via Dangerous Minds Highly recommended for lobbyists and public relations scum.

Just as the identities we create for other people and things help us model their behavior, the identities we create for ourselves help us model our own behavior. We have a great deal of control over our own behavior, so our predictive models, in some respects, are also self-fulfilling prophecies. If you think that you [...]

… [T]hings that are familiar are—generally speaking—less risky. This is the same impulse that makes us buy the same soap or automobile over and over again: It’s worked in the past, so it’s likely a safe bet again today. With recognizable people, that positive feeling, that sense of comfort, often feels like a warm glow. [...]

[We] live in a world very different from the one we evolved in. Our reflexive defenses might be optimized for the risks endemic to living in small family groups in the East African highlands in 100,000 BC, not 2009 New York City. But we can go beyond fear, and actually think sensibly about security. Far [...]

Most therapists discourage the use of extreme terms. For example, a wife would be challenged when she says, “he never spends time with the kids,” unless she can prove that the term never is factually accurate. More often than not such a term isn’t entirely on target and, moreover, it often generates defensiveness on the [...]

Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for them. They are simply cheques that men [...]

The kind of lies we find most detestable are those with a malicious intent of some kind: lies designed to swindle or hoodwink us, lies that will cause us some pain down the road. – Are You a Liar?PsyBlog Some great statistics, too. Very believable.

Do not take the concept of interchangeable parts for granted. 1793 – One essential value of this organization is the idea of interchangeability. In 1793, Eli Whitney’s mass production of muskets, based on the principle of interchangeable parts, announced the dawn of the industrial age. – Google Timeline: interchangeable parts eli whitneyretrieved 2009-10-02 The paradigm [...]

Ehrenreich argues that positive thought has at times made us deaf to the pleas of those who warn of potential dangers—the Iraqi resistance, Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, and the Wall Street implosion. Urging positivity is not just beside the point when our circumstances are rotten, it’s also dangerously distracting. This is why Ehrenreich dedicates her book [...]

Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. – An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish from Unpopular Essaysby Bertrand Russell We are all guilty of this basic interpersonal faux pas – we play [...]