TITLE: Read My Blog
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: May 25, 2007  2:11 PM
DESC: 
-----
BODY:
<A HREF="http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/">
   <IMG SRC="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog-images/humor/read-my-blog.gif"
        ALT="If you don't how will you know how clever I am?"
        ALIGN="right"></A>

Recently I wrote about the
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2007-05.html#e2007-05-10T11_28_57.htm">
   availability heuristic</A>
and how it may affect student behavior.  Schneier tells us
that this is often a useful rule of thumb, and it has served
us well evolutionarily.  But our changing world may be eroding
its value, perhaps even making it dangerous in some situations:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
But in modern society, we get a lot of sensory input from the
media. That screws up availability, vividness, and salience,
and means that heuristics that are based on our senses start
to fail.  When people were living in primitive tribes, if the
idea of getting eaten by a saber-toothed tiger was more available
than the idea of getting trampled by a mammoth, it was reasonable
to believe that--for the people in the particular place they
happened to be living--it was more likely they'd get eaten by
a saber-toothed tiger than get trampled by a mammoth.  But now
that we get our information from television, newspapers, and
the Internet, that's not necessarily the case.  What we read
about, what becomes vivid to us, might be something rare and
spectacular.  It might be something fictional: a movie or a
television show.  It might be a marketing message, either
commercial or political.  And remember, visual media are more
vivid than print media.  The availability heuristic is less
reliable, because the vivid memories we're drawing upon aren't
relevant to our real situation.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

I sometimes wonder if my omnivorous blogging and promiscuous
referencing of many different sources create a situation in
which my readers attribute brilliance to me that rightly belongs
to my sources.

A little part of my ego thinks that this would be okay.  (You
didn't read that here.)

However, if you finish the Schneier paragraph I quoted above,
you will see that just the opposite is probably true:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
And even worse, people tend not to remember where they heard
something--they just remember the content.  So even if, at
the time they're exposed to a message they don't find the
source credible, eventually their memory of the source of the
information degrades and they're just left with the message
itself.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

So you'll remember the ideas I toss out, but you'll eventually
forget that you read them here.  And so you will not be able
to blame me if it turns out to be nonsense...

Maybe you'd better not read my blog after all.
-----