Here’s an interesting article on overconfidence and the banking collapse: Cocksure. It’s interesting how overconfidence can ruin you and lead you to bad decisions, yet in some areas, overconfidence is what’s required, when confidence is vital. Here’s an excerpt:

This is what social scientists mean when they say that human overconfidence can be an adaptive trait. “In conflicts involving mutual assessment, an exaggerated assessment of the probability of winning increases the probability of winning,” Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard, writes. “Selection therefore favors this form of overconfidence.” Winners know how to bluff. And who bluffs the best? The person who, instead of pretending to be stronger than he is, actually believes himself to be stronger than he is. According to Wrangham, self-deception reduces the chances of “behavioral leakage”; that is, of “inadvertently revealing the truth through an inappropriate behavior.” This much is in keeping with what some psychologists have been telling us for years—that it can be useful to be especially optimistic about how attractive our spouse is, or how marketable our new idea is. In the words of the social psychologist Roy Baumeister, humans have an “optimal margin of illusion.”

This is a pretty interesting article on how the brain processes time and whether time really “slows down” during dangerous events: Edge: Brain Time

This is going to lead directly to skynet: Halted ’03 Iraq Plan Illustrates U.S. Fear of Cyberwar Risk. As the military starts writing these algorithms to try to attack other’s computer networks and infiltrate their security, and then start working on ones to defend against such attacks, and then algorithms to outsmart the defensive ones…. this could easily lead to skynet. We could have single algorithms/agents in charge of the military infrastructure and able to adapt and learn. Hopefully John Connor is out there somewhere…