People are fickle. We buy truckloads of Cheetos, a food product with no nutritional value, so why should expect ourselves to not be influenced by bad ideas?
Op-Ed Columnist: Learning How to Think
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, The New York Times, 4/5/09
The marketplace of ideas doesn’t clear out bad pundits and bad ideas partly because there’s no accountability. It is about time that changed.
Go ahead, please guess what all these people have in common:
This person gave a terrific sermon at Easter services at St. Dominic’s Church in San Francisco this past Sunday. The tombs of Tuscany, Italy, thousands of years ago, used to point to the West because of the dead, who had reached the end of their lives. After Jesus, the Tuscan Tombs began pointing to the East, because death was no longer thought of as an ending, but with Jesus it was viewed as a beginning. The priest encouraged each of us to think of our lives optimistically, about the possibility and the positive things. We are what we focus upon.
This person encourages people to “Live With Passion!”
This person lived for hundreds of years and said, “Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes.”
This person was a famous philosopher known for his atheistic pessimism. According to Wikipedia, “human desire was futile, illogical, directionless, and, by extension, so was all human action in the world.”
This person should give away what all these people have in common. He is one of the most famous newspapermen of all time. He once said, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.“
Each of the people above had a strong opinion about what enters our consciousness. Xavier, Tony Robbins and Yoda all believe that we have choice in what enters our consciousness. Schopenhauer would say that things are pretty bleak; William Randolph Hearst would say that he chose for people what enters their consciiousness. I have been thinking lately about, “what exactly is news?” I looked at Dictionary.com and it said, “a person, thing, or event considered as a choice subject for journalistic treatment.” But who really really considers, who really chooses, the subjects that we read about in the news? We do! The news is what each of us want it to be. Yes, certain things do happen. However, millions of things happen and, now more than ever, we can regulate what news we actually get, because there is so much information in the world. The future is a world where we choose our news. We choose the magazines, the newspapers, the ways we discover what is happening in our world. There’s just too much information for any one person to digest, so we are forced to choose. I’m reminded of “The Millionaire Next Door,” a book about the traits of “everyday millionaires,” where I understand that one of the traits of millionaires is that they spend lots time with their good friends. My point is that the best things in life are actually free. Time spent with friends is free, although not all friends are the same; it’s the choosing of your friends where there is value. Likewise, information is fast becoming free, but all information is not the same; it’s the choosing of your information where there is value.
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This is a terrific blog! If you like data visualizations, you will love this site. The owner of the blog is “Cachy” and all I really know about this person is that he/she has lived in “Newton, El Paso, Yonkers, Austin, NYC, Jersey City, Nurmanbet, Kok Oi, Houston”
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A fascinating study (pdf link) by Peter J. Rentfrow, Samuel D. Gosling, and Jeff Potter looks at the geographical variation of “the big five” personality traits: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness.
The Map Scroll: The Geography of Personality
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Great visual about water use. Amazing how much water gets used in consumption of beef and chicken. GOOD Transparency – Walk This Way
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We shouldn’t be surprised to see local banks closing. In a world where microlending is booming (see www.kiva.org), it would make sense that local lending, of the old-fashioned variety, would go through a restructuring process. The cost of the systems which provide loans is dwindling to zero; how else could rich Americans lend to poor third-worlders? Therefore, the local lender that has not improved their systems is going to be high cost relative to the Wells Fargo’s of the world. The giant banks have their own issues, but those are very different from the scale economies that give giant banks and internet banks a huge leg up on plain old-fashioned local banks. These kind of changes I am calling AMPLITUDE, which I define as accelerated creation and destruction caused by an accelerating rate of change. I would argue that we are seeing more AMPLITUDE today than in the past. Gibson Journal – A Small Town Loses a Pillar – Its Only Bank – NYTimes.com
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I’m a bit late to the party (this story broke 20 days ago), but it is still interesting and points out how challenging the print media business is today. San Francisco Chronicle a non-profit? Wow! As more and more people get their news online, traditional print media will continue to decline. I do worry, however, about the fact-checkers. When all that exists in the world are the bloggers, who will check the facts in stories? Who will verify the data? My guess is that sites will develop that will provide data verification (like Data360), although I think we are headed for a world where rumors and untruths will grow. Will San Francisco Chronicle go nonprofit? – San Francisco Business Times: 
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