Month: August 2010

Exhibit A: Mike Pence.

A self-explanatory tumblr. The above entry reads:

Aww! Get it? ‘Cause when you hang a suit on it, it looks like a dog is wearing it. Then you go to your job and try to jump out the window cause the dog’s spirit haunts whatever it touches.

"Obama’s Chief Medicare Actuary Estimates That Obama’s Government Takeover Of Health Care Will Cut Medicare By $575 Billion," – GOP.com, celebrating the 45th anniversary of Medicare.

Jonah Lehrer provides a theory:

While kids exposed to preschool got an initial bump in general intelligence, this dissipated by second grade. Instead, preschool seemed to improve performance on a variety of “non-cognitive” abilities, such as self-control, persistence and grit. While society has long obsessed over raw smarts – just look at our fixation on IQ scores – Heckman and Cunha argue that these non-cognitive traits are often more important. They note, for instance, that dependability is the trait most valued by employers, while “perseverance, dependability and consistency are the most important predictors of grades in school.” Of course, these valuable skills have little or anything to do with general intelligence. And that’s probably a good thing, since our non-cognitive traits are much more malleable, at least when interventions occur at an early age, than IQ. Preschool might not make us smarter – our intelligence is strongly shaped by our genes – but it can make us a better person, and that’s even more important.

A guide.

David McRaney takes on the anchoring effect:

Even if you’ve done some research online, you don’t know for sure exactly what the car is worth, or what the dealer paid for it. The focus instead is the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, and no matter how unrealistic it is, you can’t help but be tethered to it.

When you haggle over the price, you are pulling away from the anchor, and both you and the dealer know this.

Avent thinks the unemployed are organizing:

What's happening now, with the increase in duration of unemployment, is that you're starting to get large numbers of people with good organisational skills and lots and lots of time on their hands. And they're spending enough time without jobs that they are beginning to self-identify as unemployed, and to form bonds with others in the same situation. This is a phenomenon that I don't think has been seen in America since Martin Luther King's marches against poverty in the 1960s, if not since the Depression, and it will be interesting to see what comes of it.

Damon Linker describes the composition of a purposeful life:

In the Aristotelian tradition of moral thinking, human beings don’t face a zero-sum choice between fulfillment and moral righteousness. They strive, instead, to fulfill a holistic vision of human flourishing that includes both happiness and nobility. Or rather, this vision of human flourishing treats happiness as inseparable from nobility. This is what Martin Seligman and the best of his colleagues in the positive psychology movement have in mind when they speak of the importance of “purpose” in a fulfilling human life.

A life spent in endless pursuit of egoistic self-satisfaction (Kant’s vision of corruption) would end in wretched desolation, but so would a life devoted purely to acts of exalted self-sacrifice (Kant’s moral ideal). A genuinely purposeful life, by contrast, is one in which an individual strives to become a good human being in the fullest sense—contented as much by work, career, and material reward as by devoting oneself to the flourishing of one’s children.