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The Ulysses Strategy
The New Yorker: As the University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler tells the story, a group of fellow-graduate students in economics were at his house one night in the late nineteen-seventies, socializing before the dinner hour. Thaler saw how much they were snacking, and decided to remove the nut bowls from the living room. His colleagues—almost all of whom were ardent proponents of the idea that humans are rational decision-makers, optimizing their best interests through freely made choices—thanked him for removing the tempting snacks. Thaler took mental note of the moment, one of many notes on human irrationality that he would gather in the ensuing years.
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Playing Nicely With Others: Why Schools Teach Social Emotional Learning
The New York Times: If your children’s school seems to suddenly be devoting its time and resources to something called SEL, it may be leaving you wondering what happened to good old reading, writing and arithmetic (or even that new darling, coding). You’re not alone. SEL stands for social emotional learning, and it’s a hot topic at the moment among educators with good reason.
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Is the Justice System Overly Punitive?
Scientific American: Twenty years ago Rwanda was torn apart by violence. The Hutu majority slaughtered their Tutsi neighbors, killing approximately 70% of the Tutsi minority in the space of only four months. Once the killing finally stopped, a difficult question arose: how to right these monstrous wrongs without creating a cycle of revenge and retribution? Such a cycle would be the epitome of the ancient “eye for an eye” notion of justice, in which punishment is commensurate with the crime, an approach taken even today by most modern legal systems (including the United States). The aim is simple—when someone is wronged, the goal of punishment is to hurt the perpetrator.
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The ‘Bilingual Advantage’ May Not Actually Be a Thing
New York Magazine: It feels like at some point in the recent past, the notion that being bilingual offers certain cognitive advantages (above and beyond allowing one to communicate in two languages) went fully mainstream. It almost seems obvious now: Well, duh, obviously exposure to a whole other language is going to change your brain in beneficial ways, specifically when it comes to focus and switching between tasks. But not so fast: A new metastudy in Psychological Science suggests that there's some skewing going on when it comes to which sorts of studies on this subject are published — and, as a result, which ones trickle down to garner mainstream attention.
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Dumbing It Down in the Cockpit
Slate: Long gone are the leather jackets, goggles, and silk scarves flung over the shoulders of aviators who wrestled with flight controls, furiously scanned instruments, and navigated using paper charts. Airplanes have been largely flying themselves since the early 1980s. Today, with a few keystrokes, pilots program the details of a flight route into a computer that calculates, in seconds, the bearings, distances, altitudes, speeds, and fuel needed to get the airplane from city to city. Aircraft navigation? Yes, there is an app for that.
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Across America, whites are biased and they don’t even know it
The Washington Post: Most white Americans demonstrate bias against blacks, even if they're not aware of or able to control it. It's a surprisingly little-discussed factor in the anguishing debates over race and law enforcement that followed the shootings of unarmed black men by white police officers. Such implicit biases -- which, if they were to influence split-second law enforcement decisions, could have life or death consequences -- are measured by psychological tests, most prominently the computerized Implicit Association Test, which has been taken by over two million people online at the website Project Implicit. ...
