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Randi and Teller among the authors. [No longer behind paywall: thanks, Cory]
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"As magicians have long known and neuroscientists are increasingly discovering, human perception is a jury-rigged apparatus, full of gaps and easily manipulated."
For the Design with Intent research, techniques of misdirection are especially worth examining. Richard Wiseman & Peter Lamont's "Magic in Theory" addresses this pretty well I think.
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"The RSA is launching a new project to ask how insights from cognitive and behavioural sciences can help us respond to pressing social challenges… we’re looking at how insights from a range of disciplines, including but not limited to neuroscience, behavioural economics, anthropology and social psychology may apply to concrete public policy challenges."
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(via Michal Migurski) "Much of our thinking is two dimensional, and seldom gets beyond the three dimensional level of a side, elevation and plan drawing. There are not many three dimensional mechanisms – most, like Watt's linkage, are plane solutions. The differential, like the one in the ancient Chinese South-facing Chariot, is a beautiful exception. The idea did not appear in the West until the nineteenth century. Yet it cannot be described in words. Let any reader who does not know the differential's motions ask an engineer how it works. It cannot even be sketched without imagining the paper rotating end over end."
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"So a “choice architect” is basically anyone that organizes “the context in which people make choices.” This is so immensely broad as to be almost useless… And if you invite people to a party where alcohol is available, the music is bumpin’, and the lights are low, you are choice architect. Everyone is a choice architect some of the time."