For this trip I really want to soak in a lot of the experience even though our time was limited. This post is a little brain dump of things I found amusing, interesting or otherwise notable.

American airlines at ohare is way more enjoyable than the united airlines experience.

A city with abundant taxis is a luxury I really appreciate.

Holy cow is there a big difference between 33 degrees in Austin,Tx and 15 degrees in Chicago wind!

It’s amazing when a restaurant you used to love is as good as you remember it almost a decade later.

It seems 8 years is the limit at which 90% of your old social circle moves on or moves away. 4 years ago a visit to Chicago was filled with visits to parties and friends still in the area. Only a handful this time around.

Kids go with snow way better than adults.

Downtown Chicago on a Sunday morning is so quiet. You can own the place. It’s great.

Why does a town always build the awesome stuff after you leave? Hahahah

Man is it great to talk math and the business of math with my pal John Boller. He’s got a deep knowledge of math and is such a great communicator!

Watching kids at a great museum demonstrates the value of these cultural institutions. Also, it’s hard to create a great museum. The field museum is one of the best.

I spoke to at least 5 guys at the bears game that came alone, travelled hundreds of miles for this really big game. One guy taking pictures of the old soldier field structure almost teared up. He’d driven himself in from s. Carolina and had just enough money for one ticket. Ya, it’s just football, right? I spent the first part of a day with a gentleman from Eugene, oregon. His family sent him solo because they could only afford one ticket and this was something they really wanted for him. He showed me the texts and pics of his family prepping for the game. We took pictures with him and the Chicago police and outside of all the soldier field displays. Ya, its clearly just football.

Heavily marketing beer cutoff at end of third quarter seems to encourage fans to pound beers at halftime. Stadium folks might consider changing that marketing a bit depending on their objectives. As for me, it was so freaking cold pounding beers seemed more like punishment than the normal enjoyment it might bring. I actually drank a coffee and ate nachos cause cheese was warm.

I laughed so hard when I went to the bathroom cause there was a beer man selling.

I did order an Mgd in the stands and the guy next to me asked if I was still in college. He was drinking a miller lite. What am I missing?

The national anthem and jet flyover was quite possibly one of the coolest things ive ever experienced.

There was a moment in the third quarter when I was so cold and dejected for a brief moment I considered leaving. I fought myself back up to my seat and pulled a haine! Glad I did. That was about to an epic comeback.

Several people yelled at me via txt that I stopped txting. My hands outside of gloves could not operate these stinking phones. Sorry folks, I’m a good txter, but I couldn’t do it!

Anticipation is the best state to be in. Once the adrenaline fades you get very cold. Lucky for me after the game all I had to do was walk ocer to the she’d aquarium to meet my family. That was awesome.

Chicago is the kind of place where you don’t need a plan before wandering the streets for some decent food. Had to the feed the family after the game and all the obvious places were jammed. Found some pizza and wings on state.

Who’s idea was it to order all that food at seven at night?

Indoor swimming pools on a cold night in Chicago are awesome for kids.

Dani and i feel asleep last night watching “inside 9/11″ on nat geo. Um, wow. Almost ten years ago we were living in Chicago down the street from our hotel. Watching that show brought my 25th birthday to the forefront of my memories. What a day. Hard to remember all that unfolding in real time. That show plus all the sausage and pizza during the day generated some strange dreams indeed.

Note to self, never ever stick your hand into cab seat looking for the belt connector the morning after a city hosts a big event. I do not know what got on my hand but the fistful of baby wipes did not clean my hand and brain to my satisfaction.

Traveling with our girls is getting more fun as they age. They really get excited by trips now and seem to appreciate “cool” things.

Reese said she was mad the packers won and all those people were shouting go pack go. But she wanted to know how to spell packers. Bella called me a wolf because I howl at football games. I think they have the basics of bears packers down.

Thanks to dani for doing this ! Man, what a weekend!

Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.

– Herbert Simon

So it’s not that will doesn’t exist; it’s that the free part is problematic — a lot of people see free will and say, “Well, you’re showing there’s no free will; therefore, people have no intentions or will.” No. There is will, and will can be shaped by a host of factors: your genetic background, your early experience with your home and your family, your caretakers, you playmates, cultural influences bombarding us through the media and through socializing with your peers (and, thus what they like and what they think and what they believe from their parents). All this is being soaked up like a sponge by little kids.

– John Bargh, Conversation on EDGE.org

and more zingers…

we’re much more accurate about predicting other people than we are at predicting ourselves. All these things going on inside of us get in the way, and especially the positive illusions about ourselves.

It’s a great read.  if I put a link right here, I bet you’d read it (you’re expecting the link but it’s here instead!)

The reality is, in modern American, there is a healthy amount of conditioned incompetence.  Yes, as a society, we really don’t know better, don’t know different.  For a very long time, if ever,  we have not had to deal with some of the incredibly complex issues at play now.  For the most part our businesses, schools, health care, housing markets have been swept along in a 30 year string of mostly growth and expansion.

the last couple of generations literally do not know better. We have to develop new behaviors, new thinking, new ways of getting it done.

If beings from another galaxy were to show up on our planet on an anthropological mission, what would they think about all of this? What would they conclude?  How is it all connected? What patterns would they find?

All of This right now refers to these very diverse situations on my mind:

Modern Day Pirates

It’s amazing we don’t have more modern day pirates.  It appears relatively easy to take a non military ship.  And, as far as I can tell, we have no well-crafted strategies for recovering ships and crew.  Certainly our lack of strategies is a result of the fact that the US has basically commanded the seas for most of the last century.  We haven’t been tested and lack the response behavior.  Beyond the lack of strategies on our side, it’s very unclear what the pirates have to gain that they couldn’t gain from less risky efforts.  A very strange situation.

False Populism

Are the people really sufficiently suffering to not just demand change via signage create it?  I propose we’ve mostly lost the behaviors over the last 2 generations to implement change.  While the 60s generation marched, sat in, yelled, voted, engaged… later generations built chat rooms, IM, blogs and Twitter.  We rant online.  We don’t look each other in the eye as much.  And when we do, we talk politely…. and then fire up our iPhones to twitter our outrage.  Our online behaviors are very disconnected from meaningful real world context.  The conversations we have online rarely have direct consequences – in stark contrast to having a face to face debate, or showing up to the local public hearing, or meeting in our communities.  Yes, the last national election was a nice break from the norm – people actually used online conversation to get out into the world – but for the most part that was a short lived activity.

Perhaps it’s just a result of the news cycle.  We move on to the next news story before we’ve fully grokked the last set of events.  I don’t buy that the news cycle prevents us from focusing.  I really think that we are living more and more disconnected lives in the world while we think we’re more connected than ever online.  In a world full of status updates, text messages, dropped cell phone calls, bad web ex meetings, as a generation we’ve lost the ability to hold a long, thoughtful conversation.  We don’t read – we scan.  We don’t debate – we tweet.  We don’t listen – we mult task.

Is this “bad” or “good”?  That’s the wrong question.  Does it get us what we want in the world? Does it help us lead the lives we want? If not, what will?  Perhaps marching on our leaders and community organization and old town councils aren’t the mechanisms to drive change anymore.  What is? what comes next?

Newspapers and Journalism in Crisis

So is journalism really in trouble? is it just the papers? is it the print medium? is it the news business model? is it advertising?

Is finding someone to blame going to change what’s going on?

For me, the biggest question that probably will illuminate various reasons for chaos for the news business is: For organizations and businesses where recognizing and analyzing what’s going on in the world is their business, why were they so slow in recognizing their own crisis and coming up with course corrections?  Ironic, to say the least.

I don’t think the print medium is going away.  The existing business models are already gone, it’s just on fumes right now.

Golf as a One Man Brand

TV ratings for golf are 20-50% controlled by Tiger Woods.  I imagine other business numbers like new players, club sales, tee times, Nike clothing sales are equally affected.  This is truly an amazing thing.  What’s more amazing is how in 12 years, PGA and golf in general has not found a way to diversify.  Though it’s ok for now, in 10-15 years if golf hasn’t found a new format or a new set of interesting golfers, it’s going be in serious trouble.

What does it need to do?  Really simple – start getting people from the real world.  Most of the “golf brand” is not at all what the average person is.  Watch the coverage of the Masters.  As beautiful as it all is – it isn’t aspirational at all to most people.  It’s actually off putting, especially now.  Rich, mostly white, people at a country club all making millions.  None of it looks attainable.  It’s an argument golf has faced before… but they don’t seem to listen.

Boxing in modern times

It’s just plane strange if not downright boring.  The modern sport just doesn’t really fit in the mainstream culture like it used to.  The sport has few exciting athletes – in terms of personality and wider cultural presence.  The media surrounding boxing is dreadfully boring with the same old same old announcers and approaches to coverage.  A few years ago when The Contender started as a reality show, I thought there was some promise in reaching a new audience with a more raw, more down to earth viewing experience.

That didn’t last and the sport didn’t really commit to it.

Beyond the media, the sport itself doesn’t really work with a modern audience.  Refs stop fights too early to get the big prize knock outs and most managers keep their great boxers out of big matches.  So why bother to watch?  2 guys punching each other without the purpose of knocking the other one out really undermines the sport.  I’m not saying boxing is good or bad or making any moral judgment.  The idea of fighting is to beat someone up.  When that’s no longer the objective, what’s the big payoff?  When does the audience getting its money worth?  A tactical boxing match is highly boring for non-expert viewers.

UFC and IFC and other mixed martial arts have filled this gap and they are running away with the audience, and many times the athletes.

Also, the idea of overly priced tickets and PPV events doesn’t work in a recession.  Last night’s match card didn’t draw much of a live audience.  I say if boxing returned to smaller gyms and more intimate coverage of lesser known, but more charming athletes they’d have a shot to be relevant.

Celebrity, Method Acting and the Paparazzi

One day soon this celebrity obsession thing is going to fall to pieces in the media.  I know, I know, I certainly buy enough US Weekly’s and have run many entertainment portals and sites – who am I to say something like this?  For a long time I’ve thought this whole “let’s watch everything celebrities do” would get terribly boring.  Celebrities generally lead unremarkable lives, certainly not lives anyone would actually want.

Ok, so occasionally there’s an interesting story or some really bizarre behavior.  I’m pretty certain the behavior of celebrities is conditioned by us and the media and is not a distinct feature of the celebrity. So, if it’s the bizarro behavior we like, you really can just annoy anyone in your neighborhood enough and they too will punch you in the face.  You can now put it on YouTube and get famous.

Point is… methinks TMZ and US Weekly probably won’t have a market on this forever. At least that’s my hope.  Move on.

Stock Market Index Tells You Nothing

The current  behavior of the stock market indices provides no insight into what’s happening in the world.  News outlets and investors wish it did.  In fact, I challenge you to figure out what most economists and “leading thinkers” actually think by reading news articles and economic reports that talk about the DJI or SP500.

Probability of Life in The Universe

I just read an article in the May issue of Discovery Magazine about how the universe has a higher probability of life formation than we thought.  Why can’t we let go of this desire to prove our existence is inevitable (either as something so rare it must be divine, or something so probable of course we’re here)?  Folks, let it go.  There’s simply know way to know how likely life was or is in the universe.  Even if we find life elsewhere… 2 out of infinity is still undefined.

Bigger question: why do we care whether it’s likely or not?

Alright, enough, time for some Rockband or something.

Aliens from another planet – if you are reading this and can understand – please do tell us what you figure out, because we certainly can’t make sense out of all this.

If I were to put sound to  various cause and effect data trails from complex systems (like human behavior), I imagine it would sound a lot like that.

• What is the cause/are the causes and effects of human behavior?
• is stimulus a cause?
• is it an effect?
• can a behavior be a reinforcer at the same time as being reinforced?
• Are schedules of reinforcement causes AND effects?  are they exhausted from the behavioral system as much as they are determinants?

Perhaps these questions are just Saturday afternoon philosophical/blog musings.  However, I do think the strange loopiness of animal behavior (humans in particular) is what makes almost all models of behavior inconsistent and mostly wrong.  Or maybe just my understanding and application of them is wrong.

I have another question.  Human memory is not like computer memory.  it’s definitively fuzzy… so…

is there a difference between remembering  the past inaccurately or predicting the future inaccurately?

in both cases aren’t we just modeling context/situation/filling in details based on limited inputs?

and the biggest question is… DOES ANY OF THIS HELP UNDERSTANDING?

for fun, more about strange loops here and here.

For reference, here’s Google Trends for Ponzi/Ponzi Scheme vs. Britney Spears.  I use Britney Spears as a proxy for actual volume because she’s been a top search term for 8 or 9 years.

Ponzi Searches on the Web

On Time.com blog, Curious Capitalist, we see the commenters and the author trying to define and assign “good” and “bad” judgments to what happened with Madoff and what’s happening with Social Security.

The problem with all the debate, like many important debates, is that we’re arguing about definitions and phrasing, instead of analyzing the real issues and behavior.

Whether Madoff was running a Ponzi Scheme or whether social security is some enlightened version of one is irrelevant to what we do about the behaviors contributing to the financial mess we’re in.

In almost all the current financial situations (Social security, housing, credit slump, Madoff…), the contigency management is very inefficient.  The rewards and punishments for taking on big risk are many degrees removed from the risky behavior.  The reinforcers produced by the situations get lost in translation between computerized trading, industry memos, and the media.   We’re rewarding behaviors in one context and punishing them in another (spending without transparency – the bailout- is OK, but it isn’t OK for these businesses… which is it?)

The rules are not clear at all and so no one can play by them.

You can’t call any of this irrational either.  it’s perfectly rational to keep investing and spending when you get reinforced (returns on investment) over a long period of time.  You come to expect those returns and habituate to the risk involved in investing in companies, financial products and services that don’t have defined outcomes.  You can’t totally blame the originator of these investment vehicles either as people keep investing, further reinforcing the behavior of the originator.  (I’m simplifying a bit here).

Consider the life of Ponzi. (Find better sources than Wikipedia, but this will do for now because it’s online)  His history can be interpreted in many ways.  What strikes me is how it builds behavior by behavior.  All along the way as people wonder, they continue to make him rich, provide for him, write about him.  Even until his death he still found work, press and basically what he needed.  So, was it a character flaw in his gene code that created the great mail fraud, or was it the contingencies all along the way?

What’s to think this scenario, now played out with Paulson, Madoff, AIG… isn’t going to be played out again and again when we don’t change the environment?  The actors in this play are irrelevant pieces.  It’s the environment (the media, the surrounding people, the culture, the financial system..).

Do I have an answer? No.  You have to chip away by managing contingencies both with your own life and the wider public.  There’s no one set of rules or one policy or a perfect economic system.  We have to constantly pay attention and adjust.

Data once was a signature, a number on a driver’s license or even a newspaper subscription. Now it is much more but less of what you are used to accounting for. Digital information is today recorded by all manner of sensors you are not aware of and don’t see the consequences of. The new reality is data ‘Reality Mining’.

From phones, GPS units, RFID tags in office ID badges, texting, scans of your car through toll booths, credit card activity at ATMs, stores, gas stations, phone call tower identity, sensors are capturing your behavior in a digital form. Coupled with arguably suspect ‘secure’ anything digital including health information, income statements and Web surfing time, place and duration, the data organization and mining has birthed the emerging field of “collective intelligence”. Welcome.

All that digital information is going to servers and reformatted in data bases are as viral as anything you and a person with a lot of letters after their name can even imagine. And we are adolescents in this development.

A thick web refers to what our ubiquitous use of the web has brought us worldwide; data, tetra-terabytes of it daily. Collective intelligence practitioners acknowledge that their tools will create a sci-fi future on a level Big Brother on cocaine could not have dreamed of. In fact that is, the ‘thing’ about what is going on; we have no idea how we, our families, company, city, nation are going to be impacted as this approach to information finds every nook and cranny of everyone’s life. Stopping it is not an option.

Collective intelligence will make it possible, not probable, for insurance companies, employers, pharmaceutical companies to use data to covertly identify people with an identified gene, profile, affliction, etc., and deny them insurance coverage, employment or bank loans. They can also use it to snuff out an epidemic just as covertly. I wonder where the value of this will be positioned? The government through their budgeting selections can assist law enforcement agencies to identify opposition member’s behavior by tracking scanning, tracing public and private social networks (our old friend the Patriot Act has morphed while we worried about our 401K and “the wars”).

“Pernicious” means exceedingly harmful. Pernicious implies irreparable harm done through evil or insidious corrupting or undermining <the claim is that pornography has a pernicious effect on society>

Now, today, we have and are using the capability to assess a person’s behavior with reality mining of data and then interpret that profile without monitoring him or her directly, talking to him or her, or “knowing’ them. Does Kroger care if you are in a bad mood when you scan your value card? Is the East TX toll reader interested in your reasons for being there mid afternoon? Does Macy’s want you to buy only brand X and not brand Y at the same price? They all care about your behavior, not your feelings and emotions, and intentions and, and, and…

It is a mashup! People and organizations interacting with one another through multimedia digital means will never be less than it is today; it will always be more. Those interactions dynamically leave traces of that ‘behavior’. This allows scientists, the Mafia or over zealous investigative reporters, for example, and anyone with the technology access to the databases to study and learn about the behavior of those traced without the knowledge or consent of the people and groups being scanned. Techniques like that are thought to infringe on the individuals and groups being traced for commercial benefit of those that have that technology over the individuals, groups of individuals and commercial entities that don’t have that technology.

What’s more, if you or your group doesn’t want to be scanned, traced or digitally followed, you have little to say in the matter. Take the instance of “opting out” that’s put forth as a counter measure today for not being a target for spyware, spam and behavioral marketing… “Opting out” is another way some companies validate a cautious web user. For some it means that a different level of secrecy is needed for those that understand counter-control methods. If you want to be removed from lists you have the following troubles (WHICH ARE ALSO TRUE OF REALITY MINING AND COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE EFFORTS);

1. You don’t know where your data is; multiple servers, entities, in the “cloud”
2. Once in the web, your data is not a ‘thing’ it is a “byt-pat”, a partial byte sequence and a partial pattern
3. You don’t know who owns it legally
4. You can’t catch up to it and kill it
5. Your intimidation by technology is being used against you
6. You have no counter-control outside the boarders of your country
7. Your hope is that it isn’t true of you and your data
   
8. Arguments favoring scanning and autonomous tracing are wrapped in virtuous rationales
   

a. fighting disease: SARS, flu, etc

b. fighting terrorists: real and imagined

c. helping the sick and elderly

d. child safety: fear reduction

The reality of reality mining is that your data collected by all of these methods are like a thought you had last night when watching TV: you can’t get at it now, you can’t know exactly where it is located in your head, and once you get it back after going through some mental gymnastics it is not the same as it was when you first had it.

Every day privacy becomes more of a myth than it was even last weekend during the USC game when the water company could tell – they have the data – when the half time occurred due to a drop in the water levels in an eight minute period. We expect that the water will be there and it was. We expect that no one was watching but what “watching” means is changing. It is changing really fast and in ways no one at MIT, Bureau of the Budget and Management or the Justice Department can predict or control. The steaks for success are high. Kroger is working on it.

Are you ready for a wild ride on a roller coaster in the dark without handrails? That is what’s coming here.

US weekly jobless claims shoot up to 542000 MarketWatch

Boeing layoff of 800 rattles Wichita aircraft economy

HP to possibly layoff 25,000 world wide coincident with merger with EDS

(Update) UTMB Begins Process Of Laying Off 3000 Employees dBTechno

Brady Corp. posts slight 1Q sales dip, announces layoffs
The restructuring means layoffs for about 800 of Brady’s 8000 workers worldwide.

We all know the difficult and sometimes devastating consequences from layoffs from employment. Yes, there is a ripple effect of the shops and the Blackberry sales and the BMWs and the ‘this and that’ affected in the years to come.

All these represent, [say it with me...] “CHANGES IN CONTINGENCIES”.

There is the change in contingencies from what controls the people employed that need to be redeployed by cities and states to control contingencies of the people wanting a job, unemployment benefits, food from food banks and such. There is the toll on children, handicapped, and those with marginal skills that were working just to exist.  All their contingencies change as well only they are not any more a part of the statistics than are the one-room developers working for Macy’s or Mama Mia’s.

All these things are tough. But they are tough for other reasons than given or obsessed over a $5 Starbucks coffee [also laying off and closing retail stations]. That reason is the wholesale breakage in the schedules we have. Hold on. Think about it. We are consumed by work and the things that lead to it and result from it. We normally groan about traffic, litter, bosses, colleagues, food, time and other highly emotional elements. We have all these things on schedules. They are intertwined with each other to a point where changing one, (Starbucks is too crowded at lunch) is met with a lot of travail and consternation in the process of searching for another hangout.

Now consider that for the unemployed, there may be 12,000 to 50,000 changes in what that person does on a weekly basis.

• Oh, did I mention they have no behavior to replace those 12,000 – 50,000 “things” that they did?
• Did I mention they have ‘get a new job’ skills ‘cause those behaviors haven’t been used in six years?
• Did I mention they don’t see people that they considered of value?
• Did I mention they don’t see the affect of doing work they maybe linked and were good at?
• Did I mention they aren’t getting paid any more?
• Oh, and don’t forget the change in value they have of themselves… they are not there and others are there…”What gives with that?”

One solution is to create new schedules. FAST! Immersion into creating behavior for getting a new job as quickly as possible and, in the process, hang out with more positive people, dump all toxic people, don’t drink $5 coffee or attend to any dome and gloom stories from the talking heads. Ignore it all. Those things are out there whether you know about them or not and you can’t effect any of it. Use those social networks you surreptitiously spent time on while working…

Things will come around again if you behave! For now, find some behavior and get back on some new schedules.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/opinion/28brooks.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=&st=nyt&oref=slogin – free registration to read if not registered…

Go with the as postulated in this NYT.com article, there are four steps to every decision…

1. you perceive a situation
2. you think of possible courses of action
3. you calculate which course is in your best interest
4. you take the action

&^+%$!!)*?<#!

If only it were that simple.

Over the past few centuries, public policy pundits, talking heads and some academicians have presumed that step three was the most important. Social science disciplines are premised on that presumption as well; despite the ink used to propagate altruistism at every opportunity, people calculate and behave in their own self-interest.

Greenspan’s quoted in the above article made that clear for his reign and for the country. His comments aside, none of the steps above are worth a lot without the others.

Most of the processing takes place without literal awareness. We behave and when pressed for why, we generate a story that fits that situation and puts us in a virtuous light. We don’t really perceive all that well. Thus, the step that seems most simple is the most complex. Looking at and perceiving the world is an active process of symbol meaning-making that shapes and biases the rest of the decision-making chain.

Psychologists have been exploring our biases for four decades with the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, and also with work by people like Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, John Bargh and Dan Ariely. Now Brooks would have it that it is time for the economists to contribute. Gasp!

The desperation of the day may mean a new wave of behavioral economists and others who are next to bring pop psychology to the realm of public policy. These are the same pundits that used their antiquated assumptions to provide plausible explanations for why so many others are wrong about risk behaviors and globalization implications.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb for instance. In his books “Fooled by Randomness” and “The Black Swan” he explains it all in equally simplistic manner as the four rules above. As an astute colleague pointed out bluntly, “we are asking the guy who coined the perception of “black swans” to predict black swans.” The irony is laughable. What gives a black swan example its value is that it is not obvious [read predictable]. While Taleb may have seen it coming, as stated in the above article, that precludes it from being an example of a “black swan” phenomenon. Irony for sure.

When Taleb gets on the philosophical diving board to spring into evolutionary causation decreeing that humanoids brains evolved to fit a less complex world I found myself gagging instead of gasping. His examples of the perceptual biases that distort our thinking are themselves century old prejudices.

1. Our tendency to see data that confirm our prejudices more vividly than data that contradict them

a. We recognize information due to its relation with exiting cues we have in our repertoire. We don’t see what we haven’t been reinforced to see; it is not self-deception any more than it is self enlightenment when we see what turns out to be correct. In that set of circumstances the correctness is not based on enlightenment but on relationships that were there all along but not focused on, recognized or reinforced by the environment.

b. That environment is the same one where superstition, myth, magic, mind and phenomenalism is considered valuable to be our “humanity” and, knock on wood, we sometimes guess right despite the reasons behind the guess.

2. Our tendency to overvalue recent events when anticipating future possibilities

a. the last 6 months is more like the next six months than the last 1000 years are like the next 6 months

3. Our tendency to spin concurring facts into a single causal narrative

a. if for no other reason, this site is the mainstay of the defeat of monocausality which haunts our culture, bolsters our superstitions and keeps us surprised at regular intervals

4. Our tendency to applaud our own supposed skill in circumstances when we’ve actually benefited from dumb luck.

a. We benefit from historical uniqueness and education that is more than smattered with scientific skepticism as opposed to boorish cynicism that ignores our strengths and panders to the voodoo in the caves.

b. See 1.-b above.

Errors of perception are everywhere when experimental analysis is NOT involved. Clearly, getting to our moon and beyond was due to experimental analysis and NOT interpretation of perceptions of pundits.

Without experimental analysis we’ll continually fail to perceive “what’s going on out there.” The relationships between a zillion things and another zillion things are to complex. While a four point decision tree helps us walk across the street in a small town, it is not the way to figure out how to navigate rules of this years tax code or interpret the Patriot Act I or II on any given Sunday. Who knew and who still knows which small events are linked to big disasters? Who knew that the mechanical Newtonian links were there as well as selected consequences of a billion factors coming together world [pick one] (cause – contribute – accompany) a social-political-economic unraveling? Experimental analysis was not involved. Interpretation of biases was.

Faulty perceptions are not the only reason or application for an experimental analysis. Relationships are complex, not caused by single small or an enormous events as you have been trained to think. We don’t have much training to recognize or understand what our own self-interests are in anything but localized strings of spatial-temporal events. Brooks’ towing with trusting government to become engaged in the process is folly. Just how much “help” can a country endure? What’s worse, it is lazy. Separating government and business is impossible but collusion is asking for our own demise handed to as a coupon toward irrelevance. While we regularly make poor decisions, the government is insensitive to making the correct one or those needing to be made in a timely fashion.

If you doubt that, don’t look in the rear view mirror as some would suggest. Follow the consequences of a potential decision and determine for yourself if you or an agent of an ideology is better suited to care for what is in your best interests. Government information feedback mechanisms are limited, broadly myopic, and mechanical; not timely. The very thing that got them away from the citizenry to be politicians has had ideology numb them contributing to an end to pragmatism. This bias, to be sure, is no better or worse than any other bias. They all can be replaced with an experimental analysis from science rather than the pop pap solutions we are offered.

As we’ve seen from recent crashes before the latest one this set of economic biases just keeps on giving. It keep on giving us the problems that government is content to continue to administer to; mindfulness, equality of everything not equal, brinkmanship over leadership and above, all, saying what works to get re-elected. As stated, this meltdown is a cultural event reminding us that we are perceptive beings, seeing things that aren’t there and not perceiving things that are there. (See previous blogs]