Reciprocal Inhibition in the Blogosphere;Miscellaneous Essay on Psychology

I have noticed that it can be fun to read blogs.  Yesterday, I read 90% Crud, which is, I suppose, a good description of the Blogosphere itself, but which also happens to be the name of one particular blog, which is subtitled as follows: Sure, 90% of weblogs are crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud.  The post I noticed contains a proposal to combine TiVo-like video recording with an RSS-like aggregator to make news reports make useful as well as more palatable.  Personally, I think that is a great idea; figuring out how to do that and make it commercially viable is the next project. 

The author, George Hotelling, makes reference to another blog, Creating Passionate Users, authored by Kathy Sierra, who put up a picture of herself on a horse.  She tells us that she learned a lot about human psychology from her horse.  That probably is true, although I think baboons are much better teachers than horses. 

She points out that "You can't be afraid and rational at the same time. Pick one."  At first, it is not obvious how that applies to Mr. Hotelling's proposal, but it does.  Either trust me on that, or go read his post to see how.  There isn't any reason for me to explain it here because he explains it just fine himself, and it is not really the point I am trying to make.  In this post, I review the concept of reciprocal inhibition, and explain why that explains Ms. Sierra's observation.  Continue reading here.