500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
I was receiving some sage advice recently from a colleague after showing him a television pilot we’d made. “TV is turned up to 20 now,” he said. “Everything has to be loud.” True: For television to work you need crying, screaming, fighting and clawing.
As I aggressively bite the head off a chocolate turkey left over from Thanksgiving, I’m considering just how extreme things have become. Ad-man and provocateur Donny Deutsch was doing a show called “America the Angry” on MSNBC and got himself kicked off the air because the show may have angered Keith Olbermann, the MSNBC star, or at least angered Olbermann’s boss, according to The New York Times. You know things are heating up when a television show about people getting angry on television gets cancelled because it made some television people angry. That’s what you call a feedback loop.
Even feedback loops can speak the truth, however. Keith Olbermann is mad. Jim Cramer looks mad even when he’s just crazy. TV weathercasters, usually a sanguine bunch, are edgy. According to The New Yorker, researchers at George Mason University found that 25% of television weathercasters agree with the statement that “Global warming is a scam” and 80% of them don’t trust “mainstream news media sources.” They are idiots and that gets me mad.
I guess mad is catching. A few years ago I was doing a documentary for A&E about blowing things up. For a summer I tip-toed around trip wires and det cord and tried not to explode. I survived to write this, and I learned something. When making the film we wanted to find out if expressing anger allowed you to move on with your life. We gave people sledge hammers and let them bash apart a car and tell us how it felt. (“It felt great! Can I smash your car too?”) Yeah, that was the problem – anger just led to more anger. Psychologists we interviewed confirmed this. Getting mad can be healthy, but don’t expect just one angry episode. Anger feeds itself and it’s not a victimless crime. I’ve gotten mad lots of times and it takes its toll on the people around you, unless you smash things while living solo in your cave, which sounds boring.
I’m not expecting television to be nice, but with everything turned up to 20, much of that angry noise is showing us new ways of rehearsing anger, not reducing it. That’s how Thich Nhat Hanh described angry actions in his book Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames. He wasn’t talking about television. But he might have been. Some call tv talking furniture. That’s wrong. It’s screaming furniture now.
I’m going to bite the rest of the head off that chocolate turkey and find something else to do besides watch the loud little box over there in the corner.
Photo credit: scriptingnews via Flickr and Creative Commons license.
What if I told you there’s a way to pick stocks that is so reliable you’ll do better than the experts? But in order for it to work, you’d have to give up something: Your access to information.
Ignorance is power.
In 2000, an investment magazine held a stock picking contest. More than 10,000 people submitted portfolios, some of them professionals with access to loads of data. One portfolio in the contest stood out: it was based on collective ignorance. Researchers asked fifty people to pick stocks based solely on whether they recognized the name of the company. What happened? The stocks picked by people who knew little gained in value by 2.5 percent. The stocks picked by the editor in chief of the magazine, who knew a lot, lost 18.5 percent.
Experts like Jim Cramer are ready to help you become a market expert. Will you make any money? Well, too much information (and too much Jim Cramer) can be a bad thing.
“There’s a limit to the information a human mind can digest, a limit that often corresponds to the magical number seven, plus or minus two, the capacity of short term memory.” — Gut Feelings, by Gerd Gigerenzer
Your short term memory is good for about seven things. You’ve experienced this in Whole Foods if you attempt to shop without a shopping list. You wind up standing in front of the cheese display trying to remember the eighth thing you meant to buy.
If you go with intuition, on the other hand, you tap into something much deeper. Many believe that intuition comes from higher powers. If you listen to it, you will be guided by God, by a universal energy source, or if you are trying to pick stocks, by Warren Buffett.
That may be true, but scientists are learning that intuition accesses the unconscious mind, and that part of the mind is really smart.
A research study has suggested that gamblers who trust their gut instincts are more likely to pick up subtle visual cues from the dealer and other players. To make winning decisions they let the unconscious drive for a while. Less information turns out to be more – especially when things turn unpredictable.
When you are working with an unstable system, like the stock market or a gun battle or both (“How was work today, honey?”) having too much on your mind will slow you down. The noise between your ears blocks the wisdom of the subconscious.
This was explored in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink. If a police officer in jeopardy has to think too much, the bad guy shoots him first. If a baseball player performs differential equations in his head to calculate the trajectory and velocity of an incoming fly ball, he’d never catch it. (I think this is the Mets’ problem.)
“Woman’s intuition, as everyone knows, is a true faculty that most women possess in a form far more highly developed than anything the random male ever acquires.”
Ashley Montagu, The Natural Superiority of Women
Women are good at intuition and men are bad at it. You think so? Not so.
In another study, Dr. Richard Wiseman showed 50,000 people photographs of a person smiling. Only one was of a real smile. The other was of a fake smile. Using their intuition, men were able to guess which smile was real 72 percent of the time. The women guessed right 71 percent of the time.
I’m going to sell some stock soon, but I think I’ll wait until Warren Buffett is smiling.
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