I canna change the laws of browsers…

…but I can find a few more windows I forgot to close.

• Why Pundits Are Bad Predictors. "The best predictor, in a backward sort of way, was fame: the more feted by the media, the worse a pundit’s accuracy. And therein lay Tetlock’s first clue. The media’s preferred pundits are forceful, confident and decisive, not tentative and balanced. They are, in short, hedgehogs, not foxes.

  That bestiary comes from the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who in 1953 argued that hedgehogs "know one big thing." They apply that one thing (for instance, that ethnicity and language are primal; ergo, any country that contains many ethnic groups will break up) everywhere, express supreme confidence in their forecasts, dismiss opposing views and are drawn to top-down arguments deduced from that Big Idea. Foxes, in contrast, "know many things," as Berlin put it. They consider competing views, make bottom-up inductive arguments from an array of facts and doubt the power of Big Ideas. "The hedgehog-fox dimension did what none of the other traits did," says Tetlock, who described the study in his 2005 book "Expert Political Judgment": "distinguish more accurate forecasters from less accurate ones" in both politics (will Iraq break up?) and economics (whither unemployment?).

  In short, what experts think matters far less than how they think, or their cognitive style. At one extreme, hedgehogs seek certainty and closure, dismiss information that undercuts their preconceptions and embrace evidence that reinforces them, in what is called "belief defense and bolstering." At the other extreme, foxes are cognitively flexible, modest and open to self-criticism.
   

• Why the Republican Party Must Die – Generational Theft and End of Republicans – Esquire
   
• Diamond is no longer nature’s hardest material
   
• Mind Hacks
   
• Why Facebook Is for Old Fogies and Facebook: 25 Things I Didn’t Want to Know About You – TIME
   
• Judge Takes Money to Jail Children. Ain’t that heartening…
   
• Odysseus 1.0b14. Finally, a replacement for Eudora… maybe. Yes, I may be the last person to use Eudora for the Mac.
   

Wow, two posts in two days. This could be a trend.