Friday the 6th

What Exactly Is Economic Growth?

{http://jerrykhachoyan.com/exactly-economic-growth/}

A LIST OF REASONS WHY OUR BRAINS LOVE LISTS
{http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/12/a-list-of-reasons-that-our-brains-love-lists.html}

1. Our brains love lists
2. The headline catches our eye in a stream of content
3. It positions its subject within a preëxisting category and classification syste
4. It spatially organizes the information and it promises a story that’s finite whose length has been quantified upfront.
5. They create an easy reading experience, in which the mental heavy lifting of conceptualization, categorization, and analysis is completed well in advance of actual consumption.
6. They often hit our attentional sweet spot
7. Alleviate the so-called “paradox of choice”—the phenomenon that the more information and options we have, the worse we feel.
8. we process it more efficiently, and we retain it with little effort. Faced with a detailed discussion of policies toward China or five insane buildings under construction in Shanghai, we tend to choose the latter bite-sized option.

Even when we know we will not be entirely satisfied by it, That’s just fine, as long as we realize that our fast-food information diet is necessarily limited in content and nuance, and thus unlikely to contain the nutritional value of the more in-depth analysis of traditional articles that rely on paragraphs, not bullet points."

Why the stupid think they’re smart
{http://mindhacks.com/2013/12/02/the-more-inept-you-are-the-more-inaccurate-your-self-assessment/}