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kaylynfreeman

How Reliable Are the Social Sciences? - The New York Times - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...liable-are-the-social-sciences

psychology science research knowledge brain science

shared by kaylynfreeman on 01 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • How much authority should we give to such work in our policy decisions?  The question is important because media reports often seem to assume that any result presented as “scientific” has a claim to our serious attention.
  • A rational assessment of a scientific result must first take account of the broader context of the particular science involved.  Where does the result lie on the continuum from preliminary studies, designed to suggest further directions of research, to maximally supported conclusions of the science? 
  • Second, and even more important, there is our overall assessment of work in a given science in comparison with other sciences.  The core natural sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology) are so well established that we readily accept their best-supported conclusions as definitive. 
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  • While the physical sciences produce many detailed and precise predictions, the social sciences do not.  The reason is that such predictions almost always require randomized controlled experiments, which are seldom possible when people are involved.  For one thing, we are too complex: our behavior depends on an enormous number of tightly interconnected variables that are extraordinarily difficult to  distinguish and study separately
  • Without a strong track record of experiments leading to successful predictions, there is seldom a basis for taking social scientific results as definitive
  • our policy discussions should simply ignore social scientific research.  We should, as Manzi himself proposes, find ways of injecting more experimental data into government decisions.  But above all, we need to develop a much better sense of the severely limited reliability of social scientific results.   Media reports of research should pay far more attention to these limitations, and scientists reporting the results need to emphasize what they don’t show as much as what they do.
  • Given the limited predictive success and the lack of consensus in social sciences, their conclusions can seldom be primary guides to setting policy.  At best, they can supplement the general knowledge, practical experience, good sense and critical intelligence that we can only hope our political leaders will have.
  • How much authority should we give to such work in our policy decisions?  The question is important because media reports often seem to assume that any result presented as “scientific” has a claim to our serious attention.
  • Without a strong track record of experiments leading to successful predictions, there is seldom a basis for taking social scientific results as definitive
  • our policy discussions should simply ignore social scientific research.  We should, as Manzi himself proposes, find ways of injecting more experimental data into government decisions.  But above all, we need to develop a much better sense of the severely limited reliability of social scientific results.   Media reports of research should pay far more attention to these limitations, and scientists reporting the results need to emphasize what they don’t show as much as what they do
  • our policy discussions should simply ignore social scientific research.  We should, as Manzi himself proposes, find ways of injecting more experimental data into government decisions.  But above all, we need to develop a much better sense of the severely limited reliability of social scientific results.   Media reports of research should pay far more attention to these limitations, and scientists reporting the results need to emphasize what they don’t show as much as what they do.
  • Social sciences may be surrounded by the “paraphernalia” of the natural sciences, such as technical terminology, mathematical equations, empirical data and even carefully designed experiments. 
  • Given the limited predictive success and the lack of consensus in social sciences, their conclusions can seldom be primary guides to setting policy.  At best, they can supplement the general knowledge, practical experience, good sense and critical intelligence that we can only hope our political leaders will have.
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
  • “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.
  • 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.”
  • 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.”
  • 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

Implicit Bias Training Isn't Improving Corporate Diversity - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...-improving-corporate-diversity

training bias effectiveness racism diversity

shared by Javier E on 05 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • despite the growing adoption of unconscious bias training, there is no convincing scientific evidence that it works
  • In fact, much of the academic evidence on implicit bias interventions highlights their weakness as a method for boosting diversity and inclusion. Instructions to suppress stereotypes often have the opposite effect, and prejudice reduction programs are much more effective when people are already open-minded, altruistic, and concerned about their prejudices to begin with.
  • This is because the main problem with stereotypes is not that people are unaware of them, but that they agree with them (even when they don’t admit it to others). In other words, most people have conscious biases.
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  • Moreover, to the extent that people have unconscious biases, there is no clear-cut way to measure them
  • The main tool for measuring unconscious bias, the Implicit Association Test (IAT), has been in use for twenty years but is highly contested.
  • meta-analytic reviews have concluded that IAT scores — in other words, unconscious biases — are very weak predictors of actual behavior.
  • The vast majority of people labeled “racist” by these tests behave the same as the vast majority of people labelled “non-racist.” Do we really want to tell people who behave in non-racist ways that they are unconsciously racists, or, conversely, tell people who behave in racist ways that they aren’t, deep down, racists at all?
  • This gets to the underlying flaw with unconscious bias trainings: behaviors, not thoughts, should be the target of diversity and inclusion interventions.
  • Scientific evidence suggests that the relationship between attitudes and behaviors is much weaker than one might expect.
  • Even if we lived in a world in which humans always acted in accordance with their beliefs, there would remain better ways to promote diversity than by policing people’s thoughts.
  • Organizations should focus less on extinguishing their employees’ unconscious thoughts, and more on nurturing ethical, benevolent, and inclusive behaviors.
  • This means focusing less on employees’ attitudes, and more on organizational policies and systems, as these play the key role creating the conditions that entice employees (and leaders) to behave in more or less inclusive ways.
  • Instead of worrying what people think of something or someone deep down, we should focus on ways to eliminate the toxic or prejudiced behaviors we can see. That alone will drive a great deal of progress.
  • Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is chief talent scientist at Manpower Group and a professor at University College London and Columbia University.
Javier E

I Actually Read Woody Allen's Memoir - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...612736

morality art censorship

shared by Javier E on 07 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • I’m a Woody Allen person, not because I disbelieve Dylan—in fact, I believe her. I’m a Woody Allen person because his movies helped shape me, and I can’t unsee them, the way I can’t un-read The Great Gatsby or un-hear “Gimme Shelter.” These are things that informed my sensibilities. All of them are part of me.
  • As to our opinion about his past, one thing is for sure: He couldn’t care less about it. “Rather than live on in the hearts and mind of the public,” he says in the final lines of the book, “I prefer to live on in my apartment.”Exit laughing.
  • the scene in Hannah and Her Sisters in which the Woody Allen character, distraught by his realization that there is no God and considering suicide, stumbles into a revival house to find the movie playing. He says in voice-over: The movie was a film that I’d seen many times in my life since I was a kid, and I always loved it. And I’m watching these people up on the screen and I started getting hooked on the film. And I started to feel,  How can you even think of killing yourself? I mean, isn’t it so stupid? I mean, look at all the people up there on the screen. They’re real funny—and what if the worst is true? What if there’s no God and you only go around once and that’s it? Well, you know, don’t you want to be part of the experience? I did.I do.
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  • Can we still enjoy his work?  Of course we can, because the movies don’t really belong to Woody Allen any more than they do to you and me.
  • Some wrongs are so great that no legal or bureaucratic process can ever make things right. At some point, the only way to get unchained from a monster is through forgiveness. It would seem impossible for Geimer to be able to forgive Polanski, but she did—who understands how grace operates?—and has apparently been at peace ever since.
  • Woody Allen taught us that New York is the center of the world and L.A. is outer space. He installed himself in Elaine’s for a thousand dinners in the company of glittering figures of yesteryear (Norman Mailer! Liza Minnelli! Bill Bradley!) and made movie after movie and became one of the famous people the rest of the country associates most closely with the city.
  • He’s a 42-year-old guy with a 12th grade girlfriend, and if you want to understand the ’70s, maybe I have to tell you only that Vincent Canby’s review in The New York Times made no particular note of this fact other than to describe Tracy—played by Mariel Hemingway—as “a beautiful, 17-year-old nymphet with a turned-down mouth.” Or I could tell you that Manhattan was nominated for two Academy Awards and was widely loved by the in-crowd.
  • Soon enough he was writing, directing, and then acting in his own movies. He developed a particular method of moviemaking that was in some regards reminiscent of the studio system: he worked fast, almost never rehearsed, and rarely shot multiple takes or engineered complex shots: “As long as you’re dealing with comedy, particularly broad comedy, all you want is the scene should be lit, loud and fast.”
  • Allen is one of the great storytellers of his time, completely original, and any version of his life—including this one, in which we are obviously in the hands of an unreliable narrator, although no more so than in any of his autobiographical movies—can only be riveting. In a matter of phrases, he accomplishes things it takes a lesser writer several chapters to establish
  • We have the damn thing. What are we going to do with it? I suppose we could start—why not?—by actually reading it. And within just a phrase or two, you realize why people were afraid of it: Allen is a matchless comic writer and one whose voice is so well known by his aging fans that it’s as though the book is pouring into you through a special receiver dedicated just to him. Woody Allen does a great Woody Allen.
Javier E

The Cancel Culture Checklist - Persuasion - 0 views

www.persuasion.community/...e-cancel-culture-checklist-c63

psychology bias language social media cancel culture criticism

shared by Javier E on 28 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • a third of Americans say that they are personally worried about losing their jobs or missing out on career opportunities if they express their real political opinions.
  • Cancel culture now poses a real threat to intellectual freedom in the United States.
  • Americans in all walks of life have been publicly shamed, pressured into ritualistic apologies or summarily fired
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  • But critics of the critics of cancel culture make a powerful retort. Accusing others of canceling can, they claim, be a way to stigmatize legitimate criticism. As Hannah Giorgis writes in the Atlantic, “critical tweets are not censorship.”
  • So what, exactly, does a cancellation consist of? And how does it differ from the exercise of free speech and robust critical debate?
  • At a conceptual level, the difference is clear. Criticism marshals evidence and arguments in a rational effort to persuade.
  • Canceling, by contrast, seeks to organize and manipulate the social or media environment in order to isolate, deplatform or intimidate ideological opponents
  • its intent—or at least its predictable outcome—is to coerce conformity and reduce the scope for forms of criticism that are not sanctioned by the prevailing consensus of some local majority.
  • In practice, however, telling canceling apart from criticism can be difficult because both take the form of criticizing others.
  • The more signs you see, the more certain you can be that you are looking at a cancel campaign.
  • A better approach might therefore be diagnostic. Like the symptoms of cancer, the hallmarks of a cancellation are many. Though not all instances involve every single characteristic, they all involve some of its key attribute
  • Six warning signs make up my personal checklist for cancel culture.
  • Punitiveness
  • A critical culture seeks to correct rather than punish. In science, the penalty for being wrong is not that you lose your job or your friends. Normally, the only penalty is that you lose the argument
  • Canceling, by contrast, seeks to punish rather than correct—and often for a single misstep rather than a long track record of failure
  • Deplatforming
  • A critical culture tolerates dissent rather than silencing it. It understands that dissent can seem obnoxious, harmful, hateful and, yes, unsafe.
  • Canceling, by contrast, seeks to shut up and shout down its targets. Cancelers often define the mere act of disagreeing with them as a threat to their safety or even an act of violence
  • Organization
  • Critical culture relies on persuasion. The way to win an argument is to convince others that you are right.
  • By contrast, it’s common to see cancelers organize hundreds of petition-signers or thousands of social media users to dig up and prosecute an indictment.
  • Secondary Boycotts
  • With its commitments to exploring a wide range of ideas and correcting rather than coercing the errant, a critical culture sees no value in instilling a climate of fear
  • But instilling fear is what canceling is all about. By choosing targets unpredictably (almost anything can trigger a campaign), providing no safe harbors (even conformists can get hit), and implicitly threatening anyone who sides with those who are targeted, canceling sends the message: “you could be next.”
  • Moral Grandstanding
  • Precisely because speech can be hurtful, critical culture discourages extreme rhetoric. It encourages people to listen to each other, to use evidence and argumentation, to behave reasonably and to avoid personal attacks.
  • Cancel culture is much more invested in what philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke call “moral grandstanding”: the display of moral outrage to impress one’s peer group, dominate others, or both
  • Truthiness
  • Concern for accuracy is the north star of a critical culture. Not everyone gets every fact right, nor do people always agree on what is true; and yet people in a critical culture try to present their own and others’ viewpoints honestly and accurately.
  • canceling is not about seeking truth or persuading others; it is a form of information warfare, in which truthiness suffices if it serves the cause.
  • Those are my six warning signs. If you spot one or two, you should fear that a canceling may be happening; if you see five or six, you can be sure.
  • Though our critics like to claim that those of us who worry about cancel culture just don’t like being criticized on the internet, cancel culture is all too real. And though it may at times bear a superficial resemblance to critical culture, the two are diametrically opposed—and not so very difficult to tell apart.
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

This is what happens Fox News dominates with its bigotry - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-a9d9-a81c1a491c52_story.html

gop assumptions ideology crisis racism culture politics

shared by Javier E on 09 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • It is extraordinary that a group of people who came to our country in chains came to understand the essence of Christianity and the essence of our country far better than their oppressors. You might even call it providential.
Javier E

How to Talk About Climate Change Across the Political Divide | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ge-across-the-political-divide

climate change discourse deniers appeal rhetoric

shared by Javier E on 17 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • “It was really moving to Texas that set me on this path of figuring out how to communicate about climate change,” she told me. “I was the only climate scientist within two hundred miles.”
  • She records the questions she is asked afterward, using an app, and the two most frequent are: “What gives you hope?” and “How do I talk to my [blank] about climate change?
  • In the late nineties, a Gallup poll found that forty-six per cent of Democrats and forty-seven per cent of Republicans agreed that the effects of global warming had already begun.
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  • In her new book, “Saving Us,” which comes out in September, Hayhoe sets out to answer these questions. Chapter by chapter, she lays out effective strategies for communicating about the urgency of climate change across America’s political divide.
  • She breaks out categories—originally defined by her colleague Anthony Leiserowitz, at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, and other researchers—of attitudes toward global warming: alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, and doubtful. Only the remaining eight per cent of Americans fall into the final category, dismissive.
  • In the past decade, though, as the scope of the crisis became clear, Democrats began pressing for policies to cut U.S. reliance on fossil fuels, and Republicans were reluctant to commit. Energy companies stepped into the stalemate and began aggressively lobbying politicians, and injecting doubt into the public discourse, to stop such policies from taking effect. “Industry swung into motion to activate the political system in their favor,” Hayhoe said.
  • “In a study of fifty-six countries, researchers found people’s opinions on climate change to be most strongly correlated not with education and knowledge, but rather with ‘values, ideologies, worldviews and political orientation,’ ”
  • One salient problem is an aspect of human behavior that researchers have termed “solution aversion.” Solving the climate crisis will require ending our reliance on fossil fuels, which people believe would involve major sacrifice.
  • “If there’s a problem and we’re not going to fix it, then that makes us bad people,” Hayhoe said. “No one wants to be a bad person.” So instead people are happy to seize on excuses not to take action.
  • Most are what she calls “science-y sounding objections, and, in the U.S., religious-y sounding objections.”
  • Hayhoe often hears that the Earth has always heated and cooled according to its own intrinsic cycle, or that God, not humanity, controls the fate of the planet. These objections can then harden into aspects of our political identity.
  • Hayhoe eschews the term “climate denier,” saying that she has “seen it applied all too often to shut down discussion rather than encourage it.”
  • So much of this is not about the facts,” Leiserowitz told me later. “It’s about trusting the person the facts come from.”
  • research has shown her that dismissives are nearly impossible to influence. They are also few enough that it should be possible to build political will around fighting climate change by focussing on others.
  • “It’s not about the loudest voices,” Hayhoe told me. “It’s about everyone else who doesn’t understand why climate change matters or what they can do about it.”
  • Leiserowitz told me. His work has revealed, for example, that conversations about the climate tend to be more effective if both speakers share a core value or an aspect of their identity. The most effective climate communicators to conservatives are often people of faith, members of the military, and Republicans who are nevertheless committed to the climate.
  • “That’s why it’s so important to seek out like-minded groups: winter athletes, parents, fellow birders or Rotarians, or people who share our faith.”
  • There is a long history within evangelicalism of advocating “creation care,” the belief that God charged humanity with caring for the earth. The Evangelical Environmental Network, which Hayhoe advises, argues that evangelicals should follow a “Biblical mandate to care for creation,”
  • Hayhoe believes that emphasizing the care of plants and animals is less effective than highlighting the potential dangers for our fellow human beings. “It’s not about saving the planet—it’s about saving us,”
  • One of her communication strategies is to talk to people about their own observations, which help them connect the realities of their lives to the abstraction of climate change.
  • With farmers, Hayhoe avoids using the term “climate change,” since the phenomenon is frequently seen as a liberal hoax. “We use the words ‘climate variability’ and ‘long-term trends,’ ” she said.
  • Scott’s work served another purpose. By showing success with his climate-conscious farming techniques, he might persuade other farmers to join in, potentially becoming the center of what Hayhoe calls a cluster. “I preach to my friends about how well it’s doing,” he said.
  • I don’t accost people in diners,” she wrote me, later. “I wait until they come to me.”
  • “As recently as 2008, former speaker of the house Newt Gingrich, a Republican, and current House speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, cozied up on a love seat in front of the U.S. Capitol to film a commercial about climate change,”
  • She then directed the conversation to Republican-led free market initiatives to combat climate change by putting a price on carbon emissions. Companies passed their costs onto the rest of us by putting the carbon into the atmosphere, she told Dale, “but what if they had to pay for it? What if, when someone’s house burned down because of a forest fire, the companies making money from selling carbon had to pay a homeowner back?” Dale responded, “Well, I’m in favor of that.”
  • “It’s so important to educate kids about what’s going on, not to frighten them but to show them they can have a hand in solutions.”
  • Through the years, she’s developed a system to manage trolls. “It’s been trial and error, error, error,” she said. She now responds once, offering a link to resources.
  • Most fire back with gendered insults, often plays on her last name, after which she blocks the sender.
  • ayhoe doesn’t urge guilt on her listeners. She only urges that we change our trajectory. “That’s all repentance means,” she said. “To turn.”
  • the most important aspect of fighting climate change is pushing for policies that will cut our reliance on fossil fuels. She urges the alarmed to get involved in politics, beginning with lobbying politicians at the local and state level.
  • she’d come across a book, “Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy,” that examined the role of prophets in society, beginning with the oracle at Delphi, stretching through the Old Testament, and culminating in the work of modern-day scientists.
  • Studies show that early adopters help shift the norms of their communities.
  • By Eliza GriswoldSeptember 16, 2021
Javier E

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Father of 'Flow,' Dies at 87 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...aly-csikszentmihalyi-dead.html

psychology flow education

shared by Javier E on 29 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • Flow became an important element of positive psychology, a movement started in the early 2000s by Dr. Csikszentmihalyi and Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. It focused not on the pathologies of the human mind but its everyday experiences.
  • “Csikszentmihalyi was such a leader in our field it’s hard to do his contributions justice,” Laurie Santos, a professor of psychology at Yale, wrote in an email. “I think in a world where it’s become harder and harder to focus, his work on flow has become even more important.”
  • Dr. Csikszentmihalyi did not just explain “flow”; he offered a pointed critique of why so many people fail to achieve it. He cited countless studies showing that most people prefer meaningful work over mindless downtime, but argued that Americans in particular had been conditioned to hate their jobs and love passive relaxation.
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  • He blamed television, above all, for the decline in hobbies, avocations and lifelong education — activities that blend aspects of work and play and, he said, offer the best opportunity for flow and, through it, happiness.
  • Some critics said his finger pointing smacked of snobbery, to which he had a response: “If holding that everyone should have a chance to get the highest quality of experience is an elitist notion, so be it,” he wrote in a guest essay for The New York Times in 1993. “It is better than resigning oneself to a life of mindless entertainment.”
  • “We can’t afford to become trapped within ourselves, our jobs, and religions, and lose sight of the entire tapestry of life,” he said in a 1995 interview with Omni magazine. “When the self loses itself in a transcendent purpose — whether to write great poetry, craft beautiful furniture, understand the motions of galaxies, or help children be happier — the self becomes largely invulnerable to the fears and setbacks of ordinary existence.”
Javier E

Technopoly-Chs. 9,10--Scientism, the great symbol drain - 0 views

scientism science social science narrative objectivity advertising morality authority coherence Postman book notes

shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • By Scientism, I mean three interrelated ideas that, taken together, stand as one of the pillars of Technopoly.
  • The first and indispensable idea is, as noted, that the methods of the natural sciences can be applied to the study of human behavior. This idea is the backbone of much of psychology and sociology as practiced at least in America, and largely accounts for the fact that social science, to quote F. A. Hayek, "has cont~ibuted scarcely anything to our understanding of social phenomena." 2
  • The second idea is, as also noted, that social science generates specific principles which can be used to organize society on a rational and humane basis. This implies that technical meansmostly "invisible technologies" supervised by experts-can be designed to control human behavior and set it on the proper course.
  • ...63 more annotations...
  • The third idea is that faith in science can serve as a comprehensive belief system that gives meaning to life, as well. as a sense of well-being, morality, and even immortality.
  • the spirit behind this scientific ideal inspired several men to believe that the reliable and predictable knowledge that could be obtained about stars and atoms could also be obtained about human behavior.
  • Among the best known of these early "social scientists" were Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, Prosper Enfantin, and, of course, Auguste Comte.
  • They held in common two beliefs to which T echnopoly is deeply indebted: that the natural sciences provide a method to unlock the secrets of both the human heart and the direction of social life; that society can be rationally and humanely reorganized according to principles that social science will uncover. It is with these men that the idea of "social engineering" begins and the seeds of Scientism are planted.
  • Information produced by counting may sometimes be valuable in helping a person get an idea, or, even more so, in providing support for an idea. But the mere activity of counting does not make science.
  • Nor does observing th_ings, though it is sometimes said that if one is empirical, one is scientific. To be empirical means to look at things before drawing conclusions. Everyone, therefore, is an empiricist, with the possible exception of paranoid schizophrenics.
  • What we may call science, then, is the quest to find the immutable and universal laws that govern processes, presuming that there are cause-and-effect relations among these processes. It follows that the quest to understand human behavior and feeling can in no sense except the most trivial be called science.
  • Scientists do strive to be empirical and where possible precise, but it is also basic to their enterprise that they maintain a high degree of objectivity, which means that they study things independently of what people think or do about them.
  • I do not say, incidentally, that the Oedipus complex and God do not exist. Nor do I say that to believe in them is harmful-far from it. I say only that, there being no tests that could, in principle, show them to be false, they fall outside the purview Scientism 151 of science, as do almost all theories that make up the content of "social science."
  • in the nineteenth centu~, novelists provided us with most of the powerful metaphors and images of our culture.
  • This fact relieves the scientist of inquiring into their values and motivations and for this reason alone separates science from what is called social science, consigning the methodology of the latter (to quote Gunnar Myrdal) to the status of the "metaphysical and pseudo-objective." 3
  • The status of social-science methods is further reduced by the fact that there are almost no experiments that will reveal a social-science theory to be false.
  • et us further suppose that Milgram had found that 100 percent of his 1 subjecl:s did what they were told, with or without Hannah Arendt. And now let us suppose that I tell you a story of a Scientism 153 group of people who in some real situation refused to comply with the orders of a legitimate authority-let us say, the Danes who in the face of Nazi occupation helped nine thousand Jews escape to Sweden. Would you say to me that this cannot be so because Milgram' s study proves otherwise? Or would you say that this overturns Milgram's work? Perhaps you would say that the Danish response is not relevant, since the Danes did not regard the Nazi occupation as constituting legitimate autho!ity. But then, how would we explain the cooperative response to Nazi authority of the French, the Poles, and the Lithuanians? I think you would say none of these things, because Milgram' s experiment qoes not confirm or falsify any theory that might be said to postulate a law of human nature. His study-which, incidentally, I find both fascinating and terrifying-is not science. It is something else entirely.
  • Freud, could not imagine how the book could be judged exemplary: it was science or it was nothing. Well, of course, Freud was wrong. His work is exemplary-indeed, monumental-but scarcely anyone believes today that Freud was doing science, any more than educated people believe that Marx was doing science, or Max Weber or Lewis Mumford or Bruno Bettelheim or Carl Jung or Margaret Mead or Arnold Toynbee. What these people were doing-and Stanley Milgram was doing-is documenting the behavior and feelings of people as they confront problems posed by their culture.
  • the stories of social r~searchers are much closer in structure and purpose to what is called imaginative literature; that is to say, both a social researcher and a novelist give unique interpretations to a set of human events and support their interpretations with examples in various forms. Their interpretations cannot be proved or disproved but will draw their appeal from the power of their language, the depth of their explanations, the relevance of their examples, and the credibility of their themes.
  • And all of this has, in both cases, an identifiable moral purpose.
  • The words "true" and "false" do not apply here in the sense that they are used in mathematics or science. For there is nothing universally and irrevocably true or false about these interpretations. There are no critical tests to confirm or falsify them. There are no natural laws from which they are derived. They are bound by time, by situation, and above all by the cultural prejudices of the researcher or writer.
  • Both the novelist and the social researcher construct their stories by the use of archetypes and metaphors.
  • Cervantes, for example, gave us the enduring archetype of the incurable dreamer and idealist in Don Quixote. The social historian Marx gave us the archetype of the ruthless and conspiring, though nameless, capitalist. Flaubert gave us the repressed b~urgeois romantic in Emma Bovary. And Margaret Mead gave us the carefree, guiltless Samoan adolescent. Kafka gave us the alienated urbanite driven to self-loathing. And Max Weber gave us hardworking men driven by a mythology he called the Protestant Ethic. Dostoevsky gave us the egomaniac redeemed by love and religious fervor. And B. F. Skinner gave us the automaton redeemed by a benign technology.
  • Why do such social researchers tell their stories? Essentially for didactic and moralistic purposes. These men and women tell their stories for the same reason the Buddha, Confucius, Hillel, and Jesus told their stories (and for the same reason D. H. Lawrence told his).
  • Moreover, in their quest for objectivity, scientists proceed on the assumption that the objects they study are indifferent to the fact that they are being studied.
  • If, indeed, the price of civilization is repressed sexuality, it was not Sigmund Freud who discovered it. If the consciousness of people is formed by their material circumstances, it was not Marx who discovered it. If the medium is the message, it was not McLuhan who discovered it. They have merely retold ancient stories in a modem style.
  • Unlike science, social research never discovers anything. It only rediscovers what people once were told and need to be told again.
  • Only in knowing ~omething of the reasons why they advocated education can we make sense of the means they suggest. But to understand their reas.ons we must also understand the narratives that governed their view of the world. By narrative, I mean a story of human history that gives meaning to the past, explains the present, and provides guidance for the future.
  • In Technopoly, it is not Scientism 159 enough to say, it is immoral and degrading to allow people to be homeless. You cannot get anywhere by asking a judge, a politician, or a bureaucrat to r~ad Les Miserables or Nana or, indeed, the New Testament. Y 01.i must show that statistics have produced data revealing the homeless to be unhappy and to be a drain on the economy. Neither Dostoevsky nor Freud, Dickens nor Weber, Twain nor Marx, is now a dispenser of legitimate knowledge. They are interesting; they are ''.worth reading"; they are artifacts of our past. But as for "truth," we must tum to "science."
  • In Technopoly, it is not enough for social research to rediscover ancient truths or to comment on and criticize the moral behavior of people. In T echnopoly, it is an insult to call someone a "moralizer." Nor is it sufficient for social research to put forward metaphors, images, and ideas that can help people live with some measure of understanding and dignity.
  • Such a program lacks the aura of certain knowledge that only science can provide. It becomes necessary, then, to transform psychology, sociology, and anthropology into "sciences," in which humanity itself becomes an object, much like plants, planets, or ice cubes.
  • That is why the commonplaces that people fear death and that children who come from stable families valuing scholarship will do well in school must be announced as "discoveries" of scientific enterprise. In this way, social resear~hers can see themselves, and can be seen, as scientists, researchers without bias or values, unburdened by mere opinion. In this way, social policies can be claimed to rest on objectively determined facts.
  • given the psychological, social, and material benefits that attach to the label "scientist," it is not hard to see why social researchers should find it hard to give it up.
  • Our social "s'cientists" have from the beginning been less tender of conscience, or less rigorous in their views of science, or perhaps just more confused about the questions their procedures can answer and those they cannot. In any case, they have not been squeamish about imputing to their "discoveries" and the rigor of their procedures the power to direct us in how we ought rightly to behave.
  • It is less easy to see why the rest of us have so willingly, even eagerly, cooperated in perpetuating the same illusion.
  • When the new technologies and techniques and spirit of men like Galileo, Newton, and Bacon laid the foundations of natural science, they also discredited the authority of earlier accounts of the physical world, as found, for example, in the great tale of Genesis. By calling into question the truth of such accounts in one realm, science undermined the whole edifice of belief in sacred stories and ultimately swept away with it the source to which most humans had looked for moral authority. It is not too much to say, I think, that the desacralized world has been searching for an alternative source of moral authority ever since.
  • We welcome them gladly, and the claim explicitly made or implied, because we need so desperately to find some source outside the frail and shaky judgments of mortals like ourselves to authorize our moral decisions and behavior. And outside of the authority of brute force, which can scarcely be called moral, we seem to have little left but the authority of procedures.
  • It is not merely the misapplication of techniques such as quantification to questions where numbers have nothing to say; not merely the confusion of the material and social realms of human experience; not merely the claim of social researchers to be applying the aims and procedures of natural scien\:e to the human world.
  • This, then, is what I mean by Scientism.
  • It is the desperate hope, and wish, and ultimately the illusory belief that some standardized set of procedures called "science" can provide us with an unimpeachable source of moral authority, a suprahuman basis for answers to questions like "What is life, and when, and why?" "Why is death, and suffering?" 'What is right and wrong to do?" "What are good and evil ends?" "How ought we to think and feel and behave?
  • Science can tell us when a heart begins to beat, or movement begins, or what are the statistics on the survival of neonates of different gestational ages outside the womb. But science has no more authority than you do or I do to establish such criteria as the "true" definition of "life" or of human state or of personhood.
  • Social research can tell us how some people behave in the presence of what they believe to be legitimate authority. But it cannot tell us when authority is "legitimate" and when not, or how we must decide, or when it may be right or wrong to obey.
  • To ask of science, or expect of science, or accept unchallenged from science the answers to such questions is Scientism. And it is Technopoly's grand illusion.
  • In the institutional form it has taken in the United States, advertising is a symptom of a world-view 'that sees tradition as an obstacle to its claims. There can, of course, be no functioning sense of tradition without a measure of respect for symbols. Tradition is, in fact, nothing but the acknowledgment of the authority of symbols and the relevance of the narratives that gave birth to them. With the erosion of symbols there follows a loss of narrative, which is one of the most debilitating consequences of Technopoly' s power.
  • What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research, which meahs orienting business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable. The business of business becomes pseudo-therapy; the consumer, a patient reassl.,lred by psychodramas.
  • At the moment, 1t 1s considered necessary to introduce computers to the classroom, as it once was thought necessary to bring closed-circuit television and film to the classroom. To the question "Why should we do this?" the answer is: "To make learning more efficient and more interesting." Such an answer is considered entirely adequate, since in T ~chnopoly efficiency and interest need no justification. It is, therefore, usually not noticed that this answer does not address the question "What is learning for?"
  • What this means is that somewhere near the core of Technopoly is a vast industry with license to use all available symbols to further the interests of commerce, by devouring the psyches of consumers.
  • In the twentieth century, such metaphors and images have come largely from the pens of social historians and researchers. ·Think of John Dewey, William James, Erik Erikson, Alfred Kinsey, Thorstein Veblen, Margaret Mead, Lewis Mumford, B. F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, Marshall McLuhan, Barbara Tuchman, Noam Chomsky, Robert Coles, even Stanley Milgram, and you must acknowledge that our ideas of what we are like and what kind of country we live in come from their stories to a far greater extent than from the stories of our most renowned novelists.
  • social idea that must be advanced through education.
  • Confucius advocated teaching "the Way" because in tradition he saw the best hope for social order. As our first systematic fascist, Plato wished education to produce philosopher kings. Cicero argued that education must free the student from the tyranny of the present. Jefferson thought the purpose of education is to teach the young how to protect their liberties. Rousseau wished education to free the young from the unnatural constraints of a wicked and arbitrary social order. And among John Dewey's aims was to help the student function without certainty in a world of constant change and puzzling· ambiguities.
  • The point is that cultures must have narratives and will find them where they will, even if they lead to catastrophe. The alternative is to live without meaning, the ultimate negation of life itself.
  • It is also to the point to say that each narrative is given its form and its emotional texture through a cluster of symbols that call for respect and allegiance, even devotion.
  • by definition, there can be no education philosophy that does not address what learning is for. Confucius, Plato, Quintilian, Cicero, Comenius, Erasmus, Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, Russell, Montessori, Whitehead, and Dewey--each believed that there was some transcendent political, spiritual, or
  • The importance of the American Constitution is largely in its function as a symbol of the story of our origins. It is our political equivalent of Genesis. To mock it, to• ignore it, to circwnvent it is to declare the irrelevance of the story of the United States as a moral light unto the world. In like fashion, the Statue of Liberty is the key symbol of the story of America as the natural home of the teeming masses, from anywhere, yearning to be free.
  • There are those who believe--as did the great historian Arnold Toynbee-that without a comprehensive religious narrative at its center a culture must decline. Perhaps. There are, after all, other sources-mythology, politics, philosophy, and science; for example--but it is certain that no culture can flourish without narratives of transcendent orjgin and power.
  • This does not mean that the mere existence of such a narrative ensures a culture's stability and strength. There are destructive narratives. A narrative provides meaning, not necessarily survival-as, for example, the story provided by Adolf Hitler to the German nation in t:he 1930s.
  • What story does American education wish to tell now? In a growing Technopoly, what do we believe education is for?
  • The answers are discouraging, and one of. them can be inferred from any television commercial urging the young to stay in school. The commercial will either imply or state explicitly that education will help the persevering student to get a ·good job. And that's it. Well, not quite. There is also the idea that we educate ourselves to compete with the Japanese or the Germans in an economic struggle to be number one.
  • Young men, for example, will learn how to make lay-up shots when they play basketball. To be able to make them is part of the The Great Symbol Drain 177 definition of what good players are. But they do not play basketball for that purpose. There is usually a broader, deeper, and more meaningful reason for wanting to play-to assert their manhood, to please their fathers, to be acceptable to their peers, even for the sheer aesthetic pleasure of the game itself. What you have to do to be a success must be addressed only after you have found a reason to be successful.
  • Bloom's solution is that we go back to the basics of Western thought.
  • He wants us to teach our students what Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Saint Augustine, and other luminaries have had to say on the great ethical and epistemological questions. He believes that by acquainting themselves with great books our students will acquire a moral and intellectual foundation that will give meaning and texture to their lives.
  • Hirsch's encyclopedic list is not a solution but a description of the problem of information glut. It is therefore essentially incoherent. But it also confuses a consequence of education with a purpose. Hirsch attempted to answer the question "What is an educated person?" He left unanswered the question "What is an education for?"
  • Those who reject Bloom's idea have offered several arguments against it. The first is that such a purpose for education is elitist: the mass of students would not find the great story of
  • Western civilization inspiring, are too deeply alienated from the past to find it so, and would therefore have difficulty connecting the "best that has been thought and said" to their own struggles to find q1eaning in their lives.
  • A second argument, coming from what is called a "leftist" perspective, is even more discouraging. In a sense, it offers a definition of what is meant by elitism. It asserts that the "story of Western civilization" is a partial, biased, and even oppressive one. It is not the story of blacks, American Indians, Hispanics, women, homosexuals-of any people who are not white heterosexual males of Judea-Christian heritage. This claim denies that there is or can be a national culture, a narrative of organizing power and inspiring symbols which all citizens can identify with and draw sustenance from. If this is true, it means nothing less than that our national symbols have been drained of their power to unite, and that education must become a tribal affair; that is, each subculture must find its own story and symbols, and use them as the moral basis of education.
  • nto this void comes the Technopoly story, with its emphasis on progress without limits, rights without responsibilities, and technology without cost. The T echnopoly story is without a moral center. It puts in its place efficiency, interest, and economic advance. It promises heaven on earth through the conveniences of technological progress. It casts aside all traditional narratives and symbols that· suggest stability and orderliness, and tells, instead, of a life of skills, technical expertise, and the ecstasy of consumption. Its purpose is to produce functionaries for an ongoing Technopoly.
  • It answers Bloom by saying that the story of Western civilization is irrelevant; it answers the political left by saying there is indeed a common culture whose name is T echnopoly and whose key symbol is now the computer, toward which there must be neither irreverence nor blasphemy. It even answers Hirsch by saying that there are items on his list that, if thought about too deeply and taken too seriously, will interfere with the progress of technology.
Javier E

What If Fox News Viewers Watched CNN Instead? - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...ws-viewers-watched-cnn-instead

fox news experiment trial rival perspectives change of mind research bias

shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • The establishment of Fox News in the late 1990s forever changed both media and politics in America, transforming the formerly staid world of television news into the series of political shoutfests we know and love-hate today.
  • the question persists: Does watching Fox News actually change voters’ minds?
  • Comparing markets that had received Fox to those where it was not yet available, the study concluded that the presence of Fox News was good for a Republican gain of 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points between the 1996 and 2000 elections. It was a decidedly modest effect — but large enough to sway that super-close election.
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  • Only committed conservatives, the theory goes, would bother to tune in to Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson, so what difference could it make what they say?
  • Broockman and Kalla recruited a sample of regular Fox News viewers and paid a subset of them to watch CNN instead.
  • Then the treatment group of switchers and the control group of non-switchers took three waves of surveys about the news.
  • The results: Not only did CNN and Fox cover different things during the September 2020 survey period, but the audience of committed Fox viewers, which started the month with conservative predispositions, changed their minds on many issues.
  • Switchers were five percentage points more likely to believe that people suffer from long Covid, for example, and six points more likely to believe that many foreign countries did a better job than the U.S. of controlling the virus.
  • They were seven points more likely to support voting by mail. And they were 10 points less likely to believe that supporters of then-candidate Joe Biden were happy when police officers get shot, 11 points less likely to say it’s more important for the president to focus on containing violent protesters than on the coronavirus, and 13 points less likely to agree that if Biden were elected, “we’ll see many more police get shot by Black Lives Matter activists.”
  • These are meaningful differences, even if the group that switched to CNN remained very right-wing in their view of the American political landscape.
  • these are reasonably large changes from a one-month experiment. And they occurred despite the long-term effort of then-President Donald Trump to discredit CNN and other mainstream media outlets.
  • one of the things that switchers changed their minds about was Fox News itself: They became more skeptical that Fox would cover a story that reflected poorly on Trump, even if it were true.
  • This mode of political influence, where partisan media can simply ignore stories that are inconvenient, is a potentially powerful challenge to democratic accountability.
  • It’s also probably not symmetrical. Even media outlets that skew liberal in their coverage generally don’t shy away from covering the Covid death toll or the rise in inflation.
  • one lesson they can take from this experiment is that nobody is impossible to reach.
  • Broockman and Kalla’s research indicates that information flows at the margin really do matter. Any opportunity to present new facts to people, and new arguments, is valuable.
Javier E

The Thread Vibes Are Off - by Anne Helen Petersen - 0 views

annehelen.substack.com/...the-thread-vibes-are-off

social media twitter instagram tiktok facebook linkedin comparison

shared by Javier E on 11 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • The way people post on Twitter is different from the way people post on LinkedIn which is different than how people post Facebook which is different from the way people post on Instagram, no matter how much Facebook keeps telling you to cross-post your IG stories
  • Some people whose job relies on onlineness (like me) have to refine their voices, their ways of being, across several platforms. But most normal people have found their lane — the medium that fits their message — and have stuck with it.
  • People post where they feel public speech “belongs.”
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  • For some, the only speech they feel should be truly public should also be “professional.” Hence: LinkedIn, where the only associated image is a professional headshot, and the only conversations are those related to work.
  • Which is how some people really would like to navigate the public sphere: with total freedom and total impunity
  • Twitter is where you could publicly (if often anonymously) fight, troll, dunk, harass, joke, and generally speak without consequence; it’s also where the mundane status update/life musing (once the foundation of Facebook) could live peacefully.
  • Twitter was for publicly observing — through the scroll, but also by tweeting, retweeting, quote tweeting — while remaining effectively invisible, a reply-guy amongst reply-guys, a troll amongst trolls.
  • The Facebook of the 2010s was for broadcasting ideological stances under your real name and fighting with your close and extended community about them; now it’s (largely) about finding advice (and fighting about advice) in affinity groups (often) composed of people you’ve never met.
  • It rewards the esoteric, the visually witty, the mimetic — even more than Twitter.
  • Tiktok is for monologues, for expertise, for timing and performance. It’s without pretense.
  • On TikTok, you don’t reshare memes, you use them as the soundtrack to your reimagining, even if that reimagining is just “what if I do the same dance, only with my slightly dorky parents?
  • Instagram is serious and sincere (see: the success of the social justice slideshow) and almost never ironic — maybe because static visual irony is pretty hard to pull off.
  • Like YouTube, far fewer people are posting than consuming, which means that most people aren’t speaking at all.
  • And then there’s Instagram. People think Instagram is for extroverts, for people who want to broadcast every bit of their lives, but most Instagram users I know are shy — at least with public words. Instagram is where parents post pictures of their kids with the caption “these guys right here” or a picture of their dog with “a very good boy.”
  • The text doesn’t matter; the photo speaks loudest. Each post becomes overdetermined, especially when so readily viewed within the context of the greater grid
  • The more you understand your value as the sum of your visual parts, the more addictive, essential, and anxiety-producing Instagram becomes.
  • That emphasis on aesthetic perfection is part of what feminizes Instagram — but it’s also what makes it the most natural home for brands, celebrities, and influencers.
  • a static image can communicate a whole lifestyle — and brands have had decades of practice honing the practice in magazine ads and catalogs.
  • And what is an influencer if not a conduit for brands? What is a celebrity if not a conduit for their own constellation of brands?
  • If LinkedIn is the place where you can pretend that your whole life and personality is “business,” then Instagram is where you can pretend it’s all some form of leisure — or at least fun
  • A “fun” work trip, a “fun” behind-the-scenes shot, a brand doing the very hard work of trying to get you to click through and make a purchase with images that are fun fun fun.
  • On the flip side, Twitter was where you spoke with your real (verified) name — and with great, algorithm-assisted importance. You could amass clout simply by rephrasing others’ scoops in your own words, declaring opinions as facts, or just declaring. If Twitter was gendered masculine — which it certainly was, and is arguably even more so now — it was only because all of those behaviors are as well.
  • Instagram is a great place to post an announcement and feel celebrated or consoled but not feel like you have to respond to people
  • The conversation is easier to both control and ignore; of all the social networks, it most closely resembles the fawning broadcast style of the fan magazine, only the celebs control the final edit, not the magazine publisher
  • Celebrities initially glommed to Twitte
  • But its utility gradually faded: part of the problem was harassment, but part of it was context collapse, and the way it allowed words to travel across the platform and out of the celebrity’s control.
  • Instagram was just so much simpler, the communication so clearly in the celebrity wheelhouse. There is very little context collapse on Instagram — it’s all curation and control. As such, you can look interesting but say very little.
sarahz135

In U.S., Far More Support Than Oppose Separation of Church and State | Pew Research Center - 1 views

www.pewforum.org/...separation-of-church-and-state

research bias

shared by sarahz135 on 29 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • sarahz135 on 29 Oct 21
     
    I found this interesting in how much religion can have an effect on people's opinions to such a large extent. I also found it interesting how other factors can influence this perspective of religion like political background, gender, age, and race (even if minimally).
peterconnelly

It's Doom Times in Tech - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...doom-times-in-tech.html

new york times tech

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • The five biggest technology giants in the U.S. have collectively lost more than $2 trillion of stock market value this year.
  • Start-up founders who were turning away eager investors a few months ago now must make an effort to get more money. (Gasp.)
  • Every couple of years for the past decade, anytime there were some wobbles in technology or moments of doubt, smart people predicted that the growth of the tech economy since the Great Recession couldn’t possibly last.
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  • We haven’t seen this combination of economic anxiety and high inflation before. Economists are weighing the risks of a U.S. recession, and companies in many industries are worried that their businesses are slowing.
  • Fast growing start-ups in particular need the faith of investors, customers and employees to keep the momentum going.
  • If within a few months, stock prices bounce back, investors start putting money into start-ups again and the market for initial public offerings unfreezes, the industry might be fine. But if investors stay skittish for many months or years, that could lead to a major shake-up.
peterconnelly

Opinion: Want to keep your employees happy? Offer these 5 things - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • To attract workers in today's tight labor market, companies are touting better workplace amenities. Amazon is running ads about the company's pay and benefits. Levi Strauss is offering to cover travel costs for workers seeking abortions. Airbnb is allowing its employees to permanently work remotely. This is a workers' paradise in the making.
  • People crave predictability. Surprises make it harder for employees to plan their lives and have peace of mind. When constant change is inflicted on them, without a chance to anticipate it or participate in decisions about it, people get anxious and passive, and dream of escape.
  • Now, increasing numbers of people demand the ability to choose when, where and how to work.
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  • This made the employee feel like remote work was just another set of disempowering rules.
  • Workers clearly felt empowered by having more control over their own work life. Companies must give people choices that match their unique work and life needs.
  • But they also made clear that willingness to stay with the current employer is also a matter of whether their direct managers can deliver on five other factors beyond the paycheck that keep people happy, productive and on the team.
  • For instance, workers who get unexpected spot bonuses sometimes feel that they don't know what to count on when calculating their future compensation; they'd rather have a predictable total package.
  • People thrive when their value is acknowledged by getting more responsibility, recognition and stature, such as a bigger title.
  • Jobs that convey a sense of purpose and meaning are more likely to exercise an emotional hold on people. Whether or not the company overall thinks it stands for social responsibility, people want to see that chance to make a difference in their immediate work experience.
  • Conventional wisdom holds that the best way to improve employment circumstances is to get an offer from a new company. That shouldn't have to be the case. Managers who want to retain people should act as if they are just now hiring them.
  • The best labor pool could be the one companies already have. They should treat their people as a precious resource and give them what they want from work. Rewarding them will reward the business.
peterconnelly

Why You Need To Beat Confirmation Bias To Win Your Customers - 0 views

martechseries.com/...ion-bias-to-win-your-customers

bias

shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Confirmation bias is the tendency to interpret information in a way that is always consistent with existing beliefs. Simply, it occurs when someone views information in a positive, affirming light, even though the information could be telling a drastically different story.
  • While confirmation bias can often be chalked up to human nature, in a business setting, failure to adequately evaluate and respond to information can be a legitimate issue for a company, and particularly its marketing team.
  • This is where confirmation bias can be dangerous because it’s easy for brands to assume customers view the company through the same lens they do and have a similar opinion of the company, but this isn’t necessarily true.
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  • To beat confirmation bias, it’s vital for brands to face reality when measuring the success of their campaigns and gauging customer brand perception.
  • As a marketer, it can be easy to fall victim to simply measuring customer behavioural data (like click-through rates, ad engagement, unsubscribes, etc.). However, the best marketing teams lean on an outside-in perspective to improve customer experiences and create a better brand reputation.
  • Additionally, marketing teams would be wise to connect with potential customers who did not convert. They will be most able to point out the pain points in a marketing campaign that are dissuading buyers. It’s just as important to ask consumers why they didn’t interact with a brand as it is to ask why they do.
  • Obtaining these insights allows marketers to gauge specifics into how their competitors are beating them out, and conversely, how they can improve their product and boost customer retention.
  • At the end of the day, customers want to know that their feedback is valued and has the power to drive change. Companies that choose to neglect customer feedback are prime examples of the dangers of confirmation bias.
  • It doesn’t matter how marketing teams or their company define success, it’s up to the customer.
  • For example, in industries like video tech and security, where the community is extremely tight knit, marketing teams must have a deep understanding of their audience’s business needs to have any chance of selling to them. Brands that understand consumer perception and needs, will be able to personalize messages to their target audience and create a more positive customer experience. By gauging and adapting to direct feedback, marketing teams can avoid the dangers of confirmation bias, and make wholesale changes that will turn customers into brand champions.
peterconnelly

Elon Musk Hates Ads. Twitter Needs Them. That May Be a Problem. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...elon-musk-twitter-ads.html

ads new york times

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Since he started pursuing his $44 billion purchase of Twitter — and for years before that — the world’s richest man has made clear that advertising is not a priority.
  • Ads account for roughly 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue.
  • They have cited a litany of complaints, including that the company cannot target ads nearly as well as competitors like Facebook, Google and Amazon.
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  • Now, numerous advertising executives say they’re willing to move their money elsewhere, especially if Mr. Musk eliminates the safeguards that allowed Twitter to remove racist rants and conspiracy theories.
  • “At the end of the day, it’s not the brands who need to be concerned, because they’ll just spend their budgets elsewhere — it’s Twitter that needs to be concerned,” said David Jones
  • On Wednesday night, at Twitter’s annual NewFronts presentation for advertisers at Pier 17 in New York, company representatives stressed Twitter’s value for marketers: as a top destination for people to gather and discuss major cultural moments like sporting events or the Met Gala, increasingly through video posts.
  • “Twitter’s done a better job than many platforms at building trust with advertisers — they’ve been more progressive, more responsive and more humble about initiating ways to learn,” said Mark Read
  • Twitter earns the vast majority of its ad revenue from brand awareness campaigns, whose effectiveness is much harder to evaluate than ads that target users based on their interests or that push for a direct response, such as clicking through to a website.
  • Twitter’s reach is also narrower than many rivals, with 229 million users who see ads, compared with 830 million users on LinkedIn and 1.96 billion daily users on Facebook.
  • “Even the likes of LinkedIn have eclipsed the ability for us to target consumers beyond what Twitter is providing,” he said. “We’re going to go where the results are, and with a lot of our clients, we haven’t seen the performance on Twitter from an ad perspective that we have with other platforms.”
  • Twitter differs from Facebook, whose millions of small and midsize advertisers generate the bulk of the company’s revenue and depend on its enormous size and targeting abilities to reach customers. Twitter’s clientele is heavily weighted with large, mainstream companies, which tend to be wary of their ads appearing alongside problematic content.
  • On Twitter, he has criticized ads as “manipulating public opinion” and discussed his refusal to “pay famous people to fake endorse.”
  • “There’s a fork in the road, where Path A leads to an unfiltered place with the worst of human behavior and no brands want to go anywhere near it,” said Mr. Jones of Brandtech. “And Path B has one of the world’s genius entrepreneurs, who knows a lot about running companies, unleashing a wave of innovation that has people looking back in a few years and saying, ‘Remember when everyone was worried about Musk coming in?’”
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