David Emery OnlineDowsing is a technology for intuition amplification
So my unfounded, imagined mechanism starts like this: thinking about water, and stepping into a location where there is increased water likelihood, one may become primed to look down, which is physically represented as a microscopic movement or twitch of the fingers. (Which could of course be a random twitch because that happens too.)
—Matt Webb
I am absolutely fascinated by the idea that pseudoscience ideas like dowsing could—due to the deep and strange and mysterious ways our bodies are cobbled together—actually work on some level.
See also: homeopathy. I don’t for a second think that sugar pills with a microscopic amount of something in them have any effect, but—sometimes they do. Which means that our brains and our bodies are conjuring up that response out of nowhere, because the taker believes that they do.
And maybe—to build on Matt’s point about amplifying our own bodies intuition and natural responses—paracetamol, aspirin et al often work in the same way; it’s not the active ingredients that make you feel better, it’s the action of taking it. See also: when I give one of my kids a plaster for the most minor of scrapes.
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The Jurassic World Exhibition
There is an amazing weaponisation of consumer psychology at this end of this. You walk through room after room of dinosaur set pieces, each slowly ramping up in terms of scariness. Brachiosaurus first, velociraptor later, etc. Then, just at the point where your kids are getting a little tired after bouncing around petting anclyasauruses, in the last room—no spoilers—they terrify the pants off them.
And spit you out, tears akimbo, in an extremely well stocked gift shop.
Visit ➔The Busy Trap
If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”
This rings so true (or at least it would if I had time to read it…).
Visit ➔'How I Met Your Mother': Your Face Here
The news is this: thanks to groundbreaking technology, it is now possible to sell ads in old episodes of TV shows by digitally inserting things like TV screens in bar scenes or billboards on sidewalk scenes, and having those digital screens carry timely ads, for example, as EW noted, for the release of 'Bad Teacher' in an episode that was shot in 2009.
Great technology and all, but do advertisers seriously think they get a return on investment from taking the time to insert a product into the background on a rerun of a TV show?
I mean, really?
Visit ➔The Collapse of Complex Business Models
Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:
“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”
I could have quoted the whole of this to be honest. Really interesting.
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