Winner of the Most Naïve Idea Award: Eric Schmidt, CEO Google

Eric SchmidtSchmidt once said:

“In the future, people will spend less time trying to get technology to work … because it will just be seamless. It will just be there. The Web will be everything, and it will also be nothing. It will be like electricity. … If we get this right, I believe we can fix all the world’s problems.”

Sadly, he is far from alone in this idea. So much brain power heading to Silicon Valley to “solve” the world’s problems through apps.
Ain’t. Gonna. Happen.
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Obamacare Chipping Away at Uninsured Numbers

With all the hype and controversy over Obamacare, once in a while it’s nice to look at the facts. And here are recent numbers – on the percent of Americans who lack health insurance, a figure that has dropped significantly in recent months with the expansion of Medicaid and the opening of the health insurance exchanges:

percent uninsured

These numbers should improve even more the next few years, barring some new roadblocks to this law. At some point, we might not even lag the rest of the developed world in access to affordable healthcare. Okay – I’m getting carried away.
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On Education

pamela hieronymi“Education is not the transmission of information or ideas. Education is the training needed to make use of information and ideas. As information breaks loose from bookstores and libraries and floods onto computers and mobile devices, that training becomes more important, not less.”

 – Pamela Hieronymi, professor of philosophy at UCLA

Can Circular Reasoning Make You Rich?

circular reasoningWe Americans are notoriously bad at saving money.  While people in Germany, Sweden and even France save about 10% of the money they make, folks in the U.S. save closer to 3 or 4% of their earnings.  With so little money saved, Americans face difficulty absorbing economic shocks like recessions and layoffs, and also find themselves with too little money in the bank when they retire.
What will it take to get Americans to save more money?  According to a study in Psychological Science, it will require a shift in our thinking.  But to which way of thinking? …(Read more and view comments at Forbes)

Interesting Take on Why We Often Perceive Handsome Men to Be Jerks

I just came across an interesting article in Slate contending that we often perceive handsome men to be jerks because examples of jerky handsome men come more easily to mind than examples of jerky plain men. In the case of single women, the “acceptable” men that they consider entering into relationships with tend to be better than average looking, meaning that the majority of jerks they encounter are good looking. That’s represented in the illustration that accompanied the Slate article:

looks vs. niceness
I don’t know that there’s any actual evidence to back this up, but it is a plausible idea. And as someone trained in behavioral economics, it conjures two famous ideas of Kahneman and Tversky – of the availability heuristic, which causes us to over represent the likelihood of things that come more easily to mind, and the representativeness heuristic, which causes us to overstate the probability of attributes that fit together when we think they should.
Everywhere you look – behavioral economics and decision psychology!
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Why Desserts Are Irresistible

irresistible dessertsIt all comes down to willpower, right?  Strength of purpose.  Muster the resolve to skip dessert, and you have a shot at losing that spare tire hanging off your belly.  Succumb to your temptations, however, and you are simply being weak.
But is it just weakness that causes us to overeat?
A study in Psychological Science suggests that our inability to resist that mouthwatering looking chocolate cake doesn’t arise simply because our willpower is weak but also because, after exhausting our willpower, the cake looks even more mouthwatering to us than it did before.  Our ability to overcome temptation is reduced at the same time that the power of the temptation increases… (Read more and view comments at Forbes)

Putting the Internet Into Perspective

internet“It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the Internet is a post office, newsstand, video store, shopping mall, game arcade, reference room, record outlet, adult book shop and casino rolled into one. Let’s be honest: that’s amazing. But it’s amazing in the same way a dishwasher is amazing—it enables you to do something you have always done a little easier than before.”
-Marshall Poe
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A Clever Way to Promote Recycling

Behavioral science has taught me that subtle environmental cues can have a surprisingly strong influence on people. I don’t know if the following cue was purposeful or not, but the relative size of these two receptacles – the blue one being the recycling one of course – definitely sends a strong signal about how much of the stuff we throw away ought to be recycled instead. Do you think that will influence behavior?

recycling and trash

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PeterUbel