People would feel better about their day after an hour-long session in the Fox News rage room—they could groan out their stress, and afterward their problems at work or home were someone else’s fault. It meant that their struggles could be wholly externalized, sparing them the stark reality that maybe their employer didn’t care enough about them to give them a living wage. It would be too painful to admit that perhaps they were being taken advantage of by someone they saw every day rather than the faceless enemy of Obamacare and “illegals.”
In social sciences, a “latent variable” is an element that is influencing a result, but one you haven’t yet observed or measured—a hidden construct that’s floating just out of view. So what is the hidden construct here?
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman conducted a study that asked participants a very simple question: “Suppose you sample a word at random from an English text. Is it more likely that the word starts with a k, or that k is the third letter?” Most people responded with the former, that words that start with k (e.g., kitchen, kite, or kilometer) are more likely. However, the opposite is true, and one is actually twice as likely in a typical English text to encounter words where the third letter is a k, such as ask, like, make, joke, or take. They tested for five letters (k, l, n, r, and v) like this. It is easier for people to think of words by first letter because we are taught to organize (or alphabetize) words by their first letter. However, people conflate this ease of recall with frequency or probability, even when this is far from the truth. This cognitive bias is called the availability heuristic,
Empires preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t—the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out.
Because longitude represents a distance in the direction of the earth’s daily rotation, measuring it is further complicated by time. Each hour of the day corresponds to fifteen degrees of longitude. If a seaman compares the exact time on his ship to that of his selected reference point, he can calculate his longitude. But eighteenth-century timepieces weren’t reliable, especially at sea.
