'Uncertainty drives the search for and generation of creative ideas, but "uncertainty also makes us less able to recognize creativity, perhaps when we need it most," the researchers wrote. "Revealing the existence and nature of a bias against creativity can help explain why people might reject creative ideas and stifle scientific advancements, even in the face of strong intentions to the contrary. ... The field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more creative ideas to identify how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity."'

"The Best Visual illusion of the Year Contest is a celebration of the ingenuity and creativity of the world’s premier visual illusion research community. Contestants from all around the world submitted novel visual illusions (unpublished, or published no earlier than 2009), and an international panel of judges rated them and narrowed them to the TOP TEN. At the Contest Gala in the Naples Philharmonic Center for the Arts, the top ten illusionists presented their creations and the attendees of the event voted to pick the TOP THREE WINNERS!"

"…Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test."

"The goal is not to make your user interface as realistic as possible. The goal is to add those details which help users identify what an element is, and how to interact with it, and to add no more than those details. UI elements are abstractions which convey concepts and ideas; they should retain only those details that are relevant to their purpose. UI elements are almost never representations of real things. Adding too much realism can cause confusion."

"Brilliant … but what made Dr. K’s technique most insidiously evil and genius was, during the most technically difficult lecture of the entire quarter, there was no lie. At the end of the lecture in which he was not called on any lie, he offered the same challenge to work through the notes; on the following Monday, he fielded our theories for what the falsehood might be (and shooting them down “no, in fact that is true – look at “) for almost ten minutes before he finally revealed: “Do you remember the first lecture – how I said that ‘every lecture has a lie?’”"

" The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent—in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique. McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism, contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch’s incredible assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, has one hundred pages of bibliography and notes. The entire right-wing movement of our time is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies. Sometimes the right-wing striving for scholarly depth and an inclusive world view has startling consequences: Mr. Welch, for example, has charged that the popularity of Arnold Toynbee’s historical work is the consequence of a plot on the part of Fabians, “Labour party bosses in England,” and various members of the Anglo-American “liberal establishment” to overshadow the much more truthful and illuminating work of Oswald Spengler."

"Our reports reviewed, systematically, 13 models of learning styles and concluded that this area of research is theoretically incoherent and conceptually confused. I listed in the reports 30 dichotomies, such as “activists” versus “reflectors”, “globalists” versus “analysts”, and “left brainers” versus “right brainers”. We should stop using these terms. There’s no scientific justification for them. You can check that. Shake your head gently. Does the left hemisphere of your brain move independently from the right? Or do they seem connected?"

"Even eBay, with the most well-known example of public negative karma, doesn't represent how untrustworthy an actual seller might be-it only gives buyers reasons to take specific actions to protect themselves. In general, avoid negative public karma. If you really want to know who the bad guys are, keep the score separate and restrict it to internal use by moderation staff."

"We must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable laws of economics. These so-called laws are, in actuality, the economic mechanisms of 13th Century monarchs. Some of us analyzing digital culture and its impact on business must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems."

"My reaction to them... What the fuck is wrong with you people? Why would you think that I would want to have anything to do with you? How do you have the chutzpah to act as if we're old friends? How dare you? I see the RSVP list that one of you sent me, and I literally feel nauseous just remembering your names."

via Nic McPhee

"What’s the gap between dreams being fantasy and reality? Obviously, it’s a matter of action. But, what makes the free man take action where the cubicle citizen recoils? This is the question that has been burning in my mind for some time. This mindset makes the difference between success and near certain failure."

"In recent research experiments, Derek Rucker and Adam Galinsky, found that people who felt powerless were willing to pay more money for luxury or status items than people who’d been conditioned to feel more powerful and in control."

"Parallel play is also sometimes observed in older children when playing video games..."

[and coworkers]

"Most mainstream macroeconomic theoretical innovations since the 1970s (the New Classical rational expectations revolution associated with such names as Robert E. Lucas Jr., Edward Prescott, Thomas Sargent, Robert Barro etc, and the New Keynesian theorizing of Michael Woodford and many others) have turned out to be self-referential, inward-looking distractions at best. Research tended to be motivated by the internal logic, intellectual sunk capital and esthetic puzzles of established research programmes rather than by a powerful desire to understand how the economy works - let alone how the economy works during times of stress and financial instability. So the economics profession was caught unprepared when the crisis struck."

"The most long-standing suspicion about kindness is that it is just narcissism in disguise. We are kind because it makes us feel good about ourselves: kindly people are self-approbation junkies. Encountering this argument in the 1730s, the philosopher Francis Hutcheson dispatched it briskly: "If this is self-love, be it so ... Nothing can be better than this self-love, nothing more generous.""

"Of particular note, they have a great line where they say (my close paraphrase) that "to an outside observer who is not aware of the underlying objective function, it might appear that some agents become risk-loving." So when you say "We know that excessive risk taking was a factor in the financial crisis, but why people were willing to take on excessive risk?", you are ignoring a point emphasized by Keynes, and many others, but actively disdained by free-market fundamentalists: there is no a priori reason to believe in general that behavior that is individually rational is collectively rational. What, after all, is "excess" risk?"

"While behavioral performance did not differ between groups, Zen practitioners displayed a reduced duration of the neural response linked to conceptual processing in regions of the default network, suggesting that meditative training may foster the ability to control the automatic cascade of semantic associations triggered by a stimulus and, by extension, to voluntarily regulate the flow of spontaneous mentation."

I was presented with this del.icio.us link MOMENTS after sending off a patient and tactful explanation of why economic development is doomed and stupid. To an economic development person.

"... But they slip through the net and are gone; when the door is shut they are no longer in the room..."

"Obedience works fine on the well-organized, standardized factory floor. But what happens when we start using our heads, not our hands, when our collars change from blue to white?"

"Reality," said Willem de Kooning, "is a slipping glimpse"

"the distance between any two degrees of uncertainty equals the amount of evidence you would need to go from one to the other"

"A commitment to proceduralism and competency cannot be the end of your political or social appeal if you really aspire to lead or transform America."

"The extreme of scarcity is intensified by the extreme of ubiquity."

"This experience, I fear, maps the domain of belief onto the social domains of authority, of command, of law."

"If a foreign national is suspected of terrorist activity, the FBI will threaten to have a brutal foreign government punish his family."

Subjective randomness.

"See the sun rise or set if possible each day. Let that be your pill."

"Health and happiness are then held out as a promotional package to which all good citizens are expected to aspire, but the paradox is that it can lead to an addictive disorder that acts like a distorting mirror, affecting every aspect of our lives."

Joshua Bell makes a passable busker.

A clean and cogent argument not just against "standard" (and bad) software development practices, but also against most scientific and engineering research practices.

"Best guess beats careful planning"