Doping, Driver Emotions...stories worth a look and listen.

Hey Chainlink.  For your weekend enjoyment, here are two fairly recent stories from opposite corners of the bike-o-sphere that I've found really fascinating.  

Lance Armstrong and the Business of Doping

In an eighteen-minute podcast, the masterminds at Planet Money with whom I went to college paint a graphic yet entertaining picture of the pro-cycling drug scene.  Most impressionable: all the blood bags, IVs hanging from hotel room walls, race injuries faked to juice-up in the back of a van, and of course, the Mafia-esque code of silence surrounding the whole thing. 

Then this article in the beloved Slate is also pretty dope.  Why You Hate Cyclists. Partially because of jerks like me.  But mostly it's your own illogical mind.

Saksa is pretty funny in explaining the cause of the kind of deep-seated, knee-jerk tension between drivers and cyclists that we see filter through The Chainlink forum almost every day.  Answer: emotion trumps logic.  But still an informative read:

"...lots of drivers assume all people on bikes are assholes like me. In doing so, these motorists are making an inductive fallacy, not unlike saying, "Of course he beat me at basketball—he’s Asian like Jeremy Lin and Yao Ming." Now, you might be thinking to yourself that you’ve seen more than one or two suicidal cyclists in your day—that these roaches on two wheels are an infestation that’s practically begging to be squished underfoot (and by “foot” you mean “my Yukon Denali”).

First off—wow, that is disturbingly violent. Second, your estimate of the number of asshole cyclists and the degree of their assholery is skewed by what behavioral economists like Daniel Kahneman call the affect heuristic, which is a fancy way of saying that people make judgments by consulting their emotions instead of logic."  

Ration.  We'll let it shore-up the exceptionally heavy onslaught of bicycle hate that we are ignoring this week.  ;-)