Arpana-INFJ

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What? How?

The idea behind the flowers is that, as we've touched on elsewhere, hitting you with a product that is highly perishable yet fresh will "prime" you into thinking of freshness, and that you will carry that "freshness" mindset with you all the way back to the discount meat case. It sounds like bullshit -- humans don't connect completely unrelated ideas like that, right? Yet it's confirmed pretty much every time they test it.

Sometimes "priming" is as simple as finding that people will keep a room cleaner if it smells like disinfectant -- that subtle reminder is enough to make people think, "This is a clean room, I should keep it clean." But when you see how far they can take this, it gets weird.

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When the dharma arrived in western lands 40 to 50 years ago it was an inevitability that sooner or later comparisons and contrasts would be made with the west's very own project for overcoming suffering: psychotherapy.

Despite both practices having the aim of relieving human suffering there has been an atmosphere of mutual distrust. Upon hearing of this practice which aimed to heal and bolster the self the Asian masters simply saw in it methods of making the self's experience of samsara more comfortable. Therefore they saw it as something which would actually bind people to samsara.

On the other hand psychotherapists saw dharma practitioners as being involved in the unhealthy practice of attempting to transcend the self, cutting themselves of from their own vitality and ignoring developmental tasks.

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Punditry is all about predictions -- claiming boldly that if ___________ comes to power, the economy will be in ruins within a year, or if ___________ legislation passes, the nation will turn into a fascist nightmare (or a lawless orgy, or whatever). A 20-year study of pundits and their prognostications found that they performed significantly worse than, say, a monkey making political predictions by throwing its own faeces at a chart. The hard-line partisan pundits were right a dismal 12 percent of the time.


The monkey had 19 percent accuracy -- 24 percent on the days he ate a lot of fiber.

But the really scary statistic is that the more famous a political pundit is, the worse his predictions are. There's a reason the Becks and Olbermanns of the world are the pundits everyone's familiar with: They're not giving us accurate predictions, but they are giving us predictions we like to hear, whether we care to admit it or not. Not just predictions we agree with, but bold, scary and outrageous predictions. They make for good entertainment.

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