Warning: Your reality is out of date | Hacker News Reader

Warning: Your reality is out of date

boston.com

55 pointsjamesbritt19 comments

This is a really well-articulated explanation for the phenomena that have clumsily attempted to describe before. As someone interested in cars, I use the example of Cadillacs and Buicks most frequently, since they used to be symbols of power, prestige, and quality but seem to sell almost exclusively to people over the age of 60 today. I actually always play a game when on the highway: I check the drivers of Cadillacs and Buicks and my anecdotal sample has been heavily skewed towards older owners.

I wish that the mesofacts site was more complete, because I love updating my firmware. While reading it, I kept thinking "What else is it there I don't know I don't know?"

Your comment about Cadillacs reminded me of the scene from The Wire where Snoop buys a nailgun: "Man says this here the Cadillac of nailguns. He means Lexus but he don't know it."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8zavPW3Bus

Yeah, I've seen that episode, and it's exactly what I was thinking. Up until this Toyota safety debacle (at least it's a publicity debacle), I gave myself a little self-congratulating pat on the back whenever I saw someone driving a Cadillac, thinking "Ah, they don't know what quality really is, but I do: Lexus!" I wonder if I won't end up putzing around in a Lexus someday thinking it's so great while all the youngins snicker at me too! :)

I'm not sure if I'm saying this delicately enough, but Cadillacs also have a reputation for being popular among black people. I'm not sure why.

What you're talking about isn't a racial thing, it's an economic status thing and I've heard of it in many different countries throughout the world. People who can't afford both a nice house and a nice car, will often get as nice of a car as they can since this is a status symbol that more people will see.

Why Cadillac might be chosen in the US probably has to do with availability and reputation.

Hans Rosling has a good TED talk discussing this in the context of the mind set people have concerning industrial and developing nations, http://blog.ted.com/2009/08/let_my_dataset.php. He claims most peoples opinions are from data available in 50's through 70's which corresponds to the dates when their school teachers were in college.

Cool - the fact about cell phones is astonishing. I always cringe at the false boiling frog metaphor, though. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog)

Read the wiki article again. It cites sources for the truth of the boiling frog metaphor.

Some, yes, but all from over 100 years ago. The contemporary scientific opinion is very much against this "fact." http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/01/frog.html

The modern experimenters failed to find the original articles, since they were published in German before last Thursday. So they heated the water too fast, leading to their result.

The ages of the experiments are irrelevant here because 1) 19th century Germans had thermometers and heaters that were more than adequate for this task. We have no technological advantage over them in this regard

2) The modern experiments weren't building on or refining the old ones because the experimenters weren't aware of them. We only see farther than those who came before because we're standing on their shoulders. If we can't find their shoulders, we don't have that advantage.

There's more about this in the discussion page between two wikipedia edit warriors, on of whom, coincidentally, has the same username that I am using on this site right now.

Ha, Wikipedia articles fit the same concept as mesofacts.

From wikipedia: "In 1869, while doing experiments searching for the location of the soul, German physiologist Friedrich Goltz demonstrated that a frog that has had its brain removed will remain in slowly heated water, but his intact frogs attempted to escape the water" I wonder what did they expected to happen?

Points to the interesting site http://www.mesofacts.org/ which I found interesting enough to pop into my rss reader.

The mesofacts site is an interesting one. The concept seems related to the "half life of information" which has over 7 million hits on Google http://www.google.com/search?q=half+life+of+information [Caution: you can lose a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon following these links]

For instance, the fact that you can boil a frog, by slow heating up the water its standing in (used as an example in the article) is most likely wrong: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/01/frog.html. Not technically a meso-fact, as it the reality of it didn't change, but close enough to be funny.

For more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog#Contemporary_exper....

Dupe of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162731 .

"Our schools are biased against mesofacts."

Not sure if that's the case: schools undoubtedly hit you with bits of trivia, but this is done to develop students' mental powers. (Good) teachers know what they're doing and are training you to accept more of these 'mesofacts.'

(slightly off topic - sorry) curious.

Your Reality is Out of Date: Introducing the Mesofact (boston.com) 6 points by JacobAldridge 5 days ago | 1 comment | flag

How is it that the same article is posted twice?

The dupe checker only catches exact matches in the url. This version of the submission has a get parameter in the address.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com