Mind's Eye Re: Magic and research

As I get older my liking for shouting at the Tv has dramatically increased.  More and more often I find myself shouting at the blatant lies on TV advertising.  Only this morning wifey caught me at it and this started a discussion on whether or not this is indicative of our (English) society becoming more and more brain dead.  Sadly I'm starting to believe it is.  Or perhaps it is indicative of my growing curmudgeoningness (which I understand is indicative of getting older?) or perhaps both! 

On Thursday, 20 September 2012 16:52:17 UTC+1, archytas wrote:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi/10.1371/journal.pone.0045457

These Swedish researchers used a magic trick to show that people's
answers to survey questions are unreliable.  I noticed many years ago
that most people haven't much clue what they are on about and can't
tell chalk from cheese.  We are, in the main, moral wuckfits.

The trick used was to get people to answer a few questions but change
a couple of the answers through a magic dodge.  People argued in
support of the changed answers. even though they were the opposite of
the views they'd only just expressed.  We have known 8 out of 10 cats
prefer Whiskas to powdered glass for many years (one of our pampered
pouch-devourers has just turn his nose up at Sheba as though I was
trying to poison him).  Why do we have so  much trouble taking in the
notion that companies pay for advertising because most people are
gulled by it and basically so stupid most of them operate with the
brain on switch off?

This paper isn't all that interesting in-itself.  What is interesting
is that much more material like this is appearing on PLos through open
access.  One hopes the move away from vanity publishing and restricted
access.  Over the years I found less than one in a hundred academic
papers worthwhile (one reads thousands in a research project and at
least half are likely to be outside the university's subscription and
cost $10 or so through inter-library loans - or $40 to the private
punter).

Science doesn't have much comforting to tell us on human nature - this
is probably why most people don't want to know.  It's probably time to
a new treatise on human nature.  Economists are just discovering the
'triune brain' (I was taught brain stem, reptilian, mammalian and the
cerebellum 45 years ago - I note that adds up to 4 and quadrune).  In
fact there's plenty of reasonable science that demonstrates we are
lying, cheating, rationalising, broadly stupid bastards and some do
this in spades (we call them leaders or psychopaths) and most on a
less daring scale.

Rather than describing human nature, great literature hides it from us.

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