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marleen_ueberall

Why you may not be able to trust your own memories | The Independent - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...mory-remembering-a8687296.html

memories

shared by marleen_ueberall on 04 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Why you may not be able to trust your own memories | The Independent
  • Take storytelling for example. When we describe our memories to other people, we use artistic licence to tell the story differently depending on who’s listening.
  • we’re often guilty of changing the facts and adding false details to our memories without even realising.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • There are countless reasons why tiny mistakes or embellishments might happen each time we recall past events, ranging from what we believe is true or wish were true, to what someone else told us about the event, or what we want that person to think. And whenever these flaws happen, they can have long-term effects on how we’ll recall that memory in the future.
  • We rely on our memories not only for sharing stories with friends or learning from our past experiences, but also for crucial things like creating a sense of personal identity.
  • And we might change the story’s details depending on the listener’s attitudes or political leaning.
  • Research shows that when we describe our memories differently to different audiences it isn’t only the message that changes, but sometimes it’s also the memory itself. This is known as the “audience-tuning effect”.
  • memories can change spontaneously over time, as a product of how, when, and why we access them. In fact, sometimes simply the act of rehearsing a memory can be exactly what makes it susceptible to change. This is known as “retrieval-enhanced suggestibility”.
  • One theory is that rehearsing our memories of past events can temporarily make those memories malleable. In other words, retrieving a memory might be a bit like taking ice-cream out of the freezer and leaving it in direct sunlight for a while. By the time our memory goes back into the freezer, it might have naturally become a little misshapen, especially if someone has meddled with it in the meantime.
delgadool

Coronavirus pandemic: Congress response lets down workers, US economy - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/kers-us-economy-failure-2020-3

shared by delgadool on 23 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The US share of global GDP is nearly 15%. If our economy can't stabilize and then recover from the coronavirus pandemic, it will be harder for the world to do so
  • it's imperative that Congress write fair, generous legislation to get us through the economic shutdown required to fight the virus
  • But that isn't what's happening. Republicans accuse Democrats of not moving fast enough. Democrats accuse Republicans of short-changing American workers and favoring big corporations.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Under-funding this stimulus will drag the global economy down. And any appearance that corporations are getting a more fair deal than individuals will make people not want to comply. A lack of compliance will drag on the crisis.
  • When it falls into ruin, the entire global economy drags. We saw that happen during the financial crisis of 2008.
    • delgadool
      delgadool on 23 Mar 20
       
      Example of comparable situation
  • Congress could under-fund the US coronavirus stimulus package. If they do, they put not only the economy but the effort to fight the virus at risk.
  • this weekend the Senate was unable to pass aid legislation
  • Democrats also rejected the bill over a lack of labor protections that would only mandate corporations keep employees "to the extent possible." They want more limits on executive compensation and share buybacks, and they want more money for healthcare workers. They accuse Republicans of being cheap, and writing a deal that favors corporations over average Americans.
  • The only proposal that comes close to being generous enough for individuals comes from Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib. It would give a prepaid card with $2,000 to every American. That card would then be recharged with $1,000 monthly until one year after the end of the coronavirus crisis. This is the kind of plan that will make Americans believe the government has their back, not just the backs of big corporations.
  • The distrust that is bred by corruption will make it much harder to fight this virus, potentially dragging out the crisis. The vast majority of Americans already think that our lack of trust in each other and our government makes it hard to solve problems, according to Pew Research. If Americans feel like this whole aid package is a handout to big corporations — which they also distrust — they may stop listening to authorities.
  • Goldman Sachs estimates that the recession brought on by fighting off coronavirus will trough in April, knocking 10% off US GDP. Over time, bank analysts wrote last week, the economy should begin to grow again incrementally. How fast depends on how well Americans comply with government social-distancing mandates. Americans have to want to comply.
  • Small and midsize companies make up 83% of the US economy, and thousands of workers are already out of a job across the country. Means-testing initial payments to individuals — that is, restricting who gets the checks based on income — is a waste of time.
krystalxu

Culture, Values and the Impact at Work | Diversity Journal - 0 views

www.diversityjournal.com/-values-and-the-impact-at-work

culture diversity values work bias cooporation

shared by krystalxu on 13 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Sometimes one or more cultures may take dominance over another culture, depending on the situation
  • A number of cultural aspects influence the way we interact with other people,
  • Different values lead to different behavior, behavior you may not understand. It is important that we try to learn and appreciate these differences in order to work effectively with people from other cultures.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • the French identify with country and family, whereas the Japanese identify with the corporation, and the Irish with the Roman Catholic Church.
  • we adapt our behaviors to fit in with the group.
  • Building trust and commitment across cultures means that you need to use all parts of your cultural intelligence
  • The complexities apart, creating some common ground rules does help building trust and commitment.
katherineharron

Trump's rebuke of Fauci encapsulates rejection of science in virus fight - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

crisis

shared by katherineharron on 14 May 20 - No Cached
  • Trump broke with Fauci, who has served under six presidents, on Wednesday over the infectious disease expert's warnings that getting businesses and schools back open too quickly would lead to unnecessary suffering and death.
  • The delicate dynamic between Fauci and Trump has been watched for months. Its latest fraying marks the most pronounced clash yet in the tussle between science and politics that has long plagued the administration's fight against the coronavirus.
  • He has yet to initiate a serious national conversation about the vital need to get the economy firing again balanced against the level of death and illness that is acceptable to the country given that the pandemic could worsen if states open up too quickly.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Ironically, another of Trump's failings, one in which Fauci may be in some ways complicit as a member of the coronavirus task force -- to stand up a comprehensive national testing and tracking system -- may frustrate the President's effort to get the country up and running quickly with no vaccine in sight.
  • The gulf between Trump's approach and scientific rationality is expected to be further underscored Thursday with House testimony from Dr. Rick Bright, who says he was ousted from his job developing a coronavirus vaccine because he questioned Trump's enthusiasm for hydroxychloroquine, an unproven treatment for Covid-19. Bright will warn, according to his prepared testimony, that the US could face "unprecedented illness" and the "darkest winter in modern history" if it doesn't do a better job of preparing for a second wave of the pandemic.
  • Trump's use of the world "acceptable" in relation to Fauci's comments is instructive about how he sees subordinates in his administration. The history of his three years in power shows that officials who do not provide the justification and the pretext for his actions or who prefer to act on their own perceptions of the national interest are eventually ousted.
  • In recent weeks, Trump has shifted from an approach rooted in benchmarks for phased state openings based on a waning of the virus to one based on opening the economy whatever the cost.
  • Rising attacks on Fauci have taken their toll on his standing with the President's supporters, even though he is warmly regarded by the rest of the country. In a new CNN/SSRS poll, 84% of Republicans say they trust Trump to give them information on the virus. Only 61% of the same slice of the electorate say they trust Fauci, who has headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984.
  • "I'm a scientist, a physician and a public health official. I give advice, according to the best scientific evidence," he said. "I don't give advice about economic things."
Javier E

J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues - J.K. Rowling - 0 views

www.jkrowling.com/...g-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues

gender free speech censorship trans psychology

shared by Javier E on 14 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t.
  • All the time I’ve been researching and learning, accusations and threats from trans activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline. This was initially triggered by a ‘like’.
  • On one occasion, I absent-mindedly ‘liked’ instead of screenshotting. That single ‘like’ was deemed evidence of wrongthink, and a persistent low level of harassment began.
  • ...35 more annotations...
  • Months later, I compounded my accidental ‘like’ crime by following Magdalen Berns on Twitter. Magdalen was an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumour
  • Magdalen was a great believer in the importance of biological sex, and didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women with penises, dots were joined in the heads of twitter trans activists, and the level of social media abuse increased.
  • ‘TERF’ is an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In practice, a huge and diverse cross-section of women are currently being called TERFs and the vast majority have never been radical feminists
  • why am I doing this? Why speak up? Why not quietly do my research and keep my head down?
  • I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism, and deciding I need to speak up.
  • Firstly, I have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in Scotland, with a particular emphasis on women and children. Among other things, my trust supports projects for female prisoners and for survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. I also fund medical research into MS, a disease that behaves very differently in men and women
  • I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge.
  • The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding
  • The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended i
  • The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility
  • ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.
  • American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said: ‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.’
  • her career took a similar hit to that suffered by Maya Forstater. Lisa Littman had dared challenge one of the central tenets of trans activism, which is that a person’s gender identity is innate, like sexual orientation. Nobody, the activists insisted, could ever be persuaded into being trans.
  • The argument of many current trans activists is that if you don’t let a gender dysphoric teenager transition, they will kill themselves.
  • the new trans activism is having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of the causes I support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.
  • I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria
  • As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s, it had to be books and music that got me through both my mental health issues and the sexualised scrutiny and judgement that sets so many girls to war against their bodies in their teens
  • The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass. A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law.
  • We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced. Back in the 80s, I imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn-saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls.
  • From the leader of the free world’s long history of sexual assault accusations and his proud boast of ‘grabbing them by the pussy’, to the incel (‘involuntarily celibate’) movement that rages against women who won’t give them sex, to the trans activists who declare that TERFs need punching and re-educating, men across the political spectrum seem to agree: women are asking for trouble.
  • I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive
  • It’s also clear that one of the objectives of denying the importance of sex is to erode what some seem to see as the cruelly segregationist idea of women having their own biological realities or – just as threatening – unifying realities that make them a cohesive political class.
  • It isn’t enough for women to be trans allies. Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves.
  • ‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning.
  • I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember.
  • the scars left by violence and sexual assault don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you’ve made. My perennial jumpiness is a family joke – and even I know it’s funny – but I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud noises, or finding people behind me when I haven’t heard them approaching.
  • I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection
  • So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.
  • On Saturday morning, I read that the Scottish government is proceeding with its controversial gender recognition plans, which will in effect mean that all a man needs to ‘become a woman’ is to say he’s one. To use a very contemporary word, I was ‘triggered’
  • I forgot the first rule of Twitter – never, ever expect a nuanced conversation – and reacted to what I felt was degrading language about women. I spoke up about the importance of sex and have been paying the price ever since. I was transphobic, I was a cunt, a bitch, a TERF, I deserved cancelling, punching and death. You are Voldemort said one person, clearly feeling this was the only language I’d understand.
  • Huge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists; I know this because so many have got in touch with me to tell their stories. They’re afraid of doxxing, of losing their jobs or their livelihoods, and of violence.
  • But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it
  • I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces
  • The supreme irony is that the attempt to silence women with the word ‘TERF’ may have pushed more young women towards radical feminism than the movement’s seen in decades.
  • All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.
melnikju

The False and Exaggerated Claims Still Being Spread About the Capitol Riot - Glenn Greenwald - 0 views

greenwald.substack.com/...e-false-and-exaggerated-claims

shared by melnikju on 17 Feb 21 - No Cached
    • melnikju
      melnikju on 17 Feb 21
       
      Both conservatives and liberals, people on any side of the argument, are trying to twist it to make themselves look better
  • But none of the other four deaths were at the hands of the protesters: the only other person killed with deliberate violence was a pro-Trump protester, Ashli Babbitt, unarmed when shot in the neck by a police officer at close range. The other three deaths were all pro-Trump protesters: Kevin Greeson, who died of a heart attack outside the Capitol; Benjamin Philips, 50, “the founder of a pro-Trump website called Trumparoo,” who died of a stroke that day; and Rosanne Boyland, a fanatical Trump supporter whom the Times says was inadvertently “killed in a crush of fellow rioters during their attempt to fight through a police line.”
    • melnikju
      melnikju on 17 Feb 21
       
      Obviously, news coverage wouldn't want to make the rioters look innocent or hurt at any point, so they wouldn't want to cover this
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The problem with this story is that it is false in all respects.
  • nobody saw video of it. No photographs depicted it. To this day, no autopsy report has been released. No details from any official source have been provided.
  • “with a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support.”
  • does not say whether it came from the police or protesters.
  • With the impeachment trial now over, the articles are now rewritten to reflect that the original story was false. But there was nothing done by The New York Times to explain an error of this magnitude, let alone to try to undo the damage it did by misleading the public. They did not expressly retract or even “correct” the story.
  • far-right forums
    • melnikju
      melnikju on 17 Feb 21
       
      dividing people more by using labels that are extreme
  • and the FBI has acknowledged it has no evidence to the contrary
  • So it matters a great deal legally, but also politically, if the U.S. really did suffer an armed insurrection and continues to face one. Though there is no controlling, clear definition, that term usually connotes not a three-hour riot but an ongoing, serious plot by a faction of the citizenry to overthrow or otherwise subvert the government.
  • people rightly conclude the propaganda is deliberate and trust in journalism erodes further.
  • One can — and should — condemn the January 6 riot without inflating the threat it posed. And one can — and should — insist on both factual accuracy and sober restraint without standing accused of sympathy for the rioters.
Javier E

Opinion | How I Became Extremely Open-Minded - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lyme-disease-medicine.html

mainstream skepticism balance openness psychology science knowledge

shared by Javier E on 06 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • This is a key dynamic in political as well as biomedical debates. The conspicuous elite failures in the last 20 years have driven many voters to outsider narratives, which blend plausible critiques of the system with outlandish paranoia.
  • But the insiders only see the paranoia, the QAnon shaman and his allies at the gates. So instead of reckoning with their own failures they pull up the epistemic drawbridge and assign fact checkers to patrol the walls. Which in turn confirms the outsiders in their belief that the establishment has essentially blinded itself, and only they have eyes to see.
  • What we need, I’m convinced, are more people and institutions that sustain a position somewhere in between. We need a worldview that recognizes that our establishment fails in all kinds of ways, that there’s a wider range of experiences than what fits within the current academic-bureaucratic lines … and yet at the same time still accepts the core achievements of modern science, treats populist information sources at least as skeptically as it treats establishment sources and refuses to drink the voter-fraud Kool-Aid that Sidney Powell and the MyPillow guy served to thirsty Trump supporters.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • when the next disaster or derailment comes along, in my own life or the life of our society, I hope that I will be ready to trust experts as far as it seems wise to trust them — while always being aware that there are more things under heaven than their philosophies encompass, and a lot of strange surprises lurking deep below the not-entirely-solid earth.
peterconnelly

AI model's insight helps astronomers propose new theory for observing far-off worlds | TechCrunch - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...y-for-observing-far-off-worlds

techcrunch

shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Machine learning models are increasingly augmenting human processes, either performing repetitious tasks faster or providing some systematic insight that helps put human knowledge in perspective.
  • Astronomers at UC Berkeley were surprised to find both happen after modeling gravitational microlensing events, leading to a new unified theory for the phenomenon.
  • Gravitational lensing occurs when light from far-off stars and other stellar objects bends around a nearer one directly between it and the observer, briefly giving a brighter — but distorted — view of the farther one.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Ambiguities are often reconciled with other observed data, such as that we know by other means that the planet is too small to cause the scale of distortion seen.
  • “The two previous theories of degeneracy deal with cases where the background star appears to pass close to the foreground star or the foreground planet. The AI algorithm showed us hundreds of examples from not only these two cases, but also situations where the star doesn’t pass close to either the star or planet and cannot be explained by either previous theory,” said Zhang in a Berkeley news release.
  • But without the systematic and confident calculations of the AI, it’s likely the simplified, less correct theory would have persisted for many more years.
  • As a result — and after some convincing, since a grad student questioning established doctrine is tolerated but perhaps not encouraged — they ended up proposing a new, “unified” theory of how degeneracy in these observations can be explained, of which the two known theories were simply the most common cases.
  • “People were seeing these microlensing events, which actually were exhibiting this new degeneracy but just didn’t realize it. It was really just the machine learning looking at thousands of events where it became impossible to miss,” said Scott Gaudi
  • But Zhang seemed convinced that the AI had clocked something that human observers had systematically overlooked.
  • Just as people learned to trust calculators and later computers, we are learning to trust some AI models to output an interesting truth clear of preconceptions and assumptions — that is, if we haven’t just coded our own preconceptions and assumptions into them.
peterconnelly

Covid Vaccine Misinformation Still Fuels Fears Surrounding Pregnancy, a New Study Finds. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-pregnancy-misinformation.html

NYT

shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • A steady bombardment of coronavirus misinformation during the pandemic has left nearly one-third of American women who are pregnant, or who plan to become pregnant, believing at least one falsehood about coronavirus vaccinations and pregnancy, according to a new study. A higher share were unsure whether to believe the myths.
  • “Pregnancy is a time where a lot of women are seeking information on a variety of pregnancy-related topics, but many pregnancy forums are filled with misinformation,” said Tara Kirk Sell
  • The misinformation is so pervasive that it has even sown doubts in segments of the population that generally believe in the coronavirus vaccines’ safety for adults, like Democratic voters and people who have been fully vaccinated.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “There are certain things that increase perception of risks,” Dr. Sell said. “One of these is risks to future generations. So rumors related to pregnancy are particularly gripping.
  • “We know pregnant individuals are at an increased risk when it comes to Covid-19, but they absolutely should not and do not have to die from it,” said Dr. Christopher Zahn
  • 60 percent believed that pregnant women should not get the vaccine, or were unsure if this was true;
  • One reason misinformation about the vaccines and pregnancy may have gained so much traction, experts say, is that the earliest clinical trials of the coronavirus vaccines excluded pregnant women. The lack of trial data led the C.D.C. and World Health Organization to initially give different recommendations to pregnant women, though neither explicitly forbade, nor encouraged, immunizing pregnant women. Other health organizations chose to wait for more safety data from later trials before making an official recommendation for pregnant women to get vaccinated.
  • “At the root of this problem is trust, or really, it’s a lack of trust,” Dr. Sell said.
peterconnelly

They Did Their Own 'Research.' Now What? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...do-your-own-research.html

new york times research

shared by peterconnelly on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • the crash of two linked cryptocurrencies caused tens of billions of dollars in value to evaporate from digital wallets around the world.
  • People who thought they knew what they were getting into had, in the space of 24 hours, lost nearly everything. Messages of desperation flooded a Reddit forum for traders of one of the currencies, a coin called Luna, prompting moderators to share phone numbers for international crisis hotlines.
  • “DYOR” is shorthand for “do your own research,”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • a reminder to stay informed and vigilant against groupthink.
  • A common refrain in battles about Covid-19 and vaccination, politics and conspiracy theories, parenting, drugs, food, stock trading and media, it signals not just a rejection of authority but often trust in another kind.
  • “Do your own research” is an idea central to Joe Rogan’s interview podcast, the most listened to program on Spotify, where external claims of expertise are synonymous with admissions of malice. In its current usage, DYOR is often an appeal to join in, rendered in the language of opting out.
  • “There’s this idea that the goal of science is consensus,” Professor Carrion said. “The model they brought to it was that we didn’t need consensus.” She noted that the women she surveyed often used singular rather than plural pronouns. “It was ‘she needs to do her own research,” Professor Carrion said, rather than we need to do ours. Unlike some critical health movements in the past, this was an individualist endeavor.
  • One of the enticing aspects of cryptocurrencies, which pose an alternative to traditional financial institutions, is that expertise is available to anyone who wants to claim it.
  • In crypto, the uses of DYOR are various and contradictory, earnest and ironic sometimes within the same discussion. Breathless investment pitches for new coins are punctuated with “NFA/DYOR” (not financial advice), or admonitions not to invest more than you can afford to lose, which many people are obviously ignoring; stories about getting rich are prefaced with DYOR; requests for advice about which coins to hold are answered with DYOR. It is the siren song of crypto investing.
  • In that way — the momentum of a group — crypto investing isn’t altogether distinct from how people have invested in the stock market for decades. Though here it is tinged with a rebellious, anti-authoritarian streak: We’re outsiders, in this together; we’re doing something sort of ridiculous, but also sort of cool.
  • “Now it seems like DYOR can only do so much,” the user wrote. Eventually, the user said, you end up relying on “trust.”
Javier E

The Age of Social Media Is Ending - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...672074

social media network culture relationship discourse

shared by Javier E on 11 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • Slowly and without fanfare, around the end of the aughts, social media took its place. The change was almost invisible, but it had enormous consequences. Instead of facilitating the modest use of existing connections—largely for offline life (to organize a birthday party, say)—social software turned those connections into a latent broadcast channel. All at once, billions of people saw themselves as celebrities, pundits, and tastemakers.
  • A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset. And it’s a terrible idea that is entirely and completely bound up with the concept of social media itself: systems erected and used exclusively to deliver an endless stream of content.
  • “social media,” a name so familiar that it has ceased to bear meaning. But two decades ago, that term didn’t exist
  • ...35 more annotations...
  • a “web 2.0” revolution in “user-generated content,” offering easy-to-use, easily adopted tools on websites and then mobile apps. They were built for creating and sharing “content,”
  • As the original name suggested, social networking involved connecting, not publishing. By connecting your personal network of trusted contacts (or “strong ties,” as sociologists call them) to others’ such networks (via “weak ties”), you could surface a larger network of trusted contacts
  • The whole idea of social networks was networking: building or deepening relationships, mostly with people you knew. How and why that deepening happened was largely left to the users to decide.
  • That changed when social networking became social media around 2009, between the introduction of the smartphone and the launch of Instagram. Instead of connection—forging latent ties to people and organizations we would mostly ignore—social media offered platforms through which people could publish content as widely as possible, well beyond their networks of immediate contacts.
  • Social media turned you, me, and everyone into broadcasters (if aspirational ones). The results have been disastrous but also highly pleasurable, not to mention massively profitable—a catastrophic combination.
  • A social network is an idle, inactive system—a Rolodex of contacts, a notebook of sales targets, a yearbook of possible soul mates. But social media is active—hyperactive, really—spewing material across those networks instead of leaving them alone until needed.
  • The authors propose social media as a system in which users participate in “information exchange.” The network, which had previously been used to establish and maintain relationships, becomes reinterpreted as a channel through which to broadcast.
  • The toxicity of social media makes it easy to forget how truly magical this innovation felt when it was new. From 2004 to 2009, you could join Facebook and everyone you’d ever known—including people you’d definitely lost track of—was right there, ready to connect or reconnect. The posts and photos I saw characterized my friends’ changing lives, not the conspiracy theories that their unhinged friends had shared with them
  • Twitter, which launched in 2006, was probably the first true social-media site, even if nobody called it that at the time. Instead of focusing on connecting people, the site amounted to a giant, asynchronous chat room for the world. Twitter was for talking to everyone—which is perhaps one of the reasons journalists have flocked to it
  • on Twitter, anything anybody posted could be seen instantly by anyone else. And furthermore, unlike posts on blogs or images on Flickr or videos on YouTube, tweets were short and low-effort, making it easy to post many of them a week or even a day.
  • soon enough, all social networks became social media first and foremost. When groups, pages, and the News Feed launched, Facebook began encouraging users to share content published by others in order to increase engagement on the service, rather than to provide updates to friends. LinkedIn launched a program to publish content across the platform, too. Twitter, already principally a publishing platform, added a dedicated “retweet” feature, making it far easier to spread content virally across user networks.
  • When we look back at this moment, social media had already arrived in spirit if not by name. RSS readers offered a feed of blog posts to catch up on, complete with unread counts. MySpace fused music and chatter; YouTube did it with video (“Broadcast Yourself”)
  • From being asked to review every product you buy to believing that every tweet or Instagram image warrants likes or comments or follows, social media produced a positively unhinged, sociopathic rendition of human sociality.
  • Other services arrived or evolved in this vein, among them Reddit, Snapchat, and WhatsApp, all far more popular than Twitter. Social networks, once latent routes for possible contact, became superhighways of constant content
  • Although you can connect the app to your contacts and follow specific users, on TikTok, you are more likely to simply plug into a continuous flow of video content that has oozed to the surface via algorithm.
  • In the social-networking era, the connections were essential, driving both content creation and consumption. But the social-media era seeks the thinnest, most soluble connections possible, just enough to allow the content to flow.
  • This is also why journalists became so dependent on Twitter: It’s a constant stream of sources, events, and reactions—a reporting automat, not to mention an outbound vector for media tastemakers to make tastes.
  • “influencer” became an aspirational role, especially for young people for whom Instagram fame seemed more achievable than traditional celebrity—or perhaps employment of any kind.
  • social-media operators discovered that the more emotionally charged the content, the better it spread across its users’ networks. Polarizing, offensive, or just plain fraudulent information was optimized for distribution. By the time the platforms realized and the public revolted, it was too late to turn off these feedback loops.
  • The ensuing disaster was multipar
  • Rounding up friends or business contacts into a pen in your online profile for possible future use was never a healthy way to understand social relationships.
  • when social networking evolved into social media, user expectations escalated. Driven by venture capitalists’ expectations and then Wall Street’s demands, the tech companies—Google and Facebook and all the rest—became addicted to massive scale
  • Social media showed that everyone has the potential to reach a massive audience at low cost and high gain—and that potential gave many people the impression that they deserve such an audience.
  • On social media, everyone believes that anyone to whom they have access owes them an audience: a writer who posted a take, a celebrity who announced a project, a pretty girl just trying to live her life, that anon who said something afflictive
  • When network connections become activated for any reason or no reason, then every connection seems worthy of traversing.
  • people just aren’t meant to talk to one another this much. They shouldn’t have that much to say, they shouldn’t expect to receive such a large audience for that expression, and they shouldn’t suppose a right to comment or rejoinder for every thought or notion either.
  • Facebook and all the rest enjoyed a massive rise in engagement and the associated data-driven advertising profits that the attention-driven content economy created. The same phenomenon also created the influencer economy, in which individual social-media users became valuable as channels for distributing marketing messages or product sponsorships by means of their posts’ real or imagined reach
  • That’s no surprise, I guess, given that the model was forged in the fires of Big Tech companies such as Facebook, where sociopathy is a design philosophy.
  • If change is possible, carrying it out will be difficult, because we have adapted our lives to conform to social media’s pleasures and torments. It’s seemingly as hard to give up on social media as it was to give up smoking en masse
  • Quitting that habit took decades of regulatory intervention, public-relations campaigning, social shaming, and aesthetic shifts. At a cultural level, we didn’t stop smoking just because the habit was unpleasant or uncool or even because it might kill us. We did so slowly and over time, by forcing social life to suffocate the practice. That process must now begin in earnest for social media.
  • Something may yet survive the fire that would burn it down: social networks, the services’ overlooked, molten core. It was never a terrible idea, at least, to use computers to connect to one another on occasion, for justified reasons, and in moderation
  • The problem came from doing so all the time, as a lifestyle, an aspiration, an obsession. The offer was always too good to be true, but it’s taken us two decades to realize the Faustian nature of the bargain.
  • when I first wrote about downscale, the ambition seemed necessary but impossible. It still feels unlikely—but perhaps newly plausible.
  • To win the soul of social life, we must learn to muzzle it again, across the globe, among billions of people. To speak less, to fewer people and less often–and for them to do the same to you, and everyone else as well
  • We cannot make social media good, because it is fundamentally bad, deep in its very structure. All we can do is hope that it withers away, and play our small part in helping abandon it.
Javier E

Hey, Elon Musk, Comedy Doesn't Want to Be Legal - The New York Times - 0 views

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

comedy twitter musk news social media psychology

shared by Javier E on 14 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • while labeling something parody might be bad for comedy, it can be essential for credibility. If people can’t tell whether an article was satirical or not, that chips away at trust that is essential for a news organization. But what’s good for comedy isn’t necessarily best practices for journalism or social media.
  • Even today when the lines between comedy and politics often blur — years after the press marveled that young people trusted Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” more than the news media, which now seems like a much darker development than it did back then — the idea that free speech might involve some trade-offs seems obvious.
  • But maybe not to Musk, who appears as naïve about comedy as he does about the economics of social media.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The reality is that good comedy can’t be suppressed, particularly these days when gatekeepers have never had less power.
  • While he’s not especially good at comedy, Musk is a wonderful comic character: The boss who thinks he’s funny but isn’t. He’s Michael Scott from “The Office,” whose terrible jokes everyone must if not laugh at, at least put up with.
  • One reason Musk might think he’s hilarious is that every joke he makes gets a glowing response from his vast population of followers. Why? Comedy is subjective. But I bet a few just admire him and want his attention. This can be its own form of cringe humor and mocking it can really bring people together.
  • Musk doesn’t need to own his haters in a tweet. They already work for him for free. It’s entirely possible that we will look back on his tenure at Twitter and conclude that this was his only good joke. Judging by recent moves, he might screw that up, too.
Javier E

Male Stock Analysts With 'Dominant' Faces Get More Information-and Have Better Forecasts - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...tion-better-forecasts-6783f77c

stock analysts face dominance trust trustworthy attractiveness accuracy psychology

shared by Javier E on 09 May 23 - No Cached
  • “People form impressions after extremely brief exposure to faces—within a hundred milliseconds,” says Alexander Todorov, a behavioral-science professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “They take actions based on those impressions,”
  • . Under most circumstances, such quick impressions aren’t accurate and shouldn’t be trusted, he says.
  • Prof. Teoh and her fellow researchers analyzed the facial traits of nearly 800 U.S. sell-side stock financial analysts working between January 1990 and December 2017 who also had a LinkedIn profile photo as of 2018. They pulled their sample of analysts from Thomson Reuters and the firms they covered from the merged Center for Research in Security Prices and Compustat, a database of financial, statistical and market information
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The researchers used facial-recognition software to map out specific points on a person’s face, then applied machine-learning algorithms to the facial points to obtain empirical measures for three key face impressions—trustworthiness, dominance and attractiveness.  
  • They examined the association of these impressions with the accuracy of analysts’ quarterly forecasts, drawn from the Institutional Brokers Estimate System
  • Analyst accuracy was determined by comparing each analyst’s prediction error—the difference between their prediction and the actual earnings—with that of all analysts for that same company and quarter.
  • For an average stock valued at $100, Prof. Teoh says, analysts ranked as looking most trustworthy were 25 cents more accurate in earnings-per-share forecasts than the analysts who were ranked as looking least trustworthy
  • Similarly, most-dominant-looking analysts were 52 cents more accurate in their EPS forecast than least-dominant-looking analysts.
  • The relation between a dominant face and accuracy, meanwhile, was significant before and after the regulation was enacted, the analysts say. This suggests that dominant-looking male analysts are always able to obtain information,
  • While forecasts of female analysts regardless of facial characteristics were on average more accurate than those of their male counterparts, the forecasts of women who were seen as more-dominant-looking were significantly less accurate than their male counterparts.  
  • Says Prof. Todorov: “Women who look dominant are more likely to be viewed negatively because it goes against the cultural stereotype.
Javier E

Opinion | Farhad Manjoo: I Was Wrong About Facebook - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...farhad-manjoo-facebook.html

technology bias facebook naive unintended consequences

shared by Javier E on 22 Jul 22 - No Cached
  • I wasn’t just wrong about Facebook; I had the matter exactly backward. Had we all decided to leave Facebook then or at any time since, the internet and perhaps the world might now be a better place
  • my 2009 exhortation for people to go all in on Facebook still makes me cringe. My argument suffers from the same flaws I regularly climb up on my mainstream-media soapbox to denounce in tech bros:
  • why, at the dawn of 2009, was I foisting Facebook on the masses? I’ve got three answers.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • a failure to seriously consider the implications of an invention as it becomes entrenched in society; a deep trust in networks, in the idea that allowing people to more freely associate would redound mainly to the good of society; and too much affection for the culture of Silicon Valley and the idea that the people who created a certain thing must have some clue about what to do with it.
  • I didn’t consider the far-reaching implications of Facebook’s ubiquity.
  • Social networks, I observed, got better as more people used them; it seemed reasonable that at some point one social network would gain widespread acceptance and become a comprehensive directory for connecting everyone.
  • As an immigrant, I’d also bought into the world-shrinking implications of such a network.
  • I got carried away by the excitement of new tech.
  • What I’d failed to consider was how all these various new things would interact with one another, especially as more people got online.
  • in calling for everyone to get on Facebook, I should have made a better stab at guessing what could go wrong if we all did. What would be the implications for privacy if we were all using Facebook on our phones — how much could this one service glean about you by being in your pocket all the time?
  • What would the implications for speech and media be if this single company became a central clearinghouse in the global discourse?
  • I trusted techies.
  • This was the vibe pervading media and politics in the late 2000s: Wall Street had ruined the world. Silicon Valley could put it right.
  • It does not seem in any way good for society — for the economy, for politics, for a basic sense of equality — that a handful of hundred-billion-dollar or even trillion-dollar companies should control such large swathes of the internet.
  • Obama’s regulators allowed Facebook to buy up its biggest competitors — first Instagram, then WhatsApp — and failed to crack down on its recklessness with users’ private data
Javier E

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

www.theatlantic.com/...565775

cognitive bias psychology research knowledge bias

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

Solving the Puzzle: Network Design Assignment Helpers Unleashed - 0 views

Welcome to https://www.computernetworkassignmenthelp.com, where we unravel the complexities of network design assignments and bring you a team of expert network design assignment helpers ready to a...

#networkdesignassignmenthelper #assignmenthelpservices #onlinelearning #elearning #student #education technology knowledge education

started by karenmcgregor on 08 Dec 23 no follow-up yet
Javier E

(1) This Is Why You Don't Trust the Polls - by Jonathan V. Last - 0 views

plus.thebulwark.com/...s-why-you-dont-trust-the-polls

polls reliability JVL analysis psychology research knowledge

shared by Javier E on 09 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • The reason people have come to believe that polls are wrong is because the polls describe a reality that is utterly counter to what should be happening according to history, norms, and standard
  • There is no universe in which this election should be close. When we see polls showing that it’s actually very close, we recoil from them.
  • Here is the truth: We’ve lost sight of just how damned unreal this moment in American history is.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Nothing about it makes sense, or fits within existing patterns. We are in the middle of a genuine authoritarian attempt, which means that our baseline reality has shifted. None of us has been in a place like this pre-2016.
  • As a result, the smell tests we used to in the Before Times have become unreliable, because what was once unthinkable is now routine.
Javier E

Tracking Viral Misinformation - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ion-misinformation-distortions

QAnon conspiracy theory attitudes psychology research

shared by Javier E on 25 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • More than a year after Donald J. Trump left office, the QAnon conspiracy theory that thrived during his administration continues to attract more Americans, including many Republicans and far-right news consumers, according to results from a survey released on Thursday from the Public Religion Research Institute.
  • The nonprofit and nonpartisan group found that 16 percent of Americans, or roughly 41 million people, believed last year in the three key tenets of the conspiracy theory
  • Those are that Satanist pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation control the government and other major institutions
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • that a coming storm will sweep elites from power
  • and that violence might be necessary to save the country.
  • In October 2021, 17 percent of Americans believed in the conspiracy theory, up from 14 percent in March
  • the percentage of people who rejected QAnon falsehoods shrank to 34 percent in October from 40 percent in March
  • After Mr. Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, QAnon was expected to be hobbled without him. But it has persisted despite that and despite efforts by tech platforms to staunch its spread. Forensic linguists have also tried to unmask and defang the anonymous author who signed online messages as Q.
  • Robert P. Jones, the founder and chief executive of the research group and a social science researcher with decades of experience, said he never expected to be dealing with serious survey questions about whether powerful American institutions were controlled by devil-worshiping, sex-trafficking pedophiles. To have so many Americans agree with such a question, he said, was “stunning.”
  • Believers are “racially, religiously and politically diverse,”
  • Among Republicans, 25 percent found QAnon to be valid, compared with 14 percent of independents and 9 percent of Democrats.
  • Media preferences were a major predictor of QAnon susceptibility, with people who trust far-right news sources such as One America News Network and Newsmax nearly five times more likely to be believers than those who trust mainstream news
  • Fox News viewers were twice as likely to back QAnon ideas
  • Most QAnon believers associated Christianity with being American and said that the United States risked losing its culture and identity and must be protected from foreign influence
  • seven in 10 believers agreed with the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump.
  • More than half of QAnon supporters are white, while 20 percent are Hispanic and 13 percent are Black.
  • They were most likely to have household incomes of less than $50,000 a year, hold at most a high school degree, hail from the South and reside in a suburb.
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