Reading This Post Will Make You Sneeze

Human beings are weird.

Just to review a couple more bits of evidence to this regard I've personally come across recently:

Working for food makes it taste better.

If a menu has healthy food on it, we're more likely to pick something unhealthy.

Along similar lines, triggering our "I've done something good" switch makes us more likely to do something not-so-good, like in this study where simply looking at an eco-friendly website leads to stealing.

Oh, and daydreaming makes us sad.

Our brains and bodies seem to want to make us act against every moral and common-sensical principle we like to think we adhere to. I imagine that it will eventually be demonstrated that being loved makes us hate ourselves, experience makes us dumb, sharing makes us selfish, chocolate makes us cynical and sleeping makes us dead.

It seems strange to me that so much of what we do is preprogrammed, predictable, messed up and unconscious. We all of us like to think of ourselves as thoughtful individuals who do everything we do for a reason, based on a personal system of morals and preferences. But we're totally wrong. We're not drivers taking our body-vehicles down whatever road we choose. We're sitting on the roof with a fake steering wheel, coming up with explanations for why we go where we go, how we totally meant to turn left there or right here or go off that cliff there - when really, the car is being driven by a mischeivious chimpanzee, or maybe a malfunctioning robot, or no one at all.

I think in the future (you regular readers didn't think I'd stray from that topic for long, did you?) we might achieve a complete understanding of how humans tend to work, including knowledge of all our counterintuitive intuitions. We might even achieve a holistic picture of the principles that drive human behavior - which won't make us perfectly predictable, of course, because we still have free will and individual differences and so forth, but will make it more like we are at least sitting on that roof of that car with some bananas on a fishing pole to entice the chimp one way or the other.

At such future time - or, heck, right now - we might all benefit from taking a class, in high school or earlier, on How to Be A Human Being. It would consist mainly in participating in experiments that demonstrate our own weirdnesses and subconscious processes to us, so we can be better decision-makers in the future. Wouldn't have to be anything as extreme as the Milgram experiment (although we should read about it), but simply having many of our own cognitive biases demonstrated to us by, for instance, playing simple gambling games to demonstrate the negative effects of the sunk cost fallacy, etc., would make all of us better people and so much less vulnerable to exploitative advertising, con artistry, groupthink, political trickery, and Internet trolls.

It's a pipe dream, but even if it makes me sad pondering it, I'll do it anyways.

Terrible Writing That Needs to Be Discussed

These Gentlemen have worked our way into an excellent groove of late, bringing you wordy goodness five times a week. But there is a reason that I want to post today. Well two reasons. Two of the worst columns I've ever read (worse than the George Will one about never wearing jeans, or the George Will one about how global warming is bunk, or the George Will ... well you get the idea.)

Courtland Milloy is very liberal. Super liberal. And that's great, and he can be an insightful metro columnist. But he's on a two column streak of writing the kind of stuff that an editor, ANY EDITOR, should have politely advised against. First he tore into Mayor Fenty in a way that would make Michelle Malkin blush. But today's was worse. He wrote a column which had the following crux: "People who supported Fenty and post on Wash Post columns are terrible people, far more terrible than supports of Gray who also write vile things, but those are okay and not as bad because I have interpreted what is in their souls and I know their ethnicity." It could have been just a "Get Of My Lawn" column, but it really just betrays Milloy's complete lack of understanding of the internet and ignorance with regards to the comments on Washington Post columns. Is this the first time he's ever looked at Wash Post comment sections? Nothing is moderated, every column is followed by dozens or hundreds of vile uninformed commentary that generally include the words "sheeple," "DIMocRATS" and "Hitler."

Kathleen Parker is pretty conservative and has won a Pulitzer. Her column today would be an embarrassment if published in a college paper. She talks of how moved she was by an ad that lays basically the entire economic downfall on Obama. It's called "Mourning In America." Get it, because Obama is not Ronald Reagan? I could go into the many many fallacies in the article, but let's just go straight to the next to last paragraph:

"Nevertheless, it is probably fair to say that Obama's ideas were too big for America's appetite. It would have been nice had he made a few incremental repairs to the economy and left the transformative events for a less stressful time."

Wait, what? We're in the worst economic situation and you wish he had tweaked things a bit and stepped aside? For zombie Reagan to save us all? I think I can safely say this is the worst paragraph I have read in a newspaper all year.