CORN!

Did any information in the book come as a surprise to you? If so, why do you think that specific piece of knowledge was kept from you? Does the producer of this knowledge have any responsibility? What is your responsibility as a knower?

The explanation for the layout and design of a supermarket was particularly interesting. Supermarkets put vegetables and fruits in the very front of the stores, where people enter
to give the impression of being directly connected to nature, and the further you go into the store, the more artificial the store becomes. This is most likely a way to generate sales of some sort and fact that someone must have psychologically studied this, is astounding to me.

The analysis of why the human taste buds work the way they do was interesting as well. Mainly, how most people shy away from bitter things because some poisons found in nature are bitter. We, as a species, have a sense of disgust to keep us from eating rotten meat, which could infect us. Taste buds have evolved this way as a way of protecting us from infection and injury.

I sincerely doubt this information was kept from me, I feel that it was my own lack of prior interest in the incredibly remote topic of corn. 

I am confused however, where the problem of responsibility lies, seeing as there are no direct consequences of this knowledge. 

Am I My Parents?

How would Gladwell respond to the identity question from August 27th? How would Levitt and Dubner respond?

Gladwell would argue that while we spend most of our lives with our parents and they help us for an image of the world in which we live, most of our judgmental skills come from our peers. More competition is placed on someone when competing with peers than the rules our parents set out for us. We identify with our peers and learn from them. Siblings are a different story however, as shown in the experiment conducted by a Swedish team of scientists which found that if, for instance the youngest of three siblings is rather timid and submissive at home around older siblings, this child is perfectly capable of acting dominant around his peers.
Levitt and Dubner would argue that it is not the parents nor the peers with which one associates that shapes the person, but the environment that one grows up in. Cited in a U.S Department of Education study, it's quoted as saying,
"A child with at least 50 kids' books in his home, for instance, scores roughly 5 percentile points higher than a child with no books, and a child with 100 books scores another 5 percentile points higher than a child with 50 books."
Parents do matter according to Levitt and Dubner, it's just that the actual methods used by the parents do not matter.