kids, compared to the truncated opportunities we know exist for others. We want our children to do well, but also want to live in a fairer society. My friend and colleague E. J. Dionne put it to me this way: “I spend my weekdays decrying the problem of inequality, but then I spend my evenings and weekends adding to it.”

When the daughter of a liberal columnist failed to make it into a highly selective private school, he called a well-placed friend who called a family member who happens to run the school. Then she got in. Each of these individuals is thoughtful and liberal enough to know, at some level, their actions were morally wrong. In each case, their actions conferred an unfair advantage. If more of us start to feel Dionne’s cognitive dissonance, some political space might open up for the kind of reforms I discuss at the end of this book. These make some demands of the upper middle class, not least when it comes to paying for them. The big question is whether we are willing to make some modest sacrifices in order to expand opportunities for others or whether, deep down, we would rather pull up the ladder.


pages: 365 words: 56,751

Cryptoeconomics: Fundamental Principles of Bitcoin by Eric Voskuil, James Chiang, Amir Taaki

bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, cashless society, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, en.wikipedia.org, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, Free Software Foundation, global reserve currency, Joseph Schumpeter, market clearing, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money market fund, Network effects, peer-to-peer, price stability, reserve currency, risk free rate, seigniorage, smart contracts, social graph, time value of money, Turing test, zero day, zero-sum game

The following is a short list of commonly-banned popular things: Drugs Gambling Prostitution Religion Speech Assembly Trade Migration Weapons Labor Books Money This error may arise from failure to accept the Axiom of Resistance [122] while continuing to work in Bitcoin. This is likely to produce cognitive dissonance [123] . The subsequent search for relief may lead one here. However the error eventually becomes undeniable, which may lead to a rage-quit [124] . Hoarding Fallacy There is a theory that an increased level of hoarding produces an increased level of security in a coin . This is the similar to the Dumping Fallacy [125] but is not necessarily based on a split .

* * * [10] https://libbitcoin.info [11] https://bitcoincore.org [12] Chapter: Dedicated Cost Principle [13] https://www.dtu.dk/english [14] https://twitter.com [15] https://libbitcoin.info [16] https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Cryptoeconomics [17] Chapter: Inflation Principle [18] Chapter: Savings Relation [19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amir_Taaki [20] Chapter: Foreword [25] https://libbitcoininstitute.org [26] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation [27] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organizations/exemption-requirements-501c3-organizations [28] Chapter: Value Proposition [51] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_von_Mises [52] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard [53] Chapter: Inflation Principle [54] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [55] Chapter: Full Reserve Fallacy [56] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [57] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [83] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_geometry [84] Chapter: Permissionless Principle [85] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [86] Chapter: Hearn Error [87] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confinity [88] Chapter: Value Proposition [89] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal [90] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [91] Chapter: Proof of Work Fallacy [92] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [93] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [94] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [95] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [96] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [98] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [99] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_controls [100] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [101] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [102] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [103] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [104] http://www.imf.org/external/index.htm [105] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [106] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [107] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/big-in-venezuela/534177/ [110] Chapter: Fragmentation Principle [111] Chapter: Consolidation Principle [112] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [115] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [116] Chapter: Proof of Stake Fallacy [117] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [118] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [119] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [120] Chapter: Reservation Principle [121] Chapter: Blockchain Fallacy [122] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [123] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance [124] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Rage_quit [125] Chapter: Dumping Fallacy [126] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [127] Chapter: Inflation Principle [128] Chapter: Lunar Fallacy [131] Chapter: Hearn Error [132] Chapter: Value Proposition [134] Chapter: Other Means Principle [135] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [136] https://www.imf.org [137] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [138] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [139] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [140] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [141] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [142] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [143] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [144] Chapter: Hearn Error [145] Chapter: Fedcoin Objectives [146] Chapter: Public Data Principle [147] Chapter: Proof of Work Fallacy [148] Chapter: Other Means Principle [149] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [150] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz [151] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [152] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/1075 [153] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [154] https://www.asicboost.com/patent [155] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [156] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [157] Chapter: Public Data Principle [158] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [159] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [160] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [161] Chapter: Value Proposition [162] Chapter: Other Means Principle [174] https://coinweek.com/bullion-report/bitcoin-vs-gold-10-crystal-clear-comparisons [175] Chapter: Stability Property [176] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [177] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [178] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [181] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [182] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymizer [183] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [184] Chapter: Social Network Principle [185] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_(discrete_mathematics)#Directed_graph [186] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_(accounting) [189] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [190] Chapter: Public Data Principle [191] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [192] Chapter: Cockroach Fallacy [193] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain [194] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography [195] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software [196] Chapter: Prisoner’s Dilemma Fallacy [201] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [203] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [204] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [205] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [206] Chapter: Zero Sum Property [207] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidy [208] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_market [209] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/big-in-venezuela/534177 [210] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [211] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [212] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [213] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_surface [214] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_controls [215] Chapter: Centralization Risk [216] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [217] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_controls [218] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer [220] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [221] Chapter: Scalability Principle [222] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [223] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [224] Chapter: Value Proposition [225] Chapter: Other Means Principle [226] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [227] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [229] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [230] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [231] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [232] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [233] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [234] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value [235] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [236] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility [237] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard [238] https://mises.org/library/what-has-government-done-our-money/html/p/81 [246] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [247] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_controls [248] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [249] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/081616/understanding-taxes-physical-goldsilver-investments.asp [250] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [251] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [252] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_rate#Parallel_exchange_rate [261] Chapter: Reserve Currency Fallacy [262] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Money_substitutes [263] Chapter: Reservation Principle [264] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [265] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [266] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promissory_note [273] Chapter: Fedcoin Objectives [274] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [275] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [276] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [277] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lender_of_last_resort [278] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_banking [279] Chapter: Thin Air Fallacy [280] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank [281] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discount_window [282] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_of_the_Federal_Reserve_System [283] https://www.frbdiscountwindow.org/pages/discount-rates/current-discount-rates [309] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [310] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/12/16/how-tight-jeans-almost-ruined-americas-money [311] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/business/sweden-cashless-society.html [312] Chapter: Fedcoin Objectives [313] https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/payments--cash/e-krona [314] Chapter: Reserve Currency Fallacy [315] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard [316] Chapter: Value Proposition [320] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rate_of_return [324] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [328] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [329] https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/bios/board/default.htm [330] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [331] https://www.coindesk.com/uasf-revisited-will-bitcoins-user-revolt-leave-lasting-legacy [332] Chapter: Proof of Work Fallacy [337] Chapter: Efficiency Paradox [338] Chapter: Stability Property [339] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [340] Chapter: Variance Discount Flaw [341] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [342] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [343] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [344] Chapter: Relay Fallacy [345] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [346] Chapter: Efficiency Paradox [347] http://primecoin.io [349] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox [351] Chapter: Zero Sum Property [352] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [355] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonic_function [356] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [357] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Store_of_value [358] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value [359] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake [360] Chapter: Proof of Stake Fallacy [361] Chapter: Utility Threshold Property [362] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [364] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [365] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Step_function [366] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/economicprofit.asp [367] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [368] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_preference [369] Chapter: Proof of Work Fallacy [370] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [371] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring [372] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [375] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game [376] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win-win_game [377] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory [379] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [380] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [381] Chapter: Zero Sum Property [382] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [385] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [386] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [387] Chapter: Variance Discount Flaw [388] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale [389] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [390] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/big-in-venezuela/534177/ [391] Chapter: Relay Fallacy [392] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [393] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [394] https://www.federalreserve.gov [395] Chapter: State Banking Principle [396] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement [397] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender [398] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Note [399] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [400] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 [401] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Monetary_Fund [404] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost [405] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [406] Chapter: Variance Discount Flaw [407] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [410] Chapter: Zero Sum Property [411] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ie53/publications/btcProcFC.pdf [413] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [414] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [416] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incentive_compatibility [418] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [419] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email_spam [420] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [423] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [424] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [425] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [426] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game [427] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [428] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_system [429] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [430] Chapter: Variance Discount Flaw [431] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale [432] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidy [433] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [434] http://gavinandresen.ninja/a-definition-of-bitcoin [435] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf [436] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [437] Chapter: Brand Arrogation [438] https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core [439] https://libbitcoin.info [440] Chapter: Maximalism Definition [441] Chapter: Custodial Risk Principle [443] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function [444] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [446] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [447] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [448] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [450] Chapter: Utility Threshold Property [451] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [452] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law#Reverse_of_Gresham's_law_(Thiers'_law) [453] Chapter: Fragmentation Principle [460] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [461] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter [462] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods_and_services [463] Chapter: Consolidation Principle [464] Chapter: Network Effect Fallacy [465] Chapter: Dumping Fallacy [466] Chapter: Replay Protection Fallacy [467] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_present_value [474] Chapter: Proof of Stake Fallacy [475] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [476] Chapter: Substitution Principle [478] Chapter: Consolidation Principle [479] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [482] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [483] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [484] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [485] https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf [486] Chapter: Energy Waste Fallacy [487] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [488] Chapter: Proof of Memory Façade [489] Chapter: Energy Waste Fallacy [490] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [491] Chapter: Other Means Principle [495] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [496] Chapter: Value Proposition [497] Chapter: Proof of Stake Fallacy [498] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [499] Chapter: Proof of Memory Façade [500] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [501] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [502] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [503] Chapter: State Banking Principle [504] https://www.frbdiscountwindow.org [505] https://www.fdic.gov/resources/deposit-insurance [507] Chapter: Dumping Fallacy [508] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoarding_(economics) [509] Chapter: Replay Protection Fallacy [510] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_present_value [511] Chapter: Consolidation Principle [515] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [516] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/996 [517] Chapter: Reserve Currency Fallacy [518] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-exchange_reserves [519] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#United_States [520] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#Money_creation_by_commercial_banks [521] Chapter: State Banking Principle [522] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h3/current/default.htm [543] Chapter: Savings Relation [544] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_preference [545] Chapter: Unlendable Money Fallacy [548] Chapter: Production and Consumption [561] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [562] Chapter: Unlendable Money Fallacy [563] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value [564] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallactics [565] Chapter: Production and Consumption [566] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [569] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [570] Chapter: Labor and Leisure [571] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking [572] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [573] Chapter: Thin Air Fallacy [574] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-reserve_banking [602] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [603] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [604] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_mining [605] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [607] Chapter: Risk Free Return Fallacy [635] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic) [636] Chapter: Production and Consumption [637] Chapter: Labor and Leisure [639] Chapter: Regression Fallacy [640] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [641] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallactics [642] Chapter: Speculative Consumption [643] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump [644] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [645] Chapter: Savings Relation [646] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value [647] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility [648] Chapter: Dumping Fallacy [649] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_axiom [650] Chapter: Production and Consumption [651] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods_and_services [652] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste [653] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard [654] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/926 [655] Chapter: Expression Principle [656] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [657] Chapter: Pure Bank [658] Chapter: Reservation Principle [659] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [661] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_axiom [662] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods_and_services [663] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [664] Chapter: Labor and Leisure [665] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste [666] Chapter: Pure Bank [667] Chapter: Reserve Definition [668] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dividend [677] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_banking [678] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve [679] https://www.fdic.gov [680] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discount_window [681] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [682] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [683] Chapter: Inflation Principle [684] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [685] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation [686] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [687] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrage [688] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_(currency) [689] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_(finance) [690] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maturity_(finance) [691] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [692] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost [693] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_interest [699] Chapter: Savings Relation [700] Chapter: Inflation Principle [704] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [705] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallactics [706] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard [707] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/989 [708] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_requirement [709] Chapter: Expression Principle [715] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [726] Chapter: Savings Relation [727] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [732] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [733] Chapter: Full Reserve Fallacy [734] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [735] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [739] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [740] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [741] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [742] Chapter: Inflation Principle [756] Chapter: Speculative Consumption [757] Chapter: Regression Fallacy [758] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value [759] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter [760] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_of_exchange [761] https://mises.org/library/human-action-0/html/pp/778 [762] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [763] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity [764] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic) [765] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [766] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency [767] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Money_substitutes [779] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [780] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promissory_note [788] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender [789] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [790] Chapter: Stability Property [791] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money [797] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [798] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power [799] Chapter: Inflation Principle [803] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_money [808] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Money_substitutes [809] https://financial-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Contractual+Claim [810] Chapter: Debt Loop Fallacy [811] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization [812] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknote [813] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_certificate [814] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_money [815] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/electronic-money.asp [816] Chapter: Regression Fallacy [819] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfeit_money [823] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [824] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency [825] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [826] Chapter: Reserve Definition [827] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Regression_theorem [828] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [829] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value [830] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter [831] https://mises.org/library/human-action-0/html/pp/778 [833] Chapter: Collectible Tautology [837] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [838] Chapter: Savings Relation [843] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-free_interest_rate [844] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [855] Chapter: Full Reserve Fallacy [856] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_money [857] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [858] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [860] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Money_substitutes [861] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [874] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_past_each_other [875] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value [876] Chapter: Value Proposition [877] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallism [878] Chapter: Regression Fallacy [879] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartalism [880] Chapter: Debt Loop Fallacy [886] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run [887] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank [888] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lender_of_last_resort [889] Chapter: State Banking Principle [890] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [891] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_equation [892] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [893] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [894] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [895] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [897] Chapter: Inflation Principle [898] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [899] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [901] Chapter: Speculative Consumption [905] https://medium.com/@paulbars/magic-internet-money-how-a-reddit-ad-made-bitcoin-hit-1000-and-inspired-south-parks-art-b414ec7a5598 [906] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [907] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [908] Chapter: Stability Property [909] https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/05/25/could-the-price-of-bitcoin-go-to-1-million.aspx [910] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product [911] https://medium.com/@100trillionUSD/modeling-bitcoins-value-with-scarcity-91fa0fc03e25 [912] Chapter: Stock to Flow Fallacy [913] Chapter: Reservation Principle [914] Chapter: Reserve Currency Fallacy [915] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallactics [916] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/949 [917] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [918] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [919] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [920] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank [921] Chapter: State Banking Principle [922] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_(finance) [923] Chapter: Debt Loop Fallacy [924] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#United_States [931] Chapter: Permissionless Principle [932] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [933] https://voxeu.org/index.php?


pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

An early exposé was the sociologist Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, and recent summaries include Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson’s Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me), Robert Trivers’s Deceit and Self-Deception, and Robert Kurzban’s Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite.23 Among the signature phenomena are cognitive dissonance, in which people change their evaluation of something they have been manipulated into doing to preserve the impression that they are in control of their actions, and the Lake Wobegon Effect (named after Garrison Keillor’s fictitious town in which all the children are above average), in which a majority of people rate themselves above average in every desirable talent or trait.24 Self-serving biases are part of the evolutionary price we pay for being social animals.

In the examples I mentioned in introducing the Moralization Gap, perpetrators rationalize a harm they committed out of self-interested motives (reneging on a promise, robbing or raping a victim). But people also rationalize harms they have been pressured into committing in the service of someone else’s motives. They can edit their beliefs to make the action seem justifiable to themselves, the better to justify it to others. This process is called cognitive dissonance reduction, and it is a major tactic of self-deception.285 Social psychologists like Milgram, Zimbardo, Baumeister, Leon Festinger, Albert Bandura, and Herbert Kelman have documented that people have many ways of reducing the dissonance between the regrettable things they sometimes do and their ideal of themselves as moral agents.286 One of them is euphemism—the reframing of a harm in words that somehow make it feel less immoral.

Yet the mere process of identifying our inner demons may be a first step to bringing them under control. The second half of the 20th century was an age of psychology. Academic research increasingly became a part of the conventional wisdom, including dominance hierarchies, the Milgram and Asch experiments, and the theory of cognitive dissonance. But it wasn’t just scientific psychology that filtered into public awareness; it was the general habit of seeing human affairs through a psychological lens. This half-century saw the growth of a species-wide self-consciousness, encouraged by literacy, mobility, and technology: the way the camera follows us in slow-mo, the way we look to us all.


pages: 242 words: 60,595

Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher, Bruce Patton

book value, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, rent control, sealed-bid auction, transaction costs, zero-sum game

This combination of support and attack may seem inconsistent. Psychologically, it is; the inconsistency helps make it work. A well-known theory of psychology, the theory of cognitive dissonance, holds that people dislike inconsistency and will act to eliminate it. By attacking a problem, such as speeding trucks on a neighborhood street, and at the same time giving the company representative positive support, you create cognitive dissonance for him. To overcome this dissonance, he will be 30 tempted to dissociate himself from the problem in order to join you in doing something about it. Fighting hard on the substantive issues increases the pressure for an effective solution; giving support to the human beings on the other side tends to improve your relationship and to increase the likelihood of reaching agreement.


pages: 395 words: 103,437

Becoming Kim Jong Un: A Former CIA Officer's Insights Into North Korea's Enigmatic Young Dictator by Jung H. Pak

anti-communist, Boeing 747, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, cryptocurrency, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, new economy, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, uranium enrichment

Each of these gestures was interpreted as a hopeful sign that Kim wanted to take North Korea in a new direction. His engagement with China, South Korea, and the United States since January 2018 has revived this line of thinking, even amid fresh reports about North Korea’s progress in its ballistic missile and nuclear programs. Observers find the cognitive dissonance of Kim’s actions both disconcerting and promising. But pitted against this hope is the sense that we are certainly heading toward catastrophe. When one considers the frighteningly rapid advancement of North Korea’s cyber, nuclear, and conventional capabilities, the countless rows of soldiers marching in impossible unity at military parades, and the belligerent threats, Kim is suddenly no longer the crazy fat kid but a ten-foot-tall giant with untold and unlimited power: unstoppable, unpredictable, undeterrable, omnipotent.

The United Nations in 2019 reported that of the 25 million citizens, nearly 11 million are undernourished, 140,000 children under the age of five suffer from acute malnutrition or wasting, and nearly 20 percent of children are stunted, making these citizens more vulnerable to diseases such as tuberculosis. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that millions do not have access to basic sanitation facilities or clean water. Kim’s recognition of the cognitive dissonance between government propaganda and lived realities might be driving his efforts to create “Pyonghattan,” a way to combat fraying ties between the jangmadang generation and the regime, and keep the state relevant despite the decimation of the public distribution system. But if people are not convinced by soft power, Kim has all of the tools of repression built by his grandfather and his father to enforce compliance.

The picture of the two leaders slurping the beloved noodle dish lit up South Korean social media. Inspired South Koreans waxed poetic about the noodles, and a cold-noodle mania swept the country, with long lines forming outside restaurants that served the dish. Kim and Moon even held hands at one point and capped off the summit by watching a concert. The cognitive dissonance was overwhelming. Kim’s metamorphosis had begun. A THAW AT THE WINTER OLYMPICS Kim Jong Un’s image rehabilitation began with his New Year’s address, the same speech in which he barked about the “nuclear button” on his desk, celebrated North Korea’s “powerful nuclear deterrent,” and uttered not-so-veiled hints about being able to hit the United States, given the regime’s professed successes in developing intercontinental ballistic missiles during the previous year.


pages: 796 words: 223,275

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, British Empire, charter city, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Republic of Letters, rolodex, social contagion, social web, sparse data, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, wikimedia commons, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Alternatively, maybe he’s sick or injured? Dispositionalism emerges psychologically in two important ways. First, it makes us uncomfortable with our own inconsistencies. If you’ve had a course in Social Psychology, you might recognize this as Cognitive Dissonance. The available evidence suggests that WEIRD people suffer more severely from Cognitive Dissonance and do a range of mental gymnastics to relieve their discomfort. Second, dispositional thinking also influences how we judge others. Psychologists label this phenomenon the Fundamental Attribution Error, though it’s clearly not that fundamental; it’s WEIRD.

Many had simply assumed that they could confidently make claims about human brains, hormones, motivations, emotions, and decision-making based on studies with American college students or any other WEIRD sample.54 TABLE 1.1. KEY ELEMENTS IN WEIRD PSYCHOLOGY Individualism and Personal Motivation ■  Self-focus, self-esteem, and self-enhancement ■  Guilt over shame ■  Dispositional thinking (personality): Attribution Errors and Cognitive Dissonance ■  Low conformity and deference to tradition/elders ■  Patience, self-regulation, and self-control ■  Time thrift and hard work (value of labor) ■  Desire for control and love of choice Impersonal Prosociality (and Related Worldviews) ■  Impartial principles over contextual particularism ■  Trust, fairness, honesty, and cooperation with anonymous others, strangers, and impersonal institutions (e.g., government) ■  An emphasis on mental states, especially in moral judgment ■  Muted concerns for revenge but willingness to punish third parties ■  Reduced in-group favoritism ■  Free will: notion that individuals make their own choices and those choices matter ■  Moral universalism: thinking that moral truths exist in the way mathematical laws exist ■  Linear time and notions of progress Perceptual and Cognitive Abilities and Biases ■  Analytical over holistic thinking ■  Attention to foreground and central actors ■  Endowment effect—overvaluing our own stuff ■  Field independence: isolating objects from background ■  Overconfidence (of our own valued abilities) Despite the growing evidence, many psychologists and economists remain either in shock or denial, as it turns out that much of the material in textbooks and academic journals, as well as in popular works of nonfiction, don’t actually tell us about human psychology, but merely reflect WEIRD cultural psychology.

Understanding this helps explain why WEIRD people are so much more likely than others to impute the causes of someone’s behavior to their personal dispositions over their contexts and relationships (the Fundamental Attribution Error), and why they are so uncomfortable with their own personal inconsistencies (Cognitive Dissonance). Reacting to this culturally constructed worldview, WEIRD people are forever seeking their “true selves” (good luck!). Thus, while they certainly exist across societies and back into history, dispositions in general, and personalities specifically, are just more important in WEIRD societies.46 THE ENDOWMENT EFFECT Traditionally, Hadza hunter-gatherers engaged in no commerce among themselves and little trade with other groups.


pages: 387 words: 120,155

Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference by David Halpern

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, different worldview, endowment effect, gamification, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, IKEA effect, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, libertarian paternalism, light touch regulation, longitudinal study, machine readable, market design, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, nudge unit, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, precautionary principle, presumed consent, QR code, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, supply chain finance, the built environment, theory of mind, traffic fines, twin studies, World Values Survey

They generated useful resources but, perhaps more importantly, they created a sense of common purpose. An everyday assumption is that attitudes shape behaviours. Yet psychological studies have shown that very often it works the other way around: behaviours shape attitudes.7 It is what psychologists call cognitive dissonance: when there is a discrepancy between a person’s attitudes and their behaviour, such as when you find yourself doing a ‘boring’ task for little reward, your attitude will often move into line with your behaviour (e.g. you conclude that the task is not so dull after all, and that it enables you to relax and clear your mind).

Chapter 1: Early Steps 1 One of the most basic psychological effects is how familiarity breeds liking, from random sequences of notes to how much we like and trust institutions. 2 I’m grateful to Rory Sutherland for first drawing my attention to the fascinating example of how Frederick the Great encouraged Prussians to adopt the potato. 3 Quoted in Quarterly Journal of Military History, August 2009. 4 UCLA Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health; http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/victoria.html. 5 The Rotherhithe Tunnel was opened around 1908, and today carries the A101 road from Limehouse to Rotherhithe. As its sharp turns are now considered dangerous, it has a speed limit of just 20 mph. 6 Heide, Robert, and Gilman, John, Home Front America: Popular Culture of the World War II Era. p.36 ISBN 0-8118-0927-7 OCLC 31207708. 7 Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. A classic illustration of the effect, was a study in which students had to do a boring, repetitive task, but were then paid either $1 or $20 to persuade someone in the waiting room that it was fun. When subsequently asked to rate the experiment, those paid just $1 were much more likely to rate it as interesting than those paid $20.

(page numbers in italics refer to illustrations) advertising: and alcohol 100–1 and humour 100 and shock 98–100, 100 and smoking 99, 100 airport expansion 98 alcohol 100–1, 127 and calories 100 and pregnancy 126–7 Alexander, Danny 281 anaesthetics 17 ‘animal spirits’ 207, 210, 211 Aos, Steve 282 Ariely, Dan 96–7, 134, 325 Aristotle 221, 240 Armstrong, Hilary 34 Asch, Solomon 26 ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) 189 Ashford, Maren 57, 83 attentional spotlight 83–4 Ayres, Ian 142 Bazerman, Max 134, 325 Beales, Greg 36 Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) (see also nudging): arguments lost by 212–14 becomes social-purpose company 350 beginnings of x–xi, 50–8, 56, 58, 341 current numbers employed by xiii, 341 current trials by 341 expansion of xiii governments follow 11 initial appointments to 56–7, 56 initial scepticism towards 9 most frequent early criticisms of 333 naming of x–xi, 52–3 objectives of 54–5 and transparency, efficacy and accountability, see under nudging and webpage design 275–9, 276 World Bank’s request to 125 year of scepticism experienced by 274 behavioural predators 312–13 Benartzi, Shlomo 64 benefits, see welfare benefits Bentham, Jeremy 221–2 BIG lottery 283 ‘Big Society’ 43, 50, 142, 250 BIT, see Behavioural Insights Team Blair, Tony 151, 225 and behavioural approaches in government 302 Brown takes over from 36, 260–1 review into tenure of 34 Strategy Unit of 31 Tories’ admiration of 50 Bogotá 135, 146 Bohnet, Iris 123 Britton, John 188 Brown, Gordon 34 becomes PM 36, 260–1 Byrne, Liam 47 Cameron, David 151 BIT set up by 8 and Coalition Agreement 38 and data transparency 159 Hilton appointed by 43 and randomised controlled trials 274 and response to notes 186 and smoking 194 and well-being 225–8, 227, 250 car tax 3, 91, 92, 275–8 carrier bags 23 Centre for Ageing Better 282 Centre for Local Economic Growth (LEG) 282, 288 Chand, Raj 146 charities 116–20, 142–4, 144 and reciprocity 116 Chetty, Raj 64 childbirth, see pregnancy and childbirth Cialdini, Robert 34–6, 47, 107–8, 109, 113, 121–2, 308, 312 Clegg, Nick, and Coalition Agreement 38 Cochrane, Dr Archie 269–71, 295, 297 Cochrane Collaboration 271 cocktail-party effect 86 cognitive dissonance 21 cognitive psychology 27–9, 28 Colbourne, Tim 215 College of Policing 282, 289 Collins, Kevan 283, 285 Community First 254–5 commuting 219–20, 263–4 conflict and war 20–1, 27, 87, 344–5 consumer feedback 161–9, 167 improvements driven by 168–9 in public sector 163–9, 167 cooling-off periods 77 Council Tax 95 crime prevention (see also theft): ‘scared straight’ approach to 266–8, 267 and ‘What Works’ institutes 289 Darley, J. 27, 110 data transparency 153–84 and better nudges 179–80 and consumer feedback 161–9, 167 improvements driven by 168–9 in public sector 163–9, 167 and food labelling 172, 178 and machine-readable code 154, 157, 159 and RACAP 157 in restaurants 178 and understandable information 176–9 on cancer 178–9 on car safety 177–8 on financial products 177 and utility suppliers 154–60, 155 Davey, Ed 157 Deaton, Angus 243 decision fatigue 141 Deep Blue 7 Diener, Ed 231 disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) 272 discontinuity design 161–2 doctors’ handwriting 72, 72 Dolan, Paul 47–8, 220 Down, Nick 113 drivers’ behaviour 18, 18 Duckworth, Angela 247 Dunn, Elizabeth 220, 237, 250, 256 Durand, Martine 243 Dweck, Carol 343 e-cigarettes 188–97, 193, 215 estimated years of life saved by 195, 216 and non-smokers 193–4 and quit rates 192–3, 193 by socio-economic grouping 195 Early Intervention Foundation (EIF) 282 EAST (Easy, Attractive, Social, Timely) framework 10, 60, 149, 349 Attractive 80–105, 81, 85, 94 Easy 62–79, 68, 72, 73 and jobcentres 200 Social 106–25, 115, 118, 120, 122 (see also social influence) Timely 126–49, 129 Easterlin, Richard 238 eating habits 139, 171, 307 (see also obesity/weight issues) and choice 306–7 and food pyramid/plate illustrations 41, 41 and food tax 301–2 and healthy/unhealthy food 41, 82, 101–2, 216, 302 ‘mindless’ 171 Economic and Social Research Council 283 economy, UK 205–12 econs 6–7, 178, 223 education 137, 282 financial 64 further 146–7 and timely intervention 146–7 and ‘What Works’ institutes 283–7, 284, 286 Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF) 282, 283–7, 284, 286 Effectiveness and Efficiency (Cochrane) 295 endowment effect 140 Energy Performance Certificate 179 energy ratings 135 energy and utility suppliers, see utility suppliers Enterprise Bill 159 Epley, Nick 260–1 established behaviour, see habits ethnicity, and recruitment 137–9, 344 experimental government 266–98, 270, 272, 276 and crime prevention 266–8, 267 ethics of 325–8 (see also nudging: and accountability) and growth vouchers 279–80 and organ donation 275–9, 276 and overseas health-aid programmes 273 and radical incrementalism 291 and ‘What Works’ institutes 281–90, 292–4 Centre for Ageing Better 282 Centre for Crime Reduction 289 Centre for Local Economic Growth (LEG) 282, 288 Early Intervention Foundation (EIF) 282, 288 Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF) 282, 283–7, 284, 286 experimental psychology 24–6 farmers 145 ‘fat tax’ 301–2 (see also eating habits) fertiliser 145 Feynman, Richard 296, 297 financial crisis 45, 46, 206, 336 (see also UK economy) financial products 177, 206 fines, collecting 3–4, 52, 89, 90–1 Fischhoff, Baruch ix Fisher, Ronald 291 Fiske, Susan 84, 86, 325, 345 food pyramid/plate illustrations 41, 41 forms, prefilling 73–4 fossils 35 Frederick the Great 15, 16 Freud, Lord 279 Gallagher, Rory 55, 88–9, 158, 197–8, 204, 343, 349 gender equality, and company boards 123 Genovese, Kitty 109–10 Gigerenzer, Gerd 178 Gilbert, Danny 139, 220 Gino, Francesca 347 giving 116–20, 142–4, 144, 250 God Complex 269 Gove, Michael 287 Grant, Adam 347 Green Book 46, 228, 258, 259 Grice, Joe 233 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 222–4, 255 (see also UK economy) Grove, Rohan 211 growth vouchers 279–80 Gyani, Alex 197–8, 203, 204, 343, 349 habits: and early intervention 128–32 key moments to prompt or reshape 132–9 and tax payments 131 Hallsworth, Michael 48, 113 Hancock, Matthew 279 hand washing 99, 140 happy-slave problem 231 Haynes, Laura 56–7 hearing 25 Heider, Fritz 345 Helliwell, John 226–7, 232 Henry VIII 17 herd instinct 161 Heywood, Sir Jeremy 2, 215, 217, 281 The Hidden Wealth of Nations (Halpern) 44 Highway Code 20 Hillman, Nick 165 Hilton, Steve x, 43–4, 51, 53–4, 159, 190, 214, 215, 225–6, 247, 250 and randomised controlled trials 274 hindsight bias ix HMRC 2–3, 8, 87–8, 89, 113, 115, 118, 120, 181–2 (see also tax payments) BIT member’s secondment to 113 non-tax-related business communications sent via 210–11 and online tax forms 74 and randomised controlled trials 274 Homer, Lin 210 honesty 133–4 honours 98 horses’ behaviour 18–19, 19 hospitals: and doctors’ handwriting 72, 72 and patient charts 72–3, 73 Hume, David 221 Hunt, Stefan 209 Hurd, Nick 250 Hutcheson, Francis 221 hyperbolic discounting 139 imprinting 128–9, 129 infant development 128–30 (see also pregnancy and childbirth) and early mother–child ‘meshing’ 129 (see also imprinting) in geese 128–9, 129 and mother’s depression 129 Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Cialdini) 34–5, 312 Inglehart, Ronald F. 229 Inland Revenue, see HMRC Institute for Government 40, 46–50 J-PAL 294 jobcentres 120–1, 197–205, 200, 201, 343, 349 (see also unemployment) John, Peter 96 The Joyless Economy (Scitovsky) 223 judges 140 Kahneman, Daniel 27, 29–30, 32, 48, 220, 226, 230 BIT’s work commended by 11 Kasparov, Garry 7 Kennedy, Robert F. 218, 222 Kettle, Stuart 125 Keynes, John Maynard 210, 211–12 King, Dom 48, 72 Kirkman, Elspeth 121, 146 knife crime 122 Kuznets, Simon 222 Laibson, David 64–5, 245, 307 Latene, B. 27, 110 Layard, Richard 225, 242, 248 Lazy Town 82 Legatum Institute 242–3 letters/messages, simplifying 71–3 and handwriting 72 in hospitals 72–3, 73 and prefilled forms 73–5 Letwin, Oliver 213, 217, 281, 295 Life satisfaction (discussion paper) 225 (see also well-being) Linos, Elizabeth 137, 344 List, John 286 litter 23, 35, 94, 107–8, 114 Loewenstein, George 307, 324, 345 loft/wall insulation 3, 75–6 Lorenz, Konrad 128–9, 129 lotteries, as incentive 94–6 Luca, Michael 161–2, 166, 177 Lyard, Richard 238 Lyons, Michael 250 MacFadden, Pat 34 Mackenzie, Polly 51, 215 Major, John 46 Manzi, James 295–6 Marcel, Anthony 136 Martin, Steve 113 Matheson, Jill 227 Mayhew, Pat 66 Mazar, Nina 347 Meacher, Michael 224 mental health 246–9 Merkel, Angela 243 midata, see data transparency Milgram, Stanley 26, 327 Miliband, Ed 34 military recruitment advertising 87 Milkman, Katherine 323 Mill, John Stuart 221 MINDSPACE framework 49–50, 50, 60, 72 motorcycle helmets 66–7 Mulgan, Geoff 225, 301–2 Mullainathan, Sendhil 343 National Citizenship Service (NCS) 251–2, 251 National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) 195, 271, 281, 290 Nesta 350 Nguyen, Sam 55, 197–8, 343 The Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 240 nicotine-replacement therapy (NRT) 193, 193 (see also smoking) 9/11 28 Norton, Mike 256, 347 Nudge (Thaler, Sunstein) ix–x, 6–7, 39, 157, 234 Nudge Unit, see Behavioural Insights Team nudging (see also Behavioural Insights Team; EAST framework): and accountability 324–5 and experimentation, ethics of 325–8 and the public voice 328–32, 329 defined and discussed 22–4 and efficacy 304, 315–24 and familiarity with approach 319–24 relative 318–19 improving, with better data 179–80 rediscovery of 13 and subconscious priming 136 and transparency 304–15 and behavioural predators 312–13 and choice 306, 314–15 and effective communication vs propaganda 307–11, 311 Nurse Family Partnership 129 Obama, Barack 39–40, 254 acceptance speech of 38 Obama, Michelle 101 obesity/weight issues 101, 170–3, 307 (see also eating habits) in children, levelling of 173 and food labelling 172 and ‘mindless’ eating 171 O’Donnell, Sir Gus (later Lord) 45–6, 47, 57, 225, 227, 227, 242, 258 OECD 293, 340 Office of War Information (US) 21 Olds, David 130 online shopping 109 Ord, Toby 273 organ donation 9, 37, 52, 275–9 Orwell, George 309, 311 Osborne, George 45 and data transparency 159 O’Shaughnessy, James 247 Overman, Henry 288 Paley, William 221 paternalism x, 33, 51, 316 Pelenur, Marcos 135 pensions xii, 9, 62–5, 331 and choice 307 PMSU’s paper on 33 people’s parliaments 332 perception 24–5, 25 Personality responsibility and behaviour change (discussion paper) 301–2 police, ethnic recruits into 137–9, 344 potato consumption 15–16 pregnancy and childbirth 126–7 (see also infant development) Prescott, John 302 Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit (PMSU) 31–3, 47, 53, 225, 337 and Personality responsibility and behaviour change paper 301–2 psychological operations (PsyOps) 30, 308–9, 333 Putnam, Robert 253 radical incrementalism 291 randomised controlled trials (RCTs) 8, 113, 132, 182, 252, 270, 274–5, 283, 297–8, 339 and HMRC 274 Raseman, Sophie 157 RECAP 157 recycling 35 Red Tape Challenge 57 Reeves, Richard 51 Revenue and Customs, see HMRC road fuel 23 road traffic, see vehicles Roberto, Christine 101, 178 Rogers, Todd 146, 321 Rolls-Royce 208 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 21 Ruda, Simon 125, 137, 214, 344 Sainsbury, Lord (David) 46–7 Sanders, Michael 57, 116, 119, 142–3, 146 Scheving, Magnús 81, 82–3 Scitovsky, Tibor 223 Scott, Stephen 247 Seligman, Marty 232, 247 Sen, Amartya 231 Service, Owain 2, 56, 69 Sesame Street 101 Shadbolt, Sir Nigel 158 Shafir, Eldar 343, 345 sight 24–5, 25 Silva, Rohan x–xi, 43–5, 51, 53–4, 159 Singer, Tania 345 small businesses 205–9 passim (see also UK economy) smart disclosure 157 smoke detectors 99 smoking 9, 23, 99, 100, 138 and e-cigarettes 188–97, 193, 215 estimated years of life saved by 195, 216 and non-smokers 193–4 and nicotine-replacement therapy (NRT) 193 and pregnancy 126–7 prevalence of 189 and quit rates 192–3, 193 by socio-economic grouping 195 SNAP framework 48 social influence 26–7, 106–25 and bystander intervention 110 dark side of 109–10 and litter 107–8, 114 norms of: descriptive vs injunctive 108 picking apart 107–11 in policy 111–15 and online shopping 109 and personal touch 119–21 and reciprocity 115–17 social psychology 107 Soman, Dilip 337 Southern Cross station staircase 85 speed bumps 76–7 Sportacus 81–3, 81 Stanford Prison 26–7 Steinberg, Tom 254 stickk.com 142 subconscious priming 136 suicide 67–9, 68, 77 Sunstein, Cass ix–x, 6–7, 22, 39–42, 44, 57, 73, 305, 307, 314 and RACAP 157 supermarkets 80–1, 84, 86, 171–2 and food labelling 173, 178 Sutherland, Rory 187–8 tailored defaults. 307 tax payments 3, 8, 23, 52, 87–8, 88, 89, 112–14, 118, 120, 131, 181–2 in Central America 125 Council Tax 95 and habits 131 and lottery incentive 96–7 and online tax forms 74–5 and randomised controlled trials 274 road duty 3, 91, 92, 275–8 social-norm-based approach to 113, 115 Tetlock, Philip 192 Thaler, Richard 6–7, 22, 39, 44, 50, 51, 53, 57, 305 and BIT’s name 53 and RACAP 157 theft (see also crime prevention): mobile phones 173–6, 174, 175 and target-hardening 78, 214 vehicles: cars 169–70 motorcycles 66–7 time, perception of 128 time-inconsistent preferences 128, 139–45 Times 301–2 tobacco, see smoking Turner Lord (Adair) xii, 33, 331 Tversky, Amos 27, 29, 230 UK economy 205–12, 215, 216 (see also financial crisis; Gross Domestic Product) unemployment 120–1, 122, 197–205, 200, 201, 216, 343, 349 (see also jobcentres) and well-being 255–6 utilitarianism 221–2 utility suppliers: and data transparency 154–60 switching among 153–4, 155–6, 155, 160, 213 vehicles 18–20 safety of 177–8 and speeding 76–7, 92–5, 100 varied penalties for 147 thefts of: cars 169–70 motorcycles 66–7 Victoria, Queen 17 visas 132 Vlaev, Ivo 48 Volpe, Kevin 320 voter registration 95–6 Walsh, Emily 123 Wansink, Brian 171, 306 war 20–1 war and conflict 20–1, 27, 87, 344–5 weight, see obesity/weight issues welfare benefits 8 and conditional cash transfers 135, 145 and timing of payments 135 well-being 218–65 and community 249–55, 251 and commuting 219–20, 263–4 by country 229, 238, 243 drivers of 235–41 material factors 237–9 social factors 239–41 (see also well-being: and community) sunny disposition 235–7 early concepts of 220–2 and GDP 222–4, 255 and governance and service design 258–62 and happy-slave problem 231 and income, work and markets 255–7 and Life satisfaction paper 225 measuring 222–4 big questions concerning 231–3 subjective 228–31 and mental health 246–9 and National Citizenship Service programme 251–2, 251 by occupation 244 and policy 242–3, 258 subjective 224, 228–31 and giving 250 (see also giving) by occupation 244–5 and prostitutes 231–2 UK government’s programme on 226–8, 233–5, 234, 240 unemployment’s effects on 255–6 and utilitarianism 221–2 What Works institutes 281–90, 292–4, 340 Centre for Ageing Better 282 Centre for Crime Reduction 289 Centre for Local Economic Growth (LEG) 282, 288 Early Intervention Foundation (EIF) 282, 288 Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF) 282, 283–7, 284, 286 When Harry Met Sally 160–1 ‘wicked problems’ 170 Willetts, David 165 World Bank 125, 293, 309, 340 World Values Survey (WVS) 229 yelp.com 161–2 Young, Lord 279 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS THERE ARE MANY people who deserve thanks and credit for the work and results of the Behavioural Insights Team that this book describes, and a rather shorter list for the writing and editing of the book itself.


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The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time by Maria Konnikova

Abraham Maslow, attribution theory, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bluma Zeigarnik, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, endowment effect, epigenetics, Higgs boson, higher-order functions, hindsight bias, lake wobegon effect, lateral thinking, libertarian paternalism, Milgram experiment, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, post-work, publish or perish, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, seminal paper, side project, Skype, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, the scientific method, tulip mania, Walter Mischel

When we should be cutting our losses, we instead recommit—and that is entirely what the breakdown is meant to accomplish. Leon Festinger first proposed the theory of cognitive dissonance, today one of the most famous concepts in psychology, in 1957. When we experience an event that counteracts a prior belief, he argued, the resulting tension is too much for us to handle; we can’t hold two opposing beliefs at the same time, at least not consciously. “The individual strives,” Festinger wrote in A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, “toward consistency within himself.” True, here and there one might find exceptions. But overall, “It is still overwhelmingly true that related opinions or attitudes are consistent with one another.

., ref1, ref2 Carnegie, Andrew ref1 Carnegie, Dale ref1, ref2 Carney, Bruce ref1 Carr, Sarah ref1 Carro, Gregory ref1 Catch Me If You Can, ref1 caterpillars ref1 Cayuga, HMCS ref1, ref2 Cerf, Moran ref1, ref2 Chabris, Christopher ref1 Chadwick, Cassie ref1 Chaiken, Shelly ref1 chameleon effect ref1 change strategies ref1, ref2, ref3 Chaucer, Geoffrey ref1 Chen, Peter ref1 choices ref1, ref2, ref3 Chonko, Lawrence ref1 Choong, Lee ref1, ref2 Christie, Richard ref1 Cialdini, Robert ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Clore, Gerald ref1 Codol, Jean-Paul ref1 cognitive dissonance ref1 Cohen, Steven ref1 coins ref1, ref2 commons ref1 communities ref1 Confidence Man, The (Melville), ref1 confirmation bias ref1, ref2, ref3 Consumer Fraud Research Group ref1 control, illusion of ref1 conversations ref1 convincer ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Cooke, Janet ref1 corporate fraud ref1 Craigslist ref1, ref2 credibility ref1 creeping determinism ref1 Crichton, Judy ref1 Crichton, Robert ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Crichton, Sarah ref1 cuckoo finch ref1 cults ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 culture ref1 Cummine, Andrew ref1 Curry, Robert ref1 Dal Cin, Sonya ref1 dark triad of traits ref1, ref2 psychopathy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Davis, Barbara ref1 Dean, Jeremy ref1 DeBruine, Lisa ref1 decision making ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Dedalus Foundation ref1, ref2 default effects ref1, ref2 Demara, Ferdinand Waldo, Jr., ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13 Crichton and ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 at monasteries ref1, ref2, ref3 as navy surgeon ref1, ref2, ref3 “papering” tactic of ref1 as prison warden ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 school gifts from ref1 Demara, Ferdinand Waldo, Sr., ref1 Demara, Mary McNelly ref1, ref2 determinism, creeping ref1 Deveraux, Jude ref1 De Védrines, Christine ref1 De Védrines, Ghislaine ref1, ref2 “Diddling” (Poe), ref1 disasters ref1 disrupt-then-reframe ref1 Dittisham Lady, ref1, ref2 door-in-the-face ref1, ref2 Drake, Francis ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Dunbar, Robin ref1, ref2, ref3 Dunning, David ref1 Dutch tulip mania ref1 Dylan, Bob ref1 Ebola crisis ref1 Egan, Michael ref1 Eiffel Tower ref1 Ekman, Paul ref1, ref2, ref3 elaboration likelihood model ref1 elder fraud ref1 Elizabeth I, Queen ref1 Emler, Nicholas ref1, ref2 emotions ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 anticipation of ref1 donations and ref1 stories and ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 endowment effect ref1, ref2 entrapment effect ref1 environment ref1 Epley, Nicholas ref1, ref2, ref3 Epstein, Seymour ref1, ref2 Erdely, Sabrina Rubin ref1 Evans, Elizabeth Glendower ref1 even-a-penny scenario ref1, ref2 exceptionalism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 expectancies ref1, ref2 exposure ref1, ref2 Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Mackay), ref1 Eyal, Tal ref1 Facebook ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 facial expressions ref1, ref2, ref3 Fallon, James ref1 familiarity ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Farms Not Factories ref1 FBI ref1, ref2, ref3 fear ref1 Feldman, Robert ref1 Fenimore, Karin ref1 Festinger, Leon ref1, ref2, ref3 Fetzer, Barbara ref1 Figes, Orlando ref1 Fischhoff, Baruch ref1, ref2 Fiske, Susan ref1 Fitzgerald, Alan and Eilis ref1 Fitzgerald, Elizabeth (Madame Zingara), ref1, ref2 fix ref1 Folt, Carol ref1 football ref1 foot-in-the-door ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Frampton, Anne-Marie ref1, ref2, ref3 Frampton, Paul ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 Frank, Jerome ref1 Franklin, Benjamin ref1, ref2 Franklin Syndicate ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Fraser, Scott ref1 Freedman, Ann ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Freeman, Jonathan ref1 French, John ref1, ref2 Fund for the New American Century ref1 future ref1 predicting ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Galinsky, Adam ref1 gambler’s fallacy ref1, ref2 Gant, Robert ref1 Geis, Florence ref1 genetics ref1 Gerard, Harold ref1 Gerhartsreiter, Christian ref1 Gifford, Adam Lord ref1 Gilbert, Daniel ref1, ref2 Gilligan, Andrew ref1 Gilovich, Thomas ref1 Glass, Stephen ref1, ref2 Goetzinger, Charles ref1 Gondorf, Fred and Charles ref1 Goodrich, Judge ref1 Gordon, John Steel ref1 gorilla experiment ref1 gossip ref1, ref2, ref3 Goya, Francisco ref1 Grazioli, Stefano ref1 Great Imposter, The (Crichton), ref1, ref2, ref3 Green, Melanie ref1, ref2 Green Dot cards ref1 Greg ref1 grifter ref1 grooming ref1 groups, belonging to ref1 Guillotin, Joseph ref1 Gur, Ruben ref1 Gurney, Edmund ref1 Hancock, Jeffrey ref1 Hansen, Chris ref1 Hanson, Robert ref1 happiness ref1, ref2, ref3 Hare, Robert ref1 Harley, Richard ref1 Harlow, E.


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What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society by Paul Verhaeghe

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, call centre, capitalist realism, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gregor Mendel, income inequality, invisible hand, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-industrial society, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, The Spirit Level, ultimatum game, working poor

The selection of certain symptoms — increasingly, of certain behaviour — as indicators of mental illness is far from value-free; rather, the reverse. And the majority of research findings may be, as we know, refuted by other findings, but this is ignored by the dominant paradigm. The psychological explanation for this is known as ‘cognitive dissonance’. As far as the DSM is concerned: with the best will in the world, the scientific underpinning for its approach is extremely weak. The reason that so little attention is paid to the failure of current psychiatric diagnostics is thus fairly straightforward: the dominant paradigm allows no other viewpoint.

The current emphasis on competency-oriented education is driving our youngsters straight into the competition-and-career cluster, with all the associated values following in their wake. What the advocates of the system fail to realise is that this automatically undermines other norms and values. There is no such thing as competitive solidarity. Indeed, its impossibility is clearly illustrated by what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’. When you hold strongly to a particular value-laden cluster, you simply can’t take in information that contradicts it, however objective and factual. Someone who sets great store by solidarity, public-spiritedness, and spirituality will find it almost impossible to take in information about the advantages of individualism, competitiveness, and materialism.


pages: 405 words: 121,531

Influence: Science and Practice by Robert B. Cialdini

Albert Einstein, attribution theory, bank run, behavioural economics, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, desegregation, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, Norman Macrae, Ralph Waldo Emerson, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds

., Scheier, M. F., & Buss, A. H. (1975). Public and private self-consciousness: Assessment and theory. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 43, 522–527. Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7, 117–140. Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1964). When prophecy fails. New York: Harper & Row. Fiske, S. T., & Neuberg, S. L. (1990). A continuum of impression formation: Influences of information and motivation on attention and interpretation.

Dyads and triads at 35,000 feet: Factors affecting group process and aircraft performance. American Psychologist, 39, 885–893. Fox, M. W. (1974). Concepts in ethology: Animal and human behavior. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Freedman, J. L. (1965). Long-term behavioral effects of cognitive dissonance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1, 145–155. Freedman, J. L., & Fraser, S. C. (1966). Compliance without pressure: The foot-in-the door technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4, 195–203. Frenzen, J. R., & Davis, H. L. (1990). Purchasing behavior in embedded markets.

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 3, 248–251. Szabo, L. (2007, February 5). Patient protect thyself. USA Today, p. 8D. Taylor, R. (1978). Marilyn’s friends and Rita’s customers: A study of party selling as play and as work. Sociological Review, 26, 573–611. Tedeschi, J. T., Schlenker, B. R., & Bonoma, T. V. (1971). Cognitive dissonance: Private ratiocination or public spectacle? American Psychologist, 26, 685–695. Teger, A. I. (1980). Too much invested to quit. Elmsford, NY: Pergamon. Tesser, A., Campbell, J., & Mickler, S. (1983). The role of social pressure, attention to the stimulus, and self-doubt in conformity.


The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics by Rod Hill, Anthony Myatt

American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biodiversity loss, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, electricity market, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, failed state, financial innovation, full employment, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, positional goods, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, publication bias, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, sugar pill, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, union organizing, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

With about three cancer deaths associated with every 170 tons of asbestos (Tossavainen 2004), these exports should eventually result in about 4,400 deaths a year. Choosing false beliefs Even if workers know there may be risks to their work, will they evaluate them properly? The textbook model assumes that they will and that appropriate compensation for the extra risk will result. This won’t happen if workers experience what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’. People can choose their beliefs about the world, using information selectively to reinforce a belief they would prefer to have (Akerlof and Dickens 1982). In this case, workers have to reconcile their view of themselves as smart people who make the right choices with the actual job they choose.

Brock (2004) The Bigness Complex: Industry, labour and government in the American economy, 2nd edn, Stanford Economics and Finance, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Adler, M. (2010) Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the science that makes life dismal, New York: New Press. Akerlof, G. A. and W. T. Dickens (1982) ‘The economic consequences of cognitive dissonance’, American Economic Review, 72(3): 307–19. Akerlof, G. A. and R. J. Shiller (2009) Animal Spirits: How human psychology drives the economy and why it matters for global capitalism, Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Akerlof, G. A. and J. L. Yellen (1988) ‘Fairness and unemployment’, American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings, 78(2): 44–9.

., 128 Chandler, Alfred, The Visible Hand, 115 297 Channel One, 80 chemicals, registration of, 160 child labour, prohibition of, 173 child mortality, 83, 216; in Philippines, 239 child poverty, 210 children, vulnerable to advertising, 81–2 choice: freedom of, 42; individual, 38; public, 110, 112; rational, 9 17, 22, 110, 150, 163 Chomsky, Noam, 113, 114, 254 Chrysotile Institute, 162 cigarettes see tobacco industry Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse (CALA), 112 Clark, J. B., 179–80 climate change, 112, 152–3, 154–7, 165, 253; denial of, 156 closed-end mutual funds, 147 coffee, price of, 233–4 cognitive dissonance, 162 Cohen, Avi, 105, 106, 181, 182–3 Colander, David, 116, 132, 141, 154, 206, 232 collective good, 111, 152 see also public goods Colombia, US military aid to, 240 Commercial Alert, 82, 84 Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) (2000), 262 common resources, use of, 152 communities, destruction of, 16, 18 community: notion of, 25–6; omitted from analysis, 251–3; relation to individual, 17–18 comparative advantage, 28–30, 222, 224, 227, 230–1; evaluation of, 43–5; technological change and, 228 comparative static analysis, 48–9, 64 compensation principle, 225–6, 245 competition, 13; imperfect, model of, 66, 106; perfect, 46, 53, 54–7, 60, 65, 93, 102, 104, 107–8, 130, 131, 132, 138, 169, 194, 204, 230 (analysis of, 118–22; efficiency of, 121–2; flawed nature of, 135–8; in labour markets, 63; incompatible requirements of, 65–6; limits of, 118–49; overemphasis on, 247–8) competitive market, definition of, 46 competitive model, 106; as useful approximation, 57–62; empirical testing of, 184–5; inconsistency of, 64–5 computer waste, disposal of, 232 conspicuous consumption, 90, 158, 205 consumer loans, 260 consumer’s surplus, 75–6, 221 consumerism, 79, 248; formation of, 74 see also conspicuous consumption consumers, people as, 74–92 contracts, 60; perceived costlessness of, 245–6; relational, 141–2, 250, 256 conventions, 169 Cook, P.


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The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes From an Uncertain Science by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Atul Gawande, cognitive dissonance, Johannes Kepler, medical residency, randomized controlled trial, retrograde motion, stem cell, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes

Born in Hertfordshire in 1702, Thomas Bayes was a clergyman and philosopher who served as the minister at the chapel in Tunbridge Wells, near London. He published only two significant papers in his lifetime—the first, a defense of God, and the second, a defense of Newton’s theory of calculus (it was a sign of the times that in 1732, a clergyman found no cognitive dissonance between these two efforts). His best-known work—on probability theory—was not published during his lifetime and was only rediscovered decades after his death. The statistical problem that concerned Bayes requires a sophisticated piece of mathematical reasoning. Most of Bayes’s mathematical compatriots were concerned with problems of pure statistics: If you have a box of twenty-five white balls and seventy-five black balls, say, what is the chance of drawing two black balls in a row?


pages: 284 words: 79,265

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date by Samuel Arbesman

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, bioinformatics, British Empire, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, data science, David Brooks, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, guest worker program, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, National Debt Clock, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, p-value, Paul Erdős, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, SimCity, social contagion, social graph, social web, systematic bias, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation

No one learns something new and then holds it entirely independent of what they already know. We incorporate it into the little edifice of personal knowledge that we have been creating in our minds our entire lives. In fact, we even have a phrase for the state of affairs that occurs when we fail to do this: cognitive dissonance. Ordering our surroundings is the rule of how we as humans operate. In childhood we give names to our toys, and in adulthood we give names to our species, chemical elements, asteroids, and cities. By naming, or, more broadly, by categorizing, we are creating an order to an otherwise chaotic and frightening world.

actuarial escape velocity, 53 Akaike Information Criterion, 69–70 Albert, Réka, 103 aluminum, 53 Ambient Devices, 195 amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), 98, 100–101 anatomy, 23 Anaxagoras, 201 Anaximander, 201 Andreessen, Marc, 123 Annals of Internal Medicine, 107 apatosaurus, 79–82 apoptosis (programmed cell death), 111, 194 Aral, Sinan, 143 Arbesman, Harvey, 96–98, 100–101 Arbesman, Samuel, 79 Ariely, Dan, 172 Asimov, Isaac, 35–36 asteroids, 22, 23, 51, 85–86, 183–84 athletes, 51 Atlantic, 86, 198 Australia, 57, 59, 60 automated discovery programs, 112–14 Automated Mathematician, 112 Babbage, Charles, 106–7 Back to the Future (film), 211 Bak, Per, 137–38 Barabási, Albert-László, 103 Battle of New Orleans, 70 Bede, 115–16 Being Wrong (Schulz), 174–75, 201–2 Berlin, 64 Berman, David, 81–82 Bettencourt, Luís, 135 Bingham, Alpheus, 96–97 biomarkers, 98 Black Death, 52, 64, 71, 73 board games, 2, 51 Bohemian Journal of Counting, 86 Bone Wars, 80, 169 bookkeeping, double-entry, 200 Book of Lost Books, The: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You’ll Never Read (Kelly), 115 Boston Globe, 86 Bowers, John, 85–86 Boyle, Robert, 94 Bradley, David, 62–63 brain, 205, 207 branching process, 104 Bremer, Arthur, 66 British Medical Journal, 83, 212 brontosaurus, 79–82, 169 Brooks, David, 198 Brooks, Rodney, 46 bubonic plague, 52 Black Death, 52, 64, 71, 73 “Bully for Brontosaurus” (Gould), 82 calculations, 43–44 calculus, 67 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer), 90 Caplan, Bryan, 58 Cardarelli, François, 146 Carroll, Sean, 36–37 carrying capacity, 45 cell death, programmed, 111, 194 cell phone calls, 69, 77 Census of Marine Life, 37–39 Chabon, Michael, 184 Chabris, Christopher, 178 chain letters, 91–93 change: fast, 207–9 slow, 171, 172, 190, 191 change blindness, 177–79 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 90 chemical elements, 6, 22, 23, 50–51 atomic number of, 150–51 atomic weight of, 150–52 periodic table of, 50, 150–52, 182 thermal conductivity of, 33–35 Christakis, Nicholas, 21, 75 Christensen, Clayton, 45 chromosomes, 1–2, 89, 92, 143 cirrhosis, 28–30 Cisne, John, 116 citations, 17, 31–32, 90–91, 108 cities, 135–36, 202 citizen science, 19–21 Clarke, Arthur C., 18–19 classification systems, 204–5 Clay Mathematics Institute, 133 climate change, 203 clinical trials, 107–9, 157, 160 coelacanths, 26–27 cognitive biases, 175–76, 177, 188 cognitive dissonance, 4 Colbert, Stephen, 193 Cole, Jonathan, 48–49 Cole, Stephen, 162, 163 computation, human, 20 computers, 20, 41, 53, 110 automated discovery programs, 112–14 Babbage and, 106–7 games and, 2, 51 information transformation and, 43–44, 46 Moore’s Law and, 42 confirmation bias, 177 Consumer Price Index (CPI), 196 Cope, Edward, 80, 81, 169 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 206 CoPub Discovery, 110–12 Cosmos, 121, 129 Couric, Katie, 41 Courtenay-Latimer, Marjorie, 26–27 Cowen, Tyler, 23 cryptography, 134 cumulative knowledge, 56–57 Daily Show, The, 159 Darwin, Charles, 79, 80, 105, 166, 187 data science, 167–68 Davy, Humphry, 51 decline effect, 155–56, 157, 162 de Grey, Aubrey, 53 demographics, 204 Dessler, A.


pages: 258 words: 73,109

The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone, Especially Ourselves by Dan Ariely

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Broken windows theory, cashless society, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, fudge factor, John Perry Barlow, new economy, operational security, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Shai Danziger, shareholder value, social contagion, Steve Jobs, Tragedy of the Commons, Walter Mischel

They found that after giving a short lecture about the benefits of a certain drug, the speaker would begin to believe his own words and soon prescribe accordingly. Psychological studies show that we quickly and easily start believing whatever comes out of our own mouths, even when the original reason for expressing the opinion is no longer relevant (in the doctors’ case, that they were paid to say it). This is cognitive dissonance at play; doctors reason that if they are telling others about a drug, it must be good—and so their own beliefs change to correspond to their speech, and they start prescribing accordingly. The reps told us that they employed other tricks too, turning into chameleons—switching various accents, personalities, and political affiliations on and off.

., 246 cashless society, implications for dishonesty in, 34 Catch Me If You Can (Abagnale), 173 certificates for (false) achievements, 153–54 Chance, Zoë, 145, 264 charitable behavior, 23–24 cheating: aggressive cheaters and, 239 altruistic, 222–23, 225–26, 227–28, 232 being made blatantly aware of, 156–57 being watched and, 223–25, 227 collaborative, see collaborative cheating desire to benefit from, 12–14, 27, 29, 237 ego depletion, 104–6, 111–12 fake products’ impact on, 125–31 in golf, 55–65 honor codes and, 41–45 increasing creativity to increase level of, 184–87 as infection, 191–216; see also infectious nature of cheating infidelity and, 244–45 on IQ-like tests, self-deception and, 145–49, 151, 153–54, 156–57 reducing amount of, 39–51, 248–54 removing oneself from tempting situation and, 108–11 signing forms at top and, 46–51 Ten Commandments and, 39–40, 41, 44 what-the-hell effect and, 127–31, 136 see also dishonesty China, cheating in, 241–42 Chloé accessories, studies with, 123–34 Civil War veterans, 152 classes, infectious nature of cheating in, 195–97 Coca-Cola, stealing money vs., 32–33 cognitive dissonance, 81 cognitive load: ability to resist temptation and, 99–100 judges’ parole rulings and, 102–3 Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), 173–74 coin logic, 167–68 collaborative cheating, 217–35 altruism and, 222–23, 225–26, 227–28, 232 being watched or monitored and, 223–25, 227–28, 234–35 emphasis on working as group or team and, 217–18 infectious nature of cheating in relation to, 221–22 social utility and, 222–23 companies: being one step removed from money and, 34–37 irrationality of, 51 see also corporate dishonesty compliments, insincere, 159 conflicts of interest, 67–95, 238, 248 in academia, 82, 84–85 in dentistry, 67–71, 93, 94, 230 disclosure and, 88–92 dots task and, 129 eradication of, 92–95 exclusion of experimental data and, 86–88 expert witnesses and, 85–86 in financial services industry, 83–85, 93, 94 governmental lobbyists and, 77–78, 94 honesty threshold and, 130–31 inherent inclination to return favors and, 74–75 medical procedures and, 71–74, 92–94, 229 pharmaceutical companies’ influence in academia and, 82 pharma reps and, 78–82 what-the-hell effect and, 129–31 congressional staffers, cheating among, 243 Congress members, PAC money misused by, 208–10 contractors, 93 Conway, Alan, 150–51 Cooper, Cynthia, 215 Cornell University, 250–51 corpora callosa, 164–65 corporate dishonesty: cheating a little bit and, 239–40 Enron collapse and, 1–3, 192, 207, 215, 234 recent spread of, 192, 207–8 cost-benefit analysis, 4–5, 26–27, 237, 239 infectious nature of cheating and, 201–3, 205 see also Simple Model of Rational Crime counterfeits, see fake products creativity, 88, 163–89, 238 brain structure and, 164–65 dark side of, 187–89 fooling oneself and, 165–67 increasing, to increase level of cheating, 184–87 infidelity and, 244 intelligence vs., as predictor of dishonesty, 172–77 link between dishonesty and, 170–72, 186–89 logical-sounding rationales for choices and, 163–64 measures of, 171 moral flexibility and, 186–87 pathological liars and, 168–70 revenge and, 177–84 credit card companies, 239–40 crime, reducing, 52 cultural differences, 240–43 Danziger, Shai, 102 decision making: creating efficient process for, 167–68 effectiveness of group work in, 217–18 rationalization process and, 163–67 Denfield, George, 75 dentists: continuity of care and, 228–31 treating patients using equipment that they own, 67–68, 93–94 unnecessary work and, 67–71 depletion, see ego depletion dieting, 98, 109, 112–13, 114–15 what-the-hell effect and, 127, 130 “dine-and-dash,” 79 diplomas, lying about, 135–36, 153, 154 disabled person, author’s adoption of role of, 143–44 disclosure, 88–92, 248 study on impact of, 89–92 discounting, fixed vs. probabilistic, 194 dishonesty: causes of, 3–4, 5 collaborative, see collaborative cheating cultural differences and, 240–43 discouraging small and ubiquitous forms of, 239–40 importance of first act of, 137 infectious nature of, 191–216; see also infectious nature of cheating intelligence vs. creativity as predictor of, 172–77 link between creativity and, 170–72, 186–89 opportunities for, passed up by vast majority, 238 of others, fake products and assessing of, 131–34 rational and irrational forces in, 254 reducing amount of, 39–51, 248–54 society’s means for dealing with, 4–5 summary of forces that shape (figure), 245 when traveling, 183n see also cheating dissertation proposals and defenses, 101 distance factors, 238 in golf, 58–59 stealing Coca-Cola vs. money and, 32–33 token experiment and, 33–34 doctors: consulting for or investing in drug companies, 82, 93 continuity of care and, 228–29 lecturing about drugs, 81 pharma reps and, 78–82 treating or testing patients with equipment that they own, 92–94 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, 234 dots task: conflict of interest and, 129 description of, 127–29 link between creativity and dishonesty and, 171–72, 185–86 what-the-hell effect and, 129–31 downloads, illegal, 137–39 dressing above one’s station, 120–21 Ebbers, Bernie, 13 ego depletion, 100–116, 238, 249 basic idea behind, 101 cheating and, 104–6 in everyday life, 112–16 removing oneself from tempting situations and, 108–11, 115–16 of Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones, 103 sometimes succumbing to temptation and, 114–15 sudden deaths among students’ grandmothers at exam time and, 106–8 ego motivation, 27 England, cheating in, 242 Enron, 1–3, 192, 207, 215, 234 essay mills, 210–13 exams, sudden deaths among students’ grandmothers and, 106–8 exhaustion, 249 consumption of junk food and, 97–98 judges’ parole rulings and, 102–3 see also ego depletion experimental data, exclusion of, 86–88 expert witnesses, 85–86 explanations, logical-sounding, creation of, 163–65 external signaling, 120–22 dressing above one’s station and, 120–21 fake products and, 121–22 failures, tendency to turn blind eye to, 151 “fair,” determination of what is, 57 fake products, 119, 121–40, 238 illegal downloads and, 137–39 misrepresentation of academic credentials and, 135–36 rationalizations and, 134–35 self-signaling and, 123–26, 135 signaling value of authentic version diluted by, 121–22 suspiciousness of others and, 131–34 what-the-hell effect and, 127–31, 135 farmer’s market, benevolent behavior toward blind customer in, 23–24 fashion, 117–26 counterfeit goods and, 119, 121–22, 121–40, 123–26; see also fake products dressing above one’s station and, 120–21 external signaling and, 120–22 self-signaling and, 122–26 Fastow, Andrew, 2 favors, 74–82 aesthetic preferences and, 75–77 governmental lobbyists and, 77–78 inherent inclination to return, 74–75 pharma reps and, 78–82 see also conflicts of interest Fawal-Farah, Freeda, 117, 118 FBI, 215 Fedorikhin, Sasha, 99–100 Feynman, Richard, 165 financial crisis of 2008, 83–85, 192, 207, 234, 246–47 financial favors, aesthetic preferences and, 77 financial services industry: anonymous monitoring and, 234–35 cheating among politicians vs., 243 conflicts of interest in, 83–85, 93, 94 government regulation of, 234 fishing, lying about, 28 Frederick, Shane, 173 friends, invited to join in questionable behavior, 195 fudge factor theory, 27–29, 237 acceptable rate of lying and, 28–29, 91 distance between actions and money and, 34–37 getting people to cheat less and, 39–51 infidelity and, 244 rationalization of selfish desires and, 53 stealing Coca-Cola vs. money and, 32–33 Gazzaniga, Michael, 164–65 Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), 219–20 generous behavior, 23–24 Get Rich Cheating (Kreisler), 14 Gilovich, Tom, 250, 263–64 Gino, Francesca, 45, 104, 123, 127, 131, 145, 170, 184, 197, 225, 234–35, 242, 258–59 Glass, Ira, 6 Gneezy, Ayelet, 177, 257–58 golf, 55–65 cheating by “average golfer” vs. study participants and, 63–64 mistallying score in, 61–64 moving location of ball in, 58–59, 63 mulligans in, 60–61, 63–64 self-monitoring in, 56–57 survey on cheating in, 57–64 government regulations, 234 grandmothers, sudden deaths of, at exam time, 106–8 gray matter, 169–70 Green, Jennifer Wideman, 117 grocery shopping, ego depletion and, 109, 112–13 group or team work, 220–23 performance unaffected by, 233 possible benefits of, 223 predominance of, in professional lives, 217–18, 235 social utility and, 222–23 see also collaborative cheating Grüneisen, Aline, 210–11, 257 guilt, self-inflicted pain and, 250–52 Harford, Tim, 3–4 Harper’s Bazaar, 117–18 Harvard Medical School, 82 Harvey, Ann, 75 Henn, Steve, 209 heretics, external signaling of, 120 Hinduism, 25 honesty threshold, 130–31 honor codes, 41–45, 204 ideological organizations, 232n “I knew it all along” feeling, 149 illegal businesses, loyalty and care for customers in, 138–39 impulsive (or emotional) vs. rational (or deliberative) parts of ourselves, 97–106 cognitive load and, 99–100 ego depletion and, 100–106 exhaustion and, 97–98 Inbar, Yoel, 250, 264 infectious nature of cheating, 191–216, 249 bacterial infections compared to, 192–93 in class, 195–97 collaborative cheating in relation to, 221–22 Congress members’ misuse of PAC money and, 208–10 corporate dishonesty and, 192, 207–8 cost-benefit analysis and, 201–3, 205 essay mills and, 210–13 matrix task and, 197–204 positive side of moral contagion and, 215–16 regaining ethical health and, 214–15 slow and subtle process of accretion in, 193–94, 214–15 social norms and, 195, 201–3, 205–7, 209 social outsiders and, 205–7 vending machine experiment and, 194–95 infidelity, 244–45 “in good faith” notion, 219–20 Inside Job, 84–85 insurance claims, 49–51 intelligence: creativity vs., as predictor of dishonesty, 172–77 measures of, 173–75 IQ-like tests, cheating and self-deception on, 145–49 certificates emphasizing (false) achievement and, 153–54 increasing awareness of cheating and, 156–57 individuals’ tendency to turn a blind eye to their own failures and, 151 IRS, 47–49 Islam, 249 Israel, cheating in, 241 Italy, cheating in, 242 Jerome, Jerome K., 28 Jobs, Steve, 184 Jones, Bobby, 56 Jones, Marilee, 136 Judaism, 45, 249 judges, exhausted, parole decisions and, 102–3 junk food, exhaustion and consumption of, 97–98 Keiser, Kenneth, 135 Kelling, George, 214–15 John F.


pages: 226 words: 71,540

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web by Cole Stryker

4chan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, eternal september, Firefox, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, informal economy, Internet Archive, it's over 9,000, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, pre–internet, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social bookmarking, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, TED Talk, wage slave, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

These shared points of reference make up life as much as our inside jokes at work or gossip at church. Clay Shirky has made waves in the last few years as being a kind of Marshall McLuhan for the Web 2.0 era. Throughout his two books, Cognitive Dissonance and Here Comes Everybody, Shirky provides the kind of commentary that fills one with excitement for being a part of the web right now. We’re making things happen! It’s a new stage in human social evolution! Look at all the cool stuff the Internet lets us do! In Cognitive Dissonance, Shirky uses the lolcats found at http://www.icanhascheezburger.com as a convenient representative for what he calls “the stupidest possible creative act,” as opposed to, say, improving a Wikipedia entry or creating a platform for financing human rights projects in the third world.


pages: 566 words: 153,259

The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy by Seth Mnookin

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, illegal immigration, index card, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, loss aversion, meta-analysis, mouse model, neurotypical, pattern recognition, placebo effect, precautionary principle, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

But when it comes to decisions around emotionally charged topics, logic often takes a back seat to what are called cognitive biases—essentially a set of unconscious mechanisms that convince us that it is our feelings about a situation and not the facts that represent the truth. One of the better known of these biases is the theory of cognitive dissonance, which was developed by the social psychologist Leon Festinger in the 1950s. In his classic book When Prophecy Fails, Festinger used the example of millennial cults in the days after the prophesied moment of reckoning as an illustration of “disconfirmed” expectations producing counterintuitive results: Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong; what will happen?

Some of the others have been alluded to earlier in this book: When SafeMinds members set out to write an academic paper about a hypothesis they already believed to be true, they set themselves up for expectation bias, where a researcher’s initial conjecture leads to the manipulation of data or the misinterpretation of results, and selection bias, where the meaning of data is distorted by the way in which it was collected. In addition to being a natural reaction to the experience of cognitive dissonance, the hardening conviction on the part of vaccine denialists in the face of studies that undercut their theories is an example of the anchoring effect, which occurs when we give too much weight to the past when making decisions about the future, and of irrational escalation, which is when we base how much energy we’ll devote to something on our previous investment and discount new evidence indicating we were likely wrong.

., 9, 110, 204 Bush, Jenna, 110 Bush, Laura, 110 Bustin, Stephen, 290 Byers, Vera, 288, 294 Byrne, Rhonda, 269 caffeine, 93 California, 18n, 19, 36, 167, 186–87, 229, 272 vaccination rates in, 305 measles outbreak in, 19 mumps outbreak in, 306 pertussis outbreak in, 306 California, University of, at Los Angeles, 70 California, University of, at Santa Cruz, 235n California Department of Public Health, 306 Callous Disregard (Wakefield), 303–4 Calman, Kenneth, 100 calomel, 119–20 Campbell-Smith, Patricia, 288 Canada, 28 cancer, 58, 120, 260 breast, 138–40, 193, 270 drinking milk and, 48n Cardiff University, 163 Carnegie, Andrew, 41 Carrey, Jim, 14n, 256, 258 Carter, Jimmy, 65 case series, 110 Casey, Rhonda, 90, 91 Catholic Church, 81n, 100 cats, 40n, 120 causation, correlation and, 47, 48n, 209 Cedillo, Michael, 181–87, 190–91, 192, 285, 295–97 Cedillo, Michelle, 181–86, 192, 285–97 Omnibus Proceeding and, 190–91, 285, 290, 291, 295–97 Cedillo, Theresa, 181–87, 190–91, 192, 196, 285, 295–97 Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 54, 72, 108, 147–50, 195, 199, 221, 223, 280–81 1999 recommendations on thimerosal and, 6, 125–30, 140 Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of (ACIP), 152–53, 173 anonymous messages sent to, 200 Blaxill’s views on, 222 flu and, 62, 63, 64 Kirby’s book and, 207, 213 McCarthy and, 255 Morgellons syndrome and, 95–96 pertussis and, 280–81 “Unexplained Dermopathy Project” of, 96n vaccine compensation and, 147, 148 vaccine safety and, 148, 150, 170, 171, 173 central nervous system, 40, 120 cerebral palsy, 151, 164 Chadwick, Nicholas, 291–92 Chain, Ernst Boris, 36 Chávez, Hugo, 8 chelation therapy, 235, 260, 261, 263–64 Chen, Robert, 108, 110–11, 150 Kennedy on, 223, 226 Cherry, James, 70 Chicago, University of, 78n chicken pox vaccine, 7 childhood disintegrative disorder, 81 Childhood Neurology (textbook), 289 child rearing, obsession with, 6, 9–10 Chin-Caplan, Sylvia, 286, 292, 293n, 296–97 Chinese herbs, 288 cholera, 39–40 Christian Science, 33–34, 268 cigarette taxes, 210 Civil Registration System, Danish, 154 Clements, John, 150, 223–24 Clinton, Hillary, 95 clustering illusion, 193 CNN, 84, 88, 90, 204 Coalition for Sensible Action for Ending Mercury Induced Neurological Disorders, see SafeMinds Coast to Coast (radio show), 90n Coca-Cola Bottling Co., 51 cocaine, 94 coffee, 93 cognitive biases, 15, 193–95 cognitive defects, 121, 235n cognitive dissonance, 15, 194 cognitive relativism (truthiness), 9 Cohen, Richard, 66 Colbert, Stephen, 9 Colorado, 57, 83 “commonsense” assumptions, 18 Community Health Council, 101 compensation systems, vaccines, 12, 146–48, 175, 178, 179, 180, 220 Condé Nast, 74n confirmation bias, 194–95 Congress, U.S., 64, 65, 95, 125, 167, 257 drug safety and, 146 swine flu and, 147 vaccine compensation and, 148, 178 Connecticut, 305 conspiracy theories, 237 constipation, 116, 144 of Michelle Cedillo, 183 Consumer Protection Act, 102 Continental Army, 27–29 control studies, 109–10, 153 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 81n Cornell University, 235n correlation, causation and, see causation, correlation and coughing, 274–75, 276, 280–81 cowpox, 31–32 creationism, 197n “Crimes in the Cowpox Ring” (Little), 35 Crohn’s disease, 103–5 Crystals, 251, 253 Cure Autism Now (CAN), 137, 142, 228, 232, 233 Cure Within, The (Harrington), 268 Curtis, Valerie, 26 Cutter Laboratories (Cutter Incident), 46–47, 49–53, 55, 146 cysteine, 143 cytomegalovirus, 289 dancing cat disease, 120 Daniels, Mitch, 204 Darwin, Charles, 158n Davis, case study, 286–87 Dawbarns, 115–16 “Deadly Immunity” (Kennedy), 221–27 deafness, 20, 100 death threats, 200, 230 debates, interpretation of facts and, 198–99 Debold, Sam, 187–89 Debold, Vicky, 187–89, 196 decision making, emotions and, 192–93 Deer, Brian, 236, 237, 300, 302 Defeat Autism Now!


pages: 692 words: 127,032

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, smart grid, stem cell, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, War on Poverty, white flight, Winter of Discontent, working poor, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

The key lies in emphasizing the process, which granulates the frame from an authoritarian assertion to an antiauthoritarian exploration of the senses and intellect: “Look, see it yourself?” This has the same effect as Locke’s careful definition of knowledge: It removes science from a rhetorical frame conflict and refocuses the mind on observable reality, causing cognitive dissonance and questioning. When the evolution question is worded with the qualifier “according to the theory of evolution,” that emphasizes process. We could also ask it with the qualifier “according to observations of the fossil record” and would likely get a similar result. This is because science is a physical, objective subset of the broader worldviews that it was carved out from, and that’s okay.

But without that, they find it paralyzing and are motivated to disregard the message.”23 SPEAKING CONSERVATESE When the just world belief is held along with a high level of patriotism, this effect seems to be multiplied, Willer and Feinberg found in a follow-up study.24 “Conservatives are on average more patriotic,” says Willer. “One thing that sets up is a great deal of cognitive dissonance when it comes to global warming. You think America is great, you know it’s a greenhouse-gas emitter, and then you’re told that greenhouse gases are bad for the world.” They found that if you experimentally increase people’s patriotism, their belief in global warming tends to go down. In other experiments, Feinberg and Willer found that liberals moralize environmental issues and conservatives don’t.25 So they wondered, “What if you tried to make conservatives think of global warming as a moral issue?

Sometimes this process can take years to have an impact. But eventually, it does. “I went to the county fairs and I’d meet lots of people,” relates Sanders. “A not infrequent response was ‘Oh, since you’re a scientist you probably believe in global warming.’ This was from people who didn’t. So there was this cognitive dissonance. They know that my being a scientist would make me think that global warming was real, and they both didn’t believe it themselves and thought that there was some dispute about it. And they would maintain the position that it’s an open scientific question. But in person at least, I didn’t feel like they were hostile to me.


Stocks for the Long Run, 4th Edition: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long Term Investment Strategies by Jeremy J. Siegel

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fixed income, German hyperinflation, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, machine readable, market bubble, mental accounting, Money creation, Myron Scholes, new economy, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, popular capitalism, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, tulip mania, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, vertical integration

The propensity to shut out bad news was even more pronounced among analysts in the Internet sector. Many were so convinced that these stocks were the wave of the future that, despite the flood of ghastly news, many downgraded these stocks only after they had fallen 80 or 90 percent! The predisposition to disregard news that does not correspond to one’s worldview is called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort we encounter when we confront evidence that conflicts with our view or suggests that our abilities or actions are not as a good as we thought. We all display a natural tendency to minimize this discomfort, which makes it difficult for us to recognize our overconfidence.

., 60i, 64 Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) index, 45, 46i, 141 Central bank policy, 247 (See also Federal Reserve System [Fed]) Chamberlain, Lawrence, 82 Chamberlain, Neville, 78 Channels, 40 technical analysis and, 294 Chartists (see Technical analysis) Chevron, 176i, 177 ChevronTexaco, 55 Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT): closure due to Chicago River leak, 253, 254i, 255 stock market crash of 1987 and, 273 Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), 264–265 Volatility Index of, 281–282, 282i Chicago Gas, 47 in DJIA, 39i, 48 Chicago Mercantile Exchange, stopping of trading on, 276 Index Chicago Purchasing Managers, 244 China: global market share of, 178, 179i, 180, 180i sector allocation and, 177 China Construction Bank, 175 China Mobile, 177, 183 China National Petroleum Corporation, 182 Chrysler, 64 Chunghwa Telecom, 177 Cipsco (Central Illinois Public Service Co.), 48 Circuit breakers, 276–277 Cisco Systems, 38, 57n, 89, 104, 155, 157, 176i on Nasdaq, 44 Citigroup, 144, 175, 176i Clinton, Bill, 75, 227, 238 Clough, Charles, 86 CNBC, 48, 88 Coca-Cola Co., 59i, 61, 64 Cognitive dissonance, 328 Colby, Robert W., 295–296 Colgate-Palmolive, 59i Colombia Acorn Fund, 346 Comcast, 176 Common stock theory of investment, 82 Common Stocks as Long-Term Investments (Smith), 79, 83, 201 Communications technology, bull market and, 88 Compagnie Française des Pétroles (CFP), 184 Conference Board, 244 Conoco (Continental Oil Co.), 57 ConocoPhillips, 176i, 177, 183 Consensus estimate, 239 Consumer choice, rational theory of, 322 Consumer discretionary sector: in GICS, 53 global shares in, 175i, 176 Consumer Price Index (CPI), 245 369 Consumer staples sector: in GICS, 53 global shares in, 175i, 177 Consumer Value Store, 61 Contrarian investing, 333–334 Core earnings, 107–108 Core inflation, 245–246 Corn Products International, 47 Corn Products Refining, 47 Corporate earnings taxes, failure of stocks as long-term inflation hedge and, 202–203 Correlation coefficient, 168 Corvis Corporation, 156–157 Costs: agency, 100 effects on returns, 350 employment, 246 interest, inflationary biases in, failure of stocks as longterm inflation hedge and, 203–204 pension, controversies in accounting for, 105–107 Cowles, Alfred, 42, 83 Cowles Commission for Economic Research, 42, 83 CPC International, 47 Crane, Richard, 61 Crane Co., 59i, 60i, 61 Cream of Wheat, 62 Creation units, 252 Crowther, Samuel, 3 Cubes (ETFs), 252 Currency hedging, 173 Current yield of bonds, 111 Cutler, David M., 224n CVS Corporation, 61 Cyclical stocks, 144 DaimlerChrysler, 176 Daniel, Kent, 326n Dart Industries, 62 Dash, Srikant, 353n Data mining, 326–327 David, Joseph, 21 DAX index, 238 Day-of-the-week effects, 316–318, 317i Day trading, futures contracts and, 261 Dean Witter, 286 De Bondt, Werner, 302–303, 335 Defined benefit plans, 106–107 Defined contribution plans, 105–106 Delaware and Hudson Canal, 22 Deleveraging, 120 Del Monte Foods, 62 Department of Commerce, 203 Depreciation, failure of stocks as long-term inflation hedge and, 203 Deutsch, Morton, 324n Deutsche Post, 177 Deutsche Telekom, 177 Dexter Corp., 21n Diamonds (ETFs), 252 Dilution of earnings, 104 Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA) Small Company fund, 142n Dimson, Elroy, 18, 19n, 20 Discounts, futures contracts and, 258 Distiller’s Securities Corp., 48 Distilling and Cattle Feeding, 47 in DJIA, 39i, 48 Diversifiable risk, 140 Diversification in world markets, 168–178 currency hedging and, 173 efficient portfolios and, 168–172, 169i–171i private and public capital and, 177–178 sector diversification and, 173–177, 174i The Dividend Investor (Knowles and Petty), 147 Dividend payout ratio, 101 Dividend policy, value of stock as related to, 100–102 370 Dividend yields, 145–149, 146i–149i interest rate on government bonds above, 95–97 ratio of market value to, 120, 120i Dodd, David, 77q, 83, 95q, 139q, 141, 145n, 150, 152, 289q, 304n, 334n Dogs of the Dow strategy, 147–149, 148i, 149i, 336 Dollar cost averaging, 84 Domino Foods, Inc., 47 Dorfman, John R., 147n Double witching, 260–261 Douvogiannis, Martha, 113n Dow, Charles, 38, 290–291 Dow Chemical, 58 Dow Jones & Co., 38 Dow Jones averages, computation of, 39–40 Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), 37, 47 breaks 2000, 85 breaks 3000, 85 breaks 8000, 87 crash of 1929 and, 4 creation of, 38 fall in 1998, 88 firms in, 38–39, 39i following Iraq’s defeat in Gulf War, 85 long-term trends in, 40–41, 41i Nasdaq stocks in, 38 during 1922–1932, 269, 270i during 1980–1990, 269, 270i original firms in, 47–49 original members of, 22 predicting future returns using trend lines and, 41–42 as price-weighted index, 40 Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 Index, 45 Dow 10 strategy, 147–149, 148i, 149i, 336 Dow Theory (Rhea), 290 Index Dow 36,000 (Hassett), 88 Downes, John, 147 Dr.


pages: 505 words: 127,542

If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy? by Raj Raghunathan

behavioural economics, Blue Ocean Strategy, Broken windows theory, business process, classic study, cognitive dissonance, deliberate practice, do well by doing good, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fundamental attribution error, hedonic treadmill, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Phillip Zimbardo, placebo effect, science of happiness, Skype, sugar pill, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Hsieh, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Webster, “Motivated Closing of the Mind: ‘Seizing’ and ‘Freezing,’” Psychological Review 103(2) (1996): 263. (4) Decision avoidance: C. J. Anderson, “The Psychology of Doing Nothing: Forms of Decision Avoidance Result from Reason and Emotion,” Psychological Bulletin 129(1) (2003): 139. (5) Cognitive dissonance: L. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, vol. 2 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962). And (6) Predecisional distortion: J. E. Russo, M. G. Meloy, and V. H. Medvec, “Predecisional Distortion of Product Information,” Journal of Marketing Research (1998): 438–52. clarity on the reasons for our decisions: A.

behavior affects attitude: This theoretical basis for this phenomenon is something called self-perception theory. The idea is that we infer our characteristics (attitudes, opinions, etc.) based on how we see ourselves behaving; see D. J. Bem, “Self-perception: An Alternative Interpretation of Cognitive Dissonance Phenomena,” Psychological Review 74(3) (1967): 183. See also a discussion of a related concept, the insufficient justification paradigm, discussed in R. E. Nisbett, and T. D. Wilson, “Telling More than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review 84(3) (1977): 231.


Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend by Barbara Oakley Phd

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Barry Marshall: ulcers, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, dark triade / dark tetrad, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, double helix, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Mustafa Suleyman, Norbert Wiener, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, prisoner's dilemma, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, union organizing, Y2K

‘The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data,’” Westen says.17 Westen's remarkable study showed that neural information processing related to what he terms “motivated reasoning”—that is, political bias (in this case, at least)—appears to be qualitatively different from reasoning when a person has no strong emotional stake in the conclusions to be reached. The study is thus the first to describe the neural processes that underlie political judgment and decision making, as well as to describe processes involving emote control, psychological defense, confirmatory bias, and some forms of cognitive dissonance. The significance of these findings ranges beyond the study of politics: “Everyone from executives and judges to scientists and politicians may reason to emotionally biased judgments when they have a vested interest in how to interpret ‘the facts,’” according to Westen.18 But is emote control really that common—particularly in such areas as public policy, which cry out for reasoned and rational discourse?

See identity disturbance, chameleon-like behavior charisma as advantage for Machiavellians, 282, 297 Carolyn's, 128 of Enron's CEO, Jeffrey Skilling, 296 powerful men attracted to charisma of troubled, sometimes deeply sinister women, 277 of Princess Diana, 277, 391n54 role of memory in charm and, 312–13 of Texas Southern University's corrupt president, Priscilla Slade, 280 “cheaters” caudate activated (and we feel satisfaction) when we punish, 260 does the percentage of “cheaters” influence culture, 270–71 have led to evolutionary arms race, 258 as Machiavellians, 255–56 Cheng, Nien, suffering during Cultural Revolution, 215–16 Chhang, Youk, haunted by memories of heckling couple being buried alive, 303n “chicken,” game of, exemplifies benefit of seemingly irrational emotional strategies, 260–61 child abuse interference with development of executive control can cause subclinical to descend into clinical borderline, 202 in Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and Abraham Lincoln, 219, 219n MAO-A alleles and, 54, 81–82 psychosocial versus neurobiological “push,” 95 Chinese speakers versus English speakers, neurological differences of, 175–76 Chirot, Daniel, competition for power rarely won by faint of heart, 314 Chomsky, Noam, 174–75 Chou En-lai (Zhou Enlai, premier of China), 239 Christie, Richard, 40–48, 132, 133, 231, 268, 303n chromosomes explanation and illustration of human, 60, 61 illustration of illnesses associated with chromosome seventeen, 64 Churchill, Randolph, talentless, egotistical son of Winston, 293n Churchill, Winston alcoholism and depression, 307 benefits of his impassioned “emote control,” 188, 293 “I am so conceited…” [the point being, he really was], 293, 293n intelligence, 293 mental flexibility, 301, 314 remarkable memory, 313 Stalin's ability to fool, 29–30 cingulate cortex illustration, 73 MAO-A alleles and decreased reaction in, 80–81 serotonin transporters’ influence on signal to amygdala, 74–75 cingulate gyrus, MAO-A alleles can produce smaller, 80 Cixi, Empress, 27 Clark, Wesley, General, NATO commander, 171 clinically significant inherent flaw in DSM-IV use of concept, 375–76n32 in relation to borderline personality disorder, 162–63 Clinton, Bill excellent memory, 313 gullibility regarding Saddam Hussein, 316–17 temper, 300 clock gene, 233 Cluster A, B, and C personality disorders general description, 133–34 MAO-A and Cluster B personality disorders, 80 Cochran, Gregory argues against historical theory that only social forces matter, 267 Ashkenazi genetic mutations and intelligence, 87 cognitive dissonance, neuroimaging study reveals processes underlying, 190 cognitive dysfunction anorexia and, 142n borderline personality disorder anterior cingulate cortex dysfunction and inability to focus on something undesirable, 182 as dimensional trait of, 164 as heritable trait in, 85 irrationality under effect of strong emotions, 204 overview related to neuroscience results, 205–206 paranoid thinking (a form of cognitive dysfunction) as trait to define personality disorder used by DSM-IV, 164 delusional thinking outright, 165, 302–307 in schizophrenia and schizotypal personality disorder, 135, 227 effect of stress on, 202 “end justifies the means” behavior, 204 irrationality provides successful strategy for manipulation and control, 260–61 in Machiavellians, 209 in Machiavellians as part of precise definition used in this book, 281 neuroscience behind anterior cingulate cortex role in focus and attention, 182 cognitive dissonance, neuroimaging study reveals processes underlying, 190 dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and, 181–82, 203 lack of common sense in those with damage to dorsolateral and ventromedial areas, 203 prefrontal cortex dysfunction and, 180 role in irrationally inflexible behavior, 204 ventromedial cortex and, 182, 203 paranoia (a form of cognitive dysfunction) provides for success in dangerous social structures, 250 seen in individuals with subclinical symptoms of borderline personality disorder, 201 in people Diana, Princess, 277 general discussion of good and bad effects, with different examples, 300–307, 306n–307n, 314–15 Lay, Ken, Chairman of Enron, 296–98 Mao.

See identity disturbance, chameleon-like behavior charisma as advantage for Machiavellians, 282, 297 Carolyn's, 128 of Enron's CEO, Jeffrey Skilling, 296 powerful men attracted to charisma of troubled, sometimes deeply sinister women, 277 of Princess Diana, 277, 391n54 role of memory in charm and, 312–13 of Texas Southern University's corrupt president, Priscilla Slade, 280 “cheaters” caudate activated (and we feel satisfaction) when we punish, 260 does the percentage of “cheaters” influence culture, 270–71 have led to evolutionary arms race, 258 as Machiavellians, 255–56 Cheng, Nien, suffering during Cultural Revolution, 215–16 Chhang, Youk, haunted by memories of heckling couple being buried alive, 303n “chicken,” game of, exemplifies benefit of seemingly irrational emotional strategies, 260–61 child abuse interference with development of executive control can cause subclinical to descend into clinical borderline, 202 in Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and Abraham Lincoln, 219, 219n MAO-A alleles and, 54, 81–82 psychosocial versus neurobiological “push,” 95 Chinese speakers versus English speakers, neurological differences of, 175–76 Chirot, Daniel, competition for power rarely won by faint of heart, 314 Chomsky, Noam, 174–75 Chou En-lai (Zhou Enlai, premier of China), 239 Christie, Richard, 40–48, 132, 133, 231, 268, 303n chromosomes explanation and illustration of human, 60, 61 illustration of illnesses associated with chromosome seventeen, 64 Churchill, Randolph, talentless, egotistical son of Winston, 293n Churchill, Winston alcoholism and depression, 307 benefits of his impassioned “emote control,” 188, 293 “I am so conceited…” [the point being, he really was], 293, 293n intelligence, 293 mental flexibility, 301, 314 remarkable memory, 313 Stalin's ability to fool, 29–30 cingulate cortex illustration, 73 MAO-A alleles and decreased reaction in, 80–81 serotonin transporters’ influence on signal to amygdala, 74–75 cingulate gyrus, MAO-A alleles can produce smaller, 80 Cixi, Empress, 27 Clark, Wesley, General, NATO commander, 171 clinically significant inherent flaw in DSM-IV use of concept, 375–76n32 in relation to borderline personality disorder, 162–63 Clinton, Bill excellent memory, 313 gullibility regarding Saddam Hussein, 316–17 temper, 300 clock gene, 233 Cluster A, B, and C personality disorders general description, 133–34 MAO-A and Cluster B personality disorders, 80 Cochran, Gregory argues against historical theory that only social forces matter, 267 Ashkenazi genetic mutations and intelligence, 87 cognitive dissonance, neuroimaging study reveals processes underlying, 190 cognitive dysfunction anorexia and, 142n borderline personality disorder anterior cingulate cortex dysfunction and inability to focus on something undesirable, 182 as dimensional trait of, 164 as heritable trait in, 85 irrationality under effect of strong emotions, 204 overview related to neuroscience results, 205–206 paranoid thinking (a form of cognitive dysfunction) as trait to define personality disorder used by DSM-IV, 164 delusional thinking outright, 165, 302–307 in schizophrenia and schizotypal personality disorder, 135, 227 effect of stress on, 202 “end justifies the means” behavior, 204 irrationality provides successful strategy for manipulation and control, 260–61 in Machiavellians, 209 in Machiavellians as part of precise definition used in this book, 281 neuroscience behind anterior cingulate cortex role in focus and attention, 182 cognitive dissonance, neuroimaging study reveals processes underlying, 190 dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and, 181–82, 203 lack of common sense in those with damage to dorsolateral and ventromedial areas, 203 prefrontal cortex dysfunction and, 180 role in irrationally inflexible behavior, 204 ventromedial cortex and, 182, 203 paranoia (a form of cognitive dysfunction) provides for success in dangerous social structures, 250 seen in individuals with subclinical symptoms of borderline personality disorder, 201 in people Diana, Princess, 277 general discussion of good and bad effects, with different examples, 300–307, 306n–307n, 314–15 Lay, Ken, Chairman of Enron, 296–98 Mao.


pages: 517 words: 139,477

Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies by Jeremy Siegel

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, carried interest, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, computer age, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, fundamental attribution error, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, joint-stock company, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, machine readable, market bubble, mental accounting, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Northern Rock, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uptick rule, Vanguard fund

The propensity to shut out bad news was even more pronounced among analysts in the Internet sector. Many were so convinced that these stocks were the wave of the future that, despite the flood of ghastly news, many downgraded these stocks only after they had fallen 80 or 90 percent! Confronting news that does not correspond to one’s worldview creates what is called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort we encounter when we address evidence that conflicts with our view or suggests that our abilities or actions are not as a good as we thought. We all display a natural tendency to minimize this discomfort, which makes it difficult for us to recognize our overconfidence.

Thaler, “Mental Accounting Matters,” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, vol. 12 (1999), pp. 183-206. 21. Hersh Shefrin and Meir Statman, “The Disposition to Sell Winners Too Early and Ride Losers Too Long: Theory and Evidence,” Journal of Finance, vol. 40, no. 3 (1985), pp. 777-792. 22. See Tom Chang, David Solomon, and Mark Westerfield, “Looking for Someone to Blame: Delegation, Cognitive Dissonance, and the Disposition Effect,” May 2013. 23. Leroy Gross, The Art of Selling Intangibles, New York: New York Institute of Finance, 1982. 24. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” Science, vol. 185 (1974), pp. 1124-1131. 25. Terrance Odean, “Are Investors Reluctant to Realize Their Losses?”


pages: 82 words: 21,414

The Myth of Meritocracy: Why Working-Class Kids Still Get Working-Class Jobs (Provocations Series) by James Bloodworth

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, cognitive dissonance, Downton Abbey, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, income inequality, light touch regulation, meritocracy, precariat, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, zero-sum game

One in twenty households could not afford to feed their children properly.120 Last year, almost two-fifths of teachers said they had seen children who had not had enough to eat turning up for lessons.121 Another recent poll found that nearly half of teachers had taken food in to school to feed ravenous pupils.122 Against this backdrop, all talk of meritocracy brings to mind Richard Tawney’s characterisation of those who preach equality of opportunity while ‘[resisting] most strenuously attempts to apply it’.123 Here is located the fissure on the left between those who genuinely seek to create a socially mobile society and those who pay lip service to it while pursuing policies antithetical to a meritocratic order. Because New Labour’s verbal commitment to social mobility lacked a corresponding drive to reduce inequality, its rhetoric gave off a strong whiff of cognitive dissonance. Thus, after thirteen years of Labour governments, Britain remained a society dominated by the privileged and, invariably, the children of the privileged. If social mobility was not notably worse in 2010 than it was in 1997, it was not demonstrably better either. The acceptance by New Labour of large inequalities of wealth, buttressed by the radical-sounding mantra of equality of opportunity, produced a society in which the odds remained firmly stacked against those from poorer homes.


pages: 306 words: 82,765

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

anti-fragile, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, data science, David Graeber, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, equity premium, fake news, financial independence, information asymmetry, invisible hand, knowledge economy, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, mental accounting, microbiome, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, survivorship bias, systematic bias, tail risk, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, Yogi Berra

We saw the effect with the Vietnam War. Most people (sort of) believed that certain courses of action were absurd, but it was easier to continue than to stop—particularly since one can always spin a story explaining why continuing is better than stopping (the backfitting story of sour grapes now known as cognitive dissonance). We have been witnessing the same problem in the U.S. attitude toward Saudi Arabia. It is clear since the attack on the World Trade Center (in which most of the attackers were Saudi citizens) that someone in that nonpartying kingdom had a hand—somehow—in the matter. But no bureaucrat, fearful of oil disruptions, made the right decision—instead, the absurd invasion of Iraq was endorsed because it appeared to be simpler.

A BRIEF TOUR OF YOUR GRANDPARENTS’ WISDOM Let us now close by sampling a few ideas that exist in both ancient lore and are sort of reconfirmed by modern psychology. These are sampled organically, meaning they are not the result of research but of what spontaneously comes to mind (remember this book is called Skin in the Game), then verified in the texts. Cognitive dissonance (a psychological theory by Leon Festinger about sour grapes, by which people, in order to avoid inconsistent beliefs, rationalize that, say, the grapes they can’t reach got to be sour). It is seen first in Aesop, of course, repackaged by La Fontaine. But its roots look even more ancient, with the Assyrian Ahiqar of Nineveh.


pages: 271 words: 83,944

The Sellout: A Novel by Paul Beatty

affirmative action, Apollo 13, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, cotton gin, desegregation, El Camino Real, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Lao Tzu, late fees, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, p-value, publish or perish, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skinner box, telemarketer, theory of mind, War on Poverty, white flight, yellow journalism

It’s a guilt that has obligated me to mutter “My bad” for every misplaced bounce pass, politician under federal investigation, every bug-eyed and Rastus-voiced comedian, and every black film made since 1968. But I don’t feel responsible anymore. I understand now that the only time black people don’t feel guilty is when we’ve actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief. In the way that cooning is a relief, voting Republican is a relief, marrying white is a relief—albeit a temporary one. Uncomfortable with being so comfortable, I make one last attempt to be at one with my people.

‘Now what did you learn?’ The boy starts rubbing his cheek and says, ‘I learned that I’ve been white for only ten minutes and I hate you niggers already!’” The kids couldn’t tell whether he was joking or just ranting, but they laughed anyway, each finding something funny in his expressions, his inflections, the cognitive dissonance in hearing the word “nigger” coming from the mouth of a man as old as the slur itself. Most of them had never seen his work. They just knew he was a star. That’s the beauty of minstrelsy—its timelessness. The soothing foreverness in the languid bojangle of his limbs, the rhythm of his juba, the sublime profundity of his jive as he ushered the kids into the farm, retelling his joke in Spanish to an uncaptive audience running past him, cups and thermoses in hand, scattering the damn chickens.


pages: 303 words: 81,071

Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan

3D printing, augmented reality, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, driverless car, fake news, Free Software Foundation, friendly fire, gentrification, global supply chain, hydroponic farming, Internet of things, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, Panamax, post-Panamax, ransomware, RFID, rolling blackouts, security theater, self-driving car, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, surveillance capitalism, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning

* * * He tries to summon moisture to his dry mouth, takes a breath, puts on his best British accent. That’s meant to be worth something here, right? “Excuse me, I was just wondering—do you know how much longer it will be?” She looks up at him from across an expanse of IKEA farmed pine, his skin color and accent triggering a wave of cognitive dissonance to flicker across her face. Her skin pale against the beige. She stares into mid-space, focusing on text he can’t see. “Rushdi Manaan?” “Yes.” “You shouldn’t be too long. They’re just running some background checks. You’ll be out within a couple of hours.” “Okay.” He tries to hide his shock at a couple of hours.

At least half sit on the floor, wrapping themselves in blankets, huddled together. Here and there some tend to the injured and fallen. Others stand, grouped together in suspicious circles, whispering to one another and glancing around. Faces are stunned, tired, resigned, and sobbing eyes are bleached red by gas and tears. Anika is struck by a sudden, disturbed cognitive dissonance: all-too-familiar news footage of foreign war zones or distant refugee camps suddenly playing out on her doorstep, and all to a relentless soundtrack of grime-tinged techno. Industrial drums and distorted analog chord stabs. Refugee crisis or music festival? Terrorist attack aftermath or warehouse rave morning-after?


pages: 297 words: 84,009

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Of course, I have to get along with those associates on a very regular basis, whereas big business remains at a distance, emotionally, physically, and otherwise. So I tend to mentally blur over the fact that my close associates lie to me so that I may continue to cooperate with them and to enjoy those interactions. Cognitive dissonance rules, but I neglect this reality most of the time, unless of course those lies prevent me from getting what I want, in which case the lies will meet with some partial but still largely nonconfrontational pushback. In contrast, it is easy enough to curse Shell but every now and then pull into one of their stations and fill my car with gas.

Bernstein, Elizabeth best sellers See also publishing Bezos, Jeff See also Amazon Big Brother See privacy Big Data Big Pharma Big Tech disappearance of competition impact on intelligence innovation and loss of privacy and overview Bing Bird, Larry Bitcoin Black, Leon BlackBerry Blackstone blockchain Bloxham, Eleanor Blue Cross/Blue Shield brand loyalty Brexit Brin, David Brooks, Nathan bubbles, financial sector Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Graeber) Burger King cable TV cable companies cable news Capital One capitalism “creative destruction” and Friedman on logic of market churn and media and public’s view of short-termism venture capitalists workers and young people and See also crony capitalism Capitalism for the People, A (Zingales) Carr, Nicholas Carrier CEOs deaths of increases in salary overview pay for creating value short-termism and skill set China American manufacturing and Apple and facial recognition technology financial innovations financial institutions multinational corporations and productivity retail and tech companies and See also Alibaba Cialdini, Robert Cisco Citibank Citizens United decision See also Supreme Court Civil War Clark, Andrew E. class Clinton, Hillary Coase, Ronald cognition cognitive dissonance cognitive efficiency cognitive strengths Collison, Patrick and John compensating differential conspiracy theories control firms co-ops copyright corporations attempts to sway public opinion downside of personalization public dislike of Countrywide “creative destruction” credit cards credit card information credit card system privacy and crony capitalism business influence on government class and multinational corporations overview privilege and state monopoly status quo bias See also capitalism cryptocurrencies See also Bitcoin Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly Curry, Stephen CVS cybersecurity “daily effective experiences” See also Kahneman, Daniel; Krueger, Alan Daley, William Damaske, Sarah Damore, James daycare defense spending DejaNews Democratic Party Desan, Mathieu Deutsche Bank discrimination Dollar General Dow Scrubbing Bubbles Dream of the Red Chamber DuckDuckGo Dying for a Paycheck (Pfeffer) eBay education email employment/unemployment European Union ex post Exxon eyeglass companies Facebook advertising and AI and “anti-diversity memo” censorship and China and competition and complaints about employees “filter bubble” income inequality and information and innovation and monopoly and News Feed politics and privacy and Russian-manipulated content venture capital and See also Zuckerberg, Mark facial recognition technology “fake news” See also media Fama, Eugene fast-food Fehr, Ernst Ferguson, Niall financial crisis financial sector America as tax and banking haven American stock performance banks “too big” global importance of US growth information technology and intermediation overview venture capital and American innovation Financial Times fintech flow Ford Motor Company Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Foroohar, Rana fraud, businesses and CEOs in laboratory games comparative perspective cross-cultural game theory nonprofits vs. for-profits overview research on corporate behavior spread of information and tax gap trust and free trade French, Kenneth Friedman, Milton Friendster Fritzon, Katarina fundraising Gabaix, Xavier Gates, Bill GDP General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade General Electric General Motors Gilens, Martin Glass-Steagall Act Gmail Goetzmann, William N.


pages: 432 words: 85,707

QI: The Third Book of General Ignorance (Qi: Book of General Ignorance) by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Boris Johnson, British Empire, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, double helix, epigenetics, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route

One suggestion is that lower temperatures during the ‘Little Ice Age’ of the late seventeenth century led to slower tree growth, producing denser wood with superior acoustic properties. Others believe Stradivarius added a secret ingredient to his varnish or used magically endowed wood from ancient churches. The human tendency to experience expensive things as ‘better’ is driven by the psychological phenomenon known as ‘cognitive dissonance’. We become uncomfortable if reality doesn’t live up to our expectations, so we adjust reality accordingly. And it works. If people pay a higher price for an energy drink, like Red Bull, they are able to solve more brain-teasers afterwards than those who paid a lower price for the same drink.

K. 1 chickens 1, 2 childbirth 1 Chile 1, 2 chimpanzees 1 China, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 Chinchorro 1 chlorine 1 chlorofluorocarbons 1 chocolate 1 Cholula pyramid 1 Chopin, Frédéric 1 chopines 1 chromosomes 1 Christianity 1, 2, 3, 4 Christmas 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Churchill, Winston S. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ciabatta 1 Cielo, César 1 cinnamon 1, 2 Cistercians 1 citrus fruit 1, 2 clams 1 Clare of Assisi, St 1 Clarke, Jeremiah 1 CLARKSON, JEREMY 1, 2, 3 claws 1 Clement X, Pope 1 Cleopatra 1 Clinton, Bill 1 cloacal kiss 1 cloning 1 Club 1 2 coal-fired power stations 1 cobras 1 coca leaves 1 cocaine 1 Cochabamba 1 Cochran, Josephine Garis 1 Cockerell, Christopher 1 cockroaches 1 coffee, 1 cognitive dissonance 1 Cold War 1 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1 COLES, RICHARD 1 Colosseum 1 colour 1, 2, 3 Columbus, Christopher 1, 2 comb jellies 1 Commonwealth 1 compost 1 Conan Doyle, Arthur 1, 2, 3 conception 1 conditioned response 1 conscription 1 conservation 1 Conservatives 1 contract law 1 Cook, Thomas 1 Cool Running (film) 1 COREN-MITCHELL, VICTORIA 1 Cornelius, Robert 1 Cornwall 1, 2, 3 corrugated iron 1 corsets 1 Corvan, Ned 1 Coryat, Thomas 1 Coutts, Thomas 1 Coventry 1 cowbirds 1 cowboys 1, 2 cows 1, 2 crabs 1, 2, 3, 4 Creighton, James George Aylwin 1 Crick, Francis 1 cricket 1, 2 crickets 1 crime rates 1 Croatia 1 crocodiles 1 Croton 1 Crown Court 1 crows 1, 2 crude oil 1 Cruikshank, John 1 Cruise, Tom 1 crusades 1 crushing 1 cryogenics 1 cryonics 1 Cuba 1, 2 cuckoos 1 Cup-a-Soup 1 Currey, Donald 1 Cyprus 1 Dakar Rally 1 damnatio ad bestias 1 dams 1 dangerous sports 1 Darius the Great 1 Darwin, Charles 1, 2, 3, 4 Darwin, Emma 1 Darwin, George 1 Darwin, William Erasmus 1 dating 1 dating systems 1 Dauger, Eustache 1 David, Jacques-Louis 1 DAVIES, ALAN 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 Dead Sea 1 deductive reasoning 1 DEE, JACK 1 Denmark 1, 2, 3, 4 Dennis the Small 1 deserts 1 diabetes 1, 2 diamonds 1 diarrhoea 1, 2 DiCaprio, Leonardo 1 dictionaries 1 Dienekes 1 Dietrich, Marlene 1 Digby, Everard 1 dinosaurs 1, 2, 3 Dionysus Exiguus 1 dishwashers 1 Disney, Walt 1 DNA 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Doctor Who 1 Dodge City 1 dogs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Dolbear, Amos 1 dolphins 1, 2 Don, Monty 1 Don Juan Pond 1 doves 1 dragonflies 1 Drake, Sir Francis 1, 2 drawings 1 driving tests 1 drowning 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 drunkenness 1 dugongs 1 Dumas, Alexandre 1 dumb laws 1 Duncan, King of Scotland 1 dunce 1 Dunlop, John Boyd 1 Duns Scotus 1 Dürer, Albrecht 1 Dutch language 1 dyeing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 E. coli 1 Ea 1 Earth 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 atmosphere 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 magnetic field 1, 2, 3 orbit 1, 2, 3 population 1, 2 earthquakes 1 earthshine 1 earthworms 1, 2, 3 Easter 1, 2 eating for two 1 Eaton, Cyrus 1 Ebola 1 echolocation 1 Edinburgh 1 Edward VII, King 1 Edward VIII, King 1 Edward the Confessor 1 eggs 1, 2 Egypt 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Einstein, Albert 1, 2 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 1 elasticity 1 Eleanor of Aquitaine 1 elections 1 electricity 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 electrolytes 1 elephants 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Elizabeth I, Queen 1, 2 Elizabeth II, Queen 1, 2, 3, 4 Ellis, Eric 1 emissions standards 1 Empire State Building 1, 2 energy 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 energy drinks 1 England 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33 England, Bank of 1 English Civil War 1 English language 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 eons 1 Ephialtes 1 epigenetics 1 epochs 1 eras 1 ergs 1 Eriksson, Leif 1 Escoffier, Auguste 1 Ethiopia 1, 2 ethylene 1 EU 1 eucalyptus trees 1 Eugenie, Princess 1 euphemisms 1 Europe 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 European Convention on Human Rights 1 Eurytus 1 Evening Birds 1 Everest (Churchill’s nanny) 1 Everest (mountain) 1 Eves, Stuart 1 exosphere 1 extracellular matrix 1 eyelids 1 Fair Isle 1 Famous Five 1 Farrow, Mia 1 fascism 1 fashion 1 Faunce, Thomas 1 feathers 1 Federal Reserve 1 feeding of the 5,000 1 female franchise 1 Ferrero Rocher 1 Ferris, George Washington Gale 1 ferris wheels 1, 2 FIELDING, NOEL 1 Fiennes, Sir Ranulph 1 film-making 1 finches 1, 2 fingers 1 Finkelstein, Nat 1 Finland 1 Fiorelli, Giuseppe 1 fire extinguishers 1 First World War 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Fisher, John Arbuthnot 1 Fitzgerald, F.


pages: 309 words: 79,414

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists by Julia Ebner

23andMe, 4chan, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, game design, gamification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Greta Thunberg, information security, job satisfaction, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, off grid, OpenAI, Overton Window, pattern recognition, pre–internet, QAnon, RAND corporation, ransomware, rising living standards, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, SQL injection, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Transnistria, WikiLeaks, zero day

When your main scapegoats are Jews and Muslims, and you consider Blacks and Arabs biologically inferior, it can be a little discomfiting to find out you are a quarter Jewish and an eighth Moroccan. New technologies tend to reinforce radicalisation dynamics, but genetic tests show that they can also have the opposite effect. The cognitive dissonance that arises when mono-ethnic ideals of the future meet the multiracial realities of the past can set in motion profound attitude and behaviour changes. Aaron Panofsky of UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics and Joan Donovan of the Data and Society Research Institute analysed discussions around genetic ancestry on the white supremacist forums of Stormfront.

Apocalyptic fantasies can be appealing, as they offer a bridge between fictional tales and real life.10 As the British historian Norman Cohn showed in his famous book The Pursuit of the Millennium, millenarian expectations of profound societal transformation often went hand in hand with social unrest in the Middle Ages.11 The term ‘apocalypse’ comes from the Greek word apokalypsis, which means ‘uncovering, disclosure, revelation’.12 But it’s hard to deny that the predicted disclosure has been delayed multiple times by now.13 ‘Lol, 5453 threads, and still no storm’, one commentator wrote mockingly on the image-board website 8chan, which is used widely among far-right and conspiracy-theory adherents. ‘The entire country is laughing at you Q losers.’ As the predicted disclosure is constantly postponed, the clash between imagination and reality can create cognitive dissonance, a feeling of mental discomfort. The incentive to reinterpret facts and reframe experiences tends to grow the more time and money one invests in the failed apocalypse.14 Just take the Doomsday preppers who spend $6,000 on freeze-dried and dehydrated food cans worth around 50,000 servings in order to survive ‘the inevitable zombie apocalypse’, which televangelists like Jim Bakker, host of the American Survival Food show, predict and postpone on a weekly basis.15 (Next to these zombie apocalypse kits the fifteen-kilo Brexit emergency boxes of chicken tikka and beef and potato stew look fairly reasonable.)16 Conspiracy theories, however absurd and counterfactual, can inspire dangerous real-life action.


pages: 291 words: 90,200

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age by Manuel Castells

"World Economic Forum" Davos, access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, call centre, centre right, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, income inequality, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Port of Oakland, social software, statistical model, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

Among the causes for this extraordinary reversal of public opinion were the austerity policies implemented responsibly by the social democratic government in order to restore the economy; the pro-European Union stand of the governing coalition, in contrast to the nationalistic, xenophobic attitude of traditional Icelandic parties; and the resentment of the majority of the population against their deep indebtedness as a result of the mortgage crisis and the inefficiency of the government in resolving the debt crisis. But perhaps the main source of discontent was the cognitive dissonance between the hopes of the social movement and the grim reality of institutional politics, a recurrent theme in the history of social movements. As a result, the new parliament tabled the project of constitutional reform and one of the most daring experiments in constitutional democracy became yet another faded dream.

Confirming the pre-eminence of AKP in Turkish politics, the first presidential election held in 2014 after a constitutional change to establish a more presidential regime was easily won by Erdogan, the leader of AKP and the most direct adversary of the Gezi movement. A number of reasons have been advanced to explain this cognitive dissonance between the popularity of the Gezi movement in June 2013 and the undisputed electoral success of AKP and Erdogan in 2014. Beyond specific circumstances that would require a complex analytical journey through the intricacies of Turkish politics, the most convincing explanation is the persistence of fundamental cleavages in the Turkish society that are fixed in rigid political alignments.


pages: 307 words: 94,069

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Atul Gawande, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate social responsibility, en.wikipedia.org, fundamental attribution error, impulse control, Jeff Hawkins, Libby Zion, longitudinal study, medical residency, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Piper Alpha, placebo effect, publish or perish, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs

They thought it was a half-finished skeletal blight on their fair city, and they responded with a frenzy of protest. But as time went by, public opinion evolved from hatred to acceptance to adoration. The mere exposure principle assures us that a change effort that initially feels unwelcome and foreign will gradually be perceived more favorably as people grow accustomed to it. Also, cognitive dissonance works in your favor. People don’t like to act in one way and think in another. So once a small step has been taken, and people have begun to act in a new way, it will be increasingly difficult for them to dislike the way they’re acting. Similarly, as people begin to act differently, they’ll start to think of themselves differently, and as their identity evolves, it will reinforce the new way of doing things.

See Kazdin (2008), The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child: With No Pills, No Therapy, No Contest of Wills, New York: Houghton Mifflin. The quotations are from p. 34. Change isn’t an event; it’s a process. Chip Heath thanks Bo Brockman for teaching this idea. Steven Kelman. On pp. 22–24, Kelman explains why mere exposure and cognitive dissonance may cause people to resist change. Then, in an insightful analysis on pp. 123–127, he shows how the same factors make change hard to stop once they get going. See Kelman (2005), Unleashing Change: A Study of Organizational Renewal in Government, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.


pages: 321 words: 92,828

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement by Rich Karlgaard

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, book value, Brownian motion, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goodhart's law, hiring and firing, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, move fast and break things, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, power law, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sunk-cost fallacy, tech worker, TED Talk, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor

The sunk-cost fallacy is a major impediment to making positive changes and subsequently living a better life. There are additional psychological factors, however, that hold us back from quitting things in order to be happier or more successful. According Dan Ariely, author of the bestselling 2008 book Predictably Irrational, we’re hindered in quitting by a mental state called “cognitive dissonance.” Ariely says that if we’ve acted in a certain way, over time, we’ll overly justify our behavior. If we’ve put ten years into a job—even though we despise that job on a daily basis—we’ll convince ourselves that we love it. In addition, Ariely suggests that we actually like suffering for things we love.

., “Are Older Adults Less Subject to the Sunk-Cost Fallacy Than Younger Adults?,” Psychological Science 19, no. 7 (2008): 650–52. “Assume that you have spent”: Hal R. Arkes and Peter Ayton, “The Sunk Cost and Concorde Effects: Are Humans Less Rational Than Lower Animals?,” Psychological Bulletin 125, no. 5 (1999): 591. “cognitive dissonance”: Dan Ariely in Stephen J. Dubner, “The Upside of Quitting,” Freakonomics (podcast), http://bit.ly/​2x8fxoY. See also Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational (New York: HarperCollins, 2008). “smart quitters”: Seth Godin, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) (New York: Penguin, 2007).


pages: 304 words: 95,306

Duty of Care: One NHS Doctor's Story of the Covid-19 Crisis by Dr Dominic Pimenta

3D printing, Boris Johnson, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, fake news, global pandemic, iterative process, lockdown, post-truth, Rubik’s Cube, school choice, Skype, social distancing, stem cell

It strikes me as such a strange thing to say, but such an honest one. Perhaps it’s what we should all be saying. The concept of cognitive dissonance, believing two contradictory things simultaneously, is simply a part of being human. We spend far too much time trying to justify our thinking, to make it logical like the ordered world we try to create, but we aren’t consistent or rational beings, and our brains are not simply mushy circuit boards. This cognitive dissonance, of understanding the huge potential scale of coronavirus and yet simply not translating that into true concern, seems nearly universal.


pages: 901 words: 234,905

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, behavioural economics, belling the cat, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Defenestration of Prague, desegregation, disinformation, Dutch auction, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Joan Didion, language acquisition, long peace, meta-analysis, More Guns, Less Crime, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, plutocrats, Potemkin village, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the new new thing, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

They overestimate their contribution to a joint effort, chalk up their successes to skill and their failures to luck, and always feel that the other side has gotten the better deal in a compromise.81 People keep up these self-serving illusions even when they are wired to what they think is an accurate lie-detector. This shows that they are not lying to the experimenter but lying to themselves. For decades every psychology student has learned about “cognitive disson Sance reduction,” in which people change whatever opinion it takes to maintain a positive self-image.82 The cartoonist Scott Adams illustrates it well: Dilbert reprinted by permission of United Feature Syndicate, Inc. If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophony of spoinks.

Among them I would include the following: The primacy of family ties in all human societies and the consequent appeal of nepotism and inheritance.20 The limited scope of communal sharing in human groups, the more common ethos of reciprocity, and the resulting phenomena of social loafing and the collapse of contributions to public goods when reciprocity cannot be implemented.21 The universality of dominance and violence across human societies (including supposedly peaceable hunter-gatherers) and the existence of genetic and neurological mechanisms that underlie it.22 The universality of ethnocentrism and other forms of group-against-group hostility across societies, and the ease with which such hostility can be aroused in people within our own society.23 The partial heritability of intelligence, conscientiousness, and antisocial tendencies, implying that some degree of inequality will arise even in perfectly fair economic systems, and that we therefore face an inherent tradeoff between equality and freedom.24 The prevalence of defense mechanisms, self-serving biases, and cognitive dissonance reduction, by which people deceive themselves about their autonomy, wisdom, and integrity.25 The biases of the human moral sense, including a preference for kin and friends, a susceptibility to a taboo mentality, and a tendency to confuse morality with conformity, rank, cleanliness, and beauty.26 It is not just conventional scientific data that tell us the mind is not infinitely malleable.

., & Gächter, S. 2000. Fairness and retaliation: The economics of reciprocity. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 14, 159–181. Fernández-Jalvo, Y., Diez, J. C., Bermúdez de Castro, J. M., Carbonell, E., & Arsuaga, J. L. 1996. Evidence of early cannibalism. Science, 271, 277–278. Festinger, L. 1957. A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Finch, C. E., & Kirkwood, T. B. L. 2000. Chance, development, and aging. New York: Oxford University Press. Fischoff, S. 1999. Psychology’s quixotic quest for the media-violence connection. Journal of Media Psychology, 4. Fisher, S. E., Vargha-Khadem, F., Watkins, K.


pages: 840 words: 224,391

Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel by Max Blumenthal

airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, centre right, cognitive dissonance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, European colonialism, facts on the ground, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, intentional community, knowledge economy, megacity, moral panic, Mount Scopus, nuclear ambiguity, open borders, plutocrats, surplus humans, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, urban planning, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

They planted the idea in our heads that the system would only improve and become progressive through internal, collective criticism. So the notion that things could go very wrong, with war crimes and abuses of power or rape and sexual harassment on the base—that was out of the question. We developed a sense of cognitive dissonance that allowed us to push away all the bad thoughts.” In one of the most glaring instances of Israel’s disregard for civilian life during the Second Intifada, then–Air Force commander Dan Halutz and Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter authorized the assassination of a top-ranking Hamas military commander, Salah Shehadeh, while he slept with his family in a crowded apartment bloc in downtown Gaza City.

These photos were documents of a colonial culture in which Jewish Israeli youth became conditioned to act as sadistic overlords toward their Palestinian neighbors, and of a perpetual conquest that demanded indoctrination begin at an early age and continue perpetually throughout their lives. The young soldiers provided a perfect example of cognitive dissonance, in which chants of “Am Yisrael Chai!” (“The People of Israel Live!”) alternated easily with “Death to Arabs!” In March 2011, months after her photos drew international attention and widespread condemnation, Abergil began uploading other soldiers’ trophy shots to her Facebook page. She captioned one upload with the increasingly common refrain: “DDDEATHHH to ARABSSSSSS.”

Among the tower’s most famous residents was Marty Peretz, the former New Republic magazine owner who had abandoned his East Coast intellectual environs. “I’ve made Tel Aviv my locale now because in Jerusalem you wake up in the morning with the Jewish problem, and you go to sleep with the Palestinian problem,” Peretz told a reporter, invoking the cliché of the Tel Aviv bubble. I turned to Jesse to complain about the sense of cognitive dissonance, of hanging out at a hipster bar that could have been anywhere in the West, in Berlin or Brooklyn, with the residue of teargas still on my shirt. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “It’s always incredibly jarring to be in these rural Palestinian villages and experience army raids and repression at demos, and then you get back into this bright urban metropolis where you’re living in the cultural equivalent of Brooklyn, except it’s completely segregated.


Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere by Christian Wolmar

Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, BRICs, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, deskilling, Diane Coyle, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, gigafactory, high net worth, independent contractor, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, technological determinism, Tesla Model S, Travis Kalanick, wikimedia commons, Zipcar

The article argues that the autonomous-car industry must learn from mistakes made in aviation that have led to disasters, such as those mentioned above, which, the author says, partly result from the fact that the technology has made pilots’ tasks more difficult and complex, not easier: The airline industry trend towards higher levels of autonomy created new opportunities for confusion and mistakes – a situation called an ‘automation surprise’. In another irony of automation, this cognitive dissonance often occurred in exactly the kind of unusual situation 42 The triple revolution where advanced technology could have proven most valuable to their human operator. Yet, instead, they were doubly-burdened to sort through a confusing, dangerous and potentially escalating situation.23 Harford sums it up succinctly: ‘Automation will routinely tidy up ordinary messes but occasionally cause an extraordinary mess.’ 24 Paul Jennings, Professor of Energy and Electrical Systems at WMG, University of Warwick, who is heading a team developing a simulator for driverless cars, is a great advocate of the technology, but he is particularly concerned about the implications of Level 3: I don’t like Level 3.


pages: 360 words: 100,991

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence by Richard Yonck

3D printing, AI winter, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, backpropagation, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, ghettoisation, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of writing, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Skype, social intelligence, SoftBank, software as a service, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing test, twin studies, Two Sigma, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Review, working-age population, zero day

Why might this be happening and how is it likely to impact a field such as affective computing? Some cognitive scientists have suggested the uncanny valley may be caused by a disconnect between different parts of our brain that we use to categorize and make sense of the world. They suggest this cognitive dissonance arises when our expectations based on an object’s appearance aren’t met by some other feature or aspect of its behavior. Movement is a commonly used example when describing this disconnect because the way a human being or other animal moves is quite distinctive. The graph in Figure 1 above highlights the importance of movement, indicating that the effect can become even more pronounced when faced with something that isn’t static or stationary.

That said, a good soldier is certainly not an emotionless weapon. Just the opposite. In the field, emotional intelligence is continually called upon in assessing risks, in dealing with civilians on both sides of the conflict, and in maintaining the close-knit connections between comrades. The trauma and cognitive dissonance that arises from all of these conflicting demands on a soldier’s emotions can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and other psychological problems. These conditions can cause difficulties both while in the military and after returning to civilian life. Domestic violence, breakdowns, and suicides are just a few of the outcomes from the emotional discord that can be brought on by the experience of war.2 The global policy think tank RAND reports that at least 20 percent of veterans from the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars suffer from PTSD and depression.


pages: 297 words: 96,509

Time Paradox by Philip G. Zimbardo, John Boyd

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, cognitive dissonance, Drosophila, endowment effect, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, indoor plumbing, loss aversion, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Monty Hall problem, Necker cube, overconfidence effect, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, twin studies

Mathewson, “The Effects of Severity of Initiation on Liking for a Group: A Replication,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 2: 278–87 (1966). 23. P. G. Zimbardo, “Control of Pain Motivation by Cognitive Dissonance,” Science 151: 217–19 (1966). 24. See also E. Aronson and J. Mills, “The Effect of Severity of Initiation on Liking for a Group,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 59: 177–81 (1958); J. L. Freedman, “Long-Term Behavioral Effects of Cognitive Dissonance,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 1: 145–55 (1965); D. R. Shaffer and C. Hendrick, “Effects of Actual Effort and Anticipated Effort on Task Enhancement,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 7: 435–47 (1971); H.


pages: 537 words: 99,778

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement by Amy Lang, Daniel Lang/levitsky

activist lawyer, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bonus culture, British Empire, capitalist realism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, different worldview, facts on the ground, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, housing justice, Kibera, late capitalism, lolcat, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, plutocrats, Port of Oakland, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Slavoj Žižek, social contagion, structural adjustment programs, the medium is the message, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor

And it longed for that plaza to be clean and picturesque in the way a good plaza should be: empty of people. But hey, did you see what I did there? I was talking about rats, and then suddenly I was talking about human beings. Did you notice it when you were reading it? Did you feel any cognitive dissonance? What kind of cognitive dissonance did you feel? If you didn’t, it’s probably because ‘rats’ and ‘vermin’ is a common way of talking and thinking about this country’s underclass, the human beings who, because they sell drugs or don’t have a stable home, don’t quite seem like the sort of people we have to care about.


pages: 572 words: 94,002

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy by David Sawyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, beat the dealer, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Cal Newport, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, Desert Island Discs, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, index card, index fund, invention of the wheel, John Bogle, knowledge worker, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart meter, Snapchat, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, The 4% rule, Tim Cook: Apple, Vanguard fund, William Bengen, work culture , Y Combinator

Before the pursuit of fame and fortune and the culture of personality became a defining force from the 1920s onwards, we lived in the age of character where morals, manners, honour and good deeds done without expectation of anything in return, were prized above all else. That I think this is a shame is immaterial. What is important is you do the soul-searching to know what your values are (tip: pick three and stick to them), then let them define your vision and your purpose. This is the key to living a life with meaning: no cognitive dissonance (saying or thinking one thing and doing another). As Darren Hardy writes, values “define both who you are and what you stand for.” He adds: “Your core values are your internal compass, your guiding beacon, your personal GPS…nothing creates more stress than when our actions and behaviors aren’t congruent with our values[89].”

Be-fore we begin, let me give you an insight into our home life a few years ago, that of a married-with-two-children, early-forties couple living in an upmarket suburb of Glasgow: Two hours’ non-work-related social media use a day, while limiting the kids’ screen time. An inability to either do meaningful work or be present in the moment through digital-distractedness. This led to cognitive dissonance: a dad who extolled the virtues of reading to his kids – and himself – but rarely read a book. A fairly tidy house but with ever-growing piles. Exhibit A: kids’ art corner. Exhibit B: two of those 12-hole IKEA units housing rattan cubes, in which lurked a multitude of plastic. We could never find anything we didn’t use every day, leading to stress and precious hours wasted.


Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

In our research, we saw that white fragility prevented people from confronting their latent prejudices. This cognitive dissonance also meant that subjects would often amplify their responses expressing positive statements toward minorities in an effort to satiate their self-concept of “not being racist.” For example, when presented with a series of hypothetical biographies with photos, some respondents who scored higher in prior implicit racial bias testing would rate minority biographies higher than identical white biographies. See? I scored the black person higher, because I am not racist. This cognitive dissonance created an opening: Many respondents were reacting to their own racism not out of concern about how they may be contributing to structural oppression, but rather to protect their own social status.


pages: 120 words: 33,892

The Acquirer's Multiple: How the Billionaire Contrarians of Deep Value Beat the Market by Tobias E. Carlisle

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, corporate raider, Jeff Bezos, Mark Spitznagel, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Richard Thaler, shareholder value, stock buybacks, tail risk, Tim Cook: Apple

Now he plans to use it to stir up some trouble for Stiritz. He will put Stiritz’s plan under a spotlight. Chapman had written his letter in high English like he’d swallowed a dictionary. He filled it with phrases like “tacitly dissuade,” “egregious inefficiencies,” “proffering,” “efficacious means,” “nepotistic practices,” and “cognitive dissonance.” A shareholder needed a degree in English literature to know what he meant. That won’t be a problem for Loeb. He’s part of the new breed of investors trolling Internet message boards, posting rumors and flaming (insulting) one another. Loeb’s screen name is “Mr. Pink,” who is also one of the main characters in Quentin Tarantino’s bloody heist-gone-wrong film Reservoir Dogs.


pages: 104 words: 34,784

The Trouble With Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure by Shawn Micallef

big-box store, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, gentrification, ghettoisation, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, knowledge worker, liberation theology, Mason jar, McMansion, new economy, post scarcity, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

And though that bubble burst in the early 2000s, the aesthetic it spawned – which disguises work as play – remains popular. Does it make it easier to give up our leisure time when a meeting room is called a granny flat and designed in floral prints with easy chairs? What happens when work is going badly and a workspace that looks leisurely is suddenly a place of great stress? There is a cognitive dissonance in form and function here, perhaps the reason an event like brunch becomes such an overt act of leisure, even if in practice it isn’t leisurely. Many other people don’t have anything resembling a workspace at all. Work happens everywhere now. Many of us work from home, or from actual cafés, freelance vagabonds who move from one rickety table to the next, renting the space with our coffee purchases, getting more wired as the day goes on.


pages: 354 words: 105,322

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

I relied more the on the judgment of The Times than of the King. On behalf of those friends whose assets I was managing, I converted bank deposits and securities into gold and invested in Switzerland and Norway. A few days later the war broke out. Today, the king’s mistaken views would be described by behavioral psychologists as cognitive dissonance or confirmation bias. Somary did not use those terms, yet understood that elites live in bubbles beside other elites. They are often the last to know a crisis is imminent. Somary’s memoir was published in German in 1960; the English-language translation only appeared in 1986. Both editions are long out of print; only a few copies are available from specialty booksellers.

Empire of Debt The elite worldview rests on the intellectual pillars of equilibrium models, monetarism, Keynesianism, floating exchange rates, free trade, globalization, and fiat money. Meanwhile, the real world is best understood through the lens of complexity theory, conditional probability, behavioral psychology, currency wars, neomercantilism, and gold. Cognitive dissonance between the elite worldview and real-world economics is taking its toll on elite self-confidence and control. The elites now divide into two types: those who are confused by lost credibility, and those who are quietly panicked because they understand their intellectual failure and its consequences.


pages: 411 words: 108,119

The Irrational Economist: Making Decisions in a Dangerous World by Erwann Michel-Kerjan, Paul Slovic

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, experimental economics, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kenneth Arrow, Loma Prieta earthquake, London Interbank Offered Rate, market bubble, market clearing, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Oklahoma City bombing, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, social discount rate, source of truth, statistical model, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto

A survey of law school students published in 2003 by economists Kip Viscusi and Richard Zeckhauser in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, however, found that around 40 percent of respondents believed their personal risk assessment was higher before the attacks than currently.2 In another study of professional-school students and undergraduate business students in 2005, they showed that over two-thirds of respondents exhibited the same phenomenon.3 These respondents experienced a recollection bias, whereby after the occurrence of a low-probability event, one thinks that one’s prior risk assessment was much higher than it actually was. This could be due to an attempt to reduce cognitive dissonance, for self-justification, or simply to misremembering. It may also be a variant of hindsight bias, in which knowing the outcome alters an individual’s assessment of how likely it was to have occurred. For example, in a 1975 study by psychologist Baruch Fischhoff, who is also a contributor to this book, subjects were given passages to read about the Gurkha raids on the British in the early 1800s.

From the perspective of an ardent free-marketer, environmental problems are a threat: They require government intervention in the economy. It’s hard to believe both that we need to solve environmental problems and that the government is the problem and not the solution! Believing both leads to cognitive dissonance. Many conservatives ignore environmental problems, pretending that they don’t exist. Roosevelt and Nixon did not have this conflict: In their day, conservatism was consistent with a role for the government. Compounding this ideological change is an empirical one: the rise of climate change as an issue.


pages: 352 words: 104,411

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work by Iain Gately

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, corporate raider, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Dean Kamen, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, global pandemic, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Marchetti’s constant, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, remote working, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SpaceShipOne, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, telepresence, Tesla Model S, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban planning, éminence grise

Two-thirds of all drivers ‘rate themselves almost perfect in excellence as a driver (9 or 10 on a 10-point scale), while the rest consider themselves above average (6 to 8)’. In their own minds, they can’t put a wheel wrong when they’re on the road. As a consequence, while ‘70 per cent of drivers report being a victim of an aggressive driver’, only ‘30 per cent admit to being aggressive drivers’. Such mismatches between perception and reality suggest that cognitive dissonance rules the highways. Drivers operate in a parallel universe where they are perfect and everyone else is bad and dangerous. The territoriality, belligerence, vindictiveness and, above all, double standards that typify road-rage sufferers have been investigated in depth. It’s now treated as a problem in its own right that claims hundreds of casualties each year, and is in urgent need of solution.

Denmark, which tops its chart, wins partly because average commutes in that country are very short, and 34 per cent of Danish workers travel to their offices by bike. This combination boosts its scores on three counts – health (bicycle commuters have a 28 per cent lower mortality rate than the population average), environment and ‘work/life balance’. So are commuters all suffering from cognitive dissonance and, like smokers, addicted to a habit that will inevitably make them sick and possibly kill them? Some experts think so, and describe such blindness as a ‘weighting mistake’. We humans mess up our priorities: we invest our passions in trivia, and overlook important matters – we splash out on a new pair of shoes, and forget to pay our taxes.


pages: 384 words: 105,110

A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life by Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein

autism spectrum disorder, biofilm, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of DNA, double helix, epigenetics, Francisco Pizarro, germ theory of disease, Gregor Mendel, helicopter parent, hygiene hypothesis, lockdown, meta-analysis, microbiome, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, phenotype, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind

But the rate of change itself is so rapid now that our brains, bodies, and social systems are perpetually out of sync. For millions of years we lived among friends and extended family, but today many people don’t even know their neighbors’ names. Some of the most fundamental truths—like the fact of two sexes—are increasingly dismissed as lies. The cognitive dissonance spawned by trying to live in a society that is changing faster than we can accommodate is turning us into people who cannot fend for ourselves. Simply put, it’s killing us. In part, this book is about generalizing this message to all aspects of our lives: when it rains in the mountains, stay out of the river

See fourth frontier geographic frontiers, 224–25, 226 growth and, 224–27 technological frontiers, 224, 225–26 transfer of resource frontiers, 224, 225, 226 Hobbes, Thomas, 33 hobbits of Flores island, 35 Homo/Homo sapiens, xiv–xv, 32–38 homosexuality, 136 honey, 79–80 horses, 138 how (proximate) questions, 68 Huaorani, 225 Huichol people, 220 human niche, 1–19 adaptive evolution and, 11–14 campfire and, 4, 6–9 consciousness and, 7–9 exchange of ideas and, 4, 6–7 generalists versus specialists and, 5–6, 7, 11 human nature, understanding, 5–6 innovation and, 4 lineage and, 12–13 niche switching as, 10–11, 35–36, 138, 211 Omega principle and, 14–17 oscillation between culture and consciousness and, 9–11 populating New World, 2–4 human paradox, 5–6 humor, 202–3 hunger, 52 hunter-gatherers, xv, 35–36, 80, 113–14 hyenas, 150 hygiene hypothesis, 47 hyper-novelty, xii adulthood and, 189–90 cognitive dissonance spawned by, xii and COVID-19 pandemic, 249 diet and, 77, 79 intuitive sense of fitness value of behaviors and, 204 medicine and, 61, 67, 71–72 olfactory perception and, 57 parenting and, 136–39 sleep disruption and, 98–101 visual perception and, 40 Inca Empire, 225 Indian Deccan Traps, 29 individual consciousness, 8 indri, 60 infanticide, 13 innovation, 4, 5, 171, 209–222 insects, 22, 25, 109, 110, 238 intellectual self-reliance, 178–79 intellectual tools, 177 Inuit, 9–10, 78, 148 jacanas, 111, 112, 126 jackdaws, 131 jaws, 23 jays, 147 jealousy, 116–17, 120, 130 Jefferson, Thomas, 239 justice/freedom trade-off, 232–33 Kenyan children, 151, 152 killer whales, 142, 147 Komodo dragons, 109 !


pages: 1,737 words: 491,616

Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-pattern, anti-work, antiwork, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dematerialisation, different worldview, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, effective altruism, experimental subject, Extropian, friendly AI, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, hindsight bias, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, money market fund, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Necker cube, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), P = NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, planetary scale, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, strong AI, sunk-cost fallacy, technological singularity, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Turing complete, Turing machine, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The Unarian cult, still going strong today, survived the nonappearance of an intergalactic spacefleet on September 27, 1975. Why would a group belief become stronger after encountering crushing counterevidence? The conventional interpretation of this phenomenon is based on cognitive dissonance. When people have taken “irrevocable” actions in the service of a belief—given away all their property in anticipation of the saucers landing—they cannot possibly admit they were mistaken. The challenge to their belief presents an immense cognitive dissonance; they must find reinforcing thoughts to counter the shock, and so become more fanatical. In this interpretation, the increased group fanaticism is the result of increased individual fanaticism.

You may also think that making things illegal just makes them more expensive, that regulators will abuse their power, or that her individual freedom trumps your desire to meddle with her life. But, as a matter of simple fact, she’s still going to die. We live in an unfair universe. Like all primates, humans have strong negative reactions to perceived unfairness; thus we find this fact stressful. There are two popular methods of dealing with the resulting cognitive dissonance. First, one may change one’s view of the facts—deny that the unfair events took place, or edit the history to make it appear fair. (This is mediated by the affect heuristic and the just-world fallacy.) Second, one may change one’s morality—deny that the events are unfair. Some libertarians might say that if you go into a “banned products shop,” passing clear warning labels that say THINGS IN THIS STORE MAY KILL YOU, and buy something that kills you, then it’s your own fault and you deserve it.

If the theory is true, supporting evidence will come in shortly, and the probability will climb again. If the theory is false, you don’t really want it anyway. The problem with using black-and-white, binary, qualitative reasoning is that any single observation either destroys the theory or it does not. When not even a single contrary observation is allowed, it creates cognitive dissonance and has to be argued away. And this rules out incremental progress; it rules out correct integration of all the evidence. Reasoning probabilistically, we realize that on average, a correct theory will generate a greater weight of support than countersupport. And so you can, without fear, say to yourself: “This is gently contrary evidence, I will shift my belief downward.”


Reactive Messaging Patterns With the Actor Model: Applications and Integration in Scala and Akka by Vaughn Vernon

A Pattern Language, business intelligence, business logic, business process, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, finite state, functional programming, Internet of things, Kickstarter, loose coupling, remote working, type inference, web application

If the application process is more complex, you can introduce a Process Manager (292) or other kind of Message Router (140) between the BookOrderController, BookOrder, and OrderFulfillment. See also Figure 1.5. Figure 1.8 Allow the Actor model to rid your mind of the layers of implicit cognitive dissonance. Go ahead, be explicit. Rid your mind of the layers of implicit cognitive dissonance. It’s just you and your software model and perhaps a user interface. Go ahead, be explicit. The rest of the book helps you see how you can put much of the other conventional software layers behind you as a thing of the distant past. You are now in the fast lane with the Actor model and its concurrency and parallelism.


The Diet Myth: Why America's Obsessions With Weight Is Hazardous to Your Health by Paul Campos

caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, feminist movement, longitudinal study, moral hazard, moral panic, profit maximization, Saturday Night Live, upwardly mobile

“Most of the obesity research community has deemed such data [on the risks of weight loss] compelling—but not enough to state that weight-loss attempts by obese 46 Fat Science people are dangerous . . . Nowadays it is not uncommon to hear ‘Diets don’t work.’ In fact, diets do work. It is prescriptions to diet that fail, because patients usually do not follow them.” A better illustration of rampaging cognitive dissonance, as well as of the classic “the operation was a success but the patient died” line of argument, would be difficult to find. As we have seen, such conclusions can be explained by the economic structure of obesity research. As a practical matter, obesity research must be funded either by the weight loss industry or by government grants.

But then it all goes wrong: “A sexy woman is a woman who likes her body so of course she takes care of it which makes her lose weight which makes her like her body even more which makes her even sexier which makes her exercise more which makes her lose more weight . . .” A more precise description of the theoretical pretzel logic behind the practice of anorexia and bulimia would be difficult to formulate. Even within the context of the doublethink so characteristic of the diet culture, the level of cognitive dissonance at the center of Estrich’s arguments is breathtaking. Again, at the same time that she recognizes such truths as that there isn’t “a single woman alive who doesn’t do better, personally and professionally, when she feels great about herself,” and that the key to a fulfilling life is to choose “to be your best, to be happy with yourself, to be fit and strong and self-confident for however long you are blessed to be here” she steadfastly refuses to acknowledge the empirically undeniable fact that, for almost all people— indeed, for Susan Estrich herself, until a couple of years before she wrote 212 Fat Politics this book—feeling great about themselves and being fit and strong and self-confident precludes the whole idea of dieting, which at its core is all about weakness and self-loathing and endless dissatisfaction.


pages: 789 words: 207,744

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

The few who bother to think about such matters only do so as a result of being prompted by an anthropologist, and they have wildly divergent representations of the process.” The ancient Egyptians, however, attempted to turn their mythic patterns into a comprehensive system and, in so doing, uncovered what Assmann has called the “cognitive dissonance” that results from an attempt to resolve the relationship between unity and diversity.22 In a traditional polytheistic cosmology, there's no need for a worldview to be systematic. Each god may have unique powers that are not necessarily consistent with those of another god. However, once we conceive of a sole creative power in the universe, the gods that previously represented natural forces and creatures are no longer the source of divinity.

Trying to reconcile a universe composed of “the one” and “the many” was a massive conceptual challenge, one that has been described as a “meltdown” in polytheistic mythology.23 One solution to this meltdown was that promulgated by Akhenaten: the imposition of a systematic monotheism forcefully excluding any other form of worship. In Assmann's words, it “resolved the cognitive dissonance…of the relationship between unity and diversity by abolishing diversity.”24 Monotheism is one solution. But it's not the only one. Assmann describes how, in the post-Akhenaten era, known as the Ramesside period, a new pantheistic cosmology arose that explained the various deities as different aspects and forms of a single transcendent creator god, thus making it possible “to conceive of the diversity of deities as the colorful reflection of a hidden unity.”25 This new pantheistic god didn't just create the universe—he was the universe, in all its variegated forms.

Another hymn from this period hails “the One who makes himself into millions,” and, in another text, he's actually referred to as “million of millions.”26 These two choices for a coherent cosmological system held significance beyond ancient Egypt. As we'll see, centuries after Akhenaten's revolution, the civilizations of ancient Greece and India came across the same cognitive dissonance and chose different paths: Greece laying the framework for monotheism and India choosing a form of transcendent pantheism. In later Chinese thought, philosophers grappled with similar questions about the one and the many, leading to a sophisticated new understanding of the universe. In the struggles of ancient Egypt, we glimpse the first attempts to arrive at systematic cosmological solutions that have come to structure the thought patterns of much of the human race today.


pages: 138 words: 43,748

Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle by Jeff Flake

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, immigration reform, impulse control, invisible hand, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Potemkin village, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

If this was our Faustian bargain, then it was not worth it. If ultimately our principles were so malleable as to no longer be principles, then what was the point of political victories in the first place? Meanwhile, the strange specter of an American president’s seeming affection for strongmen and authoritarians created such a cognitive dissonance among my generation of conservatives—who had come of age under existential threat from the Soviet Union—that it was almost impossible to believe. Even as our own government was documenting a concerted attack against our democratic processes by an enemy foreign power, our own White House was rejecting the authority of its own intelligence agencies, disclaiming their findings as a Democratic ruse and a hoax.


A United Ireland: Why Unification Is Inevitable and How It Will Come About by Kevin Meagher

Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, deindustrialization, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, kremlinology, land reform, Nelson Mandela, period drama, Right to Buy, trade route, transaction costs

Despite the extensive commemorations for the Easter Rising, it is often overlooked that the original events of that week 100 years ago were not immediately greeted with a popular surge of public support. Tales abound of how apprehended Volunteers were marched through the streets of Dublin to the jeers and scorn of passers-by. Yet, in the general election of 1918, Sinn Féin won three-quarters of the parliamentary seats in Ireland. Evidence, perhaps, that the Irish suffer from cognitive dissonance – holding two, mutually exclusive, opinions – in relation to how their freedom from Britain came about. A case of public respectability and private radicalism? Many – indeed most – Irish people would like to see the country reunified, but blanch at the methods that have, hitherto, been employed to bring it about.


pages: 538 words: 121,670

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It by Lawrence Lessig

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, carbon tax, carried interest, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Edward Glaeser, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, invisible hand, jimmy wales, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Pareto efficiency, place-making, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

The vast majority of Americans (70 percent) either believe the answer to the latter question is no or they don’t know.14 Part of that belief comes from the same sort of confidence I’ve just described—we’ve had cell phone technology for almost fifty years; certainly someone must have determined whether the radiation does any damage. Part of that belief could also come from reports of actual studies—hundreds of studies of cell phone radiation have concluded that cell phones cause no increased risk of biological harm.15 And, finally, part of that belief comes from a familiar psychological phenomenon: cognitive dissonance—it would be too hard to believe to the contrary. Like smokers who disbelieved reports about the link between smoking and lung cancer, we cell phone users would find it too hard to accept that this essential technology of modern life was in fact (yet) another ticking cancer time bomb. Yet, once again, the research raises some questions.

That’s because, for many Republicans, the idea of special-interest influence is the corrupting force in government today. Everything they complain about is tied to that idea. Beltway Republicans are different of course. The party of Tom DeLay had to make some pretty awful deals with the devil in order to raise the money they needed to win. They’ve developed a fairly complicated, cognitively dissonant account that justifies selling government to the highest bidder. Outside the Beltway, citizen Republicans aren’t similarly burdened. Citizen Republicans care about the ideals of the party. And those ideals resonate well with the objective of removing the influence of cash in political campaigns.


pages: 385 words: 123,168

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

1960s counterculture, active measures, antiwork, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, data science, David Graeber, do what you love, Donald Trump, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, full employment, functional programming, global supply chain, High speed trading, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, informal economy, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, moral panic, Post-Keynesian economics, post-work, precariat, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software as a service, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, unpaid internship, wage slave, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, éminence grise

All this was barely tolerable, but once Greg actually saw the abovementioned studies, which also revealed that even if the surfer did see them, she wouldn’t click on the banner anyway, he began to experience symptoms of clinical anxiety. Greg: That job taught me that pointlessness compounds stress. When I started working on those banners, I had patience for the process. Once I realized that the task was more or less meaningless, all that patience evaporated. It takes effort to overcome cognitive dissonance—to actually care about the process while pretending to care about the result. Eventually the stress became too much for him, and he quit to take another job. • • • Stress was another theme that popped up regularly. When, as with Greg, one’s bullshit job involves not just sitting around pretending to work but actually working on something everyone knows—but can’t say—is pointless, the level of ambient tension increases and often causes people to lash out in arbitrary ways.

The useful work he performs consists mainly of duct taping: solving problems caused by various unnecessarily convoluted bureaucratic processes within the company. Plus, the company itself is fairly pointless. Finn: Still, sitting down to write this, there’s part of my brain that wants to defend my bullshit job. Mostly because the job provides for me and my family. I think that’s where the cognitive dissonance comes in. From an emotional standpoint, it’s not like I’m invested in my job or the company in any way. If I showed up on Monday and the building had disappeared, not only would society not care, I wouldn’t, either. If there’s any satisfaction that comes from my job, it’s being an expert in navigating the waters of our disorganized organization and being able to get things done.


pages: 401 words: 119,488

Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

Air France Flight 447, Asperger Syndrome, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Black Swan, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, digital map, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, index card, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, meta-analysis, new economy, power law, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, statistical model, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, Toyota Production System, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

Brehm, “Postdecision Changes in the Desirability of Alternatives,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 52, no. 3 (1956): 384; Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, vol. 2 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1962); Daryl J. Bem, “An Experimental Analysis of Self-Persuasion,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 1, no. 3 (1965): 199–218; Louisa C. Egan, Laurie R. Santos, and Paul Bloom, “The Origins of Cognitive Dissonance: Evidence from Children and Monkeys,” Psychological Science 18, no. 11 (2007): 978–83. longer than their peers E. J. Langer and J. Rodin, “The Effects of Choice and Enhanced Personal Responsibility for the Aged: A Field Experiment in an Institutional Setting,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 34, no. 2 (1976): 191–98.


pages: 484 words: 131,168

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop, Robert G. Cushing

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, big-box store, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, union organizing, War on Poverty, white flight, World Values Survey

Majorities gain confidence in their opinions, which grow more extreme over time. As a result, misunderstanding between Republicans and Democrats grows as they seclude themselves. Americans' political lives are baffling. Reconciling the narrowness of recent national elections with the lopsidedness of local results produces mass cognitive dissonance. The facts we see on television—a nearly fifty-fifty Congress, a teetering Electoral College, and presidential elections decided by teaspoons of votes—simply don't square with the overwhelming majorities we experience in our neighborhoods. In focus groups held in Omaha, University of Nebraska political scientist Elizabeth Theiss-Morse revealed how confused people are by the consensus they see in their neighborhoods versus the conflict they see at large in the nation.

Two geographers studying the 2004 U.S. presidential election said that they were "motivated by the striking similarity between U.S. electoral polarization and [O'Loughlin's] finding of significant geographic variations of local populations' effects on the outcome of the critical Nazi vote " Ian Sue Wing and Joan Walker, "The 2004 Presidential Election from a Spatial Perspective" (unpublished paper, 2005) [back] *** *Another example of this is a 1951 experiment in which students at Princeton and Dartmouth watched a film of a football game between the two schools. The students were asked to take note of foul play. "Dartmouth students saw mostly Princeton's offenses; Princeton students saw mostly Dartmouth's," reported the Wall Street journal (Cynthia Crossen, '"Cognitive Dissonance' Became a Milestone in 1950s Psychology," Wall Street Journal, December 4, 2006, p. B1) [back] *** *In early 2007, when the Pew Research Center charted views of "traditional values" championed by the Republican Party, the polls showed an increasing number of Americans holding more liberal views on abortion and sexual orientation, for example.


pages: 363 words: 123,076

The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution by Marc Weingarten

1960s counterculture, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Donner party, East Village, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Haight Ashbury, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, post-work, pre–internet, public intellectual, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Stewart Brand, upwardly mobile, working poor, yellow journalism

“I knew that if I stayed here he would drift in over me that night, grinning and dripping, all rot and green-black bloat.” Herr now viewed Vietnam as a bifurcated war: “There are two Vietnams, the one that I’m up to my ass in here and the one perceived in the States by people who’ve never been here. They are mutually exclusive.” Herr was appalled at the cognitive dissonance that existed between the cushy major press outlets in Saigon, with their lavish budgets and extensive R&R excursions, their “$3,000 a month digs at the Continental or the Caravelle,” and the horrors that were taking place within the city and nearly every other major city in the South. “I have colleagues in the press corps here, some of them incredible fakes, fantastic hacks, who live so well on their expense accounts that they may never be able to adjust to peace.”

The Mojave Desert, the West’s last untouched frontier, had been colonized by the greed-mongers, and nobody at the keno tables seemed bothered by the rising body count in Vietnam. For Sal Paradise/Kerouac, the characters on his cross-country trip are an affirmation of the beatitude and bedrock virtue of the underclass; the freak parade of humanity that Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo encounters is merely bestial and overfed on excess. Raoul Duke/Thompson’s cognitive dissonance in Vegas is most acute when he and Dr. Gonzo attend the National District Attorneys’ Association conference on narcotics and dangerous drugs in the ballroom of the Dunes Hotel. Thompson, who was registered as an accredited journalist for the event, ducked out to score mescaline from a Vegas contact, only to return to a ballroom of fifteen hundred vehemently antidrug cops loudly deriding the use of controlled substances: Their sound system looked like something Ulysses S.


pages: 385 words: 121,550

Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles by Fintan O'Toole

airport security, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Etonian, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, full employment, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, l'esprit de l'escalier, labour mobility, late capitalism, open borders, rewilding, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, technoutopianism, zero-sum game

Generations of Irish artists in England did this – and Morrissey used to be one of them. ‘The Queen Is Dead’ is a provocation in the great tradition of Wilde and Shaw. But dual identity can also lead to cognitive dissonance, the unbearable state of having attitudes and beliefs fundamentally incompatible with each other. If you can’t hack both/and – if, in this case, the Irish blood is not flowing easily through the English heart – you go for either/or. You overcome the cognitive dissonance by adopting an exaggerated version of one or other identity. There’s a very powerful strain of this in modern Irish history. Without figures with dual British/Irish identities (from Patrick Pearse to Maud Gonne to James Connolly to Erskine Childers) deciding to be hyper-Irish, that history would probably look very different.


pages: 740 words: 217,139

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, John Perry Barlow, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, means of production, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Scramble for Africa, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), spice trade, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

The disjunction in rates of change between institutions and the external environment then accounts for political decay or deinstitutionalization. Legacy investments in existing institutions lead to failures not simply in changing outmoded institutions but also in the very ability to perceive that a failure has taken place. This phenomenon is described by social psychologists as “cognitive dissonance,” of which history is littered with examples. 18 If one society is getting more powerful militarily, or wealthier, as a result of superior institutions, members of a less competitive society have to correctly attribute those advantages to the underlying institutions if they are to have any hope of surviving.

The ministry has its own vision of how to manage the Japanese economy and at times has manipulated its political bosses rather than being subordinated by them. It is therefore often seen as a paradigmatic case of an autonomous institution. See Peter B. Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 18 Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962). See also Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts (New York: Mariner Books, 2008). 19 This is the argument made about twentieth-century Britain in Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).

Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1951. Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1981. A History of Anthropological Thought. New York: Basic Books. Feldman, Noah. 2008. The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Festinger, Leon. 1962. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Finer, S. E. 1997. The History of Government, Vol. 1: Ancient Monarchies and Empires. New York: Oxford University Press. Fiorina, Morris P., et al., eds. 2010. Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America. 3rd ed. Boston: Longman. Flannery, Kent V. 1972.


pages: 153 words: 45,871

Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson

AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, edge city, Future Shock, imposter syndrome, informal economy, Joi Ito, means of production, megastructure, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, pattern recognition, proxy bid, restrictive zoning, Snow Crash, space junk, technological determinism, telepresence, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog

I found the material of the actual twenty-first century richer, stranger, more multiplex, than any imaginary twenty-first century could ever have been. And it could be unpacked with the toolkit of science fiction. I don’t really see how it can be unpacked otherwise, as so much of it is so utterly akin to science fiction, complete with a workaday level of cognitive dissonance we now take utterly for granted. Zero History, my ninth novel, will be published this September, rounding out that third set of three books. It’s set in London and Paris, last year, in the wake of global financial collapse. I wish that I could tell you what it’s about, but I haven’t yet discovered my best likely story, about that.


pages: 184 words: 46,395

The Choice Factory: 25 Behavioural Biases That Influence What We Buy by Richard Shotton

active measures, behavioural economics, call centre, cashless society, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Firefox, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Google Chrome, Kickstarter, loss aversion, nudge unit, Ocado, placebo effect, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Rory Sutherland, TED Talk, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, World Values Survey

SSRN ID: 979648 Conclusion ‘Debunking the myth of Kitty Genovese’, New York Post, 16 February 2014 Further reading The Social Animal [Elliot Aronson, 1972] First, make sure you buy the right book – confusingly there are two psychology books called The Social Animal, one by David Brooks the other by Elliot Aronson. Aronson’s book is out of print and currently second-hand copies cost £40 on Amazon. However, if you’re patient you should be able to get your hands on one for £20. Aronson’s own research covered cognitive dissonance and the pratfall effect but this book covers a far broader range of biases. Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy [Phil Barden, 2013] Most books on behavioural science talk about the subject in general terms, relying on the reader to figure out how they’ll apply it to marketing. Decoded was one of the first books to address that gap.


pages: 164 words: 44,947

Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World by Robert Lawson, Benjamin Powell

Airbnb, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Kickstarter, means of production, Mont Pelerin Society, profit motive, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, single-payer health, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

When Bernie rails against crony capitalism, or rails against permanent war, or rails against the surveillance state, or the criminal justice system that has packed our prisons, Ron Paul could be giving the same speech. And it’s not until the end of the story, when Bernie says: “That’s why we need to grow the size of government and give bureaucrats more power,” that people hear a difference. That’s Bernie’s cognitive dissonance: railing against the evils created by too much government power, and then pushing for more government power to solve the problem. Powell: You’re finding a similarity between radical socialists and radical libertarians in identifying problems that young people see. Is it that the young people don’t understand the solutions and just identify with the politicians that point out the problems?


pages: 500 words: 145,005

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard H. Thaler

3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, book value, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, endowment effect, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, impulse control, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, late fees, law of one price, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, Mason jar, mental accounting, meta-analysis, money market fund, More Guns, Less Crime, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, New Journalism, nudge unit, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, presumed consent, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systematic bias, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

Eric is a persuasive guy, and as a result of his charm and arm-twisting, the collection of psychologists who showed up at our initial meeting was truly astonishing. We had not just Amos and Danny, but also Walter Mischel, of the Oreo and marshmallow experiment fame, Leon Festinger, who formulated the idea of cognitive dissonance, and Stanley Schachter, one of the pioneers of the study of emotions. Together they were the psychology version of the dream team. Some of the friendly economists who agreed to participate were also an all-star cast: George Akerlof, William Baumol, Tom Schelling, and Richard Zeckhauser. The hard-core group was Colin, George, Bob, and me.

(Lamont and Thaler), 250 capital asset pricing model (CAPM), 226–29, 348 “CAPM is Wanted, Dead or Alive, The” (Fama and French), 228 Car Talk, 32 Case, Chip, 235 Case-Shiller Home Price Index, 235 cashews, 21, 24, 42, 85–86, 92, 100, 102–3, 107n casinos, 49n cautious paternalism, 323 Census Bureau, 47 Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP), 208, 221 charity, 66, 129 cheap stocks, 219–21 Checklist Manifesto, The (Gawande), 356 Chen, Nai-fu, 243 Chetty, Raj, 320, 357–58 Chicago, University of, 255–56 behavioral economics conference at, 159–64, 167–68, 169, 170, 205 conference on 1987 crash at, 237 debate on behavioral economics at, 159–63, 167–68, 169, 170, 205 finance studied at, 208 offices at, 270–76, 278 Chicago Bulls, 19 Chicago police department, 260 chicken (game of), 183 choice: number of, 21, 85, 99–103 preferences revealed by, 86 choice architecture, 276, 326–27, 357 Choices, Values, and Frames, xiv Chrysler, 121, 123, 363 Cialdini, Robert, 180, 335, 336 Clegg, Nick, 333 Clinton, Hillary, 22 closed-end funds, 238–39, 239, 240 puzzles of, 240–43, 244, 250 coaches, 292–93 Coase, Ronald, 261 Coase theorem, 261–62, 264–65, 264, 267–68 Cobb, David, 115 Cobb, Michael, 115, 116, 117, 118n, 119, 120, 123 Coca-Cola, 134–35 cognitive dissonance, 178 commitment strategies, 100, 102–3, 106–7 compliance (medical), 189–90 COMPUSTAT, 221 computing power, 208 concert tickets, 18–19, 66 conditional cooperators, 146, 182, 335n “Conference Handbook, The” (Stigler), 162–63 confirmation bias, 171–72 Conservative Party, U.K., 330–33 constrained optimization, 5–6, 8, 27, 43, 161, 207, 365 “Consumer Choice: A Theory of Economists’ Behavior” (Thaler), 35 consumers, optimization problem faced by, 5–6, 8, 27, 43, 161, 207, 365 consumer sovereignty, 268–69 consumer surplus, 59 consumption function, 94–98, 106, 309 “Contrarian Investment, Extrapolation, and Risk” (Lakonishok, Shleifer and Vishny), 228 cooperation, 143–47 conditional, 146, 182, 335n Prisoner’s Dilemma and, 143–44, 145, 301–5, 302 Copernican revolution, 169 Cornell University, 42, 43, 115, 140–43, 153–55, 157 Costco, 63, 71–72 Council of Economic Advisors, 352 coupons, 62, 63, 67–68, 120 credit cards, 18, 74, 76–77 late fees for, 360 crime, 265 Daily Mail, 135 Daily Show, The, 352 Dallas Cowboys, 281 data: financial, 208 collection and recording of, 355–56 Dawes, Robyn, 146 Deal or No Deal, 296–301, 297, 303 path dependence on, 298–300 deals, 61–62 De Bondt, Werner, 216–18, 221, 222–24, 226n, 233, 278 debt, 78 default investment portfolio, 316 default option, 313–16, 327 default saving rate, 312, 316, 319, 357 delayed gratification, 100–102 De Long, Brad, 240 Demos, 330 Denmark, 320, 357–58 descriptive, 25, 30, 45, 89 Design of Everyday Things, The (Norman), 326 Diamond, Doug, 273, 276 Diamond, Peter, 323 Dictator Game, 140–41, 142, 160, 182, 301 diets, 342 diminishing marginal utility, 106 of wealth, 28, 30 diminishing sensitivity, 30–34 discount, surcharge vs., 18 discounts, returns and, 242–43 discounted utility model, 89–94, 99, 110, 362 discretion, 106 Ditka, Mike, 279, 280 dividends, 164–67, 365 present value of, 231–33, 231, 237 Dodd, David, 219 doers, planners vs., 104–9 Donoghue, John, 265n “Do Stock Prices Move Too Much to be Justified by Subsequent Changes in Dividends?”


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A Man for All Markets by Edward O. Thorp

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carried interest, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Edward Thorp, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, High speed trading, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, Mason jar, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Murray Gell-Mann, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical arbitrage, stem cell, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, Works Progress Administration

Moreover, a mutual acquaintance told me that Ned, who had made hundreds of millions advising clients, was still directing investors to Madoff the same week that the latter confessed. Having once known Ned well, I thought back to get more insight into why he believed in Madoff. In my opinion Ned was not a crook. Instead, I think he suffered from so-called cognitive dissonance. That’s where you want to believe something enough that you simply reject any information to the contrary. Nicotine addicts will often deny that smoking endangers their health. Members of political parties react mildly to lies, crimes, and other immorality by their own but are out for blood when the same is done by politicians in the other party.

To get back to $100, $70 has to increase by $30 or 42.6 percent. CHAPTER 26 beat the market This sounds nonsensical at first. What it means is that no one has any information whatsoever that has predictive value. to the contrary They display the well-known characteristic known as cognitive dissonance. and hundreds of books An excellent history of these meanderings is Justin Fox’s book The Myth of the Rational Market. all the future earnings Interpreted as net value paid out or accumulated for the benefit of a sole owner. on inside information As chronicled by James Stewart in Den of Thieves, Connie Bruck in The Predators’ Ball, and others.


pages: 447 words: 141,811

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Atahualpa, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Graeber, Easter island, Edmond Halley, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, life extension, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, Ponzi scheme, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, zero-sum game

Consistency is the playground of dull minds. If tensions, conflicts and irresolvable dilemmas are the spice of every culture, a human being who belongs to any particular culture must hold contradictory beliefs and be riven by incompatible values. It’s such an essential feature of any culture that it even has a name: cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is often considered a failure of the human psyche. In fact, it is a vital asset. Had people been unable to hold contradictory beliefs and values, it would probably have been impossible to establish and maintain any human culture. If, say, a Christian really wants to understand the Muslims who attend that mosque down the street, he shouldn’t look for a pristine set of values that every Muslim holds dear.


Norco '80: The True Story of the Most Spectacular Bank Robbery in American History by Peter Houlahan

blue-collar work, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, friendly fire, index card, Peoples Temple, reserve currency

“I think his dreams are just too big for what he can really do.” By Christmas 1979, George Smith was without a job, without a car, and without a family. It was a demoralizing condition for a young man who had always thought of himself as destined for great things. George struggled with a painful cognitive dissonance between who he thought he was and what he had really become. He had a solid support system of family and friends, but to fall back on it was utterly unimaginable to him. George was the one who always saved other people, whether it be with a few extra bucks, a solution to a problem, or the salvation of their very souls.

Rudolph Holguin, who oversaw the evaluation of George Smith: “TM’s showed bilateral perforations and dry blood in the ear canal secondary to concussion syndrome of the gun firing.” In other words, George had fired the Heckler so many times that the concussion waves from .308 rounds going off next to his head had punched holes in the temporal membranes of both ears. Walter was locked in a cognitive dissonance between the George he thought he knew and the one who had just tried to rob a bank. Why would you do that, George? Walter wanted to know. Because of what I have been telling you for years, George said. The end of the world is upon us. The signs are everywhere you look, the fulfillment of the prophecies is at hand.


pages: 505 words: 138,917

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon tax, citizen journalism, classic study, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, green new deal, humanitarian revolution, illegal immigration, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, negative emissions, Network effects, open borders, open economy, Pax Mongolica, place-making, profit motive, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, spice trade, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, ultimatum game, universal basic income, World Values Survey, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

Being open to other points of view and learning from other perspectives – whether from friends, foes, cryptogamists or even (horror) colleagues – is integral to intellectual progress. Our confirmation bias always traps us in a very limited view of the world, but free speech, peer review and cognitive dissonance set us free. The birth of science The philosopher Karl Popper wrote that ‘science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths’.3 Mankind has always had myths. We have always developed stories about gods to explain the origin of the universe, disasters and thunder and lightning.

INDEX Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258), 6, 136–7, 138, 169, 353 abortion, 113 absolutist monarchies, 154, 155, 170, 182, 185 Academy Awards, 82 Accenture, 375 accountants, 41 Acemoglu, Daron, 185, 187, 200 Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC), 86–7, 88, 249 Acton, Lord, see Dalberg-Acton, John Adams, Douglas, 295 Adobe, 310 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), 306 Aeschylus, 132 affirmative action, 244 Afghanistan, 70, 345 Age of Discovery, 177 agriculture, 39–40, 42, 74, 171, 263 Akbar I, Mughal Emperor, 98 Akkadian Empire (c. 2334–2154 BC), 42 Alaska, 76 Albania, 54 Albertus Magnus, Saint, 145 d’Alembert, Jean-Baptiste le Rond, 154 Alexander III ‘the Great’, Basileus of Macedon, 87–9 Alexandria, Egypt, 134 algae, 332 algebra, 137 Alibaba, 311 Allport, Gordon, 244–5 Almohad Caliphate (1121–1269), 137–8 alpha males, 227–8, 229 Alphaville, 245 altruism, 216 Amalric, Arnaud, 94 Amazon, 275, 311 America First, 19, 272 American Civil War (1861–5), 109 American Declaration of Independence (1776), 103, 201, 202 American Revolutionary War (1775–83), 102–3, 200–201 American Society of Human Genetics, 76–7 Americanization, 19 Amherst, William, 1st Earl Amherst, 176–7 amphorae, 48 Amsterdam, Holland, 150, 152, 153 An Lushan Rebellion (755–63), 352 anaesthesia, 279, 296 anagrams, 83 Anatolia, 42, 74 Anaximander, 127 Anaximenes, 127 al-Andalus (711–1492), 97, 137–9, 140 Andromeda, 88 Anglo–French Treaty (1860), 53–4 Anhui, China, 315 anti-Semitism, 11, 94–7, 109, 220, 233, 251, 254, 255 anti-Semitism, 254–5, 356 Antonine Plague (165–80), 77 Antoninus Pius, Roman Emperor, 91 Apama, 88 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 5 Apple, 82, 195, 304, 311, 319 Apuleius, 89 Arab Spring (2011), 10, 342 Arabic numerals, 70, 137, 156 Arabic, 136, 137, 140 archaeology, 21–2, 31, 32, 38, 43, 50, 51 Archer Daniels Midland, 329 Aristides, Aelius, 48 Aristophanes, 129, 131, 132 Aristotle, 130–31, 132, 137, 141–6, 161 Armenians, 136, 220 ARPAnet, 306 Art Nouveau, 198 art, 198 Artaxerxes III, Persian Emperor, 87 Ashkenazi Jews, 99 Ashoka, Mauryan Emperor, 53 Assyria (2500–609 BC), 248–9 Assyrian Empire (2500–609 BC), 41, 43, 86 astronomy, 80, 145–6, 150 Atari, 304 Athens, 47, 53, 89, 90, 131, 134 Atlas Copco, 65 Augustine of Hippo, 133, 139 Australia, 50–53, 76, 262 Australopithecus afarensis, 24–5 Austria, 1, 150, 151, 190 Austria-Hungary (1867–1918), 179, 254 Battle of Vienna (1683), 237, 238 Habsburg monarchy (1282–1918), 151, 179, 190, 237 migration crisis (2015–), 342 Mongol invasion (1241), 95 Nazi period (1938–45), 105 Ötzi, 1–2, 8–9, 73, 74 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 150 Authoritarian Dynamic, The (Stenner), 343 authoritarianism, 4, 14, 220, 343–61, 363, 379 democracy and, 357 economics and, 346–51 exposure to difference and, 242 innovation and, 318 insecurity and, 338, 342, 378 media and, 346–9 nostalgia and 351–4 predisposition, 220, 343–6 populism and, 325, 350–51 scapegoats and, 355–6 science and, 161–3 automatic looms, 179 automation, 63, 312–13 Averroes, 137–8, 143, 144, 145 Aztec Empire (1428–1521), 55 Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, 75 baby-boom generation (1946–64), 294, 340 Babylon, 39, 86–7 Babylonia (1895–539 BC), 39, 42, 43, 86–7, 128, 131, 249, 267 Bacon, Francis, 147, 156, 165–6, 201 bad news, 322 Baghdad, 70, 136, 353 Bahrain, 42 Bailey, Ron, 11 Bailyn, Bernard, 201 balance of trade, 59–60 Banda Islands, 100 Bangladesh, 270 Bannon, Steve, 14, 108 Barcelona, Catalonia, 320 Basel, Switzerland, 152 Battle of Vienna (1683), 237, 238 Bayezid II, Ottoman Sultan, 98 Bayle, Pierre, 158 Beginning of Infinity, The (Deutsch), 332 Behavioural Immune System, 222 Beirut, Lebanon, 236 benefit–cost ratio, 60, 61, 62 Berges, Aida, 80 Bering land bridge, 76 Berkeley, see University of California, Berkeley Berlin Wall, fall of (1989), 10, 340, 341, 363, 364 Berners-Lee, Timothy, 307–8 Bernstein, William, 42 Berossus, 267 Better Angels of Our Nature, The (Pinker), 243 Beveridge, William, 59 Béziers, France, 94 Bezos, Jeffrey, 274, 275–6, 277 Bi Sheng, 171 Bible, 46, 72, 248–50, 296 bicycles, 297 de Biencourt, Charles, 189 Big Five personality traits, 7 Black Death (1346–53), 77, 139, 208, 356, 352, 356 Blade Runner, 334 Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, 124–6 Blue Ghosts, 236 Bohr, Niels, 105 Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), 307 bonobos, 226–7 Book of Jonah, 248–50 Borjas, George, 116 Boston, Massachusetts, 122, 223 Boudreaux, Donald, 62, 270 Boulton, Matthew, 194 Bowles, Samuel, 216 Boym, Svetlana, 288 Brandt, Willy, 364 Brewer, Marilynn, 247 Brexit (2016–), 9, 14, 118, 238, 240–41, 349, 354, 379 Brezhnev, Leonid, 315 Britain, 169, 181–99 Acts of Union (1707), 101, 194 Afghanistan War (2001–14), 345 Amherst Mission (1816), 176–7 anti-Semitism in, 254 arts, 198 Bletchley Park, 124–6 Brexit (2016–), 9, 14, 118, 238, 240–41, 349, 354, 379 Cheddar Man, 74 Cobden–Chevalier Treaty (1860), 53–4 coffee houses, 166 colonies, 84, 191, 194, 200 Corn Laws repeal (1846), 53, 191 creative destruction in, 179 crime in, 119, 120 Dutch War (1672–4), 101 English Civil War (1642–1651), 148, 183, 184, 201 Glorious Revolution (1688), 101, 185–8, 190, 193 hair powder tax (1795), 72 immigration in, 113, 115, 118, 119, 120, 193–4 Industrial Revolution, 188–99, 202 innovation in, 53, 189–90 Internet, development of, 307–8 Iraq War (2003–11), 345 Levellers, 183–4, 186 literacy in, 188, 198 literature, 188–9 London Bridge stabbings (2019), 120 London 7/7 bombings (2005), 341 Macartney Mission (1793), 176 Magna Carta (1215), 5 monopolies, 182 MPs’ expenses scandal (2009), 345 Muslim community, 113 Navigation Acts, 192 nostalgia in, 294 open society, 169, 181–2, 195–9 patent system, 189–90, 203, 314 Peasants’ Revolt (1381), 208 political tribalism in, 238, 240–41 poverty in, 256 railways in, 297 Royal Society, 156, 157, 158, 196, 296 ruin follies, 286–7 slavery, abolition of (1807), 182, 205 smuggling in, 192 Statute of Labourers (1351), 208 United States, migration to, 104 West Africa Squadron, 205 Whig Party, 185, 201 World War II (1939–45), 124–6 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 135 Bronze Age (c. 3300–600 BC) Late Bronze-Age Collapse (1200–1150 BC), 44, 49, 54 migration to Europe, 74–5 Phoenician civilization, 43–6, 49, 70 Sumerian civilization, 42–3 Brotherton, Rob, 322 Brown, Donald, 219, 283 Bruges, Flanders, 208 Bruno, Giordano, 150 Bryn Mawr College, 201 Buddhism, 96, 149, 352 Bulgaria, 73, 342 Bureau of Labor Statistics, US, 65 Burke, Edmund, 152, 292 Bush, George Walker, 328 ByteDance, 318 Byzantine Empire (395–1453), 94, 134, 135, 155, 224 California Gold Rush (1848–1855), 104 Calvin, John, 149 Calvinism, 6, 99, 153, 356 Canada, 235, 258 Caplan, Bryan, 258 Caracalla, Roman Emperor, 91 Carbon Engineering, 332 Cardwell, Donald, 10 Cardwell’s Law, 10 Carlson, Tucker, 82, 302 Carlyle, Thomas, 206 Carthage (814–146 BC), 45 Caspian Sea, 75 Cathars, 94, 142 Catherine II, Empress of Russia, 154 Catholicism, 208 in Britain, 101, 185–6, 191 Crusades, 94, 138 in Dutch Republic, 99 exiles and, 153 in France, 154 Jews, persecution of, 97–8, 100, 106, 140, 233 Inquisition, 94, 97, 98, 100, 143, 150 in Italy, 6, 169 Muslims, persecution of, 97, 106, 233 Papacy, 102, 142, 143, 152, 155, 178, 237 in Rwanda, 230–31 in United States, 102, 104, 108, 254 values and, 114 Cato’s Letters (Trenchard and Gordon), 201 Celts, 89, 289 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 313 Ceres, 89 Cerf, Vinton, 307 CERN (Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire), 306, 307 chariot racing, 224 Charles I, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, 148, 179, 183 Chávez, Hugo, 354 Chechen War, Second (1999–2009), 354 Cheddar Man, 74 cheongsam dresses, 73 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 286, 300 Chicago principles, 164–5 Chicago, Illinois, 202 child mortality, 168–9 Child, Josiah, 184 children, 26 chimpanzees, 24, 25, 32, 36, 226–7, 228 China, 4, 5, 6, 13, 84, 270, 314–18 Amherst Mission (1816), 176–7 An Lushan Rebellion (755–63), 352 Antonine Plague (165–80), 77 authoritarianism, 4, 162–3, 175, 318, 325, 343 budget deficits, 60 cheongsam dresses, 73 Confucianism, 129, 149, 169, 176 COVID-19 pandemic (2019–20), 4, 11–12, 162–3 Cultural Revolution (1966–76), 355 dictatorships, support for, 367 dynamism in, 315–18 ethnic groups in, 84 Great Wall, 178 industrialization 169, 172–3, 207 intellectual property in, 58 kimonos, 73 literacy in, 148 Macartney Mission (1793), 176 Ming dynasty (1368–1644), 54, 148, 175, 177–8, 179, 215 national stereotypes, 235, 236 overcapacity in, 317 paper, invention of, 136 private farming initiative (1978), 315–16 productivity in, 317 poverty in, 273, 316 Qing dynasty (1644–1912), 148, 149, 151, 153, 175–7, 179, 353 Reform and Opening-up (1979–), 4, 53, 56, 315–16 SARS outbreak (2002), 162 science in, 4, 13, 70, 153, 156, 162–3, 169–73, 269 Silk Road, 171, 174, 352 Song dynasty (960–1279), 53, 169–75 state capitalism in, 316–17 Tang dynasty (618–907), 84, 170, 177, 352 Taoism, 129, 149 trade barriers, 59 United States, migration to, 104, 109, 254 United States, trade with, 19, 57, 58–9, 62–3, 64 WTO accession (2001), 63 Yuan Empire (1271–1368), 174–5 Zheng He’s voyages (1405–33), 177–8 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 254 Christensen, Clayton, 305 Christianity, 46, 70, 96, 129 Bible, 46, 72, 248–50, 296 in Britain, 101 Calvinism, 6, 99, 149, 153, 356 Cathars, 94, 142 clash of civilizations narrative, 237 Crusades, 94, 138 Catholicism, see Catholicism Dominican order, 356 in Dutch Republic, 99 economic hardship and, 359 fundamentalism, 133–5, 149 Great Awakening (1730–55), 102 Great Vanishing, 134–5 Inquisition, 97, 98, 100 Jews, persecution of, 95, 96, 97 Lutheranism, 99, 356 in Mongol Empire, 96 Old Testament, 46, 72 orthodox backlash, 149–50 Orthodox Church, 155 Papacy, 102, 142, 143, 152, 155, 178, 233 Protestantism, 99, 104, 148, 149, 153, 169, 178 Puritanism, 99, 102 Rastafari and, 72 Reformation, 148, 155 in Roman Empire, 90, 93–4 science and, 133–5, 141–6, 149–50 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 97 tribalism and, 230–31, 246 zero-sum relationships and, 248–50 Chua, Amy, 84 Cicero, 141 Cilician, Gates, 42 cities, 40, 79, 140 division of labour in, 40 immigration and, 114, 250 innovation and, 40, 53, 79, 140, 145, 172, 287 liberalism and, 339 Mesopotamia, 37–43 open-mindedness and, 35 productivity and, 40, 98 tradition and, 287, 291 turtle theory and, 121–2 civic nationalism, 377–8 civil society, 6, 199, 253, 358, 363 clash of civilizations narrative, 237, 362–3, 365–6 ‘Clash of Civilizations?’ (Huntington), 362–3, 365–6 classical liberalism, 185, 205, 214 Claudius, Roman Emperor, 90, 92 climate change, 75, 323, 325, 326–34 Clinton, Hillary, 238 Clouds, The (Aristophanes), 129 Cobden–Chevalier Treaty (1860), 53–4 coffee houses, 166 cognitive dissonance, 127 Cohen, Floris, 150 Colombia, 120 colonialism, 214, 232, 256 Britain, 84, 191, 194, 200 Dutch Republic, 100 Portugal, 100, 146–7, 178 Spain, 147, 178, 182 Columbia University, 223 Columbus, Christopher, 77, 177, 178, 305 Comenius, John, 152 command economies, 43, 315 communism, 54, 56, 215, 302–5, 314–18 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and Engels), 33 compensatory control, 322–3 competition, 60 benefit–cost ratio and, 62 creative destruction and, 57, 190 Great Depression and, 54 guilds and, 190 immigration and, 117 Rust Belt and, 64, 65–6 competitive advantage, 28–9 computers, 302–14 automation, 63, 312–13 Internet, 57, 275, 278, 306–11, 312 confirmation bias, 127, 160, 161 Confucianism, 129, 149, 169, 176 Congo, 365 conquistadores, 77 conservatism, 334–40 authoritarianism and, 345 disgust and, 335, 336 dynamism and, 286, 300–302, 312, 326 economic, 185, 336 security and, 334–40, 378 superpowers study, 338–9 conspiracy theories, 322–3, 324 Constantine, Roman Emperor, 133–4 Constantinople, 92, 94, 224 contact hypothesis, 244–5 Conway, Kellyanne, 108 Coontz, Stephanie, 199 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, 185 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 146, 150, 332 copper, 42 Cordoba, Spain, 137–9 Corn Laws, 53, 191 corn-based ethanol, 328, 329 coronavirus, 3, 4, 10–11, 162–3, 293, 312 corruption, 317, 345, 381 COVID-19 pandemic (2019–20), 3, 4, 10–12, 162–3, 312 cowboys, 73 Cowen, Tyler, 257 Coxe, Tench, 103 creative destruction, 57, 179, 182, 190, 270, 339 automation, 63, 312–13 nostalgia and, 296–9, 313 Schumpeterian profits, 273–4 Crete, 89 crime, 110, 119–20, 346, 377 Crisis and Leviathan (Higgs), 337 Criswell King, Jeron, 255–6 Croats, 72 Cromwell, Oliver, 183 Crone, Patricia, 207 crony capitalism, 279–80 Crusades, 94, 138 cults, 244 culture appropriation, 71–2 borrowing, 70–73 evolution, 26–30 immigration and, 69–73, 116, 119, 120–23 ‘purity’ of, 69, 70, 71, 352 Cyrus II ‘the Great’, King of Persia, 86–7, 249 Daily Mail, 119 Dalberg-Acton, John, 1st Baron Acton, 140, 180 Dalton, John, 196 Danube (Magris), 219 Danube river, 93 Darfur, 365 Darius I ‘the Great’, Persian Emperor, 86 Dark Ages, 5, 50, 140, 215 Darkening Age, The (Nixey), 134 Darwin, Charles, 24, 28, 162, 227 Davies, Stephen, 170 death penalty, 349 Defense Science Board, US, 313 Defoe, Daniel, 195 deindustrialization, 62 demagogues, 15, 217, 353–4, 360 dementia, 289 democracy, 205, 321, 357, 363, 378–82 authoritarianism and, 357 deliberative, 378–9 environment and, 327 in Greece, 5 Muslims and, 112, 113 populism and, 325 representative, 378 in United States, 200 Democratic Party, 164, 224–5, 238, 302, 349 Deng Xiaoping, 316, 317 Denisovans, 75 Department of Defense, US, 306, 313 Depeche Mode, 245, 295 Descartes, René, 100, 149, 153 Désert de Retz, France, 287 Deutsch, David, 261, 332 Diamond, Jared, 41 Diana, 89 Dickens, Charles, 197, 206 dictator game, 35 Diderot, Denis, 154 Dilmun, 42 disasters, 338 disease, 77–9, 128, 213, 293 Antonine Plague (165–80), 77 Behavioural Immune System, 222 Black Death (1346–53), 77, 139, 356 COVID-19 pandemic (2019–20), 3, 4, 10–12, 162–3, 312 Plague of Justinian (541–750), 77 Spanish flu (1918–19), 77 disgust, 222, 336–7, 371 ‘dismal science’, 206 Disraeli, Benjamin, 254 diversity, 83–4, 121–2 empires and, 84–106 problem solving and, 83 turtle theory, 121–2 division of labour, 28, 31–2, 40, 57, 117, 168 DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), 8, 73–4, 75, 76 Doctor Who, 135 Doggerland, 74 Dollond, John, 158–9 Dominicans, 144 dreadlocks, 72 dung beetles, 284–5 Dunn, Kris, 357 Dutch East India Company, 100 Dutch Republic (1581–1795), 6, 53, 84, 99–101, 147, 184, 208 Calvinism, 149 colonies, 100 exiles in, 99, 152, 153, 158, 185, 186 Glorious Revolution (1688), 101, 185–8, 190, 193 Jewish community, 100, 150 multi-shuttle ribbon frame in, 180 Dutch Revolt (1568–1648), 98–9, 101, 208 dynamism, 301–2, 312, 318, 330 Eagles and Rattlers, 218–19, 236, 243, 252 East River Rift Valley, 24 Eastern Europe, 114, 115 Eastern Roman Empire (395–1453), see Byzantine Empire Ebola virus, 293 economies of scale, 42 Economist, The, 118, 279, 318 economy and nativism, 349–51 efflorescences, 5, 6, 10 Egypt, ancient, 43, 45, 70, 87, 88, 89, 128 Ehrlich, Paul, 160 Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, The (Robbins), 201 Eighty Years War (1566–1648), 101 Einstein, Albert, 105 electricity, 297 Elizabeth I, Queen of England and Ireland, 179, 237, 277 Eller, Martin, 306 Elusians, 89 Elvin, Mark, 173 empathy, 219, 224 Encyclopédie, 154 ‘End of History?’


pages: 561 words: 138,158

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

Rather remarkably, they insisted that tending to financial markets was a more legitimate social mission than openly acknowledging the highly functional, indeed essential role they played in backstopping the government budget at a time of crisis. Even in its heyday, Keynesianism had been an incomplete revolution at best.67 In 2020, the scale of the crisis-fighting raised the intensity of the cognitive dissonance to a new level. In the heat of the moment, the difference of interpretation mattered little in practical terms. It became consequential only if one looked to the future, when the economy did begin to recover, prices nudged up, and yields rose along with them. How would the divergent expectations of the markets and the central bank play out then? 

The best way to respond may be simply to ignore the histrionics. That was the path chosen by the Biden transition team, ignoring the increasingly manic attempts by Trump and his entourage to deny their defeat. The result in the final months of 2020 was that the U.S. political system was thrown into an acute state of cognitive dissonance. President-elect Biden and his team went ahead with the transition. They prepared coronavirus responses, climate policies, and plans for a stimulus. Meanwhile, a substantial caucus within the GOP continued to pander to the defeated incumbent and thus to validate his alternate reality. The grotesquerie reached its height on January 6 with the mob invasion of the Capitol incited by the president, his entourage, and several Republican members of Congress.


pages: 223 words: 52,808

Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing) by Douglas R. Dechow

3D printing, Apple II, Bill Duvall, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, game design, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, semantic web, Silicon Valley, software studies, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

Depending on what someone builds into a ZigZag data space, you could wander along many multisensory paths, taking unexpected turns down the dimensions of color then branching off into textures or shapes, or from a sound to a flavor… Maybe multivoice music-like counterpoint could also be explored in the paths through ZigZag’s spaces, with cognitive dissonance resolving to cognitive harmony—or whatever. I could see my Music Mouse software running around inside a ZigZag space. Transpublishing and the way linking would have been done were Ted to have designed the Web, these deserve much more thought than they’re getting. One of the great deficits of the existing public web, with its one way links is that there is no way to trace anything back to its origin, no provenance.


pages: 198 words: 53,264

Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments by Michael Batnick

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Carl Icahn, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, global macro, hindsight bias, index fund, initial coin offering, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, multilevel marketing, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Pershing Square Capital Management, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, short squeeze, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Y Combinator

The world is always changing, but our views usually don't evolve alongside it. Even when we're presented with evidence that disconfirms our previous views, straying far from our original feelings is too painful for most to bear. This is so deeply ingrained in the fabric of our DNA that there is a name for this natural mental malfunction; it's called cognitive dissonance. For example, ask anybody if they have the ability to predict the future. They might look at you funny, and say, “Are you asking me if I have a crystal ball? No, I do not.” Okay then, do you select individual stocks. And do you regularly buy and sell them, in anticipation that their future price will be higher or lower?


pages: 184 words: 53,625

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson

Airbus A320, airport security, algorithmic trading, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Donald Davies, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, Jane Jacobs, John Gruber, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mega-rich, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, techno-determinism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche, working poor, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, your tax dollars at work

Facebook is a private corporation; the social graph that Zuckerberg celebrates is a proprietary technology, an asset owned by the shareholders of Facebook itself. And as far as corporations go, Facebook is astonishingly top-heavy: the S-1 revealed that Zuckerberg personally controls 57 percent of Facebook’s voting stock, giving him control over the company’s destiny that far exceeds anything Bill Gates or Steve Jobs ever had. The cognitive dissonance could drown out a Sonic Youth concert: Facebook believes in peer-to-peer networks for the world, but within its own walls, the company prefers top-down control centralized in a charismatic leader. If Facebook is any indication, it would seem that top-down control is a habit that will be hard to shake.


pages: 559 words: 155,372

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez

Airbnb, airport security, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Burning Man, business logic, Celtic Tiger, centralized clearinghouse, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, content marketing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, drop ship, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, Gary Kildall, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hacker News, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, information security, interest rate swap, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, second-price auction, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Socratic dialogue, source of truth, Steve Jobs, tech worker, telemarketer, the long tail, undersea cable, urban renewal, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, éminence grise

When the flying saucers and ensuing apocalypse failed to appear on the appointed date, the cult’s believers did not lose faith. On the contrary, the experience bolstered their beliefs, annealing them into an intimate confederacy of false belief. Vestiges of the cult persist even to this day. This study would lay the groundwork for Festinger’s theory of “cognitive dissonance”: the mental stress people suffer when presented with realities contrary to their deeply held beliefs. The key takeaway is that humans naturally avoid this discomfort, skirting situations that aggravate it, or ignoring data that make their mental contradiction more apparent. Note: The purpose of the following exposition is not a neener-neener troll of Facebook, reveling in an embarrassing fiasco for the sadistic glee of it.

See also Internet advertising; marketing brand, 39–40 budgets, 461 business model, 191, 325 direct-mail, 381, 385–86, 391 direct-response, 362–63 display, 154 fuzzy world, 388 immature markets, 318 as inducement, 450 investors, 83 Jobs and, 485 mathematics for, 28 as name-calling, 380–81 newspaper, 36–37 ROAS, 81 truth in, 54 Zuckerberg knowledge, 393–94 AdWords, 106, 186, 222, 286, 300, 364 Airbnb for cars, 241 founders, 78 Internet advertising, 25 logo, 124 success, 50 taking off, 198 as visionary, 164 alpha products, 44 Altman, Sam, 160–62, 178 Amazon Amazon Web Services, 103, 155, 233 meeting with A9 team, 429–30 mobile commerce, 484 scheming, 382 shopping cart, 328 AmEx, 301 Amit, Alon, 217 analytics software, 448 Andreessen, Marc, 25, 47 Andretti, Mario, 94 Android phones, 198, 282 angel investors, 110–13, 115, 117, 154, 206 Animal House, 399 antibiotics, 293 Apple Apple OS X, 47 joining, 346 platform control, 485 product launches, 365 scheming, 382 application programming interface (API), 186 aQuantive, 454 Arjay Miller Scholar, 110 Association for Computing Machinery, 368 Atari, 124, 149 Atlas, 383, 453–55 AT&T, 315, 324 Audience Network (AN), 486 August Capital, 154, 156, 159 Ayala, 496 Badros, Greg, 3, 410, 454, 457 Bain, Adam, 184, 188–90, 203, 478–79, 494 Baker Scholar, 110 Bakshy, Eytan, 368 bar-code reading, 51 batch, 105 Battles, Matt, 430 Beacon, 335 bedroom communities, 338 beer and diapers, 363 Beltway Boomers, 385 Belushi, John, 399 Best Buy, 328 best effort, 418 beta products, 44 Bezos, Jeff, 428 Big Brother, 384, 402 Bin Laden, Osama, 384 birth, 59–60 black-hat hackers, 314 Blackwell, Trevor, 60 Bluebeard (Vonnegut), 43 BMW, 31, 39, 130, 218, 265, 372 Boland, Brian, 382, 398 digital marketing and, 389 first meeting, 3–4 in great debate, 459–61 on integration, 443 middle manager, 463–64 reporting to, 277 seducing, 408 slides, 7–8 Sponsored Stories and, 371 stripping of duties, 452 Bolshevism, 356 Bond, Jon, 173 boot camp, 269 Bosworth, Andrew (“Boz”), 2, 444–46, 457–60, 473–74 Boyd, John, 436, 437 The Boy Kings (Losse), 445 brand advertising, 39–40 Brazil, 377–78 Brazil, Alan, 22–23 British Trader babies, 58–59, 170, 304–5 child support to, 306–7 family, 84 meeting, 54–56 relationship, 165, 168, 245 separating, 169–70, 303 Brogramming, 400 Bronson, Po, 308 Brown, Bonnie, 357 bugs, 269 Bulfinch, Thomas, 447 bumping phones, 218 Burberry, 39, 362, 372 Burke, Galyn, 349 Bushnell, Nolan, 149–50 business development, 429–30, 464, 494 Business Insider, 101 Campbell, Joseph, 259 Candy Crush, 383, 384 cap, 114–17 capitalism beef with, 411–12 extremes, 355–56 marching onward, 22 Silicon Valley, 74 spectacle, 181 speed of, 25 victorious, 124 wheels of, 36 work of, 23 Car and Driver, 261 Carrey, Jim, 424 Carthago delenda est, 288–90, 428, 492–93 Casablanca, 418 Castro, Fidel, 65, 354, 456 Cato the Elder, 289 Century 21, 21 channeling, 360 chaos monkey, 103 character development, 190 Charles River Ventures, 126–27 China, 374–75 Choe, David, 333 Chrome, 484 Chrysler, 349 Church of Latter Day Saints, 356 Churchill, Winston, 167, 411 Citibank, 57 CityVille, 228 class-action lawsuits, 81 Clavier, Jean-François (“Jeff”), 160 Clickable, 83 clickbait-y publishing, 81, 101 clickthrough rates, 309, 368, 450–51, 487 clown car, 428–29 Clune, David, 312 Coca-Cola, 311 Coelius, Zach, 396–99 cognitive dissonance, 361 Cole, Rodger, 132–34, 138 Comcast Ventures, 105 common investors, 397 communism, 355–56 company culture, 74 company-wide Q&A, 348–49 conference names, 311 connected world, 285 consultancy firms, 70 consumption patterns, 385, 412 conversion data, 318 turning data into cash, 274 tracking software, 222 Conway, Ron, 98 cookies data, 392 dropping, 387 pool, 484 reading, 6, 387 retargeting, 381–82 corporate culture, 88, 262, 332, 335, 464 corporate development, 97, 180, 209, 254, 256, 494 corporate mergers, 341 cost per mille (CPM), 275, 348, 386, 424, 486 countdown clock, 347 Country Casuals, 385 Coupa Cafe, 84 Cox, Chris, 278, 356 leadership, 410 at on-boarding, 260–64 Craigslist, 52, 54, 99 The Creamery, 229 credit derivatives, 20, 26–27 credit-default swap (CDS), 19–20 Crowe, Russell, 202 CrunchBase, 43 Crusades, 356 Cuba, 227–28, 354–55 culture company, 74 corporate, 88, 262, 332, 335, 464 cultural fit, 220 engineering, 285 Facebook, 268–69, 334–35, 345 hacker, 284 Silicon Valley engineering-first, 262, 283 tech companies’ cultural fit, 220 Cureton, Aileen, 331 Custom Audiences (CA) data matching, 452, 465 expanded version, 440 FBX versus, 439, 459–62 impact, 482 introduction, 388 losing as product, 452 open plan and, 442–43 as vulture, 401–2 working of, 394–95 customer acquisition cost (CAC), 486–87 customer relations management (CRM), 384–85 cyclists, 338 cynicism, 264 DabbleDB, 236–37 Dalal, Yogen, 154, 162–63 Daniel, Rob, 391 data conversion, 318 cookies, 392 turning data into cash, 274 data-per-pixel, 274 Facebook buying, 328 geographic, 301 Irish Data Privacy Audit, 278, 320–23 joining, 465 matching, 452, 465 mobile, 382, 477, 484, 486 on-boarding, 386–87 real-time synchronization, 38 sprawl, 321 targeting, 318, 485 third-party, 390, 423, 440, 484 velocity, 319 data protection agency (DPA), 320 Datalogix, 386, 388 Debord, Guy, 32, 353 defection, 255 Deloitte, 70 demand-side platform (DSP), 396, 423–24 democracy digital, 326–27 form of government, 411 Dempster, Mark, 122–23 derivatives, 19–20, 24 Derman, Emanuel, 16 desengaño, 239 Deutsche Bank, 57 development AdGrok, 234 business, 429–30, 464, 494 character, 190 corporate, 97, 180, 209, 254, 256, 494 costs, 487 defined, 95 dev team, 234–35 environment, 270 mobile, 79 product, 47, 94, 191, 220, 334, 370, 389 software, 455 technical, 156 technology, 294 tools, 336 Dhawan, Rohit, 217 DiggBar, 85 digital advertising, 448 digital democracy, 326–27 digital marketing, 388–89 digital monetization, 184 Direct Marketing News, 173 direct response (DR), 39 direct-mail advertising, 381, 385–86, 391 direct-response advertising, 362–63 Disk Operating System (DOS), 149 Dixon, Chris, 101–2 Docker, 119 dogfooding, 43 dominoes, 227 Dorsey, Jack, 177, 464, 490 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 190, 291 DotCloud, 119 Dove, 496 Dr.


pages: 436 words: 148,809

The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune by Alexander Stille

23andMe, behavioural economics, cognitive dissonance, East Village, experimental subject, fear of failure, medical residency, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, sunk-cost fallacy, white flight

It was the first time he became aware of a part of his brain that was filtering out things coming from the group’s leaders that were exaggerated, wrong, or flat-out crazy. “So even though I stayed in the group, I kept this little space in the back of my head, thinking I’ve got to live with these fallacies.” Meshnick began to experience what is known in psychology as “cognitive dissonance,” when your thoughts and actions are out of alignment, or your idea of yourself is at odds with certain facts in your life. He had to reconcile the seeming contradiction between being a rigorous scientist and obeying the dictates of people whose views he had begun to doubt. But many members had learned to distrust authority because of the Vietnam War, during which the government frequently misled the public.

And I wanted the best for them, and that’s really what I thought I was doing.” Jody said that she tries—and somehow manages—to live with a set of deep contradictions, to face honestly the harm she did to her children without tormenting herself while continuing to live her life. “I have to live with both of those things in me … In terms of cognitive dissonance, you’re not supposed to be able to tolerate that, but I can. I’ve forgiven myself, and I understand why it happened. But there’s nothing I can do about it other than to live my life now. Maybe I compartmentalize and refuse to think about things at times, but I’m not unhappy.” When I first spoke with Jody C. on the phone, I was searching for a word with which to characterize her therapy.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

It’s true that people can cling to beliefs in defiance of all evidence, like Lucy in Peanuts who insisted that snow comes out of the ground and rises into the sky even as she was being slowly buried in a snowfall. But there are limits as to how high the snow can pile up. When people are first confronted with information that contradicts a staked-out position, they become even more committed to it, as we’d expect from the theories of identity-protective cognition, motivated reasoning, and cognitive dissonance reduction. Feeling their identity threatened, belief holders double down and muster more ammunition to fend off the challenge. But since another part of the human mind keeps a person in touch with reality, as the counterevidence piles up the dissonance can mount until it becomes too much to bear and the opinion topples over, a phenomenon called the affective tipping point.80 The tipping point depends on the balance between how badly the opinion holder’s reputation would be damaged by relinquishing the opinion and whether the counterevidence is so blatant and public as to be common knowledge: a naked emperor, an elephant in the room.81 As we saw in chapter 10, that is starting to happen with public opinion on climate change.

See Enlightenment, the Clemenceau, Georges, 341 climate change, 136–54 carbon capture and storage, 150–51 carbon taxes, 139, 145–6, 149 climate justice movement, 138–9, 141–2 cognitive impediments to understanding, 140 decarbonization, 142–6, 143–4, 150–52 denial of, 137, 138, 139, 357 depoliticizing the discourse of, 382 geoengineering solutions, 150–51, 152–4, 382–3 nuclear power and, 144–5, 146–50, 465n76 Paris agreement, 134, 152, 335, 449 religious Cornwall Declaration on, 287 scientific literacy on, 356–7 spokespeople for, 382 Trump and, 335 Clinton, Bill, 67, 294, 449 Clinton, Hillary, presidential campaign of analysis of voting patterns, 339, 438 conspiracy theories and, 358, 449 loss of, 214, 215 media and, 343, 449 popular vote won by, 214, 334, 338 theoconservatives and, 449 Clockwork Orange, A (film), 175 clothing affordable, 80, 94, 117, 118 globalization and, 118, 462n63 coal carbon-to-hydrogen ratio of, 143, 144, 465n67 cooking with, 183 gasification conversion to liquid fuel, 151 as replacing nuclear power plants, 147 See also climate change; energy; petroleum Coal Miner’s Daughter (film), 113 Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire (1942), 183 cognition combinatorial/recursive power of, 27 evolution of, not adapted to modernity, 25 language and, 27 See also abstract thinking; cognitive biases; Flynn effect; identity-protective cognition; intelligence cognitive behavioral therapy, 175, 282 cognitive biases, 25–6, 353, 354–5, 403–4 adulthood mistaken for harsher world, 48 autobiographical memory and, 48, 281 bias bias of researchers, 361–3, 374 biased evaluation, 359 cognitive dissonance reduction, 377 confirmation biases, 369, 378 critical thinking courses, 377–8 debiasing programs, 378–9 decline in self mistaken for decline in times, 48 historical lag in recognizing, 383 Illusion of Explanatory Depth, 379–80 information sought to reinforce identity, 360 intuition outperformed by formulas, 403–4 motivated reasoning, 359, 377 My-Side bias, 359 Negativity bias, 47–8, 293 Optimism Gap, 40, 115, 225–6, 268 Rationality Community avoiding, 381 science as helping to overcome, 403 thinking in scale and in orders of change, 140 See also Availability heuristic; identity-protective cognition cognitive psychology and human irrationality, 351, 353 and literary scholarship, 407 Cohen, Leonard, 183 Cohen, Roger, 420 cohort (generational) effects depression, 280–81, 282, 283, 476n74 emancipative values, 225–8, 226, 227 happiness, 273–4 liberalism, 216–17 populist support, 341–2, 342 religious belief, 437–8 social support, 275 suicide, 279–80 voting patterns, 342 See also age (life cycle) effects; Baby Boomers; Generation X; GI Generation; Millennials; period (zeitgeist) effects; Silent Generation Cold War autocratic governments propped up during, 91 civil wars during, 91, 158–60, 164 Colombian peace agreement and end of, 158 end of, and alleviation of poverty, 91 famine and, 78 New Peace following, 43 terrorism declining in period following, 195 See also nuclear war Collier, Paul, 91 Colombia, 71, 71, 158, 172 colonial governments and conquest, 163–4 famine exacerbated by, 78, 459n35 See also imperialism; postcolonial governments commerce, 12–13 bourgeois virtue, development of, 84–5 cronyism, 83 institutions facilitating, 83–4 open economies, 83–4, 90–91 sectarian hatreds ameliorated by, 84 See also trade —GENTLE COMMERCE, 13, 84, 162, 198–9, 228 American founders and, 13 and violent crime, historical reduction of, 168–9 communality, as scientific virtue, xvii–xviii communism collapse of, and escape from poverty, 90–91 democratic second wave pushed back by, 200 as failing to promote human flourishing, 364 famine exacerbated by, 78, 459n36 opposition to religion, 430, 436, 438 “primitive,” 102–3 quality of life and, 247, 248 romantic heroism and, 31, 165, 445 “scientific racism” and, 398 See also Marxism; Marxist guerrillas and terrorists Compstat program, 380 computation and consciousness, 426 and knowledge, 21 computers, delayed productivity growth from, 330.

See food and food security; poverty hunter-gatherer peoples child mortality in, 55 diet of, 23 and egalitarianism vs. inequality, 102–3 life expectancy of, 53–4, 58, 457n4 persistence hunting, 353–4 reason and, 353–4 scientific skepticism among, 354 violence among, 199, 470n1 See also Hadza people; San people Huntington, Samuel, 200 Hussein, Leyla, 442–3 Hussein, Saddam, 199, 291, 366, 447 Hutu people, 161 Huxley, Aldous, 418 Ibsen, Henrik, 284 Iceland, 171, 475n30 ideas democracy as, 206 as historical forces, 347, 349–50, 405, 443, 448 and infectious disease improvement, 67 language and communication of, 27 as patterns in matter, 22 identity politics, 31, 342, 375 identity-protective cognition blue lies and, 358–9 cognitive dissonance and, 377 institutions of reason as mitigating, 27–8, 376–7 media and intellectuals and, 366–7 and politics as predicting scientific belief, 356–8 rationalization vs. reason and, 359 scientific literacy as no cure for, 403 and Tragedy of the Belief Commons, 358 unappreciated, 379, 383 See also cognitive biases Illusion of Explanatory Depth, 379–80 immigrants and immigration cuisines introduced by, 259–60 literature written by, 284 social spending and, 110 Trump and, 335, 336 immortality, 60–61 imperialism blamed on science, 34, 388, 399 Muslim countries and, 439 See also colonial governments income, 85–7, 86, 95–6 and class distribution, 114–15 disposable (after taxes and transfers) vs. market, 115–16, 116, 118, 254–5, 254 global distribution of, 111 after Great Recession, 115 happiness as increasing with, 268–71, 269 universal basic income, 119 India agriculture in, 76 Axial Age and, 23 calories available per person in, 70, 70 carbon emissions of, 143, 143–4 civil wars in, 160 colonial government of, 78 democratization and, 200, 203 education in, 238 equal rights, moderate support for, 222 escape from poverty of, 85, 86, 90 famine in, 69, 72, 78 GDP of, 85 globalization and, 111 industrialization and women in the workforce, 94 liberalization of economy, 90 liberal Muslim rule of 16th century, 442 nuclear power and, 150 nuclear weapons and, 307–8, 317, 318 partition of, 49, 160 per capita income of, 86 as permit bureaucracy (“license raj”), 90 population-control program of, 74 poverty in, 89 refugees and displaced persons, 160 secularization and, 436 social spending in, 109 and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 419 women’s rights and, 222 indigenous peoples, 123, 199.


pages: 223 words: 58,732

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

‘The spot-the-difference politicians. Desperate to fight the middle ground, but can’t even find it. Focus groupies. The triangulators. The dog whistlers. The politicians who daren’t say what they really mean.’30 Britain’s London-centric elites got into the habit of compartmentalising signs of a backlash. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing. Long before the 2016 referendum, there were plenty of signs that Britain’s malaise went far deeper than the antics of fringe activists. In the 2001 general election, British voter turnout fell to an historic low of just 59 per cent. This ought to have sounded alarms. Much of the drop was due to rising apathy among working-class voters, who felt Labour put more energy into promoting multiculturalism than to addressing their concerns.


On Palestine by Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé, Frank Barat

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, David Brooks, facts on the ground, failed state, ghettoisation, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, Stephen Hawking

You thought that these were closed societies who would not know what is going on, so I hope this is going to change, but for us, we were like in a bubble, we did not know that there was a different existence; it was very difficult to get out of it. FB: I guess the older generation, your generation and Nurit’s, the amount of cognitive dissonance as well when you’ve believed in something so strongly all your life, even though the facts show after a while that you are wrong, it is so hard to accept that you were wrong for, let’s say, thirty or forty years of your life. You see that all the time, at events when you always see the same people coming to every single Palestinian event, I always think, they know as much as I do about Palestine and they know the facts.


pages: 209 words: 54,638

Team Geek by Brian W. Fitzpatrick, Ben Collins-Sussman

anti-pattern, barriers to entry, cognitive dissonance, Dean Kamen, do what you love, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, fear of failure, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Ken Thompson, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, publish or perish, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, value engineering, web application

That is my career strategy. I discovered where I got this rebel streak from only very recently. I realized I inherited it from my dad, which was very strange to me because when I was growing up, I perceived my dad as an establishment figure, part of the very establishment I was rebelling against, so it was a severe cognitive dissonance for me to think of my dad as a rebel. But rebel he was. My dad started his career as a child laborer (yes, one of those millions of faceless children in developing countries you read about occasionally in National Geographic), but by mid-career, he rose up the ranks to become one of the most senior military officers in all of Singapore.


Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery by Andrew Greenway,Ben Terrett,Mike Bracken,Tom Loosemore

Airbnb, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, butterfly effect, call centre, chief data officer, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, data science, Diane Coyle, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, G4S, hype cycle, Internet of things, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, loose coupling, M-Pesa, machine readable, megaproject, minimum viable product, nudge unit, performance metric, ransomware, robotic process automation, Silicon Valley, social web, The future is already here, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, work culture

Worse, they insist on teams being able to deliver many pages of fiction about how certain they are about the assumptions they make for their project’s success. The truth is that many finance ministries or heads of finance would prefer to see a complete lie about the lifetime cost of a project than a relatively certain estimate of how much the next three months will cost – that is what their spreadsheet demands. This is cognitive dissonance operating on a grand scale. Unpicking all of this will take a long time. In the UK, it took more than a year to put in place a business case process more suited to agile projects than the Treasury’s waterfall-friendly Green Book guidance. As a digital team, your focus – beyond challenging and adapting default processes to stop them from breaking agile projects before they begin – is to help make sure that the people making investment decisions in your finance ministry or elsewhere are properly qualified to opine about technology.


pages: 244 words: 58,247

The Gone Fishin' Portfolio: Get Wise, Get Wealthy...and Get on With Your Life by Alexander Green

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, behavioural economics, borderless world, buy and hold, buy low sell high, cognitive dissonance, diversification, diversified portfolio, Elliott wave, endowment effect, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, financial independence, fixed income, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, hindsight bias, impulse control, index fund, interest rate swap, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, mental accounting, Michael Milken, money market fund, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, short selling, statistical model, stocks for the long run, sunk-cost fallacy, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve

Shermer correctly points out, “Rationally, we should just compute the odds of succeeding from this point forward.” Yet investors who have sunk a lot into a stock—including a fair amount of ego—have trouble doing this. Mental accounting and the sunk-cost fallacy are just the tip of the iceberg. Shermer shows that consumers and investors also fall prey to cognitive dissonance, hindsight bias, self-justification, inattentional blindness, confirmation bias, the introspection illusion, the availability fallacy, self-serving bias, the representative fallacy, the law of small numbers, attribution bias, the low aversion effect, framing effects, the anchoring fallacy, the endowment effect, and blind spot bias.


pages: 1,157 words: 379,558

Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris by Richard Kluger

air freight, Albert Einstein, book value, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, family office, feminist movement, full employment, ghettoisation, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, junk bonds, medical malpractice, Mikhail Gorbachev, plutocrats, power law, publication bias, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, trade route, transaction costs, traveling salesman, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty

For youth or adult alike, the habit may serve to compensate for profound feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, or an abiding bitterness that stems from degraded social status, low occupational achievement, certifiable injustice, or paranoid delusion. Such victims of social pathology are suspected of smoking not in spite of the hazards associated with it but because of them. Even better-adjusted smokers, though, are susceptible to the perverse condition that behavioral specialists call “cognitive dissonance,” acting in direct and self-destructive contradiction of known truths or indisputable fact. And all smokers are gifted at rationalizing their habit. Many smokers, for example, readily acknowledge, even insist, that they are hopelessly hooked. But as addictions go, they may argue, it is pretty benign.

Their fears of withdrawal symptoms are surpassed in many cases, furthermore, by the dread of assault from life’s countless vicissitudes, which they have convinced themselves they could not cope with if denied a cigarette at the next stressful moment. Smokers are thus classic rationalizers and hiders from fact when unwelcome word arrives about the perils of the one thing they think lets them cope with life. They are the very model of the type described by Leon Festinger in his 1957 treatise, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance—people who act in ways that deny knowledge of the consequences of hurtful or self-destructive acts. Yet for all the conflict they endure over their dependency, most smokers deeply resent the ever more widely held suspicion by smoke-free society that they suffer from flawed characters or emotional instability because they persist in what they shouldn’t.

The antismoking commercials ordered by the FCC soon followed, and Tony often pointed them out to her. She remembered one that went, “Smoking—it’s a matter of life and breath,” and got lectured by her granddaughter, who told her, “Grandma, smoking kills.” Yet she kept on. Rose Cipollone, in short, had a textbook case of what academics termed “cognitive dissonance”. A pair of social psychologists, Harold Kasarjian and Joel Cohen, both of whom would testify in the Cipollone trial, had suggested in the autumn 1965 issue of California Management Review how smokers dwelled in a constant state of disequilibrium because their dependency conflicted with the human impulse to survive and continued “in the face of undeniable and overwhelming evidence that cancer is directly attributable” to smoking.


pages: 898 words: 266,274

The Irrational Bundle by Dan Ariely

accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business process, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, compensation consultant, computer vision, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Donald Trump, end world poverty, endowment effect, Exxon Valdez, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, first-price auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, IKEA effect, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, late fees, loss aversion, Murray Gell-Mann, name-letter effect, new economy, operational security, Pepsi Challenge, Peter Singer: altruism, placebo effect, price anchoring, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, second-price auction, Shai Danziger, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, social contagion, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, young professional

Anne Preston, “The Nonprofit Worker in a For-Profit World,” Journal of Labor Economics 7, no. 4 (1989): 438–463. Chapter 3: The IKEA Effect: Why We Overvalue What We Make Based on Gary Becker, Morris H. DeGroot, and Jacob Marschak, “An Experimental Study of Some Stochastic Models for Wagers,” Behavioral Science 8, no. 3 (1963): 199–201. Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957). Nikolaus Franke, Martin Schreier, and Ulrike Kaiser, “The ‘I Designed It Myself’ Effect in Mass Customization,” Management Science 56, no. 1 (2009): 125–140. Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely, “The IKEA Effect: When Labor Leads to Love,” manuscript, Harvard University, 2010.

They found that after giving a short lecture about the benefits of a certain drug, the speaker would begin to believe his own words and soon prescribe accordingly. Psychological studies show that we quickly and easily start believing whatever comes out of our own mouths, even when the original reason for expressing the opinion is no longer relevant (in the doctors’ case, that they were paid to say it). This is cognitive dissonance at play; doctors reason that if they are telling others about a drug, it must be good—and so their own beliefs change to correspond to their speech, and they start prescribing accordingly. The reps told us that they employed other tricks too, turning into chameleons—switching various accents, personalities, and political affiliations on and off.

., 246 cashless society, implications for dishonesty in, 34 Catch Me If You Can (Abagnale), 173 certificates for (false) achievements, 153–54 Chance, Zoë, 145, 264 charitable behavior, 23–24 cheating: aggressive cheaters and, 239 altruistic, 222–23, 225–26, 227–28, 232 being made blatantly aware of, 156–57 being watched and, 223–25, 227 collaborative, see collaborative cheating desire to benefit from, 12–14, 27, 29, 237 ego depletion, 104–6, 111–12 fake products’ impact on, 125–31 in golf, 55–65 honor codes and, 41–45 increasing creativity to increase level of, 184–87 as infection, 191–216; see also infectious nature of cheating infidelity and, 244–45 on IQ-like tests, self-deception and, 145–49, 151, 153–54, 156–57 reducing amount of, 39–51, 248–54 removing oneself from tempting situation and, 108–11 signing forms at top and, 46–51 Ten Commandments and, 39–40, 41, 44 what-the-hell effect and, 127–31, 136 see also dishonesty China, cheating in, 241–42 Chloé accessories, studies with, 123–34 Civil War veterans, 152 classes, infectious nature of cheating in, 195–97 Coca-Cola, stealing money vs., 32–33 cognitive dissonance, 81 cognitive load: ability to resist temptation and, 99–100 judges’ parole rulings and, 102–3 Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), 173–74 coin logic, 167–68 collaborative cheating, 217–35 altruism and, 222–23, 225–26, 227–28, 232 being watched or monitored and, 223–25, 227–28, 234–35 emphasis on working as group or team and, 217–18 infectious nature of cheating in relation to, 221–22 social utility and, 222–23 companies: being one step removed from money and, 34–37 irrationality of, 51 see also corporate dishonesty compliments, insincere, 159 conflicts of interest, 67–95, 238, 248 in academia, 82, 84–85 in dentistry, 67–71, 93, 94, 230 disclosure and, 88–92 dots task and, 129 eradication of, 92–95 exclusion of experimental data and, 86–88 expert witnesses and, 85–86 in financial services industry, 83–85, 93, 94 governmental lobbyists and, 77–78, 94 honesty threshold and, 130–31 inherent inclination to return favors and, 74–75 medical procedures and, 71–74, 92–94, 229 pharmaceutical companies’ influence in academia and, 82 pharma reps and, 78–82 what-the-hell effect and, 129–31 congressional staffers, cheating among, 243 Congress members, PAC money misused by, 208–10 contractors, 93 Conway, Alan, 150–51 Cooper, Cynthia, 215 Cornell University, 250–51 corpora callosa, 164–65 corporate dishonesty: cheating a little bit and, 239–40 Enron collapse and, 1–3, 192, 207, 215, 234 recent spread of, 192, 207–8 cost-benefit analysis, 4–5, 26–27, 237, 239 infectious nature of cheating and, 201–3, 205 see also Simple Model of Rational Crime counterfeits, see fake products creativity, 88, 163–89, 238 brain structure and, 164–65 dark side of, 187–89 fooling oneself and, 165–67 increasing, to increase level of cheating, 184–87 infidelity and, 244 intelligence vs., as predictor of dishonesty, 172–77 link between dishonesty and, 170–72, 186–89 logical-sounding rationales for choices and, 163–64 measures of, 171 moral flexibility and, 186–87 pathological liars and, 168–70 revenge and, 177–84 credit card companies, 239–40 crime, reducing, 52 cultural differences, 240–43 Danziger, Shai, 102 decision making: creating efficient process for, 167–68 effectiveness of group work in, 217–18 rationalization process and, 163–67 Denfield, George, 75 dentists: continuity of care and, 228–31 treating patients using equipment that they own, 67–68, 93–94 unnecessary work and, 67–71 depletion, see ego depletion dieting, 98, 109, 112–13, 114–15 what-the-hell effect and, 127, 130 “dine-and-dash,” 79 diplomas, lying about, 135–36, 153, 154 disabled person, author’s adoption of role of, 143–44 disclosure, 88–92, 248 study on impact of, 89–92 discounting, fixed vs. probabilistic, 194 dishonesty: causes of, 3–4, 5 collaborative, see collaborative cheating cultural differences and, 240–43 discouraging small and ubiquitous forms of, 239–40 importance of first act of, 137 infectious nature of, 191–216; see also infectious nature of cheating intelligence vs. creativity as predictor of, 172–77 link between creativity and, 170–72, 186–89 opportunities for, passed up by vast majority, 238 of others, fake products and assessing of, 131–34 rational and irrational forces in, 254 reducing amount of, 39–51, 248–54 society’s means for dealing with, 4–5 summary of forces that shape (figure), 245 when traveling, 183n see also cheating dissertation proposals and defenses, 101 distance factors, 238 in golf, 58–59 stealing Coca-Cola vs. money and, 32–33 token experiment and, 33–34 doctors: consulting for or investing in drug companies, 82, 93 continuity of care and, 228–29 lecturing about drugs, 81 pharma reps and, 78–82 treating or testing patients with equipment that they own, 92–94 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, 234 dots task: conflict of interest and, 129 description of, 127–29 link between creativity and dishonesty and, 171–72, 185–86 what-the-hell effect and, 129–31 downloads, illegal, 137–39 dressing above one’s station, 120–21 Ebbers, Bernie, 13 ego depletion, 100–116, 238, 249 basic idea behind, 101 cheating and, 104–6 in everyday life, 112–16 removing oneself from tempting situations and, 108–11, 115–16 of Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones, 103 sometimes succumbing to temptation and, 114–15 sudden deaths among students’ grandmothers at exam time and, 106–8 ego motivation, 27 England, cheating in, 242 Enron, 1–3, 192, 207, 215, 234 essay mills, 210–13 exams, sudden deaths among students’ grandmothers and, 106–8 exhaustion, 249 consumption of junk food and, 97–98 judges’ parole rulings and, 102–3 see also ego depletion experimental data, exclusion of, 86–88 expert witnesses, 85–86 explanations, logical-sounding, creation of, 163–65 external signaling, 120–22 dressing above one’s station and, 120–21 fake products and, 121–22 failures, tendency to turn blind eye to, 151 “fair,” determination of what is, 57 fake products, 119, 121–40, 238 illegal downloads and, 137–39 misrepresentation of academic credentials and, 135–36 rationalizations and, 134–35 self-signaling and, 123–26, 135 signaling value of authentic version diluted by, 121–22 suspiciousness of others and, 131–34 what-the-hell effect and, 127–31, 135 farmer’s market, benevolent behavior toward blind customer in, 23–24 fashion, 117–26 counterfeit goods and, 119, 121–22, 121–40, 123–26; see also fake products dressing above one’s station and, 120–21 external signaling and, 120–22 self-signaling and, 122–26 Fastow, Andrew, 2 favors, 74–82 aesthetic preferences and, 75–77 governmental lobbyists and, 77–78 inherent inclination to return, 74–75 pharma reps and, 78–82 see also conflicts of interest Fawal-Farah, Freeda, 117, 118 FBI, 215 Fedorikhin, Sasha, 99–100 Feynman, Richard, 165 financial crisis of 2008, 83–85, 192, 207, 234, 246–47 financial favors, aesthetic preferences and, 77 financial services industry: anonymous monitoring and, 234–35 cheating among politicians vs., 243 conflicts of interest in, 83–85, 93, 94 government regulation of, 234 fishing, lying about, 28 Frederick, Shane, 173 friends, invited to join in questionable behavior, 195 fudge factor theory, 27–29, 237 acceptable rate of lying and, 28–29, 91 distance between actions and money and, 34–37 getting people to cheat less and, 39–51 infidelity and, 244 rationalization of selfish desires and, 53 stealing Coca-Cola vs. money and, 32–33 Gazzaniga, Michael, 164–65 Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), 219–20 generous behavior, 23–24 Get Rich Cheating (Kreisler), 14 Gilovich, Tom, 250, 263–64 Gino, Francesca, 45, 104, 123, 127, 131, 145, 170, 184, 197, 225, 234–35, 242, 258–59 Glass, Ira, 6 Gneezy, Ayelet, 177, 257–58 golf, 55–65 cheating by “average golfer” vs. study participants and, 63–64 mistallying score in, 61–64 moving location of ball in, 58–59, 63 mulligans in, 60–61, 63–64 self-monitoring in, 56–57 survey on cheating in, 57–64 government regulations, 234 grandmothers, sudden deaths of, at exam time, 106–8 gray matter, 169–70 Green, Jennifer Wideman, 117 grocery shopping, ego depletion and, 109, 112–13 group or team work, 220–23 performance unaffected by, 233 possible benefits of, 223 predominance of, in professional lives, 217–18, 235 social utility and, 222–23 see also collaborative cheating Grüneisen, Aline, 210–11, 257 guilt, self-inflicted pain and, 250–52 Harford, Tim, 3–4 Harper’s Bazaar, 117–18 Harvard Medical School, 82 Harvey, Ann, 75 Henn, Steve, 209 heretics, external signaling of, 120 Hinduism, 25 honesty threshold, 130–31 honor codes, 41–45, 204 ideological organizations, 232n “I knew it all along” feeling, 149 illegal businesses, loyalty and care for customers in, 138–39 impulsive (or emotional) vs. rational (or deliberative) parts of ourselves, 97–106 cognitive load and, 99–100 ego depletion and, 100–106 exhaustion and, 97–98 Inbar, Yoel, 250, 264 infectious nature of cheating, 191–216, 249 bacterial infections compared to, 192–93 in class, 195–97 collaborative cheating in relation to, 221–22 Congress members’ misuse of PAC money and, 208–10 corporate dishonesty and, 192, 207–8 cost-benefit analysis and, 201–3, 205 essay mills and, 210–13 matrix task and, 197–204 positive side of moral contagion and, 215–16 regaining ethical health and, 214–15 slow and subtle process of accretion in, 193–94, 214–15 social norms and, 195, 201–3, 205–7, 209 social outsiders and, 205–7 vending machine experiment and, 194–95 infidelity, 244–45 “in good faith” notion, 219–20 Inside Job, 84–85 insurance claims, 49–51 intelligence: creativity vs., as predictor of dishonesty, 172–77 measures of, 173–75 IQ-like tests, cheating and self-deception on, 145–49 certificates emphasizing (false) achievement and, 153–54 increasing awareness of cheating and, 156–57 individuals’ tendency to turn a blind eye to their own failures and, 151 IRS, 47–49 Islam, 249 Israel, cheating in, 241 Italy, cheating in, 242 Jerome, Jerome K., 28 Jobs, Steve, 184 Jones, Bobby, 56 Jones, Marilee, 136 Judaism, 45, 249 judges, exhausted, parole decisions and, 102–3 junk food, exhaustion and consumption of, 97–98 Keiser, Kenneth, 135 Kelling, George, 214–15 John F.


pages: 200 words: 60,314

Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss by Frances Stroh

cognitive dissonance, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Ford Model T, Golden Gate Park, imposter syndrome, Kickstarter, new economy, nuclear winter, post-work, South of Market, San Francisco, urban renewal

Our family was like one of those hand-painted road signs that point in a multitude of directions at once: laziness and bad genes were the problem, according to my mother; according to my father and Whitney, Charlie himself was the problem; Charlie would have it that our father alone was the problem; while, according to Bobby and me, an unfortunate alchemy of both Charlie’s and our father’s problems was to blame. The cognitive dissonance between my parents’ versions of the story and ours simply could not be reconciled. I had written a paper to be presented on a panel at the gallery discussing my piece in purely conceptual terms, yet now I was unearthing a truth that could not be bound by any intellectual discussion. Looking at the piece as an outsider, I liked the tension of the raw emotional material pressing up against the cool, minimalist look I’d chosen—those six rectangular screens displaying enormous talking mouths—but these had nothing to do with me, with what went on inside of me when I myself watched the tapes: the horror, the shock of recognition.


pages: 213 words: 61,911

In defense of food: an eater's manifesto by Michael Pollan

back-to-the-land, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, Gary Taubes, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, placebo effect, Upton Sinclair

It’s no wonder that omega-3 fatty acids are poised to become the oat bran of our time as food scientists rush to microencapsulate fish and algae oil and blast it into such formerly all-terrestrial foods as bread and pasta, milk and yogurt and cheese, all of which will soon, you can be sure, spout fishy new health claims. (I hope you remember the relevant rule.) By now you’re probably feeling the cognitive dissonance of the supermarket shopper or science-section reader as well as some nostalgia for the simplicity and solidity of the first few words of this book. Words I’m still prepared to defend against the shifting winds of nutritional science and food-industry marketing, and will. But before I do, it’s important to understand how we arrived at our present state of nutritional confusion and anxiety.


pages: 190 words: 62,941

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination by Adam Lashinsky

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Benchmark Capital, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google X / Alphabet X, hustle culture, independent contractor, information retrieval, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, new economy, pattern recognition, price mechanism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, young professional

Indeed, though Kalanick blanches at acknowledging any influences, obsessing over the “kerning” of a logo is exactly what Steve Jobs did at Apple. And he was revered for it. Kalanick never met Jobs, but everyone in Silicon Valley can recite the lines from the hymnal of how Jobs wouldn’t rest until every font, typeface, and finely beveled edge had reached perfection. The Apple CEO was a master at instilling cognitive dissonance, persuading customers to overlook (usually fixable) defects in his products as well as the troubling working conditions of the contractors who made them. Similarly, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos gets away with jerking around just about everyone—suppliers, employees, shippers, other merchants—so long as he delivers the lowest prices to customers.


pages: 239 words: 62,005

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason by Dave Rubin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, deplatforming, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, job automation, Kevin Roose, low skilled workers, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple, unpaid internship, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

In other words: when it’s convenient she’s black, female, and Muslim—all things that score big in the Oppression Olympics—yet, when the mask slips and her ideas require scrutiny, she’s immediately protected via the victimhood status that comes with those labels. It’s quite a brilliant strategy, actually. Play the victim card to attain power, then, once you have it, use it to shield yourself from legitimate criticism. This cognitive dissonance stems from one key truth about modern leftism: progressives see racism, sexism, and discrimination everywhere, except where it actually exists. That’s not to say America doesn’t have issues with prejudice and discrimination. Do white supremacists exist? Yes. Do black, Jew, and Hispanic haters exist?


pages: 254 words: 61,387

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World by Yancey Strickler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits

There are understandable reasons for this. Value can be more precise than values. Value is easier to compare across contexts. There are many technological tools for measuring value (singular) and few for values (plural). The measured surpassed the not-measured. But when our only concept of value is financial, there’s cognitive dissonance between how people want to live and how our metrics want us to live. This is a dangerous misalignment. Remember, our main value metric (GDP) counts something as valuable only if money is spent on it. According to this logic, the only value that Google and Twitter add to the world are the ad units they sell.


pages: 205 words: 61,903

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

This, in turn, fires the mirror neurons in our brains, stimulating a positive feedback loop and releasing oxytocin—the bonding hormone—straight into our bloodstreams. On a Zoom call, much less a text message or Twitter comment, we can’t feel these subconsciously detected cues. Someone may say they agree with us, but we can’t confirm this assertion with our bodies. The mirror neurons don’t fire, the oxytocin doesn’t flow, and we’re left in a state of cognitive dissonance: they said they agree with me, but it doesn’t feel like it. Our bodies don’t know to blame this on the media environment. Instead, we blame it on the other person. They are not to be trusted. This sense of distrust and alienation then feeds back into the way we write our business plans and build our technologies.


pages: 512 words: 165,704

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, cellular automata, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Donald Shoup, endowment effect, extreme commuting, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, hive mind, human-factors engineering, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, Induced demand, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, megacity, Milgram experiment, Nash equilibrium, PalmPilot, power law, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, SimCity, statistical model, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury, ultimatum game, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor

Rather than the simple greed of the local municipality, it is also that the road through the village so often feels the same as the road outside the village—the same width, the same shoulders. The speed limit has suddenly been cut in half, but the driver feels as if he or she is still driving the same road. That speeding ticket is cognitive dissonance. In the mid-1980s, Monderman had an epiphany that is still reverberating throughout the world. He was called in to rework the main street of a village called Oudehaske. Villagers, as they do the world over, were complaining about cars speeding through the village, on a wide asphalt road with steady traffic volumes.

“they’ll behave like that”: Monderman’s suspicion of traffic signs was not necessarily a radical stance. The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, the bible of American traffic engineers, itself has a warning about warning signs: “The use of warning signs,” it notes, “should be kept to a minimum as the unnecessary use of warning signs tends to breed disrespect for all signs.” is cognitive dissonance: Whether a driver actually gets the ticket may depend on several factors, as a study by Thomas Stratmann and Michael Makowsky argued. “The farther the residence of a driver from the municipality where the ticket could be contested,” they wrote, “the higher is the likelihood of a speeding fine, and the larger the amount of the fine.


pages: 467 words: 503

The omnivore's dilemma: a natural history of four meals by Michael Pollan

additive manufacturing, back-to-the-land, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, double entry bookkeeping, food desert, Gary Taubes, Haber-Bosch Process, index card, informal economy, invention of agriculture, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, off-the-grid, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Whole Earth Catalog

We add only the thinnest veneer of culture to these raw leaves, dressing them in oil and vinegar. Much virtue attaches to this kind of eating, for what do we regard as more wholesome than tucking into a pile of green leaves? The contrast of the simplicity of this sort of eating, with all its pastoral overtones, and the complexity of the industrial process behind it produced a certain cognitive dissonance in my refrigerated mind. I began to feel that I no longer understood what this word I'd been following across the country and the decades really meant—I mean, of course, the word "organic." It is an unavoidable and in some ways impolite question, and very possibly besides the point if you look at the world the way Gene Kahn or Drew and Myra Goodman do, but in precisely what sense can that box of salad on sale in a Whole Foods three thousand miles and five days away from this place truly be said to be organic?

Such has been the genius of capitalism, to re-create something akin to a state of nature in the modern supermarket or fast-food outlet, throwing us back on a perplexing, nutritionally perilous landscape deeply shadowed again by the omnivore 's dilemma. • 303 SEVENTEEN THE ETHICS OF EATING ANIMALS 1. THE STEAKHOUSE DIALOGUES The first time I opened Peter Singer's Animal Liberation I was dining alone at the Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium rare. If that sounds like a recipe for cognitive dissonance, if not indigestion, well, that was sort of the idea. It had been a long time since this particular omnivore had felt any dilemma about eating meat, but then I had never before involved myself so directly in the processes of turning animals into food: owning a steak-bound steer, working the killing cones in Joel Salatin's processing shed, and now preparing to hunt a wild animal.


Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition by Kindleberger, Charles P., Robert Z., Aliber

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, death of newspapers, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, edge city, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Hyman Minsky, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, junk bonds, large denomination, law of one price, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, railway mania, Richard Thaler, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, very high income, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Nonetheless the banks and the firms hung on, waiting for the exhibition to open, because they thought or at least hoped that the increase in sales would save the situation. When the exhibition opened and the increase in sales was disappointing, the market collapsed in early May.54 As an illustration of repression of contradictory evidence – the cognitive dissonance case – consider J.W. Beyen’s analysis of the German failure to restrict short-term borrowing from abroad at the end of the 1920s. He suggested that the dangers were not faced, even by Schacht, the German finance minister, and added: ‘It would not have been the first nor the last time that consciousness was being “repressed”.’55 These examples suggest that despite the general usefulness of the assumption of rationality, markets have on occasions – infrequent occasions – acted in ways that were irrational even when each participant in the market believed he or she was acting rationally.

More and more economic theorists are moving away from unswerving reliance on the assumption that market participants are uniformly intelligent, informed, and independent in thought, introducing such concepts as asymmetric information (different knowledge available to different participants), cognitive dissonance (unconscious suppression of information that fails to fit a priori views), herd behavior, procrastination that results in failure to act in timely fashion, and so on. Those interested should consult the work especially of George Akerlof and Richard Thaler. For relevant studies, see Frederic S.


pages: 651 words: 162,060

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BIPOC, bitcoin, British Empire, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, disinformation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, land tenure, late capitalism, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, retail therapy, rewilding, social distancing, supervolcano, tech billionaire, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

Psychological Distancing means that the human brain tends to see climate change as something abstract, invisible, slow-moving, and far away in terms of both space and time. This minimizes our sense of the risk we face. Doom refers to the way we frame climate change as a looming disaster that threatens great loss and sacrifice. This framing induces fear and guilt which, after a while, leads to habituation and avoidance of the issue. Meanwhile, cognitive Dissonance between what we do (drive cars, eat beef, fly) and what we know (that carbon emissions wreak havoc on Earth’s climate) tempts us to justify ourselves rather than actually change our behaviours. Then, there’s Denial, which isn’t just about rejecting climate science: it’s to do with the way we suppress our daily awareness of it, so we can go on living as if we hadn’t heard the inconvenient facts.

See also individual organisation name Climeworks Orca, 216 Clinton, Bill, 26 clouds, 24, 51, 57, 58, 60–61, 74, 99, 172 coal, 7, 14, 23, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 49, 56, 57, 58, 92, 93, 156, 163, 164, 181, 211, 217, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 227, 260, 297, 306, 358, 393, 411, 426 Coca-Cola, 295, 297, 326 coffee, 248 cognitive dissonance, 338 colonialism, 162, 174, 175, 311, 313, 316, 364, 387–9, 398, 399–400, 410–11, 417, 418, 436 Concerned Scientists United, 338 Conference of the Parties, 93; COP1 (Berlin, 1995), 302; COP25 (Madrid, 2019), 378; COP26 (Glasgow, 2021), 93, 136, 158, 204, 212, 278, 340, 356; COP27 (Egypt, 2022), 93, 206 consumerism, 202, 218, 280, 281–9, 299, 331–6, 369, 377, 425–6 consumption-based emissions accounting, 257–8, 257, 258 consumption, circle of, 425–6 Coope, Russell, 14 Copenhagen Accord (2009), 28 Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, 98, 218 coral reefs, 7, 15, 33, 38, 51, 80, 84–5, 334, 335, 345, 346, 350 corporate engagement, 30 Covid-19 pandemic 21, 132–3, 136, 139, 141, 145, 149, 157, 159, 192, 217, 274, 355, 378–83, 393, 436 crabs, 350 crops, 52, 96; advent of agriculture and, 107; biological control agents, 110; cropland expansion, 100, 244–6, 246; cropland reallocations, 341–2, 343; cropland relocations, 109; deforestation and, 236; drought and, 172; fertilizer, 13, 32, 35, 111, 245, 246, 251, 252–4, 340, 341, 342, 343, 346, 414; food systems and, 253–5; loss/failure of, 165, 168, 172; pollination, 108, 110; rotations, 251; soil and, 340–41; yield, 149–50, 183, 245–6, 251, 253, 254, 343, 402 cryosphere, 37, 73, 114 culture wars, 326, 433 cycling, 135, 273, 274 cyclones, 67, 69, 70–71, 79, 397 D Dálvvadis, 173–4 Dakota Access Pipeline, 164 dams, 35, 89, 388 Danish Meteorological Institute, 49 Darity, William, 412 Darwin, Charles, 12 DDT, 111 decarbonization, 205, 258, 261, 264, 271, 275, 311, 315, 317, 381–2, 405–9 Deepwater Horizon oil spill (2010) 198–9, 201 defections, powerbrokers, 3, 65 democracy, 5, 42, 161, 164, 180–81, 213, 279, 325–6, 355, 356, 358, 371, 391, 392, 393, 394, 412–13, 424 dengue, 133, 143, 144, 145, 146 denial, climate-change, 2, 29, 202, 204–9, 207, 337, 338, 370, 372–4, 373, 383 dictatorship, 42, 180, 362, 364, 366, 400 Dieffenbach’s rail, 13 diets: changing, 11, 150, 239, 244–55, 246, 249, 250, 251, 340–33, 343; meat, 107, 112, 236, 248, 249–50, 249, 250, 253, 254, 282, 285, 288, 302, 356, 434; plant-based, 135, 236, 244, 247, 248, 249, 251, 327, 329, 335, 338, 342, 433; vegan, 281, 328, 329, 339, 360, 434; vegetarian, 324, 329, 435 direct-air capture (DAC), 238 disinformation campaigns, 27, 29, 30, 31 divestment, 30, 222, 412, 431 dogs, 9–10 drawdown technologies, 235–9 drought, 26, 38, 39, 65, 68, 74–5, 88, 96–7, 98, 99–100, 116, 124, 134, 165–8, 187, 189, 233, 299, 300, 399, 415 Durán, Alejandro, 299, 300 E East Siberian Arctic Seas (ESAS), 118, 121 e-bikes, 209 echinoderm, 84–5 ecocide, 431 Ecological Threat Register, Institute for Economics and Peace, 187 economics, 8, 29; capitalism, 13, 30–31, 162, 202, 310, 361–2, 390, 399; degrowth, 310–12; divestment, 30, 222, 412, 431; economic institutions, creating new, 376; equity and, 308–9; extractive economy, 163, 391; financial crisis (2008) 393; financial crisis, climate-related, 192–3; financialization of nature, 204; financial rescue packages, Covid-19, 217; GDP and see GDP; growth, 133, 148, 156, 183, 209, 240, 280, 310–12; incomes see income; laissez-faire policies, 30; market economics, 30–31, 200, 202, 255, 258, 284, 309, 324, 366, 412; market failure, climate change as, 30–31; socio-economic cost of climate change, 191–3; socio-economic trends since 1750 35; wealth inequality see wealth education, self- 324–7, 433 efficiency gains 251, 258, 259, 261, 264, 272, 288, 306, 311, 392 Ehrlich, Paul, 112 electricity generation, 30, 56, 88, 217, 227, 228, 257, 259, 261, 266, 268, 281, 309, 388, 434 electrification, 209, 271, 273n; electric vehicles (EVs), 28, 209, 221, 222–3, 226, 227, 268, 271–5, 283, 324, 333, 386; industrial processes, 260–61 elephants, 349, 350, 400 El Niño 38, 64, 100, 189, 190 El Salvador, 165–6, 168 End-Permian mass extinction, 7 energy democracy, 392, 394, 413 ENSO (El Niño-Southern Oscillation) 38 Environmental Defense Fund, US, 25 Environmental Protection Agency, US, 163, 211–12 epidemiological surveillance, 145 Equinor, 262 equity, 154; cars/personal mobility and, 274–5; colonialism and, 315; consumption-based emissions accounting approach and, 257; desire to look away from issues of, 218; geoengineering and, 233–4; Indigenous peoples and, 177; intergenerational, 172; material consumption levels and, 269; meaning of, 396–401; nationally determined contributions (NDC) and, 308–9; net zero by 2050 target and, 21, 304; Paris Agreement and, 308–9; school strike movement and, 355; taboo subject, 208–9; taxes and, 409; water system and, 89; wealth and see wealth.


The Techno-Human Condition by Braden R. Allenby, Daniel R. Sarewitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, airport security, Anthropocene, augmented reality, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, different worldview, Edward Jenner, facts on the ground, friendly fire, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, precautionary principle, prediction markets, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, smart grid, source of truth, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Given our enslavement to our own individual consciousnesses (at least until redesign), what lies between the Scylla of Level I narcissism and the Charybdis of Level III resignation and despair? What could it meant to engage authentically-fearlessly, openly, honestly-in a world that seems not only to render the individual meaningless but also to make comprehension impossible? It means that authenticity must build on a foundational cognitive dissonance. One must accept the validity of one's own experience, upbringing, culture, and other contributions to one's own grounding while simultaneously understanding that one is 186 Chapter 8 a partial and contingent reflection of the evolving and incomprehensible complexity that is out there. The continual temptation offered by the Enlightenment is to escape this dilemma through resort to ideas and ideals of progress, especially the expansion of knowledge about our world.


pages: 229 words: 67,869

So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

4chan, Adam Curtis, AltaVista, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Clive Stafford Smith, cognitive dissonance, Desert Island Discs, different worldview, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, gentrification, Google Hangouts, Hacker News, illegal immigration, Jon Ronson, Menlo Park, PageRank, Ralph Nader, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, urban planning, WikiLeaks

People really were very keen to imagine Jonah as shameless, as lacking in that quality, as if he were something not quite human that had adopted human form. I suppose it’s no surprise that we feel the need to dehumanize the people we hurt - before, during, or after the hurting occurs. But it always comes as a surprise. In psychology it’s known as cognitive dissonance. It’s the idea that it feels stressful and painful for us to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time (like the idea that we’re kind people and the idea that we’ve just destroyed someone). And so to ease the pain we create illusory ways to justify our contradictory behaviour. It’s like when I used to smoke and I’d hope the tobacconist would hand me the pack that read ‘Smoking Causes Ageing Of The Skin’ instead of the pack that read ‘Smoking Kills’, because ageing of the skin?


pages: 246 words: 68,392

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, financial independence, future of work, game design, gig economy, Hacker News, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, law of one price, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, post-work, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

He didn’t like working in law—making an impact was too slow of a process that involved much too much paperwork—and, by extension, he’d put his goal of entering politics on the sideline. But he still was interested in social issues. Both Dan and Saman saw themselves as people who would make a positive social impact, and Managed by Q’s current business strategy didn’t necessarily fulfill that vision. The answer to both the company’s business problems and to its founders’ cognitive dissonance was clearly to hire frontline workers. Not just hire them (there are plenty of terrible employers, too), but train them well, and pay them better. The potential problem with this approach was funding. In August 2014, four months after launch, Managed by Q announced a $775,000 round of funding, which was enough to get by for some months before it would need to raise another round.


pages: 265 words: 71,143

Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order by Jason Sharman

British Empire, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, death of newspapers, European colonialism, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, land tenure, offshore financial centre, passive investing, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, profit maximization, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, trade route, transaction costs

Canadian Journal of Law and Society 26 (1): 25–50. Caverley, Jonathan D. 2014. Democratic Militarism: Voting, Wealth and War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chamberlain, M. E. 1974. The Scramble for Africa. Harlow: Pearson. Chang, Tom Y., David H. Solomon, and Mark Westerfield. 2016. “Looking for Someone to Blame: Delegation, Cognitive Dissonance, and the Disposition Effect.” Journal of Finance. 71 (1): 267–302. Charney, Michael W. 2004. Southeast Asian Warfare 1300–1900. Leiden: Brill. Chase, Kenneth. 2003. Firearms: A Global History to 1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chaudhuri, K. N. 1965. The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint Stock Company.


pages: 262 words: 65,959

The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, cognitive dissonance, Donald Knuth, Erdős number, Georg Cantor, Grace Hopper, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John Nash: game theory, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, P = NP, Paul Erdős, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum cryptography, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Wolfskehl Prize, women in the workforce

There are bonus points if either of these punch lines make you smile: Joke 7 “The share of the hypertense muse equals the sum of the shares of the other two brides.” 2 points Joke 8 “The squire of the high pot and noose is equal to the sum of the squires of the other two sides.” 2 points TOTAL – 20 POINTS CHAPTER 5 Six Degrees of Separation While visiting Los Angeles in October 2012, I was lucky enough to attend a table-read of an upcoming episode of The Simpsons titled “Four Regrettings and a Funeral.” This involved the cast reading through the entire episode in order to iron out any problems before the script was finalized in preparation for animation. It was bizarre to see and hear a fully grown Yeardley Smith delivering lines with little Lisa’s voice. Similarly, I experienced extreme cognitive dissonance when I heard the voices of Homer, Marge, and Moe Szyslak, whose tones and diction are so familiar from years of watching The Simpsons, emerge from the all-too-human forms of Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, and Hank Azaria. Although there is much else to appreciate in “Four Regrettings and a Funeral,” it is sadly lacking in mathematical references.


pages: 266 words: 67,272

Fun Inc. by Tom Chatfield

Adrian Hon, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, An Inconvenient Truth, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, behavioural economics, Boris Johnson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer age, credit crunch, game design, invention of writing, longitudinal study, moral panic, publication bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, upwardly mobile

Indeed, as is often the way with modern video games, dissident voices have begun to be heard within the game itself, with a number of members of the public choosing to make ‘virtual protests’ against the actions of the US military by, among other things, registering accounts under the names of soldiers killed while on active duty in Iraq. Think too long or hard about the ethical intricacies of a simulated environment modelling a combat situation and you’re certain to experience a peculiarly modern kind of cognitive dissonance. It’s something described in detail in reporter Evan Wright’s Generation Kill, an account published in 2004 of the author’s experience of being ‘embedded’ with the First Recon unit of Marines on combat duty during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The young men he watched fighting represented, he writes, ‘more or less America’s first generation of disposable children.


pages: 244 words: 66,977

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It by Tien Tzuo, Gabe Weisert

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, connected car, data science, death of newspapers, digital nomad, digital rights, digital twin, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fiat currency, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lean Startup, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, megaproject, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear winter, pets.com, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart meter, social graph, software as a service, spice trade, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, transport as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, Y2K, Zipcar

But sitting in the audience, I couldn’t help but observe that something else was missing: the customers! There was no talk about how we are growing customers, which customers are most valuable to us, how our customers are using us, etc. The contrast was jarring. A bold vision for growth was followed by a bland presentation of decline. There was some serious cognitive dissonance in the room. What a shame. What a lost opportunity. Because if the Subscription Economy is about adopting new business models, then what better function to lead the company through that shift than the finance department? THE DAY I ALMOST GOT FIRED But I felt for the guy, because I once had a similar experience.


pages: 218 words: 70,323

Critical: Science and Stories From the Brink of Human Life by Matt Morgan

agricultural Revolution, Atul Gawande, biofilm, Black Swan, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive dissonance, crew resource management, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Strachan, discovery of penicillin, en.wikipedia.org, hygiene hypothesis, job satisfaction, John Snow's cholera map, meta-analysis, personalized medicine, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, traumatic brain injury

Every day, I see evidence of anchoring bias, where an incorrect diagnostic label is permanently attached to a patient after being applied earlier by another doctor. I am aware I often test patients for rare diagnoses in the days after I care for another patient with that very diagnosis. I know that I seek information to confirm my gut feelings, often disposing of inconvenient facts that would otherwise produce psychological conflict known as cognitive dissonance. Mentally preparing myself for these human bugs can stop them from becoming ends in themselves. Knowing about them makes me a better intensive care doctor. The final route of entry to the ICU – via the ‘theatre door’ – is for selected post-surgery patients. This can be in a planned manner or as the result of complications arising from the operation or anaesthesia.


pages: 218 words: 68,648

Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire: My Unlikely Escape From Corporate America by Dan Conway

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, buy and hold, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, financial independence, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, Haight Ashbury, high net worth, holacracy, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, initial coin offering, job satisfaction, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, rent control, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart contracts, Steve Jobs, supercomputer in your pocket, tech billionaire, tech bro, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Uber for X, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vitalik Buterin

For months, I’d tried to convince myself that the crashing ETH price was only a paper loss and that the flashing red numbers on my phone weren’t important, even though they represented the verdict on the biggest bet of my life. I had been telling myself that we were in the long game, even if that was only partially true. Now that momentum was turning in my favor, at least for the time being, cognitive dissonance made it hard to believe it was real. Deep down, I’d had the strongest conviction I’d ever had that ETH would pay off, but watching it rise like a phoenix before my eyes was like seeing Santa Claus in the flesh. The r/EthTrader boards were starting to pop. Every hour, it seemed, a hundred new people joined.


Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres by Jamie Woodcock

always be closing, anti-work, antiwork, call centre, capitalist realism, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, David Graeber, emotional labour, gamification, invention of the telephone, job satisfaction, late capitalism, means of production, millennium bug, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, profit motive, scientific management, social intelligence, stakhanovite, technological determinism, women in the workforce

In a study of stress in call centres in particular, Kerry Lewig and Maureen Dollard have outlined the importance of ‘emotional dissonance’.22 This is the psychological experience of the differences between the actual feelings of the call-centre worker and the emotions that they are performing. Modelled on cognitive dissonance, in which two contradictory ideas are held simultaneously, this concept refers to emotions and explains the feelings of guilt and stress workers experience as they try to convince customers to buy insurance while maintaining a positive, enthusiastic demeanour on the phone. They warn that ‘emotional dissonance may ultimately lead to lowered self-esteem, depression, cynicism, and alienation from work’.


The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living by Brock Bastian

Abraham Maslow, classic study, cognitive dissonance, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, helicopter parent, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, placebo effect, retail therapy, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Steven Pinker, sugar pill, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, women in the workforce

However, this effect was evident only when the women were told that the shock was a necessary prerequisite to join the group discussion. When they were told it was unrelated to whether or not they could join the discussion, the severity of the shock no longer predicted their rating of the group. To understand the findings of this study, we need to draw on a well-known psychological principle called ‘cognitive dissonance’. This term refers to the feeling of discomfort that we experience when things don’t make sense or don’t fit together. A classic paradigm in which to demonstrate the effects of dissonance is to ask people to write an essay in support of something they personally disagree with. Imagine if you felt strongly that the death penalty should not exist, but had to write an essay in support of this type of punishment.


pages: 242 words: 71,943

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Pattern Language, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-fragile, bank run, big-box store, Black Swan, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, housing crisis, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

That problem is sometimes referred to as an “outside context problem,” something so far beyond the experience of those dwelling in a certain time and place that they cannot make sense of available information. The collective mental static preventing comprehension is also sometimes referred to as “cognitive dissonance,” a term borrowed from developmental psychology. It helps explain why the American public has been sleepwalking into the future. The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race.2 Modern Americans have a track record of explaining away the process of decline. The term white flight is an unnecessarily narrow description applied to the depopulation of core cities and the explosion of horizontal growth following World War II.


pages: 232 words: 63,803

Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech's Race for the Future of Food by Chase Purdy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Big Tech, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Donald Trump, gig economy, global supply chain, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs

The scathing review continues: “We quit because Josh Tetrick is a lying, manipulative, thin-skinned, attention seeking, reactionary, incompetent, Steve Jobs wannabe who reminds me more and more of a certain ‘tweeting President’ each day, and we all reach a point where we can no longer manage the cognitive dissonance of trying to be a decent person while also enabling a con-man on a daily basis.” Disgruntled employee issues have also veered into the personal. In 2013, company drama went public when an employee named Javier Colón* was fired. According to a report by Bloomberg, the dispute between the two was over employment contracts and how Josh attempted to change the wording of them to give employees three weeks of severance instead of three months in the event they were let go.


pages: 227 words: 71,675

Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything by Becky Bond, Zack Exley

battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, declining real wages, digital rights, Donald Trump, family office, fixed income, full employment, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, immigration reform, income inequality, Kickstarter, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, plutocrats, randomized controlled trial, Skype, telemarketer, union organizing

In some ways, they seemed to be suppressing their fear of missing out (FOMO) and then projecting it on to us (for example, calling us “Bernie Bros”). As Bernie became an undeniable cultural force for revolution, progressives supporting Clinton were feeling left out. They were on the winning team—at no point was Bernie the frontrunner—but they were acting like sore losers. Perhaps the cognitive dissonance simply got the best of them. Counterrevolutionaries are almost always devotees of small organizing, while revolutionaries practice big organizing. Take note of the counterrevolutionaries when they reveal themselves. They’re definitely not allies, and sometimes they even become enemies in a particular political fight.


pages: 234 words: 67,917

The Wondering Jew: Israel and the Search for Jewish Identity by Micah Goodman

augmented reality, battle of ideas, cognitive dissonance, European colonialism, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mount Scopus

In Orthodox synagogues, for example, women are prohibited from leading the congregation in prayer—in fact, they cannot even take part in the minyan (prayer quorum), which is open only to men. Effectively, they are denied full membership in their own congregation. This gulf between their modern and religious worlds sets up a cognitive dissonance for many observant Jews. What are they supposed to do? Must they stifle their moral instincts in the name of their religious obligations? One further ideological clash that religious Jews have difficulty escaping concerns another form of exclusion. Many religious Jews believe that nobody should be excluded, insulted, or rejected because of his or her sexual orientation.


pages: 231 words: 64,734

Safe Haven: Investing for Financial Storms by Mark Spitznagel

Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, asset allocation, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, book value, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, commodity trading advisor, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, fiat currency, financial engineering, Fractional reserve banking, global macro, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Spitznagel, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Schrödinger's Cat, Sharpe ratio, spice trade, Steve Jobs, tail risk, the scientific method, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-sum game

But someone had to decide which qualities are essential and which are accidental. Which features counted, and why. The species problem becomes acute in the case of the Stooges because they are more different than they are alike. (There is the Biological Species Concept of interbreeding to define a species, but even then the thought of a Bernese pug is just cognitively dissonant.) Among investment strategies, the best example of this problem of classification is in value investing. Started by Benjamin Graham, it is about buying securities cheap compared to their intrinsic value—and good luck agreeing on the meaning of intrinsic value. In Graham's case, this mostly meant book value, or tangible value of a company's assets.


pages: 213 words: 68,363

Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction by Judith Grisel

cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, double helix, epigenetics, Haight Ashbury, impulse control, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, phenotype, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), seminal paper, systems thinking, trade route, traumatic brain injury

Sure, I met some of the criteria some of the time, but my ability to fool teachers, clinicians, and law enforcement stemmed from an ability to fool myself. It’s not unusual to rail against fate, especially when faced with a fatal diagnosis, but the thoughts and feelings that I experienced had the particular flavor of someone who’d co-authored her dilemma; cognitive dissonance is a big part of the denial engine. What this means is that when behavior and cognition don’t jibe, the expeditious solution is to change our mind: Why would I hurt myself? (Because that makes no sense) I must not be hurting myself. But eventually, when there was finally nothing left but to face the truth, I felt fury, shame, and betrayal.


pages: 233 words: 69,745

The Reluctant Carer: Dispatches From the Edge of Life by The Reluctant Carer

call centre, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, disinformation, gig economy, Jeff Bezos, load shedding, place-making, stem cell, telemarketer, trolley problem

It’s as if they have been physically transported to some unwanted and reviled dimension. I have enough time on my hands to image-search it and confirm that, indeed, this is information leaking in from the next county. Indignant frowns on already wrinkled brows thicken and multiply. The wrong news. Sure, we can do the cognitive dissonance on the national stuff and the refugees in the Mediterranean. As the world burns we know exactly when to sigh. But when it comes to people just up the motorway? Fuck them, their traffic, their sports achievements and June brides. Even the worst middle-distance tragedies yield only impatience.


pages: 225 words: 70,241

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland

affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer vision, creative destruction, driverless car, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, high net worth, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, open immigration, PalmPilot, rent control, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, young professional

“Would you mind stepping over this homeless person before I show you the future of technology?” For the first few years you buy coffee, food for these people. Because you have sympathy. And you try to show your kids that you’ll be nice. But eventually you can’t deal with it anymore. I think my children sadly may just be observing me ignoring it and learning the cognitive dissonance that is required to live with it. But we need to see more courage. TIM DRAPER (CONT’D) Not content with venture capital alone, he also has political ambitions. In recent years, he launched the “Six Californias” Campaign to divide California into multiple states. He wears a tie emblazoned with the movement’s logo, a kind of primary-colors jigsaw of the state split six ways.


pages: 687 words: 189,243

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy by Joel Mokyr

Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Deng Xiaoping, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, flying shuttle, framing effect, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Herbert Marcuse, hindsight bias, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land tenure, law of one price, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, new economy, phenotype, price stability, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, ultimatum game, World Values Survey, Wunderkammern

Some of them did so by sensing a latent demand: a dissatisfaction with some cultural beliefs or knowledge, or diffuse and incoherent earlier attempts to cope with a new reality. For cultural entrepreneurs to be successful, some disconnect must exist between the prevalent cultural elements and some new information that does not quite square with it. This is much like Thomas Kuhn’s cognitive dissonance or what he called “awareness of anomaly,” caused by the accumulation of evidence inconsistent with the current paradigm and thus leading to scientific revolutions. What was true for astronomy in the sixteenth century was equally true for anatomy and theology. Because such dissonances evolved independently, they elicited responses that tended at first to be diffuse and required coordination and standardization.

., 154 Chan, Hok-lam, 299 Chandos, Duke of, 205 Chaney, Eric, 67, 131, 256 Chaptal, Jean-Antoine, 241 Chapter Coffee House, 222 Charles II, King, 232 Charles V, Emperor, 195 Châtelet, Emilie du, 110 chemical school in medicine, 252 chemistry, 220 Newton’s influence on, 102 Chen Chianzhang, 336 Chen Hongmou, 330, 331 Chen Menglei, 333 Chen Yuanlong, 334 Cheng Hao, 300, 303 Cheng Tingzuo, 335 Cheng Yi, 300, 303 Cheng-Zhu school,330 see also neo-Confucianism Chevreul, Eugène, 269 Cheyne, George, 102 Childrey, Joshua, 80 chiliasm, 266 China, 135, 147, 149, 158, 169, 274, 287-338 and the Enlightenment, 321 books in, 293 commercial integration in, 129 economy in the 18th century, 290 education in, 293 China, Qing, 291 China, Song, 248, 292 chinaware, 145, 163 Chinese language, 311 Chinese scholarship, agenda of, 338 Chinese science, 149 Chinese technology, adopted in the West, 298 Ching, Julia, 303, 311 chinoiserie, 145 Chitnis, Anand, 79 Chow, Kai-wing, 293, 294 Christianity, 132 and progress, 266 and resistance to innovation, 19 Christina, Queen, 204 Christina of Florence, Duchess, 152 Christopoulou, Rebekka, 35, 38 Cipolla, Carlo, 53, 132, 137, 160 cities, and the Republic of Letters, 174 civil service, Chinese, 308 Civil Service, ranks in the Chinese, 306 civil service examinations, Chinese, 165, 303, 304, 324, 332 civil society, 132 Clairaut, Alexis-Claude, 107, 211 Clark, Gregory, 7, 22, 36 Clark, Peter, 42, 222 Clarke, John, 255 Clarke, Samuel, 110, 114 classical canon, under attack, 151 classical culture, in education, 254 classical learning, declining respect for, 254 see also respect classics, 156, 181, 192, 217, 302 Chinese, 293, 303, 319, 324, 330 in the Enlightenment, 253 respect for, 258 veneration of, 254 classifying, 275 Clavius, Christopher, 130, 205, 211, 239 Clement VIII, Pope, 174 Clifton, Gloria, 108 clock and watchmaking industry, 233 Clusius, Carolus, 206 Coase, Ronald, 62 Cobb, Matthew, 188 codifiable knowledge, 160, 183, 193 coercion bias, 131,165, 337 coevolution, 46 in knowledge systems, 317 of culture and institutions, 10 of different kinds of knowledge, 143 of genes and culture, 43 coexistence, of competing hypotheses, 220 coffeehouses, 42, 217, 222 and public science, 196 cognitive dissonance, 63 Cohen, Bernard I., 237 Cohen, Floris, 32, 66, 68, 75, 79, 81-84, 130, 149, 150, 156, 162, 170, 182, 191, 220, 228, 237, 240, 270, 298, 299, 314 Cohen, Jack, 30 Cohn, Norman, 266 Cohn, Tobias, 257 Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 196 Colie, Rosalie, 74 collectivist values, 18 Collegio Romano, 211 Collins, Randall, 194 Columbus, Christopher, 15 Comenius, Jan Amos, 77, 88, 95, 96, 154, 175, 188, 235, 239 commerce, growth of, 161 commercial law, and religion, 128 common-pool resource, 122 commons resource, community management of, 185 competition, 130, 131, 155, 166, 197, 204, 260, 313, 341 among states, 167, 169 in education, 130, 234 in market for ideas, 157, 181-183, 199, 208-211, 215, 268, 283, 306 political, 150, 167-169, 189, 183 religious, 131, 234, 291, 292, 300 Comte, Auguste, 250, 266 Condé, Prince de, 204, 207 Condorcet, Nicolas Marquis de, 130, 248, 262, 264, 276 Confirmation bias, 131 Confucianism, 136, 299 Confucius, 298, 319, 323, 330 Constant, Edward, 22 content bias, 101, 107, 131, 157, 158, 212, 216, 220 contestability, 50, 92, 108, 157, 160, 189, 191, 210, 218 in the Republic of Letters, 202 of ideas in China, 310 contingency, 32, 170, 219, 232 contract enforcement, 122 Cook, Harold, 62, 122, 161, 243 cooperation, and religion, 128, 129 cooperative behavior, in the Republic of Letters, 199 Copenhaver, Brian T., 211, 220 Copernican cosmology, 169 Copernicanism, 130, 156 Copernicans, 157 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 19, 72, 148, 157, 158, 170, 173, 188, 197, 212, 257, 302 Cormack, Lesley B., 205 corn, 145 corporations, 172, 174 Corpuscularianism, 156, 211 correspondence, 160, 181, 183, 184, 194-196, 281 corruption, public sector, 16 Cort, Henry, 276 Cortesian army, 23, 59, 119, 215 Corydalleus, Theophilos, 188 Cosimo II, Grand Duke, 206 Cosmides, Leda, 47 Cotes, Roger, 108 Coulomb, Charles-Augustin de, 242 Counter-Reformation, 165 Cowan, Brian, 196, 222 Cowley, Abraham, 68, 89 craftsmen, 81, 119 Cranmer-Byng, J.L., 335 Cremonini, Cesare, 127, 281 Crimean War, 167 critical junctures, 61 Cromwell, Oliver, 93, 145, 233 Cross, Rob, 191 Cullen, Christopher, 329 Cullen, William, 83, 111, 242, 274 cultural beliefs, 7, 11-14, 18, 31, 37 and economic growth, 122 cultural dynamics, 44 cultural elements, 44 cultural entrepreneurs, 59, 60, 62, 64-66, 83, 100, 158, 159, 175, 233, 267, 297, 319 in China, 337 cultural evolution, 22-33 choice-based, 34–36, 48, 62 models of, 232 cultural features, transmission of, 41 cultural menus, 38, 46 cultural transmission, horizontal, 36 cultural transmission, intergenerational, 34 cultural transmission, vertical, 36 cultural variants equilibrium, 209 culture, 3–15 and institutions, 11 and modern economics, 7 child, 39 definition of, 8, 11 economics of, 13 of useful knowledge, 142 culture, Chinese, 296 curiosities, 154 curiosity, 153 Da Gama, Vasco, 161 Dai Zhen, 330 d’Alembert, Jean le Ronde, 96, 181, 182, 272 Dalton, John, 241, 245 damasks, 145 Daniel, Stephen, 177 Daoism, 299 Daoist thought, 310 Darby, Abraham, 185 Darnton, Robert, 186, 197, 333 Darwin, Charles, 19, 24, 44, 60, 66, 158 Darwin, Erasmus, 265 Darwinian models, 22, 23 Darwinian selection, 23, 36, 43 Darwinism, 9, 51 Dasgupta, Partha, 192, 202, 203 Daston, Lorraine,186, 193, 203 data, concept of, 279 David, Paul A., 181, 183, 192, 199, 202, 203 Davids, Karel, 124, 136, 169, 338 Davy, Humphry, 79, 82, 90 Dawkins, Richard, 24, 30, 46 De Bary, W.


Evidence-Based Technical Analysis: Applying the Scientific Method and Statistical Inference to Trading Signals by David Aronson

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, asset allocation, availability heuristic, backtesting, Black Swan, book value, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, computerized trading, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, distributed generation, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, feminist movement, Great Leap Forward, hindsight bias, index fund, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, mental accounting, meta-analysis, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, retrograde motion, revision control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Sharpe ratio, short selling, source of truth, statistical model, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, systematic trading, the scientific method, transfer pricing, unbiased observer, yield curve, Yogi Berra

TA practitioners have a large emotional and financial investment in their favored method. This is especially true of practitioners whose professional lives are tied to a particular method. There is also a strong motive to maintain consistency within our system beliefs and attitudes. The theory of cognitive dissonance formulated by Festinger78 contends that people are motivated to reduce or avoid psychological inconsistencies.79 The discomfort provoked by evidence that contradicts what we believe makes it hard to digest such evidence. Biased Questions and Search The confirmation bias also slants the way questions are framed, thereby biasing the search for new evidence.

Abrams, “Effects of Alcohol on Social Anxiety and Psychological Arousal: Cognitive versus Pharmacological Processes,” Cognitive Research and Therapy 1 (1975), 195–210. Gilovich, How We Know, 50. M. Jones and R. Sugden, “Positive Confirmation Bias in the Acquisition of Information,” Theory and Decision 50 (2001), 59–99. L. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957). S. Plous, The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), 23. Practitioners who actually trade on their predictions do get clear feedback on results, but as pointed out in this chapter this feedback can be diluted by other cognitive distortions (e.g., self-attribution bias).


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The history of every airport in the United States will tell you this will happen,” promised a developer who spent two years wrangling with the FAA for the right to build closer to the fence. “Are there really people who want to live close to an airport? Yeah, there are. That’s been proven around the country too. They travel a lot on business, or whatever it is they do, but they’re connected to the airport in some way, shape, or form. Somehow.” Clearly, cognitive dissonance is at work. We loudly decry the noise, pollution, and congestion of airports, and yet our fundamental quality-of-life decision—where and how to live—seems predicated on having one close at hand, even if we rarely fly. It helps that especially massive ones like DIA and DFW double as enormous publicly financed infrastructure investments galvanizing private developers—much like what I-70 and I-225 had done for Aurora in its 1970s and 1980s heyday.

From an efficiency standpoint, the best solution for halving transportation’s share of carbon emissions is to electrify cars from renewable sources, leaving whatever oil is left for aviation. Its share of emissions would look progressively worse while the total shrinks, but we’d get over the cognitive dissonance. “We are driven as humans to adapt to new technologies, and we’re blessed with the ability to transfer them quickly across societies,” Kasarda told me in Beijing. “But people don’t change their ideas and beliefs nearly as fast. In anthropology, it’s known as ‘cultural lag.’ And the lag in this case means we’re able to envision disaster but not the future.


pages: 579 words: 183,063

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, fear of failure, Gary Taubes, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global macro, Google Hangouts, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, helicopter parent, high net worth, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, index fund, information security, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Mr. Money Mustache, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, sunk-cost fallacy, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

Later it emerged that the reference source may have had an agenda to sabotage his former protégé’s new firm. Five years later, I was evaluating another investment manager to partner with, and toward the end of our diligence process I got a reference that was mixed. By this point I was better able to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously without experiencing cognitive dissonance, the state of “negative capability” that Keats referred to as useful to writers. This time, the mixed data points only made me do more work, and I gained even more conviction in the character and competence of the investment manager. This investment has been one of our most profitable, and absent my earlier failure, I suspect I would have not had the ability to see the reality of the situation.

I believe that in a few years we will look back and marvel at the barbarism and stunning environmental waste (water consumption and methane production) of meat harvesting today. Our circle of empathy generally expands over time . . . but sometimes as a retrospective rationalization. We don’t typically discuss the meat industry in polite conversation because we don’t want to face the inevitable cognitive dissonance (because bacon tastes so good). We don’t really want to know why almost all USDA meat inspectors become vegetarian. I think all of that will change when viable meat products are grown from cell cultures, not in the field. We will switch, and condemn our former selves. What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?


pages: 829 words: 187,394

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

Instead, the model posits a world filled with rational actors possessed with perfect foresight. But it doesn’t remotely describe what actually happens on Wall Street or any other stock market. No wonder the academic economists in charge of what James Grant called the ‘PhD Standard’ were blindsided by events. Institutional factors contributed to this state of cognitive dissonance. The Federal Reserve is the world’s largest employer of finance PhDs and has deep connections with economic journals that specialize in monetary matters. It is telling that, in a 2010 survey, a large majority of academic economists believed that low rates caused, or at least greatly contributed to, the housing bubble, but most economists specializing in monetary policy continued to side with the Fed’s view.38 If Bernanke, as head of the Federal Reserve, held that the crisis wasn’t a failure of ‘economic science’ but one of economic management (regulation), it was only to be expected that the Fed’s own research team should follow their chief’s lead.39 They occupied an echo chamber in which existing beliefs were reinforced and uncomfortable questions ignored.

., 181 Egypt, 77, 78, 255, 262 Einstein, Albert, 8 Elizabeth II, Queen, 114 Ellington Capital Management, 223 Emden, Paul, 80* emerging markets: Brazilian crash (2012–13), 257–8; BRICs, 254–5, 257–8; capital controls return after 2008, 262, 291; capital flight from (starting 2015), 262, 285–6; demand for industrial commodities, 128; epic corruption scandals, 258; and extended supply chains, 261; flooding across South East Asia (2010), 255; ‘Fragile Five’, 258–9; growth of foreign exchange reserves, 252, 253, 254–5, 256; impact of ultra-low interest rates on, xxiii, 253–60, 262–3; international carry Trade, 137, 237–8; overheating during 2010, 255, 256; post-crisis capital flows into, xxiii, 253–9, 262–3; and recent phase of globalization, 260–61; recovery from 2008 crisis, 124; and savings glut hypothesis, 129, 268–9; ‘second phase of global liquidity’ after 2008 crisis, 253–9, 262–3; and taper tantrum (June 2013), xxiii, 137, 239, 256–7, 259, 263; Turkish debt, 258–60; vulnerability to US monetary policy, 137, 262–3, 267–8 see also China employment/labour markets, xx, 151–2, 240, 260–61, 260*, 296; after 2008 crisis, 210, 211; new insecurity, 211, 298 Erdogan, Recep Tyyip, 259 European Central Bank (ECB), 144, 145, 147, 239, 240, 293; inflation targeting, 119, 120, 122–3; and quantitative easing, 146, 241, 242; sets negative rate, 147, 192–3, 244, 299 European Union, 187, 241, 262 Eurozone, 124, 150–51, 226; and political sovereignty, 293, 293†; sovereign debt crisis (from 2010), 144–8, 226, 238, 239, 241, 273, 293 Evans, David Morier, 73 Evelyn, John, 36, 45 Evergrande (Chinese developer), 279, 288, 310 executive compensation schemes, 152, 162, 163–4, 170, 204, 206, 207 Extinction Rebellion, 201 ExxonMobil, 166 Fang’s Money House, Wenzhou, 281–2 farming: agricultural cycle, 11, 14, 88; and ‘Bank of John Deere’, 167; barley loans in ancient Mesopotamia, 5–6, 6*, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14; bubbles in post-crisis decade, 173; in China, 283; and language of interest, 4–5; loans related to consumption, 6, 25; US deflation of 1890s, 99 Federal Reserve, US: asymmetrical approach to rates, 136–7; as carry trader, 222; cognitive dissonance in, 118–19; Federal Reserve Act (1914), 83; ‘forgotten depression’ (1921), 84, 86, 100, 143; forward guidance policy, 131*, 133, 238, 239, 240, 241; and Gold Exchange Standard, 85, 87, 90*; the ‘Greenspan put’, 111, 186; impact on foreign countries, 137, 239, 240–41, 255–6, 259, 262–3, 267–8, 285; inflation targeting, 119, 120, 241; Long Island meeting (1927), 82–3, 88, 92; mandates of, 240, 262; and March 2020 crash, 305–6; Objectives of Monetary Policy (1937), 97; Open Market Committee (FOMC), 109, 112–13, 115†, 120, 164, 228, 238, 239, 240; Operation Twist (2011), 131*, 238; parallel with US Forest Service, 154–5; and post-Great War inflation, 84; as the ‘price of leverage’, xxi–xxii; quantitative easing by, 12*, 76, 131*, 137, 175, 215, 228, 236, 238, 239–40, 241; raised rates announcement (2015), 138, 239; reaches ‘zero lower bound’ (2008), 243–4; response to 1929 Crash, 98, 100, 101, 108; suggested as responsible for 2008 crisis, 116–17, 118–19, 155, 204, 226–7; TALF fund, 175; taper tantrum (June 2013), xxiii, 137, 239, 256–7, 259, 263; ultra-easy money after 2008 crisis, xxi, 60, 124, 131–8, 146, 149, 152–5, 181–3, 206–17, 221–4, 230, 235–41, 243–4, 262, 291–2; Paul Volcker runs, 108–9, 145; Janet Yellen runs, 120 see also Bernanke, Ben; Greenspan, Alan Feldstein, Martin, 119 Ferri, Giovanni, 277* Fetter, Frank, 30 Field, Alexander, The Great Leap Forward, 142–3 financial crisis (2008): accelerates financialization, 182–3; and complex debt securities, 116, 117–18, 231; ‘crunch porn’ on causes of, 114; economists who anticipated crisis, 113–14, 132; failure of unconventional monetary policies after, xxi, xxii, 43–4, 291–4, 298–9, 301–3; Fed’s monetary policy as suggested cause, 116–17, 118–19, 155, 204, 226–7; generational impact of, 211–12, 213; as ‘giant carry trade gone wrong’, 253–5; global causes of, 117–18; Icelandic recovery from, 301–2; and inequality, 204, 205–17, 299; interest at lowest level in five millennia during, xxi, 243–4, 247; Law’s System compared to, 49, 60–61; low/stable inflation at time of, 134, 135; monetary policy’s role in run-up downplayed, 115–16, 115*, 115†; and quoting of Bagehot, 76; recovery of lost industrial output after, 124; regulatory interpretation of, 114–15, 117; and return of the state, 292–5, 297, 298; return to ‘yield-chasing’ after, 221–6, 230–31, 233–4, 237–8; the rich as chief beneficiaries of, 206–10; savings glut hypothesis, 115–16, 117, 126, 128–9, 132, 191, 252, 268–9; ‘second phase of global liquidity’ after, 253–9, 262–3; unwinding of carry trades during, 221, 227; warnings from BIS economists before, 113–14, 131–4, 135–9 see also Great Recession financial derivatives market, 225–6 financial engineering: buybacks, 53, 152, 163–6, 167, 169, 170–71, 183, 224; crowding out of real economy by, 158–9, 160, 166–71, 182–3, 185, 237; ‘funding gap’ as impetus, 164, 176–7, 291; merger ‘tsunami’ after 2008 crisis, 160–63, 161*, 168–70, 237, 298; ‘promoter’s profit’ concept, 158–9, 160, 161, 164; and ‘shareholder value’, 163–6, 167, 170–71; Truman Show as allegory for bubble economy, 185–7; use of leverage, 111, 116, 149, 155, 158–71, 204, 207, 223, 237, 291; zaitech in Japan, 106, 182, 185 financial repression: in China, 264–5, 265*, 266–81, 268*, 283, 286–9, 292; and inequality, 287–8; McKinnon coins term, 264; political aspects, 265, 265*, 286–9, 292; returns to West after 2008 crisis, 291–3; after Second World War, 290–91, 302 financial sector: bond markets as ‘broken (2014), 227; complex securitizations, 116, 117–18, 221, 227, 231; decades-long bull market from early 1980s, 203–4; economics as fundamentally monetary, 132, 138–9; Edmunds’ ‘New World Wealth Machine’, 181–2; expansion in 1920s USA, 203; finance as leading growth, 266; financial mania of 1860s, 72–4, 75–6; fixed-income bonds, 68–9, 193, 219, 222, 225, 226; foreign securities/loans, 66, 77–8, 91; investment trusts appear (1880s), 79; liquidity traps, 114; mighty borrowers within, 202; profits bubble in post-crisis USA, 183, 183†, 185, 211; robber baron era in USA, 156–9, 203; stability as destabilizing, 82, 143, 233, 263, 285; stock market bubble in post-crisis decade, 175–7, 176*; trust companies in US, 83–4, 84*; US bond market ‘flash crash’ (2014), 138; and volatility, 153, 228–30, 233, 234, 254, 304, 305; volatility as asset class, 229–30, 229*, 233, 234, 304, 305; ‘Volmageddon’ (5 February 2018), 229–30, 234 see also banking and entries for individual institutions/events financial system, international: Asian crisis, 114, 252, 278; Basel banking rules, 232; Borio on ‘persistent expansionary bias’, 262–3; complex mortgage securities, 116, 117–18; crash (12 March 2020), 304–6; ‘excess elasticity’ of, 137; global financial imbalances, 137, 138; Louvre Accord (1987), 105–6; stock market crash (October 1987), 106, 110–11, 229 financialization, 162–71, 182–3, 185, 203–8, 237 Fink, Larry, 209, 246 Finley, Sir Moses, Economy and Society in Ancient Greece (1981), 18* fire-fighting services, 154–5 First World War, 84, 85 Fisher, Irving: and debt-deflation, 98–9, 100, 119, 280; first to refer to ‘real’ interest rate, 88–9, 219*; founds Stable Money League (1921), 87, 96; and Gesell’s rusting money, 243, 246; on interest, 29–30, 82, 189, 189*, 201; losses in 1929 crash, 94; monetarist view of 1929 Crash, 98–9, 100, 101, 108; ‘money illusion’ concept, 87*; on nature’s production, 4–5; on negative interest, 246; The Theory of Interest, xxiv, xxv, xxvi*, 16, 173 Fisher, Peter, 194 Fisher, Richard, 164 Fitzgerald, F.


Free as in Freedom by Sam Williams

Asperger Syndrome, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Debian, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Eben Moglen, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Larry Wall, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Maui Hawaii, Multics, Murray Gell-Mann, PalmPilot, profit motive, Project Xanadu, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, slashdot, software patent, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, urban renewal, VA Linux, Y2K

Despite the best efforts of Stallman and other hackers to remind people that the word "free" in free software stood for freedom and not price, the message still wasn't getting 138 through. Most business executives, upon hearing the term for the first time, interpreted the word as synonymous with "zero cost," tuning out any follow up messages in short order. Until hackers found a way to get past this cognitive dissonance, the free software movement faced an uphill climb, even after Netscape. Peterson, whose organization had taken an active interest in advancing the free software cause, offered an alternative: open source. Looking back, Peterson says she came up with the open source term while discussing Netscape's decision with a friend in the public relations industry.


pages: 294 words: 77,356

Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks

autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deindustrialization, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, housing crisis, Housing First, IBM and the Holocaust, income inequality, job automation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, payday loans, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sparse data, statistical model, strikebreaker, underbanked, universal basic income, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, zero-sum game

Our guilt, kindled because we perceived suffering and yet did nothing about it, made us look away. That is what the denial of poverty does to us as a nation. We avoid not only the man on the corner, but each other. Denial is exhausting and expensive. It is uncomfortable for individuals who must endure the cognitive dissonance required to both see and not-see reality. It contorts our physical geography, as we build infrastructure—suburbs, highways, private schools, and prisons—that allow the professional middle class to actively avoid sharing the lives of poor and working-class people. It weakens our social bonds as a political community; people who cannot meet each others’ eyes will find it very difficult to collectively govern.


pages: 246 words: 116

Tyler Cowen-Discover Your Inner Economist Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist-Plume (2008) by Unknown

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Andrei Shleifer, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, cross-subsidies, fundamental attribution error, gentrification, George Santayana, haute cuisine, low interest rates, market clearing, microcredit, money market fund, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

Another useful piece References I 229 is Shelley E. Taylor and Jonathan D. Brown, "Illusion and Well-Being: A Social Psychological Perspective on Mental Health," Psychological Bulletin, 1988,105,2,195-210. For experimental evidence that people are more likely to think their claims are just, see James Konow, "Fair Shares: Accountability and Cognitive Dissonance in Allocation Decisions," American Economic Review, September 2000,90,4, 1072-109l. For the study of gym membership, see Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier, "Paying Not to Go to the Gym," American Economic Review, June 2006, 96,3,694-719. On the unwillingness of people to defer to experts, and what that means, see my paper with Robin Hanson, "Are Disagreements Honest?"


pages: 274 words: 75,846

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

The faster the system learns from you, the more likely it is that you can get trapped in a kind of identity cascade, in which a small initial action—clicking on a link about gardening or anarchy or Ozzy Osbourne—indicates that you’re a person who likes those kinds of things. This in turn supplies you with more information on the topic, which you’re more inclined to click on because the topic has now been primed for you. Especially once the second click has occurred, your brain is in on the act as well. Our brains act to reduce cognitive dissonance in a strange but compelling kind of unlogic—“Why would I have done x if I weren’t a person who does x—therefore I must be a person who does x.”Each click you take in this loop is another action to self-justify—“Boy, I guess I just really love ‘Crazy Train.’ ” When you use a recursive process that feeds on itself, Cohler tells me, “You’re going to end up down a deep and narrow path.”


pages: 261 words: 16,734

Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom Demarco, Timothy Lister

A Pattern Language, An Inconvenient Truth, cognitive dissonance, DeepMind, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, Parkinson's law, performance metric, skunkworks, supply-chain management, women in the workforce

Thus was born the legendary Black Team. The Black Team was initially made up of people who had proved themselves to be slightly better at testing than their peers. They were slightly more motivated. They also were testing code that had been written by someone else, so they were free of the cognitive dissonance that hampers developers when testing their own programs. All in all, those who formed the team might have expected it to achieve at least a modest improvement in product quality, but they didn’t expect more than that. What they got was much more than that. The most surprising thing about the Black Team was not how good it was at the beginning, but how much it improved during the next year.


pages: 297 words: 77,362

The Nature of Technology by W. Brian Arthur

Andrew Wiles, Boeing 747, business process, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, computer age, creative destruction, double helix, endogenous growth, financial engineering, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, haute cuisine, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, locking in a profit, Mars Rover, means of production, Myron Scholes, power law, punch-card reader, railway mania, Recombinant DNA, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, technological singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Origination is not just a new way of doing things, but a new way of seeing things. And the new threatens. It threatens to make the old expertise obsolete. Often in fact, some version of the new principle has been already touted or already exists and has been dismissed by standard practitioners, not necessarily because of lack of imagination but because it creates a cognitive dissonance, an emotional mismatch, between the potential of the new and the security of the old. The sociologist Diane Vaughan talks of this psychological dissonance: [In the situations we deal with as humans, we use] a frame of reference constructed from integrated sets of assumptions, expectations, and experiences.


pages: 252 words: 79,452

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cosmological principle, dark matter, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, double helix, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Extropian, friendly AI, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, impulse control, income inequality, invention of the wheel, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Lyft, Mars Rover, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, profit motive, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Skype, SoftBank, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge

Laura’s pleasantly businesslike and mildly self-deprecating manner was not quite successful in offsetting an imposing intellectual affect, which was all the more striking given the inescapable fact that the person sitting across a boardroom table from me was younger than many of the tersely hungover English literature undergraduates I’d taught over the years. And so a strong cognitive dissonance arose from the three-way juxtaposition of Laura’s extreme youth, her position in the business world, and the nature of her work; but it began to make sense within the context of the fact that she had been monomaniacally preoccupied with death for the past thirteen years. “I have never not felt like extending the life spans of human beings is the correct thing to do,” she said, measuring her words carefully.


pages: 249 words: 77,342

The Behavioral Investor by Daniel Crosby

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, availability heuristic, backtesting, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, endowment effect, equity risk premium, fake news, feminist movement, Flash crash, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, housing crisis, IKEA effect, impact investing, impulse control, index fund, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, job automation, longitudinal study, loss aversion, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, passive investing, pattern recognition, Pepsi Challenge, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, science of happiness, Shai Danziger, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, TED Talk, Thales of Miletus, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, When a measure becomes a target

Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, authors of The Enigma of Reason, argue that human reason evolved not to be “correct” in the strictest sense of the word, but rather to privilege the stability of the shared beliefs that are the cornerstone of our species’ success.5 To more fully understand this concept, it may be useful to consider the example of belief testing in both animals and humans. A human may encounter an idea that runs contrary to a deeply held belief – for instance, that “members of my chosen political party are smart and kind” – and this may cause painful cognitive dissonance. The proof against this cherished notion may be convincing in objective terms – failed policies, incompetent leadership, scientific realities that contradict the party line – but political beliefs are often quite recalcitrant to change. Since shared communal beliefs are the glue that holds humankind together, breaking those bonds is no small task, even in the face of damning contraindications.


pages: 229 words: 72,431

Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day by Craig Lambert

airline deregulation, Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, big-box store, business cycle, carbon footprint, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, financial independence, Galaxy Zoo, ghettoisation, gig economy, global village, helicopter parent, IKEA effect, industrial robot, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, recommendation engine, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, you are the product, zero-sum game, Zipcar

But it provokes unease in the United States, where the Declaration of Independence famously announced that “all men are created equal,” royalty and hereditary aristocracies are illegal, and social mobility is the ideal, if not necessarily the reality. Receiving care from servants clashes with our national ideal of equality. The cognitive dissonance might also reflect our collective memory of America’s history of slavery in the South and indentured servitude. (Landowners in the colonies would pay the transatlantic passage of immigrants from Europe in exchange for a period of unpaid labor, during which the indentured servant worked off his or her debt.


pages: 301 words: 78,638

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear

Atul Gawande, Cal Newport, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Goodhart's law, invisible hand, Lao Tzu, late fees, meta-analysis, microaggression, Paul Graham, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, side hustle, survivorship bias, Walter Mischel, When a measure becomes a target

See: Brian Clark, “The Powerful Psychological Boost that Helps You Make and Break Habits,” Further, November 14, 2017, https://further.net/pride-habits. Research has shown that once a person: Christopher J. Bryan et al., “Motivating Voter Turnout by Invoking the Self,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 31 (2011): 12653–12656. There is internal pressure: Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957). Your identity is literally your “repeated beingness”: Technically, identidem is a word belonging to the Late Latin language. Also, thanks to Tamar Shippony, a reader of jamesclear.com, who originally told me about the etymology of the word identity, which she looked up in the American Heritage Dictionary.


pages: 253 words: 75,772

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald

air gap, airport security, anti-communist, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, Edward Snowden, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Rubik’s Cube, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Ted Kaczynski, WikiLeaks

We had discussed her plan to film us while in Hong Kong: she was, after all, a documentarian working on a film about the NSA. Inevitably, what we were doing would become a huge part of her project. I knew that, but I hadn’t been prepared for the recording to begin quite so soon. There was great cognitive dissonance between, on one hand, meeting so covertly with a source who, to the US government, had committed serious crimes and, on the other, filming it all. Laura was ready in a matter of minutes. “So I’m going to begin filming now,” she announced, as though it was the most natural thing in the world.


pages: 259 words: 73,193

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris

4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Burning Man, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Google Glasses, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, moral panic, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, pre–internet, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Steve Jobs, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, traumatic brain injury, Turing test

And then what will a constantly distracted fifty-year-old really bring to the table, except a facility with the technology that made him or her that way? But that, of course, is a fantasy; that fifty-year-old will be a multitasker in a multitasking world. And my own idea of a work ethic will be outmoded. No two generations in history have experienced such a highlighted cognitive dissonance, because never has change occurred at so rapid a pace. Look at the rate of penetration—the amount of time it takes for a new technology to be adopted by fifty million people. Radio took thirty-eight years to reach that mark; the telephone took twenty years; and television took thirteen. More recently, the World Wide Web took four years, Facebook took 3.6, Twitter took three, and the iPad took only two.


pages: 223 words: 77,566

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, blue-collar work, cognitive dissonance, late fees, medical malpractice, obamacare, off-the-grid, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, working poor

We’ll get fired for tardiness, or for stealing merchandise and selling it on eBay, or for having a customer complain about the smell of alcohol on our breath, or for taking five thirty-minute restroom breaks per shift. We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance—the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach. We talk to our children about responsibility, but we never walk the walk. It’s like this: For years I’d dreamed of owning a German shepherd puppy. Somehow Mom found me one. But he was our fourth dog, and I had no clue how to train him.


pages: 237 words: 74,109

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, behavioural economics, Blitzscaling, blockchain, blood diamond, Burning Man, call centre, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, digital divide, digital nomad, digital rights, end-to-end encryption, Extropian, functional programming, future of work, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, job automation, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, means of production, medical residency, microaggression, microapartment, microdosing, new economy, New Urbanism, Overton Window, passive income, Plato's cave, pull request, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech bro, tech worker, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, urban planning, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, work culture , Y2K, young professional

* * * I sometimes wondered whether there was a unique psychic burden shared by people who worked in technology, specifically those of us building and supporting software that existed only in the cloud. The abstractions of knowledge work were well documented, but this felt new. It was not just the cognitive dissonance of how lucrative and powerful tech companies had become, when their tools did not physically exist, but that all software was vulnerable, at any time, to erasure. Engineers could spend years writing programs only to have them updated, rewritten, and replaced. They poured hours and energy into products that never shipped.


pages: 299 words: 79,739

Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt by Steven Johnson

British Empire, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, cotton gin, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, moral panic, Stewart Brand, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, wikimedia commons

All of this history meant young Henry Every would have had two distinct models of piracy in his mind as he left Plymouth with the Royal Navy: the murderous Barbary pirates, living outside the boundaries of human decency, enemies of all mankind; and the dashing figures of Drake and other successful privateers—esteemed men who had lived lives of great adventure and risk, and who had profited mightily from their labors. To be a pirate meant that you were simultaneously beneath contempt and on a thrilling road to respectability—even to knighthood. Those two polarities were maintained for at least a century without much cognitive dissonance for an obvious reason: the Barbary pirates were (mostly) North Africans, attacking innocent British families, while Drake and his peers were sacking Spanish settlements in the New World. That the former should seem monstrous and beyond the pale and the latter worthy of knighthood was simply a case of rooting for the home team.


pages: 244 words: 73,966

Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture by Bernardo Kastrup

active measures, cellular automata, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, conceptual framework, dark matter, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum entanglement, retail therapy, scientific worldview, sugar pill, systems thinking, the scientific method

Signs and symptoms Patients tend to implicitly or explicitly deny the efficaciousness and reliability of all psychic functions except the intellect. They insist that the intellect is the only valid avenue for approaching reality, even though they are unable to coherently justify why. The condition blinds them to this obvious cognitive dissonance and causes them to arbitrarily consider their position selfevident. If, while in therapy, the patient is confronted with the fact that the human psyche is equipped with many other forms of cognition beyond the intellect, he will typically point to historical events in which these other faculties have been unreliable, while ignoring all other historical events in which they have been vital.


Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian by Boyle, Frankie

banking crisis, Boris Johnson, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, David Attenborough, Dennis Tito, discovery of penicillin, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Etonian, falling living standards, Google Earth, heat death of the universe, high-speed rail, hive mind, Jeffrey Epstein, low interest rates, negative equity, Ocado, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Red Clydeside, Right to Buy, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, wage slave

Obviously, there’s still a huge political agenda at work, but much less overt politics. The main satire show in Britain, Have I Got News for You, begins with picture jokes so forced and dispiriting they act as a kind of ideological security scan. If you can smile and nod your way through that shit then they know you won’t flip out during the shrieking cognitive dissonance of playing guessing games against a backdrop of worldwide war and financial meltdown. I was on there once when they showed a picture of a girl being captured by police as she tried to steal a leg of frozen lamb. She was pictured attempting to climb a fence as several police officers dragged her down from below.


pages: 283 words: 78,705

Principles of Web API Design: Delivering Value with APIs and Microservices by James Higginbotham

Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, business intelligence, business logic, business process, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, collaborative editing, continuous integration, create, read, update, delete, database schema, DevOps, fallacies of distributed computing, fault tolerance, index card, Internet of things, inventory management, Kubernetes, linked data, loose coupling, machine readable, Metcalfe’s law, microservices, recommendation engine, semantic web, side project, single page application, Snapchat, software as a service, SQL injection, web application, WebSocket

However, some compromises may be more significant, such as an existing API design that is too low-level. This is common for APIs that opted to expose database tables directly compared to the new proposed API design that would apply a more course-grained design with an outcome-based focus. Mixing low-level and high-level APIs may create too much cognitive dissonance for developers and therefore are less than ideal. Teams will need to determine if they wish to add the new design to an existing API, start a new API as if it were a brand-new product offering, or deliver the new design as a new version of the existing API. Each option will have an impact both on the organization and on current and future API consumers.


pages: 257 words: 77,612

The Rebel and the Kingdom: The True Story of the Secret Mission to Overthrow the North Korean Regime by Bradley Hope

Airbnb, battle of ideas, bitcoin, blockchain, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital map, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, operational security, Potemkin village, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

The challenge with these diplomats is they need to at once completely embrace and believe the “truth” that North Korea disseminates to its people while also existing in the “real world,” where none of these things are actually true. In a sense, one of the most important skills for a North Korean diplomat is to hold two contradictory views at the same time without it causing any cognitive dissonance. Orwell’s “doublethink” was a fact of life, a survival mechanism, for North Koreans posted abroad. Outgoing and talkative, Jo frequently surprised businessmen he met around Italy on trips to view factories and distribution centers. His formal manners were so precise, albeit mechanical, that many Italians he met believed he’d undergone extensive etiquette training.


pages: 772 words: 203,182

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

The safety net was weak, however, an outcome of the pecuniary nature of American politics, which—then, as now—bestows outsized influence on the affluent donor class including the business community. And so we arrive at 1981. A wave of new politicians crowded into Washington, determined to unravel this grand agreement so painfully and thoughtfully pieced together in the 1930s and 1940s. Suffering with cognitive dissonance toward economic history, unwilling to learn from the Great Depression, and enthralled by the certitude of powerful personalities pursuing an ideological agenda, they launched the Reagan era. What was their biggest mistake? They threw Adam Smith under the bus, ignoring his warning that “The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatever.”

Surveys by Michael Norton and Ariely found that respondents believe the top 20 percent own less than 60 percent of American wealth, when their actual share is close to 90 percent.18 Reform hinges on new rules from Washington. Yet, despite the 2012 election outcome, many voters remain distrustful of government, the lingering effects of decades of demonization. This attitude is reinforced by the rather pervasive cognitive dissonance of Americans regarding the sizable role played by government in their lives, documented in research by economist Suzanne Mettler of Cornell University. She found that 44 percent of Social Security recipients, 43 percent of those receiving unemployment benefits, and 40 percent of both Medicare and GI Bill beneficiaries say they “have not used a government program.”19 Even so, American voters are not fools and realize they are economically downtrodden.


Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism by Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, declining real wages, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass immigration, meta-analysis, obamacare, open borders, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, post-industrial society, post-materialism, precariat, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, War on Poverty, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The way that governments mishandled the financial and debt crises would be expected to deepen mistrust. But the linkages may be reversed; citizens may judge the performance of the economy, and assign government responsibility for economic conditions, through the prism of their prior political preferences – avoiding 144 Economic Grievances cognitive dissonance and leading people to confirm what they already believe. For example, in the US there was a substantial jump in the proportion of Republicans expressing positive evaluations of the economic situation after Trump entered the White House, with the proportion saying that these conditions were ‘very good’ or ‘somewhat good’ doubling from 31 percent in February 2016 to 61 percent a year later.

However, the results may not prove reliable as ordinary citizens may misperceive the issue position of parties by seeing them as either closer to their own views or further away than they are in reality. Ordinary people may mistake party issue positions because of motivated reasoning, selective perceptions used to reduce cognitive dissonance, confused signals about policy positions arising from internal ideological divisions within political parties, or from simple lack of political information and awareness.37 Programmatic Policy Platforms and Issue Positions The most common practice in the comparative literature has sought to distinguish the location of political parties, and the similarities across party families, based on content analysis of policy manifestos and programmatic platforms.


pages: 691 words: 203,236

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann

4chan, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open borders, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, phenotype, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, twin studies, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional

Americans welcomed immigration to grow the country, and could wax lyrical about the US as a ‘new’ nation made up of various European peoples. At the same time, they considered themselves more Protestant and Anglo-Saxon than Britain. So Jefferson could affirm both the asylum and Anglo-Saxon traditions without cognitive dissonance. Here is the great American liberal philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in 1846 about the US as ‘The asylum of all nations … the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles and Cossacks, and all the European tribes, of the Africans and Polynesians, will construct a new race … as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting pot of the Dark Ages.’11 And around the same time he declared: It cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied or do promise ever to occupy any very high place in the human family … The Irish cannot; the American Indian cannot; the Chinese cannot.

While people get the levels wrong, they have a better feel for trends over time such as the pace of ethnic change or rate of immigration, as we saw with the link between immigration rates and the salience of immigration across Europe. They also can compare the ethnic composition at present with what they experienced growing up – an important source of cognitive dissonance that leads many to report that they don’t recognize their country any more (61 per cent of whites said this in a 2011 UK sample).81 Those who study the politics of population change in developing countries find that local population dynamics, such as high birth rates leading to pressure on scarce cropland or migrations of outsider tribes into an ethnic group’s perceived homeland, can result in low-level conflicts.


pages: 286 words: 82,065

Curation Nation by Rosenbaum, Steven

Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, future of journalism, independent contractor, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Mary Meeker, means of production, off-the-grid, PageRank, pattern recognition, post-work, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, Yogi Berra

Then, after a stint at Viacom and Barry Diller’s Studios USA, Miller took on the unenviable task of fixing AOL. It was 2005, and the problems were written large on the front door. AOL was an ISP (a dial-up Internet service provider) in a world that was going broadband. You didn’t have to wake up in the morning and have cognitive dissonance around that. AOL knew it couldn’t sell its dial-up business and that it was going to go to zero—and fast. And, since parent company TimeWarner owned cable, the broadband business was already taken. Miller needed to imagine a new AOL with a new focus: “There aren’t a huge number of options, but I thought, ‘How do you figure out how to make a lot of content that people want to consume, since you’re essentially an aggregator of lots of other peoples’ content and services?’”


pages: 273 words: 85,195

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Boeing 747, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, company town, crowdsourcing, fulfillment center, full employment, game design, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, Mars Rover, new economy, Nomadland, off grid, off-the-grid, payday loans, Pepto Bismol, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, six sigma, supply-chain management, traumatic brain injury, union organizing, urban sprawl, Wayback Machine, white picket fence, Y2K

We were told to walk in paths that were marked with green tape on the floor; when someone cut a corner, our guide scolded him. When I stopped to use the restroom, the inside of my stall had a chart with a color palette ranging from pale yellow to terrifying puce. It instructed me to find the shade that matched my urine and suggested that I should be drinking more water. I spent a week at the warehouse. The cognitive dissonance was intense. At the start of each shift, a blonde, ponytailed manager in her twenties chirped “Helllloooo, campers!” to our cohort of mostly elderly workers, while her assistant coached us through stretches. Afterward, I scanned barcodes on everything from dildos (manufacturer: “Cloud 9” model “Delightful Dong”), to Smith & Wesson Gun Wraps (available in granular and rubberized textures) and $25 AMC gift cards (there were 146 of them, and they had to be scanned individually).


pages: 300 words: 79,315

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Everything should be made as simple as possible, George Santayana, index card, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex

“How hungry are we?” That was brainstorming. Those questions were part of the naturally creative process that happens once you commit to some outcome that hasn’t happened yet. Your brain noticed a gap between what you were looking toward and where you actually were at the time, and it began to resolve that “cognitive dissonance” by trying to fill in the blanks. This is the beginning of the “how” phase of natural planning. But it did the thinking in a somewhat random and ad hoc fashion. Lots of different aspects of going to dinner just occurred to you. You almost certainly didn’t need to actually write all of them down on a piece of paper, but you did a version of that process in your mind.2 Once you had generated a sufficient number of ideas and details, you couldn’t help but start to organize them.


pages: 309 words: 84,038

Bike Boom: The Unexpected Resurgence of Cycling by Carlton Reid

1960s counterculture, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, bike sharing, California gold rush, car-free, cognitive dissonance, driverless car, Ford Model T, Haight Ashbury, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, military-industrial complex, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stop de Kindermoord, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban planning, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog, Yom Kippur War

Bergman was another enthusiastic cyclist. Nineteen-seventies cycle activist Marchant “Lucky” Wentworth told me by e-mail that, at times, Bergman went beyond his brief, such as when he strongarmed DC’s Department of Motor Vehicles into publishing and promoting a “Bikes Have Equal Rights” poster. A striking example of cognitive dissonance, this poster (see color plates) was produced by Lou Stovall, then an up-and-coming African American community-art activist churning out environmental posters. (He’s now a world-renowned silkscreen printmaker.) “The DMV weren’t big fans of bikes,” remembered Wentworth, “but the [council] chairman controlled their budget and had them by the short ones.”


pages: 301 words: 85,263

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

The lock was, after all, in beta: it was a ‘smart lock’ that could be opened with a mobile phone; virtual keys could be emailed to guests in advance of their stay. Why the lock decided to open of its own accord to admit a stranger – who was, thankfully, merely a confused neighbour – was never made clear, and probably never would be. Why would one ask? This cognitive dissonance between the expected functions of a traditional lock and those offered by such a ‘smart’ product can be explained by its real target. It became evident that the locks are a preferred device for those running Airbnb apartments when another manufacturer’s software update bricked hundreds of the devices, leaving their guests out in the cold.38 In the same way that Uber alienates its drivers and customers, and Amazon degrades its workers, Airbnb can be held responsible for the reduction of homes to hotels, and the corresponding rent rises in major cities around the world.


pages: 288 words: 81,253

Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Filter Bubble, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, loss aversion, market design, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, p-value, phenotype, prediction markets, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, urban planning, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Wins and losses are symmetrical. If I field my win as having to do with my skillful play, then my opponent in the hand must have lost because of their less skillful play. Likewise, if I field my loss as having to do with luck, then my opponent must have won due to luck as well. Any other interpretation would create cognitive dissonance. Thinking about it this way, we see that the way we field other people’s outcomes is just part of self-serving bias. Viewed through this lens, the pattern begins to make sense. But this comparison of our results to others isn’t confined to zero-sum games where one player directly loses to the other (or where one lawyer loses to opposing counsel, or where one salesperson loses a sale to a competitor, etc.).


pages: 287 words: 81,014

The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism by Olivia Fox Cabane

airport security, Boeing 747, cognitive dissonance, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, hedonic treadmill, Jeff Hawkins, Lao Tzu, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, Parkinson's law, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, social intelligence, Steve Jobs

From now on, I can give people the feeling I care about them without actually liking them in the least, right?” Wrong. First, as you now know, the vast majority of the time, if you don’t mean what you say, people will intuitively know. They’ll feel it on a gut level. Second, expressing something we don’t believe leads to cognitive dissonance, which uses up our focus, diverts our attention, and thus impairs our performance. Insincerity just isn’t worth the toll it takes. With this said, think of a dozen people who could matter to your career. Then reach out to them by phone or e-mail with the following envy-prevention technique: Justification.


pages: 249 words: 80,762

Odd Girl Out: An Autistic Woman in a Neurotypical World by Laura James

autism spectrum disorder, cognitive dissonance, Kintsugi, Minecraft, neurotypical, pink-collar, Skype, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk

If a teacher tried to get me to join in with the skipping games, I would find an excuse not to. I thought everyone saw life as an obstacle course to be carefully navigated. High school held new terrors every day. It was then that I realized not everyone experienced the world in the same way as me. It was my first understanding of cognitive dissonance. I was more intelligent than most of my classmates, so why could I not understand the work being set for me? My exercise books were a mess. Ink smudged with tears of frustration and sweat from my fingers as I tried to make sense of the problem laid out in the accompanying textbook. While I didn’t learn much at school, it was during my teenage years I learned about hiding my differences and blending in.


pages: 309 words: 81,975

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

We have to judge them purely by their behavior, and their behavior is shaped (at least in part) by their environment. If you place someone in a workplace that pays them by the hour, scrutinizes their every move, and treats them like they are disposable, they may (gasp) present with Theory X behavior. So we live with the cognitive dissonance that we are (somehow) capable and others are not. Pay attention to the conversations happening in your office. What kind of language is used to describe people and teams? If you hear words such as “incentivize . . . control . . . enforce . . .” and phrases such as “they can’t handle . . . they don’t need to know . . . they don’t get it . . . ,” chances are Theory X is driving a lot of the decision making in your organization, albeit unintentionally.


pages: 269 words: 83,307

Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits by Kevin Roose

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, East Village, eat what you kill, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, fixed income, forward guidance, glass ceiling, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, hedonic treadmill, information security, Jane Street, jitney, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Michael Milken, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, plutocrats, proprietary trading, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tail risk, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, two and twenty, urban planning, We are the 99%, work culture , young professional

He wanted to absorb the good parts of the private equity experience—the management experience, the deep knowledge of how businesses work, and the ability to turn around struggling companies—without buying into the industry’s abiding principle of “shareholder value,” which held that a strategy of mass layoffs, pension cuts, and tax avoidance could be good, as long as it made more money for the private equity firm and its investors. If Derrick could truly thread that needle, and harmonize the cognitive dissonance of working in finance as a nonbeliever, it would be a rare feat, and it would mean that perhaps he’d be able to sustain his New York life after all. But until he figured out how, he was in for a lot more sleepless nights spent listening to the angel perched on his shoulder, yelling in his ear.


pages: 312 words: 84,421

This Chair Rocks: A Manifiesto Against Ageism by Ashton Applewhite

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Downton Abbey, fixed income, follow your passion, ghettoisation, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, obamacare, old age dependency ratio, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning, white picket fence, women in the workforce

All bets are off, except for the fact that the longer we live, the more different from each other we become—and the more likely it is that our lives will diverge from popular culture’s cramped, oppressive script. Intuitively we know this. Lived experience brings the lesson home. The transitions we’re conditioned to dread materialize differently, or not at all. How to jimmy open that crack, that disconnect between script and reality, that twinge of cognitive dissonance? To turn that glimmer of awareness into conscious thought? To turn that awareness into a grasp of the social and economic institutions that attempt to shape our aging? To reject those meanings and develop our own? Last but not least, to take them out into the culture at large? To shift the entire conversation around longevity—from deficit to opportunity, from dependence to interdependence, from burden to gift—and transform our internal experience along with it.


pages: 286 words: 87,168

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

And in a growth-dependent economy, that cannot be allowed to happen. Instead, the very newspapers that carry harrowing stories about ecological collapse also report excitedly on how GDP is growing every quarter, and the very politicians who wring their hands about climate breakdown also call dutifully for more industrial growth every year. The cognitive dissonance is striking. Some people try to reconcile this tension by leaning on the hope that technology will save us – that innovation will make growth ‘green’. Efficiency improvements will enable us to ‘decouple’ GDP from ecological impact so we can continue growing the global economy for ever without having to change anything about capitalism.


pages: 1,009 words: 329,520

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. by William D. Cohan

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, deal flow, diversification, Donald Trump, East Village, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, interest rate swap, intermodal, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Michael Milken, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short squeeze, SoftBank, stock buybacks, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, Yogi Berra

Chairman, that of the major, reputable investment banking firms that perform functions in this area, you would find most of the major investment banking firms in this business, I would say, being 10 or 15 firms of a major character." Felix would return often to this public obsession with the moral and ethical conduct of his fellow investment bankers--seemingly so fraught with cognitive dissonance--even as recently as July 2004, some thirty-five years after his testimony before the Celler commission. In a New York Times interview, he opined, "You should come to the business with a moral code. You're certainly not going to learn it later on. If people conduct themselves in ways that could be deemed immoral, I really wouldn't blame Wall Street, I would blame the individuals themselves who by and large should know better."

They come from people who are more than capable of strenuously negotiating over the amount of the fee. Fees are the purest form of competition. The companies have full knowledge of what other banks are getting for similar deals and the service provided, and they are not shy." Felix, though, having perfected the art of cognitive dissonance, alone among his peers criticized the growing fees. "The level of fees is so different depending on what happens--and that's the unhealthy element," he told the Times. An apex of sorts was clearly reached during one of the most infamous takeover battles of all time--the 1982 fight for Bendix between Martin Marietta, Allied, and United Technologies.

"Market conditions may occur under which a bridge loan cannot be refinanced," he correctly predicted. As to the concern about foreign acquisitions, Felix simply acknowledged that it "is becoming an area of increasing economic and political importance," and then sought clarification on the rules of engagement. Afterward, more than one of his partners remarked on the level of cognitive dissonance that Felix must be able to withstand after, on the one hand, actively participating in the acquisition of American companies by Japanese companies and, on the other hand, being able to testify before senators trying to come to terms with the phenomenon--and not even acknowledge before them his own role.


pages: 324 words: 91,653

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi

augmented reality, cognitive dissonance, deep learning, gravity well, haute couture, MITM: man-in-the-middle, music of the spheres, quantum entanglement

The thought of the place she put me in before does make her look a little like the Oortian dark god of the void. ‘Perhonen will show you your quarters.’ When the thief is gone, Mieli lies down in the pilot’s crèche. She feels exhausted, even though the biot feed of her body – that has been waiting for her with Perhonen, for months – tells her she is perfectly rested. But the cognitive dissonance is worse. Was it me who was in the Prison? Or another? She remembers the long weeks of preparation, days of subjective slowtime in a q-suit, getting ready to commit a crime just so she could be caught by the Archons and enter the Prison: the eternity in her cell, mind wrapped in an old memory.


pages: 332 words: 89,668

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America by Jamie Bronstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, oil shock, plutocrats, price discrimination, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

“In all probability a much more massive unfree or limited service would have been drafted into the plantation colonies from the ranks of white convicts and other outcasts—in which case the planters’ privileges would unmistakably have rested on the labour of landless workers with small hope of advancement for themselves and their children.”25 Plantation owners were paternalistic in their language, referring to their slaves as part of their families, but they calculated slaves as property and did not hesitate to sell them, distribute them in wills, or take any other steps that were necessary to maximize profit.26 If slaves are counted both as wealth and as potential owners of wealth, then inequality in the entire pre-Civil-War period is even more extreme than scholars of American inequality have calculated.27 Nor was the society in which slaves lived a monolith; rather, occupation, gender, the size of the community in which slaves lived, and geography created inequalities.28 The existence of slavery in a “free” country entailed a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. James L. Huston argues that from the outset, slavery conflicted with the notion of receiving the fruits of one’s labor that was essential to Republicanism, and that writers including Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson realized this.29 But the Founders did not let their hesitation about labor’s rewards get in the way of a federal Constitution that enshrined and perpetuated slavery.


pages: 324 words: 93,175

The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home by Dan Ariely

Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Burning Man, business process, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Demis Hassabis, end world poverty, endowment effect, Exxon Valdez, first-price auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, IKEA effect, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loss aversion, name-letter effect, Peter Singer: altruism, placebo effect, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, search costs, second-price auction, Skinner box, software as a service, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, Upton Sinclair, young professional

Anne Preston, “The Nonprofit Worker in a For-Profit World,” Journal of Labor Economics 7, no. 4 (1989): 438–463. Chapter 3: The IKEA Effect: Why We Overvalue What We Make Based on Gary Becker, Morris H. DeGroot, and Jacob Marschak, “An Experimental Study of Some Stochastic Models for Wagers,” Behavioral Science 8, no. 3 (1963): 199–201. Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957). Nikolaus Franke, Martin Schreier, and Ulrike Kaiser, “The ‘I Designed It Myself’ Effect in Mass Customization,” Management Science 56, no. 1 (2009): 125–140. Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely, “The IKEA Effect: When Labor Leads to Love,” manuscript, Harvard University, 2010.


Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child by Alissa Quart

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, cognitive dissonance, deliberate practice, Flynn Effect, haute couture, helicopter parent, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Two Sigma, War on Poverty

In fact, child and teen competitive preaching is such a craft that James’s father was concerned that the sermon that his son, along with the other teen preachers, would deliver a number of times (the teen preachers repeat the same sermon over and over again at the competition) had some “redundancies,” and “James went too quickly on two or three lines.” One of the competition’s judges, Dan Olinger, a Bob Jones theologian, contradicted my overall impression that style and oratorical skill triumph over the “realness” of authentic faith. “We look to see if they are nervous or artificial or if there’s too much cognitive dissonance to the sermon,” he said. “One kid one year referred to ‘a terrible storm at sea’ within one’s soul, ‘like the storm in the television show Gilligan’s Island.’” In the Bible Preaching judging forms, the factors Olinger and other judges evaluated in the preacher boy competitors included “vitality,” defined as “‘life’ in the face, body & voice”: “eye contact/empathy (direct visual and mental contact with audience)”: “Poise/Authority (sense of composure, assurance & authority)”: and “Emphasis/Variety (stress on key ideas through appropriate, accurate explanation of Scripture & principles presented).”


pages: 401 words: 93,256

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, butterfly effect, California gold rush, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Firefox, Ford Model T, General Magic , George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, IKEA effect, information asymmetry, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, loss aversion, low cost airline, Mason jar, Murray Gell-Mann, nudge theory, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Veblen good, work culture

*For instance, will wealthy Germans help poorer Germans? Yup. Will they help Syrians? Yes, albeit reluctantly. Poor Greeks, however? No chance. *In Western countries at any rate, Asia seems to be different in this, to some degree. *Including me, weirdly. *The technical term is ‘cognitive dissonance’. *Even the super-rich love a bargain. In fact supermarket own-brand products tend to be bought more by wealthier people than by poorer people. *Pernod, of course, only tastes really good in France. And Guinness tastes better in Ireland. But that’s not because Guinness is better in Ireland, but because Ireland is a better backdrop for drinking Guinness.


Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life by David Allen

Abraham Maslow, cognitive dissonance, index card, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, shareholder value, Skype, telemarketer

I need and use GTD myself so much because I often have to have blinders, just like a horse, to stay on course. On the Positive Side Of course we can never really stop visioning. By our very nature we are always imaging outcomes and goals. As soon as we decide to leave a room, we have made a commitment that is unfulfilled, which creates a cognitive dissonance that generates the juice necessary to get up and moving. Looking out on a horizon, being attracted to something that we want to experience or accomplish, is core to expressing and expanding ourselves, whether it’s a matter of putting on a hat or creating a conference. Many executives we have coached fall into this quadrant.


pages: 293 words: 89,712

After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine by Antony Loewenstein, Ahmed Moor

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, drone strike, facts on the ground, gentrification, ghettoisation, land reform, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, one-state solution, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, young professional

Indeed, Israelis, fed up with the economic situation in Tel Aviv, demanded to change the game unilaterally, with no discussion of the occupation or the deep-seated separation principle which has taken over Israeli society. The simple fact apparently lost on many Israelis is that Israeli and Palestinian society is more connected now than at any other time. Israelis have been able to maintain their society and its willing ignorance of the situation in the West Bank only through collective cognitive dissonance. This explains the bitter reaction of many tent protesters when presented with the paradox of demanding social justice without discussion of the occupation. It also explains the generally negative sentiment towards the joint struggle, as well as the low numbers of Israelis who join the protests.


pages: 398 words: 86,855

Bad Data Handbook by Q. Ethan McCallum

Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Benoit Mandelbrot, business intelligence, cellular automata, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, conceptual framework, data science, database schema, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Flash crash, functional programming, Gini coefficient, hype cycle, illegal immigration, iterative process, labor-force participation, loose coupling, machine readable, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, recommendation engine, selection bias, sentiment analysis, SQL injection, statistical model, supply-chain management, survivorship bias, text mining, too big to fail, web application

But there’s a design problem here: if a sentiment classifier is more biased towards the pos class, it will produce more false positives. And if you plan on surfacing these positive reviews, showing them to normal people that have no insight into how a sentiment classifier works, you really don’t want to show a false positive review. There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance when you claim that a business is highly rated and most people like it, while at the same time showing a negative review. One of the worst things you can do when designing a user interface is to show conflicting messages at the same time. So by balancing the pos and neg categories, I was able to reduce that bias and decrease false positives.


pages: 326 words: 94,046

The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly: A Physician's First Year by Matt McCarthy

cognitive dissonance, index card, off-the-grid, sensible shoes, upwardly mobile

She had short-circuited my one ironclad logical point. Let her die? What was I supposed to say? I could treat her HIV and what appeared to be neurosyphilis, but how was I supposed to treat whatever made her favor dying over taking the pills? Standing before her, I felt the glare of my colleagues. Chanel must have sensed my cognitive dissonance. She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Can we talk about this later, one-on-one?” “You can talk,” Dre said, “talk all you want.” “Very well,” Chanel said. “I’ll come back later.” We stepped out of the room and discussed the approach to this difficult patient. Everyone agreed that a multidisciplinary approach would be necessary, incorporating psychiatry, social work, nursing, and potentially a host of other specialists.


We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent by Nesrine Malik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, currency peg, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, moral panic, Nate Silver, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, payday loans, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade

It aims to blackmail good people into ceding space to bad ideas, even though they have a legitimate right to refuse. And it is a myth that demands in turn, its own silencing and undermining of individual freedom. To accept the freedom of speech crisis myth is to give up your own right to turn off the comments. The myth and its promoters thrive on cognitive dissonances and good intentions, feeding them with false equivalence, fabrication and ‘slippery slope’ fallacies. The first, false equivalence, is based on the notion that free speech is absolute which, both on a customary and legal level, is false. False equivalence At the same time as a proliferation in platform, a right-wing counter push was taking place online.


pages: 305 words: 97,214

Future Tense: Jews, Judaism, and Israel in the Twenty-First Century by Jonathan Sacks

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Atahualpa, back-to-the-land, cognitive dissonance, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, long peace, Socratic dialogue, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, zero-sum game

If all this is correct, it explains why, for two centuries, Jews have pursued policies that seemed to make sense but were destined to yield a result precisely the reverse of that expected.15 The less demanding the religion, the less it will be observed. The explanation lies in Leon Festinger’s famous discovery known as ‘cognitive dissonance’. One corollary of this theory is that we value most what costs us the most.16 The more demanding the task, the greater commitment it evokes. That can be seen to be true today, not only within Judaism but in all the world’s faiths. We value most that for which we make sacrifices. Judaism survived two thousand years of exile, not because it was user-friendly but because it was difficult, sometimes heartbreakingly so.


pages: 350 words: 90,898

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload by Cal Newport

Cal Newport, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collaborative editing, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, fault tolerance, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Garrett Hardin, hive mind, Inbox Zero, interchangeable parts, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Nash equilibrium, passive income, Paul Graham, place-making, pneumatic tube, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, work culture , Y Combinator

It’s the fourth of his five ideas, however, that I want to dwell on, as it casts into sharp relief the intellectual framework I’ve attempted to build in this book: Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. . . . A new medium does not add something; it changes everything. In the year 1500, after the printing press was invented, you did not have old Europe plus the printing press. You had a different Europe. Postman’s idea clarifies the confusing cognitive dissonance so many people feel about digital communication tools like email. Rationally, we know email is a better way to deliver messages than the technologies it superseded: it’s universal, it’s fast, it’s essentially free. For anyone old enough to remember clearing jammed fax machines or struggling to open the red-thread ties of those worn memo folders, there’s no debate that email elegantly solves real problems that once made office life really annoying.


Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen by Dan Heath

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, food desert, high-speed rail, Housing First, illegal immigration, Internet of things, mandatory minimum, millennium bug, move fast and break things, Nick Bostrom, payday loans, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, self-driving car, Skype, Snapchat, subscription business, systems thinking, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

., the deaths of millions of rabbits in Australia because of the introduced virus myxomatosis) then I am doubtful that we ought to do that.” He added that “we should develop non-lethal methods of population control, or if that isn’t possible, find lethal methods that result in a quick and painless death.” I quickly embraced Singer’s stance as my own, in hopes of keeping at bay any more cognitive dissonance. II. I should add, to be fair, that Holmes is not skeptical about the Macquarie Island intervention in the way that I am. Don’t want it to seem like he’s throwing his conservation colleagues under the bus here. III. Some nuance here: First, plastic surgeons often do show off photos to patients.


pages: 396 words: 96,049

Upgrade by Blake Crouch

bioinformatics, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, dark matter, deepfake, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hyperloop, independent contractor, job automation, low earth orbit, messenger bag, mirror neurons, off grid, pattern recognition, phenotype, ride hailing / ride sharing, supervolcano, time dilation

What emotional incentive do we have to make the sacrifices that will save future generations, if our brains aren’t capable of caring about them sufficiently? My mother once posited that we are not rational beings. We read about all the looming threats in the paper, we watch it on the news, and then we get on with our day. And, yes, some of that is thanks to our ability to hide from reality with denial, with cognitive dissonance, with magical thinking. But she forgot the most important thing: In the absence of compassion, selfishness is the most rational response of all. Our species’ superpower is not caring. We merely exercised that ability. We don’t have an intelligence problem. We have a compassion problem. That, more than any other single factor, is what’s driving us toward extinction.


pages: 740 words: 236,681

The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever by Christopher Hitchens

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, Edmond Halley, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, index card, Isaac Newton, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, phenotype, Plato's cave, risk tolerance, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics

I had no intention of criticizing Allah’s will, only to discover what had gone so very wrong. It was at university that I gradually lost my faith. The ideas and the facts that I encountered there were thrilling and powerful, but they also clashed horribly with the vision of the world with which I had grown up. At first, when the cognitive dissonance became too strong, I would try to shove these issues to the back of my mind. The ideas of Spinoza and Freud, Darwin and Locke and Mill, were indisputably true, but so was the Koran; and I vowed to one day resolve these differences. In the meantime, I could not make myself stop reading. I knew the argument was a weak one, but I told myself that Allah is in favor of knowledge.

A religion of talking serpents and heavenly gardens? I usually respond that I suffer from hayfever. The Christian take on Hellfire seems less dramatic than the Muslim vision, which I grew up with, but Christian magical thinking appeals to me no more than my grandmother’s angels and djinns. The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love.


pages: 410 words: 101,260

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, double helix, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fear of failure, Firefox, George Santayana, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, women in the workforce

While we’ll have an especially strong affinity toward our converted rivals, will they feel the same way toward us? Yes—this is the second advantage of converting resisters. To like us, they have to work especially hard to overcome their initial negative impressions, telling themselves, I must have been wrong about that person. Moving forward, to avoid the cognitive dissonance of changing their minds yet again, they’ll be especially motivated to maintain a positive relationship. Third, and most important, it is our former adversaries who are the most effective at persuading others to join our movements. They can marshal better arguments on our behalf, because they understand the doubts and misgivings of resisters and fence-sitters.


pages: 370 words: 94,968

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive by Brian Christian

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Blue Ocean Strategy, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, l'esprit de l'escalier, language acquisition, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Menlo Park, operational security, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, starchitect, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Thales of Miletus, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Kasparov, of course, immediately proposes a 1998 “best out of three” tiebreaker match for all the marbles—“I personally guarantee I will tear it in pieces”—but as soon as the dust settles and the press walks away, IBM quietly cuts the team’s funding, reassigns the engineers, and begins to slowly take Deep Blue apart. Doc, I’m a Corpse When something happens that creates a cognitive dissonance, when two of our beliefs are shown to be incompatible, we’re still left with the choice of which one to reject. In academic philosophy circles this has a famous joke: A guy comes in to the doctor’s, says, “Doc, I’m a corpse. I’m dead.” The doctor says, “Well, are corpses … ticklish?” “Course not, doc!”


pages: 314 words: 101,452

Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis

barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, corporate raider, disinformation, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, interest rate swap, Irwin Jacobs, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, nuclear winter, Ponzi scheme, risk free rate, The Predators' Ball, yield curve

Not that they ever doubted they were worth every penny they got. But they were uneasy with the explosion of debt in America. (In general, the better they recalled the Great Depression, the more suspicious they were of the leveraging of America.) The head of bond research at Salomon, Henry Kaufman, was, when I arrived, our most acute case of cognitive dissonance. He was the guru of the bond market and also the conscience of our firm. He told investors whether their fast-moving bonds were going up or down. He was so often right that the markets made him famous if not throughout the English-speaking world then at least among the sort of people who read the Wall Street Journal.


pages: 289 words: 99,936

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age by Virginia Eubanks

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, call centre, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, desegregation, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, game design, global village, index card, informal economy, invisible hand, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, microcredit, new economy, post-industrial society, race to the bottom, rent control, rent stabilization, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social contagion, South of Market, San Francisco, tech worker, telemarketer, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban planning, web application, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

It was, many believed, the American Dream manifest: all you needed was a good idea, some sweat equity, and a garage, and the digital economy would bestow on you its mighty gifts. I understood the itch for 4 Chapter 1 the million. Straightforward greed was not what was tying my brain in knots. What I had trouble wrapping my head around was Silicon Valley’s unique way of combining utopian fervor with blatant dissociation from reality, a cognitive dissonance that led me to a personal crisis of conscience and eventually drove me out of the Bay Area. People around me seemed to believe that the high-tech economy was going to lift all boats—lead to better outcomes for everyone—but they were ignoring the obvious evidence of increasing economic inequality that I saw around me every day.


pages: 296 words: 98,018

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

Many of them had clamored for the dismantling of systems designed, among other things, to protect equality, such as labor unions, zoning regulations, or the laws that assured job security and benefits for workers. How was the faith in the win-win maintained in the face of widespread evidence that one was in fact contributing to inequality? How did these new barons relieve the cognitive dissonance they might have felt from claiming to improve others’ lives while noticing that their own were perhaps the only ones getting better? One day at Summit at Sea, in the well of the Bliss Ultra Lounge, on the seventh floor of the ship, a high priest of this technology world, a venture capitalist named Shervin Pishevar, was demonstrating one form of relief.


pages: 550 words: 89,316

The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

assortative mating, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BRICs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discrete time, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, income inequality, iterative process, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Mason jar, means of production, NetJets, new economy, New Urbanism, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit maximization, public intellectual, Richard Florida, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the long tail, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Hsieh, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Veblen good, women in the workforce

In short, unlike Veblen’s leisure class or David Brooks’s “bobos,” this new elite is not defined by economics. Rather, the aspirational class is formed through a collective consciousness upheld by specific values and acquired knowledge and the rarified social and cultural processes necessary to acquire them. In Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks chronicled the cognitive dissonance of “bobos” (bohemian bourgeois) who grew up in the counterculture 1960s and felt a deep discomfort around their adulthood wealth. This group is also an economically based elite, or what Brooks called “the new upper class.” The uneasiness many bobos felt in reconciling their hippy, nonmaterialistic earlier years and their newfound wealth resulted in consumer habits that were still expensive but ultimately attempted to distance themselves from money.


pages: 354 words: 99,690

Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse: And Other Lessons From Modern Life by David Mitchell

bank run, Boris Johnson, British Empire, cakes and ale, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, Etonian, eurozone crisis, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Julian Assange, lateral thinking, Northern Rock, Ocado, offshore financial centre, payday loans, plutocrats, profit motive, Russell Brand, sensible shoes, Skype, The Wisdom of Crowds, WikiLeaks

Utterly inept with regard to these elements of television production which I previously considered vital to a drama’s success – or certainly its enjoyability. Yet I undoubtedly do enjoy Downton Abbey, and not “because it’s so terrible”. I unironically enjoy it despite how bad it is. Is that what they call cognitive dissonance? Or is it just really liking footage of a stately home? So Laura Carmichael deserves much credit for turning the implausible words and actions in the script into a believable character. Lady Edith is the second daughter of the Earl of Grantham, who owns Downton Abbey (which is where Downton Abbey is set – it is not a real abbey, so he is not an abbot), and she has a very rough time.


pages: 390 words: 96,624

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom by Rebecca MacKinnon

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business cycle, business intelligence, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital Maoism, don't be evil, Eben Moglen, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Global Witness, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, online collectivism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pre–internet, race to the bottom, real-name policy, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Part of our reason for being here at this meeting is to talk about the lack of a similar infrastructure for platforms for free expression, because this has been an area where we believe that in the past the legislation has not paid enough attention. We do believe in the protection of intellectual property. We also believe in the balance that permits a free and vibrant platform for free expression.” Wong’s arguments were met with dubious frowns on the faces of the elected representatives of the American people. The cognitive dissonance on display at that hearing highlighted an inconvenient reality: politicians throughout the democratic world are pushing for stronger censorship and surveillance by Internet companies to stop the theft of intellectual property. They are doing so in response to aggressive lobbying by powerful corporate constituents without adequate consideration of the consequences for civil liberties, and for democracy more broadly.


pages: 311 words: 94,732

The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, dematerialisation, Drosophila, epigenetics, Extropian, financial engineering, Future Shock, gravity well, greed is good, haute couture, heat death of the universe, hive mind, margin call, mirror neurons, negative equity, phenotype, plutocrats, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, telepresence, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing

Oh, and you need to get to present it in court, but that’s not so hard. If your argument were better, 639,219 would agree with you, right?” “No!” Huw tenses angrily, but is brought up short by a knot. “She’s a traitor—” “No, she’s you. A version of you with a different value system, is all. Her stimulus led to cognitive dissonance and she dealt with it by changing her mind. It’s fun; you should try it some time. Not,” he adds hastily, “right now, but in principle. What do you wash this with, baking soda?” “You’re telling me I have to change her mind,” Huw manages to say through gritted teeth. “Something like that would do, yes.


pages: 364 words: 99,613

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

Optimism has also had its liabilities, collective blind spots of complacency that ultimately produced recessions, depressions, and financial collapses; the dead and maimed of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; and bodies floating in the streets of New Orleans. Continuing your patterns of behavior in the face of evidence that you will end up badly is a well-known psychological construct. Cognitive dissonance, in which people feel discomfort when they hold conflicting ideas simultaneously, can sometimes be a variant of this. Denial of what is objectively apparent is another. Psychologists have catalogued numerous ways in which people would rather hunker down in their present dysfunctional jobs, relationships, or lifestyles that are leading to personal disaster than risk the discomfort and uncertainty that come with taking responsibility for their futures.


pages: 331 words: 96,989

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam L. Alter

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bluma Zeigarnik, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, death from overwork, drug harm reduction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Richard Thaler, Robert Durst, side project, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, three-martini lunch

Vinokur and Michelle van Ryn, “Social Support and Undermining in Close Relationships: Their Independent Effects on the Mental Health of Unemployed Persons,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65, no. 2 (1993): 350–59; Hans Kreitler and Shulamith Kreitler, “Unhappy Memories of the ‘Happy Past’: Studies in Cognitive Dissonance,” British Journal of Psychology 59, no. 2 (May 1968): 157–66; Mark R. Leary, Ellen S. Tambor, Sonja K. Terdal, and Deborah L. Downs, “Self-Esteem As an Interpersonal Monitor: The Sociometer Hypothesis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 68, no. 3 (1995): 518–30. Essena O’Neill, a: Elle Hunt, “Essena O’Neill Quits Instagram Claiming Social Media ‘Is Not Real Life,’” Guardian, November 3, 2015, www.theguardian.com/media/2015/nov/03/instagram-star-essena-oneill-quits-2d-life-to-reveal-true-story-behind-images; Megan McCluskey, “Instagram Star Essena O’Neill Breaks Her Silence on Quitting Social Media,” Time, January 5, 2015, time.com/4167856/essena-oneill-breaks-silence-on-quitting-social-media/; O’Neill describes her perspective in this video: Essena O’Neill, “Essena O’Neill—Why I REALLY Am Quitting Social Media,” YouTube, November 3, 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?


pages: 350 words: 98,077

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, ImageNet competition, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, ought to be enough for anybody, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, tail risk, TED Talk, the long tail, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers

Clarke used a similar plot device in his 1968 book, 2001: A Space Odyssey.16 The artificially intelligent computer HAL is programmed to always be truthful to humans, but at the same time to withhold the truth from human astronauts about the actual purpose of their space mission. HAL, unlike Asimov’s clueless robot, suffers from the psychological pain of this cognitive dissonance: “He was … aware of the conflict that was slowly destroying his integrity—the conflict between truth, and concealment of truth.”17 The result is a computer “neurosis” that turns HAL into a killer. Reflecting on real-life machine morality, the mathematician Norbert Wiener noted as long ago as 1960 that “we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire.”18 Wiener’s comment captures what is called the value alignment problem in AI: the challenge for AI programmers to ensure that their systems’ values align with those of humans.


The Last Stargazers by Emily Levesque

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, it's over 9,000, Kuiper Belt, Kwajalein Atoll, lolcat, Magellanic Cloud, mass immigration, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, the scientific method

Sometimes observing from sea level is a handy way of avoiding the physical strain of heading up to altitude. Astronomers using the Keck telescopes at Mauna Kea will observe from the Keck headquarters in Waimea, a tiny town nestled in the rolling green hills of Hawaii’s northern Big Island. The perks are undeniable—plentiful oxygen, restaurants and coffee shops across the street—but the cognitive dissonance is also sometimes funny. More than one observer has had a moment of reflexive panic when hearing the rain pounding the windows in Waimea and realizing that the telescope is open; years of conditioning from classical observing can trigger a moment of “oh god, it’s raining on the mirror” horror before the geography of the situation kicks in.


pages: 320 words: 95,629

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner by Po Bronson

23andMe, 3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, altcoin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, edge city, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fake news, financial independence, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, income inequality, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mars Rover, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, quantum entanglement, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, trade route, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

I’m not sure what would trigger an awakening moment on climate. New Orleans is only one foot above sea level (on average), and yet also the second-biggest oil-and-gas industrial center in the United States. I have a lot of family there, and they lost seven out of nine houses in Katrina. The levees are taller now. The human capacity for cognitive dissonance is infinite. Especially when it happens gradually, and even when it happens all of a sudden. They’re keeping their eye out for hurricanes on the Gulf, when the real hurricane is coming from the high-rises on Poydras Street, where the oil and gas companies have their boardrooms. Nobody thinks the world is without problems.


pages: 556 words: 95,955

Can We Talk About Israel?: A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted by Daniel Sokatch

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, European colonialism, facts on the ground, indoor plumbing, Live Aid, lockdown, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, one-state solution, Salesforce, Suez crisis 1956, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, traveling salesman, urban planning, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Highways, tunnels, walls, military bases, and heavily armed and guarded checkpoints now crisscrossed the occupied territories, allowing Israel to expand the Jewish settlements there while integrating them into the economic, social, and political life of the country. All this enabled many Israelis to ignore and remain inured to the harsh realities of the occupation going on in their name just a few kilometers away, on the other side of the Green Line. The fact that Israelis didn’t have to see this reality facilitated a kind of cognitive dissonance: an unwillingness, or even inability, on the part of Israelis to connect Israel’s actions to the roots of Palestinian misery and rage. For Israelis, things were relatively quiet, and the economy was good. As if in response, Israelis increasingly voted for right-wing governments who insisted that only they could ensure Israel’s security and prosperity.


pages: 308 words: 97,480

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, disinformation, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, false flag, gentrification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, intentional community, Jeffrey Epstein, lockdown, Occupy movement, operation paperclip, Parler "social media", prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, sensible shoes, social distancing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

Everybody seemed to know someone who’d participated (or, like Rob, had participated), and yet nobody believed it’d really happened. If, as F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function,” such cognitive dissonance is the awful genius of our ecstatically disinformed age. “Pro-life.” “Free speech.” Athena, for instance, embraced fascism and yet bridled at the name. “They call me a Nazi,” she muttered, sitting stooped on a tall chair beside the pool table. “Just because of my German-flag tattoo.” Sometimes, she said, they told her to kill herself.


pages: 329 words: 99,504

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by Ben McKenzie, Jacob Silverman

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Ben McKenzie, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, capital controls, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, data science, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, housing crisis, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Jacob Silverman, Jane Street, low interest rates, Lyft, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, offshore financial centre, operational security, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uber lyft, underbanked, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Celsius executives began seeing James and other online critics as adversaries endangering their business. Months after his company filed for bankruptcy, Mashinsky was still playing victim, blaming everyone from Sam Bankman-Fried to crypto media that “publish[ed] false and misleading stories about Celsius and almost never covered any positive news.” The cognitive dissonance was bewildering: What was there positive to say about a Ponzi scheme? James tried to keep himself anonymous online. Dirty Bubble Media provided a shield, a barrier between his day-to-day life and that of his investigator-journalist persona. In his writing, he sometimes used the more inclusive we, referring to DBM as a publication.


pages: 340 words: 101,675

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction by Adrian Hon

Adrian Hon, air gap, Anthropocene, augmented reality, blockchain, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, defense in depth, discrete time, disinformation, disintermediation, driverless car, drone strike, food desert, game design, gamification, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, impulse control, income inequality, job automation, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, machine translation, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, peak oil, peer-to-peer, phenotype, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, precariat, precautionary principle, prediction markets, rewilding, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, social graph, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, telepresence, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Turing test, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, VTOL, working-age population

Professor Gottleib recounts their thinking: They knew that, in theory, just reading a different news site or making new friends would be enough to increase a person’s and a community’s memetic diversity. But that’s easier said than done! We’re creatures of habit, and most people, myself included, would be very happy to keep to their routines and live within their comfort zones. Opening yourself up to new ideas and the cognitive dissonance that they might bring requires genuine confidence, usually born of emotional and economic security. The point is, no one at the time really knew how to reliably increase memetic diversity. Even worse, no one even knew what the true state of memetic diversity was—a precondition, you’d think, of any solution.


pages: 406 words: 105,602

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise by Eric Ries

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Ben Horowitz, billion-dollar mistake, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, connected car, corporate governance, DevOps, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, hockey-stick growth, index card, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loss aversion, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, move fast and break things, obamacare, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, place-making, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Uber for X, universal basic income, web of trust, Y Combinator

Like many of my peers in Silicon Valley, I came up in my career with a belief that “big company” people were fundamentally different from creative, disruptive entrepreneurs like us.3 That once organizations reach a certain size, they start dying slowly, from the inside. They cease to innovate. The most creative people choose to leave. Big companies inevitably become sclerotic, bureaucratic, political. This belief creates a strange paradox, a kind of cognitive dissonance that affects all of us who aspire to high-growth entrepreneurship. Having worked with literally hundreds of entrepreneurs, I’ve become used to asking them: “If you hate big companies so much, why are you trying to create a new one?” They’re often stumped by the question, since in their mind’s eye, the company they are busy building will be different.


pages: 350 words: 110,764

The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries by Kathi Weeks

antiwork, basic income, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, deskilling, feminist movement, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, glass ceiling, Kim Stanley Robinson, late capitalism, low-wage service sector, means of production, Meghnad Desai, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, pink-collar, post-Fordism, post-work, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Shoshana Zuboff, social intelligence, two tier labour market, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

The wages for housework perspective has a similar potential to demystify the wage system insofar as it can draw attention to the arbitrariness by which contributions to social production are or are not assigned a wage. Clearly one of the primary attractions of the wages for housework perspective was its denaturalizing effect. To insist that a woman receive payment for what is supposed to be a spontaneous desire rooted in women’s nature produces a certain cognitive dissonance. One advocate underscored the value of the demand in these terms: “It is the demand by which our nature ends and our struggle begins because just to want wages for housework means to refuse that work as the expression of our nature, and therefore to refuse precisely the female role that capital has invented for us” (Federici 1995, 190).


pages: 363 words: 109,374

50 Psychology Classics by Tom Butler-Bowdon

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, delayed gratification, fear of failure, feminist movement, global village, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lateral thinking, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, Necker cube, Paradox of Choice, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Considered psychology to be the “science of the self.” 13 Antonio Damasio Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994) Prominent brain researcher’s theory that debunks the separation of mind and body and shows how emotions form a vital part of rational judgment and decision making. 14 Hermann Ebbinghaus Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology (1885) Account of first ever experimental lab work into learning and memory, setting a high standard for future research. 15 Leon Festinger Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957) Famous theory of how people try to maintain consistency in their beliefs, even when what they believe has been shown to be wrong. 16 Eric Fromm Escape from Freedom (1941) Influential study on people’s willingness to submit to fascist regimes, written before the full horror of Nazism became apparent. 17 William Glasser Reality Therapy: A New Approach to Psychiatry (1965) Alternative approach to mental illness, resting on the idea that mental health means an acceptance of responsibility for one’s life. 18 Dennis Greenberger & Christine Padesky Mind Over Mood: Change How You Feel by Changing the Way You Think (1995) Popular work of powerful cognitive therapy techniques, not just for depressives. 19 Robert D.


pages: 363 words: 108,670

Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, cognitive dissonance, Dava Sobel, Defenestration of Prague, Edmond Halley, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Louis Pasteur, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Peace of Westphalia, retrograde motion

“I am thinking about treating this topic very extensively,” confessed Galileo, “in opposition to heretics, the most influential of whom I hear accept Copernicus’s opinion; I would want to show them that we Catholics continue to be certain of the old truth taught us by the sacred authors, not for lack of scientific understanding, or for not having studied as many arguments, experiments, observations, and demonstrations as they have, but rather because of the reverence we have toward the writings of our Fathers and because of our zeal in religion and faith.” Italian astronomers, in other words, could tolerate the cognitive dissonance of admiring Copernicus on a theoretical level, while rejecting him theologically. “Thus, when they [Protestants] see that we understand very well all their astronomical and physical reasons, and indeed also others much more powerful than those advanced till now, at most they will blame us as men who are steadfast in our beliefs, but not as blind to and ignorant of the human disciplines; and this is something which in the final analysis should not concern a true Catholic Christian—I mean that a heretic laughs at him because he gives priority to the reverence and trust which is due to the sacred authors over all the arguments and observations of astronomers and philosophers put together.”


pages: 398 words: 109,479

Redrobe by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

air freight, Burning Man, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Kickstarter, music of the spheres

Get yourself cloned and any half-decent clinic could suck up memories from a soul chip and spit them back into a fresh cortex. Feelings were something else. And the problem with straight copying was you know what happened to you, maybe even why it happened. What you didn’t get from a soul chip is what you felt while it was happening. It brought a whole new meaning to cognitive dissonance. Joan was fifty-five. So her brain would have processed the equivalent of 300 million books. Which sounded big but came out as around ten terrabites of memory, not remotely hard for five chips. But dreams are like feelings. Just as you can’t chip the flickering dendritic matrix that ties emotionally-rich events into a shifting web of neural connections, so it’s impossible to hardcopy the rush that kicks in during REM sleep when the frontal lobes shut down, emotional centres fire up and the brain swims with acetyl-choline.


pages: 321 words: 85,893

The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability by Lierre Keith

British Empire, car-free, clean water, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, Drosophila, dumpster diving, en.wikipedia.org, Gary Taubes, Haber-Bosch Process, longitudinal study, McMansion, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, out of africa, peak oil, placebo effect, Rosa Parks, the built environment, vertical integration

The unreal love of the sentimentalist reaches no further than the self and gives precedence to pleasures and pains of its own, or else invents for itself a gratifying image of the pleasures and pains of its object.101 The quote is from Roger Scruton’s Animal Rights and Wrongs, a book that to me was the equivalent of prodding Sappho’s rubble on the beach, and yes, I am squeamish. I’m uneasy criticizing a movement that is working to stop torture. And it leaves me with a wrenching sense of moral cognitive dissonance to find my criticism expressed by someone who is otherwise repugnant to me. But sometimes your enemies are your best critics, and Scruton is precisely right about sentimentality. The AR movement is liberal individualism applied to animals. It is a reflection of human needs and desires, not the needs and desires of animals themselves.


The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling by Arlie Russell Hochschild

affirmative action, airline deregulation, Boeing 747, call centre, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, emotional labour, Frederick Winslow Taylor, job satisfaction, late capitalism, longitudinal study, new economy, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, telemarketer

And when a worker abandons her work smile, what kind of tie remains between her smile and her self? Display is what is sold, but over the long run display comes to assume a certain relation to feeling. As enlightened management realizes, a separation of display and feeling is hard to keep up over long periods. A principle of emotive dissonance, analogous to the principle of cognitive dissonance, is at work. Maintaining a difference between feeling and feigning over the long run leads to strain. We try to reduce this strain by pulling the two closer together either by changing what we feel or by changing what we feign. When display is required by the job, it is usually feeling that has to change; and when conditions estrange us from our face, they sometimes estrange us from feeling as well.


pages: 362 words: 108,359

The Accidental Investment Banker: Inside the Decade That Transformed Wall Street by Jonathan A. Knee

AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, Boycotts of Israel, business logic, call centre, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, deal flow, discounted cash flows, fear of failure, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, if you build it, they will come, iterative process, junk bonds, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, proprietary trading, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, technology bubble, young professional, éminence grise

So, for instance, although it is true that since 1990 only Goldman or Morgan have been number one in the Global M&A rankings, Goldman has secured this position thirteen times to Morgan’s three. The last time Morgan was number one in M&A was 1996. In Global Equities during this period, Morgan typically trailed not only Goldman but Merrill and sometimes others as well. This dichotomy between self-perception and reality created a certain cognitive dissonance with respect to all things Goldman and a deep self-consciousness at Morgan with respect to the firm’s own relative standing in the world. So intense were these feelings of competitiveness that they sometimes manifested themselves in childish or petty ways. A few months after I arrived, Media Group head Jeff Sine giddily called me into his office to tell me that a friend of his had seen Pete Kiernan act boorishly at a charity horse show in Greenwich and get into a fight.


pages: 518 words: 107,836

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

For the market to be the ideal organizational mode, some economists assume that rational actors will rank the order of their preferences linearly: if rational actors prefer option A over B as well as option B over C, they also will prefer option A over C. Yet this view of the market has been challenged in recent decades. Markets hide transaction costs and information asymmetries. Behavioral economists have demonstrated how under a number of conditions (such as fear, regret, the threat of loss, cognitive dissonance, or peer pressure) the rational homo economicus is a fiction: a person may prefer apples to bananas, bananas to cantaloupes, and cantaloupes to apples, and there is no guarantee that there exists a rational solution to voting systems or daily choices involving three or more actors.24 By contrast, the concept of hierarchy (from the Greek term ἱεραρχία, “rule by priests”) reaches back fifteen centuries to religious roots.


pages: 316 words: 106,321

Switched On: My Journey From Asperger's to Emotional Awakening by John Elder Robison

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, cognitive dissonance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Minecraft, mirror neurons, neurotypical, placebo effect, traumatic brain injury, zero-sum game

After we were done the chairperson asked if I’d be willing to serve on other committees. “We could use more of your insights,” she told me. I was proud to have done a good job and honoured that she’d asked. As I pictured my staff putting water pumps on Land Rovers the next day, I thought of the phrase “cognitive dissonance,” and I wondered if I was facing a similar mental situation now, having to function effectively in two different worlds. The early committee service led to other appointments and my increased involvement in autism science. My world was becoming so different, so fast. I was proud of my contribution, and of acceptance in a new world, but I was often terrified and also lonely.


pages: 366 words: 107,145

Fuller Memorandum by Stross, Charles

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Beeching cuts, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon credits, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, congestion charging, Crossrail, death from overwork, dumpster diving, escalation ladder, false flag, finite state, Firefox, Herman Kahn, HyperCard, invisible hand, land reform, linear programming, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, operational security, peak oil, Plato's cave, post-work, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantum entanglement, reality distortion field, security theater, sensible shoes, side project, Sloane Ranger, telemarketer, Turing machine

I've got Amarok running on my desktop (playing "Drowning in Berlin" on endless repeat, because I need a pounding beat to keep me awake) and I've plowed through the CODICIL BLACK SKULL file that Angleton left me, and then on into a bunch of tedious legwork for this morning's session. I'm suffering from severe cognitive dissonance; every so often you think you've got a handle on this job, on the paper clip audits and interminable bureaucracy and committee meetings, and then something insane crawls out of the woodwork and gibbers at you, something crazy enough to give James Bond nightmares that just happen to be true.


pages: 339 words: 105,938

The Skeptical Economist: Revealing the Ethics Inside Economics by Jonathan Aldred

airport security, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, carbon credits, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Diane Coyle, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, framing effect, Goodhart's law, GPS: selective availability, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, new economy, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, pension reform, positional goods, precautionary principle, price elasticity of demand, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, school choice, social discount rate, spectrum auction, Thomas Bayes, trade liberalization, ultimatum game, When a measure becomes a target

It would be very odd to say she deserved to be paid more. 40 See Dick (1975) for further discussion of the difficulties. 41 See Wolff (2003) and Moriarty (2005). 42 Rawls (1999), p89. 43 Sher (2003) shows how hard it is to define effort in a way that leaves it entirely within our control. 44 Frey (1997). 45 Fehr and Gachter (2000). 46 That is, cognitive dissonance is reduced once it is recognized that tax brings benefits as well as being unavoidable. 47 Torgler (2007). Chapter 5 1 John Adams, second President of the United States. In Adams (1850—1856), p193. 2 Kahneman (1999), p22. 3 Kahneman (1999), p3. 4 See Frey and Stutzer (2007) for further details and full references. 5 Davidson et al (2000), Davidson (2000, 2004).


pages: 324 words: 106,699

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, disinformation, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, information security, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, peak oil, pre–internet, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, trade route, WikiLeaks, zero day

Nearly every country in the world found itself in a similar bind: its citizens outraged, its government complicit. Any elected government that relies on surveillance to maintain control of a citizenry that regards surveillance as anathema to democracy has effectively ceased to be a democracy. Such cognitive dissonance on a geopolitical scale has helped to bring individual privacy concerns back into the international dialogue within the context of human rights. For the first time since the end of World War II, liberal democratic governments throughout the world were discussing privacy as the natural, inborn right of every man, woman, and child.


pages: 300 words: 106,520

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It by Stuart Maconie

"there is no alternative" (TINA), banking crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, gentrification, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, North Sea oil, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, rent control, retail therapy, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, surveillance capitalism, The Chicago School, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent

Private schools in London have fifty-nine theatres compared to forty-two in the West End. (The auditorium at my sons’ school, more state-of-the-art than the Young Vic, was dark between student productions yet, astonishingly, never lent to local comps.) That last sentence is instructive. Turner sends her son to public school. It’s a weird piece of cognitive dissonance that many liberals feel, if not comfortable with, then liveable with. David Kynaston and Francis Green in their recent book Engines of Privilege admit that they were both privately educated (though not their kids) and, while rightly savaging the current system and the status quo, recommend not outright abolition but reforms; more places for ordinary kids, tinkering with the subsidies, quota systems for university places.


pages: 371 words: 109,320

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger

airport security, basic income, Bellingcat, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, crisis actor, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Google Earth, green new deal, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Narrative Science, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, post-truth, profit motive, public intellectual, publication bias, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech baron, the scientific method, TikTok, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

It is the human interest element that captures the imagination of readers, whether within a local community or the national one. But the first time a reporter walks up the path to knock on the door – probably hoping that no one is in – he or she is fighting an internal battle against a lifetime’s societal norms. It doesn’t feel right. It is also a moment that focuses the reporter on the cognitive dissonance of readers and viewers: the people who criticise a death knock are more than likely to be the very ones who want to read the resulting story. Reporters can only comfort themselves, as the door finally opens, with the fact that it is the job of a journalist to report events, no matter how tragic.


pages: 378 words: 107,957

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critical race theory, deplatforming, desegregation, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, gentrification, germ theory of disease, Isaac Newton, late capitalism, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, neurotypical, phenotype, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, women in the workforce

Intersectional Theory provided an entirely new, “increasingly sophisticated” way to understand power dynamics in society, allowing them to repurpose their failing theoretical models into something more diffuse and less falsifiable.23 We often observe this kind of shift to a more “sophisticated” and nebulous model when people are highly personally and ideologically committed to a theoretical approach that is clearly failing. This phenomenon was first described by Leon Festinger, in his study of UFO cults, and led to the development of the concept of cognitive dissonance.24 Festinger observed that highly committed cultists did not abandon their beliefs when the predictions of the cult failed to manifest—when the UFO never came. Instead, cultists resolved this undeniable contradiction by claiming the event had occurred, but in some unfalsifiable way (specifically, they claimed God decided to spare the planet as a result of the faith of the cultists).


pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

CHAPTER 9 The New Monopolists After my brief flirtation with the idea of working at Google nearly a decade ago, the next time I’d visit the company’s New York office was in 2017, shortly after taking up my position as the Financial Times’ global business columnist. The food was just as good, but the cognitive dissonance between how the Googlers viewed the company and how many others viewed it had grown more extreme. When I brought up the issue of monopoly power with the public policy staffer I was meeting with, she seemed genuinely surprised. “We feel like we are under threat all the time, from other big technology companies,” she told me.


pages: 489 words: 106,008

Risk: A User's Guide by Stanley McChrystal, Anna Butrico

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, fear of failure, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Googley, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, inflight wifi, invisible hand, iterative process, late fees, lockdown, Paul Buchheit, Ponzi scheme, QWERTY keyboard, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, source of truth, Stanislav Petrov, Steve Jobs, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, wikimedia commons, work culture

Now soldiers were biased toward the enemy simply because they were the enemy. Calling our enemies by epithets, racist or otherwise, dehumanizes them—and it is less difficult to kill an opponent once you have dehumanized them in your mind. In war, the biases become personal: we are quick to hate those who are hurting us. Biases prevent cognitive dissonance—supporting our thoughts and actions even when they are founded on destructive untruths. “At My Signal, Unleash Hell” On March 14, 2003, General Tommy Franks, the commander of United States Central Command (CENTCOM), readied for war. Stationed at his headquarters in Qatar, he assembled his command team for a presentation on the upcoming invasion of Iraq, still waiting to receive the order from Washington to force Saddam Hussein and his Ba‘ath Party from power.


Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories From the Frontline by Steven K. Kapp

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, book value, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, demand response, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, epigenetics, feminist movement, glass ceiling, Internet Archive, Jeremy Corbyn, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, multilevel marketing, neurotypical, New Journalism, pattern recognition, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, slashdot, theory of mind, twin studies, universal basic income, Wayback Machine

Working alongside other autistic people may take quite a lot of additional work (by all concerned) to ensure that communication is effective and perceptions of all sorts are factored in, allowed for and not seen as insuperable barriers, even if there’s some 284 D. Murray potentially painful cognitive dissonance. That said, having autistic comrades along when entering any lions’ dens can in my experience make all the difference between being able or not able to communicate effectively. Our impact partly depends on pragmatic adaptation, but our strongest suit is being people with the passion and commitment and indifference to hierarchy to persevere obstinately against the odds.


pages: 492 words: 118,882

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

All these economists also warned us about the increasing financialization of the economy, the deregulation of the market, the rising debt levels of households, and the risk of a recession. They were systematically and categorically ignored. The reason for this dismissive behavior was first based on the exclusion of financial markets from macroeconomic models (See Blanchard et al., 2010). Second, there was also a cognitive dissonance and logical fallacy associated with financialization. As finance was omnipresent in every part of our society, it had achieved a sense of trust. If you could not believe in free markets and the appropriate allocation of risk when everyone else was, then what could you believe in? This ideological kidnapping of economic theory, market policies, and societal mindsets occurred due to a monetary thought experiment now referred to as the Washington Consensus.


pages: 459 words: 118,959

Confidence Game: How a Hedge Fund Manager Called Wall Street's Bluff by Christine S. Richard

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Blythe Masters, book value, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, electricity market, family office, financial innovation, fixed income, forensic accounting, glass ceiling, Greenspan put, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, money market fund, moral hazard, old-boy network, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, short squeeze, statistical model, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, white flight, zero-sum game

“Well, the most obvious candidate is Bill Ackman.” After a few hours, the tone of the questions was less aggressive. The attorneys seemed to be running through a checklist of issues. When Tilson got up to leave, one of the attorneys asked him, “Are you really friends with Bill Ackman?” “The idea seemed to create incredible cognitive dissonance for him,” Tilson recalls. WHEN ACKMAN RETURNED to the attorney general’s office to talk about Farmer Mac, the tension rose again. The lawyers turned their attention to Ackman’s comments in his research report on Farmer Mac, which suggested the company was funding long-term assets with high levels of short-term debt.


pages: 389 words: 119,487

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charlie Hebdo massacre, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, deglobalization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, gig economy, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, obamacare, pattern recognition, post-truth, post-work, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

All the stories and gods in which people today believe – be they Yahweh, Mammon, the Nation, or the Revolution – are incomplete, full of holes, and riddled with contradictions. Therefore people rarely put their entire faith in a single story. Instead, they keep a portfolio of several stories and several identities, switching from one to the other as the need arises. Such cognitive dissonances are inherent in almost all societies and movements. Consider a typical Tea Party supporter who somehow squares an ardent faith in Jesus Christ with a firm objection to government welfare policies and a staunch support for the National Rifle Association. Wasn’t Jesus a bit more keen on helping the poor than on arming yourself to the teeth?


pages: 515 words: 117,501

Miracle Cure by William Rosen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, availability heuristic, biofilm, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, creative destruction, demographic transition, discovery of penicillin, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frances Oldham Kelsey, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, functional fixedness, germ theory of disease, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Louis Pasteur, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, microbiome, New Journalism, obamacare, out of africa, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, stem cell, the long tail, transcontinental railway, working poor

The WPB also spent nearly $8 million of federal money on six penicillin-manufacturing plants, all of which were sold to private companies after the war ended, as designated “scrambled facilities,” a term of art for assets in which the private and public investments were almost impossible to disentangle—a metaphor for the entire penicillin project.* It was, to free-market purists, either the greatest of heresies or—more likely—the source of much cognitive dissonance. At the end of the 1920s, pharmaceutical development and manufacturing was the sixteenth most profitable industry in America. By 1944, it was, by far, the most profitable. It would remain so for nearly twenty years. Moreover, the industry, which had been made up of hundreds of firms, none possessing more than 3 percent of the national market, had consolidated into twenty or so companies that held, in the aggregate, 80 percent of the market for all drugs, and that market had grown tenfold.


pages: 434 words: 114,583

Faster, Higher, Farther: How One of the World's Largest Automakers Committed a Massive and Stunning Fraud by Jack Ewing

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 1960s counterculture, Asilomar, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, business logic, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, crossover SUV, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Kaizen: continuous improvement, McMansion, military-industrial complex, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis

“Nobody could figure out how they were complying, and their engine technology is very similar to everybody else’s.” But Lutz never shared his doubts with any regulators. “The unwritten rule is you don’t throw another company under the bus.” The deployment of defeat devices at the same time that Volkswagen trumpeted its commitment to the environment seems like an extreme case of corporate cognitive dissonance. Yet, according to several former executives, Volkswagen’s top managers sincerely thought of themselves as leaders in sustainable transportation. It was true that Volkswagen diesels produced less carbon dioxide than comparable gasoline motors, and contributed less to global warming. In 2012, Greenpeace activists unfurled a banner from the ceiling of an auditorium in Hamburg where Winterkorn was giving a speech to shareholders.


Wireless by Charles Stross

air gap, anthropic principle, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Buckminster Fuller, Cepheid variable, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, cosmic microwave background, Easter island, epigenetics, finite state, Georg Cantor, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, jitney, Khyber Pass, Late Heavy Bombardment, launch on warning, lifelogging, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neil Armstrong, peak oil, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, security theater, sensible shoes, Turing machine, undersea cable

I write because I’ve got a cloud of really neat ideas buzzing around my brain, and I need to let them out lest my head explode. But having ideas is only part of the reason I write—otherwise, I could just keep a private journal. The other monkey riding my back is the urge to communicate, to reach out and touch someone. (Or to lift the lid on their brainpan, sprinkle some cognitive dissonance inside, stir briskly, then tiptoe away with a deranged titter.) Everyone I know who does this job has got the same monkey on their shoulders, urging them on, inciting them to publish or be damned, communicate or die. If you’re a compulsive communicator, nothing gets your attention like feedback from the public—a signal saying “message received.”


pages: 265 words: 15,515

Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike by Eugene W. Holland

business cycle, capital controls, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, commons-based peer production, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, deskilling, Eben Moglen, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lewis Mumford, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, post-Fordism, price mechanism, Richard Stallman, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, slashdot, Stuart Kauffman, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, wage slave, working poor, Yochai Benkler

For the State at war commands loy­ alty not just by demanding that its citizens consent to kill others; it also does so by demanding that they consent to sacrifice—their well-being and, ultimately, their lives—for the sake and at the behest of the State. The Death-State, in other words, specifically aggravates the very vulner­ ability it transforms into irrevocable loyalty to itself and to the cause of war. The strategic effectiveness of repeated calls to “support the troops” was clear evidence, based on the staggering power of cognitive dissonance, that people become incapable of questioning a cause to which citizens’ lives are sacrificed—because of the very fact o fth at sacrifice; and it is tes­ timony to the strength of their abject identification with the Death-State. State power thus derives not just from being in the position to decide and declare who is friend and who is enemy but from being in the position to demand the ultimate sacrifice: to give one’s life for one’s country.


A Sea in Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout by Carl Safina

addicted to oil, big-box store, book value, carbon tax, clean water, cognitive dissonance, energy security, Exxon Valdez, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jones Act, no-fly zone, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Piper Alpha, Ronald Reagan

“And we had what I call ‘the social and political nullification’ of the National Contingency Plan,” he says. In other words, the public and politicians weren’t buying the constraints of the law. Main case in point: “The National Contingency Plan says the spiller is the ‘responsible party.’ That means they have to be there with you. But having BP with us created cognitive dissonance with the public. People didn’t understand; how could BP be part of the command structure? But that was what the law required.” He thinks it would be best to have a third party—not the oil company, not government—in charge of spill response. “Too much perception of conflicts of interest otherwise,” he says.


pages: 381 words: 112,674

eBoys by Randall E. Stross

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, deal flow, digital rights, disintermediation, drop ship, edge city, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , high net worth, hiring and firing, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job-hopping, knowledge worker, late capitalism, market bubble, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, PalmPilot, passive investing, performance metric, pez dispenser, railway mania, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Y2K

When Beirne returned to the room, the partners piled many compliments upon Jay Walker; Kagle called him “a totally compelling dude, just totally compelling—one of the smartest economic thinkers I think I’ve ever hung with.” Dunlevie agreed. Even Harvey, usually the stingiest with praise, allowed that Walker was a “charismatic guy.” Everyone but Beirne had experienced cognitive dissonance, however: Walker was so impressive, and seemingly had thought through every contingency, yet at the same time the facts were anything but positive. “I’ll paint a negative picture,” Harvey offered. “He’s paying a shitload of money for traffic. The customer experience right now, the hit rate, is bad.


pages: 382 words: 117,536

March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019 by Stewart Lee

Airbnb, AltaVista, anti-communist, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, Donald Trump, Etonian, fake news, Ford Model T, imposter syndrome, Jeremy Corbyn, New Journalism, off-the-grid, Overton Window, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, white flight

5 On Monday, as Theresa May cautiously accepted that we will have to pay for EU schemes we were already signed up for, and the inevitable impossibility of the fluid Irish border was at last made flesh, it seemed to me that the wheels had finally fallen off the lie-encrusted Brexit battlebus. But the quiet coup currently enacted by the billionaire tax-avoiders behind Brexit continued its forward motion, as cognitive dissonance drove their brainwashed Leave-voting serfs to misdirect their ongoing anger towards everyone but themselves.6 But Harry knows the power of symbols, and he begins the enactment of a healing ritual. Has Harry, ever the self-aware prankster, chosen the tiny St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, as his wedding venue in a coded satirical message every bit as meaningful as the clearly pro-EU hat his grandmother wore at the opening of Parliament last June?


pages: 431 words: 118,074

The Ultimate Engineer: The Remarkable Life of NASA's Visionary Leader George M. Low by Richard Jurek

additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, it's over 9,000, John Conway, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Stewart Brand, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

“It was really a culture shock,” senior NASA strategist Willis Shapley recalled of the change in the national and political mood toward human spaceflight during the 1970s.4 Coming from MSC in Houston—the hub of all U.S. human spaceflight activities—it was equally so for Low, but he got over it quickly. It wasn’t the first time he had experienced the jarring cognitive dissonance between NASA Headquarters and the field centers on big policy issues. The view from Washington was rarely the same as the view from Cleveland, or Houston, or any of the other NASA installations. He’d been experiencing that disconnect since he left Lewis to come to Washington in the late 1950s.


pages: 425 words: 116,409

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, desegregation, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, éminence grise

On the tail end of the research for Hidden Figures, I can now see how that number might top one thousand. To a first-time author with no background as a historian, the stakes involved in writing about a topic that was virtually absent from the history books felt high. I’m sensitive to the cognitive dissonance conjured by the phrase “black female mathematicians at NASA.” From the beginning, I knew that I would have to apply the same kind of analytical reasoning to my research that these women applied to theirs. Because as exciting as it was to discover name after name, finding out who they were was just the first step.


pages: 446 words: 117,660

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future by Paul Krugman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, frictionless, frictionless market, fudge factor, full employment, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Seymour Hersh, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, universal basic income, very high income, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population

In fact, there’s reason to be concerned about its future: will it be given the resources it needs to cope with the flood of wounded and traumatized veterans from Iraq? But the transformation of the V.H.A. is clearly the most encouraging health policy story of the past decade. So why haven’t you heard about it? The answer, I believe, is that pundits and policymakers don’t talk about the veterans’ system because they can’t handle the cognitive dissonance. (One prominent commentator started yelling at me when I tried to describe the system’s successes in a private conversation.) For the lesson of the V.H.A.’s success story—that a government agency can deliver better care at lower cost than the private sector—runs completely counter to the pro-privatization, anti-government conventional wisdom that dominates today’s Washington.


pages: 364 words: 119,398

Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, the Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All by Laura Bates

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, anti-bias training, autism spectrum disorder, Bellingcat, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, deplatforming, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, off grid, Overton Window, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech bro, young professional

Indeed, the MRM is acutely aware of the beneficial optics of deploying this very small minority of its members as prominently as possible, in order to provide the appearance that their views are reasonable and not deeply misogynistic. How could they be if women agree with them, too? As Dean Esmay, former managing editor of AVFM, said: ‘People want to believe we’re a bunch of sad, pathetic losers who can’t get laid and are just bitter because our wives left us. The very presence of women in the movement creates cognitive dissonance.’13 Like other manosphere communities, MRAs rely on questionable biology, patchily applied, to back up many of their arguments. But this can lead to hopelessly convoluted or self-defeating logic. Our descent from hunter-gatherer cavemen, for example, is often cited, without humour, to advocate for traditional gender roles in society.


pages: 382 words: 114,537

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

That’s why Make America Great Again caught on while Clinton’s counter that America Is Already Great didn’t—people aren’t stupid. They know something isn’t right. Like Zeb’s carpenter grandpa back in Texas, who “worked his ass off for fifty years and done what you’re supposed to do, and he’s still sixty-five years old and poor as fuck.” That sort of cognitive dissonance drives people to search for a why. And I understand that. Losing my faith in the American Dream my dad taught me about left me almost as spiritually adrift as losing my faith in a religion. The idea is so central to American identity that its absence leaves a huge hole inside you. And refilling it with a new way of understanding the world from scratch is an intimidating task.


pages: 414 words: 117,581

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix by Dade Hayes, Dawn Chmielewski

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, borderless world, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, digital rights, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, hockey-stick growth, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, late fees, lockdown, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, Netflix Prize, Osborne effect, performance metric, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, QR code, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, remote working, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech bro, the long tail, the medium is the message, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, WeWork

It did not end up moving forward with the acquisition, though, after Iger determined a deal would be “corrosive to [Disney’s] brand,” as he later recalled. But the future kept intruding on business as usual at Disney. Andy Bird, the lanky, urbane Brit who shaped the company’s global strategy for a quarter century, recalls the cognitive dissonance of attending back-to-back staff meetings where, in one, ESPN’s John Skipper talked about committing billions of dollars for the rights to carry professional sports on its lucrative cable network, while the studio subsequently touted the potential windfall of shifting its library away from the premium cable service Starz to upstart Netflix.


pages: 481 words: 125,946

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

“I think I’ll go to the store,” and “I think it’s raining,” and “I think, therefore I am,” and “I think the Yankees will win the World Series,” and “I think I’m Napoleon,” and “I think he said he would be here, but I’m not sure”—all use the same word to mean entirely different things. Which of them might a machine do someday? I think that’s an important question. Could a machine get confused? Experience cognitive dissonance? Dream? Wonder? Forget the name of that guy over there and at the same time know that it really knows the answer and if it just thinks about something else for a while, it might remember? Lose track of time? Decide to get a puppy? Have low self-esteem? Have suicidal thoughts? Get bored? Worry?


pages: 490 words: 117,629

Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment by David F. Swensen

asset allocation, asset-backed security, Benchmark Capital, book value, buy and hold, capital controls, classic study, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, deal flow, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity risk premium, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, junk bonds, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, money market fund, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pez dispenser, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, the market place, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

In the case of fund management companies organized on a not-for-profit basis, no conflict exists between serving investor goals and generating corporate income. When evaluating a not-for-profit investment manager, investors begin with the comfort of knowing that they sit on the same side of the table as the fund management company. While for-profit fund managers suffer the cognitive dissonance created by divergent goals, not-for-profit fund managers enjoy single-minded focus on discharging fiduciary responsibilities. When the quest for profits disappears, abuse of investors dissipates. Excessive management fees abate, Rule 12b-1 fees vanish, portfolio turnover declines, and asset gathering stops.


pages: 468 words: 123,823

A People's History of Poverty in America by Stephen Pimpare

affirmative action, British Empire, car-free, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dumpster diving, East Village, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, green new deal, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral panic, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, payday loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Congress, called it “compulsory pregnancy” for poor women.80 And yet, by the early 1930s the forced sterilization of the “unfit” and the “feeble-minded” had been expressly permitted in thirty states, and twenty-two states still had such laws on the books in 1973.81 Perhaps this reveals a national cognitive dissonance regarding black women: their fertility is, on the one hand, a perceived threat to the public purse and to white domination, yet their ample reproduction can help the continued production of a cheap, docile labor force. As with so much, debates about birth control take many forms. A 1968 statement by the Black Unity Party of Peekskill, New York:The Brothers are calling on the Sisters not to take the pill.


pages: 433 words: 125,031

Brazillionaires: The Godfathers of Modern Brazil by Alex Cuadros

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, BRICs, buy the rumour, sell the news, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, family office, financial engineering, high net worth, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, NetJets, offshore financial centre, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, rent-seeking, risk/return, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche

This meant the temporary seating for twenty thousand of the sixty thousand fans now in the stadium had never been fully tested. In the event, though, nothing collapsed on live TV. And the Seleção beat Croatia three–one. And that night, despite the general ill will, Brazilians all around the country celebrated the win, and much cachaça and beer was consumed with varying degrees of cognitive dissonance. Normally, weeks in advance of the World Cup, people would hang the Brazilian flag from their windows and paint their streets green and yellow. This time São Paulo looked as it usually does, beige. A lot of Brazilians had decided to root against the national team. A friend of mine, Vinícius, put it like this: “The thing is that if we win, people are going to say it was all somehow worth it.”


pages: 420 words: 126,194

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam by Douglas Murray

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, deindustrialization, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, glass ceiling, high net worth, illegal immigration, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, open borders, post-industrial society, white flight

The most straightforward answer was that they should be united not necessarily by a dedication to precisely the same heritage but at least a unified belief in the core concepts of the modern liberal state such as the rule of law, the separation of Church and State and human rights. Yet even as a few figures like Tibi were thinking through this era, most of the rest of society was having to just live its way through it. If there was a painful slowness about finding any way through this, it was at least in part because of a set of ongoing and painful cognitive dissonances. Once Europe had realised that the immigrants were going to stay, it held two wholly contradictory ideas that were nevertheless able to cohabit for several decades. The first was the idea that Europeans began to tell themselves from the 1970s and 1980s onwards. This was the notion that European countries could be a new type of multi-racial, multicultural society into which anyone from anywhere in the world could come and settle if they so wished.


pages: 531 words: 125,069

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt

AltaVista, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, hygiene hypothesis, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microaggression, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, Wayback Machine

The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(5), 422–436. Adams, J. S. (1965). Inequity in social exchange. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 267–299). New York, NY: Academic Press. Adams, J. S., & Rosenbaum, W. B. (1962). The relationship of worker productivity to cognitive dissonance about wage inequities. Journal of Applied Psychology, 69, 161–164. Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York, NY: The New Press. Almas, I., Cappelen, A. W., Sorensen, E. O., & Tungodden, B. (2010). Fairness and the development of inequality acceptance.


pages: 443 words: 123,526

Glasshouse by Charles Stross

air gap, cognitive dissonance, experimental subject, gravity well, lateral thinking, loose coupling, military-industrial complex, operational security, peer-to-peer, phenotype, prisoner's dilemma, sensible shoes, theory of mind, white picket fence

Cass who I thought was Kay, obsessing over her, when all the time Kay was sleeping in the next room, and Cass was living in a nightmare. I have a problem with the ethics here, I think. Hanta's not bad. But she collaborates with Fiore and Yourdon. What kind of person would do that? I shake my head, wincing at the cognitive dissonance. One who'd perform illegal memory surgery then implant the recollection of giving informed consent in the victim's mind? I shake my head again. I don't really think Hanta would do that, but I can't be sure. If the patient agrees with the practitioner afterward, is it really abuse? IT'S a bright, sunny Thursday morning when Hanta comes and sits by my bedside with a clipboard.


pages: 404 words: 124,705

The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter by Susan Pinker

assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, facts on the ground, fixed-gear, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, indoor plumbing, intentional community, invisible hand, Kickstarter, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, neurotypical, Occupy movement, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), place-making, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social contagion, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, tontine, Tony Hsieh, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning, Yogi Berra

A house full of people; a crowded table ranging across the generations; four-hand music at the piano; nonstop conversation and cooking; baseball games and swimming in the afternoon; long walks after dinner; a poker game or Diplomacy or charades in the evening, all these activities mixing adults and children—that was our idea of a well-ordered household and more specifically of a well-ordered education.… Home was not to be thought of as the nuclear family.5 Lasch wasn’t engaging in some loopy utopian fantasy as much as he was voicing some cognitive dissonance about the future. Despite our being increasingly tethered to the devices that connect us virtually, there has not been a corresponding uptick in well-being. In fact, it’s the reverse. By and large we’re lonelier and unhappier than we were in the decades before the Internet age.6 Psychologists don’t know why that is exactly, though we do know that close relationships are the strongest drivers of happiness, and that being alone and unaffiliated makes us the most unhappy.


pages: 415 words: 125,089

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, computerized trading, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, endowment effect, experimental economics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mental accounting, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norman Macrae, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, prudent man rule, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, spectrum auction, statistical model, stocks for the long run, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

But even as the search for risk-management techniques was gaining popularity, the 1970s and the 1980s gave rise to new uncertainties that had never been encountered by people whose world view had been shaped by the benign experiences of the postwar era. Calamities struck, including the explosion in oil prices, the constitutional crisis caused by Watergate and the Nixon resignation, the hostage-taking in Teheran, and the disaster at Chernobyl. The cognitive dissonances created by these shocks were similar to those experienced by the Victorians and the Edwardians during the First World War. Along with financial deregulation and a wild inflationary sleighride, the environment generated volatility in interest rates, foreign exchange rates, and commodity prices that would have been unthinkable during the preceding three decades.


pages: 424 words: 122,350

Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life by George Monbiot

Chance favours the prepared mind, cognitive dissonance, en.wikipedia.org, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, land reform, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, place-making, precautionary principle, rewilding, seminal paper, social intelligence, trade route

But none of this is to dismiss the core argument which he and Delyth made so powerfully, and with which I find myself strongly in sympathy. They see rewilding as completing the long process of economic change and exclusion that has been erasing them and their culture from the land. I found myself tumbling into cognitive dissonance, the uncomfortable state of mind that results from an inability to resolve conflicting ideas or values. I was unable to deny either position, yet each was exclusive of the other: I could not simultaneously support rewilding and the restoration of the ecosystem and support efforts to sustain the sheep farming that kept Dafydd, Delyth and their culture alive.


pages: 391 words: 123,597

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again by Brittany Kaiser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, dark pattern, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, haute couture, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Russian election interference, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, the High Line, the scientific method, WeWork, WikiLeaks, you are the product, young professional

1 If this was moral relativism in the extreme, if there was a little voice in my head that told me, “Something is wrong with your thinking, Brittany,” I didn’t hear it. If working for Cambridge Analytica was a devil’s bargain, it was neither my place, nor in my best interest, to judge the devil. After all, if I had, I would have had to judge myself as well. It might seem strange that I experienced no crisis of conscience or cognitive dissonance. I see why now. The further away I moved from who I was, the more staunchly I became someone new: overly certain, brittle, defensive, self-righteous, and wholly unreachable. While my logic was flawed, I took a page from my law books and thought of my human rights superhero John Jones QC, the barrister of Doughty Street in London.


pages: 515 words: 126,820

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

You innovated on the edge, and the market rewards you for it. The incentives for innovation on open networks are aligned to increase efficiency better than closed networks. Dueling Bots What about conflicts of interest? If the weatherNode started expanding its capability and entered the crop insurance marketplace, wouldn’t it have cognitive dissonance? Farmer weatherNodes want to emphasize the impact of droughts, and insurer weatherNodes claim droughts are minimal. The owners and designers of agents need transparency of operations. If both are filtering sensor data through a biased screen, then their respective reputations will drop. Vitalik Buterin points out that autonomous agents are challenging to create, because to survive and succeed they need to be able to navigate in a complicated, rapidly changing, or even hostile environment.


pages: 484 words: 136,735

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis by Anatole Kaletsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, eat what you kill, Edward Glaeser, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, global rebalancing, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peak oil, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical model, systems thinking, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

These non-Gaussian mathematical methods could only provide approximations, as opposed to the precise answers offered by the Efficient Market Hypothesis and Gaussian statistics.2 The fact that the exact answers of EMH bore no relation to reality did not seem to deter “scientific” economists. Another striking example of the cognitive dissonance in the use of mathematics by scientific economists is provided by Roman Frydman and Michael Goldberg, two U.S. economists who have pioneered a research program they describe as Imperfect Knowledge Economics (IKE). This approach explicitly challenges the most important—and most implausible—assumption of rational expectations: the idea that there is one best model of how the economy works, which every rational economic agent will find out about.


pages: 542 words: 132,010

The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain by Daniel Gardner

Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Doomsday Clock, feminist movement, haute couture, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lateral thinking, Linda problem, mandatory minimum, medical residency, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, the long tail, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Y2K, young professional

In fact, I’m quite sure that in most cases those promoting fear are sincere, for the simple reason that humans are compulsive rationalizers. People like to see themselves as being basically good, and so admitting that they are promoting fear in others in order to advance their interests sets up a nasty form of cognitive dissonance: I know I’m basically a nice person; what I’m doing is awful and wrong. Those are two thoughts that do not sit comfortably in the same head and the solution is rationalization: Suburban housewives really are at risk if they don’t buy my home alarm, and I’m doing them a service by telling them so.


pages: 538 words: 141,822

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

It’s becoming clear that understanding the full impact of the Internet on the democratization of authoritarian states would require more than just looking at the tweets of Iranian youngsters, for they only tell one part of the story. Instead, one needs to embark on a much more thorough and complex analysis that would look at the totality of forces shaped by the Web. Much of the current cognitive dissonance is of do-gooders’ own making. What did they get wrong? Well, perhaps it was a mistake to treat the Internet as a deterministic one-directional force for either global liberation or oppression, for cosmopolitanism or xenophobia. The reality is that the Internet will enable all of these forces—as well as many others—simultaneously.


pages: 455 words: 133,719

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte

8-hour work day, affirmative action, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deliberate practice, desegregation, DevOps, East Village, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, game design, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, machine readable, meta-analysis, new economy, profit maximization, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Zipcar, éminence grise

Both men and women have to stop and think, a sign, she said, that they are struggling to override their innate, automatic bias. In fact, women have to struggle more. Their research found that 77 percent of the male test takers showed strong unconscious bias for male = career, female = family. But how’s this for cognitive dissonance? Fully 83 percent of the women showed that same unconscious bias, even though they professed to have none. Banaji argues that the tests are a powerful predictor of whether people will act in biased ways, even if they intend not to. The test, she told my colleague Shankar Vedantam in the Washington Post Magazine, “measures the thumbprint of the culture on our minds.”


pages: 752 words: 131,533

Python for Data Analysis by Wes McKinney

Alignment Problem, backtesting, Bear Stearns, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, data science, Debian, duck typing, Firefox, functional programming, Google Chrome, Guido van Rossum, index card, machine readable, random walk, recommendation engine, revision control, sentiment analysis, Sharpe ratio, side project, sorting algorithm, statistical model, type inference

Take the for loop in the above quicksort algorithm: for x in array: if x < pivot: less.append(x) else: greater.append(x) A colon denotes the start of an indented code block after which all of the code must be indented by the same amount until the end of the block. In another language, you might instead have something like: for x in array { if x < pivot { less.append(x) } else { greater.append(x) } } One major reason that whitespace matters is that it results in most Python code looking cosmetically similar, which means less cognitive dissonance when you read a piece of code that you didn’t write yourself (or wrote in a hurry a year ago!). In a language without significant whitespace, you might stumble on some differently formatted code like: for x in array { if x < pivot { less.append(x) } else { greater.append(x) } } Love it or hate it, significant whitespace is a fact of life for Python programmers, and in my experience it helps make Python code a lot more readable than other languages I’ve used.


pages: 465 words: 134,575

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces by Radley Balko

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", anti-communist, call centre, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, desegregation, edge city, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, moral panic, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh

Gordon Liddy, giving his listeners home defense advice on his syndicated radio show in August 1994. It was some remarkable language to be coming from the guy who helped create ODALE, the Nixon-era office that sent narcotics task forces barreling into homes to make headline-grabbing drug busts. And Giddy was still suffering from cognitive dissonance. In the same interview, he lamented that it wasn’t a federal felony to possess a personal use amount of illicit drugs.35 And of course narcotics cops hit the wrong house many, many more times than ATF agents did. Liddy wasn’t offended by the tactics as much as he was by the mission (gun control) and the people who were calling the shots at the time (Bill Clinton and Janet Reno).


pages: 515 words: 142,354

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Alex Hyde-White

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, pensions crisis, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, working-age population

The recovery strategy takes into account the need for social justice and fairness, both across and within generations. . . . The Greek programme rests upon very strong foundations.” Was it irrational optimism, a belief that things would really work out that way? Or bureaucrat hypocrisy—they knew what they were supposed to say, and the incongruence between the world and these words was of little moment. Call it cognitive dissonance run wild, or dishonesty, as you will. There is something in the last memorandum, signed soon after the Greek voters had rejected essentially the same program by an overwhelming vote of 61 percent, a vote supported by the Greek government, which provides more than a hint that it was sheer hypocrisy: the agreement begins by affirming, “Success requires ownership of the reform agenda programme by the Greek authorities,” and suggesting that there is that ownership.


pages: 432 words: 127,985

The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry by William K. Black

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business climate, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, fear of failure, financial deregulation, friendly fire, George Akerlof, hiring and firing, junk bonds, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, The Market for Lemons, transaction costs

We are sensitive to the criticism that we are too negative; we like to say positive things. We deal constantly with the industry and make friends. We are reluctant to see our friends as crooks, and we know how embarrassing it would be if the CEO we recruited and praised turned out to be a fraud. We are subject to cognitive dissonance. The combination of these factors meant that Bank Board supervisors were very unlikely to expose the goodwill accounting scams. Two other things compounded this problem. Very few people, even within the Bank Board, understood how the scam worked. I don’t want to overstate this point—many people were skeptical that goodwill was real—but only a handful knew how goodwill and mark-to-market virtually guaranteed substantial fictitious profits if the insolvency of the acquired S&L was large relative to the size of the acquirer.


pages: 404 words: 134,430

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological principle, death from overwork, discovery of DNA, Eddington experiment, false memory syndrome, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, life extension, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

The answer is in the persuasive power of the principles of influence and the choice of what type of group to join. Cult experts and activists Steve Hassan (1990) and Margaret Singer outline a number of psychological influences that shape people's thoughts and behaviors that lead them to join more dangerous groups (and that are quite independent of intelligence): cognitive dissonance; obedience to authority; group compliance and conformity; and especially the manipulation of rewards, punishments, and experiences with the purpose of controlling behavior, information, thought, and emotion (what Hassan 2000 calls the "BITE model"). Social psychologist Robert Cialdini (1984) demonstrates in his enormously persuasive book on influence, that all of us are influenced by a host of social and psychological variables, including physical attractiveness, similarity, repeated contact or exposure, familiarity, diffusion of responsibility, reciprocity, and many others.


pages: 468 words: 137,055

Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age by Steven Levy

Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, disinformation, Donald Knuth, Eratosthenes, Extropian, Fairchild Semiconductor, information security, invention of the telegraph, Jim Simons, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knapsack problem, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mondo 2000, Network effects, new economy, NP-complete, quantum cryptography, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web of trust, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

“This hearing is about the well-intentioned attempts of the National Security Agency to control that which is uncontrollable,” said Gejdenson. He was talking about export regulations, but he might have been talking about something else—the support from Congress that Fort Meade once took for granted. While the majority of legislators accepted the NSA’s contentions at face value, a cognitive dissonance was emerging between its arguments and what appeared to be a more compelling view of reality. Cantwell put it clearly in her own opening statement: “We are here to discuss, really, competing visions of the future.” On one hand was a mind-set so locked into Cold War posturing that it ignored the inevitable.


pages: 418 words: 133,703

Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover

cognitive dissonance, do-ocracy, Upton Sinclair

On the day of Christmas Eve, I supervised the distribution of little holiday “gift boxes” containing useless toiletries and a few snacks, compliments of a charity. And then I watched inmate representatives figure out how to distribute to every inmate the “holiday cheer” they had chosen: a can of Coke and two bags of chips. The cognitive dissonance grew. Standing on the mess-hall bridge, two sergeants waited for inmates to get out of earshot and then wished us all a Merry Christmas. The officer I was with disapproved of this well-wishing. “This is the time of year when a lot happens, and it’s because officers let their guard down,” he warned.


pages: 426 words: 136,925

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

My friends who own and run these giant fast-growing companies are bitching about the apartment buildings going up in their neighborhood, and the massage therapists I know who have never been busier are bitching about the Amazon people. People cannot connect the dots. People’s brains are not wired to process cognitive dissonance. People struggle to connect the benefits they’re getting with the harm it is creating, and their heads explode. Everybody here has benefited mightily, but they just cannot connect the fact that the things they are doing are creating the problem they hate. The inability to process that exploded on the head tax.


pages: 491 words: 141,690

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

In some cases, doctors that maintain 63% vaccination rates are rewarded with $400 for each patient, which for a standard pediatrician practice with 250 patients puts $100,000 per year into the doctor’s pocket.53 This is an incentive to push vaccines to everyone, both young and old, and to suppress evidence that conflicts with the narrative set by the CDC, the pharmaceutical companies, and the doctors themselves. People better get their flu shots because their doctor wants a new Range Rover. This Can’t Be Happening There is cognitive dissonance happening in the medical communities where pediatricians simply will not allow themselves to ponder the possibility that the vaccines that they have been pushing on their clients are actually the problem, not the solution. They have sent so many kids down that path that to admit they were wrong at this point in their careers would be psychologically devastating for the doctors, it would open them up to legal repercussions from the families of the injured children, it would make them a target of retribution by other doctors that have no desire to make an admission such as this, and they would be shut out by Big Pharma who would instigate a public relations war against them in order to paint them as rogue doctors that are falling into some unproven area of pseudoscience.


pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

“Death happens to all animals. All people,” Klaus said. “It will happen to me one day. It will happen to you one day.” This moment would be deeply upsetting to the three-year-old boy, and to the man, decades later. Most children—either through the love of their parents or through a happy sort of cognitive dissonance—recover from these early encounters with their own mortality. Thiel never did and would return to the cow—and the brutal, finality of the thing—again and again, even in middle age. Klaus earned his master’s degree over the next six years, becoming a project manager who oversaw a team of engineers on mine projects.


pages: 420 words: 135,569

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, airport security, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, fiat currency, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mason jar, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, Minecraft, moral hazard, open borders, pattern recognition, place-making, plant based meat, post-truth, QAnon, QR code, remote working, RFID, risk tolerance, School Strike for Climate, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, stem cell, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator

Our brains have various defense mechanisms, including paying less attention to “disconfirming data” and forgetting it faster if we notice it at all. If you’ve ever told someone, “I don’t want to hear it,” when they’re trying to convince you of something, you know exactly what I’m talking about! Your brain really does not want to hear it—it actively filters out and rejects information that causes it discomfort, or “cognitive dissonance.” There are good reasons for these defense mechanisms, according to cognitive scientists. Our brains don’t want to waste energy reassessing our mental models every time we get new information. We need to save that energy for all the other important thinking, planning, and problem solving we have to do.


pages: 689 words: 134,457

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Citizen Lab, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, data science, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, job-hopping, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, load shedding, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, mortgage debt, Multics, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, profit maximization, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, urban planning, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Edstrom questioned his superiors about the disconnect between McKinsey’s public statements about curbing carbon emissions and its work with coal companies. In response, he was told, “If we don’t serve coal clients, BCG [Boston Consulting Group] will.” Edstrom was becoming increasingly disillusioned. The cognitive dissonance came not only from client work but also at corporate social events such as the 2018 Australia Values Day, held in the executive meeting rooms overlooking Sydney’s premier horse-racing track. After the usual pep talks and the corporate bonding games such as a putt-putt golf competition on a course made from nonperishable food (donated to the needy, of course), the consultants were treated to the evening’s entertainment—McKinsey’s own Australia-based band, the Marvins, named after the firm’s legendary de facto founder, Marvin Bower, famous for putting the firm’s interests above his own.


pages: 488 words: 148,340

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, dark matter, epigenetics, gravity well, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, mandelbrot fractal, microbiome, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, precautionary principle, printed gun, quantum entanglement, traveling salesman, Turing test

Those who agreed with Aram formed a separate line to speak, and the organizers of the assembly began to let people from the two lines speak in alternation, until it became clear from the muttering from the crowd, including even short bursts of laughter as each new talk began, that the effect of the alternation was unhelpful. Contemplating two starkly different futures back and forth was perhaps too much like a debating society exercise, but because the topic debated was life or death for them, the back-and-forth engendered first cognitive dissonance, then estrangement: some laughed, others looked sick. Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options. Of course every human faces the fact of individual death, and therefore existential nausea must be to a certain extent a universal experience, and something that must be dealt with by one mental strategy or another.


pages: 286 words: 94,017

Future Shock by Alvin Toffler

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, East Village, Future Shock, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, information retrieval, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open immigration, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, social intelligence, Teledyne, the market place, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

Aunt Ethel's toaster or tablewear is not important, in and of itself. But it is a message from a different subcultural world, and unless we are weak in commitment to our own style, unless we happen to be in transition between styles, it represents a potent threat. The psychologist Leon Festinger coined the term "cognitive dissonance" to mean the tendency of a person to reject or deny information that challenges his preconceptions. We don't want to hear things that may upset our carefully worked out structure of beliefs. Similarly, Aunt Ethel's gift represents an element of "stylistic dissonance." It threatens to undermine our carefully worked out style of life.


Foundation and Earth by Isaac Asimov

active measures, cognitive dissonance, Magellanic Cloud

“Once we went underground, we never truly emerged. Nor would we want to, though I find it pleasant to feel the sunlight on occasion. I dislike clouds or night in the open, however. That gives one the sensation of being underground without truly being underground, if you know what I mean. That is cognitive dissonance, after a fashion, and I find it very unpleasant.” “Earth built underground,” said Pelorat. “The Caves of Steel, they called their cities. And Trantor built underground, too, even more extensively, in the old Imperial days. —And Comporellon builds underground right now. It is a common tendency, when you come to think of it.”


America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism by Anatol Lieven

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, driverless car, European colonialism, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, income inequality, laissez-faire capitalism, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, moral panic, new economy, Norman Mailer, oil shock, open immigration, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, World Values Survey, Y2K

Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books also suggested that the methods used to "soften up" the prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere reflected not just random sadism but an analysis of Arab culture.151 The combination of these attitudes to Arabs on the part of the neoconservatives with their loudly professed belief in democratizing the Arab world is one for which terms such as "hypocrisy" and "cognitive dissonance" are quite inadequate. This is Orwellian doublethink, an offense against fundamental human standards of intellectual decency. That such an incoherent and morally repellent mixture could be taken seriously and exert influence on U.S. policy and the U.S. national debate reveals starkly the hideous muddle into which American thinking about the Muslim world has fallen.


pages: 537 words: 158,544

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

AMERICA: FROM THE FIRST WORLD TO THE SECOND? China already is second-world, but is climbing up from the third. Europe is absorbing its second-world periphery, seeking to elevate it to the first world. Could America, long the first-world icon, slip into the second world? As with all empires, there is a certain cognitive dissonance when contemplating its demise. But civilization, Toynbee explained, “is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour.” To understand how civilizations break down, we must “extend our mental range of vision beyond its bounds.” Toynbee’s study of imperial personalities found that the most common causes of decline were militarism and the deterioration of the creative minority.


pages: 479 words: 144,453

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

23andMe, Aaron Swartz, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chekhov's gun, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, computer age, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, European colonialism, experimental subject, falling living standards, Flash crash, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, low interest rates, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, ultimatum game, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Doubts about the existence of free will and individuals are nothing new, of course. Thinkers in India, China and Greece argued that ‘the individual self is an illusion’ more than 2,000 years ago. Yet such doubts don’t really change history unless they have a practical impact on economics, politics and day-to-day life. Humans are masters of cognitive dissonance, and we allow ourselves to believe one thing in the laboratory and an altogether different thing in the courthouse or in parliament. Just as Christianity didn’t disappear the day Darwin published On the Origin of Species, so liberalism won’t vanish just because scientists have reached the conclusion that there are no free individuals.


Lonely Planet Panama (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Carolyn McCarthy

California gold rush, carbon footprint, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, land tenure, low cost airline, megaproject, off-the-grid, Panamax, post-Panamax, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, sustainable-tourism, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, women in the workforce

On the Península de Azuero, where there is a rich Spanish cultural heritage of traditional festivals, dress and customs, local villagers raise the same concerns about the future of their youth. Given the clash between old and new, it’s surprising the country isn’t suffering from a serious case of cognitive dissonance. However, the exceptionally tolerant Panamanian character weathers many contradictions – the old and the new, the grave disparity between rich and poor, and the stunning natural environment and its rapid destruction. Much of the famous Panamanian tolerance begins in the family, which is the cornerstone of Panamanian society, and plays a role in nearly every aspect of a person’s life.


pages: 205 words: 18,208

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? by David Brin

affirmative action, airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, data acquisition, death of newspapers, Extropian, Garrett Hardin, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, Iridium satellite, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, packet switching, pattern recognition, pirate software, placebo effect, plutocrats, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, telepresence, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, workplace surveillance , Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

We already see this trend in channels devoted to specific ethnic and religious groups, and in the cult followings of pundits like Rush Limbaugh. According to Paul Steiger, managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. “The ability of people with like minds to talk to each other [on the Internet] is wonderful. But if only people of like minds talk to each other, you get the kind of cognitive dissonance that is destructive to a democracy.” As individuals use such new tools to tailor privacy guardians and personalized data sieves, choosing which sympathetic voices will be allowed into their home and which dissenting ones will be blocked out, the result may be nearly perfect isolation in walled-off worlds of the mind.


pages: 547 words: 148,732

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Mother of all demos, off-the-grid, overview effect, placebo effect, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, satellite internet, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Whole Earth Catalog

When I asked conferencegoers which session they deemed most memorable, almost invariably they mentioned the plenary panel called “Future of Psychedelic Psychiatry.” What was most noteworthy about this panel was the identity of the panelists, which, at a psychedelic convention, was cause for cognitive dissonance. Here was Paul Summergrad, MD, the former head of the American Psychiatric Association, seated next to Tom Insel, MD, the former head of the National Institute of Mental Health. The panel was organized and moderated by George Goldsmith, an American entrepreneur and health industry consultant based in London.


pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

Annalise Burkhart, a 21-year-old woman from Tennessee, has signed on as the director of operations. She wants to get Pursuance into the hands of Middle Eastern activists. She minored in Arabic in college, and between that, YouTube videos, a Syrian tutor, and practice translating in her community, she became fluent; she enjoys the cognitive dissonance it produces when an American girl with silver-highlighted long hair suddenly busts out the language. “I’ll be on the phone and suddenly I speak Arabic and people will be like, Whaaaat?” Bahnken, who’s wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with “SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL GIRL GANG,” talks about a security writer he’s started reading who mines rap lyrics for pro-privacy ideas.


pages: 688 words: 147,571

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence by Jacob Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Basel III, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial exclusion, financial innovation, friendly fire, future of work, hallucination problem, hive mind, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, medical malpractice, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nudge unit, obamacare, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Philippa Foot, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge

Balancing AI rights against those of existing legal persons will be a complex exercise and (as with many of the unanswered questions) is best answered through societal deliberation. 4.4 Would Anyone Own AI? It might be thought that an entity cannot be both a person and property. This is incorrect; though today it may be repugnant to think of any human person as being owned by another, we experience no cognitive dissonance in viewing a company as both a legal person and the property of its shareholders. At present, most corporate structures, no matter how complicated, end with humans as the ultimate beneficial owners.89 Just as no one “owns” a human, could we have a situation where no one “owns” AI? In theory, this would be possible, but we would need to decide as a society whether or not this would be desirable.


pages: 489 words: 148,885

Accelerando by Stross, Charles

book value, business cycle, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, disinformation, dumpster diving, Extropian, financial engineering, finite state, flag carrier, Flynn Effect, Future Shock, glass ceiling, gravity well, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Kuiper Belt, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, performance metric, phenotype, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, quantum entanglement, reversible computing, Richard Stallman, satellite internet, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, slashdot, South China Sea, stem cell, technological singularity, telepresence, The Chicago School, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, web of trust, Y2K, zero-sum game

I bet you never even bothered to check what it felt like from inside –" "– I did –" Sirhan freezes for a moment, personality modules paging in and out of his brain like a swarm of angry bees – "make a fool of myself," he adds quietly, then slumps back in his seat. "This is so embarrassing … " He covers his face with his hands. "You're right." "I am?" Rita's puzzlement slowly gives way to understanding; Sirhan has finally integrated the memories from the partials they hybridized earlier. Stuck-up and proud, the cognitive dissonance must be enormous. "No, I'm not. You're just overly defensive." "I'm –" Embarrassed. Because Rita knows him, inside out. Has the ghost-memories of six months in a simspace with him, playing with ideas, exchanging intimacies, later confidences. She holds ghost-memories of his embrace, a smoky affair that might have happened in real space if his instant reaction to realizing that it could happen hadn't been to dump the splinter of his mind that was contaminated by impure thoughts to cold storage and deny everything.


pages: 548 words: 147,919

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon by Rosa Brooks

airport security, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, big-box store, clean water, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, different worldview, disruptive innovation, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, technological determinism, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, unemployed young men, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Some of the language from my congressional testimony also found its way into the Stimson Commission’s report on U.S. drone policy, for which I served as primary author. See Rosa Brooks, “Drone Wars: The Constitutional and Counterterrorism Implications of Targeted Killing,” Hearing Before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights of the Subcommittee on the Judiciary, 113th Cong., April 23, 2013; Rosa Brooks, ”Drones and Cognitive Dissonance,” in Peter L. Bergen and Daniel Rothenberg, eds., Drone Wars: Transforming Conflict, Law, and Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 230–52; John P. Abizaid, Rosa Brooks, and Rachel Stohl, “Recommendations and Report of the Task Force on US Drone Policy,” Stimson Center, May 12, 2014, www.stimson.org/spotlight/recommendations-and-report-of-the-stimson-task-force-on-us-drone-policy/. 4.


pages: 527 words: 147,690

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

(When we spoke, Smith said he was working on a book project that would also examine the history of racism in public policy in the South.) His account is particularly interesting because he seeks out people who start by hedging their comments—“I’m not racist, but . . .”—only to spill out remarkably prejudiced comments. Each of these tweets arrives with a sort of cognitive dissonance baked into it—a prophylactic denial of being racist followed by a clear example of that very sin. Smith explained how widespread he’s found this phenomenon to be: “It’s really opened my eyes to how many people, especially young people, don’t seem to understand the concept of racism. It seems like they think that unless you’re out there lynching somebody or burning a cross in someone’s yard, then you’re not a racist.”


pages: 462 words: 150,129

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

People do not apply this to their own lives, interestingly: they tend to assume that they will live longer, stay married longer and travel more than they do. Some 19 per cent of Americans believe themselves to be in the top 1 per cent of income earners. Yet surveys consistently reveal individuals to be personally optimistic yet socially pessimistic. Dane Stangler calls this ‘a non-burdensome form of cognitive dissonance we all walk around with’. About the future of society and the human race people are naturally gloomy. It goes with the fact that they are risk-averse: a large literature confirms that people much more viscerally dislike losing a sum of money than they like winning the same sum. And it seems that pessimism genes might quite literally be commoner than optimism genes: only about 20 per cent of people are homozygous for the long version of the serotonin transporter gene, which possibly endows them with a genetic tendency to look on the bright side.


pages: 530 words: 147,851

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism by Ed West

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Bullingdon Club, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, replication crisis, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, twin studies, urban decay, War on Poverty, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

Socialism looked defeated and outmoded, and the Labour Party, almost taken over by Tony Benn a few years earlier, was already making moves towards the centre that would culminate with the election of Tony Blair as leader. Yet perhaps in retrospect the period of Soviet domination was a glorious time from the point of view of Western conservatism. We were at least sure that our socialist enemies didn’t have the moral high ground, since no amount of cognitive dissonance or intellectual obfuscation could compete with the visual metaphor of a wall to keep their citizens imprisoned. Besides which communism was hardly very sexy by this point, represented not by Che but the hard-faced Politburo geriatrics who would turn out for their annual May Day events looking like living corpses, old, tired men addicted to vodka and surviving on dialysis machines.


pages: 523 words: 154,042

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

In reality, however, benefits and risks tend to be directly correlated. Nuclear power is controversial precisely because the benefits and the costs are significant. The same is true for pesticide use, geoengineering to combat climate change, and genetically engineered crops. The Affect Heuristic reduces the cognitive dissonance of our having to balance high benefits with high costs. It is much easier going through life thinking that choices are easier than they really are. Studies have shown that time pressure greatly magnifies the role of affect in decision-making. The less time people have to make a decision, the higher the chance they’ll assume inverse correlation of benefits and costs.


The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Georg Cantor, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, Necker cube, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, randomized controlled trial, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Schrödinger's Cat, social intelligence, social web, source of truth, stem cell, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury

., The Science Question in Feminism, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1986 Hare, E. H., ‘Was insanity on the increase?’, British Journal of Psychiatry, 1983, 142(5), pp. 439–55 ——, ‘Schizophrenia as a recent disease’, British Journal of Psychiatry, 1988, 153(4), pp. 521–31 Harmon-Jones, E., ‘Contributions from research on anger and cognitive dissonance to understanding the motivational functions of asymmetrical frontal brain activity’, Biological Psychology, 2004, 67(1–2), pp. 51–76 ——, ‘Trait anger predicts relative left frontal cortical activation to anger-inducing stimuli’, International Journal of Psychophysiology, 2007, 66(2), pp. 154–60 Harmon-Jones, E. & Allen, J.

, Psychological Bulletin, 1994, 116(2), pp. 195–219 Horowitz, M. J., Image Formation and Psychotherapy, Jason Aronson, New York, 1983 Horton, P. C., ‘The comforting substrate and the right brain’, Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 1995, 59(4), pp. 480–86 Hoshino-Browne, E., Zanna, A. S., Spencer, S. J. et al., ‘On the cultural guises of cognitive dissonance: the case of easterners and westerners’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2005, 89(3), pp. 294–310 Hoshiyama, M., Kakigi, R., Watanabe, S. et al., ‘Brain responses for the subconscious recognition of faces’, Neuroscience Research, 2003, 46(4), pp. 435–42 Houde, O., Zago, L., Crivello, F. et al., ‘Access to deductive logic depends on a right ventromedial prefrontal area devoted to emotion and feeling: evidence from a training paradigm’, NeuroImage, 2001, 14(6), pp. 1486–92 Hough, M.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

As we automate something that humans used to do, how can we augment them so that they can do something newly valuable? The idea that Uber teaches us that augmenting workers and helping them to succeed is an essential feature of companies looking to prosper in the next economy might create some cognitive dissonance for readers who have read about Uber’s abrasive, driven, former CEO, Travis Kalanick. In early 2017, Uber was rocked by a viral video that showed Kalanick berating a driver who told him that he had gone bankrupt because of Uber’s falling prices. “Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit.


pages: 522 words: 162,310

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

During the first four decades of the century, U.S. population growth actually slowed, but the big cities doubled and tripled or quintupled in size. For a people whose adoring self-conception was wrapped up in its Little House on the Prairie past—Laura Ingalls Wilder published those novels in the 1930s and early ’40s—urbanization caused some cognitive dissonance. Wright learned to despise big cities as a young architect working in Chicago for a decade. L. Frank Baum was living there at the same time when he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and the world’s fair’s White City clearly inspired his Emerald City. Over the next few decades, after Baum decamped to Hollywood as soon as possible and wrote a dozen more Oz novels, the portion of the U.S. population living in central cities increased by half.


pages: 544 words: 168,076

Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, asset allocation, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kitchen Debate, linear programming, lost cosmonauts, market clearing, MITM: man-in-the-middle, New Journalism, oil shock, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, profit motive, RAND corporation, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method

No need to’ve walked, someone like you, day like this. I’d’ve picked you up.’ ‘That’s kind of you,’ said Emil. ‘No problem,’ said Pletkin. ‘After all, not every day, meet the young man’s going to marry our clever girl here.’ The words were friendly but the tone was on the edge of surly. Pletkin, Emil saw, was in a state of cognitive dissonance. He was set up to receive some well-connected stripling from the city, and instead he was having to make his obliging little speech, in front of all his people, to someone who looked like a tramp. ‘He’m covered in shit!’ said an old man who came up no further than the middle of Emil’s chest.


pages: 836 words: 158,284

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss

23andMe, airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Buckminster Fuller, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, Dean Kamen, game design, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, index card, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, language acquisition, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, messenger bag, microbiome, microdosing, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, placebo effect, Productivity paradox, publish or perish, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

This includes backflips on one leg, break-dancing headspins, and the much-vaunted snatch.16 The problem with such movements, and dozens of others, is that a minor mistake can cause serious, often permanent, injuries. These injuries are underreported because: (1) those affected don’t want to be ostracized from communities that view the moves as gospel, and (2) cognitive dissonance prevents them from condemning a move they’ve advocated for a long time. So what is used to explain the injury? “I/he/she just didn’t do it right.” There is underreporting of diet failures (raw food as one example) for similar reasons. In fairness, can you learn to do snatches safely? Sure.


pages: 604 words: 161,455

The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life by Robert Wright

agricultural Revolution, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 13, Asian financial crisis, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, cotton gin, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Easter island, fault tolerance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, invention of writing, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Marshall McLuhan, Multics, Norbert Wiener, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, social web, Steven Pinker, talking drums, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, your tax dollars at work, zero-sum game

The main thing is that they be far-flung and cross-cutting. Maybe this is the most ambitious realistic hope for the future expansion of amity—a world in which just about everyone holds allegiance to enough different groups, with enough different kinds of people, so that plain old-fashioned bigotry would entail discomfiting cognitive dissonance. It isn’t that everyone will love everyone, but rather that everyone will like enough different kinds of people to make hating any given type problematic. Maybe Teilhard’s mistake was to always use “noosphere” in the singular, never in the plural. Maybe the world of tomorrow will be a collage of noospheres with enough overlap to vastly complicate the geography of hatred.


pages: 526 words: 160,601

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

(Let’s dispense with the old saw that the latter tune critiques consumerism—the lyrics only passingly condemn ads before skipping on to the usual Boomer obsession with sex and, anyway, the Rolling Stones licensed the rights for $4 million for use in a Snickers commercial, rolling up junk food, fornication, TV, and cognitive dissonance into one perfect Boomer song/snack package.)48 As it was in songs, so it was in books, surveys of which show use of “we” declining somewhat since 1960, suggesting a faltering sense of community. Use of “I” has been increasing for forty years, accelerating dramatically in the late 1980s to rates in 2008 about 42 percent higher than in 1960, suggesting a rising degree of self-focus.*,49 “You” has also enjoyed a heyday, with usage tripling over the same period.


pages: 684 words: 188,584

The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era by Craig Nelson

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, El Camino Real, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, music of the spheres, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, Project Plowshare, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, TED Talk, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, éminence grise

Von Neumann’s promotion of a preemptory nuclear strike was one of the many oddities that inspired Einstein to nickname his Princeton colleague Denktier, “think animal.” Washington military and civilian policymakers during the Cold War would be baffled by the conundrum of “What is the atom good for in war?”—to the point of making them angry and confused. This cognitive dissonance, this inscrutable puzzle, was demonstrated in full force by the president of the United States when, after Mao bolstered North Korea with Chinese troops in the autumn of 1950, Truman threatened nuclear retaliation at a notorious November 30 news conference: THE PRESIDENT: We will take whatever steps are necessary to meet the military situation, just as we always have.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Alan Greenspan theorized that “a rising, debt-to-income ratio for households or of total non-financial debt to GDP” did not signify stress but was “a reflection of dispersion of a growing financial imbalance of economic entities that in turn reflects the irreversible up-drift in division of labor and specialization.”4 In 2005, Ben Bernanke, Greenspan’s successor as chairman of the US Federal Reserve, provided an apology for high levels of debt: “Concerns about debt should be allayed by the fact that household assets (particularly housing wealth) have risen even more quickly than household liabilities.”5 In the Great Moderation, debt-driven speculation drove prosperity. For Bernanke, it was not even a debt problem but a savings problem. He blamed the Germans, Japanese and Chinese for saving too much.6 America was being “neighborly,” helping out. After the global crisis, in a case of severe cognitive dissonance, Bernanke continued to blame the foreign savers for the problems.7 In 1933, the economist Irving Fisher identified the danger: “over-investment and over-speculation are often important; but they would have far less serious results were they not conducted with borrowed money.”8 In 2005, William White, chief economist at the Bank of International Settlement, broke ranks by warning that easy money was creating a boom that would end painfully, reflecting “the size of the real imbalances that, preceded it.”


pages: 611 words: 188,732

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

I left Silicon Valley for college and then returned a dozen years later as an editor for Wired magazine. There I started to notice something odd: The stories about Silicon Valley emanating from the New York media world were vastly different from those stories that I had heard at sleepaway camp and in computer rooms, and then later in barrooms and at Burning Man. There was a cognitive dissonance there. New York just doesn’t get it, I told myself. Eventually I came to understand that it all came down to perspective. The mainstream media sees Silicon Valley as a business beat, a money story: Who’s up and who’s down in the new economy? Who’s the latest billionaire? Those are valid questions, maybe even interesting ones—but not to me.


Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics by Robert Skidelsky

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kondratiev cycle, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, law of one price, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, long and variable lags, low interest rates, market clearing, market friction, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, placebo effect, post-war consensus, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, value at risk, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-sum game

The QTM is the first theory of macroeconomics; it is also very muddled. On the one hand it depicts money as being a paltry thing, hardly worth writing about; 60 t h e qua n t i t y t h e ory of mon e y on the other, it sees it as a mighty monster, which has to be kept under lock and key if it is not to wreak havoc. These two views are inconsistent, the cognitive dissonance arising from trying to account for the real-world impact of monetary disturbances with an analytic structure that abstracts from the use of money. The realization that money needs to be treated as an independent factor of production had to wait until the coming of Keynes. And even Keynes had to emancipate himself from the quantity theory before he felt he could accurately analyse the economic problem to which money gave rise.


pages: 498 words: 184,761

The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland by Ali Winston, Darwin Bondgraham

affirmative action, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ferguson, Missouri, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden Gate Park, mass incarceration, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, Port of Oakland, power law, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra

She and other officers destroyed a video surveillance system during the search of an East Oakland liquor store and made no attempt to recover footage of any suspected drug deals. An employee charged with drug dealing alleged he’d been framed by the Oakland police.20 In the end, sixteen criminal cases were dismissed and two people’s convictions overturned.21 Most of the cases involved alleged marijuana dealers, a glaring bit of cognitive dissonance in progressive Oakland: in 2004, voters passed a ballot measure making cannabis-related arrests the police’s lowest priority.22 While predominantly white and wealthy residents of Rockridge and Temescal freely bought weed from private storefront “clubs,” the OPD ran buy-bust operations for small-time Black, Latino, and Asian dealers like it was still 1982.


The Chomsky Reader by Noam Chomsky

American ideology, anti-communist, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, business climate, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, feminist movement, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, interchangeable parts, land reform, land tenure, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, War on Poverty, zero-sum game, éminence grise

The consequences with regard to your question are pretty obvious. JP: You have said that most intellectuals end up obfuscating reality. Do they understand the reality they are obfuscating? Do they understand the social processes they mystify? NC: Most people are not liars. They can’t tolerate too much cognitive dissonance. I don’t want to deny that there are outright liars, just brazen propagandists. You can find them in journalism and in the academic professions as well. But I don’t think that’s the norm. The norm is obedience, adoption of uncritical attitudes, taking the easy path of self-deception. I think there’s also a selective process in the academic professions and journalism.


pages: 829 words: 186,976

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't by Nate Silver

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, book value, Broken windows theory, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Freestyle chess, fudge factor, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Laplace demon, locking in a profit, Loma Prieta earthquake, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oklahoma City bombing, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, power law, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, public intellectual, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, savings glut, security theater, short selling, SimCity, Skype, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

These threats are asymmetric; all of America’s naval power in the Pacific didn’t help it much when the Japanese fleet slipped right through the blind spots in our defenses and found that most of our arsenal was conveniently located in just one place, where it could easily be attacked. This is why events like Pearl Harbor and September 11 produce the sort of cognitive dissonance they do. Where our enemies will strike us is predictable: it’s where we least expect them to. Some of the type of thinking I encourage in this book can probably be helpful in the realm of national security analysis.87 For instance, the Bayesian approach toward thinking about probability is more compatible with decision making under high uncertainty.


pages: 516 words: 1,220

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks

business process, clean water, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, facts on the ground, failed state, friendly fire, Isaac Newton, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, private military company, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

But when Bremer went over there, he was given autonomy over all kinds of plans that he didn't implement." Back in Baghdad, Chalabi commented, "Jay Garner was a nice man." It wasn't clear that he meant that as praise. Rumsfeld vs. reality The root cause of the occupation's paralysis may have been the cloud of cognitive dissonance that seems to have fogged in Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials at this time. They were not finding what they had expected: namely, strong evidence of intensive efforts to develop and stockpile chemical and biological weapons, and even some work to develop nuclear bombs. Meanwhile, they were finding what they had not expected: violent and widespread opposition to the U.S. military presence.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

In the meantime, you’re sitting at home on the couch eating ice cream with your wife and kids, enjoying the latest episode of The Big Bang Theory. The cops think a woman inside is moments away from being murdered, and the police are marshaling all available black-and-whites and the local SWAT unit to come save her. When the two sides meet, there is a deep cognitive dissonance and the encounter proves a dangerous powder keg. The cops have surrounded the house and are yelling for you to put your hands up and come out. Your kids are screaming, and your wife is confused. You’re not complying well with the police commands, making them further suspicious something horrible is going on.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

The way to do it: a new agency run by scientific experts, a “National Research Foundation.” The next month, the detonation of atomic weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave Bush’s argument about technological capacity a grim and forceful proof point.16 From the very beginning, then, there was a cognitive dissonance in the way America’s postwar politicians and technologists talked about the world-changing upsides of high-tech investment—expanding the frontiers of knowledge, pushing out into the unknown, bettering society, furthering democracy—and the far more bellicose and disquieting reasons that this investment happened in the first place.


pages: 705 words: 192,650

The Great Post Office Scandal: The Fight to Expose a Multimillion Pound Scandal Which Put Innocent People in Jail by Nick Wallis

Asperger Syndrome, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business process, call centre, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Dominic Cummings, forensic accounting, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, lockdown, paper trading, social distancing, Wayback Machine, work culture

Bates recommended that anyone who was invited to attend mediation should delay their decision until Second Sight delivered their final report. ____________________ 1 Forgive me for reproducing large chunks of dialogue over the course of this chapter, but its Pinter-esque nature reveals the alternate reality the two Post Office execs were living in. For extra cognitive dissonance, try reading it out loud. 2 See the ‘Going In Hard’ chapter. 3 1) Interim Report – 8 July 2013; 2) Briefing Report Part 1 – 25 July 2014; 3) Briefing Report Part 2 – 21 August 2014. WORKING GROUP DISSOLVES On 10 March 2015, before Second Sight could deliver their promised report, the Post Office terminated the Working Group with immediate effect.


pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

After limited success with open monitoring or mindfulness meditation, he was introduced to Transcendental Meditation by a friend, Dan Loeb, billionaire and founder of Third Point LLC, a $17 billion asset management firm. ✸ Most-gifted or recommended books Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. The latter is a book about cognitive dissonance that looks at common weaknesses and biases in human thinking. Peter wants to ensure he goes through life without being too sure of himself, and this book helps him to recalibrate. ✸ Peter’s best $100 or less purchase? Peter has a monthly daddy/daughter date with his 8-year-old daughter.


Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, continuous integration, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, gentrification, global reserve currency, guns versus butter model, Howard Zinn, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Samuelson, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, wage slave, women in the workforce

But even in the Soviet Union, chances are very strong that if you actually bothered to look, you’d find that most of the journalists actually believed the things they wrote. And that’s because people who didn’t believe that kind of thing would never have made it onto Pravda in the first place. It’s very hard to live with cognitive dissonance: only a real cynic can believe one thing and say another. So whether it’s a totalitarian system or a free system, the people who are most useful to the system of power are the ones who actually believe what they say, and they’re the ones who will typically make it through. So take Tom Wicker at the New York Times: when you talk to him about this kind of stuff, he gets very irate and says, “Nobody tells me what to write.”


pages: 998 words: 211,235

A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

Al Roth, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, book value, Brownian motion, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Dr. Strangelove, experimental economics, fear of failure, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, linear programming, lone genius, longitudinal study, market design, medical residency, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, second-price auction, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, spectrum auction, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, zero-sum game

Artin, for example, switched frantically from field to field trying to catch hold of something that would equal his early accomplishments.7 Steenrod slipped into a deep depression. When one of his students published a note on “Steenrod’s Reduced Powers” — the reference was, of course, mathematical, not personal — other mathematicians smirked and said, “Oh, yes, Steenrod’s reduced powers!”8 Nash’s thirtieth birthday produced a kind of cognitive dissonance. One can almost imagine a sniggering commentator inside Nash’s head: “What, thirty already, and still no prizes, no offer from Harvard, no tenure even? And you thought you were such a great mathematician? A genius? Ha, ha, ha!” Nash’s mood was odd. Periods of gnawing self-doubt and dissatisfaction alternated with periods of heady anticipation.


Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale by David N. Blank-Edelman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, bounce rate, business continuity plan, business logic, business process, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, commoditize, continuous integration, Conway's law, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, database schema, Debian, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, DevOps, digital rights, domain-specific language, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, exponential backoff, fail fast, fallacies of distributed computing, fault tolerance, fear of failure, friendly fire, game design, Grace Hopper, imposter syndrome, information retrieval, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, invisible hand, iterative process, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kubernetes, loose coupling, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Maslow's hierarchy, microaggression, microservices, minimum viable product, MVC pattern, performance metric, platform as a service, pull request, RAND corporation, remote working, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, search engine result page, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, single page application, Snapchat, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, systems thinking, the long tail, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, traumatic brain injury, value engineering, vertical integration, web application, WebSocket, zero day

Despite being realistic about how terrible everything is, we stay strongly optimistic that the systems, software, and people we work with will get better. I’ve conducted surveys of deeply troubled teams for which every response seemed to indicate everything was wonderful. I’d love to hear from people who have experience uncovering such cognitive dissonance in engineers. After all these years, I’m still surprised when I uncover it. Further Reading Kim Scott, Radical Candor. Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler, Crucial Conversations. Bio John Looney is a production engineer at Facebook, managing a data center provisioning team.


pages: 723 words: 211,892

Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Joan Didion, land reform, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, Ronald Reagan, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, yellow journalism, young professional

Yet others hurled slogans aimed at Fidel Castro: ‘!Abajo Fidel! Death to the tyrant!’ I wanted to cry. This is why I had left Cuba, I thought, so that I would never again have to hear another slogan….”49 She was listening to an uncanny echo, peering through a distorted looking glass. But that feeling—Miami’s cognitive dissonance, as Joan Didion once called it—was not always sinister. Sometimes it was just about family and survival, longing and attachment. So, a young girl in Cuba grows up in a home with a special drawer filled with nice clothes given to her family by relatives in the United States. They were clothes, pressed and never worn, waiting for the day the family would fly to its exile abroad.


pages: 778 words: 239,744

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Burning Man, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive dissonance, false flag, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Future Shock, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Khartoum Gordon, lifelogging, neurotypical, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, place-making, post-industrial society, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, the market place, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban sprawl

The machine will make any necessary adjustments for my wellbeing: deal with physical deformities to the brain matter, ensure there is no bleeding or swelling that might endanger me, take preventative and curative measures against sociopathy, psychosis, depression, aggressive social narcissism, sadism, masochism, low self-esteem, undiagnosed neuroatypicality, attention deficit, in other words all the known issues of our complex biological processing, even unto the insidious and alienating cognitive dissonance and maladjustment syndrome. (You really have to watch for that one. Almost anyone can have it.) Or you could say that in twelve hours I will have betrayed everyone I love into the hands of these my torturers, and we will all of us emerge perfected and adjusted and happy and enslaved. We will be remade in the image of a creation I once believed was the only way to avoid horror, but which by a ridiculous string of errors and confusions of the mind is now a horror in itself.


pages: 798 words: 240,182

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The world of consciousness is vastly bigger than what any one person or group can imagine. Cognitive liberty stands as an assertion to protect, as best we can, those who want to be protected, those who want to reach, and those who don’t. One of the marvels of our species is that even as we think through our own ­contradictions, we may be led to – but we don’t have to – resolve cognitive dissonance. We are not binary beings. Humans have an uncanny ability to bootstrap our intelligence and our ­empathy by catalyzing an ability to imagine and innovate, and consequently, make manifold leaps in acting in and on the world. But we are not immune to our own success. It is with this paradoxical recognition of ­pattern-making and creative drive – of limitations at odds with a desire for self-expression, to expand rather than contract, to enhance rather than diminish our human potential – that I ­champion cognitive liberty as a twenty-first-century value.


pages: 829 words: 229,566

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Or the drought that hit the Mississippi River one year earlier, pushing water levels so low that barges loaded with oil and coal were unable to move for days, while they waited for the Army Corps of Engineers to dredge a channel (they had to appropriate funds allocated to rebuild from the previous year’s historic flooding along the same waterway). Or the coal-fired power plants in other parts of the country that were temporarily shut down because the waterways that they draw on to cool their machinery were either too hot or too dry (or, in some cases, both). Living with this kind of cognitive dissonance is simply part of being alive in this jarring moment in history, when a crisis we have been studiously ignoring is hitting us in the face—and yet we are doubling down on the stuff that is causing the crisis in the first place. I denied climate change for longer than I care to admit. I knew it was happening, sure.


pages: 824 words: 268,880

Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

anthropic principle, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, different worldview, epigenetics, gravity well, heat death of the universe, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, Kim Stanley Robinson, land tenure, new economy, phenotype, quantum entanglement, stem cell, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship

But it didn’t feel that way; the ground was still at a slope that supported the feeling in his body. The contradiction was so intense that he suffered a wave of nausea, the internal torque twisting him until it actually hurt to stand, as if every cell in his body was twisting to the side against the pressure of what the wristpad was telling him— the physiological effects of a purely cognitive dissonance, it was amazing. It almost made one believe in the existence of an internal magnet in the body, as in the pineal glands of migrating birds— but there was no magnetic field to speak of. Perhaps his skin was sensitive to solar radiation to the point of being able to pinpoint the sun’s location, even when the sky was a thick dark gray everywhere.


pages: 1,261 words: 294,715

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky

autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biofilm, blood diamond, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Brownian motion, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fudge factor, George Santayana, global pandemic, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, intentional community, John von Neumann, Loma Prieta earthquake, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, nocebo, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, publication bias, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social contagion, social distancing, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, trolley problem, twin studies, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

And with remarkable regularity our stances reflect our implicit, affective makeup, with cognition playing post-hoc catch up. If you really want to understand someone’s politics, understand their cognitive load, how prone they are to snap judgments, their approaches to reappraisal and resolving cognitive dissonance. Even more important, understand how they feel about novelty, ambiguity, empathy, hygiene, disease and dis-ease, and whether things used to be better and the future is a scary place. Like so many other animals, we have an often-frantic need to conform, belong, and obey. Such conformity can be markedly maladaptive, as we forgo better solutions in the name of the foolishness of the crowd.


Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy by Irvin D. Yalom, Molyn Leszcz

cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, confounding variable, delayed gratification, deskilling, epigenetics, experimental subject, impulse control, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, TED Talk, the scientific method, traveling salesman, unbiased observer

Experiencing and expressing negative feelings about the group at this point would be unlikely for at least two reasons: (1) there is strong group pressure at termination to participate in positive testimonials—few group participants, as Asch15 has shown, can maintain their objectivity in the face of apparent group unanimity; and (2) members reject critical feelings toward the group at this time to avoid a state of cognitive dissonance: in other words, once an individual invests considerable emotion and time in a group and develops strong positive feelings toward other members, it becomes difficult to question the value or activities of the group. To do so thrusts the individual into a state of uncomfortable dissonance. Research on marathon groups is plagued with a multitude of design defects. 16 Some studies failed to employ proper controls (for example, a non–time-extended comparison group).


pages: 1,073 words: 314,528

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

As Kahneman put it, “people rely on a limited number of heuristic principles which reduce the complex tasks of assessing probabilities and predicting values to simpler judgmental operations. In general, these heuristics are quite useful, but sometimes they lead to severe and systematic errors.”12 The Economist summed up what behavioral research suggested about actual decision-making: [People] fear failure and are prone to cognitive dissonance, sticking with a belief plainly at odds with the evidence, usually because the belief has been held and cherished for a long time. People like to anchor their beliefs so they can claim that they have external support, and are more likely to take risks to support the status quo than to get to a better place.


I You We Them by Dan Gretton

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, Desert Island Discs, drone strike, European colonialism, financial independence, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Honoré de Balzac, IBM and the Holocaust, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, pre–internet, restrictive zoning, Stanford prison experiment, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons

And suddenly, perhaps, we can guess why he realised he could not travel beyond Dublin – for if he came face to face with the consequences of his policies, if he saw the eyes of the starving, they would no longer be a collective mass of abstract Irish peasantry, they would be individual human beings who were suffering. They would move from being ‘them’ to ‘him’ or ‘her’. And perhaps Trevelyan, deep down, knew he would not have been able to face that; today, we would say that his cognitive dissonance – his ability to continue holding contradictory moral positions – would no longer be able to function. Because here, fundamentally, was a man of duty, a man who strictly ordered his own feelings, regarded them with the suspicion he reserved for enemy forces. He was a man – in this particular respect – not dissimilar to Adolf Eichmann, who put all his energies into his official self, his work, most content behind his desk in Whitehall, issuing the orders in letters and memoranda which resulted in the deaths of a multitude of people he would never see.


pages: 1,351 words: 404,177

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, cognitive dissonance, company town, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, European colonialism, false flag, full employment, Future Shock, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, immigration reform, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, Kitchen Debate, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Seymour Hersh, systematic bias, the medium is the message, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, walking around money, War on Poverty, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog

A yellow convertible tried to run a policeman down. Two hundred teenagers set out to storm Mayor Daley’s house. As police closed in, teenagers threw their incriminating arsenal of chains, cleavers, and clubs over the Thirty-fifth Street overpass of the Dan Ryan Expressway (an inattentive newspaper reader wrote to Senator Douglas and in the cognitive dissonance at the notion of lawless Caucasians called them “a gang of Negroes”). “There must be some way of resolving questions without marches,” Daley whined plaintively into the TV cameras, haunted now by the most frightening chant of all: “Don’t vote for Democrats! Don’t vote for Democrats!” Richard Nixon was in Saigon, denouncing Vietnam War critics at an airport press conference: they were “prolonging the war, encouraging the enemy, and preventing the very negotiations the critics say they want.”


Central America by Carolyn McCarthy, Greg Benchwick, Joshua Samuel Brown, Alex Egerton, Matthew Firestone, Kevin Raub, Tom Spurling, Lucas Vidgen

airport security, Bartolomé de las Casas, California gold rush, call centre, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, digital map, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, land reform, liberation theology, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Suez canal 1869, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Others, however, are not so ready to embrace gringo culture. Indigenous groups such as the Emberá and Kuna are struggling to keep their traditions alive, as more and more of their youth are lured into the Westernized lifestyle of the city. Given the clash between old and new, it’s surprising the country isn’t suffering from a serious case of cognitive dissonance. Somehow, the exceptionally tolerant Panamanian character weathers many contradictions — the old and the new, the grave disparity between rich and poor, and the gorgeous natural environment and its rapid destruction. Lifestyle In spite of the skyscrapers and gleaming restaurants lining the wealthier districts of Panama City, nearly a third of the country’s population lives in poverty.


Engineering Security by Peter Gutmann

active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business process, call centre, card file, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, combinatorial explosion, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, domain-specific language, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, false flag, fault tolerance, Firefox, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Hacker News, information security, iterative process, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, linear programming, litecoin, load shedding, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, nocebo, operational security, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, post-materialism, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, random walk, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolling blackouts, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, semantic web, seminal paper, Skype, slashdot, smart meter, social intelligence, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain attack, telemarketer, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, Therac-25, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wayback Machine, web application, web of trust, x509 certificate, Y2K, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

When a security researcher demonstrated to his parents that the lock on the 26 Problems front door of their house could be bypassed in a matter of seconds and offered relatively easy unauthorised entry to their home their reaction was to ask him not to inform them of this again. This extends beyond security and carries over to general life. If you’d like to read more about this look up a reference to “cognitive dissonance”, an interesting concept first proposed in a study into why believers in end-of-the-world prophecies continued to believe in them even when they failed to come true [169]. As security researcher Amir Herzberg puts it, “Defend, don’t ask”. Building something that relies on user education to be effective is a recipe for disaster.