Daniel Kahneman explains that there is such a thing as the affect heuristic,

where judgments and decisions are guided directly by feelings of liking and disliking, with little deliberation or reasoning.

The example he had just given was the chief investment officer of a large financial firm, who told Kahneman he had just invested tens of millions of dollars in the stock of Ford Motor Company. Why? He’d gone to an automobile show and been impressed by Ford cars. “Wo, good cars!” Yes but that’s not the relevant question. The relevant question is whether the stock is currently underpriced.

The cio did an affect heuristic thing – which is pretty funny, really, given his job. But the thing is, Kahneman … Read the rest

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Some grey bloke did a nice video last October. I may have already posted it but never mind, here it is again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-FSzy3Mbqo

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Coming up this week at the Tate Modern:

a major performance-art event conceived and curated by US artist Suzanne Lacy. Silver Action will see 400 women aged 60 and over – who have taken part in some of the last century’s major political protests, from the 1968 Ford sewing machinists’ strike to Greenham Common – converge on the gallery’s subterranean performance space, the Tanks, for a live, unscripted performance about ageing and activism.

Why? Well one reason is…

One evening a couple of years ago, 82-year-old Barbara Robson was crammed in a rush-hour London tube train. Politely, she asked a young man near her, smart in his suit and tie, if he might move along a little. “He

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What a waste. What a horrible waste.

Less than two weeks ago, Hadiya Pendleton was leading her classmates in the King College Prep School Marching Band down Pennsylvania Avenue on the afternoon of President Obama’s second inauguration. It would be an opportunity of a lifetime for any 15 year old, but for Pendleton, it was her last. On Tuesday, she was gunned down in a park a few blocks from school on the South Side of Chicago, less than a mile from the first family’s home.

It’s always a horrible waste and it happens way too much. As I said at the time, the children at Newtown are no more (or less) of a waste because there was a larger … Read the rest

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Salman Rushdie’s in India and he talked to the BBC there. I transcribed most of it.

The bigger question India needs to ask itself is about gender relations, is about how men think about women, and actually to an extent how women think about women because again there’s a lot of oppression inside families by matriarchs of daughters-in-law.

And many women bring up these boys, you know? And don’t teach them proper ways to behave.

Rajini Vaidyanathan: What appals you the most about the way women are treated here?

Well just the brutality of it, the easy brutality of it, and the fact that mostly people get away with it.

It’s nothing to do with what clothes they

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BBC World does a thing where it reads a proverb as a little filler item. Yesterday’s proverb – which is currently visible on its Africa page – is a charmer.

Today’s African Proverb

“He who never saw his mother while she was young thinks his father wasted the dowry”

A Maragoli proverb from Western Kenya sent by H Essendi, Southampton, UK

Good choice. Well done, BBC.… Read the rest

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Lee Moore is hoping for a cease fire.

I think a cease fire could be possible, since I haven’t been firing except when attacked. That makes it easy to agree to a cease fire. Do I want to write about Reap Paden and Atheist Asshole all the time? Fuck no. Of course not. If they would leave me the hell alone I would be delighted to forget all about them.

But Lee wants more than just a cease fire.

I am going to do something about it.  In order to facilitate this I am calling for representatives from both camps in these blog wars to sit down with me in what may be the first of many live and

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How cute.

Yesterday a guy invited me to do a podcast on Women in Secularism and “problems with online discussion (cyber bullying).” I said sure. Later he told me that he has a couple of partners on the podcast, one of whom is…Reap Paden. Oh. Not doing that then.

So what do we have here? Why it’s a blog post by Reap Paden wondering why I could possibly not want to chat with him.

Ophelia Benson was offered a guest spot on the A-News podcast today. She accepted too.  Then when she learned  the details ( I am a co-host on the show) She pulled out (so to speak) Ophelia has done public speaking before right? So it isn’t

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One thing in that interview with Nick Turse…

On how the military trained U.S. troops to dehumanize the Vietnamese

“The idea was that the Vietnamese, they weren’t really people. They were subhuman, mere ‘gooks’ who could be killed or abused at will and, you know, veterans I talked to told me that from the moment they got into basic training they were told, ‘Never call them Vietnamese. Call them gooks or dinks, slopes, slants, rice-eaters.’ Anything to take away their humanity, to dehumanize them and make it easy to see any Vietnamese — all Vietnamese — as the enemy.”

Oh really? That’s very interesting.

I always knew that went on, of course, but I’m not sure I knew it … Read the rest

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There was an interview on Fresh Air yesterday with a guy who’s written a book about civilian massacres and other atrocities in the Vietnam War, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. Apparently the received wisdom is that My Lai was an aberration. I actually didn’t know that – I thought My Lai was just the one that got a lot of publicity but that there were plenty of others. It’s the nature of that kind of war, and of that particular war. I even thought I remembered reporting on it from the time (yes I’m that ancient!), but the author, Nick Turse, says there wasn’t much in the US. (But there was in the … Read the rest

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Ahahahahaha – I usually never do spam jokes but this one is too good to pass up.

Perfectly composed articles, thankyou for entropy.

Thank you for entropy! ♥♥… Read the rest

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Greta did a post the other day about someone who rethought something she wrote and then took it back. I hadn’t seen it until this morning.

This is how it’s done, people. She didn’t double down. She didn’t insist that she hadn’t done anything wrong; she didn’t equate “lots of people disagreeing with you” with tribalism, bullying, McCarthyism, or witch hunts. She kept it short and sweet, without a “making it worse” morass of defensive rationalizations/ making it all about her hurt feelings about people being mean to her. She heard the criticism, accepted that she screwed up, and apologized. This is how it’s done.

([cough] Michael Shermer [cough])

The result of course was that – starting in comment 2, … Read the rest

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I tweeted a link about an upcoming debate at Cambridge between Dawkins and Rowan Williams a few hours ago. There are replies saying Richard will wipe the floor with him. I’m not so sure. Williams was an academic before he was the archbish, and now he’s not the archbish any more.

He almost certainly knows of better arguments than the kind of highflown archepiscopal bafflegab he gave to the House of Lords and so on while he actually was the archbish. And since he’s not the archbish any more, he may feel less of a duty to sound churchy and archepiscopal.

There’s no chance that he’s actually stupid. The fact that he used to say a lot of stuff that … Read the rest

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The BBC’s Andrew North tells us more about the Delhi rape victim.

Like the student’s family, at least two of the accused are from impoverished villages in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, and source for many of the thousands of migrants who come to Delhi every year hoping for a better life
- the same journey her father made nearly 30 years ago.

And the other men are from similar migrant backgrounds. Where they differ, though, was in what they did about it.

“We gave our all to our daughter,” her mother told us, still devastated with grief. She says she can barely leave her bed, complaining of frequent headaches and chest pains.

And their support was working:

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There’s a BBC Four series from last summer, Uncovering Shakespeare; I saw the first two episodes last night, Macbeth first and The Comedies/Shakespeare’s Women second, which is the opposite of the order of broadcast.

I thought the Macbeth wasn’t very good. It was way too heavy on “interesting” but totally irrelevant visuals – lots of New York streets packed with cars, for instance; wut? – and way too light on the words. Not enough discussion of the words, not enough saying of them, not enough clips of actors saying them, pretty much no discussion at all of the way the words do the work. On the other hand there were some clips, and the discussion wasn’t actually boring, so … Read the rest

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Chapter 5 of Martha Nussbaum’s Sex and Social Justice is titled “American Women” and it’s basically about the idea that there is sane normal sensible feminism and then there is crazy extremist radical feminism, with the first being sensibly in favor of equality before the law, which we now have, so that’s that, and the second being about crazy wild stuff like distorted preferences and asymmetrical power. Nussbaum addresses Christina Hoff Sommers as the clearest source of this notion (and as a fellow philosopher), but she says the idea is widespread.

Nussbaum points out that the feminists Sommers sees as “radical” are the very people who brought about the changes that Sommers applauds.

It is not only women in the

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