va·ca·tion

   [vey-key-shuhn-]: 

a temporary escape from your own problems.

Source: my silly brain

Only a mass of mystery and misunderstandings; of knowledge and acceptance.

Cognitive Bias

Very Interesting. Read.

-New Yorker

Here’s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs ten cents. This answer is both obvious and wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and a dollar and five cents for the bat.)

For more than five decades, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and professor of psychology at Princeton, has been asking questions like this and analyzing our answers. His disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way we think about thinking. While philosophers, economists, and social scientists had assumed for centuries that human beings are rational agents—reason was our Promethean gift—Kahneman and his scientific partner, the late Amos Tversky, demonstrated that we’re not nearly as rational as we like to believe.

When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions. These shortcuts aren’t a faster way of doing the math; they’re a way of skipping the math altogether. Asked about the bat and the ball, we forget our arithmetic lessons and instead default to the answer that requires the least mental effort.

Although Kahneman is now widely recognized as one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, his work was dismissed for years. Kahneman recounts how one eminent American philosopher, after hearing about his research, quickly turned away, saying, “I am not interested in the psychology of stupidity.”

The philosopher, it turns out, got it backward. A new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology led by Richard West at James Madison University and Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto suggests that, in many instances, smarter people are more vulnerable to these thinking errors. Although we assume that intelligence is a buffer against bias—that’s why those with higher S.A.T. scores think they are less prone to these universal thinking mistakes—it can actually be a subtle curse.

West and his colleagues began by giving four hundred and eighty-two undergraduates a questionnaire featuring a variety of classic bias problems. Here’s a example:

In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?

Your first response is probably to take a shortcut, and to divide the final answer by half. That leads you to twenty-four days. But that’s wrong. The correct solution is forty-seven days.

West also gave a puzzle that measured subjects’ vulnerability to something called “anchoring bias,” which Kahneman and Tversky had demonstrated in the nineteen-seventies. Subjects were first asked if the tallest redwood tree in the world was more than X feet, with X ranging from eighty-five to a thousand feet. Then the students were asked to estimate the height of the tallest redwood tree in the world. Students exposed to a small “anchor”—like eighty-five feet—guessed, on average, that the tallest tree in the world was only a hundred and eighteen feet. Given an anchor of a thousand feet, their estimates increased seven-fold.

But West and colleagues weren’t simply interested in reconfirming the known biases of the human mind. Rather, they wanted to understand how these biases correlated with human intelligence. As a result, they interspersed their tests of bias with various cognitive measurements, including the S.A.T. and the Need for Cognition Scale, which measures “the tendency for an individual to engage in and enjoy thinking.”

The results were quite disturbing. For one thing, self-awareness was not particularly useful: as the scientists note, “people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.” This finding wouldn’t surprise Kahneman, who admits in “Thinking, Fast and Slow” that his decades of groundbreaking research have failed to significantly improve his own mental performance. “My intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy”—a tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task—“as it was before I made a study of these issues,” he writes.

Perhaps our most dangerous bias is that we naturally assume that everyone else is more susceptible to thinking errors, a tendency known as the “bias blind spot.” This “meta-bias” is rooted in our ability to spot systematic mistakes in the decisions of others—we excel at noticing the flaws of friends—and inability to spot those same mistakes in ourselves. Although the bias blind spot itself isn’t a new concept, West’s latest paper demonstrates that it applies to every single bias under consideration, from anchoring to so-called “framing effects.” In each instance, we readily forgive our own minds but look harshly upon the minds of other people.

And here’s the upsetting punch line: intelligence seems to make things worse. The scientists gave the students four measures of “cognitive sophistication.” As they report in the paper, all four of the measures showed positive correlations, “indicating that more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.” This trend held for many of the specific biases, indicating that smarter people (at least as measured by S.A.T. scores) and those more likely to engage in deliberation were slightly more vulnerable to common mental mistakes. Education also isn’t a savior; as Kahneman and Shane Frederick first noted many years ago, more than fifty per cent of students at Harvard, Princeton, and M.I.T. gave the incorrect answer to the bat-and-ball question.

What explains this result? One provocative hypothesis is that the bias blind spot arises because of a mismatch between how we evaluate others and how we evaluate ourselves. When considering the irrational choices of a stranger, for instance, we are forced to rely on behavioral information; we see their biases from the outside, which allows us to glimpse their systematic thinking errors. However, when assessing our own bad choices, we tend to engage in elaborate introspection. We scrutinize our motivations and search for relevant reasons; we lament our mistakes to therapists and ruminate on the beliefs that led us astray.

The problem with this introspective approach is that the driving forces behind biases—the root causes of our irrationality—are largely unconscious, which means they remain invisible to self-analysis and impermeable to intelligence. In fact, introspection can actually compound the error, blinding us to those primal processes responsible for many of our everyday failings. We spin eloquent stories, but these stories miss the point. The more we attempt to know ourselves, the less we actually understand.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06/daniel-kahneman-bias-studies.html#ixzz1xeekh04J

A lot of the things I see today, I saw differently yesterday. Little by little, it's still happening. What can I say? This life is crazy. I'm making the most, before I forget what it's like to feel, when I'm dead, not even a century from today.

MANHATTANHENGE

It's been awhile since my last post. I think I'm busy. Next week is my last week at my full time job. Looking forward to being able to get a good nights rest for a bit! going to see how long I can go before I need another job. That should be exciting.

Today was Manhattanhenge. We got there about 2 minutes too late. But I walked away with this ridiculous photo.... and so did they.

 If you didn't catch it... I ended up taking a photo of a photographer, photographing another photographer photographing somebody who was photographing somebody taking photos of the Manhattan sunset with a Polaroid camera. I wonder if anyone was taking a photo of me? Weird....

 I want to find all the photographers and put their images in sequencial order. That would be awesomesauce.

Friendships can last a lifetime.

Ben & Jerry's

Ran 3.75 miles in 29 minutes... Then when I got home I ate a half quart of Ben & Jerry's. YUM

It all starts and then you're dead.

It all starts....

As a toddler: eat your greens

As a child: eat your greens, be nice to others

As a teenager: eat your greens, be nice to others, get good grades

As a younger adult: eat your greens, be nice to others, get good grades, be successful.

As a middle aged man: eat your greens, be nice to others, get good grades, be successful, create a functioning family.

As a senior citizen: eat your greens, be nice to others, get good grades, be successful, create a functioning family, watch your blood pressure

As an elderly man: eat your greens, be nice to others, get good grades, be successful, create a functioning family, watch your blood pressure, keep your sanity.

And then you're dead.






Quite Relative to the existence of this blog post: http://unplugthetv.com/post/20481301288/7-billion-how-did-we-get-so-big-so-fast

I feel like your words speak directly to my soul. I understand you. All that you are. And I fucking love you for that.

Life is too short.

Words are too long.

Being so lost has never felt so great. I'm completely freaked out right now but I wouldn't have it any other way. I keep taking these paths that lead me to something greater. Is it all accidental or is it my destiny? That was a pointless question. I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

How many times do I have to remind myself that the future is right in front of me? And that the only person stopping me from achieving any of those goals.... would be this guy right here. Obviously I am having some problems with committing to that fact, otherwise I wouldn't be writing about this right now.

my goal is to reach my goals. not only reach, but to grasp.

Direction

Walk in your own footsteps.
Wander deeper into the woods.
Leave behind all you are;
Take with you what you'll become.

Listserve.com

You are a unique, badass, and multi-faceted human being. There is no one else even remotely like you. Who are you to withhold your greatness from the world?

Why would you waste a second of your precious time pretending to be someone else? How dare you hide your gifts from us? Why would we want you to be like every other [insert category here] out there?

We don't.

We want you. The authentic you. The real, genuine, imperfect, weird, quirky, REAL you. Anything less than that is not enough.

Just be you. It's the most amazing gift you can give to yourself, to me, to everyone in your world, and everyone in the world.

It's easier for some people than it is for others. If it's hard for you, make it your life's work to search for and find your authentic self. There is nothing more urgent.

Take full responsibility for your thoughts, behaviors, actions, the consequences of those actions, and the impact you have on people around you.

Be grateful. Appreciate and love what you have and what's working.

Seek clarity. Figure out what you like, what you want, and what's important to you.

Make decisions based on what's aligned with your values and what you're passionate about.

Learn to let go of the things/people/thoughts that don't serve you or steer you toward happiness and fulfillment.

If you know what's important to you, it's easier to know why you are doing things and what things you should be doing. Don't waste time doing things that are not related to what's important to you.

Dare to be emotionally accessible, vulnerable, and to expand your emotional range. Go for depth, richness, and honesty. It's raw, it's terrifying, and it's exhilarating.

Whatever you are, whoever you are, and whatever it is that you're all about - OWN IT.

Be unapologetically you. Know what you're about and pursue your dreams with an open heart and genuine passion. If someone doesn't like it, that's fine. But it's not your problem.

Seek resonance. This is where the magic happens. Don't fear it. Embrace it.

Be alive. Be real. Be you.

I dare you.


Sandra Possing
sandrapossing@gmail.com
San Francisco, CA


-The Listserve 05/04/2012

it's kind of humbling once you realize there are 7,000,000,000 people on earth and that each one of them is experiencing their own life one day at a time.

“Because I always feel like running
Not away, because there is no such place
Because if there was, I would have found it by now
Because it's easier to run,
Easier than staying and finding out you're the only one who didn't run
Because running will be the way your life and mine will be described,
As in "the long run"
Or as in having "given someone a run for his money"
Or as in "running out of time"
Because running makes me look like everyone else, though I hope there will never be cause for that
Because I will be running in the other direction, not running for cover
Because if I knew where cover was, I would stay there and never have to run for it
Not running for my life, because I have to be running for something of more value to be running and not in fear
Because the thing I fear cannot be escaped, eluded, avoided, hidden from, protected from, gotten away from,
Not without showing the fear as I see it now
Because closer, clearer, no sir, nearer
Because of you and because of that nice
That you quietly, quickly be causing
And because you're going to see me run soon and because you're going to know why I'm running then
You'll know then
Because I'm not going to tell you now”

---Gil Scott-Heron

Looking pretty in a city of a million lost personalities. 

Being shy is not fun.

It's going to be a fantastic summer.

“I am my own biggest critic. Before anyone else has criticized me, I have already criticized myself. But for the rest of my life, I am going to be with me and I don't want to spend my life with someone who is always critical. So I am going to stop being my own critic. It's high time that I accept all the great things about me.” 
― C. JoyBell C.

I can't stop thinking... about anything. friends, this city, my future...

My world seems to have been flipped completely upside down.

I'm still here, but nobody's around. Nothing makes nearly as much sense as it used to.

I'm moving to the woods... on an island...alone..(Not in Central Park) 

Try to come and find me.

It's cheesy

blind before I met you

Everyone needs to see this.

Stanley Kubrick

Photos Of Stanley Kubrick's New York City, Circa The 1940s:

Rough night on the subway, 1946

Women on the subway, 1946

Shoe shine boys, 1947

Columbia University students at a bar, 1948

Shoe Shine Boy Mickey bringing laundry to the laundromat, 1947

Waldorf Astoria Circa 1940's

Madison Square Garden—Fight Night, people outside Madison Square Garden, 1948

Where is the sea lion?

The New York Times Metropolitan Diary:


Dear Diary:

METROPOLITAN DIARY

Reader Tales From the City

I’m sitting at the information desk one afternoon at the American Museum of Natural History. A woman, with a heavy accent, approaches to ask a question.

“Where’s the sea lion?” she asks.

“In the Hall of Ocean Life,” I respond.

She gives me a perplexed look, then tries again.

“Where’s the sea lion?”

I try to give her a little more help. “In the Hall of Ocean Life. Go to the lower level of the Hall, turn left, and you will see two sea lions behind a pane of glass.”

Still perplexed, and now impatient, she tries one more time:

“No. Choo-choo. The C line.”

A midnight campfire deep inside a secluded forest.

The fire burns safely; deep inside a secluded forest.

Sitting directly towards the warmth on an dry rotted fallen tree, I turn my head and neck around, squinting into complete darkness.

There's nothing to see past the next tree with a soft warm glow in any direction anyway.

Heat and the sounds of crackling timber signaling into my ear to reassure me.

A half crescent moon dodges clouds and tree branches.

looking down at my twisting toes making patterns fire lit in the dirt, pulverizing last seasons fallen brown leaves

I'm gazing blankly into the fire until my vision blurs

I want this to last forever.

I feel completely content.

Next Chapter

Even though I try to constantly remind myself of direction. I think I'm officially lost. The next couple of months should be quite interesting and new. For the better? We'll see.

Noah Kalina

Noah Kalina. 

Will always be my favorite photographer.

Incredible

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

INTERESTING

Scientists have speculated that the human brain features a "God spot," one distinct area of the brain responsible for spirituality. Now, University of Missouri researchers have completed research that indicates spirituality is a complex phenomenon, and multiple areas of the brain are responsible for the many aspects of spiritual experiences. Based on a previously published study that indicated spiritual transcendence is associated with decreased right parietal lobe functioning, MU researchers replicated their findings. In addition, the researchers determined that other aspects of spiritual functioning are related to increased activity in the frontal lobe.

Holland Tunnel

Moon

APRIL 2012