Egocentrism

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Brookline, MA, United States
I'll post rants here, and musings; articles and thoughts about articles. I'll keep it quite complex and yet astoundingly simple: whatever it is I am interested in at any given moment.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

More Shoddy Science and Headline Writing From CNN


A little bit ago I lambasted CNN for misrepresenting a study about the impact of eating massive amounts of red meat on mortality. Recently, CNN was at it again.

This article claimed to report on a study that showed "women rate funny guys as more intelligent than guys who are not so funny." The idea here is that evolutionary tendencies will attract women to more intelligent men (contrary to everyone's experience in high school and the truth-claims of the genre of teen movies).

The obvious point that both the study and the article miss is that, just maybe, evolutionary tendencies attract women to men who are smart in a certain way that makes them seem funnier or, to represent pretty much the same idea slightly differently, maybe smarter = funnier. (This, of course, being my theory for why the "popular" girls gave me a lot more attention near the end of high school - at some point people realized that I was smart/funny enough to write the TV shows they liked watching ... but I digress.)

The study seems, to me, to be ludicrous, attempting to isolate for humor (who ever heard of an absolutist approach to humor? if anything in the entire world is contextually- and culturally-dependent, its humor, no?) and then asking stupid questions about it.

For example - and here I'm bringing the examples offered in the article - here is an example of a fictionalized vignette rated as not so amusing: "I was out skiing last year when I ended up slipping all the way down the mountain." Low on humor? How about low on IQ? Did this psychologist control for klutz genes?

To contrast, the following witty anecdote was rated as amusing: "I was standing in a mental illness ward the other day when I heard a doctor speaking to a new nurse on the ward. He was really giving her a telling-off, and his parting words were, 'And remember, when it's busy, don't go around saying it's a madhouse.'" That is funny. Even I want to date that guy.

To state the obvious, one of these anecdotes makes the guy sound like a moron, while the other actually is a smart joke. Of course the guy who says the second statement is going to be judged (a) more amusing, (b) smarter, and (c) someone I'd like to spend the rest of my life with (especially compared to the first guy who is likely already brain-damaged from his fall down the mountain or likely to be run over by a tractor trailer in the near future).

I hope the Health authors at CNN have Buttercup's dream in The Princess Bride where she is hissed at for passing up her true love (w/ picture of actress Margery Mason above). They suck.

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