Today we learn why we spend so much time burying our heads in the sand when a risky decision might not be going our way, we see how to get married in Scotland, and Iain M Banks comments on the nature of war. (This post was written before Mr. Bank’s untimely death from Cancer. I would just like to take this moment to say what a loss his death is for the science fiction community and the world at large. If for whatever reason friends or family of Mr. Banks sees this, you have all of our condolances. –Steve)
…in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots. –Iain M Banks, Use of Weapons
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The ostrich effect: Selective attention to information We develop and test a model which links information acquisition decisions to the hedonic utility of information. Acquiring and attending to information increases the psychological impact of information (an impact effect), increases the speed of adjustment for a utility reference-point (a reference-point updating effect), and affects the degree of risk aversion towards randomness in news (a risk aversion effect). Given plausible parameter values, the model predicts asymmetric preferences for the timing of resolution of uncertainty: Individuals should monitor and attend to information more actively given preliminary good news but “put their heads in the sand” by avoiding additional information given adverse prior news. We test for such an “ostrich effect” in a finance context, examining the account monitoring behavior of Scandinavian and American investors in two datasets. In both datasets, investors monitor their portfolios more frequently in rising markets than when markets are flat or falling. (Niklas Karlsson, George Loewenstein, Duane Seppi)
Superstitions.
