Contriving

Reshared post from +gwern branwen

'This is the perfect finger food. I usually eat a handful at a time. Though to be honest, when asked how they taste, I say, "It varies from person to person."'

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The kids have worse grades, and they are more depressed and more alienated from their parents.

When Amy Chua’s book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother came out in 2011, it sparked  controversy among many people but especially psychologists and experts in  child development. The book, they felt, had lodged in the culture certain stereotypes about an Asian parenting style that was not well-studied or well-understood and certainly not ready to be held up as some kind of model.

Unsurprising, really.  Most "philosophies" advocating parenting styles, diet choices, wealth building seem to gain popularity before there is much, if any, science to support them.

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Kids of Tiger Moms Get Worse Grades and Are More Depressed
When Amy Chua’s book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother came out in 2011, it sparked  controversy among many people but especially psychologists and experts in  child development. The book, they felt, had lodged in the culture certain stereotypes about an Asian parenting style that was not well-studied or well-understood…

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When asked what kind of coffee they like, most Americans will say: "a dark, rich, hearty roast". But actually, only 25-27% want that. Most prefer weak, milky coffee. Judgement is clouded by aspiration, peer pressure and marketing messages.

Interesting piece on the psychology of restaurant menu design.  

As an aside, I'm a decently smart guy who at a young age was singled out for advanced classes because of my great-for-my-age vocabulary…and yet I can never remember how to spell "restaurant"!

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Restaurant menu psychology: tricks to make us order more
From wine-appropriate music to authentic-sounding foreign names, restaurateurs have many ways to persuade diners into ordering high-profit meals

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"I've been in a crowded elevator with mirrors all around, and a woman will move and I'll go to get out the way and then realise: 'oh that woman is me'."

Heather Sellers has prosopagnosia, more commonly known as face blindness. "I can't remember any image of the human face. It's simply not special to me," she says. "I don't process them like I do a car or a dog. It's not a visual problem, it's a perception problem."

It's pretty fascinating to think about what it would be like to have conditions like these that cause people to see the world in a different way.

I'm sure that many (most?) people without face blindness have never even consciously realized that recognizing faces is a special thing that we humans do.

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Mindscapes: The woman who can’t recognise her face – health – 02 May 2013 – New Scientist
Heather Sellers has one of the worst cases of prosopagnosia ever recorded. She can’t recognise any face – even her own – so she uses gait to

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Thinking about a professor just before you take an intelligence test makes you perform better than if you think about football hooligans. Or does it? An influential theory that certain behaviour can be modified by unconscious cues is under serious attack.

A paper published in PLoS ONE last week1 reports that nine different experiments failed to replicate this example of ‘intelligence priming’, first described in 1998 (ref. 2) by Ap Dijksterhuis, a social psychologist at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, and now included in textbooks.

And a bit later:

An acrimonious e-mail debate on the subject has been dividing psychologists, who are already jittery about other recent exposures of irreproducible results

Good!  They should be jittery, science of this sort has been shaky for years.  In psychology (and other fields) there are too many positive results and not nearly enough attempts to replicate!

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Disputed results a fresh blow for social psychology
Failure to replicate intelligence-priming effects ignites row in research community.

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I'm always wondering about how (or if) other people's inner dialog differs from my own.

I spend much of my idle thought time[1] thinking about philosophy and science, and when my thoughts take the specific form of "speaking" it's almost always along the lines of a hypothetical argument with some random person in my life wherein I'm trying to justify something I believe, or where I'm trying to teach (as I get a lot of enjoyment out of teaching others new things).

One striking similarity to the example in this article is the almost frantic gear switching.  I'll be having a mental dialog about evolutionary psychology, think about where/how/when I'm going to get gas tomorrow, think about how to explain modern web development to my Mom, and then pick up exactly where I left up with my evolutionary psychology dialog.

[1] By "idle thought time", I'm talking about when I'm driving the car, in the shower, sitting on the deck enjoying the weather, etc…

Some people have tried to eavesdrop on the silent conversations in other people’s minds. Psychologists have attempted to capture what they call self-talk or inner speech in the moment, asking people to stop what they are doing and write down their thoughts at random points in time. Others have relied on surveys or diaries. Andrew Irving, an anthropologist at the University of Manchester, decided to try something a little different: a peripatetic transcription of consciousness.

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Mrs. Dalloway in New York City: Documenting How People Talk to Themselves in Their Heads | Brainwaves, Scientific American Blog Network
On any given day, millions of conversations reverberate through New York City. Poke your head out a window overlooking a busy street and you will hear …

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 I find it interesting that with the study subjects it seems to be less about a natural ability to do math and more about a natural ability to learn.  I'd like to see follow-up studies with tutoring in other subject matters.

The day is coming where parents will be able to select for such things in pre-pregnancy consultations.

In a study of third-graders' responses to math tutoring, Stanford scientists found that the size and wiring of specific brain structures predicted how much an individual child would benefit from math tutoring. However, traditional intelligence measures, such as children's IQs and their scores on tests of mathematical ability, did not predict improvements from tutoring.

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Size, wiring of brain structures in kids predict benefit from math tutoring, study says – Office of Communications & Public Affairs – Stanford University School of Medicine
Why do some children learn math more easily than others? Research from the Stanford University School of Medicine has yielded an unexpected new answer. In a study of third-graders’ responses to math tutoring, Stanford scientists found that the size and wiring of specific brain structures …

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The founder of Dow Chemical sold bromine in the US for 36 cents per pound.  Elsewhere in the world a German cartel sold it at 49 cents per pound, but there was an understanding that Dow would remain US-only while the cartel stayed out of the US.

Well, Dow was in financial trouble so he ended up taking his product overseas and easily beat the German cartels price.  Eventually, in retaliation, the Germans came to the US with a super low price of 15 cents per pound.

Dow's response?  He secretly bought the Germans product in the US, shipped it overseas, and sold it in the Germans backyard for 27 cents per pound…way less than what the Germans were selling it for.

The Germans couldn't figure out how come they weren't driving Dow out of business and why there was such a sudden demand for bromine in the US, so they lowered their price in the US all the way to 10 cents before they figured out what was going on!

My weekly best-of-Quora email is the best email I receive every week, and is where I got this story.  So I tip my hat to Quora and David Fry who provided this great story. 

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What’s the shrewdest, smartest maneuver you’ve ever seen in business?
Answer (1 of 104): Herbert Dow founded Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan when he invented a way to produce bromine cheaply. He sold the chemical for industrial purposes all over the US for 36 cents per pound at the turn of the 20th Century. He couldn’t go overseas, however, because the internatio…

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Flux pinning.

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I mean, why wouldn't you drop the cannonball in?

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