Survivorship bias also flash-freezes your brain into a state of ignorance from which you believe success is more common than it truly is and therefore you leap to the conclusion that it also must be easier to obtain. You develop a completely inaccurate assessment of reality thanks to a prejudice that grants the tiny number of survivors the privilege of representing the much larger group to which they originally belonged.
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Unlucky people are narrowly focused, he observed. They crave security and tend to be more anxious, and instead of wading into the sea of random chance open to what may come, they remain fixated on controlling the situation, on seeking a specific goal. As a result, they miss out on the thousands of opportunities that may float by. Lucky people tend to constantly change routines and seek out new experiences. Wiseman saw that the people who considered themselves lucky, and who then did actually demonstrate luck was on their side over the course of a decade, tended to place themselves into situations where anything could happen more often and thus exposed themselves to more random chance than did unlucky people. The lucky try more things, and fail more often, but when they fail they shrug it off and try something else. Occasionally, things work out.
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In one study, he asked subjects to look through a newspaper and count the number of photographs inside. The people who labeled themselves as generally unlucky took about two minutes to complete the task. The people who considered themselves as generally lucky took an average of a few seconds. Wiseman had placed a block of text printed in giant, bold letters on the second page of the newspaper that read, “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” Deeper inside, he placed a second block of text just as big that read, “Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250.” The people who believed they were unlucky usually missed both.
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According to psychologist Richard Wiseman, luck – bad or good – is just what you call the results of a human beings consciously interacting with chance, and some people are better at interacting with chance than others.
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It is easy to do. After any process that leaves behind survivors, the non-survivors are often destroyed or rendered mute or removed from your view. If failures becomes invisible, then naturally you will pay more attention to successes. Not only do you fail to recognize that what is missing might have held important information, you fail to recognize that there is missing information at all.
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For several decades, what we know today as a “car” was referred to as a “horseless carriage.” It was easier to describe this new invention as what it was not, rather than what it was.
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A new analysis of the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactics found that officers performed more searches on young black men last year than the total number of young black men living in the city.
— Report Finds Stop-and-Frisk Focused on Black Youth - Metropolis - WSJ (via iamdanw)
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Here, then, is a portrait of a wealthy and powerful white man, the mayor of North America’s fourth-largest city and heir to Deco Labels and Tags, a successful business begun by his father, Doug, with his arm around a black youth who died in a gang-related shooting and who can be seen extending his middle finger to the camera.
— Rob Ford’s insatiable appetite for destruction - Canada - Macleans.ca
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Design refers to the will to interpret the meaning of human life and existence through the process of making things.
— Kenya Hara (via sssarah)design, (via usersillusions)
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New Wheelchair Lift Promises More Access (by AssociatedPress)
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among rich countries, high levels of inequality correlate with lower levels of social cohesion and social mobility, worse mental and physical health, and higher levels of crime, violence, drug use, and imprisonment. These problems do not merely afflict the poor. Rather, they touch people across the social spectrum. The implication is that large income gaps, by themselves, are significant contributors to these particular sources of human misery.
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Often, when people cross a threshold from one state into its alternative, or when they avoid crossing that boundary by taking an action to steer themselves away form the borderline, it’s a matter of maintaining standards of acceptability and appropriateness. For designers to understand what lies within the boundaries of acceptable use and what lies outside those boundarieas, they need to understand the contexts in which things will be used, and the range of likely conditions that will change that context in some way.
