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Carl Sagan was a coauthor of the first paper warning of a nuclear winter, and when he campaigned for a nuclear freeze by trying to generate “fear, then belief, then response,” he was advised by an arms-control expert, “If you think that the mere prospect of the end of the world is sufficient to change thinking in Washington and Moscow you clearly haven’t spent much time in either of those places.”
Enlightenment Now
Steven Pinker
To make sure the Trobrianders weren’t some kind of special case, Jarillo and Crivelli then traveled to Mozambique to study a group of isolated subsistence fishermen known as the Mwani. Once again, the results were dismal. The Mwani did marginally better than chance with the smiling faces, but they seemed baffled by sad faces and angry faces. Another group, led by Maria Gendron, traveled to the mountains of northwest Namibia to see whether the people there could accurately sort photographs into piles according to the emotional expression of the subject. They couldn’t. Even historians have now gotten into the act. If you could go into a time machine and show the ancient Greeks and Romans pictures of modern-day people grinning broadly, would they interpret that expression the same way we do? Probably not. As classicist Mary Beard writes in her book, Laughter in Ancient Rome: This is not to say that Romans never curled up the edges of their mouths in a formation that would look to us much like a smile; of course they did. But such curling did not mean very much in the range of significant social and cultural gestures in Rome. Conversely, other gestures, which would mean little to us, were much more heavily freighted with significance. If you staged a screening of that Friends episode for the Trobriand Islanders, they would see Ross confronting Chandler and think Chandler was angry and Ross was scared. They would get the scene completely wrong. And if you threw a Friends premiere in ancient Rome for Cicero and the emperor and a bunch of their friends, they would look at the extravagant grimaces and contortions on the faces of the actors and think: What on earth?
Talking to Strangers
Malcolm Gladwell
Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a goal, it ceases to become a measure. E.g. British colonialists tried to control snakes in India. They measured progress by number of snakes killed, offering money for snake corpses. People responded by breeding snakes & killing them.
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