February 2012
8 posts
5 tags
5 tags
Teller Reveals His Secrets →
Teller of Penn & Teller explaining how some of his magic work:
Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest. My partner, Penn, and I once produced 500 live cockroaches from a top hat on the desk of talk-show host David Letterman. To...
3 tags
Bloomberg Without Bloomberg →
Formulas to success: vision, commitment and conviction. This is a pretty good example by Bloomberg News showing just that:
Winkler’s exacting approach was eventually codified in an often mocked companywide stylebook titled The Bloomberg Way. Bloomberg News stories, it declared, “have a structure that is as immutable as the rules that govern sonnets and symphonies.” Every story needed to include...
9 tags
Bioconservatives vs. Bioprogressives →
Perhaps, this is the Brave New Utopia:
“Equality is a political, not a biological concept,” Moreno correctly responds. Fukuyama is wrong when he asserts that equality rests on biological facts. Instead, the ideal of political equality arose from the Enlightenment’s insistence that since no one has access to absolute truth, no one has a moral right to impose his values and beliefs on others. In...
4 tags
6 tags
Free will and politics →
Worth a read, especially considering how different fields are converging in on politics recently:
I’m going to have a very hard time condensing what I mean here into a paragraph at the end of a blog post, but roughly: we assign responsibility for desired public outcomes to decision-making units that communicate well internally and have internally shared interests in that outcome. So in...
4 tags
Drinking Games →
Example of social norm arising from social learning:
In other words, the frat boys drinking in a bar on a Friday night don’t have to be loud and rowdy. They are responding to the signals sent by their immediate environment—by the pulsing music, by the crush of people, by the dimmed light, by the countless movies and television shows and general cultural expectations that say that young men in a...
4 tags
The Ballad of Mark Zuckerberg →
No wonder why Facebook came to be the $5 billion IPO.