A study featured in New Scientist this week showed that average people have a spectacular capability for short-circuiting their own judgment when in the presence of an expert.
This new data happens to fit perfectly into TMR’s 85% Theory. The theory states that since a large majority of professionals and advice-givers are incompetent, people should always take advice with a grain of salt and do their own due diligence before making decisions.
So, while I temporarily have the support of the scientific community on this one, let me preach for a moment: Don’t listen blindly to doctors, lawyers, accountants, politicians, brokers, astronauts, or clergy (or scientists). These people are just as fallible as anyone else. They are just as self-serving as anyone else. They are just as complacent and mistake-prone as anyone else.
Expert status is just as much a function of good publicity as it is of real practicable wisdom. You are almost always the most qualified advocate on your own behalf . And you always know yourself better than anyone else ever can.
“No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.”
Flickr User Techthis, seems to be on a roll. Another excellent periodic table. Though I would nitpick here and mention that I’m pretty sure Intellivision was distinct from Colecovision. As such, it fails to get a mention.
UPDATE 3/28: Hi there. Welcome to our little podcast/blog project. Due to last night’s BoingBoinging, we seem to have a lot of new visitors. So after you read about our shot across the bow of AIG, you might wanna check out some of our other features, like one of our 100+ podcast episodes. Here’s a good sample to start with.
Anyway, thanks for visiting. Feel free to leave comments and feedback and let us know how we can improve the Emu. END UPDATE
Here is a fascinating, gripping, and yet oddly disturbing lecture by Mythbusters co-host, Adam Savage.
I can’t match the level of obsessiveness it takes to devote one’s life to the fetishizing of these various objects and props. But hey, I’m sure something had to fuel Da Vinci and Newton, and Carrot Top.
Government tactics include random internet disruptions for citizens under 30, rationing the national supply of Cheetos and Dr. Pepper, and distributing free samples of heroin.
Other news outlets are reporting that a mammoth Chinese government project is underway to create an MMORPG-wide-government-sponsored gank group. The gank group, run by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would be designed to “grief” addicted gamers to the point of forcing them to either quit gaming or throw their computers out the window.
Not to be outdone, the Americans are working on their own elite team of griefers:
Last week, George Stepnanopolis conducted the worlds first network Twitter interview with John McCain. Celebrities are twitting all over the place. Senators were twitting during the President’s recent address to Congress. I guess you could say that the twits are everywhere.
While I’m sure this project was organized with the best of intentions, do the folks at Fixcnbc.com really expect CNBC executives to stop listening to the directives of their corporate overlords?
Stewart already exposed the nature of this cable channel’s (and many other networks) scam. CNBC has certain financial interests to protect, and creates programming most likely to disseminate favorable opinions of those interests. Period. It’s not as if CNBC was once a bastion of objective, investigative journalism that somehow lost its way. A majority of the hosts on its shows aren’t even professional journalists — just business community fluffers.
Only a truly massive public fervor would compel NBC to take action to ensure that CNBC once again acted as the Consumer News and Business Channel. Don’t expect that to happen anytime soon.
I don’t mean to be telling tales out of school, but friend and fellow Mepper, Storily Clayton, once shared with me a theory of time that I found both brilliant and strangely comforting.
The idea is as follows: If we think of time as the position of the Earth in relation to the Sun (which is how we typically measure a year), any given time is actually a very specific geographical position in the Earth’s orbit. In other words, the Earth is in a nearly identical spot today as it was a year ago. And so am I, and so are you, as are all other passengers on the giant blue sphere as it careens through space. We are constantly traveling through “time” at over 66,000 miles per hour around an orbital track over 585 million miles long.
This gives a strangely physical or spatial quality to time. And lends a lot more credence to the relativists’ notion of Space/Time as a single entity.
It also warrants a new type of observation. Are we prone to certain behaviors or actions at certain times of the year because we find ourselves in the same geographical location?
I mean, think about how returning to a formative location (a school you graduated from, a house you spent your childhood, a old familiar dive bar) affects your thoughts and brings back certain old lines of thinking, certain memories.
Now realize that visits to those locations are randomly strewn about space; each visit to the school (that wasn’t an anniversary of another visit) could have taken place hundreds of thousands of miles apart from each other (in the context of where you are in space). Relatively speaking, the only time when you’re anywhere near in the same place as you had been before, is on the yearly anniversary of a given day. Even if you are on the other side of the planet (having a circumference of about 25,000 miles) on that anniversary you’re still much closer to your location on that anniversary than a half hour later, when you’ve moved another 30,000 miles down the orbital track.
So Mr. Clayton often uses his blog as an empirical analysis of how different times tend to affect him. And I’ve begun to buy into this line of thinking. I just re-listened to Mep Report 18, an absolutely phenomenal specimen that we recorded almost exactly three years ago. And I listened to myself wrestle with life questions that have been occurring to me very recently. I suppose I can only truly be in the same mental “space” as I was for TMR 18 during this time of year.
