But an objective, unbiased view of his record on civil liberties should have gotten me worried. Perhaps it’s because self-serving TV news shows tends to report one kind of story and downplay the other? Availability, you see.īut from inside the shack, I perceive the overall interior space as level, so water (or a ball) appears to be running uphill.Īnd while we’re on the subject of distorted views of the President, I voted for Obama in 2012. Yet they seem remarkably unconcerned about the fact that the office of the President recently claimed the right to kill American citizens whenever and wherever it wanted to, without resort to trial or rule of law. So my perception of angles is distorted and balls appear to be rolling uphill.Įver notice how people who watch a lot of television express concern about a wide range of unlikely catastrophes from child abductions to racial uprisings in the suburbs. The fact that we are tilted at a severe angle is compensated for in my mind and corrected in my perception in accordance with what’s level in that space. When I’m in the crazy, tipped over shack at the Oregon Vortex, the information that’s available to me is only what’s available to me within that space. Our thinking is distorted by the information available to us.įrom outside the shack, water (or a ball) is clearly running slightly downhill, nothing unusual about that. His assessment of the threat of mugging is too high, mine is too low. My friend doesn’t expect to be mugged in the suburbs and never has been, but when he sees an article in the paper about a mugging in the suburbs he freaks out. When I see an article in the paper about yet another mugging in the city, I tend to shrug it off. I have never been mugged, although I’m aware that the likelihood of being mugged is greater in the city than the suburbs. I live in the city, my friend lives in the suburbs. Then there’s the science of availability. The problem I should be solving is, “How does the Ponzo Illusion work in the Oregon Vortex?” But the problem I prefer to solve is, “How did that person suddenly become taller?” In the context of the Oregon Vortex it’s hard to figure out how this applies. Converging background lines distort our perception. The height change phenomenon is due to an effect called the Ponzo Illusion. When it comes to the vortex, it takes some mental effort to figure out what’s really going on. It’s that we don’t bother to solve the real problem. It’s not that we don’t recognize that there’s a problem. To complicate matters, according to Kahneman, we are cognitively lazy. So which kind do most humans prefer? You guessed it.Īccording to the Italian researcher Ponzo, the human mind judges an object’s size by its background. The problem, according to Kahneman, is that slow thinking is hard work and fast thinking is easy. In his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman asserts that human beings employ two modes of thinking: the fast, intuitive, emotional kind, which makes us spend money on lottery tickets and vote for poorly qualified leaders, and the slow, methodical, intellectual kind that makes us figure out our taxes and debunk conspiracy theories. Heedless, Lazy, Distorted Thinking, the Most Popular Kind For my part, I would like nothing more than to see the laws of physics turned upside down, so we could start all over again and maybe figure out how to develop that transporter beam I’ve seen on Star Trek. So what is the proper protocol when approaching a vortex? No one knows for sure, and that’s what I like about it, the idea that there’s a mystery here that science has yet to crack. Pack mules owned by gold seeking panhandlers displayed a similar distaste, and even today the area is said to be devoid of wildlife, dumb animals apparently having better sense when it comes to vortices than knuckle-headed tourists.īelieve it or not, this ball was actually rolling uphill. My favorite part of the Litster version is that Native-Americans considered this area “forbidden ground” their horses refused to enter it. Okay, maybe so, but I for one sort of like the idea of a vortex. ![]() In other words, we are only fooling ourselves. The scientific explanation for all of this, as offered by Oregonians for Science and Reason, is a combination of boiler plate optical illusions and the power of suggestion. Where Animals Have More Sense than Humans They don’t like being bamboozled and demand to see the man behind the curtain. Litster explained this as a disturbance of the earth’s magnetic fields caused by the vortex, an explanation that suited me fine, but other folks are a little put off by what they see as a load of hokum. Excuse me, but, uh… this broom is standing up by itself.
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