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sissij

Science in the Age of Alternative Facts | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...n-the-age-of-alternative-facts

science brain science research

shared by sissij on 15 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • discovered a peculiar aspect of human psychology and physiology: the placebo effect. As biographer Richard Holmes writes regarding their increased health, “It was simply because the patients believed they would be cured.”
  • Most importantly he did not finagle results to fit his preconceived notion of what this and other gases accomplish.
  • For science to work we need to move out of the way of ourselves and observe the data. Right now too many emotionally stunted and corporate-backed obstacles stand in the way of that.
  • sissij on 15 Feb 17
     
    Alternative facts are spooky things that confuse us between what we think is happening and what's really taking place. In this article, the author uses the example of Davy to suggest that treating the data objectively is what science should be doing. Data is tricky in science because we can draw different conclusions from the same set of data. Just like the line drawing game we played in TOK, there are infinite numbers of lines we can draw to connect all the data point, but there is only one that would be true. As the author shown in this article, the best way to avoid creating alternative facts is to leave out our emotion and personal opinion and let the data speak. Although intuition and imagination is good for science, but for most of the times, we need to remind ourselves not to force the data.
sissij

There Is No Such Thing as Alternative Medicine | Big Think - 1 views

bigthink.com/...-thing-as-alternative-medicine

alternative medicine science bias

shared by sissij on 28 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Unfortunately for Hahnemann his philosophy—the less of an active ingredient remains the more powerful a remedy is (once you reach 13c on the homeopathic scale there is no longer any active ingredient left)—is nonsense.
  • This does not stop the irrational stream of unproven (or disproven) therapies arising from the holistic and wellness sphere.
  • Distrust in one doctor should not imply blind faith in another.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Yet a growing suspicion of corporate and political interests in the sixties inspired a new wave of holism that’s gaining strength a half-century later. We’re right to be wary of corporate agendas and political mismanagement when it comes to healthcare.
  • The reality is the most basic advice—move often and diversely; eat a balanced, whole foods diet—is boring in an age of immediate gratification.
  • The alternative is suffering, something many companies and hucksters willfully champion at a time when we can all use less of it.
  • sissij on 28 Feb 17
     
    People have been searching for more powerful and more efficient medicines. All sorts of weird ideas pop up as people try out different possibilities. Although people believe in science today, they are still willing to try out different things. Alternative medicine is where people like to spend their money on. When it comes to health, people are likely to be superstitious. Many people don't go to the doctors until the last minute. They tends to rely more on their own senses and perception when it comes to their life. I think it's because going to doctor is like trusting another person with your life, which is very hard for people. Seeking for alternative medicine give people a feeling that they can avoid the doctors. Like the medicine of eternity back in time, the alternative medicine today uses the same flaws in our reasoning. --Sissi (2/28/2017)
oliviaodon

Identifying and Avoiding Bias in Research - 0 views

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...PMC2917255

shared by oliviaodon on 09 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Bias can occur in the planning, data collection, analysis, and publication phases of research. Understanding research bias allows readers to critically and independently review the scientific literature and avoid treatments which are suboptimal or potentially harmful. A thorough understanding of bias and how it affects study results is essential for the practice of evidence-based medicine.
  • Bias is not a dichotomous variable. Interpretation of bias cannot be limited to a simple inquisition: is bias present or not? Instead, reviewers of the literature must consider the degree to which bias was prevented by proper study design and implementation. As some degree of bias is nearly always present in a published study, readers must also consider how bias might influence a study's conclusions
  • Chance and confounding can be quantified and/or eliminated through proper study design and data analysis. However, only the most rigorously conducted trials can completely exclude bias as an alternate explanation for an association.
Javier E

Why It's OK to Let Apps Make You a Better Person - Evan Selinger - Technology - The Atl... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...254246

self person morality will agent willpower technology enhanced psychology

shared by Javier E on 19 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • one theme emerges from the media coverage of people's relationships with our current set of technologies: Consumers want digital willpower. App designers in touch with the latest trends in behavioral modification--nudging, the quantified self, and gamification--and good old-fashioned financial incentive manipulation, are tackling weakness of will. They're harnessing the power of payouts, cognitive biases, social networking, and biofeedback. The quantified self becomes the programmable self.
  • the trend still has multiple interesting dimensions
  • Individuals are turning ever more aspects of their lives into managerial problems that require technological solutions. We have access to an ever-increasing array of free and inexpensive technologies that harness incredible computational power that effectively allows us to self-police behavior everywhere we go. As pervasiveness expands, so does trust.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Some embrace networked, data-driven lives and are comfortable volunteering embarrassing, real time information about what we're doing, whom we're doing it with, and how we feel about our monitored activities.
  • Put it all together and we can see that our conception of what it means to be human has become "design space." We're now Humanity 2.0, primed for optimization through commercial upgrades. And today's apps are more harbinger than endpoint.
  • philosophers have had much to say about the enticing and seemingly inevitable dispersion of technological mental prosthetic that promise to substitute or enhance some of our motivational powers.
  • beyond the practical issues lie a constellation of central ethical concerns.
  • It simply means that when it comes to digital willpower, we should be on our guard to avoid confusing situational with integrated behaviors.
  • it is antithetical to the ideal of " resolute choice." Some may find the norm overly perfectionist, Spartan, or puritanical. However, it is not uncommon for folks to defend the idea that mature adults should strive to develop internal willpower strong enough to avoid external temptations, whatever they are, and wherever they are encountered.
  • In part, resolute choosing is prized out of concern for consistency, as some worry that lapse of willpower in any context indicates a generally weak character.
  • Fragmented selves behave one way while under the influence of digital willpower, but another when making decisions without such assistance. In these instances, inconsistent preferences are exhibited and we risk underestimating the extent of our technological dependency.
  • they should cause us to pause as we think about a possible future that significantly increases the scale and effectiveness of willpower-enhancing apps. Let's call this hypothetical future Digital Willpower World and characterize the ethical traps we're about to discuss as potential general pitfalls
  • the problem of inauthenticity, a staple of the neuroethics debates, might arise. People might start asking themselves: Has the problem of fragmentation gone away only because devices are choreographing our behavior so powerfully that we are no longer in touch with our so-called real selves -- the selves who used to exist before Digital Willpower World was formed?
  • Infantalized subjects are morally lazy, quick to have others take responsibility for their welfare. They do not view the capacity to assume personal responsibility for selecting means and ends as a fundamental life goal that validates the effort required to remain committed to the ongoing project of maintaining willpower and self-control.
  • Michael Sandel's Atlantic essay, "The Case Against Perfection." He notes that technological enhancement can diminish people's sense of achievement when their accomplishments become attributable to human-technology systems and not an individual's use of human agency.
  • Borgmann worries that this environment, which habituates us to be on auto-pilot and delegate deliberation, threatens to harm the powers of reason, the most central component of willpower (according to the rationalist tradition).
  • In several books, including Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, he expresses concern about technologies that seem to enhance willpower but only do so through distraction. Borgmann's paradigmatic example of the non-distracted, focally centered person is a serious runner. This person finds the practice of running maximally fulfilling, replete with the rewarding "flow" that can only comes when mind/body and means/ends are unified, while skill gets pushed to the limit.
  • Perhaps the very conception of a resolute self was flawed. What if, as psychologist Roy Baumeister suggests, willpower is more "staple of folk psychology" than real way of thinking about our brain processes?
  • novel approaches suggest the will is a flexible mesh of different capacities and cognitive mechanisms that can expand and contract, depending on the agent's particular setting and needs. Contrary to the traditional view that identifies the unified and cognitively transparent self as the source of willed actions, the new picture embraces a rather diffused, extended, and opaque self who is often guided by irrational trains of thought. What actually keeps the self and its will together are the given boundaries offered by biology, a coherent self narrative created by shared memories and experiences, and society. If this view of the will as an expa
  • nding and contracting system with porous and dynamic boundaries is correct, then it might seem that the new motivating technologies and devices can only increase our reach and further empower our willing selves.
  • "It's a mistake to think of the will as some interior faculty that belongs to an individual--the thing that pushes the motor control processes that cause my action," Gallagher says. "Rather, the will is both embodied and embedded: social and physical environment enhance or impoverish our ability to decide and carry out our intentions; often our intentions themselves are shaped by social and physical aspects of the environment."
  • It makes perfect sense to think of the will as something that can be supported or assisted by technology. Technologies, like environments and institutions can facilitate action or block it. Imagine I have the inclination to go to a concert. If I can get my ticket by pressing some buttons on my iPhone, I find myself going to the concert. If I have to fill out an application form and carry it to a location several miles away and wait in line to pick up my ticket, then forget it.
  • Perhaps the best way forward is to put a digital spin on the Socratic dictum of knowing myself and submit to the new freedom: the freedom of consuming digital willpower to guide me past the sirens.
Javier E

The Conservative War on Liberal Media Has a Long History - Nicole Hemmer - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...283149

media bias objectivity balance conservatism Fox News

shared by Javier E on 19 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Ailes made conservative news popular and profitable, but he was not the first to mingle partisanship with news. The twinned concepts of balance and bias were not his legacy but his inheritance. Long before Fox News, before Ailes and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, there was a conservative media complex in the United States refining a theory of liberal media bias.
  • The idea of “fair and balanced” partisan media has its roots in the 1940s and 1950s. Human Events, the right-wing newsweekly founded in 1944, was dedicated to publishing the “facts” other outlets overlooked.
  • By the early 1960s, Human Events arrived at this formulation of its mission: In reporting the news, Human Events is objective; it aims for accurate representation of the facts. But it is not impartial. It looks at events through eyes that are biased in favor of limited constitutional government, local self-government, private enterprise, and individual freedom.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • In distinguishing between objectivity and impartiality, Human Events’ editors created a space where “bias” was an appropriate journalistic value, one that could work in tandem with objectivity.
  • two events in the early 1960s convinced the right that creating conservative media wasn’t enough to achieve balance. Conservatives would also have to discredit existing media.
  • Conservative discontent with the FCC focused on the Fairness Doctrine
  • Conservatives felt the Fairness Doctrine unfairly tilted the playing field against them. Though devised to encourage controversial broadcasting, in practice the doctrine often led broadcasters to avoid controversy so they wouldn’t have to give away free airtime. To conservatives, avoiding controversy inevitably meant silencing right-wing voices.
  • the right repeatedly challenged the central assumptions the FCC—and Americans more broadly—made about journalism. For much of the 20th century, journalists cleaved to the idea of objectivity. Opinion and analysis had their place, but that place was distinct and separate from the news. Conservative broadcasts, on the other hand, were by their very nature opinion. Fairness dictated these partisan broadcasters provide airtime for a response.
  • Conservatives saw the media landscape differently. They viewed objectivity as a mask concealing entrenched liberal bias, hiding the slanted reporting that dominated American media. Because of this, the right believed fairness did not require a response to conservative broadcasts; conservative broadcasts were the response. Unable to bring the FCC around to their position, conservatives increasingly saw the commission as a powerful government agency dedicated to maintaining media’s liberal tilt.
  • In calling coverage of Goldwater “unfounded in fact,” Manion was making another argument to which conservatives anchored their charges of liberal bias: Established media did not just slant the news—they fabricated it. And if established media couldn’t be counted on for truth, the argument went, then surely they should be required to offer both sides of the argument. In the years that followed, conservatives began an active campaign against liberal bias
  • The combined forces of the administration and its conservative media-research wing had an effect. By 1971 CBS Radio had launched Spectrum, a debate show featuring conservatives like Stan Evans, James Kilpatrick, and Phyllis Schlafly. That same year 60 Minutes pitted conservative Kilpatrick against liberal Nicholas von Hoffman in a regular segment called “Point/Counterpoint.” By then, even the publisher of Human Events, in the midst of selling his paper as an alternative to liberal media, had to admit that conservatives were popping up all over established media—even the editorial pages of “that holy house organ of Liberalism—the New York Times.”
  • So balance and bias became part of the American news diet long before Ailes entered the conservative media game. Why does that matter? It makes Ailes’s successes at Fox News far more understandable—and far less Ailes-centric. By the time Ailes entered the game, the American right had spent a generation seeking out conservative alternatives to the “liberal media,” and America’s news media was already in the midst of a revolution that made Fox News possible.
Javier E

The Fortnightly Review › Death to the Reading Class. - 0 views

fortnightlyreview.co.uk/...death-to-the-reading-class

reading books evolution history knowledge policy

shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • most people don’t want to read and, therefore, don’t read. The evidence on this score is clear: the average American reads for about fifteen minutes a day and almost never reads a book for pleasure.
  • we have tried to solve the reading “problem” by removing the most obvious impediments to reading: we taught everyone to read; we printed millions upon millions of books; and we made those books practically free in libraries. And so the barriers fell: now nearly everyone in the developed world is literate, there is plenty to read, and reading material is dirt cheap. But still people don’t read. Why? The obvious answer—though one that is difficult for us to admit—is that most people don’t like to read.
  • Humans achieved their modern form about 180,000 years ago; for 175,000 of those years they never wrote or read anything. About 40,000 years ago, humans began to make symbols,
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Most people successfully avoided reading until about 300 years ago. It was about then that Western European priests and princes decided that everyone should be taught to read. These literacy-loving types tried various schemes to make common folks literate; the most effective of these, however, was naked coercion. By the nineteenth century, churches and states all over Europe and North America were forcing parents to send their kids to school to learn to read
  • So it happened that by the early twentieth century most people in Western Europe and North America could read. They had no choice in the matter. They still don’t.
  • Why don’t most people like to read? The answer is surprisingly simple: humans weren’t evolved to read. Note that we have no reading organs: our eyes and brains were made for watching, not for decoding tiny symbols on mulch sheets. To prepare our eyes and brains for reading, we must rewire them. This process takes years of hard work to accomplish, and some people never accomplish it all. Moreover, even after you’ve learned to read, you probably won’t find reading to be very much fun. It consumes all of your attention, requires active thought, and makes your eyes hurt. For most people, then, reading is naturally hard and, therefore, something to be avoided if at all possible.
  • we have misidentified the “problem” facing us: it is not the much-bemoaned reading gap, but rather a seldom-mentioned knowledge gap. Though it is immodest to say, we readers genuinely know more than those who do not read. Thus we are usually able to make better-informed decisions than non-readers can.
  • If we lived in an aristocracy of readers, this maldistribution of knowledge might be acceptable. But we don’t; rather, we live in a democracy (if we are lucky). In a democracy, the people – readers and non-readers alike – decide. Thus we would like all citizens to be knowledgeable so that they can make well-informed decisions about our common affairs. This has been a central goal of the Reading Class since the literacy-loving Enlightenment.
  • If we in the Reading Class want to teach the the reading-averse public more effectively than we have in the past, we must rid ourselves of our reading fetish and admit that we’ve been falling down on the job. Once we take this painful step, then a number of interesting options for closing the knowledge gap become available. The most promising of these options is using audio and video to share what we know with the public at large.
  • We have to laboriously learn to read, but we are born with the ability to watch and listen. We don’t find reading terribly pleasant, but we do find watching and listening generally enjoyable.
  • The results of this “natural experiment” are in: people would much rather watch/listen than read. This is why Americans sit in front of the television for three hours a day, while they read for only a tiny fraction of that time.
  • Our task, then, is to give them something serious to watch and listen to, something that conveys the richness and complexity of our written work in pictures and sounds. The good news is that we can easily do this.
  • Today any lecturer can produce and distribute high quality audio and video programs. Most scholars have the equipment on their desks (that is, a PC). The software is dead simple and inexpensive. And the shows themselves can be distributed the world over on the Internet for almost nothing.
  • I’ve done it. Here are two examples. The first is New Books in History, an author-interview podcast featuring historians with new books. Aside from the computer, the total hardware and software start-up costs were roughly $300. It took me no time to learn the software thanks to some handy on-line tutorials available on Lynda.com. Today New Books in History has a large international audience.
  • The “new books” podcasts are not about serious books; they are about the ideas trapped in those serious, and seriously un-read, books. Books imprison ideas; the “new books” podcasts set them free.)
julia rhodes

Opinion: Is Google redefining 'don't be evil'? - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

opinion google drones science research technology evil human science

shared by julia rhodes on 21 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Well, some of Google's recent forays are waking people up to the fact that evil is in the eyes of the beholder. The company just acquired military robot maker Boston Dynamics, leading to great consternation in the Twitterverse. As @BrentButt put it this week in a tweet that caught fire:
  • What we have to ask, and keep asking at every turn, is: To what end? What real purpose are we serving?
  • Not doing evil is actually a pretty low bar to begin with. Is this really a high aspiration? To avoid embodying Satan in silicon?
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • We can't employ an entirely programmatic approach to human affairs. However well we think we might be embedding our technologies with the values we hope to express, more often than not we also get unexpected consequences.
  • Still, we can't help but do a bit of evil when we build technology upon technology, without taking a pause to ask what it's all for. New technologies give us the opportunity to reevaluate the systems we have been using up until now, and consider doing things differently.
  • our best Stanford computer science graduates end up writing algorithms that better extract money from the stock market, rather than exploring whether capital is even serving its original purpose of getting funds to new businesses.
  • When we develop technology in a vacuum, disconnected from the reality in which people really live, we are too likely to spend our energy designing some abstract vision of a future life rather than addressing the pains and injustices around us right now. Technology becomes a way of escaping the world's problems, whether through virtual reality or massive Silicon Valley stock options packages, rather than engaging with them.
  • . It's not enough to computerize and digitize the society we have, and exacerbate its problems by new means. We must transcend the mere avoidance of the patently evil and instead seek to do good. That may involve actually overturning and remaking some institutions and processes from the ground up. That's the real potential of digital technology. To retrieve the values and ideas that may have seemed impossible before and see whether we can realize them today in this very new world.
Javier E

Getting Older, Sleeping Less - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tting-older-sleeping-less.html

sleep research psychology science

shared by Javier E on 13 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • Insomnia, Dr. Alon Y. Avidan says, “is a symptom, not a diagnosis” that can be a clue to an underlying and often treatable health problem and, when it persists, should be taken seriously.
  • Unless noted by their bed partners, people with primary sleep disorders may not know why their sleep is disrupted. An accurate diagnosis often requires a professional sleep study: spending a night or two in a sleep lab hooked up to instruments that record respiration, heart rate, blood pressure, bodily movements and time spent in the various stages of sleep.
  • Nonmedical causes of insomnia are often successfully treated by practicing “good sleep hygiene,” a concept developed by the late Peter J. Hauri, a sleep specialist at the Mayo Clinic. That means limiting naps to less than 30 minutes a day, preferably early in the afternoon; avoiding stimulants and sedatives; avoiding heavy meals and minimizing liquids within two to three hours of bedtime; getting moderate exercise daily, preferably in the morning or early afternoon; maximizing exposure to bright light during the day and minimizing it at night; creating comfortable sleep conditions; and going to bed only when you feel sleepy.
sissij

The Necessity of Atheism | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...the-necessity-of-atheism

brain science bias education

shared by sissij on 17 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Previously our ignorance kept us from unraveling nature’s secret process; when the process is understood knowledge replaces mysticism. He sums this up succinctly:
  • Education is essential because religion is effectively a struggle for power.
  • Since God is invented by man, it is through man that he is made known. Make people believe in your story and you can write whatever narrative you’d like. 
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • This indifference confuses Shelley: a being that we endow with all the goodness in the world while turning a blind eye to endless atrocities.
  • Atheism is a necessity to the thinking mind, Shelley concludes.
  • The mind of Shelley has held up in the two centuries since his drowning. He discovered firsthand, however briefly before he succumbed, the extraordinary forces of nature.
  • sissij on 17 Mar 17
     
    I think Shelley's idea is really interesting. The questions he asked about religion is somehow similar to the questions we ask in our TOK class. As we discuss in TOK about religion, we talked about that God is invented by human so religion is essentially a human invention. The ignorance that Shelly talked about in this article also reminded me of Song of Solomon, where Pilate said "ignorance is the only thing that can kill him (Milkman)". I think atheism is a belief that human should not avoid questions that cannot be answered by creating an answer to it. --Sissi (3/16/2017)
sissij

I know they've seen my message - so why haven't they replied? | Culture | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...age-so-why-havent-they-replied

social media bias psychology

shared by sissij on 17 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Ah, the tyranny of read receipts – enough to put you off digital communication for good.
  • It sounds straightforward enough, even perfunctory, and indeed it is if it’s only a blip in the back-and-forth. But when a message lingers on “seen” without explanation for anything beyond a few minutes, you’ve been “left on read”. It’s enough to make even the most self-assured individuals question their worth.
  • It works both ways, too: if you’ve read a message that you’re either unable or unwilling to respond to immediately, the countdown has already started.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • You never picture them driving, or in the bath, or with relatives who don’t believe in phones at the table. In the moment, the likelihood of their secretly resenting you, or agonising over a reply that is certain to disappoint, seems far greater than it actually is.
  • The anxiety of being left on read is silly but it is real, and unique to this time. There is no analog equivalent.
  • but in that case I’d like to think you’d give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume they’d fallen over in the shower or something.
  • There’s no such goodwill in web 2.0, when everyone is assumed to be available at all times. And if not – it’s personal.
  • well, is it any wonder anxiety is so rife among Generation Y?
  • People will go to some lengths to avoid being seen to have “seen” a message – on Snapchat and Facebook, downloading the message then turning on flight mode and opening it can stop it from registering as opened.
  • Turning on “previews” that display on the lock screen will, in many cases, show enough to get the gist of a message (“I think we should break ... ”) without opening it.
  • But while some people contort themselves to avoid being seen to have “seen”, others manipulate that anxiety to their own ends.
  • But maybe read receipts and the games people play with them have just ruined my ability to trust.
  • When we’re used to good things happening instantly, time taken to craft a thoughtful reply is considered a bad thing.
  • sissij on 17 Mar 17
     
    I totally agree with the author that the read receipts should be optional. I personally have some issue with the read receipt because I don't like to reply instantly except it is a urgent message. I like to take some time to think about what I want to comment on or write back. Although the society now likes to be fast and instant, I am still a slow person. I feel the read receipt is forcing me and giving me pressure to be fast and instant. 
Cecilia Ergueta

We Aren't Built to Live in the Moment - The New York Times - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...re-is-always-on-your-mind.html

memory perception emotion psychology brain science

shared by Cecilia Ergueta on 22 May 17 - No Cached
  • Looking into the future, consciously and unconsciously, is a central function of our large brain, as psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered — rather belatedly, because for the past century most researchers have assumed that we’re prisoners of the past and the present.
  • Behavior, memory and perception can’t be understood without appreciating the central role of prospection. We learn not by storing static records but by continually retouching memories and imagining future possibilities
  • Our emotions are less reactions to the present than guides to future behavior
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • If traditional psychological theory had been correct, these people would have spent a lot of time ruminating. But they actually thought about the future three times more often than the past,
  • paid special attention to unexpected novelties because that was how they learned to avoid punishment and win rewards.
  • Your brain engages in the same sort of prospection to provide its own instant answers, which come in the form of emotions. The main purpose of emotions is to guide future behavior and moral judgments, according to researchers in a new field called prospective psychology. Emotions enable you to empathize with others by predicting their reactions.
  • If Homo prospectus takes the really long view, does he become morbid? That was a longstanding assumption in psychologists’ “terror management theory,” which held that humans avoid thinking about the future because they fear death. The theory was explored in hundreds of experiments assigning people to think about their own deaths. One common response was to become more assertive about one’s cultural values, like becoming more patriotic.
sissij

How Behavioral Economics Can Produce Better Health Care - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...care-behavioral-economics.html

new york times psychology research brain science

shared by sissij on 13 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • I’ll sometimes prescribe a particular brand of medication not because it has proved to be better, but because it happens to be the default option in my hospital’s electronic ordering system.
  • if a poster outside your room prompts me to think of your health instead of mine.
  • I’ll more readily change my practice if I’m shown data that my colleagues do something differently than if I’m shown data that a treatment does or doesn’t work.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • These confessions can be explained by the field of behavioral economics, which holds that human decision-making departs frequently, significantly and predictably from what would be expected if we acted in purely “rational” ways.
  • Rather, our behavior is powerfully influenced by our emotions, identity and environment, as well as by how options are presented to us.
  • (organ donation rates are over 90 percent in countries where citizens need to override a default and opt out of donation compared with 4 to 27 percent where they much choose to opt in)
  • Employees were randomly assigned to one of three groups. The first was “usual care,” in which they received educational materials and free smoking cessation aids. The second was a reward program: Employees could receive up to $800 over six months if they quit. The third was a deposit program, in which smokers initially forked over $150 of their money, but if they quit, they got their deposit back along with a $650 bonus.
  • Those in the lottery group were eligible for a daily lottery prize with frequent small payouts and occasional large rewards — but only if they clocked in at or below their weight loss goal.
  • sissij on 13 Apr 17
     
    As we learned in TOK, people tend to follow the default. I think there is a phenomenon like inertia in human social behavior. Once we make up our mind doing something, we are very unlikely to make a change or make a correction. This has a subconscious influence on people so people can't notice it unless they are trained to avoid their logical fallacy. I found this a really good example of policy making can manipulate people's action and thoughts. --Sissi (4/13/2017)
Javier E

The Science of Snobbery: How We're Duped Into Thinking Fancy Things Are Better - The At... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...279571

psychology judgment intuition bias unconscious expertise perception

shared by Javier E on 26 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • Expert judges and amateurs alike claim to judge classical musicians based on sound. But Tsay’s research suggests that the original judges, despite their experience and expertise, judged the competition (which they heard and watched live) based on visual information, just as amateurs do.
  • just like with classical music, we do not appraise wine in the way that we expect. 
  • Priceonomics revisited this seemingly damning research: the lack of correlation between wine enjoyment and price in blind tastings, the oenology students tricked by red food dye into describing a white wine like a red, a distribution of medals at tastings equivalent to what one would expect from pure chance, the grand crus described like cheap wines and vice-versa when the bottles are switched.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • Taste does not simply equal your taste buds. It draws on information from all our senses as well as context. As a result, food is susceptible to the same trickery as wine. Adding yellow food dye to vanilla pudding leads people to experience a lemony taste. Diners eating in the dark at a chic concept restaurant confuse veal for tuna. Branding, packaging, and price tags are equally important to enjoyment. Cheap fish is routinely passed off as its pricier cousins at seafood and sushi restaurants. 
  • Just like with wine and classical music, we often judge food based on very different criteria than what we claim. The result is that our perceptions are easily skewed in ways we don’t anticipate. 
  • What does it mean for wine that presentation so easily trumps the quality imbued by being grown on premium Napa land or years of fruitful aging? Is it comforting that the same phenomenon is found in food and classical music, or is it a strike against the authenticity of our enjoyment of them as well? How common must these manipulations be until we concede that the influence of the price tag of a bottle of wine or the visual appearance of a pianist is not a trick but actually part of the quality?
  • To answer these questions, we need to investigate the underlying mechanism that leads us to judge wine, food, and music by criteria other than what we claim to value. And that mechanism seems to be the quick, intuitive judgments our minds unconsciously make
  • this unknowability also makes it easy to be led astray when our intuition makes a mistake. We may often be able to count on the price tag or packaging of food and wine for accurate information about quality. But as we believe that we’re judging based on just the product, we fail to recognize when presentation manipulates our snap judgments.
  • Participants were just as effective when watching 6 second video clips and when comparing their ratings to ratings of teacher effectiveness as measured by actual student test performance. 
  • The power of intuitive first impressions has been demonstrated in a variety of other contexts. One experiment found that people predicted the outcome of political elections remarkably well based on silent 10 second video clips of debates - significantly outperforming political pundits and predictions made based on economic indicators.
  • In a real world case, a number of art experts successfully identified a 6th century Greek statue as a fraud. Although the statue had survived a 14 month investigation by a respected museum that included the probings of a geologist, they instantly recognized something was off. They just couldn’t explain how they knew.
  • Cases like this represent the canon behind the idea of the “adaptive unconscious,” a concept made famous by journalist Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink. The basic idea is that we constantly, quickly, and unconsciously do the equivalent of judging a book by its cover. After all, a cover provides a lot of relevant information in a world in which we don’t have time to read every page.
  • Gladwell describes the adaptive unconscious as “a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings.”
  • In a famous experiment, psychologist Nalini Ambady provided participants in an academic study with 30 second silent video clips of a college professor teaching a class and asked them to rate the effectiveness of the professor.
  • In follow up experiments, Chia-Jung Tsay found that those judging musicians’ auditions based on visual cues were not giving preference to attractive performers. Rather, they seemed to look for visual signs of relevant characteristics like passion, creativity, and uniqueness. Seeing signs of passion is valuable information. But in differentiating between elite performers, it gives an edge to someone who looks passionate over someone whose play is passionate
  • Outside of these more eccentric examples, it’s our reliance on quick judgments, and ignorance of their workings, that cause people to act on ugly, unconscious biases
  • It’s also why - from a business perspective - packaging and presentation is just as important as the good or service on offer. Why marketing is just as important as product. 
  • Gladwell ends Blink optimistically. By paying closer attention to our powers of rapid cognition, he argues, we can avoid its pitfalls and harness its powers. We can blindly audition musicians behind a screen, look at a piece of art devoid of other context, and pay particular attention to possible unconscious bias in our performance reports.
  • But Gladwell’s success in demonstrating how the many calculations our adaptive unconscious performs without our awareness undermines his hopeful message of consciously harnessing its power.
  • As a former world-class tennis player and coach of over 50 years, Braden is a perfect example of the ideas behind thin slicing. But if he can’t figure out what his unconscious is up to when he recognizes double faults, why should anyone else expect to be up to the task?
  • flawed judgment in fields like medicine and investing has more serious consequences. The fact that expertise is so tricky leads psychologist Daniel Kahneman to assert that most experts should seek the assistance of statistics and algorithms in making decisions.
  • In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, he describes our two modes of thought: System 1, like the adaptive unconscious, is our “fast, instinctive, and emotional” intuition. System 2 is our “slower, more deliberative, and more logical” conscious thought. Kahneman believes that we often leave decisions up to System 1 and generally place far “too much confidence in human judgment” due to the pitfalls of our intuition described above.
  • Not every judgment will be made in a field that is stable and regular enough for an algorithm to help us make judgments or predictions. But in those cases, he notes, “Hundreds of studies have shown that wherever we have sufficient information to build a model, it will perform better than most people.”
  • Experts can avoid the pitfalls of intuition more easily than laypeople. But they need help too, especially as our collective confidence in expertise leads us to overconfidence in their judgments. 
  • This article has referred to the influence of price tags and context on products and experiences like wine and classical music concerts as tricks that skew our perception. But maybe we should consider them a real, actual part of the quality.
  • Losing ourselves in a universe of relativism, however, will lead us to miss out on anything new or unique. Take the example of the song “Hey Ya!” by Outkast. When the music industry heard it, they felt sure it would be a hit. When it premiered on the radio, however, listeners changed the channel. The song sounded too dissimilar from songs people liked, so they responded negatively. 
  • It took time for people to get familiar with the song and realize that they enjoyed it. Eventually “Hey Ya!” became the hit of the summer.
  • Many boorish people talking about the ethereal qualities of great wine probably can't even identify cork taint because their impressions are dominated by the price tag and the wine label. But the classic defense of wine - that you need to study it to appreciate it - is also vindicated. The open question - which is both editorial and empiric - is what it means for the industry that constant vigilance and substantial study is needed to dependably appreciate wine for the product quality alone. But the questions is relevant to the enjoyment of many other products and experiences that we enjoy in life.
  • Maybe the most important conclusion is to not only recognize the fallibility of our judgments and impressions, but to recognize when it matters, and when it doesn’t
lucieperloff

Teenagers, Anxiety Can Be Your Friend - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...teen-anxiety-myths.html

science brain science mental health knowledge anxiety

shared by lucieperloff on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • A new report from the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health found that one in three teen girls and one in five teen boys have experienced new or worsening anxiety since March 2020.
  • You might be feeling tense about where things stand with your friends or perhaps you’re on edge about something else altogether: your family, your schoolwork, your future, the health of the planet.
  • But the discomfort of anxiety has a basic evolutionary function: to get us to tune into the fact that something’s not right.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • That odd feeling in the pit of your stomach will help you to consider the situation carefully and be cautious about your next step.
  • It’s more often a friend than a foe, one that will help you notice when things are on the wrong track.
  • psychologists agree that anxiety becomes a problem if its alarm makes no sense — either going off for no reason or blaring when a chime would do.
  • Feeling a little tense before a big game is appropriate and may even improve your performance. Having a panic attack on the sidelines means your anxiety has gone too far.
  • At the physical level, the amygdala, a primitive structure in the brain, detects a threat and sends the heart and lungs into overdrive getting your body ready to fight or flee that threat.
  • Though it can sound like a daffy approach to managing tension, breathing deeply and slowly activates a powerful part of the nervous system responsible for resetting the body to its pre-anxiety state.
  • Am I overestimating the severity of the problem I’m facing? Am I underestimating my power to manage it?
  • It’s human nature to want to repeat any behavior that leads to feelings of pleasure or comfort, but every boost of avoidance-related relief increases the likelihood that you’ll want to continue to avoid what you fear.
  • For example, the realities of in-person school are sure to be more manageable than the harrowing scenarios your imagination can create.
  • Knowing what’s true about anxiety — and not — will make it easier to navigate the uncertain times ahead.
clairemann

Why Are People Afraid of Clowns? | Time - 0 views

time.com/...hy-are-people-afraid-of-clowns

psychology brain science research

shared by clairemann on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • It’s been a rough few years for people who have a fear of clowns. In the wake of the ‘clown attack’ craze that reached a fever pitch in 2016, movies about creepy clowns have taken over the entertainment landscape.
  • A local legend, Wrinkles is a 69-year-old retiree who will show up in a terrifying clown suit to scare the pants off anyone you ask him to — even your misbehaving child. In 2015, he told the Washington Post that he gets hundreds of phone calls a day requesting his services. “We know that there’s a human underneath and yet, you don’t know their identity,” a voiceover says of Wrinkles in the trailer for the doc. “That creeps people out.” Indeed.
  • “Clowns’ faces are disguised and they have these large artificial displays of emotion. So you have a clown with a painted face and a big smile, but you don’t really know what they’re actually feeling,” he tells TIME. “There’s this inherent mistrust that what they’re presenting to you isn’t what they’re actually feeling.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “When people hear ‘clown,’ the first associations that pop into their head are the killer clowns in the movies — It, the Joker— and then John Wayne Gacy, the real-life mass murderer,” McAndrew says of the 1970s serial killer who became known as the “Killer Clown” for his volunteer clown work. “It’s kind of hard to get past all of that.”
  • “[Some of the] very first clowns were the court jesters who poked fun at kings and made people in high places uncomfortable. That’s why they exist,” he tells TIME of the history of clowns in medieval Europe. “They’re designed to make people afraid. If you go all the way back to the beginning of clownhood, they’ve always been bad. They’re pranksters, they play tricks.”
  • However, while many people are apprehensive or fearful of clowns, both Nader and McAndrew agree that someone having an actual phobia of clowns, a.k.a. coulrophobia, is rare.
  • “Fortunately, we live in a society where clowns aren’t just wandering around, so it’s pretty easy to avoid them or at least not come into contact with them very regularly. Rarely does this fear ever cause a person to experience a disruption in their lifestyle or ability to do things.”
  • “We like to learn about dangers in a safe way so that we’re prepared in some unknown future time to deal with them if they ever come our way. So by going to see IT and watching this evil clown lure children in and kill them, we learn strategies for avoiding that kind of fate ourselves,” he says. “We’re not consciously sitting there, watching the movie and thinking these things, but that impulse to like to scare ourselves is there.”
anonymous

Talking to Children About Anti-Asian Bias - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-children-anti-Asian-bias.html

shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • I’m Helping My Korean-American Daughter Embrace Her Identity to Counter Racism
  • “I’m not sure Asian-American families can avoid ‘the talk’ any longer,” one expert said.
  • My daughter was the only kid who didn’t have a separate Korean name when we signed her up for Korean classes three years ago. The blank space on the registration form looked at me, as if to say we’d forgotten something as parents.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • my spouse and I, who are both Asian-American, never thought to give her a name like Seohyun or Haeun. Though Korean was the language I spoke growing up in New York with my immigrant parents, I’ve forgotten many of the words I used to know. Yet hearing it spoken still conjures the sense of home.
  • I had no ambition to teach my daughter Korean, but when she turned 5, she insisted she wanted to learn so she could talk to her halmoni — her grandmother. So I conceded.
  • On Seollal, the Korean New Year, she and the other girls in her class sported traditional silk outfits. The floor-length skirts flapped to show their patterned leggings underneath, in a church basement that smelled of steamed rice and sesame oil.
  • Still, I kept asking my daughter when she would try soccer, which seemed to me the “American thing” to do on a Saturday morning. It was held at the same time as Korean School. I kept thinking about the parents on the sidelines and wondered what we were missing
  • A classmate had written that coronavirus was a problem and that keeping Chinese people out of the country was the solution.
  • In the summer of 2020, the Stop A.A.P.I. Hate Youth Campaign interviewed 990 Asian-American young adults across the United States about their experiences during the pandemic, and found that one in four had reported experiencing racism in some way
  • Kids said that they had been bullied, physically harassed and had racial slurs shouted at them
  • a child who hears a racist remark hears this: “You don’t belong. You’re other. You’re different.”
  • We are one of only a handful of Asian-American families in our school, which prides itself on teaching about inclusion. Earlier in the year, our daughter came home talking about Malala Yousafzai and Ruby Bridges, asking where we would have been sitting on the bus in times of segregation.
  • But when a girl in our neighborhood pointed to my daughter and said they could not play together because of the “China virus,” I wept.
  • During lockdown, we devoured books with Asian-American heroines by authors like Grace Lin and Min Jin Lee
  • I struggled to find the words to explain to my daughter why Chinese-Americans were forced to live in these barracks; why they were separated from their families.
  • She doesn’t yet know about the 84-year old man who died two days after being shoved to the sidewalk in Chinatown in San Francisco last month, or about the six Asian-American women killed by a shooter in Atlanta this week.
  • While attacks on Asian people aren’t always charged as hate crimes, many Asians feel an increasing sense of vulnerability.
  • Kids begin to develop a sense of racial identity by age 3 or 4, Dr. Yip said.
  • Once they enter grade school, they hear about race and racism from peers and the media they consume.
  • “By not talking about race” and what they’re hearing, Dr. Yip said, “you run the risk of intensifying stereotypes” which can then lead to racism.
  • “We think we’re protecting our kids, by not talking about racist incidents” Dr. Chen added. “But actually not talking about it is not helping.” Building their racial identity is what helps them feel safe.
  • When a racist incident happens to your child, Dr. Chen said, don’t jump into solving the problem. First ask how they feel and listen. Tell them you don’t know all the answers, but you can find solutions together.
  • Make sure that the children who were targeted know it wasn’t their fault, Dr. Chen added. Role play what you will do if it happens again and tell them, Mom or Dad or your caregivers will keep you safe.
  • “I’m not sure Asian-American families can avoid ‘the talk’ any longer.” It’s a talk that must include listening to, and coming to understand, all groups who face racial bias.
  • In hindsight, I now see that Korean School has done more for my family than soccer ever could. It’s a place where my daughter sees she isn’t alone. There are families who look like ours and wrestle with the same questions, about what we will forget, and what we will keep from our immigrant families’ pasts.
  • My daughter has gone from sewing masks for her bears, to carrying Black Lives Matter posters and voting with me in a presidential election.
Javier E

Opinion | The 1619 Chronicles - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-1619-project-criticisms.html

1619 history politics project racism 1776 Founding journalism

shared by Javier E on 21 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The 1619 Project introduced a date, previously obscure to most Americans, that ought always to have been thought of as seminal — and probably now will. It offered fresh reminders of the extent to which Black freedom was a victory gained by courageous Black Americans, and not just a gift obtained from benevolent whites.
  • in a point missed by many of the 1619 Project’s critics, it does not reject American values. As Nikole Hannah-Jones, its creator and leading voice, concluded in her essay for the project, “I wish, now, that I could go back to the younger me and tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag.” It’s an unabashedly patriotic thought.
  • ambition can be double-edged. Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not the capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • on these points — and for all of its virtues, buzz, spinoffs and a Pulitzer Prize — the 1619 Project has failed.
  • That doesn’t mean that the project seeks to erase the Declaration of Independence from history. But it does mean that it seeks to dethrone the Fourth of July by treating American history as a story of Black struggle against white supremacy — of which the Declaration is, for all of its high-flown rhetoric, supposed to be merely a part.
  • he deleted assertions went to the core of the project’s most controversial goal, “to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.”
  • She then challenged me to find any instance in which the project stated that “using 1776 as our country’s birth date is wrong,” that it “should not be taught to schoolchildren,” and that the only one “that should be taught” was 1619. “Good luck unearthing any of us arguing that,” she added.
  • I emailed her to ask if she could point to any instances before this controversy in which she had acknowledged that her claims about 1619 as “our true founding” had been merely metaphorical. Her answer was that the idea of treating the 1619 date metaphorically should have been so obvious that it went without saying.
  • “1619. It is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?”
  • Here is an excerpt from the introductory essay to the project by The New York Times Magazine’s editor, Jake Silverstein, as it appeared in print in August 2019 (italics added):
  • In his introduction, Silverstein argues that America’s “defining contradictions” were born in August 1619, when a ship carrying 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from what is present-day Angola arrived in Point Comfort, in the English colony of Virginia. And the title page of Hannah-Jones’s essay for the project insists that “our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written.”
  • What was surprising was that in 1776 a politically formidable “defining contradiction” — “that all men are created equal” — came into existence through the Declaration of Independence. As Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1859, that foundational document would forever serve as a “rebuke and stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.”
  • As for the notion that the Declaration’s principles were “false” in 1776, ideals aren’t false merely because they are unrealized, much less because many of the men who championed them, and the nation they created, hypocritically failed to live up to them.
  • These two flaws led to a third, conceptual, error. “Out of slavery — and the anti-Black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional,” writes Silverstein.
  • Nearly everything? What about, say, the ideas contained by the First Amendment? Or the spirit of openness that brought millions of immigrants through places like Ellis Island? Or the enlightened worldview of the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift? Or the spirit of scientific genius and discovery exemplified by the polio vaccine and the moon landing?
  • On the opposite side of the moral ledger, to what extent does anti-Black racism figure in American disgraces such as the brutalization of Native Americans, the Chinese Exclusion Act or the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II?
  • The world is complex. So are people and their motives. The job of journalism is to take account of that complexity, not simplify it out of existence through the adoption of some ideological orthodoxy.
  • This mistake goes far to explain the 1619 Project’s subsequent scholarly and journalistic entanglements. It should have been enough to make strong yet nuanced claims about the role of slavery and racism in American history. Instead, it issued categorical and totalizing assertions that are difficult to defend on close examination.
  • It should have been enough for the project to serve as curator for a range of erudite and interesting voices, with ample room for contrary takes. Instead, virtually every writer in the project seems to sing from the same song sheet, alienating other potential supporters of the project and polarizing national debate.
  • James McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Battle Cry of Freedom” and a past president of the American Historical Association. He was withering: “Almost from the outset,” McPherson told the World Socialist Web Site, “I was disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective.”
  • In particular, McPherson objected to Hannah-Jones’s suggestion that the struggle against slavery and racism and for civil rights and democracy was, if not exclusively then mostly, a Black one. As she wrote in her essay: “The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of Black resistance.”
  • McPherson demurs: “From the Quakers in the 18th century, on through the abolitionists in the antebellum, to the Radical Republicans in the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the N.A.A.C.P., which was an interracial organization founded in 1909, down through the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, there have been a lot of whites who have fought against slavery and racial discrimination, and against racism,” he said. “And that’s what’s missing from this perspective.”
  • Wilentz’s catalog of the project’s mistakes is extensive. Hannah-Jones’s essay claimed that by 1776 Britain was “deeply conflicted” over its role in slavery. But despite the landmark Somerset v. Stewart court ruling in 1772, which held that slavery was not supported by English common law, it remained deeply embedded in the practices of the British Empire. The essay claimed that, among Londoners, “there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade” by 1776. But the movement to abolish the British slave trade only began about a decade later — inspired, in part, Wilentz notes, by American antislavery agitation that had started in the 1760s and 1770s.
  • ie M. Harris, an expert on pre-Civil War African-American life and slavery. “On Aug. 19 of last year,” Harris wrote, “I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones … repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America.”
  • The larger problem is that The Times’s editors, however much background reading they might have done, are not in a position to adjudicate historical disputes. That should have been an additional reason for the 1619 Project to seek input from, and include contributions by, an intellectually diverse range of scholarly voices. Yet not only does the project choose a side, it also brooks no doubt.
  • “It is finally time to tell our story truthfully,” the magazine declares on its 1619 cover page. Finally? Truthfully? Is The Times suggesting that distinguished historians, like the ones who have seriously disputed aspects of the project, had previously been telling half-truths or falsehoods?
  • unlike other dates, 1776 uniquely marries letter and spirit, politics and principle: The declaration that something new is born, combined with the expression of an ideal that — because we continue to believe in it even as we struggle to live up to it — binds us to the date.
  • On the other, the 1619 Project has become, partly by its design and partly because of avoidable mistakes, a focal point of the kind of intense national debate that columnists are supposed to cover, and that is being widely written about outside The Times. To avoid writing about it on account of the first scruple is to be derelict in our responsibility toward the second.
huffem4

Why Don't We Prepare Enough for Disasters? - 1 views

greatergood.berkeley.edu/...e_prepare_enough_for_disasters

psychology disaster cognitive bias bias

shared by huffem4 on 23 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Why do so many of us hide our heads in the sand when faced with the possibility of a catastrophic future event?
  • we are governed by two cognitive systems: one that is more automated and drives instinctual decisions—like quickly moving away from danger—and another that involves more considered thought and drives deliberate decisions—like deciding what house to buy.
  • In these cases, we tend to rely on six biases that can lead us to misperceive our situation and potentially take wrong action (or avoid action altogether). These are nicely described in The Ostrich Paradox, as follows: Myopia: The tendency to focus more on the short-term costs than the future potential benefits of investments. Amnesia: The tendency to forget the lessons of past disasters. Optimism: The tendency to underestimate the likelihood of future hazards. Inertia: The tendency to maintain the status quo or adopt the default option when uncertain about the future benefits of investing now. Simplification: The tendency to selectively consider only certain factors when making choices involving risk. Herding: The tendency to follow the “wisdom” of the crowd.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • if taking action now to prevent a future disaster involves a difficult hurdle—such as bureaucratic red tape or high financial, social, or political costs—we will tend to focus on the immediate (avoiding public resistance to increased taxes) versus the future (preventing a catastrophe)
  • it’s best if decision makers don’t prepare for future consequences only by looking at objective risks and vulnerabilities. Instead, planners should be encouraged “to think first about how individuals in hazard-prone areas are likely to perceive risks and why they might not adopt different preparedness measures.
  • The challenge is how to get the public to adopt these principles
adonahue011

Twitter is Showing That People Are Anxious and Depressed - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...social-media-.html

new york times people psychology research technology social media

shared by adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • the lab offers this answer: Sunday, May 31. That day was not only the saddest day of 2020 so far, it was also the saddest day recorded by the lab in the last 13 years. Or at least, the saddest day on Twitter.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      The lab is offering the idea that May 31st was the saddest day of 2020, and the saddest in the last 13 years. The toll 2020 has put on all of us mentally is probably something at times we cannot even recognize.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      The lab is offering the idea that May 31st was the saddest day of 2020, and the saddest in the last 13 years. The toll 2020 has put on all of us mentally is probably something at times we cannot even recognize.
  • measuring word choices across millions of tweets, every day, the world over, to come up with a moving measure of well-being.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      They use a machine to track the words people are using on twitter specifically to measure the well-being of people
  • the main finding to emerge was our tendency toward relentless positivity on social media.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • “Happiness is hard to know. It’s hard to measure,”
  • “We don’t have a lot of great data about how people are doing.”
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      This is an interesting statement because it is so true. Yet it is so important to know how people are doing. Often times I think we personally miss some of the feelings we have, which is something we talked about in TOK. We cut out certain memories or feelings to make the narrative we want
  • to parse our national mental health through the prism of our online life.
  • that stockpile of information towered as high as it does now, in the summer of 2020
  • , Twitter reported a 34 percent increase in daily average user growth.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Important statistic because we all took part in this
  • has gathered a random 10 percent of all public tweets, every day, across a dozen languages.
  • Twitter included “terrorist,” “violence” and “racist.” This was about a week after George Floyd was killed, near the start of the protests that would last all summe
  • the pandemic, the Hedonometer’s sadness readings have set multiple records. This year, “there was a full month — and we never see this — there was a full month of days that the Hedonometer was reading sadder than the Boston Marathon day,”
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      This is saddening because it is the reality we have all had to learn how to deal with.
  • “These digital traces are markers that we’re not aware of, but they leave marks that tell us the degree to which you are avoiding things, the degree to which you are connected to people,”
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      I agree with this statement because it is so similar to what we discussed in TOK with the idea that our brain lets us avoid things when we don't feel like we can deal with them.
  • one of the challenges of this line of research is that language itself is always evolving — and algorithms are notoriously bad at discerning context.
  • they were able to help predict which ones might develop postpartum depression, based on their posts before the birth of their babies.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      This type of research seems like a positive way to utilize social media. Not that the saddening posts are good but the way we can perceive this information is important
  • Using data from social media for the study of mental health also helps address the WEIRD problem:
  • psychology research is often exclusively composed of subjects who are Western, Educated, and from Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic countries.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      I never thought of this but it is so true! Using social media means that the stats are global.
  • We’re now able to look at a much more diverse variety of mental health experiences.”
  • but also anxiety, depression, stress and suicidal thoughts. Unsurprisingly, she found that all these levels were significantly higher than during the same months of 2019.
  • is really a representative place to check the state of the general population’s mental health.
  • argues that in the rush to embrace data, many researchers ignore the distorting effects of the platforms themselves.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Contrasting opinion from the rest of the article
  • emotionally invested in the content we are presented with, coaxed toward remaining in a certain mental state.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Interesting idea though I tend to think more in the opposite direction that social media is a pretty solid reflection.
  • The closest we get to looking at national mental health otherwise is through surveys like the one Gallup performs
  • the lowest rates of life satisfaction this year in over a decade, including during the 2008 recession
  • I have never been more exhausted at the end of the day than I am now,” said Michael Garfinkle, a psychoanalyst in New York.
  • There are so many contenders to consider: was it Thursday, March 12, the day after Tom Hanks announced he was sick and the N.B.A. announced it was canceled? Was it Monday, June 1, the day peaceful protesters were tear gassed so that President Trump could comfortably stroll to his Bible-wielding photo op?
lucieperloff

Are Nightmares Bad for You? | TIME - 0 views

time.com/...are-nightmares-bad-for-you

psychology brain science nightmares knowledge research

shared by lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • But experts who study nightmares say this is a pretty typical bad-dream scenario. “There’s often some threat of death or injury or annihilation, and you’re trying to escape,”
  • In some instances, a bad dream’s setting or events may be innocent, but the emotions the dreamer feels are ones of terror, disgust or distress, he explains.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      It's not so much the event as it is how it makes you feel
  • “For people who have significant nightmare problems, it’s also common is for these individuals to actively try to avoid sleep in order to avoid having nightmares,” he says. “When they do have [a nightmare], they often don’t sleep for the rest of the night.”
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Nightmares can lead to sleep deprivation
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Chronic poor sleep can cause a whole range of mental and physical health issues, including depression and heart disease.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Nightmares have many effect other than just being tired
  • In many cases, they may help the dreamer ameliorate some of their daytime anxieties. Research has found that nightmares can help some people learn to better manage stress.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      How does this happen??
  • In much the same way, nightmares—especially those following an upsetting event—may allow a person’s brain to relive the event and move past it, Nadorff says.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      The brain's form of exposure therapy?
  • “We have the person talk through their nightmare and change it in a way that’s not threatening, and then they practice the new dream during the day using visual imagery,” Nadorff explains. This kind of daily rehearsal can help reshape the scary dream even while a person is sleeping.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      This seems much more difficult and abstract
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