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The Reason We Reason | Wired Science | Wired.com
The idea here is that the confirmation bias is not a flaw of reasoning, it’s actually a feature. It is something that is built into reasoning; not because reasoning is flawed or because people are stupid, but because actually people are very good at reasoning — but they’re very good at reasoning for arguing. Not only does the argumentative theory explain the bias, it can also give us ideas about how to escape the bad consequences of the confirmation bias.
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[Tool] Android Injector – xda-developers
A tool for Android to install non-market apps when restricted by your service provider. Thankfully this is not yet a problem in India.
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General Motors: Weight Loss Diet Program
Includes the steps in the program along with explanations for why the diet is suggested.
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References in Samit Basu’s ‘The Simoquin Prophecies’ // needlessly|messianic
Some seem to be off the mark as pointed out by the author himself in a twitter post.
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Notable Quotables : The New Yorker
Quite a lot of information on how quotes get mangled over time & get popular thus immortalizing the person who made the quote. Then again, sometimes quotes are misattributed. It also mentions a couple of books that help verify the authenticity of quotes & traces their origins.
“Public circulation is what renders something a quotation. It’s quotable because it’s been quoted, and its having been quoted gives it authority. Quotations are prostheses. “As Emerson/Churchill/Donald Trump once observed” borrows another person’s brain waves and puts them to your own use. (If you fail to credit Emerson et al., it’s called plagiarism. But isn’t plagiarism just the purest form of quotation?) Then, there is a subset of quotations that are personal. We pick them up off the public street, but we put them to private uses. We hoard quotations like amulets. They are charms against chaos, secret mantras for dark times, strings that vibrate forever in defiance of the laws of time and space. That they may be opaque or banal to everyone else is what makes them precious: they aren’t supposed to work for everybody. They’re there to work for us. Some are little generational badges of identity. Some just seem to pop up on a million occasions. Some are razors.”
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Anatomy of a Fake Quotation – Megan McArdle – National – The Atlantic
An analysis of how the fake quote “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. – Martin Luther King, Jr” originated & went viral through the social networks in a couple of days
Interesting links for the week (weekly)
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