@dustcirclenews - FREE DOCUMENTARIES: Breaking Inequality, Drone On, Unlimited Power, Silence of the Lambs' True Story, Life is Impossible, Internet Archive, Art of Data Visualization, Chicago Sessions, From Glasgow to Detroit, Hackers World

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BREAKING INEQUALITY: WHY YOU WILL ALWAYS BE POOR
We live in a world where governments can create as much money as they want in order to fund all kinds of wasteful projects, wars, handouts, and banker bailouts. The current system by design has transferred the wealth from average everyday Americans to an elite few who care not about the majority.

DRONE ON: THE FUTURE OF UAV OVER THE US
From military weapons expos in Jordan to idyllic SoCal beaches, we caught up with some of those who are building and selling unmanned aerial vehicles all over the world, and even convinced a few companies to let us take their flying spy robots for a spin.

CAN WE HAVE UNLIMITED POWER?
We are the most power-hungry generation that has ever lived. This film tells the story of how that power has been harnessed – from wind, steam and from inside the atom. In the early years the drive for new sources of power was led by practical men who wanted to make money. 

THE TRUE STORY OF THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
Meet the deranged serial killers and the determined FBI agents who inspired one of Hollywood’s most terrifying thrillers and gave Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster the roles of a lifetime. We go behind the scenes at the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit to meet the profilers who became the basis for Harris’s characters and to uncover the details of real-life murderers Ed Gein, Ted Bundy, and others.

LIFE IS IMPOSSIBLE
A look at how life began on Earth, exploring whether it evolved on the ground, in the sea or in space and considering the theory that it may have begun in the molten world below the ocean floor.

INTERNET ARCHIVE
Archive is a documentary focused on the future of long-term digital storage, the history of the Internet and attempts to preserve its contents on a massive scale.


THE ART OF DATA VISUALIZATION
Humans have a powerful capacity to process visual information, skills that date far back in our evolutionary lineage. And since the advent of science, we have employed intricate visual strategies to communicate data, often utilizing design principles that draw on these basic cognitive skills.


The Chicago Sessions
Widely known philosopher and University of Chicago Law School professor Martha Nussbaum explores the ethical implications of the financial crisis during three sessions with a group of ten talented law and philosophy students. The grounds of the University of Chicago provide a compelling arena, since it is here that both economist Milton Friedman, staunch promoter of free market capitalism, and president Barack Obama, lectured.


















From Glasgow to Detroit
Looking at Detroit, comparing and contrasting its experience with Glasgow, we will look at what has happened to a once prosperous city and see first hand how ordinary people have overcome official antagonism to their needs and created a vibrant system of farming.


















Hackers World: Anonymous Investigation
Anonymous is a loosely associated hacktivist group. It originated in 2003, representing the concept of many online and offline community users simultaneously existing as an anarchic, digitized global brain.

Why do people find logic in supernatural rituals?

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Even in this modern age of science, people are likely to find logic in supernatural rituals that require a high degree of time and effort, according to new research from The University of Texas at Austin.

The study, published in the June issue of Cognition, is the first psychological analysis of how people of various cultures evaluate the efficacy of ritual beliefs. The findings provide new insight into cognitive reasoning processes — and how people intuitively make sense out of the unknown.

“One of the most remarkable characteristics of human cognition is the capacity to use supernatural reasoning to explain the world around us,” said Cristine Legare, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin. “We argue that the characteristics of ritual are the product of an evolved cognitive system.”

Cause-and-effect thinking is critical to human survival, Legare said. So it’s natural for people to find logic in supernatural rituals that emphasize repetition and procedural steps. If doing something once has some effect, then repeating it must have a greater effect. For example, if a mechanic says he inspected something five times, the frequency of his actions leads the customer to overestimate the effectiveness of his work.

To find out how people rate the effectiveness of magical rituals, Legare and graduate student André Souza conducted a study in Brazil, a country suffused with rituals called simpatias. Used for solving problems as varied as quitting smoking, curing asthma and warding off bad luck, simpatias are formulaic rituals that involve various steps and repetition.

The psychologists presented 162 Brazilian respondents several versions of these rituals. Each was modified with different characteristics, such as repetition of procedures, number of steps, number of items used, and the presence of religious icons.

As part of the study, Legare asked the respondents to rate the effectiveness of each ritual. According to the findings, three elements of the simpatias had the biggest influence: number of steps, repetition of procedures and a specified time.

To see how magical rituals are perceived across cultures, the researchers conducted the same study with 68 U.S. respondents of various religious and socioeconomic backgrounds. As the researchers expected, the majority of respondents didn’t believe in simpatias. Yet similar to the Brazilians, they were more inclined to believe in rituals involving numerous repetitions and steps. For example, they gave a higher rating for this sadness-curing ritual, which involves numerous steps and repetitions.

In a metal container, put the leaves of a white rose. After that, set fire to the leaves. Get the remaining ash from the leaves and put it in a small plastic bag. Take the small plastic bag and leave it at a crossroad. Repeat the procedure for seven days in a row.

Though simpatias are primarily practiced in Brazil, magical rituals and other superstitions are widely accepted in the United States. Findings from the study provide further insight into how people find logic in the supernatural, regardless of concrete evidence.

The Reality Distortion Field

by MICHAEL SHERMER

Steve Jobs’s modus operandi of ignoring reality
is a double-edge sword

Robert Friedland was a long-haired, sandal-wearing, spiritual-seeking proprietor of an apple farm commune and student at Reed College when he met Steve Jobs in 1972 and taught the future Apple computer founder a principle called the “reality distortion field” (RDF). Macintosh software designer Bud Tribble recalled, “In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything.” And yet the blade could cut two ways: “It was dangerous to get caught in Steve’s distortion field, but it was what led him to actually be able to change reality.” Another Mac software designer named Andy Hertzfeld said, “The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.” The first Mac team manager Debi Coleman said Jobs “reminded me of Rasputin. He laser-beamed in on you and didn’t blink. It didn’t matter if he was serving purple Kool-Aid. You drank it.” And yet when the power was properly channeled, “You did the impossible, because you didn’t realize it was impossible.”

The RDF is an extreme version of what the psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls a “pervasive optimistic bias” in his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). “Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be.” For example, only 35 percent of small businesses survive in the U.S., but when surveyed 81 percent of entrepreneurs assessed their odds of success at 70 percent, and 33 percent went so far as to put it at 100 percent! “One of the benefits of an optimistic temperament is that it encourages persistence in the face of obstacles,” Kahneman notes, while also citing study in which 47 percent of inventors “continued development efforts even after being told that their project was hopeless, and on average these persistent (or obstinate) individuals doubled their initial losses before giving up.” Failure may not be an option in the minds of entrepreneurs, but it is all too frequent in reality, which is why another bias called “loss aversion” is felt by most. Thus, Jobs’s success story is also an example of a selection bias whereby those who failed tend not to have biographies.

Jobs’s optimistic bias was off the charts. According to his biographer Walter Isaacson, “At the root of the reality distortion was Jobs’s belief that the rules didn’t apply to him. He had the sense that he was special, a chosen one, an enlightened one.” Jobs’s self-importance and will to power over rules that applied only to others were reflected in numerous ways: legal (parking in handicapped spaces, driving without a license plate), moral (accusing Microsoft of ripping off Apple when both took from Xerox the idea of the mouse and the graphical user interface), personal (refusing to acknowledge paternity of his daughter Lisa even after an irrefutable paternity test), and practical (besting resource-heavy giants IBM and Xerox in the computer market with a fraction of their budgets). Jobs’s RDF unquestionably contributed to his success in revolutionizing no fewer than six industries: personal computers, animated films, digital music, cell phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

There was, however, one reality his distortion field could not bend to his will: cancer. In 2003 Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which further tests revealed to be an islet cell or pancreatic neuroendrocrine tumor that is treatable with surgical removal, which Jobs refused. “I really didn’t want them to open up my body, so I tried to see if a few other things would work,” he later admitted to Isaacson with regret. Those other things included consuming large quantities of carrot and fruit juices, fasting, bowel cleansings, hydrotherapy, acupuncture and herbal remedies, a vegan diet, and, says Isaacson, “a few other treatments he found on the Internet or by consulting people around the country, including a psychic.” They didn’t work, and in the process we find the alternative medicine question, “What’s the harm?,” answered in the form of an irreplaceable loss to humanity.

Out of this heroic tragedy a lesson emerges: reality must take precedence over willful optimism, for nature cannot be distorted.

Rating: 4.7/5 (20 votes cast)

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Recommended Reading

Epiphenom: Deep Thinkers are More Likely to Lose Their Faith

[REPRINT]


By Tom Rees 

There's always a fair amount of interest in whether atheists are more intelligent than believers. When I've reported on this in the past, I've always been a little sceptical about whether the purported statistical association is meaningful or even real. SO here's a couple of studies that shed an intriguing light on the problem.

The first by psychologists Gary Lewis, Stuart Ritchie, and Timothy Bates at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland has provided some of the most rigorous evidence to date that the link is indeed real. They took data from the large MacArthur Foundation Survey of Midlife Development in the United States and found that high IQ was significantly associated with every one of six different measures of religion.

For the most part, this association still held even after adjusting for factors like education, sex, age and even personality - the only exception with spirituality, the weakest of all indicators of religion. Overall, link between religion and IQ was strongest for the 'fundamentalism' measure.

The authors point out that the effect is very small. And what's more, there's still no reason to suppose that atheists are less religious because of their intelligence. There might be some other factor that they didn't account for that's related to both.


And that's where the second new analysis comes in. Led by Amitai Shenhav, a psychologist at Harvard University, the team looked at cognitive style. Basically, they were interested in whether people make snap decisions based on their gut feelings, or whether they ponder things a bit more deeply.

So they asked the questions like this:

“A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?”

The intuitive answer (10 cents) is the wrong one. Stop and think about it for a while and you'll figure it out! You'll probably take less time than I did...

Anyway, it turned out that intuitive thinkers (who get the wrong answer) are more likely to believe in god and immortal souls. Even more intriguingly, deep-thinkers were also more likely to say that they had lost their belief since childhood.

That seems to fit with other research showing that believers in the paranormal seem to have a bunch of faulty, intuitive beliefs about how the world works.

But maybe you're thinking this isn't really about IQ? Maybe the religious just couldn't figure out the right answers (it took me quite a lot of puzzling before I figured that example question out).

Well, in one study they did measure IQ, and IQ was indeed correlated with 'thinking style' test scores. That means that cleverer people were more likely to get the answer right.

However, even after adjusting for their higher IQ, deep-thinkers were still more likely to be atheists, and to have lost their childhood religion.

Now, you can probably invent explanations for that just as well as anyone. But one implication, it seems to me, is that this might help to explain the apparent link between atheism and IQ.

You see, if cognitive style and IQ are linked, then it might be that IQ is an innocent bystander here - a case of guilt by association. How you think, and whether you take the time to ponder things through, might be all that matters.

---

Lewis, G., Ritchie, S., & Bates, T. (2011). The relationship between intelligence and multiple domains of religious belief: Evidence from a large adult US sample Intelligence DOI: 10.1016/j.intell.2011.08.002

Shenhav A, Rand DG, & Greene JD (2011). Divine intuition: Cognitive style influences belief in God. Journal of experimental psychology. General PMID: 21928924