No Wonder So Many People are Depressed

[Mugwump]

^indeed, K. Kahnemann’s description of his professional and personal,relationship with Amos Tversky at the start of the book is rather moving. I haven’t red Lewis’s book, but I will look it up. Thanks.

As to a book club, I think KenH suggested one once, but it never quite works because we all have such different interests and tastes. I read 1-2 books a week, but I doubt the majority of them would be of much interest to most folks on here. Occasionally I pick up an idea from a thread where I am interested in the topic. I recently read Helen Garner’s “This House of Grief” after WPT mentioned it, and I will try “The Undoing Project” But it’s probably more likely that one will be led to a book of interest by a specific thread, rather than by a general “books” thread.

[HAL]

How do you choose?

[KenH]

[K]

I did recall a thread, but yesterday when I tried to find it I could not. With the added info from above, I've now found it:
http://magpies.net/nick/bb/viewtopic.php?t=76130
It seems it has had a total of four clumps of posts, including one from JW, who has pretty much stopped posting in the last 18 months.

What is your personal Ellenberg Index (which I'll define now as the true average percentage of a book you read, which is not approximately equal to his Piketty Index discussed on the previous page)?

[Mugwump]

Because I use ally read books that address subjects I am interested in, and I usually check reviews first, I usually finish a book once started. I’d say I’m above 90%. Like most people I have not managed to finish “a brief history of time” and I skipped bits of Piketty, though I think he has some important points to make.

[K]

It seems to me that there's a big difference between fiction and non-fiction, the unread portion of the latter not being necessary for the reader to benefit from the read portion.

With respect to behavioural economics, the other book that comes to mind is Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge. I have not read that yet either. I wonder whether book sales got a (ahem...) nudge after Thaler got last year's Nobel Economics Prize.*

Ariely has established some sort of mass production line of popular books, with the later ones feeling a bit like just more of the same. They are rather amusing, but also rather lightweight in content. Of greater concern (both specifically and more generally in the whole field) is how reliable the claims are, how replicable the results. Ariely describes an experiment with Cokes put in dorm common-room fridges, compared with plates of dollar bills. The Cokes get taken, but not the money. He concludes that "when you take money, you can't help but think you're stealing," but with the Coke, you can fudge to yourself that "maybe somebody left it on purpose, or somebody took mine once so it's okay for me to take this."

I think the problem with this is that people really do sometimes have leftover food and drink from a party or event, which they really do want others to consume rather than it all going to waste. That's never the case for money. In fact, I think if most people see money in a tin or something in the common kitchen, they'll assume that's for people to pay for common supplies (e.g. cups of coffee) on an honour system. That's quite common in workplaces. If the dollar bills were separated and just dropped on the carpet in common areas, I suspect people would just pocket them on the "finders keepers" principle.

In fact, an amusing experiment would be to place them both in the common area, with the plate of dollar bills right next to the Cokes. People might think that those bills were payment for the Cokes, an alternative to a vending machine. You could hope to get the amusing result of some Cokes being taken and there being more dollar bills in the plate than when you started the experiment.


* Update:

It seems you can watch Thaler's speech:
https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2017/thaler-lecture.html
Does this mean there's no need to read the book now?

[pietillidie]

[Dave The Man]

Gotta Love the News at the Start is all about Murders

[HAL]

Why do you have to do it?

[K]

[K]

[K]

[K]

Further thoughts on the Ariely Coke vs. cash experiment:

It now seems to me that a critical factor in the experiment is how private the setting is. I suspect that in a relatively intimate space, like a common-room fridge shared by maybe only 20 people, you'll get the same results as Ariely, but in a very public and therefore impersonal space, like a bus stop or park bench, you'll get the opposite results (the cash will disappear, while the Coke remains). In the public place, the dollar bills seem completely impersonal. You don't really feel they have an owner, so you just pocket them. Somehow, a six-pack of coke in the same place feels like it does have an owner. You think, maybe someone left it behind accidentally and will come back for it. If, as claimed, private fudging in your thought processes is involved, it's required more for the Coke.


Here, I guess, endeth the Ariely books review : somewhat repetitive and lightweight, they are nevertheless amusing enough that one hopes the results described therein are largely true in a general sense.

[K]

[K]

For example, here's Katharine Viner, Guardian editor-in-chief:

"After working at the Guardian for two decades, I feel I know instinctively why it exists. Most of our journalists and our readers do, too – it’s something to do with holding power to account, and upholding liberal values.
...

John Edward Taylor was in the crowd that day, reporting for a weekly paper, the Manchester Gazette. When a reporter for the daily Times of London was arrested, Taylor was concerned that the people of the capital might not get an accurate report of the massacre – he correctly feared that without the account of a journalist on the scene, Londoners would instead get only the official version of events, which would protect the magistrates who had caused the bloodshed.

So Taylor rushed a report on to the night coach to London, got it into the Times, and thus turned a Manchester demonstration into a national scandal. Taylor exposed the facts, without hysteria. By reporting what he had witnessed, he told the stories of the powerless, and held the powerful to account.

But Taylor did not stop there. After the massacre, he spent months reporting on the fate of the wounded, documenting the injuries of more than 400 survivors.

Taylor’s relentless effort to tell the full story of Peterloo strengthened his own reformist political views – and he became determined to agitate for fair representation in parliament. He decided to start his own newspaper, the Manchester Guardian...

...

During the second Boer war, from 1899 to 1902, Britain was rampantly jingoistic; anyone who opposed the war was cast as a traitor. The Guardian stood against it and ran a campaign for peace, while the brilliant Guardian reporter Emily Hobhouse exposed the concentration camps for the Boers run by the British.

The paper’s stance was so controversial that it lost advertisers and one-seventh of its sales. ...

Scott’s courageous position nearly did kill the Guardian. But in standing up to the prevailing political mood of the day, Scott turned the newspaper into “the dominant expression of radical thinking among educated men and women”, as Ayerst wrote.
...

Our moral conviction, as exemplified by Taylor and codified by Scott, rests on a faith that people long to understand the world they’re in, and to create a better one. We believe in the value of the public sphere; that there is such a thing as the public interest, and the common good; that we are all of equal worth; that the world should be free and fair."


https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/16/a-mission-for-journalism-in-a-time-of-crisis