Base rate fallacy – ignoring available statistical data in favor of particulars.

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It's easy to admire our military personnel for the things they do in combat zones and hostile missions.  These are what we see on TV and read about in magazines.  They're what Hollywood turns into movies.

What many of us don't understand, including yours truly, is the risks our military men and women take every day, doing their equivalents of going to the office, filing reports and attending meetings.  In some cases, their 'routine' tasks and training can become more dangerous than being on actual missions.

Each of the two videos below is 10 minutes long, depicting what it's like for Naval aviators to try and land a fighter on a pitching aircraft carrier.  Seas that toss a carrier 30+ feet are incredibly dangerous, making pitch and yaw measurement insanely difficult.  The only thing that's more difficult is doing it at night, which also is a reality for these pilots.

You won't find a more gripping 20 minutes of video.  They're from 2008, but they never lose their punch.

Here's the scariest part: the Navy forces its pilots out in rough seas to practice this skill.  It's dangerous to the point where it even steels even the most experienced pilots, but it's necessary: one day, when the situation is real and there's no real chance of air support, pilots will live or die based upon whether they can pull this off or not. It's contingency training taken to the nth degree.

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Bandwagon effect – the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behaviour.

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My 2-year-old daughter surprised me recently with two words: “Daddy’s book.” She was holding my Kindle electronic reader.

Here is a child only beginning to talk, revealing that the seeds of the next generation gap have already been planted. She has identified the Kindle as a substitute for words printed on physical pages. I own the device and am still not completely sold on the idea.

My daughter’s worldview and life will be shaped in very deliberate ways by technologies like the Kindle and the new magical high-tech gadgets coming out this year — Google’s Nexus One phone and Apple’s impending tablet among them. She’ll know nothing other than a world with digital books, Skype video chats with faraway relatives, and toddler-friendly video games on the iPhone. She’ll see the world a lot differently from her parents.

Fascinating article from Brad Stone stating that, quite simply, the unflagging rate of tech advancement is creating mini generation gaps whereby these mini-generations can be identified and grouped by what technology they grow up with during formative years.  Makes perfect sense, because more than once I've observed that young kids today are familiar with an iPhone in a way that kids of eight years ago are not.  My son, now 5, tries to touch, swipe and pinch the screen of every mobile phone he comes across.  Eight years ago, kids would have been introduced to a BlackBerry or Windows Mobile phone or something from Nokia and then introduced to an iPhone.

Another thing I think about: what will tech look like when my son is 16?  How many disruptive technologies will come down and displace the things that, by today's standards, are considered contemporary?

And perhaps the biggest question of all: speaking from psychological, cognitive, sociological and developmental perspectives, what long-term effect will all this technology, replete with its 'information anywhere' capability, have on people?  Today, we see all sorts of psychopharmaceutical drugs aimed at what we now consider mainstream psychological conditions: anxiety, ADHD, depression.  It's interesting -- and not just a little scary -- to consider what we'll be 'treating' 15 years from now as a result of people being overstimulated, forced to multitask beyond what the human mind can reasonably do (some argue we're there already) and rely on technology for everything: information, answers, directions, social consensus, morality.

Even as a tech geek, I reel sometimes.  As a guy who used to read a book a week but now struggles to get through one a month (most of my reading is web reading, which, arguably, is more convenient due to its more fragmented nature), I wonder where this is all going.

I know -- I think I'll check out a Kindle.  If, of course, the Apple tablet disappoints.  Then -- yes, then -- I'll get back to reading at a tyrannosaurid rate.  Right?

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Absolutely fascinating:

Dinotopia artist James Gurney posted this video about a "change blindness" experiment. 75% of the participants didn't notice that the experimenter who bent under a counter was replaced by a different person. Says Gurney: "Here's proof that most of the time we look but don't see." I think Matisse said something to the effect that he didn't really see things unless he was painting them.

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Go figure: focusing on a dozen things poorly, running from fragmented job to fragmented job, trying to shift mindsets from tactical to strategic and struggling to figure out where you left a certain task might have long-term negative effects.

After jumping through the mental hoops, the researchers found that the heavy multimedia users were at a disadvantage. Compared with those who rarely used more than one type of media at a time, heavy multitaskers had slower response times, most often because they were more easily distracted by irrelevant information, and because they retained that useless information in their short-term memory. While the delay was only about half a second in some tests, this could be enough to cause problems in everyday life, says Goodman, who is also an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "You're being flooded with too much information and you can't selectively filter out quickly which is important and which is not important," says Goodman.

• Heavy-multitaskers did worse on attention tests than non-multitaskers.
• Multitaskers are more easily distracted and susceptible to irrelevant information.
• Multitaskers often retain useless information in short-term memory.
• Negative effects from sustained multimedia multitasking may not be reversible.
• The good news: multitasking cannot cause ADHD, which is rooted in genetic susceptibility.

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Mark Frauenfelder over at Boing Boing asks an interesting question:

Here’s a test: let’s say a meeting, originally scheduled for Wednesday, has been moved forward two days. What is the new day of the meeting?

To me, the answer is Monday (because moving something forward means it will happen sooner), but it turns out that how you answer the question says a lot about how you perceive time itself.

If you think it’s Friday, you imagine time as something you move through. If you think it’s Monday, you think of time as something that passes by you.

What does this have to do with anger?

Well, according to the British Psychological Society, “Friday” people have an angrier disposition, than “Monday” people.

Not sure how scientific this is (seems a little wobbly to me), but it sure makes for fun intra-office profiling.

(Via Tyler Cowen)

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