Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
Reddit moderated sub-community with strict rules, where participants discuss various topics for the purpose of understanding opposing viewpoints.
A discussion on the You Are Not So Smart podcast explains what kind of arguments are most likely to change people's minds, and what kinds of minds are most likely to be changed.
There's a psychological phenomenon behind it: the Dunning-Kruger effect.
"When psychologists Dunning and [Justin] Kruger first described the effect in 1999, they argued that people lacking knowledge and skill in particular areas suffer a double curse. First, they make mistakes and reach poor decisions. But second, those same knowledge gaps also prevent them from catching their errors. In other words, poor performers lack the very expertise needed to recognize how badly they're doing."
Also see, what the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn't:
So the bias is definitively not that incompetent people think they're better than competent people. Rather, it's that incompetent people think they're much better than they actually are. But they typically still don't think they're quite as good as people who, you know, actually are good.
New research explains why we pretend to know more than we do.
We are not great reasoners. Most people don't like to think at all,
or like to think as little as possible. And by most, I mean roughly
70 percent of the population. Even the rest seem to devote a lot of
their resources to justifying beliefs that they want to hold,
as opposed to forming credible beliefs based only on fact.
...
But some people do try to rise above the crowd: to verify claims
independently, to give fair hearing to others' claims, and to follow
the data where it actually leads. In fact, many people are trained
to do that: scientists, judges, forensic investigators, physicians, etc.
That doesn't mean they always do (and they don't always),
just that they're supposed to try.
Antitrust was necessary "not because they're too big, but because there's no market solution" to Google and Facebook. The barriers to entry are now so high nobody is going bust open the ad duopoly. This is the point made by Oracle in its European complaint. Effective behavioural advertising requires hods of data, and nobody can gather sufficient data enough to compete against Google's "superprofiles", or Facebook's Graph in behavioural advertising.
When it comes to judging visual beauty,
there are no hard-and-fast biological rules.
...
cross-cultural studies revealed something surprising: perception
of the (Müller-Lyer) illusion varies widely-and Westerners are outliers.
When scientists measured how different the segments appeared to
different groups of people, they found that Westerners saw the
greatest distortion. The Zulu, Fang, and Ijaw people of Africa
observed half as much. The San foragers of the Kalahari didn't
perceive the illusion at all: they recognized right away that a
and b were the same length. People raised in Western countries
literally don't see things the same way as the foragers of the
Kalahari. Your experience of the world changes what you take to be
true, and vision is no exception.
by Morgan Housel
Some things are timeless. Bubbles will always occur. A handful of companies will dominate industries. Things won't be fair. Patience will be rewarded, stubbornness will be penalized, and we'll never be able to tell which is which.
But I'm not optimistic on learning specific lessons from individual events. We are not the NTSB. There's a limited amount we can learn from one event that makes us better prepared to handle the next event.
I think it's rare that we can say, "Always do this." Or even, "Never do that again." Unless it's flagrantly obvious or reckless, "I have an evidence-based strategy but I am perpetually open to amending those views as our ever-evolving world adapts, and I know I'll occasionally be wrong even when I technically should have been right" should be your position on almost every business, investing, and economic topic.
One possible reason why Trump won't laugh:
The less honest you are with yourself, the less likely you are to laugh.
...
Another cost to distorting the truth is that you're less likely
to even get why something is funny, much less laugh at it.
"If you get rid of those poorly functioning, sluggish cells, then that allows cancer cells to proliferate," says lead researcher Paul Nelson.
"And if you get rid of, or slow down, those cancer cells, then that allows sluggish cells to accumulate."
Thanks to their understanding of causality, crows can conceptualize, create, and use tools. They play, learn from each other, and can manipulate humans into helping them out. Some types of crows can even count.
Eric Raymond on computer languages
I was thinking a couple of days ago about the new wave of systems
languages now challenging C for its place at the top of the
systems-programming heap -- Go and Rust, in particular.
...
So Go is designed for the C-like jobs
Python can't handle.