Steve Sailer writes:
I was one of the few critics to be less than utterly awestruck by psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s 2011 bestseller Thinking Fast and Slow.
Lately, the chapter in Thinking Fast and Slow on “priming” has come in for severe criticism as celebrated priming experiments, such as how if you show college students word scrambles that include a lot of words about the elderly, they will then walk slower (or maybe faster), have often failed to replicate. (…)
Think of “priming” as a euphemism for “manipulability.” (…)
Is it plausible that people are consistently, endlessly manipulable in important ways by simple minded tricks repeated over and over?
Maybe, maybe not. And certainly less as time goes by.
For ten years, for instance, Jerry Lewis could manipulate America into howling with laughter. For the next fifty years, not so much.
Sailer is too modest to note the irony:
That on a REAL planet, he’d be the one who’d have had Kahneman’s career.
