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 whitney
retrieved 2009-10-02

The paradigm which ushered in the Industrial Age begged to be applied everywhere – from muskets to sewing machines to locomotives to automobiles; machines which built machines became a matter of course.

In the “long run”, all of these factors of production can be adjusted by management. The “short run”, however, is defined as a period in which at least one of the factors of production is fixed.

A fixed factor of production is one whose quantity cannot readily be changed. Examples include major pieces of equipment, suitable factory space, and key managerial personnel.

A variable factor of production is one whose usage rate can be changed easily. Examples include electrical power consumption, transportation services, and most raw material inputs. In the short run, a firm’s “scale of operations” determines the maximum number of outputs that can be produced. In the long run, there are no scale limitations.

- Production Theory Basics
rev# 317048388 at Wikipedia.org
2009-09-30 07:39

Could the theory of production be applied to more than inanimate objects?

The machine-building machines still needed an operator who could be relied upon to behave without deviation.

Our knowledge about operant conditioning has greatly influenced educational practices. Children at all ages exhibit behavior. Teachers and parents are, by definition, behavior modifiers (if a child is behaviorally the same at the end of the academic year, you will not have done your job as a teacher; children are supposed to learn (i.e., produce relatively permanent change in behavior or behavior potential) as a result of the experiences they have in the school / classroom setting.

- Applications of Operant Conditioning to Education
Huitt, W., & Hummel, J. (1997)

Because students believe what they are told, explicitly and implicitly, about the world they are entering, they behave in ways that fulfill the prophecies the system makes about them and about that world. This is the linkback that completes the system: students do more than accept the way things are, and ideology does more than damp opposition. Students act affirmatively within the channels cut for them, cutting them deeper, giving the whole a patina of consent and weaving complicity into everyone’s life story.

- Legal Education as Training for Hierarchy
by Duncan Kennedy

A system of order is installed.

Complications were to be expected…

It appears then that there is a serious discrepancy between the American ideal of “rugged individualism” and its actual implementation. A teen-ager has to learn carefully that this blueprint for American individualism is not generalizable and that there are definite areas of limitations and prohibitions. The fact of non-generalizability destroys the simplicity and predictability of always responding to the same cue in identical or similar ways, thereby complicating the learning process and rendering the behavioral blueprint ambiguous and situational.

- Individualism vs. Conformity
life-us.blogspot.com
2009-11-19

It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

• War is peace
• Freedom is slavery
• Ignorance is strength

- 1984 by George Orwell

… though, eventually, superior virtue will surely triumph.

All flaws exposed
You are raw material
Do good work for us

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 to “complainers everywhere,” inciting them to “turn up the volume.” But surely there’s a middle way between clueless cheerleaders and grumpy prophets. The Dalai Lama shows you can strive to be content and remain angry about injustice.

- Positively Downbeat by Julia Baird
Newsweek.com
2009-09-25

While this will likely come off (initially, at least) as a kind of self-absorbed diatribe against the way some comport themselves, I firmly believe that you should stick with it – I do not claim to have the answers here, but the issues at play are well worth examining for a variety of reasons and, if one is to be an agent of change, one must apply oneself and one’s social relations to the problem of rooting out the rancor of competitive bias, misinformed opinions, and needless argument.

The Problem: Overconfidence

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 Essays
by Bertrand Russell

We are all guilty of this basic interpersonal faux pas – we play the part of the know-it-all because, in most cases, it works.

In every walk of life – and in the information technology sector especially – personalities and careers are built around competence and knowledge. Many strive to be the go-to person or the lynch-pin of the organization: a cushy salary and job security are the obvious rewards.

Overconfidence kicks in when an individual assumes his or her abilities or knowledge in one specialized task will carry over into others; in the past week I have seen a handful of patently-incorrect statements of fact (all of them easily debunked) made by well-intentioned individuals when answering the questions of novices in technical forums.

While there should be no competition in the context of answering a simple technical question, some Reptilian-complex self-preservation response must be kicking in and triggering the default response – overconfidence (often coupled with a competitive attitude).

The tendency toward competitive action arises from a lack of understanding – particularly in the context of a technical forum: to make inaccurate assertions is damaging to the knowledge and growth of the individual asking the question and the reputation of the individual answering the question. So why do it?

If your brain were a piece of computer hardware, the software running on your brain would be more advanced than anything a thousand code monkeys on a thousand terminals could crank out in a thousand years – this would software so efficient that its inner workings would be virtually impenetrable to all but the most genius of software architects (and that’s not to say we do not already have some of our brightest minds working to crack the puzzle at this very moment) … but …

The software running on your brain would also be some of the buggiest code in existence. Not only would it suffer from regular crashes (you have to sleep sometime, right?) and a wholly counter-intuitive lack of environmental awareness, the software running on your brain would include some lines which constitute the cardinal sin of all software:

Your brain does not validate input.

Believing is not a two-stage process involving first understanding then believing. Instead understanding is believing, a fraction of a second after reading it, you believe it until some other critical faculty kicks in to change your mind.

• Correspondence bias: this is people’s assumption that others’ behaviour reflects their personality, when really it reflects the situation.
• Truthfulness bias: people tend to assume that others are telling the truth, even when they are lying.
• The persuasion effect: when people are distracted it increases the persuasiveness of a message.
• Denial-innuendo effect: people tend to positively believe in things that are being categorically denied.
• Hypothesis testing bias: when testing a theory, instead of trying to prove it wrong people tend to look for information that confirms it.

- Why You Can’t Help Believing Everything You Read
PsyBlog
2009-09-17

Every software vulnerability known to man results from a failure to properly validate input. Your brain is a happy little piece of high-powered hardware just begging to be hacked – and if you’ve ever believed in Santa Claus or Jesus or the benevolence of profit-driven entities, your mind has already been compromised.

Apply security patches. Upgrade where possible. Reboot.

The danger of rote procedure, the power of symbol over substance, the shortcomings of human cognition and attentiveness, et cetera… nothing you haven’t heard before. Or is it?

Thanks for paying attention.

In American culture, evil is to the flowering of bad seeds within defective people, as obesity is to the manifestation of defective genes into addictive consumption. Evil is feared as the loss of personal willpower to restrain brutishness; obesity is disdained as the failure to contain gluttony. Obesity is not evil, but both share a common yet long undetected feature.

Why has victory been so elusive in these “wars” against the baleful and the bulging?

The answer: We have misidentified the enemy.

- Bad Seeds and Everyday Gluttony
by Phillip Zimbardo, PhD
2009-09-15

The System sent me and I’m here to help.

I think it’s safe to say that our culture isn’t going to help us to make changes. Ultimately, our culture doesn’t care about us, only about making money and accumulating power. Instead, it is up to each of us individually to decide that a different road is necessary if we wish to find what we seek.

- Popular Culture: Too Much Time On Our Hands
by Jim Taylor, Ph.D. for Psychology Today
2009-09-09

Culture is a virus with roots in every mind…

Terraforming prospects looked fruitless until the Systemic Terraform Procedure was developed. Rather than expend our resources by shuttling equipment and supplies to other planetary bodies, we crafted spore delivery systems which required a minuscule amount of energy to project into space across every conceivable vector.

The delivery system contained the nanotech devices which, when combined with their power source by the force of impact on a planetary body, composite indigenous materials into heterogeneous Systemic Terraform Operands. With minor intervention from the delivery system’s devices, the Systemic Terraform Operands will interact with the extant environ to extract resources and alter the atmospheric composition of the planetary body.

Systemic Terraform Operands will diversely mutate and compete as they apply Genetic Algorithms to the problems of resource extraction and alteration of atmospheric composition.

Yes, there remains the possibility that Systemic Terraform Operands will eventually develop self-awareness. This potentiality has been addressed by the inclusion of a Uniform Destruct Operator – they will never be like us.

Social optimists, of course, are in the happy position of expecting to be accepted and finding that, generally speaking, they are. Social pessimists, though, face the dark side of what sociologist Robert K. Merton — who coined the expression ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ — has called a ‘reign of error’. Expectation of rejection leads to the projection of colder, more defensive behaviour towards others, and this leads to actual rejection. “Uh-huh,” mutters the social pessimist, “I knew they wouldn’t like me”.

- The Acceptance Prophecy: How You Control Who Likes You
PsyBlog

There is no argument that Sigmund Freud was an odd duck.*

* See also: quack

Dominic Streatfeild writes of Freud’s passion for medicine in Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography – the father of psychoanalysis was a driving force behind the introduction of cocaine as local anesthesia (for treatment of “nasal reflex neurosis”) and an antidepressant in European medicine. Freud was also a regular user.

The pernicious roots of Freud’s theories have been intrinsic to psychoanalysis from its very origin – from the infantile incest fantasies and bowel-related neurosis to disjointed psychic apparatchik and the interplay of Eros and Thanatos.

William James, pragmatist and author of Principles of Psychology described the psychologist’s fallacy thusly: “The great snare of the psychologist is the confusion of his own standpoint with that of the mental fact about which he is making his report. I shall hereafter call this the ‘psychologist’s fallacy’ par excellence” (p. 196)

Do Freud’s theories apply? Should they apply to anyone, that person would be Freud.

If you abused cocaine for twelve years you would probably have some crackpot theories, too.

Freud’s pseudoscience (and countless watered-down but no less incorrect derivatives) remain en vogue with some mental health practitioners to this day, despite ample evidence that the theories are bunk. It helps that the theories and attendant therapies do not resolve problems: a lifelong prescription of psychoanalysis for every patient ensures that Freud’s followers will be billing at $75.00 an hour well nigh to eternity.

Against all odds, some followers of Freud’s cocaine-fueled fallacy are starting to see the light:

But that course is now extinct, and readers of my latest book, The Imprinted Brain; how genes set the balance between autism and psychosis (Jessica Kingsley May 2009) will find that a part of the last chapter reads a bit like those product-withdrawal notices you see in your supermarket. Certainly, this was an important aspect of the book for me: it gave me a chance to recant my Freudian faith and confess to the egregious errors I had made.

What had happened? You need to read the whole book to understand that, but a short answer is: I discovered autism, and more important still, I began to see that, far from being a cure for mental problems, psychoanalysis was a cultural embodiment of what I would now call hyper-mentalism.

- Product-withdrawal Notice: I was wrong about Freud
by Christopher Badcock, Ph.D.

While it is admirable that Dr. Badcock would retract his support for Freud’s work, the “product withdrawal” metaphor is patently disingenuous … generally when an actual product recall occurs the consumers who’ve purchased the product receive a replacement or refund.

Do you plan to refund those who bought your prior books, Dr. Badcock?