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Category: S2n – Blog

Nudging screws to nails

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Again psychological economy got a Nobel Price. I am a fan of Kahneman and all the others like Tversky, Slovic and last but not least Thaler – and all the others I do not remind in the first second. What happens lately from my personal point of view is, that in contrast to the founders of psychological economy, today behavioral economics comes along as a white knight of science. Kahneman et al. wanted to widen the economical behavioral concept to get better explanations on an aggregate level. This is still the extraordinary advantage of economy to ignore individuality and find…

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Systematic Election

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From a systematic point of view, the gathering for option surveys of politicians is following the agenda of democracy. The only aim of politicians is creating majorities in a democratic process, based on individual preferences. However, we don’t like these kind of politicians, following the path of democratic opportunism. We all are looking for political representatives with fundamental values and norms, suitable for a personal feeling of being decisive. Even those having read the Arrow’s theorem and being aware of this extraordinary intellectual analysis, think of it as a mathematical model and not a problematic description of real democracy. In…

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Statistics for Self-Marketing 1

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Today it is crucial to produce extraordinary information. With the structural coupling of (only) positive feedback in social media, a forced exaggeration is taking place for not drowning in a sea of tweets. This is also true for scientific publishing with a focus on successful studies and the run for a marathon publication list. A key feature for this is statistics. One of my favorite paper to this topic is: ‘Matthews, R.; 2000; “Storks Deliver Babies (p= 0.008)”; 36-38; Teaching Statistics; 1467-9639; 22/2; link‘. In this paper, it is ‘proofed’ that there is a highly significant correlation between the number…

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Plush Toy Moralism

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Plush Toy

One of the main argumentations for a veggie life is the respect to animals. With a change in your diet, the suffering of animals can be avoided. In some cases, the moral supremacy to carnivores is boost to a categorical distinction between good and evil. The magnitude of emotional sentiments is sometimes really astonishing – maybe because a lack of sacrosanct believes. But this is not the theme here. The argumentation to diminish the pain of creatures that are suffering is straight forward and just a small expansion of an anthropogenic justification. A categorical difference between man and animal is…

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Civil Society

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The leaders of the rich countries discussed at G20 summit new rules for the world. This time there was a focus on development of poor countries – or less developed counties. On the one hand they want to increase investments in these countries, which might be an advantage, but in times of a global financial system this is not a clear strategy. On the other hand, they want to strengthen the civil society. Sounds good, but with a look at the members of G20 this seems to be quite obvious. In less developed countries with a weak civil society a…

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Universal Me

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This is the time for school reports. My son got his first one – an A4 page full of text. 40 years ago, my fist school report contained four sentences. But in fact these two are quite identically. In the first class you still get a universal evaluation, but in further forms you get grades. But today these grades are individualized. This sounds funny to me. An individualized grade is just like a championship without comparing performance. And what is the meaning of an individualized grade other than a number, individually ordered? If the framing is individual, the content of…

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Culture or Nature

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Culture

Nature After a week of skiing I still enjoy the impressions of being in nature. The huge alpine mountains contrary to tiny streets and houses down in the sunny valleys. This contrast combined with a change in position let me focus on fundamental experiences of being alive. Reinhold Messner described this motivation for climbing as the two elementary feelings of humans: While climbing up, nature seems to be infinite, huge and untamable. You feel like a speck of dust compared with these dimensions and power, with the risk of being smashed and erased immediately. But on the top, it is…

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not Australia

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Not Australia

Where do you come from? I’m from Austria. Oh yeah -last summer we went to Sydney and later in the outback… Sorry – not Australia! I had several situation like this – mostly funny. But sometimes uncomfortable, especially for me. Because I’m a guy with some kind of migration background. Saying ‘I’m from Austria’ is not the whole truth. I was born in Germany and grew up there. From that perspective I’m a socialized German, but holding another nationality. This is especially obvious when I come ‘home’ in vacations. For the ‘Alpine Aborigines’ I’m definitely ‘Piefke’ – very German. On…

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  • S2n - ISSN 2366-0104