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Thursday, May 3, 2012
Top Stories from the last 24 hours
Embrace the Supernatural: How Superstitions, Placebos and Rituals Help You to Achieve Your Goals
May 3rd, 2012Top StoryEmbrace the Supernatural: How Superstitions, Placebos and Rituals Help You to Achieve Your GoalsBy Thorin Klosowski
Superstitions can range from small behavioral choices (like always putting on your right shoe first) to more extreme decisions (say you avoid the number 13 at all costs). The most curious thing about these superstitions is that they actually work and can alter your behavior, boost your performance, and help you achieve your goals. To get a grasp on why we believe in superstitions—and how superstition and placebos manage to have measurable positive effects—I talked with Dr. Stuart Vyse, Professor of Psychology at Connecticut College, and author of Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition, and Matthew Hutson, science writer and author of The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane. Let's start by taking a look at why we believe in superstitions to begin with before we move onto the reasons why you should sometimes embrace them (and be wary of getting too attached to them). Why Superstitions and Placebos Change Your BehaviorWe should get a working definition of superstition here, because on its own, it's a broad term that encompasses a whole slew of magical thinking. Both Dr. Vyse and Matthew Hudson provided similar definitions, so we'll cobble them together into one: A superstition is a belief or behavior that's inconsistent with conventional science and attributes functional mental properties into non-mental phenomenon. Essentially, a superstition is a belief that the universe is always watching you and changes depending on your actions or what you're holding. Sounds ridiculous, right? So let's look at why we believe them. Why We Believe in Superstitions
Another theory is based on the idea of the "illusion of control," but as Hudson points out, it's about making sense of the world:
As far as the origin of these beliefs, one thought is that we evolved to believe in superstitions based on these pattern recognitions. In an article in New Scientist evolutionary biologist Kevin Foster suggests we learned superstitions based on the need to survive:
Essentially, you have superstitions because you want to believe that you can change your fate, that a little magic in your routine can change the outcome of an event, and because you need a little confidence boost. It's not a bad thing to believe in superstitions and as we'll see in later sections, believing in them can actually boost your performance. Photo by Mykl Roventine. How Placebos Can Boost Mind and Body Performance
Like superstitions, the placebo effect can generate a subjective outcome. If you believe in an outcome then when it happens you'll connect that to what you did before (wore a good luck charm or took a fake-pill). In some ways the difference between a placebo and a superstition is tiny. Take, for instance, people's insistence that Vitamin C and Echinacea prevent colds, despite no scientific evidence existing for either. Dr. Howard Brody explains this to Psychology Today:
Additionally, as the author at Psychology Today, Steven Kotier points out in his own story, the differences between a placebo and a superstition are hard to define sometimes:
The point is that when you believe doing something to make a difference in an outcome—like taking a fake pill, alternative medicines, wearing a knee sleeve, or knocking on wood—it can increase the chances of a positive outcome. You can actually trigger certain responses in the brain and body that help you meet a certain goal. Photo by Anders Sandberg. When Rituals Turn Into SuperstitionsSo we have a good understanding of why we believe in superstitions and in turn, how placebos work in a similar fashion. What about those of us who didn't grow up with complex superstitions, but still feel like we have them? For instance, I have to walk to the end of a block, pause for two minutes, then return to an entryway before I have to give a presentation or speak publicly. That sounds like a ritual, but when do these rituals become superstitions? I asked both experts what they thought and they both agreed: it's when you imbue a ritual with magical power. Dr. Vyse explains:
The difference between a ritual and a superstition is in the expected outcome. If you believe that performing your morning ritual or your pre-game routine can alter the outcome then it's a superstition. If you just do it to calm yourself before taking a plunge into an important event, the ritual continues as a ritual. The interesting thing, as Dr. Vyse noted, is that while routines have a psychological benefit, so do superstitions. Stop Being So Rational and Embrace Your Superstitions
The benefits likely come from both the placebo effect and the illusion of control. When you wear a lucky pair of shorts or perform a ritualistic dance before you give a speech, you trigger different parts in your brain that make you more receptive to the changes in the world around you. Wearing those lucky shorts, for instance, gives you a confidence boost. It also makes you visualize a positive outcome. When you prime your brain with that you're more receptive to opportunities and you project positivity in a way that people respond to it. Imbuing objects and routines with a the magical power of a superstition is essentially a way to prime yourself to act a certain way. It's not magic, but it's pretty close. Photo by London Looks. The Dangers of Superstition (and What You Can Do to Keep Your Relationship Positive)
Overdoing your positive beliefs can also have major, life-altering repercussions. Hudson explains:
Like most things in life, the key here is moderation. The fact that stock trading goes down on Friday the 13th, as does travel, financial deals, and even movie releases isn't healthy. Dr. Vyse has never had a patient call and complain about superstitions taking over their life, but he also stresses that they're best used in tandem with real preparation. For example, a lucky charm on a test is helpful provided you also studied for the test. Photo by Karin Dalziel. The real takeaway here is that despite the fact that most people won't admit it, many of us are superstitious to some degree. Believing in these superstitions isn't a bad thing as long as you use them as a part of larger plan and integrate them into your life in a healthy way. Best of all, believing in superstitions can provide that subtle, but useful boost to your performance on all sorts of tasks. How about you? Besides well known superstitions like knocking on wood or crossing your fingers, do you have any superstitious rituals or carry any lucky charms? And what do they "do" for you? Title image remixed from Rido (Shutterstock), Triff (Shutterstock), and LostINtrancE (Shutterstock).  |
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Five Things I Want to See in The Elder Scrolls Online
May 3rd, 2012Top StoryFive Things I Want to See in The Elder Scrolls OnlineBy Mike Fahey
Sight unseen The Elder Scrolls Online already has a leg up on other games in the MMO market, being based in a setting that's been in a constant state of development for more than 18 years. The first game in the series, Arena, arrived in 1994, and Bethesda's been adding to it ever since. It's also got Matt Firor as game director, one of the men responsible for Mythic's Dark Age of Camelot. DAoC was a highlight of my lengthy MMO-playing career. With three different realms, each with its own lineup of unique character classes, it was almost three games in one, tied together with one of the most compelling player-versus-player experiences in MMO history. With the right man at the helm and a rich world to plunder for content, I've no doubt The Elder Scrolls Online will be a rousing success, as long as they include everything I want to see in the game. Things like… No Traditional Character ClassesThe Elder Scrolls series has always been about the player making their own way through the world of Tamriel. There've been character templates, sure, but they were more of a guideline than a rule, giving players ideas rather than locking them into a specific set of skills. How would completely open character progression fit into the standard MMO holy trinity of tank, healer, and damage? That's left up to the players, as it always has been. Funcom's upcoming modern day MMO The Secret World features a similar mechanic. Players can invest in any skill they wish, piecing together a build that suits their play style. Experienced players have the options they crave, and character build cards are available to help the less experienced squeeze themselves into an easier-to-manage mold. They could have borrowed the system from older games in The Elder Scrolls series. The Elder Scrolls Online should borrow it back. First-Person Action-AdventureIn many of today's massively multiplayer online role-playing games the first-person camera is a novelty at best, completely absent at worst. I generally have no problem with this. I've gotten used to playing in third person over the years. It makes maneuvering through constantly evolving online landscapes much easier. In fact, there's only one role-playing game series I prefer in first person, and that's The Elder Scrolls. I might not be completely happy with the way combat currently works the series, but with a little tweaking it could make for an incredibly unique and versatile system that's unlike anything we've seen in the MMO genre. If players want to swap between views, that's fine. Just give me a viable first-person option. And while you're at it… Minimal InterfaceIf we're aiming for Skyrim-level immersion in The Elder Scrolls Online, there's one popular MMO convention that doesn't need to make it into the game: the hot bar. That's the portion of the MMO hud where the player accesses their skills and spells, clicking either their mouse or a corresponding keyboard key to activate them. It's an MMO tradition. Please kill it. Bethesda has done a wonderful job in minimizing the amount of screen clutter in The Elder Scrolls series. No colorful buttons, no quest-tracking sidebars, no quick-slot displays or indicators of how much gold you've amassed; just a health indicator and a great big beautiful world. Faction-Based Player Versus Player CombatAn MMO needs player-versus-player combat, but simply throwing in the option to kill your friends isn't good enough for an Elder Scrolls game. If I'm going to raise my sword against my fellow fans, I'm going to need a compelling reason to do so. Tamriel is a world of intrigue and conflict that's far from 'this race hates this race, so they fight'. There are powerful forces at work behind-the-scenes, forcing players to throw their lot in with one faction or another in order to survive. Outside of the utter chaos of a PVP server, basing player conflict on factional strife is the only way that randomly killing one's fellow adventurers makes sense. I'm thinking three or four major factions caught up in a never-ending struggle for dominance. Or better yet, level-based faction tiers that allow players to select their allegiance for each new tier of PVP combat. Side with the Stormcloaks in your 30s, switch over to the Imperial side in your 40s. It may sound convoluted but hey, isn't that the Dark Age of Camelot guy? And Finally, ModsThe unprecedented access Bethesda has given players of The Elders Scrolls over the years has resulted in games that are constantly improving via player input. They've not only enhanced the games, they've improved upon them exponentially. One might say that if you aren't playing the PC version of Skyrim with mods you aren't playing the real game. Mods are easy enough to allow in a single-player experience, but when thousands of players exist in a single world, paying close attention to the competition, policing mods that give others unfair advantage becomes an extremely difficult task. So? Make a mod-friendly server. Make two. Make three. The non-modding players can get a pure experience on vanilla servers, and the modders can go freaking crazy. Set up a service like the Steam Workshop for specially certified mods. Keep it cosmetic, or let players toy with the mechanics. When it comes right down to it, there's one surefire way to make The Elder Scrolls Online one of the most successful massively multiplayer online role-playing games of all-time. See Skyrim? Let me play that with a few hundred of my close friends. Maintain that same spirit of adventure, sprinkle in community, and realize that the bugs we thought were funny in the single-player game won't fly in an MMO environment. How about you folks? What do you hope to see in The Elder Scrolls Online, aside from yourselves?  |
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Mitt Romney's Case Against a Mitt Romney Presidency
May 3rd, 2012Top StoryMitt Romney's Case Against a Mitt Romney PresidencyBy Mobutu Sese Seko
To save mental space, I've tried to assemble Romney's gaffes into a Frankenstein error, a Katamari of campaign stumbles: "Mitt Romney let the dogs out, only to fire them into a corporation to kill people via creative destruction and win a $10,000 bet." But there's always something new. This week, Romney's leadership of his advisors as well as his own words about leadership in protecting America seemed to suggest one thing: Mitt Romney believes that the United States cannot afford to elect Mitt Romney. You've probably seen the first story: Richard Grenell, Romney's newly minted foreign policy expert, was silenced on a major conference call, unceremoniously closeted by the Romney campaign and subsequently resigned. Because he was gay. Don't start the waterworks yet. Grenell played lackey to George Bush's UN Ambassador John Bolton, bearer of the Ur-Freeper mustache and the sort of person whose idea of a response to UN protests over bombing the Middle East to a sheet of glass would have been to don a pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones. Grenell fit right in, and his nastiness extended to the personal, where he used Twitter to slam Rachel Maddow, Michelle Obama and Callista Gingrich's appearance without the leavening aspect of "not being incredibly obvious and unfunny." All of which is to say that Grenell has a robust neoconservative background of being indifferent to killing a lot of people while also being a huge dick. Even with his history of sharing corporate-camp bunk beds with Bibi Netanyahu, Romney's unfair "Massachusetts Moderate" reputation needed counterbalance from someone like Grenell. Unfortunately, all it took was the homophobic outrage of a far-right Christian loudmouth and director of an SPLC-designated hate group named Bryan Fischer to change the strategy of the presumptive GOP nominee's campaign. Grenell's homosexuality, which disrupted no aspect of Bush-era diplomacy, could somehow be fatal to Romney. Naturally, seeing the bar set so low, the National Review oozed under it:
After years of voting and working for the sorts of people who leverage restricting his civil rights in order to "mobilize the base," it's pretty safe to say that Grenell isn't jumping ship any time soon. When your own employers make you the boogeyman to get votes and you don't shop your resume around, you're probably a true believer. (And if sexual pursuits really motivate political behavior over all other concerns, where was the huge middle-aged male voting swing for McCain over his MILF policy?) But this is Planet GOP, after all, where gay people are fervid, priapic little deviants who can't help but indoctrinate children and think broken thoughts with the broken dicks that they keep trying to cram into the wrong openings. I mean, Christ, if the ambassador from Tehran is exotically long-lashed and Persian enough, Grenell might sell out our war plans for a handjob. This might just be saucy, shabby sexual politics, but Romney's pitch to the American people is "LEADERSHIP" and capable management. When Romney's being charitable to Obama, he uses codewords to call him stupid ("in over his head") while championing his own expertise. Given his campaign approach, it's significant that the three natural responses to the Grenell matter are all negative:
The first two are bad on their own, but the vacillating wussiness of the third was the sort of thing castigated by Romney himself. After Romney condemned Obama for "politicizing" national defense and the assassination of Osama bin Laden—a truly rich accusation coming from the party of "Mission Accomplished" and fishily timed political benchmarks in Iraq—people like William Saletan at Slate and Ben Armbruster and Igor Volsky at Think Progress printed substantial quotes from George Bush, Dick Cheney, Ed Gillespie and Zell Miller politicizing the war on terror and slamming John Kerry for his lack of leadership and resolve. One person who joined them was Mitt Romney:
Not only does this quote challenge Romney's ability to manage his own staff of advisors and his attitude toward targeting bin Laden (to borrow another 2004 phrase, "He was against it before he was for it") but it impeaches him on practically anything else. He was for a woman's right to choose before he was against it. He was for stem-cell research before he was against it. He was for his own healthcare program before he was against it. Militarily, economically... our very way of life is under attack. If Mitt Romney is to be believed, Mitt Romney is an existential threat to it. We "don't want presidential leadership that comes in 57 varieties." America needs resolute leadership it can count on, and Mitt Romney has ruled out a candidate like Mitt Romney in no uncertain terms. Unless, of course, he changed his mind about that. "Mobutu Sese Seko" is founder of the blog Et tu, Mr. Destructo?  |
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