Skip to main content

January 02, 2018

From Harper's:
Racists in the United States support free-speech rights for racist speech, but not for speech critical of their co-workers or the police.

From The Economist:
Affluent parents intensively nurture their children for success; the offspring of less fortunate homes fall far behind before they ever set foot in a school.

From The Economist:
Helpfully, some European countries have begun to offer civil unions for heterosexuals. (Gay couples already had that option.) They confer nearly all the rights of marriage but entail less of the intimidating hoopla. These now account for a fifth of new formal unions in the Netherlands, and more in some working-class districts. They have not undermined marriage so far. It is a small fix for a huge problem, but it might help.

From The Guardian (John Banville on "The book that changed my life/the world"):
The Catechism of the Catholic Church. It had all the answers; it told you what simony is, and why you will go to hell for indulging in concupiscence. If only it were all true …

From Journal of Experimental Social Psychology:
Being observed by others fosters honest behavior. In this study, we examine a very subtle eye signal that may affect participants' tendency to behave honestly: observed pupil size. For this, we use an experimental task that is known to evoke dishonest behavior. Specifically, participants made private predictions for a coin toss and earned a bonus by reporting correct predictions. Before reporting the (in)correctness of their predictions, participants viewed videos of partners with dilating or constricting pupils. As dilating pupils are generally perceived positively, we expected that dishonesty would be reduced when participants look into the eyes of a partner with dilating pupils, especially when their own pupil size mimics the observed pupil size. In line with this prediction, Experiments 1 and 2 showed that, when earning a bonus meant harming the interaction partner, dishonesty occurred less frequently when the partner's pupils dilated rather than constricted. That is, when the interests of the self and the other conflict, participants use the pupil of the partner as a social cue to inform their behavior. However, pupil mimicry was not observed. In Experiment 3, we examined pupil mimicry and dishonesty in a context where there was no temptation to hurt the partner. Here, pupil mimicry between partners was observed, but there were no effects of the partner's pupil on dishonesty. Thus, when dishonesty harms the interaction partner, participants use pupillary cues from their partner to inform their behavior. Pupil mimicry, however, is bound to non-competitive contexts only.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

February 24, 2018

From The New York Times : We are willing to pay a premium for convenience, of course — more than we often realize we are willing to pay. During the late 1990s, for example, technologies of music distribution like Napster made it possible to get music online at no cost, and lots of people availed themselves of the option. But though it remains easy to get music free, no one really does it anymore. Why? Because the introduction of the iTunes store in 2003 made buying music even more convenient than illegally downloading it. Convenient beat out free. As task after task becomes easier, the growing expectation of convenience exerts a pressure on everything else to be easy or get left behind. We are spoiled by immediacy and become annoyed by tasks that remain at the old level of effort and time. When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone, waiting in line to vote in an election is irritating. This is especially true for those who have never had to wait in lines (whic...
Post a Comment
Read more

January 30

From  University of Virginia Working Paper : This paper studies how collecting offender DNA profiles affects offenders’ later recidivism and likelihood of getting caught by exploiting a large expansion of Denmark’s DNA database. We find that DNA profiling increases detection probability and reduces recidivism within the following year by as much as 43%. We estimate the elasticity of criminal behavior with respect to the probability of detection to be -1.7, implying that a 1% higher detection probability reduces crime by almost 2%. We also find that DNA profiling changes non-criminal behavior: profiled offenders are more likely to engage in a stable relationship, and live with their children. From Iris Murdoch : Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. From  Iris Murdoch : I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time. From  Iris Murdoch : Of course reading and thinking are impor...
Post a Comment
Read more

February 26, 2018

From The Economist : An equity is a claim on the assets and the profits of a firm; a bond entitles the investor to a series of interest payments and repayment on maturity. Bitcoin brings no cashflows to the owner; the only return will come via a rise in price. When there is no obvious way of valuing an asset, it is hard to say that one target price is less likely than another. Bitcoin could be worth $10 or $100,000. One argument made by bitcoinnoisseurs is that it is a type of “digital gold”. Stores of value are supposed to keep their value; bitcoin, by contrast, is extremely volatile. Its code ensures that no more than 21m coins can ever be created; that sets bitcoin apart from fiat money, which central banks can create at will. Yet being limited in supply is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for having value; signed photographs of Economist journalists are rare but, sadly, of negligible worth. Nor is supply really limited. Plenty of other cryptocurrencies exist. If the...
Post a Comment
Read more