Links For December

• File this under “everything you believe about yourself is lie”: “Surveys of the psychological literature suggest that perception of skill is often only moderately or modestly correlated with actual level of performance.”

• What country is the best for expats?

• “The misperception that political spending drives electoral outcomes is reinforced every campaign season by sensational media coverage, post-election debriefs from losing candidates and the exaggerated rhetoric of professional reform advocates.” Even more here.

• I came here to read about retro computing. I didn’t come here to feel.

• Maybe women don’t love psychopaths after all.

• What pieces of philosophical science fiction do actual philosophers recommend? (via Luke Muehlhauser)

• Ever notice how authors tend to be neurotic? A new paper from Personality and Individual Differences finds that verbal intelligence is correlated with worry, rumination, generalized anxiety disorder, and depression.

• The secret to successful haggling? Avoid round numbers. Results from field testing on eBay were less than spectacular.

• How do economists feel about net neutrality?

• Guy builds technical analysis software. Has happy customers. Discovers bug four years later. Software doesn’t work, hasn’t ever worked.

• On cajoling athletes to sleep more: “The results were startling. … A 13-percent performance enhancement is the sort of gain that one associates with drugs or years of training—not simply making sure to get tons of sleep.” (via Isegoria)

• “No one has been able to find someone who has both congenital blindness and a diagnosis of schizophrenia.”

• Study participants lifted more in their 3RM squat after looking at erotic images.

• I have always assumed that the order of authorship on academic papers goes from most-contributed to least-contributed. Whoever does the bulk of the work, well, they’re listed first. Turns out, this is not true across fields. Most notably, postmodernism, where the names might not even be those of the authors at all because, hey, that’s just a social construct.