Blue- and Yellow-Tinted Choices

Maybe u shld write a post that describes the same effect but wihout the pics, citaations or grammar.

I agree, all that good grammar just gets in the way. There's too little appreciation for bad grammar here on lesswrong.

FWIW, I suspect most casual readers don't know about Methods of Rationality and were confused by this.

Well, they should fix that.

The label "Dark Arts" is itself an example of Dark Arts: romanticizing something to hide assumptions in it.

Nick Tarleton:

I'm a little worried that calling (a/i)rrational persuasive techniques "Dark Arts", even in seemingly indefensible (though, it must be said, minor) cases like this, biases us against them and will make people averse to using them even when doing so is ethical and beneficial. What do others think? Am I overreacting?

Here is a provocative thought. In my opinion, scientists nowadays command the trust and confidence of the general public largely thanks to the "dark arts."

Nobody except the scientists themselves and a tiny number of hobbyist enthusiasts who have invested the large effort to study the relevant material has the necessary competence to judge whether the work in any particular field is true and sound or just bullshit. (To be precise, in some applied areas, people can be reasonably confident because they constantly see useful new technologies coming out of the research efforts, but that's not the case for most fields.) Now, when scientists make outreach to the general public and try to popularize science -- thus reinforcing their status and authority -- it's absolutely impossible for them to argue things in a way that would be both: (1) correct and logically rigorous, and (2) comprehensible even to exceptionally intelligent and informed readers and listeners, let alone average ones.

Because of this, we get popular science materials that are, from an intellectually rigorous point of view, basically a pile of bullshit arguments for conclusions that are likely true, but for altogether different reasons -- reasons which the intended audience is utterly incapable of comprehending. Even the conclusions themselves are often so complicated and remote from everyday experience that they get presented in a way that is perhaps technically true, but virtually guaranteed to cause misunderstanding and puzzlement in most of the audience. Sure, some fields allow for decent popular presentations, like e.g. people studying the migration patterns of animals. But the stuff found in most pop-science treatments of, say, physics or evolution is just awful, and the silly and naive beliefs that masses of people form by reading them are even worse.

Therefore, for many areas of science, the bulk of the general public has no reason to believe that scientists are right except raw appeals to authority and the "dark arts" pop-science bullshit they've been served. Yet, our political system involves a significant democratic component, and scientists must maintain their intellectual authority in front of wide masses of people lest they lose government and philanthropic support. This might well be impossible to do without serving them a steady diet of "dark arts" pop-science that, on its own merits, has barely any more logical validity than all sorts of superstition and charlatanism that scientists are competing with for authority and public prominence.

I like the reference to "Dark Arts", but I've removed the Quirrell part on your suggestion.

This led me to deduce two possibilities: a group of men which trade off dominance on different nights (this would take a lot of trust, I think)

This is pretty much a standard part of being a 'wingman' in PUA.

This is really too long for a comment, but I couldn't resist:

Tom Marvolo Riddle, who had lately taken to calling himself Lord Voldemort, shut his eyes. When he opened them again, the envelope was lying on his bed, just as he had hoped. He studied the papers inside with barely concealed glee. Over several pages was a very long string of incomprehensible letters and numbers. Almost shaking, he typed it into the computer, where it said "ENTER RANDOM SEED", and pressed enter. The screen filled with - could it be? - pages of comprehensible text. He had to restrain himself from giving a very un-Dark-Lordly whoop of triumph.

This was outstandingly clever even for him. The Time-Turner, the computer generating random text blocks that - with the right seed - would be coherent hypotheses, the dungeon of prisoners to serve as subjects in hastily conducted impromptu experiments. And the only stable time loop being the one where he ended up with the secrets of human behavior.

He hit PRINT, then called in Dolohov, the trustworthy one. "Take these psychology hypotheses and test them on the prisoners downstairs. If you get p < .05, no, make it .01, and if you can think of ways they'd be useful in manipulating people, take these pages of letters and numbers, copy them, stick the copy in this envelope, and put it on my desk. Otherwise, increase the ASCII value of the last character in the random seed by one, and put that on my desk. No questions, just do it. And do it in the next twenty-four hours."

That would take care of the Time-Turner. He was glad his model lacked the length limitations of the standard version: six hours wouldn't have been enough time for Dolohov to finish the tests. Those idiots at the Ministry had no idea how easy it was to extend the gas mileage of one of those things. Or maybe they did and were too squeamish to go around obtaining the secret ingredient. He smiled lovingly at the jar of kitten hearts on his desk. Those things were like the duct tape of evil magic - you could use them for anything.

Now it only remained to make sure no one else ever copied his trick. The Ministry he'd already dealt with - Merlin bless that fool Minister Bagnold and her "it's inconceivable anyone could break through our wards" policy. He'd apparated into the Ministry, put a curse on their whole stockpile of Time-Turners, and gotten out with no one the wiser. The artifacts would still function for little things like attending extra classes, but try to use them for anything...clever...and they'd do their best to scare the user into submission. Cryptic warnings not to mess with time, that kind of thing.

But his own Death Eaters were more of a problem. They'd notice if their master suddenly and inexplicably learned all the secrets of the human mind. Some of the brighter ones might start asking where he'd learned them. Some of the really bright ones might try figuring out exactly what those secrets were and how to use them themselves. He needed a distraction. Something that would turn their minds away from the Dark Lord's late nights in his study tinkering with Time Turners and computers, something that would make the secrets of the mind not even worth obtaining.

Suddenly he broke out into a grin. Make something a secret, and of course people would look for it. Make it mundane, better yet make it low status, and people wouldn't give it a second thought - that was the lesson of Muggle science. Was that on the paper he'd given Dolohov? It must be. He'd tell everyone he learned the secrets from the Muggles. Everyone knew they came up with a bright idea every so often, but the ancient and noble bloodlines who populated the Death Eaters would sooner die than go rooting around in Muggle books like Mudbloods trying to find them.

He'd fake an identity as a Muggle scientist - maybe even two, now that he'd mastered duplication with the Time-Turner, and get the secrets published in a Muggle journal. If anyone asked, he'd been reading Muggle journals, and there was nothing unusual about his possessing the secrets of the human mind at all.

His Quirrell alias was already a professor, but he was saving that for a rainy day. And Voldemort and Tom Riddle were right out. That meant someone new. He took out his sketchpad. He did so love anagrams. That TOM MARVOLO RIDDLE == I AM LORD VOLDEMORT one still sent chills up his spine. He'd want something at least that good if he was going to be a Muggle researcher or two. After a few abortive attempts, he finally found something he liked.

DOR DANIEL KM & DOR AMOS TVERSKY, IL == YIKES, I'M DARK LORD VOLDEMORT-SAN

Right, then. Dr. Daniel Kahneman and Dr. Amos Tversky, Israel. And while he was in the area, he could pick up the Spear of Destiny. Kill two birds with one stone.

He'd just need a few supplies, and he'd be ready to go. He picked up his miniature scapel and put in a call to the local animal shelter, whistling merrily to himself.

And yet Ariely's first paper was published in 1994, which implies that a fictional Ariely from HP could have learned from Quirrell.

I was going to mention Time Turners, but it looks like I'm 17 days too late. Course, I always felt Time Turners were a cheap way out for a writer anyways.

I think the tops of the cubes in the 3D picture look brighter because of the "shadow". Your visual system is imagining a light source coming from the upper right. There's no such effect in the 2D picture.

The thing that worries me about these techniques is that they seem to be aimed at making a person satisfied with their environment but very focused on changing their mental and behavioral patterns. This runs counter to my general understanding that people's environments are generally easier to change and have much larger impacts on behavior than are generally recognized.

But it's one's mental and behavioral patterns that generally keep one from actually changing their environment. Many of our patterns are also homeostatic in nature: if the environment takes away one way to get the need met, we find another one. Such patterns are much more difficult to fix environmentally.

Paradoxically, being "satisfied" (i.e. neutral) to one's environment is more conducive to changing it. Stated more precisely, perceiving one's environment as non-threatening is vastly more conducive to changing it, than perceiving it as a threat. Our brains don't work nearly as well (or as creatively) when the environment is perceived to be threatening, relative to one's own resources.

(Btw, Buddhist meditations do include visualizing the loss of valuable things, such as one's own life. Also, the Zen Buddhist's mind is also going to be all over the place during meditation... the objective of the meditation is to see through these thoughts as false hopes and false fears distracting one from the objective neutrality of existence.)

The first, negative visualization, is aimed at bringing more satisfaction to one's life.

I know this sounds silly, but the first time I heard of this life-changing technique was in Star Wars episode III, in this quote by Yoda:

"Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose."

Quote with context

I think it's similar to systematic desensitization which is what I personally believe is the main function of hypnosis (although I'm uneducated about the subject). My application of this concept consists of relaxing while thinking about bad scenarios, over and over again for a few days or weeks.

It looks like it's compression. The image in the post is JPEG, which uses lossy compression; the one in mattnewport's post is PNG, which uses lossless compression.

I think it might be some dodgy processing or gamma correction at some point in the image's history. Some of the 'yellow' tile pixels in my image have very slightly different RGB values than the 'blue' tile pixels. Applying a gamma curve, saturation adjustment or other image processing could have resulted in the greater differences seen in the image in the post.

I mean, wow, when you draw a line from the "blue" to "yellow" tiles the same color as both tiles, the line looks like it's changing color, even though it can't be!

Cool idea, here's what it looks like.

Yeah, I don't think this illusion (which I posted in the colour constancy discussion you mention) is an appropriate example to use as an introduction to the Predictably Irrational story. Your brain is not being 'fooled' here - it is doing exactly what it is supposed to do, which is solving the inverse rendering problem and not identifying RGB values. The anchoring effect with the prices of subscriptions is not really the same kind of thing at all.

Ariely then went so far as to recommend in his book that for best effect, you should go to bars and clubs with a wingman who is similar to you but less attractive.

It's commonly observed that many girls use this exact tactic when going to bars and clubs.

I unfortunately don't have the book with me, so I can't give you page numbers. I gave a link to the Amazon page for the book, but I realize that's not optimal. There's a link to an online Scribd version of the book I can give you if you want it, but it's of questionable legality and I figured having that in the main article wasn't the sort of thing we wanted LW associated with.