Fremdscham is the new Schadenfreude

Fremdscham (the noun) describes the almost-horror you feel when you notice that somebody is oblivious to how embarrassing they truly are. Fremdscham occurs when someone who should feel embarrassed for themselves simply is not, and you start feeling embarrassment in their place.

Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.

Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. Kruger and Dunning conclude,

“the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others”.

Vicious Cycle

“The skills needed to produce logically sound arguments, for instance, are the same skills that are necessary to recognize when a logically sound argument has been made. Thus, if people lack the skills to produce correct answers, they are also cursed with an inability to know when their answers, or anyone else’s, are right or wrong. They cannot recognize their responses as mistaken, or other people’s responses as superior to their own.”

the little things

just saw this on google maps:

meals

Skipping breakfast really does make you want donuts. Neuroscientists find that when you miss a meal, the brain primes you to seek higher-calorie food, so you don’t just want to eat more—you want to eat worse.

sleep

For the study, young, healthy, slim subjects spent four nights getting eight and a half hours of sleep and four nights getting only four and a half hours of sleep. The difference in their fat cells was startling: after sleep deprivation, the cells became 30 percent less receptive to insulin signals—a difference that is as large as that between non-diabetic and diabetic patients.

Challenging conventions

It’s quite exciting to see what is happening in NYC recently. Both Square and Über are really challenging some established conventions for payment and transportation.

So far both have been on a winning spree against its competitors. But this week they had some casualties. Curious to see what will come next.

Scrrrreech! The TLC Explains Why Square Stopped Its Pilot Program in NYC Taxis

Uber quietly shutting down taxis in New York after fight with regulators

iPad Kiosk

The pilot program called for putting iPads in airport waiting areas so that people might order food from the nearby restaurant, essentially turning a 50-seat restaurant into a 200-seat restaurant.

more here.

TV Tropes

thanks ricky

on nootropics

“I don’t have a whole lot of choice,” said Dr. Anderson, a pediatrician for many poor families in Cherokee County, north of Atlanta. “We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.”

Dr. Anderson’s instinct, he said, is that of a “social justice thinker” who is “evening the scales a little bit.” He said that the children he sees with academic problems are essentially “mismatched with their environment” — square pegs chafing the round holes of public education. Because their families can rarely afford behavior-based therapies like tutoring and family counseling, he said, medication becomes the most reliable and pragmatic way to redirect the student toward success.

“People who are getting A’s and B’s, I won’t give it to them,” he said. For some parents the pills provide great relief. Jacqueline Williams said she can’t thank Dr. Anderson enough for diagnosing A.D.H.D. in her children — Eric, 15; Chekiara, 14; and Shamya, 11 — and prescribing Concerta, a long-acting stimulant, for them all. She said each was having trouble listening to instructions and concentrating on schoolwork.

“My kids don’t want to take it, but I told them, ‘These are your grades when you’re taking it, this is when you don’t,’ and they understood,” Ms. Williams said, noting that Medicaid covers almost every penny of her doctor and prescription costs.

Regarding Apple Maps

Our data experts performed an identical series of activities on Google Maps and Apple Maps that included searching for several US cities, addresses and airports and zooming in and out to locate specific locations. On Google Maps, the average data loaded from the cellular network for each step was 1.3MB. Apple Maps came in at 271KB – that’s approximately 80% less data! On some actions, such as zooming in to see a particular intersection, Apple Maps’ efficiency advantage edged close to 7.

Apple Maps Uses 80 Percent Less Data Than Google Maps.