rePost:Advice to Various Presidential Candidates: The demand for quacks :Stumbling and Mumbling

Read the whole thing. Interesting thought, even if a product doesn’t work, advertising does. This is why we need to force the candidates that we like to advertise more. If your for Gibo, for Noy, for Gordon, for Villanueva, we can’t let the Villar (aka Arroyo 2) to win.
Btw1: except for the Ampatuan misstep Gibo’s brand of campaigning is really good, though not good enough. I especially like the way they highlighted the aviator credentials (Believe this is good for the girls). Gibo has the hottest wife they need to get her to do more shows/commercials. Although Gibo’s interview highlights his intelligence I believe as the GMA2’s popularity boost has shown its about virality, Last Song Syndrome etc.
Btw2: Noy’s advertisements are dull and kind of self centered. I fail to get “Di Ka Nag Iisa”. Campaigns should be about the candidate showing us he/she is worth voting. Di ka nag iisa was made as if you want us to convince you to run. Come on, fix your message/Public Relations team, they seem to be too full of themselves.
Bt3: I’ve written about this before but Gordon should be highlighting his nickname. We need a more fun campaign.
Bt4: I believe that Eddie should just point his followers to any of the three other candidates (Gibo/Gordon/Noy). Religion and Government should not mix.
Btw5: I think that in the next Presidential Forum the other candidates should gang up on GMA2(Just love that GMA2 is like 7ABS hehehe) in the passive aggressive way we Filipinos excel at. Everyone should keep saying. Hindi ako magnanakaw, di ko gagamitin ang pera ng gobyerno para sa pansarili kong kapakanan, etc etc. Though I fear only Bro Eddie can say this because he is a relatively new politician, and all politicians are liars (well not all but close enough).

The 10:23 campaign against homeopathy raises a question: given that homeopathy doesn’t work, why is there such strong demand for it? A new paper by Werner Troesken (ungated draft pdf) sheds some interesting light on this.
He studies not homeopathy but US patent medicines in the 19th century. Despite being practically useless, these enjoyed spectacular long-run growth – Professor Troesken estimates that spending on them grew 22 times faster than US GDP between 1810 and 1939. Why?
The answer, he says, is that demand for them was inelastic with respect to failure – people kept buying them even though they didn’t work. This was because the medicines offered enormous consumer surplus; the products were cheap, but the benefits they offered were huge; there’s an analogy here with Pascal’s wager. As a result, when a product failed to work, consumers downgraded the probability that patent medicines generally would work, but still saw a positive expected gain from buying them; the small chance of a big improvement in one’s health is worth paying for.
via Stumbling and Mumbling: The demand for quacks.

Research Of The Day (ROTD):The Only Reason I'd Love To Move Abroad:The Bellows » Paper of the Day the First

Yes, there is a part of me that wants to move abroad. It’s the part that believes Silicon Valley/New York/London is where the tech action is. Where I’d likely find people of like or at least similar aspirations. Take for instance the Philippine Tech Community. Its the same faces, and there is a reason for this, for keeping an 8 hour job and still coding/blogging/learning new programming languages/coding up personal projects is tiring and people who are either not rich/not very very smart/ very very productive/ very very lucky can do it. Life get’s in the way. I consider myself lucky , and this is the only reason why I am at least at the periphery or maybe the first row at the outside of the Philippine Tech Community, not quite there yet but slowly inching inwards. Sometimes it’s not about greener pastures. It’s what a musician and a dancer working in Hong Kong Disneyland says when interviewed by Kara Davin in last weeks episode of OFW Diaries, It’s the opportunity to practice something you love.

And I think that to a certain extent, people make these choices based on conceptions they have about themselves and the people they’d like to be. If you see yourself as someone who is interested in art, you may move to New York, not just because there is a lot of great art there, but also because you’ll meet people there who are themselves interested in art and who will nudge you toward more involvement with art and artists. Or you might move to Denver, because you want to be an outdoorsy person. People you meet there will typically be outdoorsy, and they’ll make it easier for you to become this outdoorsy person that you hope to be. At a more general level, people may simply feel that they’re “destined for bigger things”, or ready for a “simpler life”, and they may choose cities based on these feelings. Not just because they’re going where they want to go, but because they’re committing themselves to a certain lifestyle, and placing themselves in a situation where the people they come to know will act as constraints on them, pushing them to behave in a certain way. After all, you can love art in Denver and be outdoorsy in New York.
It seems to me that people want to be a lot of things that they can’t necessarily become on their own. A move can be a means to commit oneself to a certain course, and to make it harder to back away from a desired goal or style of life.
via The Bellows » Paper of the Day the First.

rePost::Experimental Theology: The Way, the Truth and the Life

Nice way to think about this!!!

Jesus said he was “the way, the truth and the life.”
For many Christians, where faith has been reduced to propositional assent (“I believe x to be true”), Jesus’ claim moves through the following sequence:

Truth-Life-Way

That is, we have the following order:

  1. Truth: I believe in Jesus
  2. Life: Because of this belief I get to go to heaven
  3. Way: And maybe, but this doesn’t always happen, I’ll begin to live more like Jesus

What I was arguing for in the last post was this kind of sequence. A reversal of the traditional order:

Way-Life-Truth

Things go in this order:

  1. Way: I begin to follow the path of Jesus
  2. Life: I discover that in losing my life I find it
  3. Truth: And maybe, but this doesn’t always happen, I’ll begin to believe the claims about Jesus to be true

via Experimental Theology: The Way, the Truth and the Life.

Learned Today:Income Mobility My ASS:Born Poor? | Santa Fe Reporter

Again with the numbers:
30
32
The first number is the likelihood, expressed as a percentage, that a child born to parents whose incomes fall within the top 10 percent of Americans will grow up to be at least as wealthy.
The second is the percentage likelihood that a person born into the bottom 10 percent of society will stay at the bottom.
Just to drive the point home, here’s a third number: 1.3
That’s the percentage likelihood that a bottom 10 percenter will ever make it to the top 10 percent. For 99 out of 100 people, rags never lead to riches.
via Born Poor? | Santa Fe Reporter.

rePost::Born Poor? | Santa Fe Reporter

“Inequality,” she says, “really holds us back.”
Bowles offers a key reason why this is so. “Inequality breeds conflict, and conflict breeds wasted resources,” he says.
In short, in a very unequal society, the people at the top have to spend a lot of time and energy keeping the lower classes obedient and productive.
Inequality leads to an excess of what Bowles calls “guard labor.” In a 2007 paper on the subject, he and co-author Arjun Jayadev, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, make an astonishing claim: Roughly 1 in 4 Americans is employed to keep fellow citizens in line and protect private wealth from would-be Robin Hoods.
The job descriptions of guard labor range from “imposing work discipline”—think of the corporate IT spies who keep desk jockeys from slacking off online—to enforcing laws, like the officers in the Santa Fe Police Department paddy wagon parked outside of Walmart.
The greater the inequalities in a society, the more guard labor it requires, Bowles finds. This holds true among US states, with relatively unequal states like New Mexico employing a greater share of guard labor than relatively egalitarian states like Wisconsin.
via Born Poor? | Santa Fe Reporter.

Learned Today::Innovation's Accidental Enemies – BusinessWeek

Abductive logic, Logic of what could be. I like the sound of that!!!

Does that mean we are doomed to live in world devoid of proof—that innovation must be consigned to a realm of cross-our-fingers hopefulness? No, it’s not so bleak. Instead, when facing an anomalous situation, we can turn to a third form of logic: abductive logic, the logic of what could be. To use abduction, we need to creatively assemble the disparate experiences and bits of data that seem relevant in order to make an inference—a logical leap—to the best possible conclusion.
via Innovation’s Accidental Enemies – BusinessWeek.

Quote::Innovation's Accidental Enemies – BusinessWeek

When faced with a new idea, the boardroom impulse is to ask for proof in one of two flavors: deductive and inductive. With deduction, we apply a widely held rule. With induction, we develop a new rule from a wide range of data. In both cases, we use existing information to understand the issue in play. But for breakthroughs, there is no rule or pool of past data to provide certainty. So when a CEO, like our banker friend, demands evidence that an idea will succeed, he is driving innovation away.
via Innovation’s Accidental Enemies – BusinessWeek.