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Easy = True

boston.com

68 pointsrobg24 comments

"Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names."

A giant "citation needed" needs to be attached to this. A quick search came up with this: http://www.pnas.org/content/103/24/9369.full - pretty terrible. I hope such a breathless claim isn't actually being backed by such lame research.

Hey, if everyone starts believing it, it'll happen, right?

Well, actually, the exact opposite is probably true: http://lesswrong.com/lw/yv/markets_are_antiinductive/

(Hello, Eliezer in this post's uncle post!)

Not to mention, does "outperform" mean "higher earnings over time relative to stock price" or does it mean "stock prices higher relative to earnings"? The latter would seem to be what is predicted, and that's hardly "outperformance".

It should be some measure of market-relative total return, including dividend yield, etc. As far as I can tell from the paper, they don't even adjust for market-relative returns, so if a bunch of unpronounceable companies got launched at the peak of the Internet bubble and proceeded to perform exactly in-line with the market, this would still be counted as underperformance even though it is completely untradeable.

One huge "Causation does not imply correlation" needs to be stamped on this one. There is a good chance that companies with complex names have worse marketing overall.

Sort of helps to explain why political discourse seems doomed to stick on such a low level. Simple ideas will always have an edge over complicated ones, and so politicians who communicate with simple ideas and hold simple ideologies will always have an edge. It wouldn't be such a terrible thing if only the world weren't so damned complicated.

Particularly in the "it used to be so much better when it was easier" style politics. If it really was so good why did we change it? Also true in the parts of politics where you hear complaints of conspiracy and/or ivory towers.

Simple ideas that produce nice sound bites are also much easier to repeat over and over in a stump speech. The simplicity of the ideas (producing this so-called "fluency effect") combined with the power of repetition (which might be another example of the fluency effect) means that a candidate whose goal is to get elected is better off saying as little as possible about issues of substance.

Wow! I like this. "Cognitive fluency" is a concept that I've felt should exist for a long time (but, amusingly, have had no words to describe). It's a reason why I believe in the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity).

Cognitive fluency has a lot of relevance for programming languages research. From the article: "When people read something in a difficult-to-read font, they unwittingly transfer that sense of difficulty onto the topic they’re reading about." Wow -- similarly, the programming language you're writing in might have an even bigger effect on what programs you find easy to create or think about.

Seems like that would be a counterexample to Sapir-Whorf, not evidence. You clearly had an idea but not a word; language did not bound your ideation.

(I don't accept it, at least not in its strong form, pretty much for this reason; one way of looking at my programming job is nailing down concepts before they have names, then giving them names only later. There's some useful idea there, but Sapir-Whorf overstates it.)

In the "woes unite foes" rhyming example, it's definitely using the same part of my brain involved with processing poetic license. I disagree with the sentence, but I can feel my brain working to frame it charitably.

OT: You disagree that challenging circumstances unite people who would otherwise be uncharitable to one another?

In times of hardship would you work with someone you don't get on with so you could both survive? Note that the made up aphorism does not include a term such as "always". A less charitable version would be "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" (an example of the aphorism is which is well known).

Just curious as I felt this was a sort of given about innate human behaviour.

I guess if they're scared they might work together. But by woes it doesn't necessarily mean common enemy. (This is what I meant by a charitable interpretation.) If I'm having a bad day, I'm less likely to be nice to an enemy.

Woe is a pretty strong emotion. Think of being completely lost of in grief. It pushes far beyond bad day to rocked-to-the-core

Reminds me of:

If she weighed the same as a duck... she's made of wood. And therefore... ...A witch!

I can't help but wonder if this "discovery" and cognitive fluency theory doesn't sound so great and obvious because it is so simple. :P

I'm not sure I get what kind of psychological theory the article is describing.

"Things that are easy to understand are perceived as better than hard to understand things unless you're in some kind of mood that makes the opposite true."

How am I supposed to get anything useful out of a theory like that?

How am I supposed to get anything useful out of a theory like that?

Write a grant proposal.

I wonder what this says about the language gap? Are people heavily disinclined to agree or empathize with people and situations expressed to them in a language which is not their most fluent?

The only truth is that there is no truth.

http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth

A simple idea?

All ideas are true in some sense, false in some sense, and meaningless in some sense.

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