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Javier E

COVID-19: Individually Rational, Collectively Disastrous - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...617192

cognitive bias psychology infection pandemic

shared by Javier E on 25 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • One major problem is that stopping the virus from spreading requires us to override our basic intuitions.
  • Three cognitive biases make it hard for us to avoid actions that put us in great collective danger.
  • 1. Misleading Feedback
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  • some activities, including dangerous ones, provide negative feedback only rarely. When I am in a rush, I often cross the street at a red light. I understand intellectually that this is stupid, but I’ve never once seen evidence of my stupidity.
  • Exposure to COVID-19 works the same way. Every time you engage in a risky activity—like meeting up with your friends indoors—the world is likely to send you a signal that you made the right choice. I saw my pal and didn’t get sick. Clearly, I shouldn’t have worried so much about socializing!
  • Let’s assume, for example, that going to a large indoor gathering gives you a one in 20 chance of contracting COVID-19—a significant risk. Most likely, you’ll get away with it the first time. You’ll then infer that taking part in such gatherings is pretty safe, and will do so again. Eventually, you are highly likely to fall sick.
  • 2. Individually Rational, Collectively DisastrousWe tend to think behavior that is justifiable on the individual level is also justifiable on the collective level, and vice versa. If eating the occasional sugary treat is fine for me it’s fine for all of us. And if smoking indoors is bad for me, it’s bad for all of us.
  • The dynamics of contagion in a pandemic do not work like that
  • if everyone who isn’t at especially high risk held similar dinner parties, some percentage of these events would lead to additional infections. And because each newly infected person might spread the virus to others, everyone’s decision to hold a one-off dinner party would quickly lead to a significant spike in transmissions.
  • The dynamic here is reminiscent of classic collective-action problems. If you go to one dinner, you’ll likely be fine. But if everyone goes to one dinner, the virus will spread with such speed that your own chances of contracting COVID-19 will also rise precipitously.
  • 3. Dangers Are Hard to Recognize and Avoid
  • Many of the dangers we face in life are easy to spot—and we have, over many millennia, developed biological instincts and social conventions to avoid them
  • When we deal with an unaccustomed danger, such as a new airborne virus, we can’t rely on any of these protective mechanisms.
  • The virus is invisible. This makes it hard to spot or anticipate. We don’t see little viral particles floating through the air
  • In time, we can overcome these biases (at least to some extent).
  • Social disapprobation can help
  • We all should do what we can to identify the biases from which we suffer—and try to stop them from influencing our behavior.
Javier E

Climate Researchers Enlist Big Cloud Providers for Big Data Challenges - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ig-data-challenges-11606300202

climate cloud data research Big Data science

shared by Javier E on 27 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • “Sustainability, climate mitigation and climate adaptation is incredibly data-intensive. You’re talking about large amounts of data and you’re talking about large complex data sets,” he said. “Absolutely, cloud will play an increasingly important role.”
  • Microsoft Corp.’s AI for Earth program, for example, offers grants and technical help from Azure, its cloud division, for just such projects.
  • More broadly, tools like Amazon SageMaker, launched in 2017, allow software developers in any industry to build, train and use machine-learning models more quickly and with less technical complexity than in years prior, he said.
johnsonel7

Brainless Creatures Can Do Some Incredibly Smart Things - 0 views

www.nationalgeographic.com/...s-plants-jellyfish-osr-science

brain science

shared by johnsonel7 on 01 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • There's no denying that human intelligence makes our species stand out from other life on Earth. Our brains much more than our brawn account for our evolutionary successes—as well as our sometimes devastating impacts on the planet.
  • Depending on your definition, some basic hallmarks of intelligence—from decision-making to learning—can even be found in creatures that don't have brains at all.
  • These skills let slime molds do impressively well at some human tasks. When presented with bits of food arranged like the stops on Tokyo's rail system, branching slime molds come close to recreating the actual railway network. And in 2016, a team led by Macquarie University researcher Chris Reid showed that slime molds can solve the two-armed bandit problem—a decision-making test normally reserved for organisms with brains.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • they're facing the direction of next morning's sunrise, behavior that requires the plant to anticipate the future. What's more, young shoots of corn can “remember” the directions of light sources.
anniina03

People with at least two Northern Isles grandparents needed for genetics study - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...-east-orkney-shetland-51135287

science research

shared by anniina03 on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • People with at least two grandparents who were born in Orkney or Shetland are being sought for a genetics study aimed at improving health.The research aims to better understand the causes of conditions such as diabetes, stroke, heart disease and cancer, and in turn find treatments.Those taking part in the University of Edinburgh study-led Viking II project will complete an online questionnaire about their health and lifestyle.
  • The team believes the "unique genetic identity" of those with Northern Isles ancestry offers a "rare opportunity" to give a detailed picture on how genes are implicated in health
  • It is believed this information could be useful in terms of their future healthcare, including taking preventive actions to reduce the impact of health conditions.The study is being backed by the Medical Research Council.
krystalxu

When You Fear Making the "Wrong" Decision - 0 views

tinybuddha.com/...fear-making-the-wrong-decision

decision making psychology brain science fear choice science

shared by krystalxu on 08 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • “Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.”
  • mind resists all attempts to make any kind of decision at all.
  • immobilized, unable to push through the debilitating fear.
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  • I realized that the issue isn’t about being afraid to go to Korea. The real issue is that I have an overall fear of making the “wrong” decisions in my life.
  • Understand that there are no “wrong” decisions.
  • Listening closely to my fears about Korea made me aware of some pretty negative beliefs I held about myself and doubts I had in my abilities.
  • Make peace with your emotions.
  • I’m hearing the messages my mind, body, and spirit are trying to tell me because I’ve made a conscious decision to listen
  • It really takes the pressure off if you understand that every experience you have, whether you characterize it as “good” or “bad,” is exactly the experience you need to have at that moment. Some choices may lead to more painful lessons than others, but nothing hurts like living in fear.
  • Intuition can use fear to help you grow.
  • Fear is often described as a psychological response to a perceived threat.
  • It only makes sense to avoid things that can potentially harm you.
  • many of us have developed fear from negative experiences in our past.
  • We have built a protective fence around our emotional scars, and learned to ward off anybody or anything that triggers an unconscious fear.
  • The next time you feel fear, embrace it, examine it, and if guided to do so, move boldly toward it.
tongoscar

Violence in Mexico peaks as cartels fight over drugs and avocados - Los Angeles Times - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...exico-cartel-violence-avocados

shared by tongoscar on 25 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Mexico’s multibillion-dollar avocado industry, headquartered in Michoacan state, has become a prime target for cartels,
  • More than a dozen criminal groups are battling for control of the avocado trade in and around the city of Uruapan,
  • After seizing control of the forest in March, the Viagras announced a tax on residents who owned avocado trees, charging $250 a hectare in “protection fees.”
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  • Homicides are at an all-time high in Mexico, which has long been home to the world’s most powerful and violent narcotics traffickers. Yet much of the killing today has little to do with drugs.
  • In Mexico City, bar owners in upscale neighborhoods must pay taxes to a local gang, while on the nation’s highways, cargo robberies have risen more than 75% since 2016.
  • Compared with drug trafficking, a complex venture that requires managing contacts across the hemisphere, these new criminal enterprises are more like local businesses. The bar to entry is far lower.
  • Mexican forces, with strong U.S. support, focused on capturing or killing cartel leaders. But that strategy backfired as the big cartels fractured into smaller and nimbler organizations that sought criminal opportunity wherever they could find it.
  • Security has become so tenuous that in June a group of avocado producers bought ads in several national newspapers warning of an “irreparable impact” to the industry unless officials address the problem.
  • In August, the U.S. Department of Agriculture temporarily suspended its avocado inspection program in a town near Uruapan after threats to some of its employees.
tongoscar

Ridgecrest earthquakes show how small faults can trigger big quakes - Los Angeles Times - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...uake-ruptured-dozens-of-faults

shared by tongoscar on 25 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • When an earthquake strikes, the instinct of many Californians is to ask: Which fault ruptured — the Newport-Inglewood, the Hayward, the mighty San Andreas?
  • But scientists are increasingly saying it’s not that simple.
  • New research shows that the Ridgecrest earthquakes that began in July ruptured at least two dozen faults.
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  • The findings are important in helping understand how earthquakes can grow in the seconds after a fault ruptures, when two blocks of earth move away from each other.
  • The results provide even more evidence to support the idea that California faults once thought to be limited by their individual length can actually link together in a much more massive earthquake.
  • “The point is that the Landers earthquake and this earthquake are daisy-chaining up faults that previously were thought to rupture only by themselves, and that’s an important observation,”
  • The study raises the possibility that past earthquakes actually may have been bigger than previously thought.
  • In New Zealand, scientists were stunned at the bizarre map of the faults ruptured in the magnitude 7.8 Kaikoura earthquake of 2016, resembling an upside-down trident aimed at the silhouette of an eagle.
  • On a practical level, the research underscores the potential limitations of state earthquake zones designated to prevent new construction directly on top of faults,
  • Further analysis needs to be done to determine whether the 20 cross faults identified in the Ridgecrest study using computer analysis of shaking records actually broke the ground at the surface, according to Tim Dawson, a senior engineering geologist with the California Geological Survey.
  • A significant achievement of this study, Dolan said, was being able to image what faults look like deep underground, at a depth where earthquakes begin.
  • what this study proves is that the structural complexity continues deep underground where earthquakes begin, Dolan said.That’s important, Dolan said, because it may help scientists determine where future earthquakes are likely to stop, which tends to happen where faults become structurally complicated.
sanderk

The Truth Behind Why We Procrastinate - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...th-behind-why-we-procrastinate

procrastination psychology brain science research

shared by sanderk on 23 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Procrastination is the habit of putting off important, less pleasurable tasks by doing something that’s easier or more pleasurable. Email, Twitter, Facebook, food, and Netflix are a procrastinator’s best friends.
  • You procrastinate because: • You lack motivation, and/or • You underestimate the power of present emotions versus future emotions when you set your goals or make your task list.
  • But what if you could better anticipate your future emotions? What if you could feel the pain now of being up at three in the morning working on that report, instead of then? Or what if you could feel what it’s like to face yet another complaint against that toxic worker now, instead of next month?
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  • If you could better connect your current self with your future self, you would muster up the motivation you need to accomplish the task now, and not then.
  • Half of the participants were to consider that their “children” would begin college in 18 years, the other half in 6,570 days. Of course, this was the exact same amount of time. But did the way they counted time influence when would they start saving for that education? Interestingly, the “parents” who looked at matters from a “days” perspective planned to start saving four times sooner than parents planning from a “years” perspective. This experiment illustrated a valuable lesson: Procrastination can be overcome by finding a way to connect to your future self, now.
  • If you’re tempted to procrastinate, find a way to visualize your future self. Focus on the pain that results from putting things off, contrasted with the relief of having completed your task.
blythewallick

People with Depression Use Language Differently | JSTOR Daily - 0 views

daily.jstor.org/ssion-use-language-differently

science psychology research brain science language

shared by blythewallick on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • New research shows that people with depression use absolute words, such as “always,” “nothing,” or “completely,” more often than others.
  • Scientists have long tried to pin down the exact relationship between depression and language, and technology is helping us get closer to a full picture. Our new study, published in Clinical Psychological Science, has now unveiled a class of words that can help accurately predict whether someone is suffering from depression.
  • So far, personal essays and diary entries by depressed people have been useful, as has the work of well-known artists such as Cobain and Plath. For the spoken word, snippets of natural language of people with depression have also provided insight. Taken together, the findings from such research reveal clear and consistent differences in language between those with and without symptoms of depression.
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  • We know that rumination (dwelling on personal problems) and social isolation are common features of depression. However, we don’t know whether these findings reflect differences in attention or thinking style. Does depression cause people to focus on themselves, or do people who focus on themselves get symptoms of depression?
  • Our lab recently conducted a big data text analysis of 64 different online mental health forums, examining over 6,400 members. “Absolutist words” – which convey absolute magnitudes or probabilities, such as “always”, “nothing” or “completely” – were found to be better markers for mental health forums than either pronouns or negative emotion words.
  • From the outset, we predicted that those with depression will have a more black and white view of the world, and that this would manifest in their style of language.
  • Crucially, those who have previously had depressive symptoms are more likely to have them again. Therefore, their greater tendency for absolutist thinking, even when there are currently no symptoms of depression, is a sign that it may play a role in causing depressive episodes. The same effect is seen in use of pronouns, but not for negative emotion words.
  • But as the World Health Organisation estimates that more than 300m people worldwide are now living with depression, an increase of more than 18% since 2005, having more tools available to spot the condition is certainly important to improve health and prevent tragic suicides such as those of Plath and Cobain.
blythewallick

Better sleep habits lead to better college grades: Data on MIT students underscore the ... - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...191001083956.htm

psychology research knowledge brain science education

shared by blythewallick on 19 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Two MIT professors have found a strong relationship between students' grades and how much sleep they're getting. What time students go to bed and the consistency of their sleep habits also make a big difference. And no, getting a good night's sleep just before a big test is not good enough -- it takes several nights in a row of good sleep to make a difference.
  • 100 students in an MIT engineering class were given Fitbits, the popular wrist-worn devices that track a person's activity 24/7, in exchange for the researchers' access to a semester's worth of their activity data
  • One of the surprises was that individuals who went to bed after some particular threshold time -- for these students, that tended to be 2 a.m., but it varied from one person to another -- tended to perform less well on their tests no matter how much total sleep they ended up getting.
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  • "What we found at the end of the day was zero correlation with fitness, which I must say was disappointing since I believed, and still believe, there is a tremendous positive impact of exercise on cognitive performance," Grossman says.
  • "When you go to bed matters," Grossman says. "If you get a certain amount of sleep -- let's say seven hours -- no matter when you get that sleep, as long as it's before certain times, say you go to bed at 10, or at 12, or at 1, your performance is the same. But if you go to bed after 2, your performance starts to go down even if you get the same seven hours. So, quantity isn't everything."
  • those who got relatively consistent amounts of sleep each night did better than those who had greater variations from one night to the next, even if they ended up with the same average amount.
  • The overall course grades for students averaging six and a half hours of sleep were down 50 percent from other students who averaged just one hour more sleep. Similarly, those who had just a half-hour more night-to-night variation in their total sleep time had grades that dropped 45 percent below others with less variation. This is huge!"
blythewallick

Opinion | One Cure for Malnutrition of the Soul - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...faith-catholic-pilgrimage.html

shared by blythewallick on 19 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • We do not have all the answers. We are on a spiritual journey.
  • Britain — and much of Europe, the theological cradle of Christianity — has perhaps never been so removed from belief in God. Elsewhere, the world is becoming more religious, and Christianity is growing, robustly so in China and Africa. With 2.2 billion followers, the faith that began as a small Jewish sect is by far the planet’s most popular and diverse religion.
  • While organized religion may be dying in Europe, the pilgrim trails of the Via Francigena, and the better-known Camino de Santiago in Spain, are drawing crowds.
    • blythewallick
      blythewallick on 19 Oct 19
       
      Interesting to consider why some places are losing touch with Christianity, while others are rapidly expanding the religion.
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  • But for many of us, malnutrition of the soul is a plague of modern life. That’s one reason 200 million people worldwide a year make some form of religious pilgrimage.
  • At a Benedictine monastery in a tiny village in northern France, it was strangely moving to eat dinner in utter silence among a handful of men who’ve shed all material comforts to engage in rigorous daily aerobics of the soul. I missed Wi-Fi, Twitter, emails and endless digital updates, until I didn’t.
  • Doubts are allowed by God,”
  • “It’s a bit like training for sports. If you only ride a bicycle with the wind at your back, that’s not going to help you. You need to ride your bike against the wind.”
  • Do we “allow ourselves to be amazed?” he said. “Do we let ourselves be surprised?”
blythewallick

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

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

science psychology research brain science

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

How Procrastination Affects Your Health - Thrive Global - 0 views

thriveglobal.com/...astination-affects-your-health

procrastination health Technology

shared by sanderk on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • fine line between procrastination and being “pressure prompted.” If you’re like me and pressure prompted, you are someone who often does your best work when faced with a looming deadline. While being pressure prompted may entail a bit of procrastination, it is procrastination within acceptable limits. In other words, it is a set of conditions that offers just enough pressure to ensure you’re at the top of your game without divulging into chaos or most importantly, impacting other members of your team by preventing them from delivering their best work in a timely manner.
  • Procrastination is a condition that has consequences on one’s mental and physical health and performance at school and in the workplace.
  • Piers Steel defines procrastination as “a self-regulatory failure leading to poor performance and reduced well-being.” Notably, Steel further emphasizes that procrastination is both common (80% to 90% of college-age students suffer from it at least some of the time) and something most people (95%) wish to overcome.
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  • Steel even argues that procrastination may now be on the rise as people increasingly turn to the immediate gratification made possible by information technologies and specifically, social media platforms.
  • for a small percentage of people, procrastination isn’t just a temporary or occasional problem but rather something that comes to structure their lives and ultimately limit their potential.
  • In a 2008 study, Peter Gröpel & Piers Steel investigated predictors of procrastination in a large Internet-based study that included over 9,000 participants. Their results revealed two important findings. First, their results showed that goal setting reduced procrastination; second, they found that it was strongly associated with lack of energy.
  • While it is true that intrinsically motivated people may have an easier time getting into flow, anyone, even a chronic procrastinator, can cultivate flow. The first step is easy—it simply entails coming up with a clear goal.
  • The second step is to stop feeling ashamed about your procrastinating tendencies.
  • sanderk on 21 Oct 19
     
    This article is very interesting because it says that procrastination is not necessarily bad. Procrastination can be good for people in small quantities because it causes them to be pressured into actually doing their work. However, there is a point where procrastination becomes an issue. I find it interesting how phones and computers have caused procrastination problems to become more severe. Phones and computers can give people instant gratification which leads to more procrastination. As the article says if people set goals for themselves and are disciplined they can overcome procrastination.
krystalxu

What Is Behavioral Economics? | Psychology Today - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...what-is-behavioral-economics

Behavioral Economics

shared by krystalxu on 09 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • behavioral economics shows that actual human beings do not act that way. People have limited cognitive abilities and a great deal of trouble exercising self-control.
  • That is, there is no dominant decision maker. Although the behavioral goal of an individual can be stated as maximizing happiness, reaching that goal requires contributions from several brain regions.
  • krystalxu on 09 Mar 18
     
    "Behavioral Economics"
Javier E

Slate Suspends Podcast Host After Debate Over Racial Slur - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...late-mike-pesca-suspended.html

censorship racist term discussion language overreaction

shared by Javier E on 23 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • The online publication Slate has suspended a well-known podcast host after he debated with colleagues over whether people who are not Black should be able to quote a racial slur in some contexts.
  • he was suspended indefinitely on Monday after defending the use of the slur in certain contexts. He made his argument during a conversation last week with colleagues on the interoffice messaging platform Slack.
  • Slate staff members were discussing the resignation of Donald G. McNeil Jr., a reporter who said this month that he was resigning from The New York Times after he had used the slur during a discussion of racism while working as a guide on a student trip in 2019.
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  • Mr. Pesca, who is white, said he felt there were contexts in which the slur could be used, according to screen shots of the Slack conversation that were shared with The Times
  • In November 2019, Slate introduced a policy that required podcast hosts and producers to discuss the use of racist terms in a pending episode, in or out of quoted material, before recording it.
  • Mr. Pesca explored the argument over the use of the slur in a 2019 podcast about a Black security guard who was fired for using it. In one recording of the episode, Mr. Pesca said, he used the term while quoting the man, but asked his producer to make a version without the term. After consulting with his producers and his supervisor, who objected to his quotation of the slur, they decided to go with the version without it, he said
  • “The version of the story with the offensive word never aired, and this is how I think the editorial process should go,” Mr. Pesca said in the interview.
  • No action was taken against him after a human resources investigation into his quotation of the slur, Mr. Pesca said
  • He said he had apologized to the producers involved.
  • Mr. Pesca said Mr. Check, the chief executive, and Jared Hohlt, Slate’s editor in chief, had brought up the previous instance of his quoting the slur when they spoke with him after the Slack conversation
  • Mr. Pesca, whose interview style at times seemed to embody Slate's contrarian brand, said he was told on Friday that he would be suspended for a week without pay. On Monday he was informed that the suspension was indefinite,
  • Mr. Pesca, who has worked at Slate for seven years, said he was “heartsick” over hurting his colleagues but added, “I hate the idea of things that are beyond debate and things that cannot be said.”
  • “I don’t think he did anything that merits discipline or consequences, and I think it’s an example of a kind of overreaction and a lack of judgment and perspective that is unfortunately spreading,”
  • Joel Anderson, a Black staff member at Slate who hosted the third season of the podcast “Slow Burn,” disagreed. “For Black employees, it’s an extremely small ask to not hear that particular slur and not have debate about whether it’s OK for white employees to use that particular slur,”
Javier E

Why Baseball Is Obsessed With the Book 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...inking-fast-and-slow-book.html

baseball cognitive bias cognitive psychology knowledge

shared by Javier E on 24 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • In Teaford’s case, the scouting evaluation was predisposed to a mental shortcut called the representativeness heuristic, which was first defined by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In such cases, an assessment is heavily influenced by what is believed to be the standard or the ideal.
  • Kahneman, a professor emeritus at Princeton University and a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, later wrote “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” a book that has become essential among many of baseball’s front offices and coaching staffs.
  • “Pretty much wherever I go, I’m bothering people, ‘Have you read this?’” said Mejdal, now an assistant general manager with the Baltimore Orioles.
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  • There aren’t many explicit references to baseball in “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” yet many executives swear by it
  • The central thesis of Kahneman’s book is the interplay between each mind’s System 1 and System 2, which he described as a “psychodrama with two characters.”
  • A few, though, swear by it. Andrew Friedman, the president of baseball operations for the Dodgers, recently cited the book as having “a real profound impact,” and said he reflects back on it when evaluating organizational processes. Keith Law, a former executive for the Toronto Blue Jays, wrote the book “Inside Game” — an examination of bias and decision-making in baseball — that was inspired by “Thinking, Fast and Slow.”
  • “As the decision tree in baseball has changed over time, this helps all of us better understand why it needed to change,” Mozeliak wrote in an email. He said that was especially true when “working in a business that many decisions are based on what we see, what we remember, and what is intuitive to our thinking.”
  • “From coaches to front office people, some get back to me and say this has changed their life. They never look at decisions the same way.
  • System 1 is a person’s instinctual response — one that can be enhanced by expertise but is automatic and rapid. It seeks coherence and will apply relevant memories to explain events.
  • System 2, meanwhile, is invoked for more complex, thoughtful reasoning — it is characterized by slower, more rational analysis but is prone to laziness and fatigue.
  • Kahneman wrote that when System 2 is overloaded, System 1 could make an impulse decision, often at the expense of self-control
  • No area of baseball is more susceptible to bias than scouting, in which organizations aggregate information from disparate sources:
  • “The independent opinion aspect is critical to avoid the groupthink and be aware of momentum,”
  • Matt Blood, the director of player development for the Orioles, first read “Thinking, Fast and Slow” as a Cardinals area scout nine years ago and said that he still consults it regularly. He collaborated with a Cardinals analyst to develop his own scouting algorithm as a tripwire to mitigate bias
  • Mejdal himself fell victim to the trap of the representativeness heuristic when he started with the Cardinals in 2005
Javier E

The Philosopher Redefining Equality | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...hilosopher-redefining-equality

philosophy equality political theory culture

shared by Javier E on 26 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • The bank experience showed how you could be oppressed by hierarchy, working in an environment where you were neither free nor equal. But this implied that freedom and equality were bound together in some way beyond the basic state of being unenslaved, which was an unorthodox notion. Much social thought is rooted in the idea of a conflict between the two.
  • If individuals exercise freedoms, conservatives like to say, some inequalities will naturally result. Those on the left basically agree—and thus allow constraints on personal freedom in order to reduce inequality. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin called the opposition between equality and freedom an “intrinsic, irremovable element in human life.” It is our fate as a society, he believed, to haggle toward a balance between them.
  • What if they weren’t opposed, Anderson wondered, but, like the sugar-phosphate chains in DNA, interlaced in a structure that we might not yet understand?
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  • At fifty-nine, Anderson is the chair of the University of Michigan’s department of philosophy and a champion of the view that equality and freedom are mutually dependent, enmeshed in changing conditions through time.
  • She has built a case, elaborated across decades, that equality is the basis for a free society
  • Because she brings together ideas from both the left and the right to battle increasing inequality, Anderson may be the philosopher best suited to this awkward moment in American life. She builds a democratic frame for a society in which people come from different places and are predisposed to disagree.
  • she sketched out the entry-level idea that one basic way to expand equality is by expanding the range of valued fields within a society.
  • The ability not to have an identity that one carries from sphere to sphere but, rather, to be able to slip in and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining one’s identities in other domains?” She paused. “That is what it is to be free.”
  • How do you move from a basic model of egalitarian variety, in which everybody gets a crack at being a star at something, to figuring out how to respond to a complex one, where people, with different allotments of talent and virtue, get unequal starts, and often meet with different constraints along the way?
  • The problem, she proposed, was that contemporary egalitarian thinkers had grown fixated on distribution: moving resources from lucky-seeming people to unlucky-seeming people, as if trying to spread the luck around.
  • Egalitarians should agree about clear cases of blameless misfortune: the quadriplegic child, the cognitively impaired adult, the teen-ager born into poverty with junkie parents. But Anderson balked there, too. By categorizing people as lucky or unlucky, she argued, these egalitarians set up a moralizing hierarchy.
  • In Anderson’s view, the way forward was to shift from distributive equality to what she called relational, or democratic, equality: meeting as equals, regardless of where you were coming from or going to.
  • By letting the lucky class go on reaping the market’s chancy rewards while asking others to concede inferior status in order to receive a drip-drip-drip of redistributive aid, these egalitarians were actually entrenching people’s status as superior or subordinate.
  • To the ugly and socially awkward: . . . Maybe you won’t be such a loser in love once potential dates see how rich you are.
  • . To the stupid and untalented: Unfortunately, other people don’t value what little you have to offer in the system of production. . . . Because of the misfortune that you were born so poorly endowed with talents, we productive ones will make it up to you: we’ll let you share in the bounty of what we have produced with our vastly superior and highly valued abilities. . . 
  • she imagined some citizens getting a state check and a bureaucratic letter:
  • This was, at heart, an exercise of freedom. The trouble was that many people, picking up on libertarian misconceptions, thought of freedom only in the frame of their own actions.
  • To be truly free, in Anderson’s assessment, members of a society had to be able to function as human beings (requiring food, shelter, medical care), to participate in production (education, fair-value pay, entrepreneurial opportunity), to execute their role as citizens (freedom to speak and to vote), and to move through civil society (parks, restaurants, workplaces, markets, and all the rest).
  • Anderson’s democratic model shifted the remit of egalitarianism from the idea of equalizing wealth to the idea that people should be equally free, regardless of their differences.
  • A society in which everyone had the same material benefits could still be unequal, in this crucial sense; democratic equality, being predicated on equal respect, wasn’t something you could simply tax into existence. “People, not nature, are responsible for turning the natural diversity of human beings into oppressive hierarchies,”
  • Her first book, “Value in Ethics and Economics,” appeared that year, announcing one of her major projects: reconciling value (an amorphous ascription of worth that is a keystone of ethics and economics) with pluralism (the fact that people seem to value things in different ways).
  • Philosophers have often assumed that pluralistic value reflects human fuzziness—we’re loose, we’re confused, and we mix rational thought with sentimental responses.
  • She offered an “expressive” theory: in her view, each person’s values could be various because they were socially expressed, and thus shaped by the range of contexts and relationships at play in a life. Instead of positing value as a basic, abstract quality across society (the way “utility” functioned for economists), she saw value as something determined by the details of an individual’s history.
  • Like her idea of relational equality, this model resisted the temptation to flatten human variety toward a unifying standard. In doing so, it helped expand the realm of free and reasoned economic choice.
  • Anderson’s model unseated the premises of rational-choice theory, in which individuals invariably make utility-maximizing decisions, occasionally in heartless-seeming ways. It ran with, rather than against, moral intuition. Because values were plural, it was perfectly rational to choose to spend evenings with your family, say, and have guilt toward the people you left in the lurch at work.
  • The theory also pointed out the limits on free-market ideologies, such as libertarianism.
  • In ethics, it broke across old factional debates. The core idea “has been picked up on by people across quite a range of positions,” Peter Railton, one of Anderson’s longtime colleagues, says. “Kantians and consequentialists alike”—people who viewed morality in terms of duties and obligations, and those who measured the morality of actions by their effects in the world—“could look at it and see something important.”
  • Traditionally, the discipline is taught through a-priori thought—you start with basic principles and reason forward. Anderson, by contrast, sought to work empirically, using information gathered from the world, identifying problems to be solved not abstractly but through the experienced problems of real people.
  • “Dewey argued that the primary problems for ethics in the modern world concerned the ways society ought to be organized, rather than personal decisions of the individual,”
  • In 2004, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy asked Anderson to compose its entry on the moral philosophy of John Dewey, who helped carry pragmatist methods into the social realm. Dewey had an idea of democracy as a system of good habits that began in civil life. He was an anti-ideologue with an eye for pluralism.
  • She started working with historians, trying to hone her understanding of ideas by studying them in the context of their creation. Take Rousseau’s apparent support of direct democracy. It’s rarely mentioned that, at the moment when he made that argument, his home town of Geneva had been taken over by oligarchs who claimed to represent the public. Pragmatism said that an idea was an instrument, which naturally gave rise to such questions as: an instrument for what, and where, and when?
  • In “What Is the Point of Equality?,” Anderson had already started to drift away from what philosophers, following Rawls, call ideal theory, based on an end vision for a perfectly just society. As Anderson began a serious study of race in America, though, she found herself losing faith in that approach entirely.
  • Broadly, there’s a culturally right and a culturally left ideal theory for race and society. The rightist version calls for color blindness. Instead of making a fuss about skin and ethnicity, its advocates say, society should treat people as people, and let the best and the hardest working rise.
  • The leftist theory envisions identity communities: for once, give black people (or women, or members of other historically oppressed groups) the resources and opportunities they need, including, if they want it, civil infrastructure for themselves.
  • In “The Imperative of Integration,” published in 2010, Anderson tore apart both of these models. Sure, it might be nice to live in a color-blind society, she wrote, but that’s nothing like the one that exists.
  • But the case for self-segregation was also weak. Affinity groups provided welcome comfort, yet that wasn’t the same as power or equality, Anderson pointed out. And there was a goose-and-gander problem. Either you let only certain groups self-segregate (certifying their subordinate status) or you also permitted, say, white men to do it,
  • Anderson’s solution was “integration,” a concept that, especially in progressive circles, had been uncool since the late sixties. Integration, by her lights, meant mixing on the basis of equality.
  • in attending to these empirical findings over doctrine, she announced herself as a non-ideal theorist: a philosopher with no end vision of society. The approach recalls E. L. Doctorow’s description of driving at night: “You can see only as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
  • or others, though, a white woman making recommendations on race policy raised questions of perspective. She was engaging through a mostly white Anglo-American tradition. She worked from the premise that, because she drew on folders full of studies, the limits of her own perspective were not constraining.
  • Some philosophers of color welcomed the book. “She’s taking the need for racial justice seriously, and you could hardly find another white political philosopher over a period of decades doing that,”
  • Recently, Anderson changed the way she assigns undergraduate essays: instead of requiring students to argue a position and fend off objections, doubling down on their original beliefs, she asks them to discuss their position with someone who disagrees, and to explain how and why, if at all, the discussion changed their views.
  • The challenge of pluralism is the challenge of modern society: maintaining equality amid difference in a culture given to constant and unpredictable change.
  • Rather than fighting for the ascendancy of certain positions, Anderson suggests, citizens should fight to bolster healthy institutions and systems—those which insure that all views and experiences will be heard. Today’s righteous projects, after all, will inevitably seem fatuous and blinkered from the vantage of another age.
  • Smith saw the markets as an escape from that order. Their “most important” function, he explained, was to bring “liberty and security” to those “who had before lived almost in a continual state of war with their neighbours, and of servile dependency upon their superiors.”
  • Anderson zeroed in on Adam Smith, whose “The Wealth of Nations,” published in 1776, is taken as a keystone of free-market ideology. At the time, English labor was subject to uncompensated apprenticeships, domestic servitude, and some measure of clerical dominion.
  • Smith, in other words, was an egalitarian. He had written “The Wealth of Nations” in no small part to be a solution to what we’d now call structural inequality—the intractable, compounding privileges of an arbitrary hierarchy.
  • It was a historical irony that, a century later, writers such as Marx pointed to the market as a structure of dominion over workers; in truth, Smith and Marx had shared a socioeconomic project. And yet Marx had not been wrong to trash Smith’s ideas, because, during the time between them, the world around Smith’s model had changed, and it was no longer a useful tool.
  • mages of free market society that made sense prior to the Industrial Revolution continue to circulate today as ideals, blind to the gross mismatch between the background social assumptions reigning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and today’s institutional realities. We are told that our choice is between free markets and state control, when most adults live their working lives under a third thing entirely: private government.
  • Today, people still try to use, variously, both Smith’s and Marx’s tools on a different, postindustrial world:
  • The unnaturalness of this top-heavy arrangement, combined with growing evidence of power abuses, has given many people reason to believe that something is fishy about the structure of American equality. Socialist and anti-capitalist models are again in vogue.
  • Anderson offers a different corrective path. She thinks it’s fine for some people to earn more than others. If you’re a brilliant potter, and people want to pay you more than the next guy for your pottery, great!
  • The problem isn’t that talent and income are distributed in unequal parcels. The problem is that Jeff Bezos earns more than a hundred thousand dollars a minute, while Amazon warehouse employees, many talented and hardworking, have reportedly resorted to urinating in bottles in lieu of a bathroom break. That circumstance reflects some structure of hierarchical oppression. It is a rip in the democratic fabric, and it’s increasingly the norm.
  • Andersonism holds that we don’t have to give up on market society if we can recognize and correct for its limitations—it may even be our best hope, because it’s friendlier to pluralism than most alternatives are.
  • we must be flexible. We must remain alert. We must solve problems collaboratively, in the moment, using society’s ears and eyes and the best tools that we can find.
  • “You can see that, from about 1950 to 1970, the typical American’s wages kept up with productivity growth,” she said. Then, around 1974, she went on, hourly compensation stagnated. American wages have been effectively flat for the past few decades, with the gains of productivity increasingly going to shareholders and to salaries for big bosses.
  • What changed? Anderson rattled off a constellation of factors, from strengthened intellectual-property law to winnowed antitrust law. Financialization, deregulation. Plummeting taxes on capital alongside rising payroll taxes. Privatization, which exchanged modest public-sector salaries for C.E.O. paydays. She gazed into the audience and blinked. “So now we have to ask: What has been used to justify this rather dramatic shift of labor-share of income?”
  • It was no wonder that industrial-age thinking was riddled with contradictions: it reflected what Anderson called “the plutocratic reversal” of classical liberal ideas. Those perversely reversed ideas about freedom were the ones that found a home in U.S. policy, and, well, here we were.
Javier E

Boris Johnson's blundering was political genius. But now that moment has passed | Steph... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ris-johnson-brexit-coronavirus

leadership group great theory genius psychology research

shared by Javier E on 07 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • One of the most potent and enduring myths in our society is that leadership is reducible to the power of the leader. A few special individuals are blessed with special qualities that set them apart from the rest of us and entitle them to rule. As Thomas Carlyle asserted, “Universal history … is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here.” If only we could isolate the qualities that make these leaders exceptional.
  • Such ideas launched numerous studies that sought to find personality characteristics that predict leadership success – none of them particularly fruitful.
  • such an approach misses a very obvious point: leaders only achieve anything through their followers, and “great man” theories write the followers out of history.
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  • And leaders are never just leaders, they are always leaders of a particular social group – a nation, a political party, a religion
  • leadership is a group process: and, more specifically, it is the cultivation of a “we” relationship between leaders and followers.
  • Effective leadership, then, is not about what separates the leader from others. It is about what brings the leader together with group members and allows him or her to represent them
  • n effective leader is one who is seen to be one of us, to work for us and to achieve the things we value. That isn’t about being ordinary or typical. It is about being prototypical – of representing the values and the qualities that make our group distinctive.
  • In addition, effective leaders are not passive. They actively craft the group narrative and their own personal narrative to make the two mesh: they are skilled entrepreneurs of identity.
  • Hence, no given set of qualities will guarantee effective leadership, for these will change according to the identity of the group.
  • the performative politics of populism can backfire by making one unrepresentative as the groupings change. In the midst of a pandemic where the widest possible compliance to restrictive measures is necessary, the nation and its communities must be unified and inclusive. The inherently divisive categories of populism are no longer tenable.
  • Moreover, we need competent governance to get us through, rather than insurgent incompetence to get our votes. In this global crisis, our blundering prime minister is no longer of the group, nor for the group, and certainly not achieving what the group needs.
Javier E

Opinion | Standard metrics won't suffice. Here's how to measure Trump's failures so the... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-99a1-71343d03bc29_story.html

metrics comparative statistics rhetoric language psychology

shared by Javier E on 04 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Maybe what’s needed are different units for measuring the Trump administration’s failures and scandals, since the standard metrics aren’t registering. His record should be quantified in scales that a Fox News viewer might be more familiar with: not body counts or dollars, but Benghazis and Solyndras.
  • For instance, sometimes pundits try to put the 183,000 covid-19 deaths in context by noting that cumulative deaths per capita in the United States are double those of Canada, quintuple those of Germany, 20 times those of Australia, 90 times those of South Korea, and so on.
  • here’s a different way to contextualize this national trauma: The number of lives lost to covid-19 is roughly equal to the death toll of 60 9/11 attacks.
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  • Last week alone, though, 1.6 million people newly applied for unemployment benefits. That’s the equivalent of 2,300 Carrier plants
  • Somehow, for years, the four tragic deaths in Benghazi consumed the agenda of six GOP-controlled congressional committees and the programming of the most-watched cable news channel. But today, a deadly shock magnified by government ineptitude that has led to 46,000 times as many lives lost “is what it is.”
  • the coronavirus death toll is about 46,000 Benghazis
  • According to congressional investigators, Navarro negotiated a contract that resulted in the government overpaying for ventilators by $500 million. (The contract was canceled Monday.) He also championed a $765 million federal loan to Eastman Kodak to transform it into a drugmaker. (The loan has since unraveled and is the subject of a securities investigation.)
  • So how many taxpayer dollars was Navarro involved in wasting through these two deals alone? Measured in units that should be familiar to consumers of right-wing news, it’s roughly two Solyndras.
  • The debt increase under Trump during a single term is on track to surpass that under Obama across two terms.
  • For each Hillary Clinton private email scandal (one), there are at least eight senior Trump officials who have reportedly used private email to conduct official business
  • For every Obama-era incident involving supposed retaliation against political opponents, there are literally dozens of instances of Trump trying to use the power of his office to punish perceived enemie
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