Daily Stupidity

Kathryn Jean Lopez: "[...A]nd underneath it all (well, there's not that much covering it up, sure), [Paris Hilton]'s pro-life (remember the "birth control kill pill" on her Sidekick?) and could someday get it. "

The odds that she is not on some kind of birth control are probably non-existent, you idiot.

Megan McArdle: "Analysts generally expect housing declines to be three years from peak to trough, so we're riding out the worst of it right now--at least, if history is any guide."

Calculated Risk says,"As we've been discussing, the 2nd wave of defaults it just starting, and Alt-A will be ground zero this time. " See this chart. I also don't believe that history is a guide in this case, due to the housing bubble. Megan's post is stupid, or at least stupidly limited.

Michael Novak: "there is the experience of making practical decisions — which sometimes we know that we make intelligently, and sometimes stupidly — in which scientific knowledge does not show us which decision to make. At those times, in practical intellect, we know a form of knowing that leads to decisions which we darkly know to be right — “feel comfortable with,” we sometimes say. Here, too, we reach a kind of dark knowing, a knowledge of unseeing. Since we become aware in our practical knowing of better decisions and worse, greater goods and lesser goods, we come to understand darkly that there is an (unseen) standard by which we measure all goods, so as to judge them better and worse."

Hullabaloo quotes a Wall Street Journal article: "Pollsters try to get voters to reveal the biases they're too embarrassed or afraid to admit by asking questions like, "Is the country ready to elect an African-American president?" But people also have biases they don't know they have. These implicit biases, as psychologists call them, are picked up over a lifetime, absorbed from our culture, and work automatically to color our perceptions and influence our choices....Most people don't see their own implicit bias, which can appear spontaneously as intuition, a gut feeling or a vague doubt about a candidate."

Most people make many decisions based on unconscious factors, then try to justify them after the fact with some favorite ideology or religion. They think they're being logical (or devout) but they are really making choices based on fears, prejudices, and hatreds.