At TEDGlobal 2010, author Matt Ridley shows how, throughout history, the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas. It's not important how clever individuals are, he says; what really matters is how smart the collective brain is.
You try it on, look in the mirror and decide you must have it. While wearing this item, you imagine onlookers will clutch their chests and gasp every time you walk into a room or cross a street. You lift the sleeve to check the price – $1,000.
This is how you get duped into buying things on "sale" that are still priced a lot higher than they are worth.
http://www.ted.com/ Michael Shermer says the human tendency to believe strange things -- from alien abductions to dowsing rods -- boils down to two of the brain's most basic, hard-wired survival skills. ...
For instance, today’s students are less likely to agree with statements like, “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective"
Instead of posting the latest account of Miami spoiled-brat misdeeds, I thought I'd share something that helps makes sense of it.
Although women the world over have been doing it for centuries, we can't really blame a guy for being a guy. And this is especially true now that we know that the male and female brains have some profound differences.
Women: Get over it. It's science. You can't argue with science.
Just like all the other parts of the human body, the brain – and all the evolved psychological mechanisms in it – are designed for and adapted to the conditions of the ancestral environment in which they evolved, not necessarily to the current environment. This principle holds for both psychological adaptations, like evolved psychological mechanisms, and physical adaptations, like the eye, the vision, and the color recognition system.
Some months back, while roaming Berlin's famous "Kaufhaus des Westens" - an over-glorified shopping mall - my friends and I had a little contest about who could find the most expensive bottle of wine within 2 two minutes. Although I don't remember who won - which means it probably wasn't me - I remember the winning wine costing more than a thousand Euros (which feels like 50 billion $US these days). A price tag like that makes me wonder: How big of a difference does quality in wine really make? Is there a real 985$ difference in taste between the 1000$ wine and a comparable 15$ wine?
I always thought some principle like this existed. How else would one explain a $500 purse?
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