Padd Solutions

I'm a registered Independent, and for a reason: I want to remain unaffiliated. But why not pick a side I agree with most? Well first of all, this was partially a matter of spam mail. I simply do not want to receive buckets of partisan propaganda fliers before every election. But I'm also an Independent because I think parties have become too uniform, and those not in check with the rest of their group to a certain acceptable extent eventually result in the creation of a party subsect or a complete split.

Parrots apparently are the main target of parties. People who can agree with a few basic views of any given party depending on how their conscience dictates them will inevitably be sucked into a sort of informal contract of complete submission to their party. If things don't go their way, they'll squabble amongst themselves, their heretic party members, and, of course, the opposition, until they can try again in the future to unite briefly enough to gain the upper hand in world dominance.

I know their actions, as a whole, don't speak for me, but that's exactly why I don't affiliate myself with any of them. I don't believe for a second that parties are inherently evil, but that they show a tendency to thrive on closed-mindedness. And with our TV, Internet, and radio punditocracy full of nonstop fear and misinformation, it's bound only to get worse (unless we do something about it). Americans should never fight Americans. The Civil War is long over. Neither party will destroy our nation, but only having two with significant voter bases is divisive and unnecessary.

We don't think about it too often, nor do we enjoy doing so. Deep down, we all believe we're perfect; we have superior opinions, religious beliefs, political ideologies, personal philosophies, fast food preferences, and brands of underwear. We also constantly make mistakes, bad judgments, and somehow we can never seem to live up to this divine vision we've created of ourselves. Some people are more intellectually honest about their mortal imperfections than others, of course, and some rely on cognitive bias more than others. But what exactly is the logical reasoning behind this universally innate stubbornness?

So, we must acknowledge that we're imperfect and incapable of becoming perfect, the idea of which can't even be clearly defined. But then, why can't we at least think logically all the time? Most researchers hold that many cognitive biases are vestigial modern elements of human evolution, similar to vestigial organs and body parts like wisdom teeth, the coccyx (tailbone), hair, and nails. Most of our prejudices have little or no use today (besides maybe getting you beaten up), but some are employed usefully in everyday life. Natural selection has emblazoned these biases and prejudices into our genetic code as defense mechanisms, coping habits, and other skills which have since been reduced in necessity and/or relevance. Often, they help maintain homeostasis (the inner system that regulates our bodies) by attempting to keep our emotions in check.


Bias doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong, but that your way of thinking is flawed. For your intellectual convenience, here's a condensed list of some of the most common misleading ways of thinking. Wikipedia's full version can be found here, complete with embedded links to additional information concerning all documented cognitive biases.

Common cognitive biases

• Bandwagon effect — the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. 
• Base rate fallacy — ignoring available statistical data in favor of particulars. 
• Choice-supportive bias — the tendency to remember one's choices as better than they actually were. 
• Illusion of control — the tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes that they clearly cannot 
• Mere exposure effect — the tendency for people to express undue liking for things merely because they are familiar with them. 
• Omission bias — the tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions (inactions). 
• Pseudocertainty effect — the tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.
• Selective perception — the tendency for expectations to affect perception. 
• Von Restorff effect — the tendency for an item that "stands out like a sore thumb" to be more likely to be remembered than other items.

Common probability/belief biases

• Ambiguity effect — the avoidance of options for which missing information makes the probability seem "unknown". 
• Anchoring effect — the tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on a past reference or on one trait or piece of information when making decisions 
• Authority bias — the tendency to value an ambiguous stimulus (e.g., an art performance) according to the opinion of someone who is seen as an authority on the topic. 
• Availability cascade — a self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or "repeat something long enough and it will become true").
• Belief bias — an effect where someone's evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion. 
• Clustering illusion — the tendency to see patterns where actually none exist. 
• Illusory correlation — beliefs that inaccurately suppose a relationship between a certain type of action and an effect. 
• Ludic fallacy — the analysis of chance-related problems according to the belief that the unstructured randomness found in life resembles the structured randomness found in games, ignoring the non-gaussian distribution of many real-world results. 
• Ostrich effect — ignoring an obvious (negative) situation. 
• Overconfidence effect — excessive confidence in one's own answers to questions. For example, for certain types of question, answers that people rate as "99% certain" turn out to be wrong 40% of the time.
• Pareidolia — vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) are perceived as significant, e.g., seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse.
• Stereotyping — expecting a member of a group to have certain characteristics without having actual information about that individual.

Common social biases 

• Forer effect (aka Barnum Effect) — the tendency to give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. For example, horoscopes. 
• False consensus effect — the tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them. 
• Herd instinct — Common tendency to adopt the opinions and follow the behaviors of the majority to feel safer and to avoid conflict. 
• Illusion of asymmetric insight — people perceive their knowledge of their peers to surpass their peers' knowledge of them.
• Illusion of transparency — people overestimate others' ability to know them, and they also overestimate their ability to know others.
• Illusory superiority — overestimating one's desirable qualities, and underestimating undesirable qualities, relative to other people. 
• Ingroup bias — the tendency for people to give preferential treatment to others they perceive to be members of their own groups. 
• Just-world phenomenon — the tendency for people to believe that the world is just and therefore people "get what they deserve." 
• Projection bias — the tendency to unconsciously assume that others share the same or similar thoughts, beliefs, values, or positions. 
• Self-fulfilling prophecy — the tendency to engage in behaviors that elicit results which will (consciously or not) confirm existing attitudes. 
• Ultimate attribution error — Similar to the fundamental attribution error, in this error a person is likely to make an internal attribution to an entire group instead of the individuals within the group.

This blog is starting off with an all-purpose politically correct generic winter-theme. Of tolerance. The actual logo was going to parody the AC/DC logo, which can still be viewed as of this writing in the admittedly terrible thumbnail to the lower left.

Since I realized, of course, that I may as well be taking originality lessons from creationists, I decided during my very next moment of lucidity that it will unfortunately be put to death. But I worked really hard on painting the snow in the version you see up on the top left. So basically I'm keeping it until January probably. Anyway, stick around. The next post will be a real one.

According to ScienceDaily, our food is trying to kill us yet again. A study carried out by researchers from the University of Helsinki and the University of Edinburgh has explained that women that eat excessive amounts of licorice during pregnancy (100g or more) are at risk of bearing children with behavioral problems and lower intelligence levels. It also may lead to poor attention span and physically disruptive symptoms, ADHD included. The findings were documented in Finland, and since "consumption of licorice among young women is common" in Finland, this is apparently an unknown problem in the US as well. Probably to a much larger extent, too. Pun intended.


A number of eight year old kids whose mothers ate ridiculous amounts of licorice while they were pregnant were given a series of cognitive tests, along with other kids. The children with candy-obsessed moms performed poorer than normal.

Naturally, these results spell doom for us all. I mean, lots of people really like licorice. Why have a baby if you can't eat your Red Vines during the eight-month wait period anyway? This study adds to the list of substances which, when consumed during pregnancy, could cause ADHD in the fetus (along with lead and tobacco smoke). The research follows a study which suggested that licorice consumption is also linked to shorter pregnancies.

According to award-winning science writer Ed Yong at ScienceBlogs, one of the most fundamental aspects of ADHD, which has been built more on assumptions than on empirical data may soon be obsolete.

New research by the National Institute of Mental Health suggests that ADHD may not be the result of the brain maturing differently than normal, but slower. Apparently, while some parts of the brain develop at a typical rate, others lag behind by several years. Notably, the biggest delays take place in the lateral prefrontal cortex. Development of this region takes place up to five years beyond that in an average person.

Besides the unaffected lobes, the exception to this unusually slow development is that the primary motor cortex was shown to mature faster than normal. This lobe of the brain aids in the planning and controlling of body movement, and, interestingly, also works alongside the slower-than-normal prefrontal cortex. It's not known why this section matures at a quicker than normal rate, but it may have something to do with a binary glitch in brain function at a genetic level: a mutation. Mutations are what enable evolution and the Darwinian theory of natural selection, but not all genes are dominant and eventually fail to become passed to future offspring.

Most scientists agree that genetics and environment are main factors in ADHD. Genetics, for example, was suggested to be contributory in at least 70% of cases by at least two studies. A series of mutations in a group of genes that produce proteins called neurotrophins, which control the growth, division, and survival of brain neurons have previously been linked to the disorder. Neurons are what build up the huge interconnected network of information in your brain. They dictate your entire thought process and range of emotions through electric signals and chemical reactions.

Here's a timeline of brain development of an ADHD brain compared with a normal one.


One of the coolest things about this study is that it could help us understand why anywhere from 50%-57% of ADHD kids eventually grow out of their symptoms. It may also demonstrate why children show such a wide range of symptoms which are still unique for every individual. It may even link ADHD people to above average intelligence (although IQ, the scientific measurement of intelligence, isn't a direct indicator of how smart someone is). Children with high IQ have cortices that develop slower than normal, but they thicken unusually fast during childhood. At the current rate of technological advancement, the inner mechanics of the human brain will probably be completely deciphered in a matter of years anyway.

This and other studies have introduced a huge amount of new information to explain why the ADHD brain matures differently -- whoops, more slowly, than the average person's. Plus, it made us all look like idiots for being on the wrong track this whole time. SCIENCE! More as research progresses.