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What Are Republicans So Afraid Of?

Instead of conspiracy-mongering about an election they did well in, they could try to win real majorities.

There was a time, in recent memory, when the Republican Party both believed it could win a national majority and actively worked to build one.

there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that we’re all at least somewhat subject to bias

Tell Republicans that some imaginary policy is a Republican one, as the psychologist Geoffrey Cohen did in 2003, and they’re much more likely to support it, even if it runs counter to Republican values. But ask them why they support it, and they’ll deny that party affiliation played a role. (Cohen found something similar for Democrats.

those who saw the names were biased in favour of famous artists. But even though they acknowledged the risk of bias, when asked to assess their own objectivity, they didn’t view their judgments as any more biased as a result.

Among the many decision-making methods for life’s big decisions, one that stands out is from an early 16th-century soldier-turned-mystic, St. Ignatius of Loyola.

Ignatius uses the language of faith, but, I believe, anyone can apply his method to make more informed decisions.

1. Rely on Reason and Feelings

our tendency to judge decisions based on how they turn out, known in poker as “resulting.”

our strategy is often based on beliefs that can be biased or wrong. We are quick to form, and slow to update our beliefs. We tend towards absolutes, and indulge in “motivated reasoning,” seeking out confirmation while ignoring contradictory evidence

solution is to embrace uncertainty by calibrating our confidence

Misinformation or even disinformation in search results was already a problem before generative AI. Back in 2017, The Outline noted that a snippet once confidently asserted that Barack Obama was the king of America.

This is what experts have worried about since ChatGPT first launched: false information confidently presented as fact, without any indication that it could be totally wrong. The problem is “the way things are presented to the user, which is Here’s the answer,” Chirag Shah, a professor of information and computer science at the University of Washington, told me. “You don’t need to follow the sources. We’re just going to give you the snippet that would answer your question. But what if that snippet is taken out of context?”

Responding to the notion that Google is incentivized to prevent users from navigating away, he added that “we have no desire to keep people on Google.

academic researchers and scientists at companies like Microsoft, I.B.M. and Hewlett-Packard have been working to develop quantum computers.

Lockheed Martin — which bought an early version of such a computer from the Canadian company D-Wave Systems two years ago — is confident enough in the technology to upgrade it to commercial scale, becoming the first company to use quantum computing as part of its business.

if it performs as Lockheed and D-Wave expect, the design could be used to supercharge even the most powerful systems, solving some science and business problems millions of times faster

We are hurried and distracted and don’t pay close attention to what we are doing. Often, we turn over our data in exchange for a deal we can’t refuse.

his research argues that when it comes to privacy, policy makers should carefully consider how people actually behave. We don’t always act in our own best interest, his research suggests. We can be easily manipulated by how we are asked for information. Even something as simple as a playfully designed site can nudge us to reveal more of ourselves than a serious-looking one.

“His work has gone a long way in trying to help us figure out how irrational we are in privacy related decisions,” says Woodrow Hartzog, an assistant professor of law who studies digital privacy at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala. “We have too much confidence in our ability to make decisions.”

the goal is to improve cognitive skills. LearningRx is one of a growing number of such commercial services — some online, others offered by psychologists. Unlike traditional tutoring services that seek to help students master a subject, brain training purports to enhance comprehension and the ability to analyze and mentally manipulate concepts, images, sounds and instructions. In a word, it seeks to make students smarter.

“The average gain on I.Q. is 15 points after 24 weeks of training, and 20 points in less than 32 weeks.”

, “Our users have reported profound benefits that include: clearer and quicker thinking; faster problem-solving skills; increased alertness and awareness; better concentration at work or while driving; sharper memory for names, numbers and directions.”

Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger—all by the time he was thirty. The New York Times now publishes FiveThirtyEight.com, where Silver is one of the nation’s most influential political forecasters.

Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the “prediction paradox”: The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future.

the most accurate forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable, and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can distinguish the signal from the noise.

Of their serious presidential candidates, and even of their presidents, Americans demand constant reassurance that their country, their achievements and their values are extraordinary.

It is permissible, in the political major leagues, for candidates to talk about big national problems — but only if they promise solutions in the next sentence: Unemployment is too high, so I will create millions of jobs

It is impermissible to dwell on chronic, painful problems, or on statistics that challenge the notion that the United States leads the world

a Marketplace-Edison Research Poll

The survey found that more than 4 in 10 Americans somewhat or completely distrust the economic data reported by the federal government

Among Donald Trump voters, the share is 68 percent, with nearly half saying they don’t trust government economic data “at all.”

SCIENTISTS have often been accused of exaggerating the threat of climate change,

The year just concluded is about to be declared the hottest one on record,

Science is conservative, and new claims of knowledge are greeted with high degrees of skepticism.

scientists are still debating exactly when and where the ancient bond originated

agree that they evolved from ancient wolves

he essence of the idea is that people actively bred wolves to become dogs just the way they now breed dogs to be tiny or large, or to herd sheep.

Why Do We Teach Girls That It’s Cute to Be Scared?

Apparently, fear is expected of women.

parents cautioned their daughters about the dangers of the fire pole significantly more than they did their sons and were much more likely to assist them

I don’t fault Silver for his caution. It’s honest. What it really says is he doesn’t know with much confidence what’s going to happen

That’s because there’s a lot of human caprice and whim in electoral behavior that can’t always be explained or predicted with scientific precision. Politics ain’t moneyball. Good-quality polls give an accurate sense of where a political race is at a point in time, but they don’t predict the future.

Predictive models, generally based on historical patterns, work until they don’t.

There is no mystery about Barack Obama’s greatest presidential achievement: He stopped the Great Recession from becoming the second Great Depression. True, he had plenty of help, including from his predecessor, George W. Bush, and from the top officials at the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve. But if Obama had made one wrong step, what was a crushing economic slump could have become something much worse.

It is Obama’s unfortunate fate that the high-water mark of his presidency occurred in the first months, when the world flirted with financial calamity. The prospect of another Great Depression — a long period of worsening economic decline — was not far-fetched.

In the first quarter of 2009, as Obama was moving into the White House, monthly job losses averaged 772,000. The ultimate decline in employment was 8.7 million jobs, or 6.3 percent. Housing prices and stock values were collapsing. From their peak in February 2007 to their low point, housing prices dropped 26 percent. Millions of homeowners were “underwater” — their houses were worth less than the mortgages on them. Stock prices fell roughly by half from August 2007 to March 2009.

25% of American respondents answered that the sun orbits the Earth [1]. A recent AP-GFK poll found that as many as 4 in 10 American adults doubt evolution, over half aren't confident that the Big Bang took place, just under 40% don't believe that pollution is causing climate change

When teaching science, teachers have to contend with students' old ideas of how the world works, an uphill battle where the old ideas have the advantage.

Children are exposed to scientific ideas at around age eight, when they become able to understand abstract concepts. Before that age, children rely on "magical thinking" to explain how the world exists and works, so, science education faces a tough challenge right from the start

Yet you’d be hard pressed to find the word in any official document, or to hear any politician utter it today. In fact we seem almost embarrassed to talk about beauty, other than in private. Instead we have invented all kinds of pseudo, management-speak words to describe the things we need to look after: words like ecosystem services, natural capital and sustainable development

But it wasn’t always like that. Beauty was a word and an idea that people in previous centuries used freely and confidently, including in legislation and public policy. And because people celebrated beauty it was something they sought to create, in town and country, and enacted laws to protect the things and places people loved.

Beauty is written deeply into our culture. Some of the earliest texts show a yearning for beauty, with Chaucer reminding us that it was the beauty of an April spring that “longen folk to goon on pilgrimages”. Medieval stonemasons constructed fabulous churches and cathedrals, carving flowers and animals into their stone.

“Almost every kid — and I mean virtually every kid — can learn math at a very high level, to the point where they could do university level math courses,”

“If you ask why that’s not happening, it’s because very early in school many kids get the idea that they’re not in the smart group, especially in math. We kind of force a choice on them: to decide that either they’re dumb or math is dumb.”

In particular, math teachers often fail to make sufficient allowances for the limitations of working memory and the fact that we all need extensive practice to gain mastery in just about anything.