I’m still working on my making my phone mine. I just add the MTA app. I’m not using that now but someday I’ll need to buy tickets again. I love that I could sign in with my fingerprint. I didn’t have to remember my password. That’s how everything should be done, biometrics. Much better than signatures, which are worthless, and passwords which are difficult to remember. I know there are imperfections with them but so are the alternatives. Passwords, like birth control pills, don’t work at close to their theoretical efficacy because people find it too difficult to use them optimally. The fun part was adding the custom ringtones. I need more of these. I like to hear a great song that lets me know who is calling. Once again I set my alarm plays Arise! Arise! by Jean Rohe to get me out of bed. Pesky J. Nixon’s Talk About Heaven is my default ringtone.
Many problems are due to people’s cognitive blind spots. Our brains perform all sorts of shortcuts that keep us functioning in real time but lead to mistakes when we don’t recognize them. A famous case that we outgrow, and thus can more easily perceive, is the one that was described by developmental psychologist Piaget and illustrated below.
People get fooled all the time by optical illusions and magicians. They read all the time how other people have implicit prejudices. Yet people don’t question themselves. I often call myself an idiot. You’re an idiot at times too. Everyone is an idiot at times. Accepting that is part of being rational. If you say, “Every time I see this bad thing the person who does it is X,” doubt yourself. Do a study. Actually count. Sometimes you’ll fine that X people do it disproportionately, and sometimes you’ll find that you are wrong. I always thought Keith Hernandez was a great clutch hitter until I looked at his stats. He wasn’t. My father complained that Vince Coleman hit into too many double plays. I looked it up, he had the lowest double play rate in baseball.
In my last entry I wrote about a survey I made while walking to the phone store on the rates men & women wear masks. The results were that as my gut told me the rates were about the same. But you can’t trust one survey, so I did it again yesterday. I had to go back to the phone store because I’m an idiot and left my cell phone case there. At least I thought I did. They didn’t have it. I talked to the same person that I saw the day before. What did I do with it? Did it fall out of my pocket on the way there? Is it hiding someplace in my house? I don’t know, I’m an idiot. But as I know I’m an idiot I repeated the survey. Yesterday’s results were.
- Men
- Masked 45
Unmasked 27
Masked Percentage 62.5%
- Women
- Masked 23
Unmasked 14
Masked Percentage 62.2%
If we combine the two days the results are.
- Men
- Masked 59
Unmasked 39
Masked Percentage 60.2%
- Women
- Masked 36
Unmasked 25
Masked Percentage 59.0%
Those results are starting to look robust, about 60% of both men and women in my neighborhood wear masks.
My motivation for doing the study was that I thought that someone’s assessment that it was only men not wearing masks was wrong. This meant my prejudice was that the numbers would be close to equal. I’d be surprised that if we looked at the general population that they’d be equal, there are differences in gender attitudes about many things. But that doesn’t mean that I could suss that out in my one-person survey of my one neighborhood. I will continue to do this till I’ve observed over 200 people. That should take me one more trip. You have to decide beforehand when to end the survey otherwise you might stop when the same gives you the results you want.
I started this yesterday then got distracted. In the time since then I have been repeatedly Dunning-Krugered on Facebook. People have such a hard time understanding that they don’t understand something. They won’t even take the simple step of checking their sources. They hear what they want so they repeat it. Here’s a hint, if read about some huge news story on some obscure website and no place else, don’t take it with a grain of salt but with a salt mine. Someone posted a totally ridiculous story about the Democrats proposing a law in congress to ban the singing of the National Anthem at sporting events. Don’t start thinking that only Trump supporters do it. Most of my friends are progressives, so most of the time I see it it’s from progressives. Here’s another tip. If you see a simple solution to a complex problem that experts are struggling over don’t assume it’s because they are stupid or corrupt; it’s because they see all the difficulties you don’t.
What happened to be writing fun stuff about music and friends. Wasn’t that what I was planning? Pretty sure it was but ran right out of my head. I forgot to put the plug in. Have I had an adventures in cooking? I made scrapple and eggs on naan yesterday. The world needs more scrapple and more intellectual humility. That sums up today’s lesson.
Wise Madness 