links for 2009-01-05

" In fancy restaurants, never ask, "What should I get?" Instead, ask, "What's best?" That allows the waiter to highlight what's special and reveals how informed the staff is. If the waiter's answer is "everything" – an uninformed or cowardly response – head for the door. In ethnic restaurants, in contrast, asking what's best often gets you the most watered-down dishes, designed for gringos. Look at what teh ethnic diners are eating and order that."

But very often the restaurant food hews to the English stereotype of potted meat, soggy pastry, and vegetable mush. At several meals, it was rare to encounter a single thing that crunched at all or was remotely fresh or colorful.

Gullibility can be considered a form of stupidity, so it is safe to assume that deficiencies in knowledge and/or clear thinking often are implicated in a gullible act. By terming this factor “cognition” rather than intelligence, I mean to indicate that one can have a high IQ and still prove gullible. There is a large literature, by scholars such as Michael Shermer11 and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini12 that show how often people of average and above-average intelligence fail to use their intelligence fully or efficiently when addressing everyday decisions. Keith Stanovich makes a distinction between intelligence (the possession of cognitive schemas) and rationality (the actual application of those schemas).13 The “pump” that drives irrational decisions (many of them gullible), according to Stanovich, is the use of intuitive, impulsive and non-reflective cognitive styles, often driven by emotion.

6. De-friending can regress mature women into a high school gossip mob