There’s nothing like late night improvements to your editor. Tonight’s finds:
And for those so interested, my .emacs file can be found on github.
I’ve mentioned Radiolab here before. It’s a remarkable radio program produced by WNYC that talks about science in delightful, entertaining, thought-provoking way. If you haven’t listened, please do yourself a favor and check it out.
I’d like to talk about a recent episode, Choice, and it’ll certainly help if you’re familiar with it. I’ll do my best to summarize however, where necessary.
So there’s this experiment. I won’t pretend that I’ve read the entire paper, but in brief:
Subjects are asked to complete a simple task – memorize a number, walk down a hall into another room and recite the number. Some people are given a two-digit number, others a seven-digit number. While walking down the hall, they are interrupted by a staff member who thanks them for their participation and rewards them with a snack of their choosing, either chocolate cake or fruit salad. Those who were given seven-digit numbers overwhelming chose cake.
First, there is no cake. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way…
So what was the conclusion? Simply put, our rational minds are feeble, so much so that a simple seven-digit number blows the fuse and our ability to make sensible decisions, like fruit over cake, are impaired. The fruit salad is there to gauge the logical response, since it speaks to our sensibilities concerning weight and appetite and overall health. Chocolate cake, is well, chocolate cake – the mental meltdown after heartache.
Almost immediately, I thought of the stereotype of the fat programmer/IT worker. Our job is to be logical all day – juggle numbers, variables and contexts, keeping all the threads between them tidy and organized. Our rational brains are chock full, and all the other decisions in our lives that could make use of some logic get stuck with a short stick. So we eat pizza, too much. Ignore significant others. Get too little sleep, say things before we think about them and beat up helpless puppies. Granted, a bit much of a generalization/overinflation, but it’s interesting to see a possible explanation for a common stereotype.
More so, perhaps we can learn something from this. If we’re really wired this way, then it should pay to unplug from time to time. Spool down in order to save capacity for other important decisions. Your logic is a limited resource.
I had something else to say about this episode, but it’s getting late. I’ll spit it out later.