The Links:
Truthiness is probably the best word of the past decade. It does such a great job at encompassing so much of our political and public discourse. Moreover, it hints at the complete malleability of "facts" in the service of political agendas. Slate highlights some recent research into truthiness.
Newman, who works out of the University of California–Irvine, recently uncovered an unsettling precondition for truthiness: The less effort it takes to process a factual claim, the more accurate it seems. When we fluidly and frictionlessly absorb a piece of information, one that perhaps snaps neatly onto our existing belief structures, we are filled with a sense of comfort, familiarity, and trust. The information strikes us as credible, and we are more likely to affirm it—whether or not we should.A good example of this kind of cognitive bias would be the people who continually hated on the Federal Reserve and worried we'd have super inflation because of low interest rates. Well, if you followed their advice, you'd have missed out on $1 trillion in investment returns.
Kids these days want to be changing jobs willy-nilly. In my day you kept a job forever. I worked in the factory for 30 years and I liked it. Good for nothing millenials.
And why it's bad for the economy that our generation is getting stuck in jobs instead of finding careers.
It appears the demographic winds have shifted as the US prime working age population is growing again. What does that mean for the unemployment rate?
Oh boy, a law enforcement trade show! Let's buy a tank for my small mountain town.
Here's what all of our Senators were doing 30 years ago:
A big criticism of Obamacare was that the exchange plans that cost least had very limited pools of physicians and facilities. Critics worried that would lead to poorer quality of care. Now that we're a few months in, it appears the quality of care is pretty much the same.
Here's an ebola survivor's first hand account of what it's like to have the disease.
An interesting discussion of scientific research funding. For example:
The average age to receive NIH research grants has gone from 38 in 1980 to 51 today.Digitopoly criticizes HuffPo for being the poster child of media mistrust. If you're looking to HuffPo for media with integrity and fact checking, you're in real trouble.
In The Witcher you can actually collect binders full of women. Sleep with a woman, get a trading card to show your friends!
In which a coder who literally wrote the book on programming is continually thought of as an amateur or worse because she is a woman.
Are job interviews a waste of time? Well, here's my new interview tactic:
Hey, you're white and I'm white. You're a man and I'm a man. Let's cut all the crap and you just hire me because that's how this works.Speaking of being white, here's an old post no the 8 types of white identities.
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