All this happened, more or less.

we don’t perceive circumstances objectively. We pick out those bits of data that make us feel good because they confirm our prejudices. As Andrew Lo of M.I.T. has demonstrated, if stock traders make a series of apparently good picks, the dopamine released into their brains creates a stupor that causes them to underperceive danger ahead.

Biases abound. People who’ve been told to think of a high number will subsequently bid much more for an item than people who’ve been told to think of a low number. As Jonah Lehrer writes in his forthcoming book, “How We Decide,” there are certain circumstances (often when there are many options) in which gut instincts lead to the best decisions, while there are other circumstances (sometimes when there are a few options) when calm deliberation is best.

Most important, people seek relationships more than money. If behaving a certain way helps a stock trader or a regulator fit in with his crowd, he’s likely to keep doing it without too much rigorous self-examination.

centralasian

"We must always make connections, ever more connections, since they are not already given. For to connect is to affirm, and to affirm, to connect" - John Rajchman, in "The Deleuze Connections."

Бессмысленность почти всех сетевых споров и дебатов (да и не только сетевых, конечно) - факт, который трудно не заметить. То, зачем люди это делают, остается в итоге неясным - даже несмотря на то, что я и сам иногда так поступаю (т.е. вступаю в заведомо бессмысленный спор или даже начинаю его) - и потом обычно не могу самому себе объяснить, зачем это сделал.
http://avva.livejournal.com/1951877.html

Because the overall capacity for mental effort is limited, effortful processes tend to disrupt each other, whereas effortless processes neither cause nor suffer much interference when combined with other tasks. For example, a driver's ability to conduct a conversation is a sensitive indicator of the amount of attention currently demanded by the driving task. Dual tasks have been used in hundreds of psychological experiments to measure the attentional demands of different mental activities (for a review, see Harold E. Pashler, 1998). Studies using the dual-task method suggest that the self-monitoring function belongs with the effortful operations of System 2. People who are occupied by a demanding mental activity (e.g., attempting to hold in mind several digits) are much more likely to respond to another task by blurting out whatever comes to mind (Gilbert, 1989).

Frederick (2003, personal communication) has used simple puzzles to study cognitive self-monitoring, as in the following example: "A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?" Almost everyone reports an initial tendency to answer "10 cents" because the sum $1.10 separates naturally into $1 and 10 cents, and 10 cents is about the right magnitude. Frederick found that many intelligent people yield to this immediate impulse: 50 percent (47/93) of a group of Princeton students and 56 percent (164/293) of students at the University of Michigan gave the wrong answer. Clearly, these respondents offered their response without first checking it. The surprisingly high rate of errors in this easy problem illustrates how lightly the output of effortless associative thinking is monitored: people are not accustomed to thinking hard, and are often content to trust a plausible judgment that quickly comes to mind.

Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics[dagger] Daniel Kahneman. The American Economic Review. Nashville: Dec 2003. Vol. 93, Iss. 5; pg. 1449