Lone Gunman

Forever’s Not So Long is a touch­ing short film (13 mins.) chronicling how two peo­ple decide to see out the end of their lives.

via Link Banana

Writ­ten by, among oth­ers, Daniel Gilbert (author of Stum­bling on Hap­pi­ness), an arti­cle in Sci­ence looks at how bad we are at judg­ing our reac­tions to var­i­ous future events (closed access article).

In two exper­i­ments, par­tic­i­pants more accu­rately pre­dicted their affec­tive reac­tions to a future event when they knew how a neigh­bor in their social net­work had reacted to it than when they knew about the event itself. Women made more accu­rate pre­dic­tions about how much they would enjoy a date with a man when they knew how much another woman in their social net­work enjoyed dat­ing the man than when they read the man’s per­sonal pro­file and saw his pho­to­graph. Men and women made more accu­rate pre­dic­tions about how they would feel after being eval­u­ated by a peer when they knew how another per­son in their social net­work had felt after being eval­u­ated than when they pre­viewed the eval­u­a­tion itself. Although sur­ro­ga­tion trumped sim­u­la­tion, both par­tic­i­pants and inde­pen­dent judges had pre­cisely the oppo­site intu­ition. By a wide mar­gin, they believed that sim­u­la­tion was more likely than sur­ro­ga­tion to pro­duce accu­rate affec­tive forecasts.

Robin Han­son gives his typ­i­cally learned opin­ion on the paper:

Peo­ple often won­der what it will be like for them to be old, or mar­ried, or with a suc­cess­ful career, etc.  They usu­ally con­clude they just can’t know, and must wait and see.  Yet all around them are other folks who are old, mar­ried, etc. — why not just accept those expe­ri­ences as a good pre­dic­tions of such futures?

This research shows that we should do exactly that, as we’re not as dif­fer­ent as we would like to think.

For indi­vid­u­als and fam­i­lies fac­ing finan­cial ruin one would assume that a lot­tery win would be a per­fect, if lucky, way out of hard­ship. Con­trary to this, how­ever, an analy­sis of a small, unique set of people—Floridian lot­tery win­ners linked to bank­ruptcy records—finds that lot­tery win­ners are more likely to claim bank­ruptcy than oth­ers who were in a sim­i­lar finan­cial state pre­vi­ous to their win (pdf).

A fun­da­men­tal ques­tion faced by pol­i­cy­mak­ers is how best to help indi­vid­u­als who are in finan­cial trou­ble. This paper exam­ines the con­se­quences of the most basic approach: giv­ing peo­ple large cash trans­fers. To deter­mine whether this pre­vents or merely post­pones bank­ruptcy, we exploit a unique dataset of Florida Lot­tery win­ners linked to bank­ruptcy records. Results show that although recip­i­ents of $50,000 to $150,000 are 50 per­cent less likely to file for bank­ruptcy in the two years after win­ning rel­a­tive to small win­ners, they are equally more likely to file three to five years after­ward. Fur­ther­more, bank­ruptcy fil­ings indi­cate that even though the median win­ner of a large cash prize could have paid off all of his unse­cured debt or increased equity in new or exist­ing assets, she chose not to do either. Con­se­quently, although we can­not be sure other recip­i­ents of finan­cial assis­tance would react in the same way lot­tery play­ers did, our results do sug­gest that some skep­ti­cism regard­ing the long-term effect of cash trans­fers may be warranted.

via The Under­cover Economist

New Sci­en­tist pro­vides a com­pre­hen­sive sum­mary of stud­ies look­ing at the psy­chol­ogy of money. There are some fas­ci­nat­ing find­ings here, includ­ing a study show­ing that “sim­ply think­ing about words asso­ci­ated with money seems to makes us more self-reliant and less inclined to help oth­ers [and] just han­dling cash can take the sting out of social rejec­tion and even dimin­ish phys­i­cal pain”.

Our rela­tion­ship with money has many facets. Some peo­ple seem addicted to accu­mu­lat­ing it, while oth­ers can’t help max­ing out their credit cards and find it impos­si­ble to save for a rainy day. As we come to under­stand more about money’s effect on us, it is emerg­ing that some people’s brains can react to it as they would to a drug, while to oth­ers it is like a friend. Some stud­ies even sug­gest that the desire for money gets cross-wired with our appetite for food. And, of course, because hav­ing a pile of money means that you can buy more things, it is vir­tu­ally syn­ony­mous with sta­tus — so much so that los­ing it can lead to depres­sion and even sui­cide. In these cash-strapped times, per­haps an insight into the psy­chol­ogy of money can improve the way we deal with it.

*The orig­i­nal arti­cle has, since post­ing this, gone behind a pay­wall. Simoleon Sense has some exten­sive excerpts.

For The New York Times, Joseph Tar­takovsky pro­vides a short, sur­pris­ingly groan­less, his­tory of the pun.

The inglo­ri­ous pun! Dry­den called it the “low­est and most grov­el­ing kind of wit.” To Ambrose Bierce it was a “form of wit to which wise men stoop and fools aspire.” Uni­ver­sal expe­ri­ence con­firms the adage that puns don’t make us laugh, but groan. […]

Puns are the fee­blest species of humor because they are ephemeral: what­ever comic force they pos­sess never out­lasts the split sec­ond it takes to resolve the seman­tic con­fu­sion. Most resem­ble math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­las: clever, per­haps, but hardly occa­sion for knee-slapping. The worst smack of taw­dri­ness, even inde­cency, which is why puns, like off-color jokes, are often fol­lowed by apologies.

I’ll say noth­ing more on the sub­ject lest I pun and lose you all as readers.