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Javier E

'Follow the science': As Year 3 of the pandemic begins, a simple slogan becomes a polit... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...logan-becomes-political-weapon

science pandemic slogan philosophy implications truth knowledge bias

shared by Javier E on 13 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • advocates for each side in the masking debate are once again claiming the mantle of science to justify political positions
  • pleas to “follow the science” have consistently yielded to use of the phrase as a rhetorical land mine.
  • “so much is mixed up with science — risk and values and politics. The phrase can come off as sanctimonious,” she said, “and the danger is that it says, ‘These are the facts,’ when it should say, ‘This is the situation as we understand it now and that understanding will keep changing.’
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • The pandemic’s descent from medical emergency to political flash point can be mapped as a series of surges of bickering over that one simple phrase. “Follow the science!” people on both sides insisted, as the guidance from politicians and public health officials shifted over the past two years from anti-mask to pro-mask to “keep on masking” to more refined recommendations about which masks to wear and now to a spotty lifting of mandates.
  • demands that the other side “follow the science” are often a complete rejection of another person’s cultural and political identity: “It’s not just people believing the scientific research that they agree with. It’s that in this extreme polarization we live with, we totally discredit ideas because of who holds them.
  • “I’m struggling as much as anyone else,” she said. “Our job as informed citizens in the pandemic is to be like judges and synthesize information from both sides, but with the extreme polarization, nobody really trusts each other enough to know how to judge their information.
  • Many people end up putting their trust in some subset of the celebrity scientists they see online or on TV. “Follow the science” often means “follow the scientists” — a distinction that offers insight into why there’s so much division over how to cope with the virus,
  • although a slim majority of Americans they surveyed don’t believe that “scientists adjust their findings to get the answers they want,” 31 percent do believe scientists cook the books and another 16 percent were unsure.
  • Those who mistrust scientists were vastly less likely to be worried about getting covid-19 — and more likely to be supporters of former president Donald Trump,
  • A person’s beliefs about scientists’ integrity “is the strongest and most consistent predictor of views about … the threats from covid-19,”
  • When a large minority of Americans believe scientists’ conclusions are determined by their own opinions, that demonstrates a widespread “misunderstanding of scientific methods, uncertainty, and the incremental nature of scientific inquiry,” the sociologists concluded.
  • Americans’ confidence in science has declined in recent decades, especially among Republicans, according to Gallup polls
  • The survey found last year that 64 percent of Americans said they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in science, down from 70 percent who said that back in 1975
  • Confidence in science jumped among Democrats, from 67 percent in the earlier poll to 79 percent last year, while Republicans’ confidence cratered during the same period from 72 percent to 45 percent.
  • The fact that both sides want to be on the side of “science” “bespeaks tremendous confidence or admiration for a thing called ‘science,’ ”
  • Even in this time of rising mistrust, everybody wants to have the experts on their side.
  • That’s been true in American debates regarding science for many years
  • Four decades ago, when arguments about climate change were fairly new, people who rejected the idea looked at studies showing a connection between burning coal and acid rain and dubbed them “junk science.” The “real” science, those critics said, showed otherwise.
  • “Even though the motive was to reject a scientific consensus, there was still a valorization of expertise,”
  • “Even people who took a horse dewormer when they got covid-19 were quick to note that the drug was created by a Nobel laureate,” he said. “Almost no one says they’re anti-science.”
  • “There isn’t a thing called ‘the science.’ There are multiple sciences with active disagreements with each other. Science isn’t static.”
  • The problem is that the phrase has become more a political slogan than a commitment to neutral inquiry, “which bespeaks tremendous ignorance about what science is,”
  • t scientists and laypeople alike are often guilty of presenting science as a monolithic statement of fact, rather than an ever-evolving search for evidence to support theories,
  • while scientists are trained to be comfortable with uncertainty, a pandemic that has killed and sickened millions has made many people eager for definitive solutions.
  • “I just wish when people say ‘follow the science,’ it’s not the end of what they say, but the beginning, followed by ‘and here’s the evidence,’
  • As much as political leaders may pledge to “follow the science,” they answer to constituents who want answers and progress, so the temptation is to overpromise.
  • It’s never easy to follow the science, many scientists warn, because people’s behaviors are shaped as much by fear, folklore and fake science as by well-vetted studies or evidence-based government guidance.
  • “Science cannot always overcome fear,”
  • Some of the states with the lowest covid case rates and highest vaccination rates nonetheless kept many students in remote learning for the longest time, a phenomenon she attributed to “letting fear dominate our narrative.”
  • “That’s been true of the history of science for a long time,” Gandhi said. “As much as we try to be rigorous about fact, science is always subject to the political biases of the time.”
  • A study published in September indicates that people who trust in science are actually more likely to believe fake scientific findings and to want to spread those falsehoods
  • The study, reported in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, found that trusting in science did not give people the tools they need to understand that the scientific method leads not to definitive answers, but to ever-evolving theories about how the world works.
  • Rather, people need to understand how the scientific method works, so they can ask good questions about studies.
  • Trust in science alone doesn’t arm people against misinformation,
  • Overloaded with news about studies and predictions about the virus’s future, many people just tune out the information flow,
  • That winding route is what science generally looks like, Swann said, so people who are frustrated and eager for solid answers are often drawn into dangerous “wells of misinformation, and they don’t even realize it,” she said. “If you were told something every day by people you trusted, you might believe it, too.”
  • With no consensus about how and when the pandemic might end, or about which public health measures to impose and how long to keep them in force, following the science seems like an invitation to a very winding, even circular path.
knudsenlu

Trumpism isn't an ideology. It's a psychology - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...psychology-20180306-story.html

psychology trump culture politics language

shared by knudsenlu on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • For the last couple of years, I've been banging my spoon on my highchair about how Trumpism isn't a political or ideological movement so much as a psychological phenomenon. This was once a controversial position on the right and the left. Former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon devoted considerable resources to promoting Trumpist candidates who supposedly shared President Trump's worldview and parroted his rhetoric, including anti-globalism, economic nationalism and crude insults of "establishment" politicians. Those schemes largely came to naught.
  • On the left, there's an enormous investment in the idea that Trump isn't a break with conservatism but the apotheosis of it. This is a defensible, or at least understandable claim if you believe conservatism has always been an intellectually vacuous bundle of racial and cultural resentments. But if that were the case, Commentary magazine's Noah Rothman recently noted, you would not see so many mainstream and consistent conservatives objecting to Trump's behavior.
  • Trump has said countless times that he thinks his gut is a better guide than the brains of his advisors. He routinely argues that the presidents and policymakers who came before him were all fools and weaklings. That's narcissism, not ideology, talking.
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  • Trump's biggest fans have stuck by him and often reflect or echo his irrationality, discovering ever more extravagant ways to justify the president's behavior. (Krein's decision to renounce Trump was unusual.) When Trump attacked Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, Jerry Falwell Jr. of Liberty University tweeted his support, floating the idea that Sessions was an anti-Trump deep cover operative who endorsed Trump to undermine his presidency from within. It seems Trumpism is infectious. If this infection becomes a pandemic — a cult of personality — one could fairly call Trumpism a movement. But psychology would still be the best way to understand it.
Javier E

Opinion | Who Will Teach Us How to Feel? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...art-politics.html

psychology art emotion politics postmodernism

shared by Javier E on 23 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • T Magazine had a very good idea. They gathered some artists and museum curators and asked them to name the artworks that define the contemporary age — pieces created anywhere in the world since 1970.
  • of the 25 works they chose, very few are paintings or sculptures.
  • Most of the pieces selected are intellectual concepts or political attitudes expressed through video, photographs, installations or words.
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  • Of the 27 artists recognized, 20 were born in the U.S
  • most of these artists haven’t captured or maybe even appealed to a mass audience
  • Most of the artists have adopted a similar pose: political provocateur. The works are less beautiful creations to be experienced and more often political statements to be decoded
  • What you see when all these works are brought together is how the aesthetic has given way to the political, how the inner life has given way to the protest gesture.
  • Among these 25 pieces, 20 are impersonal and only five allow you to see what life is like for another human being
  • Only a few explore relationships and emotional connection.
  • There almost seems to be a taboo now against capturing states like joy, temptation, gratitude, exaltation, betrayal, forgiveness and longing.
  • one of the things art has traditionally done is educate the emotions
  • Lisa Feldman Barrett and other neuroscientists argue that emotions aren’t baked into our nature as things all humans share. They are constructed by culture — art and music, and relationships.
  • When we see the depth of psychological expression in a Rembrandt portrait, or experience the intimacy of a mother and daughter in a Mary Cassatt, we’re not gaining a new fact, but we’re experiencing a new emotion. We’re widening the repertoire of ways we can feel and can communicate feelings to others.
  • Barrett uses the phrase “emotional granularity” to capture the reality that some people — and some eras — experience a wider range and specificity of emotions than others.
  • People with highly educated emotions can be astonished by the complexity of other people without feeling the need to judge them immediately as good or bad according to some political logic.
sissij

Liberals and Conservatives Read Different Science Books, Except for One Subject | Big T... - 0 views

bigthink.com/...e-books-except-for-one-subject

science research psychology

shared by sissij on 10 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • While scientists generally try to stay out politics, letting evidence-based research to speak for itself, the strong division in American society has spread to science.
  • By analyzing millions of online purchases, researchers from Cornell, Yale and University of Chicago found that there are clear partisan preferences in how we buy books on scientific topics.
  • The study’s authors think it’s likely that people who buy political books get science books to support their views rather than out of a general interest in science.
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  • One topic popular with both sides - books on dinosaurs. These were bought across the whole political spectrum.
  • Is there a way science could help heal the division in the country?
  • While the study is illuminating, it  has some limitations, with political scientist Toby Bolsen cautioning that this research did not draw on a random sample of books, relying instead on how the online sellers categorized them.
  • sissij on 10 Apr 17
     
    As we discussed in TOK, people selectively read about science due to confirmation bias. When reading about science, people tends to ignore the limitation and uncertainties in science, this is because of the source amnesia. It is not surprise that liberals and conservatives read different science book because the policies they make are so different that they need different scientific paper to support. Although science is trying to stay out of politics, but it cannot stop politicians from using science. However, it is totally a surprise for me to see that science books on dinosaurs are read by author throughout the political spectrum. It doesn't seem to fit in with my hypothesis earlier. --Sissi (4/10/2017)
Javier E

Can truth survive this president? An honest investigation. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...sident-an-honest-investigation

truth Language post-truth postmodernism fact-checking democracy science enlightenment epistemic Psychology

shared by Javier E on 15 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • in the summer of 2002, long before “fake news” or “post-truth” infected the vernacular, one of President George W. Bush’s top advisers mocked a journalist for being part of the “reality-based community.” Seeking answers in reality was for suckers, the unnamed adviser explained. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
  • This was the hubris and idealism of a post-Cold War, pre-Iraq War superpower: If you exert enough pressure, events will bend to your will.
  • the deceit emanating from the White House today is lazier, more cynical. It is not born of grand strategy or ideology; it is impulsive and self-serving. It is not arrogant, but shameless.
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  • Bush wanted to remake the world. President Trump, by contrast, just wants to make it up as he goes along
  • Through all their debates over who is to blame for imperiling truth (whether Trump, postmodernism, social media or Fox News), as well as the consequences (invariably dire) and the solutions (usually vague), a few conclusions materialize, should you choose to believe them.
  • There is a pattern and logic behind the dishonesty of Trump and his surrogates; however, it’s less multidimensional chess than the simple subordination of reality to political and personal ambition
  • Trump’s untruth sells best precisely when feelings and instincts overpower facts, when America becomes a safe space for fabrication.
  • Rand Corp. scholars Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich point to the Gilded Age, the Roaring Twenties and the rise of television in the mid-20th century as recent periods of what they call “Truth Decay” — marked by growing disagreement over facts and interpretation of data; a blurring of lines between opinion, fact and personal experience; and diminishing trust in once-respected sources of information.
  • In eras of truth decay, “competing narratives emerge, tribalism within the U.S. electorate increases, and political paralysis and dysfunction grow,”
  • Once you add the silos of social media as well as deeply polarized politics and deteriorating civic education, it becomes “nearly impossible to have the types of meaningful policy debates that form the foundation of democracy.”
  • To interpret our era’s debasement of language, Kakutani reflects perceptively on the World War II-era works of Victor Klemperer, who showed how the Nazis used “words as ‘tiny doses of arsenic’ to poison and subvert the German culture,” and of Stefan Zweig, whose memoir “The World of Yesterday” highlights how ordinary Germans failed to grasp the sudden erosion of their freedoms.
  • Kakutani calls out lefty academics who for decades preached postmodernism and social constructivism, which argued that truth is not universal but a reflection of relative power, structural forces and personal vantage points.
  • postmodernists rejected Enlightenment ideals as “vestiges of old patriarchal and imperialist thinking,” Kakutani writes, paving the way for today’s violence against fact in politics and science.
  • “dumbed-down corollaries” of postmodernist thought have been hijacked by Trump’s defenders, who use them to explain away his lies, inconsistencies and broken promises.
  • intelligent-design proponents and later climate deniers drew from postmodernism to undermine public perceptions of evolution and climate change. “Even if right-wing politicians and other science deniers were not reading Derrida and Foucault, the germ of the idea made its way to them: science does not have a monopoly on the truth,
  • McIntyre quotes at length from mea culpas by postmodernist and social constructivist writers agonizing over what their theories have wrought, shocked that conservatives would use them for nefarious purposes
  • pro-Trump troll and conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich , who helped popularize the “Pizzagate” lie, has forthrightly cited his unlikely influences. “Look, I read postmodernist theory in college,” Cernovich told the New Yorker in 2016. “If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative. I don’t seem like a guy who reads [Jacques] Lacan, do I?
  • When truth becomes malleable and contestable regardless of evidence, a mere tussle of manufactured narratives, it becomes less about conveying facts than about picking sides, particularly in politics.
  • In “On Truth,” Cambridge University philosopher Simon Blackburn writes that truth is attainable, if at all, “only at the vanishing end points of enquiry,” adding that, “instead of ‘facts first’ we may do better if we think of ‘enquiry first,’ with the notion of fact modestly waiting to be invited to the feast afterward.
  • He is concerned, but not overwhelmingly so, about the survival of truth under Trump. “Outside the fevered world of politics, truth has a secure enough foothold,” Blackburn writes. “Perjury is still a serious crime, and we still hope that our pilots and surgeons know their way about.
  • Kavanaugh and Rich offer similar consolation: “Facts and data have become more important in most other fields, with political and civil discourse being striking exceptions. Thus, it is hard to argue that the world is truly ‘post-fact.’ ”
  • McIntyre argues persuasively that our methods of ascertaining truth — not just the facts themselves — are under attack, too, and that this assault is especially dangerous.
  • Ideologues don’t just disregard facts they disagree with, he explains, but willingly embrace any information, however dubious, that fits their agenda. “This is not the abandonment of facts, but a corruption of the process by which facts are credibly gathered and reliably used to shape one’s beliefs about reality. Indeed, the rejection of this undermines the idea that some things are true irrespective of how we feel about them.”
  • “It is hardly a depressing new phenomenon that people’s beliefs are capable of being moved by their hopes, grievances and fears,” Blackburn writes. “In order to move people, objective facts must become personal beliefs.” But it can’t work — or shouldn’t work — in reverse.
  • More than fearing a post-truth world, Blackburn is concerned by a “post-shame environment,” in which politicians easily brush off their open disregard for truth.
  • it is human nature to rationalize away the dissonance. “Why get upset by his lies, when all politicians lie?” Kakutani asks, distilling the mind-set. “Why get upset by his venality, when the law of the jungle rules?”
  • So any opposition is deemed a witch hunt, or fake news, rigged or just so unfair. Trump is not killing the truth. But he is vandalizing it, constantly and indiscriminately, diminishing its prestige and appeal, coaxing us to look away from it.
  • the collateral damage includes the American experiment.
  • “One of the most important ways to fight back against post-truth is to fight it within ourselves,” he writes, whatever our particular politics may be. “It is easy to identify a truth that someone else does not want to see. But how many of us are prepared to do this with our own beliefs? To doubt something that we want to believe, even though a little piece of us whispers that we do not have all the facts?”
Javier E

History News Network | Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About Donald Trump's Am... - 1 views

historynewsnetwork.org/...162131

politics psychology brain science stupid evolution bias context institutions

shared by Javier E on 29 Feb 16 - No Cached
  •  Just How Stupid Are We?  Facing the Truth About the American Voter.  The book is filled with statistics like these:● A majority of Americans don’t know which party is in control of Congress.  ● A majority can’t name the chief justice of the Supreme Court.  ● A majority don’t know we have three branches of government.
  • suddenly mainstream media pundits have discovered how ignorant millions of voters are.  See this and this and this and this.  More importantly, the concern with low-information voters has become widespread.  Many are now wondering what country they’re living in. 
  • The answer science gives us (the title of my last book and this essay notwithstanding) is not that people fall for slick charlatans like Trump because they’re stupid.
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  •  The problem is that we humans didn’t evolve to live in the world in which we find ourselves.  As the social scientists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby put it, the human mind was “designed to solve the day-to-day problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. These stone age priorities produced a brain far better at solving some problems than others.” 
  • there are four failings common to human beings as a result of our Stone-Age brain that hinder us in politics.
  • why are we this way?  Science suggests that one reason is that we evolved to win in social settings and in such situations the truth doesn't matter as much as sheer doggedness
  • Second, we find it hard to size up politicians correctly.  The reason for this is that we rely on instant impressions. 
  • This stops voters from worrying that they need to bolster their impressions by consulting experts and reading news stories from a broad array of ideological viewpoints.  Why study when you can rely on your gut instinct?
  • Third, we aren’t inclined to reward politicians who tell us hard truths.
  • First, most people find it easy to ignore politics because it usually involves people they don’t know.  As human beings we evolved to care about people in our immediate vicinity.  Our nervous system kicks into action usually only when we meet people face-to-face
  •  This has left millions of voters on their own.  Lacking information, millions do what you would expect.  They go with their gut
  • most of the time we return to a state of well-being by simply ignoring the evidence we find discomforting.  This is known as Disconfirmation Bias and it afflicts all of us
  • Fourth, we frequently fail to show empathy in circumstances that clearly cry out for it.
  • We evolved to show empathy for people we know.  It takes special effort to empathize with people who don’t dress like us or look like us.
  • long-term we need to teach voters not to trust their instincts in politics because our instincts often don’t work.
  • Doing politics in a modern mass democracy, in other words, is an unnatural act.
  • Teaching this lesson doesn’t sound like a job for historians, but in one way it is.  Studying history is all about putting events into context. And as it turns out, voters need to learn the importance of context.
  • Given the mismatch between our Stone-Age brain and the problems we face in the 21st century, we should only trust our political instincts when those instincts are serviceable in a modern context.  If they aren’t (and most of the time they aren't), then higher order cognitive thinking is required.
  • Just why mass ignorance seems to be afflicting our politics at this moment is a complicated question.  But here again history can be helpful.  The answer seems to be that the institutions voters formerly could turn to for help have withered.
  • We don't want the truth to prevail, as Harvard's Steven Pinker informs us, we want our version of the truth to prevail, for in the end what we're really concerned with is maintaining our status or enhancing it.
  • ut cultural norms can be established that help us overcome our natural inclinations.
  • don’t have much confidence that people in general will be willing on their own to undertake the effort.
Javier E

The science of influencing people: six ways to win an argument | Science | The Guardian - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...le-six-ways-to-win-an-argument

psychology argument persuasion influence

shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • we have all come across people who appear to have next to no understanding of world events – but who talk with the utmost confidence and conviction
  • the latest psychological research can now help us to understand why
  • the “illusion of explanatory depth”
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • The problem is that we confuse a shallow familiarity with general concepts for real, in-depth knowledge.
  • our knowledge is also highly selective: we conveniently remember facts that support our beliefs and forget others
  • Psychological studies show that people fail to notice the logical fallacies in an argument if the conclusion supports their viewpoint
  • “motivated reasoning”
  • A high standard of education doesn’t necessarily protect us from these flaws
  • That false sense of expertise can, in turn, lead them to feel that they have the licence to be more closed-minded in their political views – an attitude known as “earned dogmatism”.
  • “People confuse their current level of understanding with their peak knowledge,”
  • Graduates, for instance, often overestimate their understanding of their degree subject:
  • recent psychological research also offers evidence-based ways towards achieving more fruitful discussions.
  • a simple but powerful way of deflating someone’s argument is to ask for more detail. “You need to get the ‘other side’ focusing on how something would play itself out, in a step by step fashion”
  • By revealing the shallowness of their existing knowledge, this prompts a more moderate and humble attitude.
  • You need to ask how something works to get the effect
  • If you are trying to debunk a particular falsehood – like a conspiracy theory or fake news – you should make sure that your explanation offers a convincing, coherent narrative that fills all the gaps left in the other person’s understanding
  • The persuasive power of well-constructed narratives means that it’s often useful to discuss the sources of misinformation, so that the person can understand why they were being misled in the first place
  • Each of our beliefs is deeply rooted in a much broader and more complex political ideology. Climate crisis denial, for instance, is now inextricably linked to beliefs in free trade, capitalism and the dangers of environmental regulation.
  • Attacking one issue may therefore threaten to unravel someone’s whole worldview – a feeling that triggers emotionally charged motivated reasoning. It is for this reason that highly educated Republicans in the US deny the overwhelming evidence.
  • disentangle the issue at hand from their broader beliefs, or to explain how the facts can still be accommodated into their worldview.
  • “All people have multiple identities,” says Prof Jay Van Bavel at New York University, who studies the neuroscience of the “partisan brain”. “These identities can become active at any given time, depending on the circumstances.”
  • you might have more success by appealing to another part of the person’s identity entirely.
  • when people are asked to first reflect on their other, nonpolitical values, they tend to become more objective in discussion on highly partisan issues, as they stop viewing facts through their ideological lens.
  • Another simple strategy to encourage a more detached and rational mindset is to ask your conversation partner to imagine the argument from the viewpoint of someone from another country
  • The aim is to help them recognise that they can change their mind on certain issues while staying true to other important elements of their personality.
  • this strategy increases “psychological distance” from the issue at hand and cools emotionally charged reasoning so that you can see things more objectively.
  • If you are considering policies with potentially long-term consequences, you could ask them to imagine viewing the situation through the eyes of someone in the future
  • people are generally much more rational in their arguments, and more willing to own up to the limits of their knowledge and understanding, if they are treated with respect and compassion.
  • Aggression, by contrast, leads them to feel that their identity is threatened, which in turn can make them closed-minded
  • Assuming that the purpose of your argument is to change minds, rather than to signal your own superiority, you are much more likely to achieve your aims by arguing gently and kindly rather than belligerently, and affirming your respect for the person, even if you are telling them some hard truths
  • As a bonus, you will also come across better to onlookers. “There’s a lot of work showing that third-party observers always attribute high levels of competence when the person is conducting themselves with more civility,”
johnsonel7

The case for economics - by the numbers | MIT News - 0 views

news.mit.edu/...cs-influence-fields-study-0303

economics Inside Job social sciences data

shared by johnsonel7 on 06 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • In recent years, criticism has been levelled at economics for being insular and unconcerned about real-world problems. But a new study led by MIT scholars finds the field increasingly overlaps with the work of other disciplines, and, in a related development, has become more empirical and data-driven, while producing less work of pure theory.
  • In psychology journals, for instance, citations of economics papers have more than doubled since 2000. Public health papers now cite economics work twice as often as they did 10 years ago, and citations of economics research in fields from operations research to computer science have risen sharply as well.
  • As Angrist acknowledges, one impetus for the study was the wave of criticism the economics profession has faced over the last decade, after the banking crisis and the “Great Recession” of 2008-2009, which included the finance-sector crash of 2008. The paper’s title alludes to the film “Inside Job” — whose thesis holds that, as Angrist puts it, “economics scholarship as an academic enterprise was captured somehow by finance, and that academic economists should therefore be blamed for the Great Recession.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “If you ask me, economics has never been better,” says Josh Angrist, an MIT economist who led the study. “It’s never been more useful. It’s never been more scientific and more evidence-based.”
  • The study also details the relationship between economics and four additional social science disciplines: anthropology, political science, psychology, and sociology. Among these, political science has overtaken sociology as the discipline most engaged with economics. Psychology papers now cite economics research about as often as they cite works of sociology. The new intellectual connectivity between economics and psychology appears to be a product of the growth of behavioral economics, which examines the irrational, short-sighted financial decision-making of individuals — a different paradigm than the assumptions about rational decision-making found in neoclassical economics.
  • “It really seems to be the diversity of economics that makes it do well in influencing other fields,” Ellison says. “Operations research, computer science, and psychology are paying a lot of attention to economic theory. Sociologists are paying a lot of attention to labor economics, marketing and management are paying attention to industrial organization, statisticians are paying attention to econometrics, and the public health people are paying attention to health economics. Just about everything in economics is influential somewhere.”
Javier E

What's behind the confidence of the incompetent? This suddenly popular psychological ph... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...pular-psychological-phenomenon

confidence psychology knowledge competence

shared by Javier E on 07 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • Someone who has very little knowledge in a subject claims to know a lot. That person might even boast about being an expert.
  • This phenomenon has a name: the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s not a disease, syndrome or mental illness; it is present in everybody to some extent, and it’s been around as long as human cognition, though only recently has it been studied and documented in social psychology.
  • Charles Darwin followed that up in 1871 with “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
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  • Put simply, incompetent people think they know more than they really do, and they tend to be more boastful about it.
  • To test Darwin’s theory, the researchers quizzed people on several topics, such as grammar, logical reasoning and humor. After each test, they asked the participants how they thought they did. Specifically, participants were asked how many of the other quiz-takers they beat.
  • Time after time, no matter the subject, the people who did poorly on the tests ranked their competence much higher
  • On average, test takers who scored as low as the 10th percentile ranked themselves near the 70th percentile. Those least likely to know what they were talking about believed they knew as much as the experts.
  • Dunning and Kruger’s results have been replicated in at least a dozen different domains: math skills, wine tasting, chess, medical knowledge among surgeons and firearm safety among hunters.
  • Even though President Trump’s statements are rife with errors, falsehoods or inaccuracies, he expresses great confidence in his aptitude. He says he does not read extensively because he solves problems “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had.” He has said in interviews he doesn’t read lengthy reports because “I already know exactly what it is.”
  • He has “the best words” and cites his “high levels of intelligence” in rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change. Decades ago, he said he could end the Cold War: “It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” Trump told The Washington Post’s Lois Romano over dinner in 1984. “I think I know most of it anyway.”
  • Whether people want to understand “the other side” or they’re just looking for an epithet, the Dunning-Kruger effect works as both, Dunning said, which he believes explains the rise of interest.
  • Dunning says the effect is particularly dangerous when someone with influence or the means to do harm doesn’t have anyone who can speak honestly about their mistakes.
  • Not surprisingly (though no less concerning), Dunning’s follow-up research shows the poorest performers are also the least likely to accept criticism or show interest in self improvement.
Javier E

Why Partisans Can't Explain Their Views - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-cant-explain-their-views.html

politics partisan extremism knowledge ignorance discourse

shared by Javier E on 20 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • we have grown so accustomed to this divide that we no longer flinch at the brazen political attacks on either side — even when the logic underlying these attacks is hard to fathom.
  • attack ads work, in large part, because we don’t understand them. Statements take advantage of a fact about human psychology called the “illusion of explanatory depth,” an idea developed by the Yale psychologist Frank Keil and his students. We typically feel that we understand how complex systems work even when our true understanding is superficial.
  • it is not until we are asked to explain how such a system works — whether it’s what’s involved in a trade deal with China or how a toilet flushes — that we realize how little we actually know.
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  • we report on experiments showing that people often believe they understand what is meant by well-worn political terms like the “flat tax,” “sanctions on Iran” or “cap and trade” — even when they don’t.
  • The real surprise is what happens after these same individuals are asked to explain how these policy ideas work: they become more moderate in their political views — either in support of such policies or against them. In fact, not only do their attitudes change, but so does their behavior
  • asking people to justify their position — rather than asking them to explain the mechanisms by which a policy would work — doesn’t tend to soften their political views. When we asked participants to state the reasons they were for or against a policy position, their initial attitudes held firm. (Other researchers have found much the same thing: merely discussing an issue often makes people more extreme, not less.)
  • asking people to “unpack” complex systems — getting them to articulate how something might work in real life — forces them to confront their lack of understanding.
  • rarely is anybody — candidate or voter — asked to explain his or her positions. American political discourse, in short, is not discourse at all.
  • The answer implied by our research is not that we should all become policy wonks. Instead, we voters need to be more mindful that issues are complicated and challenge ourselves to break down the policy proposals on both sides into their component parts. We have to then imagine how these ideas would work in the real world — and then make a choice: to either moderate our positions on policies we don’t really understand, as research suggests we will, or try to improve our understanding. Either way, discourse would then be based on information, not illusion.
  • whether or not we citizens make this effort, our leaders should. We should demand that Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney explain how in addition to why.
  • We have a problem in American politics: an illusion of knowledge that leads to extremism. We can start to fix it by acknowledging that we know a lot less than we think.
Javier E

Most Campaign Outreach Has No Effect on Voters - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...541485

campaign election partisan outreach voters politics psychology research

shared by Javier E on 01 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • David Broockman, a Stanford University assistant professor, and Joshua Kalla, a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, analyzed data from 49 field experiments—state, local, and federal campaigns that let political scientists access their data to evaluate their methods
  • For every flyer stuck in a mailbox, every door knocked by an earnest volunteer, and every candidate message left on an answering machine, there was no measurable change in voting outcomes. Even early outreach efforts, which are somewhat more successful at persuading voters, tend to fade from memory by Election Day.
  • Broockman and Kalla also estimated that the effect of television and online ads is zero, although only a small portion of their data speaks directly to that point.
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  • The findings suggest that a lot of the time, energy, and money poured into traditional campaigning methods is wasted, and that the campaign operatives hawking tried-and-true tactics don’t have the evidence to back up their claims.
  • It also casts doubt on the theory of the swing voter who can be persuaded with enough flyers, ad exposure, and conversations with earnest volunteers
  • In reality, Broockman and Kalla find, direct outreach is most effective at improving voter turnout, suggesting that campaigns should focus on getting their core supporters to the polls than reaching out to a mythical middle.
  • This new study suggests that intentionally curated, issue-specific persuasion campaigns may shift people’s views more easily than partisan political campaigns.
  • Emma Green: So, is political campaigning useless?Joshua Kalla: The short answer is ‘no.
  • There are lots of things that campaigning can accomplish. Two decades of research on voter registration and hundreds of field experiments show really cost-effective ways to increase turnout in the base.But on persuasion, yes, we find that on average, there are very small effects.
  • Kalla: A lot of campaign operatives think there’s this big pool of moderate, undecided voters that we can spend money on to persuade them to our side. That strategy is probably not the right strategy. And we should be skeptical of big claims of persuasion.
  • Kalla: All the money is being poured into the same time and the same place. It’s hard to imagine that the hundredth TV ad that a person views is really worth it from a monetary perspective, versus that same money spent in a different race or a lower race. There’s a case to be made that too much money is being spent in the same ways and on the same people.
  • But the takeaway from this paper should not be that campaigns should stop. Campaigns do a lot of work that is measurable in return on getting voters to vote, and persuading voters. It’s just a question of how the money is spent.
  • Kalla: The first order of understanding an election and how people vote is partisan identity. Most people vote based on whether there’s a D or an R next to their name. Unpacking that should be more the focus than the horserace.
  • We don’t see persuasive effects in general elections where a Democrat is talking to a Republican. But in ballot-measure campaigns and primaries and the transgender work, it seems that persuasion is possible.
  • Most Americans view themselves in a partisan lens. When it comes time to vote, it’s less a function of a person running for office than a person with a party label beside his or her name.
  • Green: But what about the roughly 39 percent of Americans who identify as independents?Kalla: A lot of independents tend to be what political scientists term as “closeted partisans.” They might not explicitly identify with a party, but if you ask them which party they lean toward, they’ll often give you an answer. Their behavior tends to look a lot like the behavior of people who explicitly identify as partisans.
  • Green: Our democracy is based on this romantic idea that encounters in the public square—conversations, essays, speeches, etc.— have the power to change how people view the world. If you’re saying that’s basically not true, where does that leave us? Are we all just destined to remain isolated in the prisons of our own convictions?
  • Kalla: I want to draw a distinction with the transgender canvassing work. That was very much focusing on getting people to be introspective and think about times that they or their loved ones have been discriminated against, and how that made them feel, and how that real, lived experience informs their views on non-discrimination laws and views toward LGBT people. That’s close to an ideal of how we want democracy to function.
  • That’s not the type of discourse you see in campaigns. I don’t think TV ads or every glossy postcard is really going to lead to enlightened discourse among the American public.
honordearlove

6 Cognitive Biases That Make Politics Irrational - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.ca/...e-bias-politics_b_3077740.html

bias politics psychology

shared by honordearlove on 07 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • In turn, these seemingly irrational flaws in judgement can lead to perpetual distortion, inaccurate judgement, and illogical interpretation -- all of which are key ingredients in the widening of cultural rifts, the deepening of global disparity gaps, and the general intensifying of political upheavals.
  • forming culturally cohesive social circles based upon similar viewpoints, and unconsciously referencing only those perspectives which reaffirm our deeply entrenched beliefs
  • innate tribal desire to be socially accepted, we tend to favour the thoughts, ideals, and sentiments of those with whom we racially, culturally, and ethnocentrically identify with most.
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  • The repercussions of this bias confines us to the same routines, political parties, and economic strategies
  • our cognitive selective attention processes identify negative news as inherently important or profound
  • This is the sort of groupthink that convinces religious and political radicals they have greater support
  • This lack of self-control, where most of us would rather exchange serious pains in the not-to-distant future for menial pleasures in the moment, personifies the impulsive decision-making that has led to the financial meltdown, urban saturation, political corruption, and general slighting of imminent environmental cataclysms.
  • So while the majority of us may be prone to these errors in rational judgement, we can also be more aware of them. And who knows, if we can manage to re-rationalise how we think, act, and treat one another, perhaps our politics will follow suit.
Javier E

Technopoly-Chs. 4.5--The Broken Defenses - 0 views

expert technocracy technopoly information meaning bureaucracy history institutions Postman book notes

shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • r ~~~-~st of us. There is almo-~t-n~ ~ wheth;~~ct~~l or imag'l ined, that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world that would [ make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction.
  • The belief system of a tool-using culture is rather like a brand-new deck of cards. Whether it is a culture of technological simplicity or sophistication, there always exists a more or less comprehensive, ordered world-view, resting on a set of metaphysical or theological assumptions. Ordinary men and women might not clearly grasp how the harsh realities of their lives fit into the grand and benevolent design of the universe, but they have no doubt that there is such a design, and their priests and shamans are well able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to make it, if not wholly rational, at least coherent.
  • From the early seventeenth century, when Western culture u~ertook to reorganize itself to accommodate the printing press, until the mid-nineteenth century, no significant technologies were introduced that altered l-he form, volume, or speed of . in~. As a consequence, Western culture had more than two hundred years to accustom itself to the new information conditions created by the press.
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  • That is eseecial1y the case with technical facts.
  • as incomprehensible problems mount, as the con- ~ cept of progress fades, as meaning itself becomes suspect, the T echnopolist stands firm in believing that what the world needs is yet more information. It is like the joke about the man who , complains that the food he is being served in a restaurant is \ inedibleand also that the_ portions are too small
  • The faith of those who believed in Progress was based on the assumption that one could discern a purpose to the human enterprise, even without the theological scaffolding that supported the Christian edifice of belief. Science and technology were the chief instruments of Progress, and · i.Lac_cumulation of reliable in orma on a out nature _1b_n, would bring ignorance, superstition, and suffering to an end.
  • In T ~chnopoly, we are driven to fill our lives with the quesUo "accesTinformation.
  • But the genie that came out of the bottle proclaiming that information was the new god of culture was a deceiver. It solved the problez:n of information scarcity, the disadvantages o_f wh~s~ious. But it gave no wami g_ahout the dan_gers of information7rttn,
  • !:ion of what is called a_ curriculum was a logical step toward 1./ organizing, limiting, and discriminating among available sources of information. Schools became technocracy's first secular bureaucracies, structures for legitimizing some parts of the flow of infgrmatiQD and di"s.ci.e.diling other earts. School;;ere, in short, a ~eans of governing the ecology of information.
  • James Beniger's The <;antral Revolution, which is among the three or four most important books we have on the lb\b'ect of the relation of informe;ition to culture. In the next chapter, I have relied to a considerable degree on The Control Revolution in my discussion of the breakdown of the control mechanisms,
  • most of the methods by which technocracies. have hoped to keep information from running amok are now dysfunctional. Indeed, one_ ~_i!)!_.Q.L.de£ining_a.I..em Q~ oly is to say that its inf_o_fmation immu is inoperable.
  • Very early ~n, tt..w.as..understood that the printed book had er ate.cl-a ir::ifo · · on crisis and that . =somet ing needed to be done to aintain a measure of control.
  • it is why in _a TechnoE,.oly there can be no transcendent sense of purpose or meaning, no cultural coherence.
  • In - 1480, before the informati9n explosion, there were thirty-four schools in all of England. By 1660, there were 444, one school for every twelve square miles.
  • There were several reasons for the rapid growth of the common school, but none was more obvious than that it was a necessary response to the anxiefies and confusion aroused by information on the loose. The inven-
  • The milieu in which T echnopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., inf~rmation appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds; and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose.
  • Abetted ~~orm of ed~~on that in itself has been em _lie~any co~e~ent world-view, Technopoly deprives us of the social, p·olitical, historical, mefaphys1cal, logical, or spiritual bases for knowing what is beyond belief.
  • It developed new institutions, such as the school and representative government. It developed new conceptions of knowledge and intelligence, and a height-
  • ened respect for reason and privacy. It developed new forms of economic activity, such as mechanized production and corporate capitalism, and even gave articulate expression to the possibilities of a humane socialism.
  • There is not a single line written by Jefferson, Adams, Paine, Hamilton, or Franklin that does not take for granted that when information is made available to citizens they are capable of managing it. This is not to say that the Founding Fathers believed information could not be false, misleading, or irrelevant. But they believed that the marketplace of infonpation and ideas was sufficiently ordered so that citizens could make sense of what they read and heard and, through reason, judge ·its μsefulness to their lives. Jefferson's proposals for education, Paine'~ arguments for self-governance, Franklin's arrangements for community affairs assume coherent, commonly shared principles.that allow us to debate such questions as: What are the responsibilities of citizens? What is the nature of education? What constitutes human progress? What are the limitations of social structures?
  • New forms of public discourse came into being through newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and books.
  • It is no wonder that the eighteenth century gave us our standard of excellence in the use of reason, as exemplified in the work of Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Vico, Edward Gibbon, and, of course, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Thomas Paine.
  • I weight the list with America's "Founding Fathers" because technocratic-typographic America was the first nation ever to be argued into existence irLpr111t. Paine's Common Sense and The Rights of Man, Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, and the Federalist Papers were written and printed efforts to make the American experiment appear reasonable to the people, which to the eighteenth-century mind was both necessary and sufficient. To any people whose politics were the politics of the printed page, as Tocqueville said of America, reason and printr ing were inseparable.
  • The presumed close connection among information, reason, and usefulness began to lose its_ legitimacy toward the midnineteenth century with the invention of the telegraph. Prior to the telegraph, information could be moved only as fa~. as a train could travel: al5out thirty-five miles per hour. Prior to the telegraph, information was sought as part of the process of understanding and solvin articular roblems. Prior to the telegraph, informal-ion tended to be of local interest.
  • First Amendment to the United States Constitution stands as a monument to the ideolo_g~~ print. It says: "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging freedom of speech or of the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." In these forty-five words we may find the fundamental values of the literate, reasoning_giind as fostered by the print revolution: a belief in privacy, individuality, intellectual freedom, open criticism, and ~.' adio .
  • telegraphy created the idea of context-free . 1 informatig_n::= that fs'~the idea that the value of information need ;;~t be ti~ to any function it might serve in social and political
  • decision-making and action. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a "thing" that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning. 2
  • a new definition qf information came into being. Here was information that rejected the necessit ·of interco~nectedness, proceeded without conte~rgued for instancy against historic continuity, and offere · ascination· in place of corn !exit and cohe ence.
  • The potential of the telegraph to transform information into a commodity might never have been realized except for its artnershi with the enny ress, which was the first institution to grasp the significance of the annihilation of space and the saleability of irrelevant information.
  • the fourth stage of the information revolution occurred, broadcasting. And then the fifth, computer technology. Each of these brought with it new forms of information, unpre~edented amounts of it, and increased speeds
  • photography was invented at approximately the same time a~phy, and initiated the Ehi:rd stage of the information revolution. Daniel Boorstin has called it "the graphic revolution," bec~use the photograph and other ico~ogr~phs br~ on a massive intrusion of ima es into the symbolic environment:
  • The new imagery, with photography at its forefront, did not merely function as a supplement to language but tended to replace it as our dominant: means for construing, understanding~d testing reaj.ity.
  • ~ the beginning of the seventeenth century, an entirely new information environment had been created by_12rint
  • It is an improbable world. It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon ex~sed it, has been g~ by the idea of technological progress.
  • The aim is no_t to reduZe ignorance, r . supersti ion, and s ering but to accommodate ourselves to the requirements of new technologies.
  • echnopoly is a state of cttlture., It is also a st~te of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in te0,~logy, finds · .atisf~tions in technolo , and takes its orders from technolog-¥,
  • We proceed under ( the. assumption that information is our friend, believing that cultures may suffer grievously from a lack of information, which, of course, they do. It is only now beginning to be understood that cultures may also suffer grievously from infori mation glut, information without meaning, information without · .... control mechanisms.
  • Those who feel most comfortable in Technop.oJy are those who are convinced that technical progress is humanity's supreme achievement and the instrument by which our most profound dilemmas may be solved. They also believe that information is an unmixed blessing, which through its continued and uncontrolled production and dissemination offers increased freedom, creativity, and peace of mind.
  • Th_e relationship between information and the mechanisms ( for its control is fairly simple ~ec · ·ology increases the available supply of information. As the supply is increased, \ control mechanisms are strained. Additional control mech\ anisms ~re needed to cope with new information. When addi1 tional control mechanisms are themselves technical, they in tum I further increase the supply of information. When the supply of information is no longer controllable, a general breakdown in psychic tranquillity and social purpose occurs. Without defenses, people have no way of finding meaning in their experiences, lose their capacity to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures.
  • any decline in the force of i~~~ti'?n_s makes people vulnerable to information chaos. 1 To say that life is destabilized by weakened institutions is merely to say that information loses its use and therefore becomes a source of confu;~n rather than coherence.
  • T echnop_oly, then, is to say it is what h~pens to society when the defe~ainst informati;~ glut have broken down.
  • Soci~finstitufions sometimes do their work simply by denying people access to information, but principally by directing how much weight and, therefore, value one must give to information. Social institutions are concerned with the meaning of information and can be quite rigorous in enforcing standards of admission.
  • H is what happens when a culture, overcome by information generated by technology, tries to employ technology itself as a means of providing clear direction and humane purpose. The effort is mostly doomed to failure
  • although legal theory has been taxed to the limit by new information from diverse sources-biology, psychology, and sociology, among themthe rules governing relevance have remained fairly stable. This may account for Americans' overuse of the co~~-~~ as a mean; of finding cohe_!Til.<iAncl__s.tability. As other institutions become I unusabl~ mechanisms for the control of wanton information, the courts stand as a final arbiter of truth.
  • the school as a mechanism for information control. What its standards are can usually be found in, a curriculum or, with even more clarity, in a course catalogue. A college catalogue lists courses, subjects, and fields of study that, taken together, amount to a certified statement of what a serious student ought to think about.
  • The Republican Party represented the interests of the rich, who, by definition, had no concern for us.
  • More to the point, in what is omitted from a catalogue, we may learn what a serious student ought not to think about. A college catalogue, in other words, is a formal description of an information management program; it defines and categorizes knowledge, and in so doing systematically excludes, demeans, labels as trivial-i~ a word, disregards certain kinds of information.
  • In the West, the family as an institution for the management of nonbiological information began with the ascendance of print. As books on every conceivable subject become available, parent_~ were forced int°._the roles of guard-· ians'... protectors, nurturers, and arbiters of taste and rectitude. \ Their function was to define what it means to be a child by \ excluding from the family's domain information that would 1. undermine its purpose.
  • all_ theories are oversimplifications, or at least lead to oversimplification. The rule of law is an oversimplification. A curriculum is an oversimplification. So is a family's conception of a child. T~~t is the funt!ion _o._Ltheories-_ to o~~~~ip:lp}}_fy, and thus to assist believers in_ organiziDg, weighting, _ _an~_ excluding information. Therein lies the power of theories.
  • That the family can no longer do this is, I believe, obvious to everyone.
  • Th~-ir weakness is that precisely because they oversimplify, they are vulnerable to attack by new information. When there is too much information to _$_ustaJ12 -~,:Z}I theory, infoLm_a_ti.on._Q.~S<?~es essentially mea11iD_g!~s
  • The political party is another.
  • As a young man growing up in a Democratic-household, I was provided with clear instructions on what value to assign to political events and commentary.
  • The most imposing institutions for the control of information are religio!1 ~nd the st~J:f, .. They do their work in a somewhat more abstract way than do courts, schools, families, or political parties. The_y m?n~g~__Ji;1formation throug~ creation of mytJ:is and stories that express theories about funq1m1entaf question_s_:_ __ 10:_hy are we here, where have we come from, and where are we headed?
  • They followed logically from theory, which was, as I remember it, as follows: Because people need protection, they must align themselves with a political organization. The Democratic Party was entitled to our loyalty because it represented the social and economic interests of the working class, of which our family, relatives, and neighbors were members
  • the Bible also served as an information control mechanism, especially in the moral domain. The Bible gives manifold
  • any educational institution, if it is to function well in the mana~~nt of information, must have a theory about its purpose and meaning-'. .!n'!::!Sl. have the means to give clear expression to its_ theory, and must do so, to a large extent, by excluding information.
  • instructions on what one must do and must not do, as well as guidance on what language to avoid (on pain of committing blasphemy), what ideas to avoid (on pain of committing heresy), what symbols to avoid (on pain of committing idolatry). Necessarily but perhaps._ unfortunately, the Bible also explained how the world came into being in such literal detail that it could not accommodate new information produced by the telescope and subsequent technologies.
  • in observing God's laws, and the detailed requirements of their enactment, believers receive guidance about what books they should not read, about what plays and films they should not see, about what music they should not hear, about what subjects their children should not study, and so on. For strict fundamentalists of the Bible, the theory and what follows from it seal them off from unwanted information, and in that way their actions are invested with meaning, clarity, and, they believe, moral authority.
  • Those who reject the Bible's theory and who believe, let us say, in the theory of Science are also protected from unwanted information. Their theory, for example, instructs them to disregard information about astrology, dianetics, and creationism, which they usually label as medieval superstition or subjective opinion.
  • Their theory fails to give any guidance about moral information and, by definition, gives little weight to information that falls outside the constraints of science. Undeniably, fewer and fewer people are bound in any serious way to Biblical or other religious traditions as a source of compelling attention and authority, the result of which is that they make no f!lOral decisions, onl~_pradical ones. _This is still another way of defining Technopoly. The term is aptly used for a _culture whose av.~ilable theories do not offer guidance about what is acceptable informaHon in the moral domain.
  • thought-world that functions not only without a transcendent; narrative to provide moral underpinnings but also without strong social institutions to control the flood of information produced by technology.
  • In the r case of the United States, the great eighteenth-century revolution was not indifferent to commodity capitalism but was nonetheless infused with profound moral content. The U~!ed States was not merely an experiment in a new form of governance; it wai1nefu1fillmenl-oFGocf s plan. True, Adams, Jeffe;son, and Painere1ected-fne supernatural elements in the Bible,· but they never doubted that their experiment had the imprimatur of \ Providence. People were to be free but for a eurp_9se. Their [ God~giv_e~ig[ifs im li~_? obli ations and responsibilities, not L onfytoGod but to other nations, to which the new republic would be a guide and a showcase of what is possible-w~en reason and spirituality commingle.
  • American Technopoly must rel,y, to an obsessive extent, on technica( ~ethods to control the flow of information. Three such means merit speci attention.
  • The first is bureaucracy, which James Beniger in The Control © Revolution ra°i1l~as atoremost among all technological solutions to the crisis of control."
  • It is an open question whether or not "liberal democracy" in its present form can provide a thought-world of sufficient moral substance to sustain meaningful lives.
  • Vaclav Havel, then newly elected as president of Czechoslovakia, posed in an address to the U.S. Congress. "We still don't know how to put morality ahead of politics, science, and economics," he said. "We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of our actions-if they are to be moral-is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success." What Havel is saying is that it is not enough for his nation to liberate itself from one flawed theory; it is necessary to find another, and he worries that Technopoly provides no answer.
  • Francis Fukuyama is wrong. There is another ideological conflict to be fought-between "liberal democracy" as conceived in the eighteenth century, with all its transcendent moral underpinnings, and T echnopoly, a twentieth-century
  • in at- ~ tempting to make the most rational use of information, bureaucracy ignores all information and ideas that do not contribute to efficiency
  • bureaucracy has no intellectual, I political, or moral theory--,--except for its implicit assumption that efficiency is the principal aim of all social institutions and that other goals are essentially less worthy, if not irrelevant. That is why John Stuart Mill thought bureaucracy a "tyranny" and C. S. Lewis identified it with Hell.
  • in principle a bureaucracy is simply a coordinated series of techniques for reducing the amount of information that requires processing.
  • The transformation of bureaucracy from a set of techniques·> designecfto serve social ~tutions to an auton-;;mous metainstitution that largely serves itself came as a result of several developments in the mid-andlate-nineteenth century: rapid ../ industrial growth, improvements in transportation and commu- ·✓ nication, the extension of government into ever-larger realms of V public and business affairs, the increasing centralization of gov- v ernmental structures.
  • extent that the decision will affect the efficient operations of the J bureaucracy, and takes no responsibility for its human consequences.
  • Along the way, it ceased to be merely a servant of social institutions an
  • became ~ their master. Bureaucracy now not only solves problems but creates them. More important, it defines what our problems are---and they arec!.lways, in the bureaucra!!c view, problems of l . , efficiency.
  • ex~r- (J} tis~ is a second important technical means by which Technopoly s~s furiously to control information.
  • the expert in Techno oly has two characteristics that distinguish im or her from experts of the {i) past. First, Technopoly's experts tend to be ignorant about any matter not directly related to their specialized area.
  • T echnopoly' s experts claim dominion not only_gyer technical matters but also over so@,--12~ichological. and moral · aff~irs.
  • "bureaucrat" has come to mean a person who \ by training, commitment, and even temperament is indifferent ~ ). to both the content and the fatality of a human problem. Th~ \ 'bureaucrat considers the implications of a decision only to the
  • Technical machinery is essential to both the bureaucrat and c:/ the expert, and m~ be regarded as a third mechanism of information control.
  • I have in mind "softer" technologies such as IQ tests, SATs, standardized forms, taxonomies, and opinion polls. Some of these I discuss in detail in chapter eight, "Invisible T echnologies," but I mention them here because their role in reducing the types and quantity of information admitted to a system often goes unnoticed, and therefore their role in redefining traditional concepl::s also· goes unnoticed. There is, for example, no test that can measure a person's intelligenc
  • Th_~-role of t!;_e ~xpert is to concentrate o_l}_one_ .H~ld of knowledge, sift through all that is available, eliminate that -.--:-: __ __:~---------which has no bearing on a problem, and use what is left !Q. !!§Sist in solving a probl~.
  • the expert relies on our believing in the reality of technical machinery, which means we will reify the answers generated by the machinery. We come to believe that our score is our intelligence,· or our capacity for creativity or love or pain. We come to believe that the results of opinion polls are what people believe, as if our beliefs can be encapsulated in such sentences as "I approve" and "I disapprove."
  • it is disas~ \ trou~p!ie~e_~ved by technical means and where efficiency is usually irrelevant, such as in education, law, fa~iiy life, and p·r;blems of p~;;~~al maladjustment.
  • perceptions and judgment declines, bureaucracies, expertise, and technical machinery become the principal means by which, T echnopoly hopes to control information and thereby provide itself with intelligibility and order. The rest of this book tells the · story of why this cannot work, and of the pain and stupidity that are the consequences.
  • Institutions ca~~aked~cisions on the basis of scores and. sfatistics, and. there certainly may be occasions where there is no reasonable alternative. But unless such decisions are made with profound skepticism-that is, acknowledged as being made for administrative convenience-they are delusionary.
  • In Technopoly, the \. delusion is sanctified by our granting inordinate prestige to experts who are armed with sophisticated technical machinery. Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. I would go further: in Technopoly, all exeeds are invested with the charisma of priestliness
  • The god they serve does not speak \ of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such concepts as sin and evil disappear in Technopoly. They come from a moral universe that is irrelevant to the theology of expertise. And so the priests of Technopoly call sin "social deviance," which is a statistical concept, and they call evil "psychopathology," which is a medical concept. Sin and evil disappear because they cannot be measured and objectified, and therefore cannot be dealt with by experts.
  • As the power of traditional social institutions to organize
Javier E

You're Not Going to Change Your Mind - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...going-to-change-your-mind.html

confirmation bias desirability bias psychology research bias

shared by Javier E on 29 May 17 - No Cached
  • A troubling feature of political disagreement in the United States today is that many issues on which liberals and conservatives hold divergent views are questions not of value but of fact. Is human activity responsible for global warming? Do guns make society safer? Is immigration harmful to the economy? Though undoubtedly complicated, these questions turn on empirical evidence.
  • Unfortunately, people do not always revise their beliefs in light of new information. On the contrary, they often stubbornly maintain their views. Certain disagreements stay entrenched and polarized.
  • A common explanation is confirmation bias
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  • the psychological tendency to favor information that confirms our beliefs
  • If this explanation is right, then there is a relatively straightforward solution to political polarization: We need to consciously expose ourselves to evidence that challenges our beliefs to compensate for our inclination to discount it.
  • But what if confirmation bias isn’t the only culprit? It recently struck us that confirmation bias is often conflated with “telling people what they want to hear,” which is actually a distinct phenomenon known as desirability bias, or the tendency to credit information you want to believe.
  • we decided to conduct an experiment that would isolate these biases
  • The results, which we report in a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, were clear and robust. Those people who received desirable evidence — polls suggesting that their preferred candidate was going to win — took note and incorporated the information into their subsequent belief
  • . In contrast, those people who received undesirable evidence barely changed their belief about which candidate was most likely to win.
  • we observed a general bias toward the desirable evidence.
  • What about confirmation bias? To our surprise, those people who received confirming evidence — polls supporting their prior belief about which candidate was most likely to win — showed no bias in favor of this information.
  • They tended to incorporate this evidence into their subsequent belief to the same extent as those people who had their prior belief disconfirmed. In other words, we observed little to no bias toward the confirming evidence.
  • Our study suggests that political belief polarization may emerge because of peoples’ conflicting desires, not their conflicting beliefs per se
  • This is rather troubling, as it implies that even if we were to escape from our political echo chambers, it wouldn’t help much. Short of changing what people want to believe, we must find other ways to unify our perceptions of reality.
Javier E

Technopoly-Chs. 9,10--Scientism, the great symbol drain - 0 views

scientism science social science narrative objectivity advertising morality authority coherence Postman book notes

shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • By Scientism, I mean three interrelated ideas that, taken together, stand as one of the pillars of Technopoly.
  • The first and indispensable idea is, as noted, that the methods of the natural sciences can be applied to the study of human behavior. This idea is the backbone of much of psychology and sociology as practiced at least in America, and largely accounts for the fact that social science, to quote F. A. Hayek, "has cont~ibuted scarcely anything to our understanding of social phenomena." 2
  • The second idea is, as also noted, that social science generates specific principles which can be used to organize society on a rational and humane basis. This implies that technical meansmostly "invisible technologies" supervised by experts-can be designed to control human behavior and set it on the proper course.
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  • The third idea is that faith in science can serve as a comprehensive belief system that gives meaning to life, as well. as a sense of well-being, morality, and even immortality.
  • the spirit behind this scientific ideal inspired several men to believe that the reliable and predictable knowledge that could be obtained about stars and atoms could also be obtained about human behavior.
  • Among the best known of these early "social scientists" were Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, Prosper Enfantin, and, of course, Auguste Comte.
  • They held in common two beliefs to which T echnopoly is deeply indebted: that the natural sciences provide a method to unlock the secrets of both the human heart and the direction of social life; that society can be rationally and humanely reorganized according to principles that social science will uncover. It is with these men that the idea of "social engineering" begins and the seeds of Scientism are planted.
  • Information produced by counting may sometimes be valuable in helping a person get an idea, or, even more so, in providing support for an idea. But the mere activity of counting does not make science.
  • Nor does observing th_ings, though it is sometimes said that if one is empirical, one is scientific. To be empirical means to look at things before drawing conclusions. Everyone, therefore, is an empiricist, with the possible exception of paranoid schizophrenics.
  • What we may call science, then, is the quest to find the immutable and universal laws that govern processes, presuming that there are cause-and-effect relations among these processes. It follows that the quest to understand human behavior and feeling can in no sense except the most trivial be called science.
  • Scientists do strive to be empirical and where possible precise, but it is also basic to their enterprise that they maintain a high degree of objectivity, which means that they study things independently of what people think or do about them.
  • I do not say, incidentally, that the Oedipus complex and God do not exist. Nor do I say that to believe in them is harmful-far from it. I say only that, there being no tests that could, in principle, show them to be false, they fall outside the purview Scientism 151 of science, as do almost all theories that make up the content of "social science."
  • in the nineteenth centu~, novelists provided us with most of the powerful metaphors and images of our culture.
  • This fact relieves the scientist of inquiring into their values and motivations and for this reason alone separates science from what is called social science, consigning the methodology of the latter (to quote Gunnar Myrdal) to the status of the "metaphysical and pseudo-objective." 3
  • The status of social-science methods is further reduced by the fact that there are almost no experiments that will reveal a social-science theory to be false.
  • et us further suppose that Milgram had found that 100 percent of his 1 subjecl:s did what they were told, with or without Hannah Arendt. And now let us suppose that I tell you a story of a Scientism 153 group of people who in some real situation refused to comply with the orders of a legitimate authority-let us say, the Danes who in the face of Nazi occupation helped nine thousand Jews escape to Sweden. Would you say to me that this cannot be so because Milgram' s study proves otherwise? Or would you say that this overturns Milgram's work? Perhaps you would say that the Danish response is not relevant, since the Danes did not regard the Nazi occupation as constituting legitimate autho!ity. But then, how would we explain the cooperative response to Nazi authority of the French, the Poles, and the Lithuanians? I think you would say none of these things, because Milgram' s experiment qoes not confirm or falsify any theory that might be said to postulate a law of human nature. His study-which, incidentally, I find both fascinating and terrifying-is not science. It is something else entirely.
  • Freud, could not imagine how the book could be judged exemplary: it was science or it was nothing. Well, of course, Freud was wrong. His work is exemplary-indeed, monumental-but scarcely anyone believes today that Freud was doing science, any more than educated people believe that Marx was doing science, or Max Weber or Lewis Mumford or Bruno Bettelheim or Carl Jung or Margaret Mead or Arnold Toynbee. What these people were doing-and Stanley Milgram was doing-is documenting the behavior and feelings of people as they confront problems posed by their culture.
  • the stories of social r~searchers are much closer in structure and purpose to what is called imaginative literature; that is to say, both a social researcher and a novelist give unique interpretations to a set of human events and support their interpretations with examples in various forms. Their interpretations cannot be proved or disproved but will draw their appeal from the power of their language, the depth of their explanations, the relevance of their examples, and the credibility of their themes.
  • And all of this has, in both cases, an identifiable moral purpose.
  • The words "true" and "false" do not apply here in the sense that they are used in mathematics or science. For there is nothing universally and irrevocably true or false about these interpretations. There are no critical tests to confirm or falsify them. There are no natural laws from which they are derived. They are bound by time, by situation, and above all by the cultural prejudices of the researcher or writer.
  • Both the novelist and the social researcher construct their stories by the use of archetypes and metaphors.
  • Cervantes, for example, gave us the enduring archetype of the incurable dreamer and idealist in Don Quixote. The social historian Marx gave us the archetype of the ruthless and conspiring, though nameless, capitalist. Flaubert gave us the repressed b~urgeois romantic in Emma Bovary. And Margaret Mead gave us the carefree, guiltless Samoan adolescent. Kafka gave us the alienated urbanite driven to self-loathing. And Max Weber gave us hardworking men driven by a mythology he called the Protestant Ethic. Dostoevsky gave us the egomaniac redeemed by love and religious fervor. And B. F. Skinner gave us the automaton redeemed by a benign technology.
  • Why do such social researchers tell their stories? Essentially for didactic and moralistic purposes. These men and women tell their stories for the same reason the Buddha, Confucius, Hillel, and Jesus told their stories (and for the same reason D. H. Lawrence told his).
  • Moreover, in their quest for objectivity, scientists proceed on the assumption that the objects they study are indifferent to the fact that they are being studied.
  • If, indeed, the price of civilization is repressed sexuality, it was not Sigmund Freud who discovered it. If the consciousness of people is formed by their material circumstances, it was not Marx who discovered it. If the medium is the message, it was not McLuhan who discovered it. They have merely retold ancient stories in a modem style.
  • Unlike science, social research never discovers anything. It only rediscovers what people once were told and need to be told again.
  • Only in knowing ~omething of the reasons why they advocated education can we make sense of the means they suggest. But to understand their reas.ons we must also understand the narratives that governed their view of the world. By narrative, I mean a story of human history that gives meaning to the past, explains the present, and provides guidance for the future.
  • In Technopoly, it is not Scientism 159 enough to say, it is immoral and degrading to allow people to be homeless. You cannot get anywhere by asking a judge, a politician, or a bureaucrat to r~ad Les Miserables or Nana or, indeed, the New Testament. Y 01.i must show that statistics have produced data revealing the homeless to be unhappy and to be a drain on the economy. Neither Dostoevsky nor Freud, Dickens nor Weber, Twain nor Marx, is now a dispenser of legitimate knowledge. They are interesting; they are ''.worth reading"; they are artifacts of our past. But as for "truth," we must tum to "science."
  • In Technopoly, it is not enough for social research to rediscover ancient truths or to comment on and criticize the moral behavior of people. In T echnopoly, it is an insult to call someone a "moralizer." Nor is it sufficient for social research to put forward metaphors, images, and ideas that can help people live with some measure of understanding and dignity.
  • Such a program lacks the aura of certain knowledge that only science can provide. It becomes necessary, then, to transform psychology, sociology, and anthropology into "sciences," in which humanity itself becomes an object, much like plants, planets, or ice cubes.
  • That is why the commonplaces that people fear death and that children who come from stable families valuing scholarship will do well in school must be announced as "discoveries" of scientific enterprise. In this way, social resear~hers can see themselves, and can be seen, as scientists, researchers without bias or values, unburdened by mere opinion. In this way, social policies can be claimed to rest on objectively determined facts.
  • given the psychological, social, and material benefits that attach to the label "scientist," it is not hard to see why social researchers should find it hard to give it up.
  • Our social "s'cientists" have from the beginning been less tender of conscience, or less rigorous in their views of science, or perhaps just more confused about the questions their procedures can answer and those they cannot. In any case, they have not been squeamish about imputing to their "discoveries" and the rigor of their procedures the power to direct us in how we ought rightly to behave.
  • It is less easy to see why the rest of us have so willingly, even eagerly, cooperated in perpetuating the same illusion.
  • When the new technologies and techniques and spirit of men like Galileo, Newton, and Bacon laid the foundations of natural science, they also discredited the authority of earlier accounts of the physical world, as found, for example, in the great tale of Genesis. By calling into question the truth of such accounts in one realm, science undermined the whole edifice of belief in sacred stories and ultimately swept away with it the source to which most humans had looked for moral authority. It is not too much to say, I think, that the desacralized world has been searching for an alternative source of moral authority ever since.
  • We welcome them gladly, and the claim explicitly made or implied, because we need so desperately to find some source outside the frail and shaky judgments of mortals like ourselves to authorize our moral decisions and behavior. And outside of the authority of brute force, which can scarcely be called moral, we seem to have little left but the authority of procedures.
  • It is not merely the misapplication of techniques such as quantification to questions where numbers have nothing to say; not merely the confusion of the material and social realms of human experience; not merely the claim of social researchers to be applying the aims and procedures of natural scien\:e to the human world.
  • This, then, is what I mean by Scientism.
  • It is the desperate hope, and wish, and ultimately the illusory belief that some standardized set of procedures called "science" can provide us with an unimpeachable source of moral authority, a suprahuman basis for answers to questions like "What is life, and when, and why?" "Why is death, and suffering?" 'What is right and wrong to do?" "What are good and evil ends?" "How ought we to think and feel and behave?
  • Science can tell us when a heart begins to beat, or movement begins, or what are the statistics on the survival of neonates of different gestational ages outside the womb. But science has no more authority than you do or I do to establish such criteria as the "true" definition of "life" or of human state or of personhood.
  • Social research can tell us how some people behave in the presence of what they believe to be legitimate authority. But it cannot tell us when authority is "legitimate" and when not, or how we must decide, or when it may be right or wrong to obey.
  • To ask of science, or expect of science, or accept unchallenged from science the answers to such questions is Scientism. And it is Technopoly's grand illusion.
  • In the institutional form it has taken in the United States, advertising is a symptom of a world-view 'that sees tradition as an obstacle to its claims. There can, of course, be no functioning sense of tradition without a measure of respect for symbols. Tradition is, in fact, nothing but the acknowledgment of the authority of symbols and the relevance of the narratives that gave birth to them. With the erosion of symbols there follows a loss of narrative, which is one of the most debilitating consequences of Technopoly' s power.
  • What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research, which meahs orienting business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable. The business of business becomes pseudo-therapy; the consumer, a patient reassl.,lred by psychodramas.
  • At the moment, 1t 1s considered necessary to introduce computers to the classroom, as it once was thought necessary to bring closed-circuit television and film to the classroom. To the question "Why should we do this?" the answer is: "To make learning more efficient and more interesting." Such an answer is considered entirely adequate, since in T ~chnopoly efficiency and interest need no justification. It is, therefore, usually not noticed that this answer does not address the question "What is learning for?"
  • What this means is that somewhere near the core of Technopoly is a vast industry with license to use all available symbols to further the interests of commerce, by devouring the psyches of consumers.
  • In the twentieth century, such metaphors and images have come largely from the pens of social historians and researchers. ·Think of John Dewey, William James, Erik Erikson, Alfred Kinsey, Thorstein Veblen, Margaret Mead, Lewis Mumford, B. F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, Marshall McLuhan, Barbara Tuchman, Noam Chomsky, Robert Coles, even Stanley Milgram, and you must acknowledge that our ideas of what we are like and what kind of country we live in come from their stories to a far greater extent than from the stories of our most renowned novelists.
  • social idea that must be advanced through education.
  • Confucius advocated teaching "the Way" because in tradition he saw the best hope for social order. As our first systematic fascist, Plato wished education to produce philosopher kings. Cicero argued that education must free the student from the tyranny of the present. Jefferson thought the purpose of education is to teach the young how to protect their liberties. Rousseau wished education to free the young from the unnatural constraints of a wicked and arbitrary social order. And among John Dewey's aims was to help the student function without certainty in a world of constant change and puzzling· ambiguities.
  • The point is that cultures must have narratives and will find them where they will, even if they lead to catastrophe. The alternative is to live without meaning, the ultimate negation of life itself.
  • It is also to the point to say that each narrative is given its form and its emotional texture through a cluster of symbols that call for respect and allegiance, even devotion.
  • by definition, there can be no education philosophy that does not address what learning is for. Confucius, Plato, Quintilian, Cicero, Comenius, Erasmus, Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, Russell, Montessori, Whitehead, and Dewey--each believed that there was some transcendent political, spiritual, or
  • The importance of the American Constitution is largely in its function as a symbol of the story of our origins. It is our political equivalent of Genesis. To mock it, to• ignore it, to circwnvent it is to declare the irrelevance of the story of the United States as a moral light unto the world. In like fashion, the Statue of Liberty is the key symbol of the story of America as the natural home of the teeming masses, from anywhere, yearning to be free.
  • There are those who believe--as did the great historian Arnold Toynbee-that without a comprehensive religious narrative at its center a culture must decline. Perhaps. There are, after all, other sources-mythology, politics, philosophy, and science; for example--but it is certain that no culture can flourish without narratives of transcendent orjgin and power.
  • This does not mean that the mere existence of such a narrative ensures a culture's stability and strength. There are destructive narratives. A narrative provides meaning, not necessarily survival-as, for example, the story provided by Adolf Hitler to the German nation in t:he 1930s.
  • What story does American education wish to tell now? In a growing Technopoly, what do we believe education is for?
  • The answers are discouraging, and one of. them can be inferred from any television commercial urging the young to stay in school. The commercial will either imply or state explicitly that education will help the persevering student to get a ·good job. And that's it. Well, not quite. There is also the idea that we educate ourselves to compete with the Japanese or the Germans in an economic struggle to be number one.
  • Young men, for example, will learn how to make lay-up shots when they play basketball. To be able to make them is part of the The Great Symbol Drain 177 definition of what good players are. But they do not play basketball for that purpose. There is usually a broader, deeper, and more meaningful reason for wanting to play-to assert their manhood, to please their fathers, to be acceptable to their peers, even for the sheer aesthetic pleasure of the game itself. What you have to do to be a success must be addressed only after you have found a reason to be successful.
  • Bloom's solution is that we go back to the basics of Western thought.
  • He wants us to teach our students what Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Saint Augustine, and other luminaries have had to say on the great ethical and epistemological questions. He believes that by acquainting themselves with great books our students will acquire a moral and intellectual foundation that will give meaning and texture to their lives.
  • Hirsch's encyclopedic list is not a solution but a description of the problem of information glut. It is therefore essentially incoherent. But it also confuses a consequence of education with a purpose. Hirsch attempted to answer the question "What is an educated person?" He left unanswered the question "What is an education for?"
  • Those who reject Bloom's idea have offered several arguments against it. The first is that such a purpose for education is elitist: the mass of students would not find the great story of
  • Western civilization inspiring, are too deeply alienated from the past to find it so, and would therefore have difficulty connecting the "best that has been thought and said" to their own struggles to find q1eaning in their lives.
  • A second argument, coming from what is called a "leftist" perspective, is even more discouraging. In a sense, it offers a definition of what is meant by elitism. It asserts that the "story of Western civilization" is a partial, biased, and even oppressive one. It is not the story of blacks, American Indians, Hispanics, women, homosexuals-of any people who are not white heterosexual males of Judea-Christian heritage. This claim denies that there is or can be a national culture, a narrative of organizing power and inspiring symbols which all citizens can identify with and draw sustenance from. If this is true, it means nothing less than that our national symbols have been drained of their power to unite, and that education must become a tribal affair; that is, each subculture must find its own story and symbols, and use them as the moral basis of education.
  • nto this void comes the Technopoly story, with its emphasis on progress without limits, rights without responsibilities, and technology without cost. The T echnopoly story is without a moral center. It puts in its place efficiency, interest, and economic advance. It promises heaven on earth through the conveniences of technological progress. It casts aside all traditional narratives and symbols that· suggest stability and orderliness, and tells, instead, of a life of skills, technical expertise, and the ecstasy of consumption. Its purpose is to produce functionaries for an ongoing Technopoly.
  • It answers Bloom by saying that the story of Western civilization is irrelevant; it answers the political left by saying there is indeed a common culture whose name is T echnopoly and whose key symbol is now the computer, toward which there must be neither irreverence nor blasphemy. It even answers Hirsch by saying that there are items on his list that, if thought about too deeply and taken too seriously, will interfere with the progress of technology.
blythewallick

Be Humble, and Proudly, Psychologists Say - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...y-humility-pride-behavior.html

science psychology research brain science

shared by blythewallick on 23 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Humility is not the boldest of personality traits, but it’s an important one, studies find. And it’s hard to fake.
  • In a paper published in the latest issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a team of researchers reviewed studies of a once-widespread personal trait, one “characterized by an ability to accurately acknowledge one’s limitations and abilities, and an interpersonal stance that is other-oriented rather than self-focused.” Humility.
  • The word “humble” travels so often now as a verb that embodying its gentler spirit, the adjective, can be an invitation to online trolling, professional invisibility or worse. Oscar Wilde wrote that, before he found humility, he spent two years behind bars experiencing “anguish that wept aloud” and “misery that could find no voice” — which sounds more like defeat than victory.
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  • Humility is a relative newcomer to social and personality psychology, at least as a trait or behavior to be studied on its own. It arrived as part of the effort, beginning in the 1990s, to build a “positive” psychology: a more complete understanding of sustaining qualities such as pride, forgiveness, grit and contentment.
  • In another, ongoing study, Dr. Krumrei Mancuso had 587 American adults complete questionnaires intended to measure levels of intellectual humility. The participants rated how much they agreed with various statements, including “I feel small when others disagree with me on topics that are close to my heart,” and “For the most part, others have more to learn from me than I have to learn from them.” Those who scored highly on humility — not that they’d boast about it — also scored lower on measures of political and ideological polarization, whether conservative or liberal.
  • “These kinds of findings may account for the fact that people high in intellectual humility are not easily manipulated with regard to their views,” Dr. Krumrei Mancuso said. The findings, she added, may also “help us understand how humility can be associated with holding convictions.”
  • Now that humility is attracting some research attention, Dr. Van Tongeren said, there are a number of open questions, including whether it can somehow be taught, or perhaps integrated into psychotherapy. “One of the thorny issues is that the people who are the most open and willing cultivate humility might be the ones who need it the least,” he said. “And vice versa: Those most in need could be the most resistant.”
  • Between 10 and 15 percent of adults score highly on measures of humility, depending on the rating scale used. That’s at least 25 million humble people in this country alone.
Javier E

Thieves of experience: On the rise of surveillance capitalism - 1 views

www.roughtype.com/?p=8608

tech brain science knowledge memory distraction smartphone learning creativity reasoning problem-solving silicon valley elite surveillance capitalism psychology

shared by Javier E on 06 May 20 - No Cached
  • Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff argues in her new book that the Valley’s wealth and power are predicated on an insidious, essentially pathological form of private enterprise—what she calls “surveillance capitalism.” Pioneered by Google, perfected by Facebook, and now spreading throughout the economy, surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately-owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting.
  • By reengineering the economy and society to their own benefit, Google and Facebook are perverting capitalism in a way that undermines personal freedom and corrodes democracy.
  • Under the Fordist model of mass production and consumption that prevailed for much of the twentieth century, industrial capitalism achieved a relatively benign balance among the contending interests of business owners, workers, and consumers. Enlightened executives understood that good pay and decent working conditions would ensure a prosperous middle class eager to buy the goods and services their companies produced. It was the product itself — made by workers, sold by companies, bought by consumers — that tied the interests of capitalism’s participants together. Economic and social equilibrium was negotiated through the product.
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  • By removing the tangible product from the center of commerce, surveillance capitalism upsets the equilibrium. Whenever we use free apps and online services, it’s often said, we become the products, our attention harvested and sold to advertisers
  • this truism gets it wrong. Surveillance capitalism’s real products, vaporous but immensely valuable, are predictions about our future behavior — what we’ll look at, where we’ll go, what we’ll buy, what opinions we’ll hold — that internet companies derive from our personal data and sell to businesses, political operatives, and other bidders.
  • Unlike financial derivatives, which they in some ways resemble, these new data derivatives draw their value, parasite-like, from human experience.To the Googles and Facebooks of the world, we are neither the customer nor the product. We are the source of what Silicon Valley technologists call “data exhaust” — the informational byproducts of online activity that become the inputs to prediction algorithms
  • Another 2015 study, appearing in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, showed that when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline.
  • The smartphone has become a repository of the self, recording and dispensing the words, sounds and images that define what we think, what we experience and who we are. In a 2015 Gallup survey, more than half of iPhone owners said that they couldn’t imagine life without the device.
  • So what happens to our minds when we allow a single tool such dominion over our perception and cognition?
  • Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens.
  • he has seen mounting evidence that using a smartphone, or even hearing one ring or vibrate, produces a welter of distractions that makes it harder to concentrate on a difficult problem or job. The division of attention impedes reasoning and performance.
  • internet companies operate in what Zuboff terms “extreme structural independence from people.” When databases displace goods as the engine of the economy, our own interests, as consumers but also as citizens, cease to be part of the negotiation. We are no longer one of the forces guiding the market’s invisible hand. We are the objects of surveillance and control.
  • Social skills and relationships seem to suffer as well.
  • In both tests, the subjects whose phones were in view posted the worst scores, while those who left their phones in a different room did the best. The students who kept their phones in their pockets or bags came out in the middle. As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased.
  • In subsequent interviews, nearly all the participants said that their phones hadn’t been a distraction—that they hadn’t even thought about the devices during the experiment. They remained oblivious even as the phones disrupted their focus and thinking.
  • The researchers recruited 520 undergraduates at UCSD and gave them two standard tests of intellectual acuity. One test gauged “available working-memory capacity,” a measure of how fully a person’s mind can focus on a particular task. The second assessed “fluid intelligence,” a person’s ability to interpret and solve an unfamiliar problem. The only variable in the experiment was the location of the subjects’ smartphones. Some of the students were asked to place their phones in front of them on their desks; others were told to stow their phones in their pockets or handbags; still others were required to leave their phones in a different room.
  • the “integration of smartphones into daily life” appears to cause a “brain drain” that can diminish such vital mental skills as “learning, logical reasoning, abstract thought, problem solving, and creativity.”
  •  Smartphones have become so entangled with our existence that, even when we’re not peering or pawing at them, they tug at our attention, diverting precious cognitive resources. Just suppressing the desire to check our phone, which we do routinely and subconsciously throughout the day, can debilitate our thinking.
  • They found that students who didn’t bring their phones to the classroom scored a full letter-grade higher on a test of the material presented than those who brought their phones. It didn’t matter whether the students who had their phones used them or not: All of them scored equally poorly.
  • A study of nearly a hundred secondary schools in the U.K., published last year in the journal Labour Economics, found that when schools ban smartphones, students’ examination scores go up substantially, with the weakest students benefiting the most.
  • Data, the novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick once wrote, is “memory without history.” Her observation points to the problem with allowing smartphones to commandeer our brains
  • Because smartphones serve as constant reminders of all the friends we could be chatting with electronically, they pull at our minds when we’re talking with people in person, leaving our conversations shallower and less satisfying.
  • In a 2013 study conducted at the University of Essex in England, 142 participants were divided into pairs and asked to converse in private for ten minutes. Half talked with a phone in the room, half without a phone present. The subjects were then given tests of affinity, trust and empathy. “The mere presence of mobile phones,” the researchers reported in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, “inhibited the development of interpersonal closeness and trust” and diminished “the extent to which individuals felt empathy and understanding from their partners.”
  • The evidence that our phones can get inside our heads so forcefully is unsettling. It suggests that our thoughts and feelings, far from being sequestered in our skulls, can be skewed by external forces we’re not even aware o
  •  Scientists have long known that the brain is a monitoring system as well as a thinking system. Its attention is drawn toward any object that is new, intriguing or otherwise striking — that has, in the psychological jargon, “salience.”
  • even in the history of captivating media, the smartphone stands out. It is an attention magnet unlike any our minds have had to grapple with before. Because the phone is packed with so many forms of information and so many useful and entertaining functions, it acts as what Dr. Ward calls a “supernormal stimulus,” one that can “hijack” attention whenever it is part of our surroundings — and it is always part of our surroundings.
  • Imagine combining a mailbox, a newspaper, a TV, a radio, a photo album, a public library and a boisterous party attended by everyone you know, and then compressing them all into a single, small, radiant object. That is what a smartphone represents to us. No wonder we can’t take our minds off it.
  • The irony of the smartphone is that the qualities that make it so appealing to us — its constant connection to the net, its multiplicity of apps, its responsiveness, its portability — are the very ones that give it such sway over our minds.
  • Phone makers like Apple and Samsung and app writers like Facebook, Google and Snap design their products to consume as much of our attention as possible during every one of our waking hours
  • Social media apps were designed to exploit “a vulnerability in human psychology,” former Facebook president Sean Parker said in a recent interview. “[We] understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”
  • A quarter-century ago, when we first started going online, we took it on faith that the web would make us smarter: More information would breed sharper thinking. We now know it’s not that simple.
  • As strange as it might seem, people’s knowledge and understanding may actually dwindle as gadgets grant them easier access to online data stores
  • In a seminal 2011 study published in Science, a team of researchers — led by the Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow and including the late Harvard memory expert Daniel Wegner — had a group of volunteers read forty brief, factual statements (such as “The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over Texas in Feb. 2003”) and then type the statements into a computer. Half the people were told that the machine would save what they typed; half were told that the statements would be erased.
  • Afterward, the researchers asked the subjects to write down as many of the statements as they could remember. Those who believed that the facts had been recorded in the computer demonstrated much weaker recall than those who assumed the facts wouldn’t be stored. Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it
  • The researchers dubbed this phenomenon the “Google effect” and noted its broad implications: “Because search engines are continually available to us, we may often be in a state of not feeling we need to encode the information internally. When we need it, we will look it up.”
  • as the pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James said in an 1892 lecture, “the art of remembering is the art of thinking.”
  • Only by encoding information in our biological memory can we weave the rich intellectual associations that form the essence of personal knowledge and give rise to critical and conceptual thinking. No matter how much information swirls around us, the less well-stocked our memory, the less we have to think with.
  • As Dr. Wegner and Dr. Ward explained in a 2013 Scientific American article, when people call up information through their devices, they often end up suffering from delusions of intelligence. They feel as though “their own mental capacities” had generated the information, not their devices. “The advent of the ‘information age’ seems to have created a generation of people who feel they know more than ever before,” the scholars concluded, even though “they may know ever less about the world around them.”
  • That insight sheds light on society’s current gullibility crisis, in which people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you’ll believe anything it tells you.
  • A second experiment conducted by the researchers produced similar results, while also revealing that the more heavily students relied on their phones in their everyday lives, the greater the cognitive penalty they suffered.
  • When we constrict our capacity for reasoning and recall or transfer those skills to a gadget, we sacrifice our ability to turn information into knowledge. We get the data but lose the meaning
  • We need to give our minds more room to think. And that means putting some distance between ourselves and our phones.
  • Google’s once-patient investors grew restive, demanding that the founders figure out a way to make money, preferably lots of it.
  • nder pressure, Page and Brin authorized the launch of an auction system for selling advertisements tied to search queries. The system was designed so that the company would get paid by an advertiser only when a user clicked on an ad. This feature gave Google a huge financial incentive to make accurate predictions about how users would respond to ads and other online content. Even tiny increases in click rates would bring big gains in income. And so the company began deploying its stores of behavioral data not for the benefit of users but to aid advertisers — and to juice its own profits. Surveillance capitalism had arrived.
  • Google’s business now hinged on what Zuboff calls “the extraction imperative.” To improve its predictions, it had to mine as much information as possible from web users. It aggressively expanded its online services to widen the scope of its surveillance.
  • Through Gmail, it secured access to the contents of people’s emails and address books. Through Google Maps, it gained a bead on people’s whereabouts and movements. Through Google Calendar, it learned what people were doing at different moments during the day and whom they were doing it with. Through Google News, it got a readout of people’s interests and political leanings. Through Google Shopping, it opened a window onto people’s wish lists,
  • The company gave all these services away for free to ensure they’d be used by as many people as possible. It knew the money lay in the data.
  • the organization grew insular and secretive. Seeking to keep the true nature of its work from the public, it adopted what its CEO at the time, Eric Schmidt, called a “hiding strategy” — a kind of corporate omerta backed up by stringent nondisclosure agreements.
  • Page and Brin further shielded themselves from outside oversight by establishing a stock structure that guaranteed their power could never be challenged, neither by investors nor by directors.
  • What’s most remarkable about the birth of surveillance capitalism is the speed and audacity with which Google overturned social conventions and norms about data and privacy. Without permission, without compensation, and with little in the way of resistance, the company seized and declared ownership over everyone’s information
  • The companies that followed Google presumed that they too had an unfettered right to collect, parse, and sell personal data in pretty much any way they pleased. In the smart homes being built today, it’s understood that any and all data will be beamed up to corporate clouds.
  • Google conducted its great data heist under the cover of novelty. The web was an exciting frontier — something new in the world — and few people understood or cared about what they were revealing as they searched and surfed. In those innocent days, data was there for the taking, and Google took it
  • Google also benefited from decisions made by lawmakers, regulators, and judges — decisions that granted internet companies free use of a vast taxpayer-funded communication infrastructure, relieved them of legal and ethical responsibility for the information and messages they distributed, and gave them carte blanche to collect and exploit user data.
  • Consider the terms-of-service agreements that govern the division of rights and the delegation of ownership online. Non-negotiable, subject to emendation and extension at the company’s whim, and requiring only a casual click to bind the user, TOS agreements are parodies of contracts, yet they have been granted legal legitimacy by the court
  • Law professors, writes Zuboff, “call these ‘contracts of adhesion’ because they impose take-it-or-leave-it conditions on users that stick to them whether they like it or not.” Fundamentally undemocratic, the ubiquitous agreements helped Google and other firms commandeer personal data as if by fiat.
  • n the choices we make as consumers and private citizens, we have always traded some of our autonomy to gain other rewards. Many people, it seems clear, experience surveillance capitalism less as a prison, where their agency is restricted in a noxious way, than as an all-inclusive resort, where their agency is restricted in a pleasing way
  • Zuboff makes a convincing case that this is a short-sighted and dangerous view — that the bargain we’ve struck with the internet giants is a Faustian one
  • but her case would have been stronger still had she more fully addressed the benefits side of the ledger.
  • there’s a piece missing. While Zuboff’s assessment of the costs that people incur under surveillance capitalism is exhaustive, she largely ignores the benefits people receive in return — convenience, customization, savings, entertainment, social connection, and so on
  • hat the industries of the future will seek to manufacture is the self.
  • Behavior modification is the thread that ties today’s search engines, social networks, and smartphone trackers to tomorrow’s facial-recognition systems, emotion-detection sensors, and artificial-intelligence bots.
  • All of Facebook’s information wrangling and algorithmic fine-tuning, she writes, “is aimed at solving one problem: how and when to intervene in the state of play that is your daily life in order to modify your behavior and thus sharply increase the predictability of your actions now, soon, and later.”
  • “The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale,” a top Silicon Valley data scientist told her in an interview. “We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable certain behaviors are for us.”
  • This goal, she suggests, is not limited to Facebook. It is coming to guide much of the economy, as financial and social power shifts to the surveillance capitalists
  • Combining rich information on individuals’ behavioral triggers with the ability to deliver precisely tailored and timed messages turns out to be a recipe for behavior modification on an unprecedented scale.
  • it was Facebook, with its incredibly detailed data on people’s social lives, that grasped digital media’s full potential for behavior modification. By using what it called its “social graph” to map the intentions, desires, and interactions of literally billions of individuals, it saw that it could turn its network into a worldwide Skinner box, employing psychological triggers and rewards to program not only what people see but how they react.
  • spying on the populace is not the end game. The real prize lies in figuring out ways to use the data to shape how people think and act. “The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” the computer scientist Alan Kay once observed. And the best way to predict behavior is to script it.
  • competition for personal data intensified. It was no longer enough to monitor people online; making better predictions required that surveillance be extended into homes, stores, schools, workplaces, and the public squares of cities and towns. Much of the recent innovation in the tech industry has entailed the creation of products and services designed to vacuum up data from every corner of our lives
  • “The typical complaint is that privacy is eroded, but that is misleading,” Zuboff writes. “In the larger societal pattern, privacy is not eroded but redistributed . . . . Instead of people having the rights to decide how and what they will disclose, these rights are concentrated within the domain of surveillance capitalism.” The transfer of decision rights is also a transfer of autonomy and agency, from the citizen to the corporation.
  • What we lose under this regime is something more fundamental than privacy. It’s the right to make our own decisions about privacy — to draw our own lines between those aspects of our lives we are comfortable sharing and those we are not
  • Other possible ways of organizing online markets, such as through paid subscriptions for apps and services, never even got a chance to be tested.
  • Online surveillance came to be viewed as normal and even necessary by politicians, government bureaucrats, and the general public
  • Google and other Silicon Valley companies benefited directly from the government’s new stress on digital surveillance. They earned millions through contracts to share their data collection and analysis techniques with the National Security Agenc
  • As much as the dot-com crash, the horrors of 9/11 set the stage for the rise of surveillance capitalism. Zuboff notes that, in 2000, members of the Federal Trade Commission, frustrated by internet companies’ lack of progress in adopting privacy protections, began formulating legislation to secure people’s control over their online information and severely restrict the companies’ ability to collect and store it. It seemed obvious to the regulators that ownership of personal data should by default lie in the hands of private citizens, not corporations.
  • The 9/11 attacks changed the calculus. The centralized collection and analysis of online data, on a vast scale, came to be seen as essential to national security. “The privacy provisions debated just months earlier vanished from the conversation more or less overnight,”
Javier E

Revisiting the prophetic work of Neil Postman about the media » MercatorNet - 1 views

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postman media analysis social media psychology brain science technology education

shared by Javier E on 13 May 21 - No Cached
  • The NYU professor was surely prophetic. “Our own tribe is undergoing a vast and trembling shift from the magic of writing to the magic of electronics,” he cautioned.
  • “We face the rapid dissolution of the assumptions of an education organised around the slow-moving printed word, and the equally rapid emergence of a new education based on the speed-of-light electronic message.”
  • What Postman perceived in television has been dramatically intensified by smartphones and social media
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  • Postman also recognised that technology was changing our mental processes and social habits.
  • Today corporations like Google and Amazon collect data on Internet users based on their browsing history, the things they purchase, and the apps they use
  • Yet all citizens are undergoing this same transformation. Our digital devices undermine social interactions by isolating us,
  • “Years from now, it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organisations, but have solved very little of importance to most people, and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.”
  • “Television has by its power to control the time, attention, and cognitive habits of our youth gained the power to control their education.”
  • As a student of Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, Postman believed that the medium of information was critical to understanding its social and political effects. Every technology has its own agenda. Postman worried that the very nature of television undermined American democratic institutions.
  • Many Americans tuned in to the presidential debate looking for something substantial and meaty
  • It was simply another manifestation of the incoherence and vitriol of cable news
  • “When, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility,” warned Postman.
  • Technology Is Never Neutral
  • As for new problems, we have increased addictions (technological and pornographic); increased loneliness, anxiety, and distraction; and inhibited social and intellectual maturation.
  • The average length of a shot on network television is only 3.5 seconds, so that the eye never rests, always has something new to see. Moreover, television offers viewers a variety of subject matter, requires minimal skills to comprehend it, and is largely aimed at emotional gratification.
  • This is far truer of the Internet and social media, where more than a third of Americans, and almost half of young people, now get their news.
  • with smartphones now ubiquitous, the Internet has replaced television as the “background radiation of the social and intellectual universe.”
  • Is There Any Solution?
  • Reading news or commentary in print, in contrast, requires concentration, patience, and careful reflection, virtues that our digital age vitiates.
  • Politics as Entertainment
  • “How television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged,” observed Postman. In the case of politics, television fashions public discourse into yet another form of entertainment
  • In America, the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is the television commercial. The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. … They tell everything about the fears, fancies, and dreams of those who might buy them.
  • The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and towards making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.
  • Such is the case with the way politics is “advertised” to different subsets of the American electorate. The “consumer,” depending on his political leanings, may be manipulated by fears of either an impending white-nationalist, fascist dictatorship, or a radical, woke socialist takeover.
  • This paradigm is aggravated by the hypersiloing of media content, which explains why Americans who read left-leaning media view the Proud Boys as a legitimate, existential threat to national civil order, while those who read right-leaning media believe the real immediate enemies of our nation are Antifa
  • Regardless of whether either of these groups represents a real public menace, the loss of any national consensus over what constitutes objective news means that Americans effectively talk past one another: they use the Proud Boys or Antifa as rhetorical barbs to smear their ideological opponents as extremists.
  • Yet these technologies are far from neutral. They are, rather, “equipped with a program for social change.
  • Postman’s analysis of technology is prophetic and profound. He warned of the trivialising of our media, defined by “broken time and broken attention,” in which “facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation.” He warned of “a neighborhood of strangers and pointless quantity.”
  • does Postman offer any solutions to this seemingly uncontrollable technological juggernaut?
  • Postman’s suggestions regarding education are certainly relevant. He unequivocally condemned education that mimics entertainment, and urged a return to learning that is hierarchical, meaning that it first gives students a foundation of essential knowledge before teaching “critical thinking.”
  • Postman also argued that education must avoid a lowest-common-denominator approach in favor of complexity and the perplexing: the latter method elicits in the student a desire to make sense of what perplexes him.
  • Finally, Postman promoted education of vigorous exposition, logic, and rhetoric, all being necessary for citizenship
  • Another course of action is to understand what these media, by their very nature, do to us and to public discourse.
  • We must, as Postman exhorts us, “demystify the data” and dominate our technology, lest it dominate us. We must identify and resist how television, social media, and smartphones manipulate our emotions, infantilise us, and weaken our ability to rebuild what 2020 has ravaged.
Javier E

Is sanity returning to the trans debate? | The Spectator - 0 views

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trans gay UK trends language bias psychology science

shared by Javier E on 09 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • Mermaids, the UK charity for, in their own words, ‘gender variant and transgender children’ is under the spotlight. Following investigations by the Telegraph and Mail newspapers, as well as demands from critics concerned about child safeguarding, the Charity Commission has launched a regulatory compliance case and have said that they have written to the organisation’s trustees
  • The investigations found that Mermaids has been offering breast binders to girls reportedly as young as 13, and despite children saying their parents opposed the practice. Binding can often cause breathing difficulties, back pain and broken ribs. It was also uncovered that kids have been ‘congratulated’ online for identifying as transgender by staff and volunteers on the charity’s online help centre, with teenagers being advised that puberty blockers are safe and ‘totally reversible’.
  • Mermaids has been given half a million pounds in total from the National Lottery, and lauded by the likes of Emma Watson, Jameela Jamil and even Harry and Meghan. In other words, the charity has had powerful supporters and been like Teflon for a very long time. Starbucks did a fundraiser for them, more than 40 schools invited them in to educate teachers and kids about ‘gender identity’, and a number of corporates sponsor the charity.
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  • There is no such thing as a trans child. Mermaids passionately advocates for the availability of puberty blockers for kids, despite the growing bank of evidence that they can cause a multitude of harms. The vast majority of those prescribed blockers go to take cross-sex hormones further down the line.
  • In the dim and distant past, lobotomies were performed on those with mental illness and psychosis, and today distressed children are being fed the line that they are trapped in the wrong body and that drugs and surgery is the solution. When and how did it become acceptable to pump kids full of harmful hormones and remove healthy body parts as opposed to offering them therapy?
  • I was in court during the cross examination of Mermaids and its supporter, and heard loud and clear its dismissal of the fact that sex is immutable. As far as Mermaids and its lackeys are concerned, all that is necessary to identify and live as the opposite sex is an inner ‘feeling’ of gender identity. The witnesses declared that trans men are men, and trans women, women. They were seemingly unconcerned when presented with the fact that there has been a 4000-plus per cent increase in girls presenting at clinics such as the Tavistock GIDS, claiming to be trans boys.
  • A recent interim report on the Tavistock GIDs recommended that it be closed down in due course, and that much of the ‘treatment’ at the clinic was focused solely on affirming a child’s trans identity and not scrutinising related issues such as mental health issues, autistic disorders, and abuse within the family home.
  • I first contacted Mermaids in 2003, when investigating the notion of ‘trans children’ and was given the cold shoulder. Many other individuals and organisations that have grave concerns about its practices have spoken out, and as a result have been labelled bigots and transphobes. That we are now about to be validated is little comfort, bearing in mind the number of lives ruined by irreversible medical intervention on children who, if supported therapeutically, would likely have grown up to be lesbian or gay.
  • As a result of its spiteful attempt to discredit LGB Alliance, it seems the practice and ideology of Mermaids is now being exposed. In my view it is an organisation led by dangerous ideology that promotes medical intervention to kids that simply need to be supported in who they are and in the bodies they were born with. I believe it deserves to be shut down.
Javier E

Why it's as hard to escape an echo chamber as it is to flee a cult | Aeon Essays - 0 views

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echo-chamber epistemic bubble trust goodwill Descartes network information truth rationality cult filter reliability corroborated bias psychology

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  • there are two very different phenomena at play here, each of which subvert the flow of information in very distinct ways. Let’s call them echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Both are social structures that systematically exclude sources of information. Both exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs.
  • they work in entirely different ways, and they require very different modes of intervention
  • An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side.
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  • start with epistemic bubbles
  • That omission might be purposeful
  • But that omission can also be entirely inadvertent. Even if we’re not actively trying to avoid disagreement, our Facebook friends tend to share our views and interests
  • An ‘echo chamber’ is a social structure from which other relevant voices have been actively discredited. Where an epistemic bubble merely omits contrary views, an echo chamber brings its members to actively distrust outsiders.
  • an echo chamber is something like a cult. A cult isolates its members by actively alienating them from any outside sources. Those outside are actively labelled as malignant and untrustworthy.
  • In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined.
  • The way to break an echo chamber is not to wave “the facts” in the faces of its members. It is to attack the echo chamber at its root and repair that broken trust.
  • Looking to others for corroboration is a basic method for checking whether one has reasoned well or badly
  • They have been in the limelight lately, most famously in Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble (2011) and Cass Sunstein’s #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (2017).
  • The general gist: we get much of our news from Facebook feeds and similar sorts of social media. Our Facebook feed consists mostly of our friends and colleagues, the majority of whom share our own political and cultural views
  • various algorithms behind the scenes, such as those inside Google search, invisibly personalise our searches, making it more likely that we’ll see only what we want to see. These processes all impose filters on information.
  • Such filters aren’t necessarily bad. The world is overstuffed with information, and one can’t sort through it all by oneself: filters need to be outsourced.
  • That’s why we all depend on extended social networks to deliver us knowledge
  • any such informational network needs the right sort of broadness and variety to work
  • Each individual person in my network might be superbly reliable about her particular informational patch but, as an aggregate structure, my network lacks what Sanford Goldberg in his book Relying on Others (2010) calls ‘coverage-reliability’. It doesn’t deliver to me a sufficiently broad and representative coverage of all the relevant information.
  • Epistemic bubbles also threaten us with a second danger: excessive self-confidence.
  • An ‘epistemic bubble’ is an informational network from which relevant voices have been excluded by omission
  • Suppose that I believe that the Paleo diet is the greatest diet of all time. I assemble a Facebook group called ‘Great Health Facts!’ and fill it only with people who already believe that Paleo is the best diet. The fact that everybody in that group agrees with me about Paleo shouldn’t increase my confidence level one bit. They’re not mere copies – they actually might have reached their conclusions independently – but their agreement can be entirely explained by my method of selection.
  • Luckily, though, epistemic bubbles are easily shattered. We can pop an epistemic bubble simply by exposing its members to the information and arguments that they’ve missed.
  • echo chambers are a far more pernicious and robust phenomenon.
  • amieson and Cappella’s book is the first empirical study into how echo chambers function
  • echo chambers work by systematically alienating their members from all outside epistemic sources.
  • Their research centres on Rush Limbaugh, a wildly successful conservative firebrand in the United States, along with Fox News and related media
  • His constant attacks on the ‘mainstream media’ are attempts to discredit all other sources of knowledge. He systematically undermines the integrity of anybody who expresses any kind of contrary view.
  • outsiders are not simply mistaken – they are malicious, manipulative and actively working to destroy Limbaugh and his followers. The resulting worldview is one of deeply opposed force, an all-or-nothing war between good and evil
  • The result is a rather striking parallel to the techniques of emotional isolation typically practised in cult indoctrination
  • cult indoctrination involves new cult members being brought to distrust all non-cult members. This provides a social buffer against any attempts to extract the indoctrinated person from the cult.
  • The echo chamber doesn’t need any bad connectivity to function. Limbaugh’s followers have full access to outside sources of information
  • As Elijah Millgram argues in The Great Endarkenment (2015), modern knowledge depends on trusting long chains of experts. And no single person is in the position to check up on the reliability of every member of that chain
  • Their worldview can survive exposure to those outside voices because their belief system has prepared them for such intellectual onslaught.
  • exposure to contrary views could actually reinforce their views. Limbaugh might offer his followers a conspiracy theory: anybody who criticises him is doing it at the behest of a secret cabal of evil elites, which has already seized control of the mainstream media.
  • Perversely, exposure to outsiders with contrary views can thus increase echo-chamber members’ confidence in their insider sources, and hence their attachment to their worldview.
  • ‘evidential pre-emption’. What’s happening is a kind of intellectual judo, in which the power and enthusiasm of contrary voices are turned against those contrary voices through a carefully rigged internal structure of belief.
  • One might be tempted to think that the solution is just more intellectual autonomy. Echo chambers arise because we trust others too much, so the solution is to start thinking for ourselves.
  • that kind of radical intellectual autonomy is a pipe dream. If the philosophical study of knowledge has taught us anything in the past half-century, it is that we are irredeemably dependent on each other in almost every domain of knowledge
  • Limbaugh’s followers regularly read – but do not accept – mainstream and liberal news sources. They are isolated, not by selective exposure, but by changes in who they accept as authorities, experts and trusted sources.
  • we depend on a vastly complicated social structure of trust. We must trust each other, but, as the philosopher Annette Baier says, that trust makes us vulnerable. Echo chambers operate as a kind of social parasite on that vulnerability, taking advantage of our epistemic condition and social dependency.
  • I am quite confident that there are plenty of echo chambers on the political Left. More importantly, nothing about echo chambers restricts them to the arena of politics
  • The world of anti-vaccination is clearly an echo chamber, and it is one that crosses political lines. I’ve also encountered echo chambers on topics as broad as diet (Paleo!), exercise technique (CrossFit!), breastfeeding, some academic intellectual traditions, and many, many more
  • Here’s a basic check: does a community’s belief system actively undermine the trustworthiness of any outsiders who don’t subscribe to its central dogmas? Then it’s probably an echo chamber.
  • much of the recent analysis has lumped epistemic bubbles together with echo chambers into a single, unified phenomenon. But it is absolutely crucial to distinguish between the two.
  • Epistemic bubbles are rather ramshackle; they go up easily, and they collapse easily
  • Echo chambers are far more pernicious and far more robust. They can start to seem almost like living things. Their belief systems provide structural integrity, resilience and active responses to outside attacks
  • the two phenomena can also exist independently. And of the events we’re most worried about, it’s the echo-chamber effects that are really causing most of the trouble.
  • new data does, in fact, seem to show that people on Facebook actually do see posts from the other side, or that people often visit websites with opposite political affiliation.
  • their basis for evaluation – their background beliefs about whom to trust – are radically different. They are not irrational, but systematically misinformed about where to place their trust.
  • Many people have claimed that we have entered an era of ‘post-truth’.
  • Not only do some political figures seem to speak with a blatant disregard for the facts, but their supporters seem utterly unswayed by evidence. It seems, to some, that truth no longer matters.
  • This is an explanation in terms of total irrationality. To accept it, you must believe that a great number of people have lost all interest in evidence or investigation, and have fallen away from the ways of reason.
  • echo chambers offers a less damning and far more modest explanation. The apparent ‘post-truth’ attitude can be explained as the result of the manipulations of trust wrought by echo chambers.
  • We don’t have to attribute a complete disinterest in facts, evidence or reason to explain the post-truth attitude. We simply have to attribute to certain communities a vastly divergent set of trusted authorities.
  • An echo chamber doesn’t destroy their members’ interest in the truth; it merely manipulates whom they trust and changes whom they accept as trustworthy sources and institutions.
  • in many ways, echo-chamber members are following reasonable and rational procedures of enquiry. They’re engaging in critical reasoning. They’re questioning, they’re evaluating sources for themselves, they’re assessing different pathways to information. They are critically examining those who claim expertise and trustworthiness, using what they already know about the world
  • none of this weighs against the existence of echo chambers. We should not dismiss the threat of echo chambers based only on evidence about connectivity and exposure.
  • Notice how different what’s going on here is from, say, Orwellian doublespeak, a deliberately ambiguous, euphemism-filled language designed to hide the intent of the speaker.
  • echo chambers don’t trade in vague, ambiguous pseudo-speech. We should expect that echo chambers would deliver crisp, clear, unambiguous claims about who is trustworthy and who is not
  • clearly articulated conspiracy theories, and crisply worded accusations of an outside world rife with untrustworthiness and corruption.
  • Once an echo chamber starts to grip a person, its mechanisms will reinforce themselves.
  • In an epistemically healthy life, the variety of our informational sources will put an upper limit to how much we’re willing to trust any single person. Everybody’s fallible; a healthy informational network tends to discover people’s mistakes and point them out. This puts an upper ceiling on how much you can trust even your most beloved leader
  • nside an echo chamber, that upper ceiling disappears.
  • Being caught in an echo chamber is not always the result of laziness or bad faith. Imagine, for instance, that somebody has been raised and educated entirely inside an echo chamber
  • when the child finally comes into contact with the larger world – say, as a teenager – the echo chamber’s worldview is firmly in place. That teenager will distrust all sources outside her echo chamber, and she will have gotten there by following normal procedures for trust and learning.
  • It certainly seems like our teenager is behaving reasonably. She could be going about her intellectual life in perfectly good faith. She might be intellectually voracious, seeking out new sources, investigating them, and evaluating them using what she already knows.
  • The worry is that she’s intellectually trapped. Her earnest attempts at intellectual investigation are led astray by her upbringing and the social structure in which she is embedded.
  • Echo chambers might function like addiction, under certain accounts. It might be irrational to become addicted, but all it takes is a momentary lapse – once you’re addicted, your internal landscape is sufficiently rearranged such that it’s rational to continue with your addiction
  • Similarly, all it takes to enter an echo chamber is a momentary lapse of intellectual vigilance. Once you’re in, the echo chamber’s belief systems function as a trap, making future acts of intellectual vigilance only reinforce the echo chamber’s worldview.
  • There is at least one possible escape route, however. Notice that the logic of the echo chamber depends on the order in which we encounter the evidence. An echo chamber can bring our teenager to discredit outside beliefs precisely because she encountered the echo chamber’s claims first. Imagine a counterpart to our teenager who was raised outside of the echo chamber and exposed to a wide range of beliefs. Our free-range counterpart would, when she encounters that same echo chamber, likely see its many flaws
  • Those caught in an echo chamber are giving far too much weight to the evidence they encounter first, just because it’s first. Rationally, they should reconsider their beliefs without that arbitrary preference. But how does one enforce such informational a-historicity?
  • The escape route is a modified version of René Descartes’s infamous method.
  • Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). He had come to realise that many of the beliefs he had acquired in his early life were false. But early beliefs lead to all sorts of other beliefs, and any early falsehoods he’d accepted had surely infected the rest of his belief system.
  • The only solution, thought Descartes, was to throw all his beliefs away and start over again from scratch.
  • He could start over, trusting nothing and no one except those things that he could be entirely certain of, and stamping out those sneaky falsehoods once and for all. Let’s call this the Cartesian epistemic reboot.
  • Notice how close Descartes’s problem is to our hapless teenager’s, and how useful the solution might be. Our teenager, like Descartes, has problematic beliefs acquired in early childhood. These beliefs have infected outwards, infesting that teenager’s whole belief system. Our teenager, too, needs to throw everything away, and start over again.
  • Let’s call the modernised version of Descartes’s methodology the social-epistemic reboot.
  • when she starts from scratch, we won’t demand that she trust only what she’s absolutely certain of, nor will we demand that she go it alone
  • For the social reboot, she can proceed, after throwing everything away, in an utterly mundane way – trusting her senses, trusting others. But she must begin afresh socially – she must reconsider all possible sources of information with a presumptively equanimous eye. She must take the posture of a cognitive newborn, open and equally trusting to all outside sources
  • we’re not asking people to change their basic methods for learning about the world. They are permitted to trust, and trust freely. But after the social reboot, that trust will not be narrowly confined and deeply conditioned by the particular people they happened to be raised by.
  • Such a profound deep-cleanse of one’s whole belief system seems to be what’s actually required to escape. Look at the many stories of people leaving cults and echo chambers
  • Take, for example, the story of Derek Black in Florida – raised by a neo-Nazi father, and groomed from childhood to be a neo-Nazi leader. Black left the movement by, basically, performing a social reboot. He completely abandoned everything he’d believed in, and spent years building a new belief system from scratch. He immersed himself broadly and open-mindedly in everything he’d missed – pop culture, Arabic literature, the mainstream media, rap – all with an overall attitude of generosity and trust.
  • It was the project of years and a major act of self-reconstruction, but those extraordinary lengths might just be what’s actually required to undo the effects of an echo-chambered upbringing.
  • we need to attack the root, the systems of discredit themselves, and restore trust in some outside voices.
  • Stories of actual escapes from echo chambers often turn on particular encounters – moments when the echo-chambered individual starts to trust somebody on the outside.
  • Black’s is case in point. By high school, he was already something of a star on neo-Nazi media, with his own radio talk-show. He went on to college, openly neo-Nazi, and was shunned by almost every other student in his community college. But then Matthew Stevenson, a Jewish fellow undergraduate, started inviting Black to Stevenson’s Shabbat dinners. In Black’s telling, Stevenson was unfailingly kind, open and generous, and slowly earned Black’s trust. This was the seed, says Black, that led to a massive intellectual upheaval – a slow-dawning realisation of the depths to which he had been misled
  • Similarly, accounts of people leaving echo-chambered homophobia rarely involve them encountering some institutionally reported fact. Rather, they tend to revolve around personal encounters – a child, a family member, a close friend coming out.
  • hese encounters matter because a personal connection comes with a substantial store of trust.
  • We don’t simply trust people as educated experts in a field – we rely on their goodwill. And this is why trust, rather than mere reliability, is the key concept
  • goodwill is a general feature of a person’s character. If I demonstrate goodwill in action, then you have some reason to think that I also have goodwill in matters of thought and knowledge.
  • f one can demonstrate goodwill to an echo-chambered member – as Stevenson did with Black – then perhaps one can start to pierce that echo chamber.
  • the path I’m describing is a winding, narrow and fragile one. There is no guarantee that such trust can be established, and no clear path to its being established systematically.
  • what we’ve found here isn’t an escape route at all. It depends on the intervention of another. This path is not even one an echo-chamber member can trigger on her own; it is only a whisper-thin hope for rescue from the outside.
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