Warning: Your reality is out of date

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/02/28/warning_your_reality_is_out_of_date?mode=PF

by jamesbritt • 16 years ago

55 19 16 years ago

wglb• 16 years ago

Points to the interesting site http://www.mesofacts.org/ which I found interesting enough to pop into my rss reader.

skmurphy• 16 years ago

The mesofacts site is an interesting one. The concept seems related to the "half life of information" which has over 7 million hits on Google http://www.google.com/search?q=half+life+of+information [Caution: you can lose a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon following these links]

gjm11• 16 years ago

Dupe of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162731 .

losvedir• 16 years ago

Cool - the fact about cell phones is astonishing. I always cringe at the false boiling frog metaphor, though. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog)

rsheridan62• 16 years ago

Read the wiki article again. It cites sources for the truth of the boiling frog metaphor.

Psyonic2• 16 years ago

Some, yes, but all from over 100 years ago. The contemporary scientific opinion is very much against this "fact." http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/01/frog.html

scott_s• 16 years ago

Ha, Wikipedia articles fit the same concept as mesofacts.

lpellis• 16 years ago

From wikipedia: "In 1869, while doing experiments searching for the location of the soul, German physiologist Friedrich Goltz demonstrated that a frog that has had its brain removed will remain in slowly heated water, but his intact frogs attempted to escape the water" I wonder what did they expected to happen?

gsaines2• 16 years ago

This is a really well-articulated explanation for the phenomena that have clumsily attempted to describe before. As someone interested in cars, I use the example of Cadillacs and Buicks most frequently, since they used to be symbols of power, prestige, and quality but seem to sell almost exclusively to people over the age of 60 today. I actually always play a game when on the highway: I check the drivers of Cadillacs and Buicks and my anecdotal sample has been heavily skewed towards older owners.

I wish that the mesofacts site was more complete, because I love updating my firmware. While reading it, I kept thinking "What else is it there I don't know I don't know?"

mreid• 16 years ago

Your comment about Cadillacs reminded me of the scene from The Wire where Snoop buys a nailgun: "Man says this here the Cadillac of nailguns. He means Lexus but he don't know it."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8zavPW3Bus

gsaines2• 16 years ago

Yeah, I've seen that episode, and it's exactly what I was thinking. Up until this Toyota safety debacle (at least it's a publicity debacle), I gave myself a little self-congratulating pat on the back whenever I saw someone driving a Cadillac, thinking "Ah, they don't know what quality really is, but I do: Lexus!" I wonder if I won't end up putzing around in a Lexus someday thinking it's so great while all the youngins snicker at me too! :)

philwelch• 16 years ago

I'm not sure if I'm saying this delicately enough, but Cadillacs also have a reputation for being popular among black people. I'm not sure why.

ytinas• 16 years ago

What you're talking about isn't a racial thing, it's an economic status thing and I've heard of it in many different countries throughout the world. People who can't afford both a nice house and a nice car, will often get as nice of a car as they can since this is a status symbol that more people will see.

Why Cadillac might be chosen in the US probably has to do with availability and reputation.

Psyonic2• 16 years ago

For instance, the fact that you can boil a frog, by slow heating up the water its standing in (used as an example in the article) is most likely wrong: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/01/frog.html. Not technically a meso-fact, as it the reality of it didn't change, but close enough to be funny.

For more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog#Contemporary_exper....

_mattb• 16 years ago

"Our schools are biased against mesofacts."

Not sure if that's the case: schools undoubtedly hit you with bits of trivia, but this is done to develop students' mental powers. (Good) teachers know what they're doing and are training you to accept more of these 'mesofacts.'

troystribling• 16 years ago

Hans Rosling has a good TED talk discussing this in the context of the mind set people have concerning industrial and developing nations, http://blog.ted.com/2009/08/let_my_dataset.php. He claims most peoples opinions are from data available in 50's through 70's which corresponds to the dates when their school teachers were in college.

onoj• 16 years ago

(slightly off topic - sorry) curious.

Your Reality is Out of Date: Introducing the Mesofact (boston.com) 6 points by JacobAldridge 5 days ago | 1 comment | flag

How is it that the same article is posted twice?

erik• 16 years ago

The dupe checker only catches exact matches in the url. This version of the submission has a get parameter in the address.

Warning: Your reality is out of date

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