www.youtube.com/watch?v=tv749SCqzuU

Afridi’s response made it to Facebook and other social media sites and was appreciated by many as a mature and responsible response by a de-fact ambassador of Pakistan and cricket.
The very next day, Afridi is interviewed by a reporter from Dawn news and he says this: “The media in India is very negative. One of the reasons India and Pakistan do not get along well is because of the media there. [...] I tried a lot to reach out to the Indian players, but no matter how hard we try they can never be like us.”
Here is the video [the interview is in Urdu]:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXh8Wk9LkqU

So in 24 hours, Afridi goes from chastising Pakistani media for all the hyperbole and starts blaming Indian media and the Indian team for the less than cordial atmosphere between the two nation.

Wonder what prompted the turncoat act. Any theories?

P.S: Note that Afridi avoids eye contact rather conspicuously in the second video and not the first.

There are several arguments for why we are not just monkeys. We have the ability to transform our environment; we have an unprecedented level of cognition that has forced us to ask questions like “Why?” and “How?”; we have become the most dominant species on this planet and have established a unique signature on our world (global warming, anyone?); we are capable of generating and propagating information across space and time beyond the confines of an individual, group, or even temporal identity. The list is practically endless. But perhaps the most charming among them is our unique flaws.

Much like any other species, we are indeed flawed in many respects. Yet our intellect, while compensation for many of our flaws, introduces many more. Specifically, consider our cognitive biases which have propelled us into a seemingly unstoppable downward spiral both as individuals and as a species. Everything from the present economic crisis to the quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan can be tied back to these biases. This is often viewed as the burden of intellect, of intelligence. We are too smart for our own good. A plausible argument is that these flaws are symptomatic of the complexity of our environment. Thanks to our intelligence, we have succeeding in creating an environment (being it the stock market, or security backed mortgages, or the concept of nation states, or frameworks for morality and the accompanying dilemmas, or many more) so complex, that we fail to understand it, we fail to comprehend its complexity, and inevitably stretches the limits of cerebral tractability.

Or does it?

Are our cognitive biases really an artefact of the complexity of our environment? This recent TED talk reveals that it might actually not be so! Experiments with monkeys have revealed that monkeys make surprisingly the same rational and (more importantly) irrational decisions as humans when it comes to certain cognitive tasks that involve economic transactions. So may be we really are just monkeys that figured out how to get down from trees, grow an opposable thumb, and speak. A humbling notion indeed!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUd8XA-5HEk

Here is the first video of the 12 [link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY

www.youtube.com/watch?v=b84cDbZrFIk

By his own admission, it took over nearly 40 seconds to do his research on this matter! Must be a new personal record for him!

Now if you looking for an article from a bunch of losers who have spend more than 40 seconds to get their facts and analysis right (like anyone cares about that!), I recommend the article that was published in the Wall Street Journal on Nov. 25th, 2009 [link].

They even have boring bar graphs to present the data related to heart surgeries in Narayana Hrudayalaya (in Bangalore, India) vs. the US (national averages):

image source: The Wall Street Journal http://www.wsj.com/

Enough said. If it wasn’t for Glenn Beck, I would have never known the truth!

The statement on the website says:

Zeitgeist was created as a non-profit filmiac expression to inspire people to start looking at the world from a more critical perspective and to understand that very often things are not what the population at large think they are. The information in Zeitgeist was established over a year long period of research and the current Source page on this site lists the basic sources used / referenced. Soon, an Interactive Transcript will be online with detailed footnotes and links so exact sources and further research can be relayed.

…

Here’s the movie for your viewing. Note that the movie is 2 hours long, so make sure you have enough time to watch it. But I guarantee that you will have strong opinions about it one way or the other.
Don’t forget to check out the Clarifications (which dented my confidence in the authenticity of the ‘facts’ in the movie), and the Sources sections.

Without further ado, here’s the movie :)