The Anosognosic's Dilemma: Something's Wrong but You'll Never Know What It Is (Part 1)

Existence is elsewhere. — André Breton, “The Surrealist Manifesto” 1. The Juice David Dunning, a Cornell professor of social psychology, was perusing the 1996 World Almanac. In a section called Offbeat News Stories he found a tantalizingly brief account of a series of bank robberies committed in Pittsburgh the previous year. From there, it was an easy matter to track the case to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, specifically to an article by Michael A. At 5 feet 6 inches and about 270 pounds, bank robbery suspect McArthur Wheeler isn’t the type of person who fades into the woodwork. Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight. In a follow-up article, Fuoco spoke to several Pittsburgh police detectives who had been involved in Wheeler’s arrest. (a) the film was bad; (b) Wheeler hadn’t adjusted the camera correctly; or (c) Wheeler had pointed the camera away from his face at the critical moment when he snapped the photo.[2] ERROL MORRIS: Why not? 1. 2.

What we can learn from procrastination Some years ago, the economist George Akerlof found himself faced with a simple task: mailing a box of clothes from India, where he was living, to the United States. The clothes belonged to his friend and colleague Joseph Stiglitz, who had left them behind when visiting, so Akerlof was eager to send the box off. But there was a problem. There’s something comforting about this story: even Nobel-winning economists procrastinate! Academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to putting things off: surveys suggest that the vast majority of college students procrastinate, and articles in the literature of procrastination often allude to the author’s own problems with finishing the piece. Ainslie is probably right that procrastination is a basic human impulse, but anxiety about it as a serious problem seems to have emerged in the early modern era. It’s also a surprisingly costly one. Philosophers are interested in procrastination for another reason.