It is claimed that Golda Meir once requested Nixon not to appoint jews as his delegates in Israel. There was a strong feeling in Israel that to avoid accusations of bias, delegates who happen to be jewish tend to lean the other way instead.
In general, how can we be sure that by “correcting” subconscious associations, we really shift our subconscious towards rationality rather than suppress what those around us consider a “thoughtcrime”?
There’s a story—it might be by Jorge Luis Borges, but the setting makes me think it isn’t—in which two men are competing for an appointment at Oxford, and it’s well-known that one moderate on the committee is going to have the deciding vote.
One of the candidates is a friend of this moderate. The second candidate goes out of his way to not befriend the moderate with the deciding vote, and even insults him publicly on numerous occasions. The moderate votes for this second candidate.
After the decision is final, the second candidate reveals that he deliberately got on the wrong side of the man who cast the deciding vote, because he knew him to be so scrupulously fair (and to like having a reputation for being fair), that he would overcompensate for his friendship with the one candidate and his animosity towards the other—and thus the second candidate cleverly gained an unfair advantage.
No, that’s Borges alright. (He’s one of my favorite authors, so I’ve read all his fictions many times. I don’t have my books handy to say exactly what story it is, but I’m fairly sure it’s one of the later ones.)
EDIT: I leafed through my Collected Fictions until I found it. It’s “The Bribe”, in The Book of Sand (Borges’s 2nd-to-last collection). Turns out the appointment is not to Oxford, which explains why my googling failed, and is actually who is to chair a literature conference in Wisconsin.
It is claimed that Golda Meir once requested Nixon not to appoint jews as his delegates in Israel. There was a strong feeling in Israel that to avoid accusations of bias, delegates who happen to be jewish tend to lean the other way instead.
In general, how can we be sure that by “correcting” subconscious associations, we really shift our subconscious towards rationality rather than suppress what those around us consider a “thoughtcrime”?
There’s a story—it might be by Jorge Luis Borges, but the setting makes me think it isn’t—in which two men are competing for an appointment at Oxford, and it’s well-known that one moderate on the committee is going to have the deciding vote.
One of the candidates is a friend of this moderate. The second candidate goes out of his way to not befriend the moderate with the deciding vote, and even insults him publicly on numerous occasions. The moderate votes for this second candidate.
After the decision is final, the second candidate reveals that he deliberately got on the wrong side of the man who cast the deciding vote, because he knew him to be so scrupulously fair (and to like having a reputation for being fair), that he would overcompensate for his friendship with the one candidate and his animosity towards the other—and thus the second candidate cleverly gained an unfair advantage.
No, that’s Borges alright. (He’s one of my favorite authors, so I’ve read all his fictions many times. I don’t have my books handy to say exactly what story it is, but I’m fairly sure it’s one of the later ones.)
EDIT: I leafed through my Collected Fictions until I found it. It’s “The Bribe”, in The Book of Sand (Borges’s 2nd-to-last collection). Turns out the appointment is not to Oxford, which explains why my googling failed, and is actually who is to chair a literature conference in Wisconsin.