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carolinewren

Bridgegate scandal coverage puts media 'bias' on 'full display,' Christie says | NJ.com - 0 views

www.nj.com/...ge_puts_media_bias_on_ful.html

media bias coverage

shared by carolinewren on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Gov. Chris Christie insisted during his latest trip to New Hampshire that the fallout from the George Washington Bridge scandal wouldn't have been as nearly as intense if he were a Democrat.
  • argued to early-primary voters Hillary Clinton escaped scrutiny for clearing the private server housing emails from her tenure as secretary of state because she's a Democrat and he declared "bias is on full display" when that's compared to his own controversy.
  • "Could you imagine if my response the day after
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • "As you all know, I went through a really fun time the last 15 months with lots of different people investigating me too, right?"
  • all of that happened last January was, 'Oh, by the way, ... I have a private email server and all my emails were on this private server and I deleted a bunch of them, but they were only personal, and you're going to have to take my word for it cause the servers gone."
  • "There is a bias," Christie insisted
  • not the first time the governor suggested media bias was to blame for the fallout of the George Washington Bridge lane closure controversy.
  • December 2013, a month before the now infamous "time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee" email from a top Christie staffer was revealed, Christie brushed off questions about the lane closures during a Statehouse news conference
  • "I know you guys are obsessed with this, I'm not. I'm really not. It's not that big a deal," Christie insisted. "Just because press runs around and writes about it, both here and nationally, I know why that is and so do you, let's not pretend it's because of the gravity of the issue. It's because I am a national figure and anything like this will be written a lot about now, so let's not pretend this is some grave thing."
  • Christie signaled in New Hampshire he's intent on pressing Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner in the 2016 presidential race, on the attacks in Benghazi, Libya that's been a lighting rod for Clinton critics just as the governor declared during a recent trip here that he's done "apologizing" for the Bridgegate scandal
  • "I don't think there's been nearly enough questions asked about this," Christie said. "We need to ask a lot more questions about Benghazi. We need to get to the bottom of what happened because it does matter, madam secretary."
ilanaprincilus06

Towns Reel As Banks Close Branches In Record Numbers : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-close-branches-at-record-pace

Banks Covid-19

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Banks have been permanently shuttering branches for years, but the number of closures hit a record in 2020 as the pandemic accelerated the move by many customers to online banking.
  • Banks closed 3,324 branches last year, according to a tally by S&P Global Market Intelligence.
  • And bank branch closures are especially affecting isolated neighborhoods in big cities or towns like Moorhead — a largely African American community in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • "The reality is, the vast majority of the activity that happens in a branch is not revenue generating,"
  • poor communities, rural communities and areas with a high concentration of Black and brown residents have been hardest hit.
  • "It's a good thing that banks are moving away from charging those kinds of fees, but it's a bad thing that they're moving away from serving those neighborhoods,"
  • It can also push people to more expensive options such as check-cashing stores or payday lenders.
  • It's a trend that's unlikely to reverse now that the pandemic has pushed more customers to bank on smartphones and computers.
  • Williams understands that for small towns a bank can be more than a place to cash a check. It can also be the place to catch up or gossip about what's going on around town.
  • People want to come to that bank branch because it's social."
  • Even though a lot of banking can now be done online, an FDIC survey found that 83% of people still met with a teller or other bank employee at least once during 2019.
  • "A lot of banks have utilized the pandemic to justify downsizing even more,"
  • "When you have young boys and girls riding by and seeing empty buildings, or that building which was once a bank is turned over to a payday lender, what message are we sending?" he asks. "Is my neighborhood not a priority?"
kaylynfreeman

Cognitive Bias - TOK Topics - 0 views

toktopics.com/...cognitive-bias

shared by kaylynfreeman on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • “People who are anxious because of the uncertainty that surrounds them are going to be attracted to messages that offer them certainty. The need for closure is the need for certainty. To have clear-cut knowledge. You feel that you need to stop processing too much information, stop listening to a variety of information and zero in on what, to you, appears to be the truth. The need for closure is absolutely essential but it can also be extremely dangerous.”
  • gether, and
jmfinizio

Jordan McNair: University of Maryland reaches $3.5 million settlement with football pla... - 0 views

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

football player settlement

shared by jmfinizio on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The University of Maryland has reached a $3.5 million settlement with the family of Jordan McNair, the offensive lineman who died after suffering heatstroke during a team workout in 2018.
  • "This has been a long and painful fight, but we will attempt to find closure even though this is a wound that will never, ever fully heal,"
  • An independent medical report found several issues with his treatment, including failure to assess his vital signs, not having proper cooling devices and failure to recognize quickly he was having heat illness.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "We are focused on honoring Jordan's legacy so that his death was not in vain. This includes protecting student athletes of all levels of competition, increasing awareness, education, and prevention of all heat-related illnesses, empowering student athletes, and introducing legislation nationwide so that no parent should have to wait this long for closure where their child has been treated unfairly or unjustly,"
  • the "university accepts legal and moral responsibility for the mistakes that our training staff made on that fateful workout day."
  • "This is not at all a reflection of my opinion of Coach Durkin as a person. However, a departure is in the best interest of the university,"
cvanderloo

'All Hands On Deck': National Mall Is Closed As Agencies Fortify D.C. : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...closed-as-agencies-fortify-d-c

election inauguration biden trump DC capitol

shared by cvanderloo on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The National Mall, where millions of people have gathered to mark historic events in Washington, D.C., was closed to the public late Friday morning, as officials announced a string of security measures meant to foil any attempts to derail next week's inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden.
  • They urged people to enjoy the inauguration from home and to follow it online rather than in person.
  • With the National Mall closure, the public will be barred from entering an area some 2 miles in length from the Capitol complex to the Potomac River;
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Many streets are also being closed off, including the Memorial Bridge that runs from the Lincoln Memorial in D.C. across the Potomac River to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
  • The National Park Service began a "temporary public closure" of the National Mall
  • Once a security perimeter is fully in place, any vehicle that enters will have to do so through a checkpoint, where it will be "searched for explosives, weapons and other prohibited items,"
  • Bowser acknowledged that while she agrees that the security measures, including a new fence around the Capitol complex, are necessary and prudent, she isn't happy that large chunks of her city now look like militarized zones.
  • The National Guard did not have a representative at the briefing. When asked what Guard members' rules of engagement will be, Miller of the Secret Service said the National Guard is "printing rules of engagement cards for each of its soldiers deployed on this exercise."
tongoscar

U.S. prepares for coronavirus pandemic, school and business closures: health officials ... - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...health-officials-idUSKBN20F2GS

shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • The United States has yet to see community spread of the virus that emerged in central China in late December. But health authorities are preparing medical personnel for the risk, Nancy Messonnier, an official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told reporters on a conference call.
  • The World Health Organization has warned that the window of opportunity to contain the international spread of the epidemic that has killed more than 2,200 people was closing, as the virus has spread to some 26 countries with a large cluster in South Korea and recent outbreaks in Iran, Lebanon and Italy
  • “Our goal continues to be to slow the introduction of the virus into the U.S. This buys us more time to prepare communities for more cases and possibly sustained spread.”
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  • “We’re not seeing community spread here in the United States yet, but it’s very possible, even likely, that it may eventually happen,” Messonnier said.
  • “If we do well, we can avert any serious crisis, but if we squander the opportunity then we will have a serious problem on our hands,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in Geneva.
  • The United States currently has 13 cases of people diagnosed with the virus within the country and 21 cases among Americans repatriated on evacuation flights from Wuhan, China, and from the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan, CDC said.
sissij

What Michelle Obama Wore and Why It Mattered - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-obama-first-lady-fashion.html

new york times social media psychology

shared by sissij on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • it had just been revealed that the campaign clothes budget for Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, was $150,000
  • And thus was an eight-year obsession born. Not to mention a new approach to the story of dress and power.
  • it set in motion a strategic rethink about the use of clothes that not only helped define her tenure as first lady, but also started a conversation that went far beyond the label or look that she wore and that is only now, maybe, reaching its end.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • If you know everyone is going to see what you wear and judge it, then what you wear becomes fraught with meaning.
  • She realized very early on that everything she did had ramifications
  • Just because something appears trivial does not mean it is any less powerful as a means of persuasion and outreach. In some ways its very triviality — the fact that everyone could talk about it, dissect it, imitate it — makes fashion the most potentially viral item in the subliminal political toolbox.
  • as she said to Vogue in her third cover story, the most of any first lady, one of the factors in choosing a garment always has to be, “Is it cute?”
  • she saw it as a way to frame her own independence and points of difference, add to her portfolio and amplify her husband’s agenda.
  • Mrs. Obama seemed to work with them all.
  • We all tend to gravitate toward certain designers in part because of sheer laziness: We know what suits us, what we like, and so we go there first. To have been so, well, evenhanded in her choices could have happened only with careful calculation.
  • Especially because Mrs. Obama not only wore their clothes, she also took their business seriously, framing fashion as a credible, covetable job choice during her education initiatives.
  • If you think that was an accident, there’s a bridge I can sell you — just as the fact she wore Jason Wu to her husband’s farewell address in Chicago, a designer she also wore at both inaugural balls, was no coincidence. It was closure.
  • But above all, her wardrobe was representative of the country her husband wanted to lead.
  • It may be because the point of what Mrs. Obama wore was never simply that it was good to mix up your wardrobe among a group of designers, but rather that clothes were most resonant when they were an expression of commitment to an idea, or an ideal, that had resonance.
  • sissij on 16 Jan 17
     
    This article takes a close look to Mrs. Obama's wardrobe, which I found to be very interesting. Even clothes can represent what a person is think about. There is a quote in this article that I really like: "Just because something appears trial does not mean it is any less powerful as a means of persuasion and outreach." Especial that it is the era of internet and you can find literally every detail online. People always like to assign meanings to things they see, though sometimes others don't mean it. Also, people are very easily influenced by social medias. For example, when I finish reading this article, the clothes Mrs. Obama chose suddenly become meaningful. Twenty-first century is an era of information. Even the smallest thing such as clothing can be a delivery of information
Javier E

The Failure of Rational Choice Philosophy - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-failure-of-rational-choice

rational choice philosophy economics theory individualism

shared by Javier E on 30 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • According to Hegel, history is idea-driven.
  • Ideas for him are public, rather than in our heads, and serve to coordinate behavior. They are, in short, pragmatically meaningful words.  To say that history is “idea driven” is to say that, like all cooperation, nation building requires a common basic vocabulary.
  • One prominent component of America’s basic vocabulary is ”individualism.”
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  • individualism, the desire to control one’s own life, has many variants. Tocqueville viewed it as selfishness and suspected it, while Emerson and Whitman viewed it as the moment-by-moment expression of one’s unique self and loved it.
  • individualism as the making of choices so as to maximize one’s preferences. This differed from “selfish individualism” in that the preferences were not specified: they could be altruistic as well as selfish. It differed from “expressive individualism” in having general algorithms by which choices were made. These made it rational.
  • it was born in 1951 as “rational choice theory.” Rational choice theory’s mathematical account of individual choice, originally formulated in terms of voting behavior, made it a point-for-point antidote to the collectivist dialectics of Marxism
  • Functionaries at RAND quickly expanded the theory from a tool of social analysis into a set of universal doctrines that we may call “rational choice philosophy.” Governmental seminars and fellowships spread it to universities across the country, aided by the fact that any alternative to it would by definition be collectivist.
  • rational choice philosophy moved smoothly on the backs of their pupils into the “real world” of business and governme
  • Today, governments and businesses across the globe simply assume that social reality  is merely a set of individuals freely making rational choices.
  • At home, anti-regulation policies are crafted to appeal to the view that government must in no way interfere with Americans’ freedom of choice.
  • But the real significance of rational choice philosophy lay in ethics. Rational choice theory, being a branch of economics, does not question people’s preferences; it simply studies how they seek to maximize them. Rational choice philosophy seems to maintain this ethical neutrality (see Hans Reichenbach’s 1951 “The Rise of Scientific Philosophy,” an unwitting masterpiece of the genre); but it does not.
  • Whatever my preferences are, I have a better chance of realizing them if I possess wealth and power. Rational choice philosophy thus promulgates a clear and compelling moral imperative: increase your wealth and power!
  • Today, institutions which help individuals do that (corporations, lobbyists) are flourishing; the others (public hospitals, schools) are basically left to rot. Business and law schools prosper; philosophy departments are threatened with closure.
  • Hegel, for one, had denied all three of its central claims in his “Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences” over a century before. In that work, as elsewhere in his writings, nature is not neatly causal, but shot through with randomness. Because of this chaos, we cannot know the significance of what we have done until our community tells us; and ethical life correspondingly consists, not in pursuing wealth and power, but in integrating ourselves into the right kinds of community.
  • By 1953, W. V. O. Quine was exposing the flaws in rational choice epistemology. John Rawls, somewhat later, took on its sham ethical neutrality, arguing that rationality in choice includes moral constraints. The neat causality of rational choice ontology, always at odds with quantum physics, was further jumbled by the environmental crisis, exposed by Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “The Silent Spring,” which revealed that the causal effects of human actions were much more complex, and so less predicable, than previously thought.
Javier E

Anti-vaccine activists, 9/11 deniers, and Google's social search. - Slate Magazine - 1 views

www.slate.com/...e_s_social_search_.single.html

internet online science skepticism closure lying deceit search

shared by Javier E on 27 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • democratization of information-gathering—when accompanied by smart institutional and technological arrangements—has been tremendously useful, giving us Wikipedia and Twitter. But it has also spawned thousands of sites that undermine scientific consensus, overturn well-established facts, and promote conspiracy theories
  • Meanwhile, the move toward social search may further insulate regular visitors to such sites; discovering even more links found by their equally paranoid friends will hardly enlighten them.
  • Initially, the Internet helped them find and recruit like-minded individuals and promote events and petitions favorable to their causes. However, as so much of our public life has shifted online, they have branched out into manipulating search engines, editing Wikipedia entries, harassing scientists who oppose whatever pet theory they happen to believe in, and amassing digitized scraps of "evidence" that they proudly present to potential recruits.
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  • The Vaccine article contains a number of important insights. First, the anti-vaccination cohort likes to move the goal posts: As scientists debunked the link between autism and mercury (once present in some childhood inoculations but now found mainly in certain flu vaccines), most activists dropped their mercury theory and point instead to aluminum or said that kids received “too many too soon.”
  • Second, it isn't clear whether scientists can "discredit" the movement's false claims at all: Its members are skeptical of what scientists have to say—not least because they suspect hidden connections between academia and pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the vaccines.
  • mere exposure to the current state of the scientific consensus will not sway hard-core opponents of vaccination. They are too vested in upholding their contrarian theories; some have consulting and speaking gigs to lose while others simply enjoy a sense of belonging to a community, no matter how kooky
  • attempts to influence communities that embrace pseudoscience or conspiracy theories by having independent experts or, worse, government workers join them—the much-debated antidote of “cognitive infiltration” proposed by Cass Sunstein (who now heads the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the White House)—w
  • perhaps, it's time to accept that many of these communities aren't going to lose core members regardless of how much science or evidence is poured on them. Instead, resources should go into thwarting their growth by targeting their potential—rather than existent—members.
  • Given that censorship of search engines is not an appealing or even particularly viable option, what can be done to ensure that users are made aware that all the pseudoscientific advice they are likely to encounter may not be backed by science?
  • One is to train our browsers to flag information that may be suspicious or disputed. Thus, every time a claim like "vaccination leads to autism" appears in our browser, that sentence woul
  • The second—and not necessarily mutually exclusive—option is to nudge search engines to take more responsibility for their index and exercise a heavier curatorial control in presenting search results for issues like "global warming" or "vaccination." Google already has a list of search queries that send most traffic to sites that trade in pseudoscience and conspiracy theories; why not treat them differently than normal queries? Thus, whenever users are presented with search results that are likely to send them to sites run by pseudoscientists or conspiracy theorists, Google may simply display a huge red banner asking users to exercise caution and check a previously generated list of authoritative resources before making up their minds.
  • In more than a dozen countries Google already does something similar for users who are searching for terms like "ways to die" or "suicidal thoughts" by placing a prominent red note urging them to call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline.
Javier E

How The Internet Enables Lies - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast - 1 views

andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/...-internet-enables-crazies.html

internet online science skepticism closure lying deceit

shared by Javier E on 27 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • the ease of self-publishing and search afforded by the Internet along with a growing skeptical stance towards scientific expertise—has given the anti-vaccination movement a significant boost
  • She regularly shares her "knowledge" about vaccination with her nearly half-million Twitter followers. This is the kind of online influence that Nobel Prize-winning scientists can only dream of; Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most famous working scientist, has only 300,000 Twitter followers.
Javier E

On Political Disagreement - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...on-political-disagreement

disagreement politics epistemic closure philosophy

shared by Javier E on 05 Aug 12 - Cached
  • On most political matters, then, we have what philosophers call “epistemic peers” — people at least our equals in the intellectual qualities needed to made good judgments about a given matter — who disagree with us. What should we make of this fact?
  • freedom of thought does not imply correctness of thought: my political right to assert my views does not mean that I have good reasons for holding them.
  • when epistemic peers disagree with me, I have a good reason to question my views. Shouldn’t I see their disagreeing as another piece of evidence in the political debate, one that may tip the balance against the case I have for my position.
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  • the restaurant disagreement is highly localized.  Our different results do not mean we disagree on other topics.  Political disagreements, however, go wide and deep.  If we disagree about health care, we likely also disagree on welfare, budget deficits and regulating business.  And this range of disagreements may well be because of differences in fundamental values.  Such thoroughgoing differences suggest that I should not see those on the other side as epistemic peers.
Javier E

Our Cold Civil War Intensifies, Ctd « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...ld-civil-war-intensifies-ctd-3

polarization compromise gop democrat epistemic closure in-group exclusion politics

shared by Javier E on 25 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Taken alone, it would appear both sides share equal blame for the present political paralysis as each shifts to their ideological poles.
  • while both sides may be guilty of running to their respective corners, one is clearly more liable for putting the kibosh on negotiation deal-making.
  • one gets more liberal, the more he or she wants elected officials who compromise.
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  • only the Republicans are carrying out a primary purification to fit their no-compromise dispositions.
  • polarization per se is not the current critical crisis – it’s a refusal to compromise, to reach out from one’s ideological end of the spectrum to meet in the middle (where most of us already are), and demanding that one’s representatives refuse to negotiate to get things done and better the country.
  • A consistently liberal position is fine if you’re prepared to meet the other side halfway – and vice-versa of course. In fact, sometimes a strong position can help facilitate a real deal.
  • it’s the GOP that is the outlier, and long has been.
  • Liberals and conservatives are coming to rely on different worldviews motivated by different interpretations of what “reality” is. The Republican party has clearly decided that the only path open to them is to further embrace the resentment exhibited in rural, displaced white voters – people whose concerns have been unconscionably ignored but who have directed their anger at an entirely inappropriate target. They see Obama as the enemy but they vote for the people who are their real enemies.
  • If you think about it point by point, it becomes even less sensible. The debt? That was a result of Bush’s unfunded wars, irresponsible tax cuts and his corporatist Medicare expansion (which was itself just a subsidy for drug companies). The recession? A logical endpoint of a decades-long abandonment of responsible financial regulation. Immigration? There have been no significant changes to our immigration law since 1986, when Saint Reagan pushed through a bill that provided legal status to many who were undocumented – and the right conveniently proceeded to forget that. Ditto with gun control, since Reagan supported the Brady Bill publicly, and that clearly must be erased from the record.
  • The left, by contrast, did not throw Democrats out of office for supporting the Bush tax cuts. It did not throw Democrats out of office for opposing cap-and-trade legislation, immigration reform, or for stonewalling Obamacare until the very last minute when Scott Brown’s surprise election made inaction untenable. The left complained about these realities but never pretended that the reality was any different than what it was; we had the best we could get and that while Obama has let us down on specific issues, he has been a wholly underappreciated president – and history will very likely vindicate him
Javier E

When Beliefs and Facts Collide - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...beliefs-and-facts-collide.html

beliefs facts science epistemic closure

shared by Javier E on 06 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Yale Law School professor, Dan Kahan, finds that the divide over belief in evolution between more and less religious people is wider among people who otherwise show familiarity with math and science, which suggests that the problem isn’t a lack of information. When he instead tested whether respondents knew the theory of evolution, omitting mention of belief, there was virtually no difference between more and less religious people with high scientific familiarity. In other words, religious people knew the science; they just weren’t willing to say that they believed in it.
  • more people know what scientists think about high-profile scientific controversies than polls suggest; they just aren’t willing to endorse the consensus when it contradicts their political or religious views.
  • One implication of Mr. Kahan’s study and other research in this field is that we need to try to break the association between identity and factual beliefs on high-profile issues – for instance, by making clear that you can believe in human-induced climate change and still be a conservative Republican
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  • we also need to reduce the incentives for elites to spread misinformation to their followers in the first place. Once people’s cultural and political views get tied up in their factual beliefs, it’s very difficult to undo regardless of the messaging that is used.
Javier E

Conservative Delusions About Inflation - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...delusions-about-inflation.html

economics epistemic closure partisan bias

shared by Javier E on 08 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • the stark partisan divide over issues that should be simply factual, like whether the planet is warming or evolution happened.
  • The problem, in other words, isn’t ignorance; it’s wishful thinking. Confronted with a conflict between evidence and what they want to believe for political and/or religious reasons, many people reject the evidence. And knowing more about the issues widens the divide, because the well informed have a clearer view of which evidence they need to reject to sustain their belief system.
  • In fact, hardly any of the people who predicted runaway inflation have acknowledged that they were wrong, and that the error suggests something amiss with their approach. Some have offered lame excuses; some, following in the footsteps of climate-change deniers, have gone down the conspiracy-theory rabbit hole, claiming that we really do have soaring inflation, but the government is lying about the numbers
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  • Above all, there were many dire warnings about the evils of “printing money.” For example, in May 2009 an editorial in The Wall Street Journal warned that both interest rates and inflation were set to surge “now that Congress and the Federal Reserve have flooded the world with dollars.” In 2010 a virtual Who’s Who of conservative economists and pundits sent an open letter to Ben Bernanke warning that his policies risked “currency debasement and inflation.”
  • Although the Fed continued on its expansionary course — its balance sheet has grown to more than $4 trillion, up fivefold since the start of the crisis — inflation stayed low. For the most part, the funds the Fed injected into the economy simply piled up either in bank reserves or in cash holdings by individuals — which was exactly what economists on the other side of the divide had predicted would happen.
  • the similar state of affairs when it comes to economics, monetary economics in particular.
  • Mainly, though, the currency-debasement crowd just keeps repeating the same lines, ignoring its utter failure in prognostication.
  • Isn’t the question of how to manage the money supply a technical issue, not a matter of theological doctrine?
  • Well, it turns out that money is indeed a kind of theological issue. Many on the right are hostile to any kind of government activism, seeing it as the thin edge of the wedge — if you concede that the Fed can sometimes help the economy by creating “fiat money,” the next thing you know liberals will confiscate your wealth and give it to the 47 percent.
  • if you look at the internal dynamics of the Republican Party, it’s obvious that the currency-debasement, return-to-gold faction has been gaining strength even as its predictions keep failing.
Javier E

The Virtue of Contradicting Ourselves - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...f-contradicting-ourselves.html

psychology research cognitive dissonance cognitive consistency bias

shared by Javier E on 18 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • We don’t just loathe inconsistencies in others; we hate them in ourselves, too. But why? What makes contradictions so revolting — and should they be?
  • Leon Festinger, one of the great social psychologists in history, coined the term cognitive dissonance to describe the discomfort you feel if you say or do something that is inconsistent with one of your beliefs
  • there was a catch: Sometimes people weren’t bothered at all by holding inconsistent beliefs
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • it appeared that people felt dissonance only when their choices had negative consequences, but people still felt dissonance when they wrote something inconsistent with their prior beliefs and then threw it in the trash, never to be seen again
  • For years, it remained a mystery why people would feel dissonance even when there were no negative consequences. But recently, it was solved
  • Using neuroscience to track the activation of different brain regions, Professor Harmon-Jones and colleagues found that inconsistent beliefs really bother us only when they have conflicting implications for action
  • If I’m socially liberal and fiscally conservative, and I want to vote for a candidate with a decent shot at winning, my beliefs are contradictory. One way to reconcile them is to change my opinion on abortion or tax policies. Goodbye, dissonanc
  • This helps to explain why many people’s political beliefs fall on a simple left-right continuum, rather than in more complex combinations. Once, we might have held more nuanced opinions, but in pursuit of consistency, we’ve long since whitewashed the shades of gray
  • It also explains why we can’t stand to vote for flip-floppers. We worry that they don’t have clear principles; we think they lack integrity
  • t consistency is especially appealing to political conservatives, who report a stronger preference for certainty, structure, order and closure than liberals. If you favor predictability over ambiguity and stability over change, a candidate who holds fast to his ideology has a lot of curb appeal.
  • When historians and political scientists rate the presidents throughout history, the most effective ones turn out to be the most open-minded
  • This is true of both conservative and liberal presidents. Abraham Lincoln was a flip-flopper: He started out pro-slavery before abolishing it. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a flip-flopper, too: Elected on a platform of balancing the budget, he substantially increased spending with his New Deal.
  • we should be wary of electing anyone who fails to evolve. “Progress is impossible without change,” George Bernard Shaw observed, “and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
  • when it comes to facing our own contradictions, perhaps we should be more open as well. As the artist Marcel Duchamp observed, “I have forced myself to contradict myself, in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”
ilanaprincilus06

New York Launches First COVID-19 Vaccination, Test Result App For Event Attendance : Co... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...result-app-for-event-attendanc

New York Covid-19

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Cuomo announced Friday that the state's health status certification, called the Excelsior Pass, will help New Yorkers voluntarily share vaccination and COVID-19 negative statuses with entertainment venues and other businesses to put the state state's economy back on track.
  • New Yorkers can always show alternate proof of vaccination or testing, like another mobile application or paper form, directly at a business or venue.
  • The pass could see New York's Broadway theaters, concert venues and sports arenas fill seats again after closures that started in March of 2020.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Airlines and technology companies have been working on developing technology to do so, but New York's is the first pass being made widely available to residents.
  • The idea is similar to mobile airline boarding passes: they can be printed or stored on smartphones, and participating businesses and venues can use a companion app to confirm patrons' health status.
  • rather than boost the economy and encourage vaccination, efforts like the Excelsior Pass could wind up further spread of variants. It's also still not clear that vaccinated people cannot spread the virus to people who have not been vaccinated.
  • Some worry that the passes might encourage fraud and increase the spread of the virus by people who claim to be vaccinated or COVID-19 negative but aren't.
cvanderloo

Teachers, Students Meet For First Time After School Closures : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...ng-students-for-the-first-time

covid pandemic education school

shared by cvanderloo on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • "I'd say, 'Wait! Don't tell me!' And try to guess their voices," Jeffords explains. "Some of them had such unique voices [over Zoom] that I could tell, but others never really spoke, so it felt like having new students in front of me."
  • "I'm a really social person," she explains. "Once you get used to waking up and then logging into class, it gets really tiring just sitting all day in your pajamas not doing anything. But waking up, having something to get ready for, seeing old friends – oh my gosh!' "
  • But there was one surprising difference when she actually met them in person.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • When Arcola Elementary School reopened in person in mid-March, Barksdale's students had to adjust to a very different classroom. The reading corner was gone. The carpet squares the kids usually sat on? Packed away.
  • And for the first time, Barksdale had to encourage her first-graders not to share. "An aspect for social and emotional learning that they really need to gain is how to share and how to collaborate," she says. "And right now, the safest thing for them is to not share their materials."
  • 22% of elementary students and 26% percent of middle school students are still learning completely virtually.
  • A recent NPR/IPSOS poll shows that 29% of parents polled are considering keeping their kids in remote learning indefinitely. This could be for a myriad of reasons, such as home being a better environment to focus in, or not having to feel the impacts of an unsupportive education system.
  • "This definitely is the hardest thing I've ever done... trying to teach students virtually and in person through a mask."
  • "Kids don't learn from someone they don't like," he explains. "I've just learned to tap into their desires, how they want to see themselves, and their interests... and that works virtually or in person."
  • "I feel like we've gone backwards in education," she says. "Now the desks are in rows, you know, spaced out six feet apart – it's just really sterile. With this form of in-person learning, I don't know that they're getting a good education."
  • Nevertheless, Higgins believes that in-person learning is better than being completely virtual when it comes to the mental health and social development of her students.
caelengrubb

Cognitive Bias and Public Health Policy During the COVID-19 Pandemic | Critical Care Me... - 0 views

jamanetwork.com/...2767950

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • As the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic abates in many countries worldwide, and a new normal phase arrives, critically assessing policy responses to this public health crisis may promote better preparedness for the next wave or the next pandemic
  • A key lesson is revealed by one of the earliest and most sizeable US federal responses to the pandemic: the investment of $3 billion to build more ventilators. These extra ventilators, even had they been needed, would likely have done little to improve population survival because of the high mortality among patients with COVID-19 who require mechanical ventilation and diversion of clinicians away from more health-promoting endeavors.
  • Why are so many people distressed at the possibility that a patient in plain view—such as a person presenting to an emergency department with severe respiratory distress—would be denied an attempt at rescue because of a ventilator shortfall, but do not mount similarly impassioned concerns regarding failures to implement earlier, more aggressive physical distancing, testing, and contact tracing policies that would have saved far more lives?
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • These cognitive errors, which distract leaders from optimal policy making and citizens from taking steps to promote their own and others’ interests, cannot merely be ascribed to repudiations of science.
  • The first error that thwarts effective policy making during crises stems from what economists have called the “identifiable victim effect.” Humans respond more aggressively to threats to identifiable lives, ie, those that an individual can easily imagine being their own or belonging to people they care about (such as family members) or care for (such as a clinician’s patients) than to the hidden, “statistical” deaths reported in accounts of the population-level tolls of the crisis
  • Yet such views represent a second reason for the broad endorsement of policies that prioritize saving visible, immediately jeopardized lives: that humans are imbued with a strong and neurally mediated3 tendency to predict outcomes that are systematically more optimistic than observed outcomes
  • A third driver of misguided policy responses is that humans are present biased, ie, people tend to prefer immediate benefits to even larger benefits in the future.
  • Even if the tendency to prioritize visibly affected individuals could be resisted, many people would still place greater value on saving a life today than a life tomorrow.
  • Similar psychology helps explain the reluctance of many nations to limit refrigeration and air conditioning, forgo fuel-inefficient transportation, and take other near-term steps to reduce the future effects of climate change
  • The fourth contributing factor is that virtually everyone is subject to omission bias, which involves the tendency to prefer that a harm occur by failure to take action rather than as direct consequence of the actions that are taken
  • Although those who set policies for rationing ventilators and other scarce therapies do not intend the deaths of those who receive insufficient priority for these treatments, such policies nevertheless prevent clinicians from taking all possible steps to save certain lives.
  • An important goal of governance is to mitigate the effects of these and other biases on public policy and to effectively communicate the reasons for difficult decisions to the public. However, health systems’ routine use of wartime terminology of “standing up” and “standing down” intensive care units illustrate problematic messaging aimed at the need to address immediate danger
  • Second, had governments, health systems, and clinicians better understood the “identifiable victim effect,” they may have realized that promoting flattening the curve as a way to reduce pressure on hospitals and health care workers would be less effective than promoting early restaurant and retail store closures by saying “The lives you save when you close your doors include your own.”
  • Third, these leaders’ routine use of terms such as “nonpharmaceutical interventions”9 portrays public health responses negatively by labeling them according to what they are not. Instead, support for heavily funding contact tracing could have been generated by communicating such efforts as “lifesaving.
  • Fourth, although errors of human cognition are challenging to surmount, policy making, even in a crisis, occurs over a sufficient period to be meaningfully improved by deliberate efforts to counter untoward biases
cvanderloo

Colleges are eliminating sports teams - and runners and golfers are paying more of a pr... - 0 views

theconversation.com/l-or-basketball-players-148965

sports NCAA running XC track football basketball economics college US

shared by cvanderloo on 17 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Since COVID-19 emerged, dozens of colleges and universities have announced the elimination of different intercollegiate athletics teams.
  • But the majority of closures came at regional and local campuses that participate in the NCAA’s Division II and Division III, or the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics. Also, around 30 teams were eliminated by community colleges.
  • The 78 schools we examined spend around $87 million a year to keep all those teams going.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Most university administrators don’t expect their athletics programs to make a lot of money. Only about 25 of the 1,100 NCAA member schools’ athletics departments generate a profit.
  • public universities with NCAA Division I football teams received about 6% more in state funding annually than other institutions.
  • Many colleges and universities depend on varsity sports – like rowing, track and swimming – to attract more students to attend.
  • Most students who play college sports – including all of those at Division III and Ivy League programs – are not on an athletic scholarship.
  • Playing sports can also help with the transition into college. An intercollegiate team provides a ready-made social group that can help the new team member adjust to their new school.
  • Research also shows that hiring managers value college sports experience
  • The financial savings for athletics departments are immediate and obvious. But a longer-term impact will be seen on enrollment, campus life and the communities where colleges are located.
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