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Javier E

An Unholy Alliance Between Ye, Musk, and Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...671816

social media musk trump oligarchs ego grievance conflict free speech tech

shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • Musk, Trump, and Ye are after something different: They are all obsessed with setting the rules of public spaces.
  • An understandable consensus began to form on the political left that large social networks, but especially Facebook, helped Trump rise to power. The reasons were multifaceted: algorithms that gave a natural advantage to the most shameless users, helpful marketing tools that the campaign made good use of, a confusing tangle of foreign interference (the efficacy of which has always been tough to suss out), and a basic attentional architecture that helps polarize and pit Americans against one another (no foreign help required).
  • The misinformation industrial complex—a loosely knit network of researchers, academics, journalists, and even government entities—coalesced around this moment. Different phases of the backlash homed in on bots, content moderation, and, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, data privacy
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  • the broad theme was clear: Social-media platforms are the main communication tools of the 21st century, and they matter.
  • With Trump at the center, the techlash morphed into a culture war with a clear partisan split. One could frame the position from the left as: We do not want these platforms to give a natural advantage to the most shameless and awful people who stoke resentment and fear to gain power
  • On the right, it might sound more like: We must preserve the power of the platforms to let outsiders have a natural advantage (by stoking fear and resentment to gain power).
  • the political world realized that platforms and content-recommendation engines decide which cultural objects get amplified. The left found this troubling, whereas the right found it to be an exciting prospect and something to leverage, exploit, and manipulate via the courts
  • Crucially, both camps resent the power of the technology platforms and believe the companies have a negative influence on our discourse and politics by either censoring too much or not doing enough to protect users and our political discourse.
  • one outcome of the techlash has been an incredibly facile public understanding of content moderation and a whole lot of culture warring.
  • Musk and Ye aren’t so much buying into the right’s overly simplistic Big Tech culture war as they are hijacking it for their own purposes; Trump, meanwhile, is mostly just mad
  • Each one casts himself as an antidote to a heavy-handed, censorious social-media apparatus that is either captured by progressive ideology or merely pressured into submission by it. But none of them has any understanding of thorny First Amendment or content-moderation issues.
  • They embrace a shallow posture of free-speech maximalism—the very kind that some social-media-platform founders first espoused, before watching their sites become overrun with harassment, spam, and other hateful garbage that drives away both users and advertisers
  • for those who can hit the mark without getting banned, social media is a force multiplier for cultural and political relevance and a way around gatekeeping media.
  • Musk, Ye, and Trump rely on their ability to pick up their phones, go direct, and say whatever they wan
  • the moment they butt up against rules or consequences, they begin to howl about persecution and unfair treatment. The idea of being treated similarly to the rest of a platform’s user base
  • is so galling to these men that they declare the entire system to be broken.
  • they also demonstrate how being the Main Character of popular and political culture can totally warp perspective. They’re so blinded by their own outlying experiences across social media that, in most cases, they hardly know what it is they’re buying
  • These are projects motivated entirely by grievance and conflict. And so they are destined to amplify grievance and conflict
Javier E

Book Review: 'Life Is Hard,' by Kieran Setiya - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ife-is-hard-kieran-setiya.html

life phiosophy suffering book review psychology happiness success

shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • “Life Is Hard” pushes back against many platitudes of contemporary American self-improvement culture. Setiya is no friend to positive thinking — at best, it requires self-deception, and at worst, such glass-half-full optimism can be cruel to those whose pain we refuse to recognize.
  • Another theory Setiya challenges is the idea that happiness should be life’s primary pursuit. Instead, he argues that we should try to live well within our limits, even if this sometimes means acknowledging difficult truths.
  • If you really consider “happiness” in its everyday sense — a feeling of contentment and pleasure — its desirability is complicated; we can certainly be made to feel good by ignoring injustice, wars, climate change or the hardships of aging. But we cannot live meaningfully that way.
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  • what does living well mean in practice? To Setiya, it lies in embracing one of the many possible “good-enough lives” instead of aching for a perfect one
  • Setiya’s approach blends empathy with common sense. True, a person who is blind or lacks full movement may not be able to enjoy certain pleasures — at least, in the typical way. And suffering injury can be traumatic. But none of us can fit everything worth doing into one lifetime. Our possibilities and our choices are always limited, and we can live fully within those limits.
  • he invites the reader to join him as he looks at life’s challenges — loneliness, injustice, grief — and in turning them over to examine every angle. Sometimes these twists make it difficult to grasp his ultimate point; in his discussion of the potential extinction of human beings, for instance, Setiya argues movingly that it is hard to find meaning in our actions without the promise of future societies who will enjoy the result
  • The golden thread running through “Life Is Hard” is Setiya’s belief in the value of well-directed attention. Pain, as much as we wish to avoid it, forces us to remember that we are indelibly connected to our bodies.
  • Listening carefully, whether to good friends or to strangers on a bus, can help us feel less lonely. “Close reading” other people, trying as hard as possible to see them in their full humanity, is a small step toward a more just world. By cultivating our sensitivity to ourselves and to others, we escape another destructive modern myth: that we are separate from other people, and that we can live well without caring for them.
  • Mindfulness is also Setiya’s answer to the threat of personal failure. If we can teach ourselves to notice all the splendid, varied incidents of our lives, he claims, we are much less likely to brand ourselves with a single label, winner or loser.
  • He encourages readers to abandon simple narratives about success over the course of a lifetime. I suspect this is why Setiya so often finds his conclusions in poetry, not in philosophy: The experience of suffering leads to messy, counterintuitive truths.
  • “Life Is Hard” is a humane consolation for challenging times. Reading it is like speaking with a thoughtful friend who never tells you to cheer up, but, by offering gentle companionship and a change of perspective, makes you feel better anyway.
Javier E

How a dose of MDMA transformed a white supremacist - BBC Future - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...ransformed-a-white-supremacist

psychology research brain science connections empathy

shared by Javier E on 19 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • February 2020, Harriet de Wit, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural science at the University of Chicago, was running an experiment on whether the drug MDMA increased the pleasantness of social touch in healthy volunteers
  • The latest participant in the double-blind trial, a man named Brendan, had filled out a standard questionnaire at the end. Strangely, at the very bottom of the form, Brendan had written in bold letters: "This experience has helped me sort out a debilitating personal issue. Google my name. I now know what I need to do."
  • They googled Brendan's name, and up popped a disturbing revelation: until just a couple of months before, Brendan had been the leader of the US Midwest faction of Identity Evropa, a notorious white nationalist group rebranded in 2019 as the American Identity Movement. Two months earlier, activists at Chicago Antifascist Action had exposed Brendan's identity, and he had lost his job.
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  • "Go ask him what he means by 'I now know what I need to do,'" she instructed Bremmer. "If it's a matter of him picking up an automatic rifle or something, we have to intervene."
  • As he clarified to Bremmer, love is what he had just realised he had to do. "Love is the most important thing," he told the baffled research assistant. "Nothing matters without
  • When de Wit recounted this story to me nearly two years after the fact, she still could hardly believe it. "Isn't that amazing?" she said. "It's what everyone says about this damn drug, that it makes people feel love. To think that a drug could change somebody's beliefs and thoughts without any expectations – it's mind-boggling."
  • Over the past few years, I've been investigating the scientific research and medical potential of MDMA for a book called "I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World". I learnt how this once-vilified drug is now remerging as a therapeutic agent – a role it previously played in the 1970s and 1980s, prior to its criminalisation
  • He attended the notorious "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville and quickly rose up the ranks of his organisation, first becoming the coordinator for Illinois and then the entire Midwest. He travelled to Europe and around the US to meet other white nationalist groups, with the ultimate goal of taking the movement mainstream
  • some researchers have begun to wonder if it could be an effective tool for pushing people who are already somehow primed to reconsider their ideology toward a new way of seeing things
  • While MDMA cannot fix societal-level drivers of prejudice and disconnection, on an individual basis it can make a difference. In certain cases, the drug may even be able to help people see through the fog of discrimination and fear that divides so many of us.
  • in December 2021 I paid Brendan a visit
  • What I didn't expect was how ordinary the 31-year-old who answered the door would appear to be: blue plaid button-up shirt, neatly cropped hair, and a friendly smile.
  • Brendan grew up in an affluent Chicago suburb in an Irish Catholic family. He leaned liberal in high school but got sucked into white nationalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he joined a fraternity mostly composed of conservative Republican men, began reading antisemitic conspiracy books, and fell down a rabbit hole of racist, sexist content online. Brendan was further emboldened by the populist rhetoric of Donald Trump during his presidential campaign. "His speech talking about Mexicans being rapists, the fixation on the border wall and deporting everyone, the Muslim ban – I didn't really get white nationalism until Trump started running for president," Brendan said.
  • If this comes to pass, MDMA – and other psychedelics-assisted therapy – could transform the field of mental health through widespread clinical use in the US and beyond, for addressing trauma and possibly other conditions as well, including substance use disorders, depression and eating disorders.
  • A group of anti-fascist activists published identifying information about him and more than 100 other people in Identity Evropa. He was immediately fired from his job and ostracised by his siblings and friends outside white nationalism.
  • When Brendan saw a Facebook ad in early 2020 for some sort of drug trial at the University of Chicago, he decided to apply just to have something to do and to earn a little money
  • At the time, Brendan was "still in the denial stage" following his identity becoming public, he said. He was racked with regret – not over his bigoted views, which he still held, but over the missteps that had landed him in this predicament.
  • About 30 minutes after taking the pill, he started to feel peculiar. "Wait a second – why am I doing this? Why am I thinking this way?" he began to wonder. "Why did I ever think it was okay to jeopardise relationships with just about everyone in my life?"
  • Just then, Bremmer came to collect Brendan to start the experiment. Brendan slid into an MRI, and Bremmer started tickling his forearm with a brush and asked him to rate how pleasant it felt. "I noticed it was making me happier – the experience of the touch," Brendan recalled. "I started progressively rating it higher and higher." As he relished in the pleasurable feeling, a single, powerful word popped into his mind: connection.
  • It suddenly seemed so obvious: connections with other people were all that mattered. "This is stuff you can't really put into words, but it was so profound," Brendan said. "I conceived of my relationships with other people not as distinct boundaries with distinct entities, but more as we-are-all-on
  • I realised I'd been fixated on stuff that doesn't really matter, and is just so messed up, and that I'd been totally missing the point. I hadn't been soaking up the joy that life has to offer."
  • Brendan hired a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant to advise him, enrolled in therapy, began meditating, and started working his way through a list of educational books. S still regularly communicates with Brendan and, for his part, thinks that Brendan is serious in his efforts to change
  • "I think he is trying to better himself and work on himself, and I do think that experience with MDMA had an impact on him. It's been a touchstone for growth, and over time, I think, the reflection on that experience has had a greater impact on him than necessarily the experience itself."
  • Brendan is still struggling, though, to make the connections with others that he craves. When I visited him, he'd just spent Thanksgiving alone
  • He also has not completely abandoned his bigoted ideology, and is not sure that will ever be possible. "There are moments when I have racist or antisemitic thoughts, definitely," he said. "But now I can recognise that those kinds of thought patterns are harming me more than anyone else."
  • it's not without precedent. In the 1980s, for example, an acquaintance of early MDMA-assisted therapy practitioner Requa Greer administered the drug to a pilot who had grown up in a racist home and had inherited those views. The pilot had always accepted his bigoted way of thinking as being a normal, accurate reflection of the way things were. MDMA, however, "gave him a clear vision that unexamined racism was both wrong and mean," Greer says
  • Encouraging stories of seemingly spontaneous change appear to be exceptions to the norm, however, and from a neurological point of view, this makes sense
  • Research shows that oxytocin – one of the key hormones that MDMA triggers neurons to release – drives a "tend and defend" response across the animal kingdom. The same oxytocin that causes a mother bear to nurture her newborn, for example, also fuels her rage when she perceives a threat to her cub. In people, oxytocin likewise strengthens caregiving tendencies toward liked members of a person's in-group and strangers perceived to belong to the same group, but it increases hostility toward individuals from disliked groups
  • In a 2010 study published in Science, for example, men who inhaled oxytocin were three times more likely to donate money to members of their team in an economic game, as well as more likely to harshly punish competing players for not donating enough. (Read more: "The surprising downsides of empathy.")
  • According to research published this week in Nature by Johns Hopkins University neuroscientist Gül Dölen, MDMA and other psychedelics – including psilocybin, LSD, ketamine and ibogaine – work therapeutically by reopening a critical period in the brain. Critical periods are finite windows of impressionability that typically occur in childhood, when our brains are more malleable and primed to learn new things
  • Dölen and her colleagues' findings likewise indicate that, without the proper set and setting, MDMA and other psychedelics probably do not reopen critical periods, which means they will not have a spontaneous, revelatory effect for ridding someone of bigoted beliefs.
  • In the West, plenty of members of right-wing authoritarian political movements, including neo-Nazi groups, also have track records of taking MDMA and other psychedelics
  • This suggests, researchers write, that psychedelics are nonspecific, "politically pluripotent" amplifiers of whatever is going on in somebody's head, with no particular directional leaning "on the axes of conservatism-liberalism or authoritarianism-egalitarianism."
  • That said, a growing body of scientific evidence indicates that the human capacity for compassion, kindness, empathy, gratitude, altruism, fairness, trust, and cooperation are core features of our natures
  • As Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal wrote, "Empathy is the one weapon in the human repertoire that can rid us of the curse of xenophobia."
  • Ginsberg also envisions using the drug in workshops aimed at eliminating racism, or as a means of bringing people together from opposite sides of shared cultural histories to help heal intergenerational trauma. "I think all psychedelics have a role to play, but I think MDMA has a particularly key role because you're both expanded and present, heart-open and really able to listen in a new way," Ginsberg says. "That's something really powerful."
  • "If you give MDMA to hard-core haters on each side of an issue, I don't think it'll do a lot of good,"
  • if you start with open-minded people on both sides, then I think it can work. You can improve communications and build empathy between groups, and help people be more capable of analysing the world from a more balanced perspective rather than from fear-based, anxiety-based distrust."
  • In 2021, Ginsberg and Doblin were coauthors on a study investigating the possibility of using ayahuasca – a plant-based psychedelic – in group contexts to bridge divides between Palestinians and Israelis, with positive findings
  • "I kind of have a fantasy that maybe as we get more reacquainted with psychedelics, there could be group-based experiences that build community resiliency and are intentionally oriented toward breaking down barriers between people, having people see things from other perspectives and detribalising our society,
  • "But that's not going to happen on its own. It would have to be intentional, and – if it happens – it would probably take multiple generations."
  • Based on his experience with extremism, Brendan agreed with expert takes that no drug, on its own, will spontaneously change the minds of white supremacists or end political conflict in the US
  • he does think that, with the right framing and mindset, MDMA could be useful for people who are already at least somewhat open to reconsidering their ideologies, just as it was for him. "It helped me see things in a different way that no amount of therapy or antiracist literature ever would have done," he said. "I really think it was a breakthrough experience."
Javier E

DeSantis's Revolutionary Defense of the Classics - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...eo-caesar-great-books-275268d9

classics defense western civilization learning history Great Books knowledge bias education

shared by Javier E on 13 May 23 - No Cached
  • Gov. Ron DeSantis just gave a welcome boost to the classical-education movement. He signed legislation allowing high-school students to qualify for Bright Futures scholarships, a state fund for college education, by submitting scores from the Classic Learning Test instead of the SAT alone.
  • the greatest works of civilization have always been about spurring—not preventing—radical change. They teach us about the revolutionary ideas of the past and help us better understand the present
  • The richest ideas of what it means to be human are those that have stood the test of time.
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  • Many of the seminal works of literature, history, philosophy, science and theology were revolutionary in their respective age
  • Like revolutionary ideas today, the ideas of yesterday were provocative and, in many cases, much more consequential.
  • Revolutionary figures of the past give us insight into the present and allow for reflection on the consequences of their choices.
  • one of the virtues of the classics: They are a means of considering what is true without invoking the blind partisanship that encourages thoughtless action. There is nothing we need more today than the cultivation of reason and understanding.
  • Education based on values, logic and discipline isn’t Republican—it’s timeless.
Javier E

Opinion | David Brooks: I Was Wrong About Capitalism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...david-brooks-capitalism.html

error bias causes personal misjudgment capitalism psychology knowledge

shared by Javier E on 22 Jul 22 - No Cached
  • sometimes I’m just slow. I suffer an intellectual lag.
  • Reality has changed, but my mental frameworks just sit there. Worse, they prevent me from even seeing the change that is already underway — what the experts call “conceptual blindness.”
  • For a while this bet on free-market economic dynamism seemed to be paying off. It was the late 1980s and 1990s
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  • In the early 1990s, The Journal sent me on many reporting trips to the U.S.S.R.
  • I saw but did not see the enormous amount of corruption that was going on. I saw but did not see that property rights alone do not spontaneously make a decent society. The primary problem in all societies is order — moral, legal and social order.
  • By the time I came to this job, in 2003, I was having qualms about the free-market education I’d received — but not fast enough. It took me a while to see that the postindustrial capitalism machine — while innovative, dynamic and wonderful in many respects — had some fundamental flaws.
  • The most educated Americans were amassing more and more wealth, dominating the best living areas, pouring advantages into their kids. A highly unequal caste system was forming. Bit by bit it dawned on me that the government would have to get much more active if every child was going to have an open field and a fair chance.
  • the financial crisis hit, the flaws in modern capitalism were blindingly obvious, but my mental frames still didn’t shift fast enough.
  • Sometimes in life you should stick to your worldview and defend it against criticism. But sometimes the world is genuinely different than it was before. At those moments the crucial skills are the ones nobody teaches you: how to reorganize your mind, how to see with new eyes.
Javier E

Cognitive Biases and the Human Brain - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...565775

cognitive bias psychology research knowledge bias

shared by Javier E on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Present bias shows up not just in experiments, of course, but in the real world. Especially in the United States, people egregiously undersave for retirement—even when they make enough money to not spend their whole paycheck on expenses, and even when they work for a company that will kick in additional funds to retirement plans when they contribute.
  • hen people hear the word bias, many if not most will think of either racial prejudice or news organizations that slant their coverage to favor one political position over another. Present bias, by contrast, is an example of cognitive bias—the collection of faulty ways of thinking that is apparently hardwired into the human brain. The collection is large. Wikipedia’s “List of cognitive biases” contains 185 entries, from actor-observer bias (“the tendency for explanations of other individuals’ behaviors to overemphasize the influence of their personality and underemphasize the influence of their situation … and for explanations of one’s own behaviors to do the opposite”) to the Zeigarnik effect (“uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones”)
  • If I had to single out a particular bias as the most pervasive and damaging, it would probably be confirmation bias. That’s the effect that leads us to look for evidence confirming what we already think or suspect, to view facts and ideas we encounter as further confirmation, and to discount or ignore any piece of evidence that seems to support an alternate view
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  • Confirmation bias shows up most blatantly in our current political divide, where each side seems unable to allow that the other side is right about anything.
  • The whole idea of cognitive biases and faulty heuristics—the shortcuts and rules of thumb by which we make judgments and predictions—was more or less invented in the 1970s by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman
  • versky died in 1996. Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for the work the two men did together, which he summarized in his 2011 best seller, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Another best seller, last year’s The Undoing Project, by Michael Lewis, tells the story of the sometimes contentious collaboration between Tversky and Kahneman
  • Another key figure in the field is the University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler. One of the biases he’s most linked with is the endowment effect, which leads us to place an irrationally high value on our possessions.
  • In an experiment conducted by Thaler, Kahneman, and Jack L. Knetsch, half the participants were given a mug and then asked how much they would sell it for. The average answer was $5.78. The rest of the group said they would spend, on average, $2.21 for the same mug. This flew in the face of classic economic theory, which says that at a given time and among a certain population, an item has a market value that does not depend on whether one owns it or not. Thaler won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics.
  • “The question that is most often asked about cognitive illusions is whether they can be overcome. The message … is not encouraging.”
  • that’s not so easy in the real world, when we’re dealing with people and situations rather than lines. “Unfortunately, this sensible procedure is least likely to be applied when it is needed most,” Kahneman writes. “We would all like to have a warning bell that rings loudly whenever we are about to make a serious error, but no such bell is available.”
  • At least with the optical illusion, our slow-thinking, analytic mind—what Kahneman calls System 2—will recognize a Müller-Lyer situation and convince itself not to trust the fast-twitch System 1’s perception
  • Kahneman and others draw an analogy based on an understanding of the Müller-Lyer illusion, two parallel lines with arrows at each end. One line’s arrows point in; the other line’s arrows point out. Because of the direction of the arrows, the latter line appears shorter than the former, but in fact the two lines are the same length.
  • Because biases appear to be so hardwired and inalterable, most of the attention paid to countering them hasn’t dealt with the problematic thoughts, judgments, or predictions themselves
  • Is it really impossible, however, to shed or significantly mitigate one’s biases? Some studies have tentatively answered that question in the affirmative.
  • what if the person undergoing the de-biasing strategies was highly motivated and self-selected? In other words, what if it was me?
  • Over an apple pastry and tea with milk, he told me, “Temperament has a lot to do with my position. You won’t find anyone more pessimistic than I am.”
  • I met with Kahneman
  • “I see the picture as unequal lines,” he said. “The goal is not to trust what I think I see. To understand that I shouldn’t believe my lying eyes.” That’s doable with the optical illusion, he said, but extremely difficult with real-world cognitive biases.
  • In this context, his pessimism relates, first, to the impossibility of effecting any changes to System 1—the quick-thinking part of our brain and the one that makes mistaken judgments tantamount to the Müller-Lyer line illusion
  • he most effective check against them, as Kahneman says, is from the outside: Others can perceive our errors more readily than we can.
  • “slow-thinking organizations,” as he puts it, can institute policies that include the monitoring of individual decisions and predictions. They can also require procedures such as checklists and “premortems,”
  • A premortem attempts to counter optimism bias by requiring team members to imagine that a project has gone very, very badly and write a sentence or two describing how that happened. Conducting this exercise, it turns out, helps people think ahead.
  • “My position is that none of these things have any effect on System 1,” Kahneman said. “You can’t improve intuition.
  • Perhaps, with very long-term training, lots of talk, and exposure to behavioral economics, what you can do is cue reasoning, so you can engage System 2 to follow rules. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t provide cues. And for most people, in the heat of argument the rules go out the window.
  • Kahneman describes an even earlier Nisbett article that showed subjects’ disinclination to believe statistical and other general evidence, basing their judgments instead on individual examples and vivid anecdotes. (This bias is known as base-rate neglect.)
  • over the years, Nisbett had come to emphasize in his research and thinking the possibility of training people to overcome or avoid a number of pitfalls, including base-rate neglect, fundamental attribution error, and the sunk-cost fallacy.
  • Nisbett’s second-favorite example is that economists, who have absorbed the lessons of the sunk-cost fallacy, routinely walk out of bad movies and leave bad restaurant meals uneaten.
  • When Nisbett asks the same question of students who have completed the statistics course, about 70 percent give the right answer. He believes this result shows, pace Kahneman, that the law of large numbers can be absorbed into System 2—and maybe into System 1 as well, even when there are minimal cues.
  • about half give the right answer: the law of large numbers, which holds that outlier results are much more frequent when the sample size (at bats, in this case) is small. Over the course of the season, as the number of at bats increases, regression to the mean is inevitabl
  • When Nisbett has to give an example of his approach, he usually brings up the baseball-phenom survey. This involved telephoning University of Michigan students on the pretense of conducting a poll about sports, and asking them why there are always several Major League batters with .450 batting averages early in a season, yet no player has ever finished a season with an average that high.
  • we’ve tested Michigan students over four years, and they show a huge increase in ability to solve problems. Graduate students in psychology also show a huge gain.”
  • , “I know from my own research on teaching people how to reason statistically that just a few examples in two or three domains are sufficient to improve people’s reasoning for an indefinitely large number of events.”
  • isbett suggested another factor: “You and Amos specialized in hard problems for which you were drawn to the wrong answer. I began to study easy problems, which you guys would never get wrong but untutored people routinely do … Then you can look at the effects of instruction on such easy problems, which turn out to be huge.”
  • Nisbett suggested that I take “Mindware: Critical Thinking for the Information Age,” an online Coursera course in which he goes over what he considers the most effective de-biasing skills and concepts. Then, to see how much I had learned, I would take a survey he gives to Michigan undergraduates. So I did.
  • he course consists of eight lessons by Nisbett—who comes across on-screen as the authoritative but approachable psych professor we all would like to have had—interspersed with some graphics and quizzes. I recommend it. He explains the availability heuristic this way: “People are surprised that suicides outnumber homicides, and drownings outnumber deaths by fire. People always think crime is increasing” even if it’s not.
  • When I finished the course, Nisbett sent me the survey he and colleagues administer to Michigan undergrads
  • It contains a few dozen problems meant to measure the subjects’ resistance to cognitive biases
  • I got it right. Indeed, when I emailed my completed test, Nisbett replied, “My guess is that very few if any UM seniors did as well as you. I’m sure at least some psych students, at least after 2 years in school, did as well. But note that you came fairly close to a perfect score.”
  • Nevertheless, I did not feel that reading Mindware and taking the Coursera course had necessarily rid me of my biases
  • For his part, Nisbett insisted that the results were meaningful. “If you’re doing better in a testing context,” he told me, “you’ll jolly well be doing better in the real world.”
  • The New York–based NeuroLeadership Institute offers organizations and individuals a variety of training sessions, webinars, and conferences that promise, among other things, to use brain science to teach participants to counter bias. This year’s two-day summit will be held in New York next month; for $2,845, you could learn, for example, “why are our brains so bad at thinking about the future, and how do we do it better?”
  • Philip E. Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and his wife and research partner, Barbara Mellers, have for years been studying what they call “superforecasters”: people who manage to sidestep cognitive biases and predict future events with far more accuracy than the pundits
  • One of the most important ingredients is what Tetlock calls “the outside view.” The inside view is a product of fundamental attribution error, base-rate neglect, and other biases that are constantly cajoling us into resting our judgments and predictions on good or vivid stories instead of on data and statistics
  • In 2006, seeking to prevent another mistake of that magnitude, the U.S. government created the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (iarpa), an agency designed to use cutting-edge research and technology to improve intelligence-gathering and analysis. In 2011, iarpa initiated a program, Sirius, to fund the development of “serious” video games that could combat or mitigate what were deemed to be the six most damaging biases: confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, the bias blind spot (the feeling that one is less biased than the average person), the anchoring effect, the representativeness heuristic, and projection bias (the assumption that everybody else’s thinking is the same as one’s own).
  • most promising are a handful of video games. Their genesis was in the Iraq War
  • Together with collaborators who included staff from Creative Technologies, a company specializing in games and other simulations, and Leidos, a defense, intelligence, and health research company that does a lot of government work, Morewedge devised Missing. Some subjects played the game, which takes about three hours to complete, while others watched a video about cognitive bias. All were tested on bias-mitigation skills before the training, immediately afterward, and then finally after eight to 12 weeks had passed.
  • “The literature on training suggests books and classes are fine entertainment but largely ineffectual. But the game has very large effects. It surprised everyone.”
  • he said he saw the results as supporting the research and insights of Richard Nisbett. “Nisbett’s work was largely written off by the field, the assumption being that training can’t reduce bias,
  • even the positive results reminded me of something Daniel Kahneman had told me. “Pencil-and-paper doesn’t convince me,” he said. “A test can be given even a couple of years later. But the test cues the test-taker. It reminds him what it’s all about.”
  • Morewedge told me that some tentative real-world scenarios along the lines of Missing have shown “promising results,” but that it’s too soon to talk about them.
  • In the future, I will monitor my thoughts and reactions as best I can
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