One of my recent reading kicks has been for those trendy "how we think and why your brain is no more capable of free choice than a hamster's" books. You know the books - The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Everything is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts, Thinking Fast and Slow, by Danial Kahneman, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, by David Brooks, etc, ad nauseum, and so on.
These authors are all smitten with the new studies which seem to imply that our subconscious mind is making all our choices for us while we blithely go around assuming we're in control. I've come to find the methodology and conclusions of these brain studies highly suspect -- rather like modern phrenology. And for a field whose conclusions lean on the side of questioning everything we think we know about ourselves, their conclusions sure sound suspiciously confident.
All these authors cite studies done on human brains while their owners are in MRIs looking at various pictures or told to think on some topic. Nothing contrived here! Nothing unscientific about showing self-selected test subjects researcher-selected photographs while in a metal coffin! I think we can now definitively say that our brains light up.
Of all the books, I like Taleb's The Black Swan best. It is good to be shown how difficult it is for our minds to encompass super big numbers and difficult statistics. Accurate risk assessment is difficult for humans. We should constantly remind ourselves of our tendency to rationalize and ignore. You've got me there. We do delude ourselves. Some of us may even be closer to automatons than to Socrates, think of the Occupy Wall Street types. But to go farther, to assume all of us are automatons in the control of a subconscious that apparently is bent on us buying groceries from the perimeter of the store, is idiotic.
And in these human behavioural studies, 100% of the time results are never 100%. Instead, its 80% of the time, or 78% of participants did such and such. What about the rest? Outliers? Margin of error? Contrarians who are as predictable in their contrariness? Or free will? Ask the hamster.
Fixed your paragraph 3. "cite" vice "site"
You should publish this. It's well written.
Posted by: GrammarNazi | 01/12/2012 at 03:54 AM
I don't know why I can't remember "cite" for "site"! Better than the time I used "skewered" for "skewed" in a paper for a history exam. Otherwise, I sleighed that essay!
Tks, M
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