Group items tagged

The planet has multiple morbidities, some of which will make this coronavirus look, by comparison, easy to treat

how will we feed ourselves?

A large body of evidence is beginning to accumulate showing how climate breakdown is likely to affect our food supply

In his forthcoming book, Our Final Warning, Mark Lynas explains what is likely to happen to our food supply with every extra degree of global heating. He finds that extreme danger kicks in somewhere between 3C and 4C above pre-industrial levels.

At this point, a series of interlocking impacts threatens to send food production into a death spiral. Outdoor temperatures become too high for humans to tolerate, making subsistence farming impossible across Africa and South Asia. Livestock die from heat stress. Temperatures start to exceed the lethal thresholds for crop plants across much of the world, and major food producing regions turn into dust bowls.

Simultaneous global harvest failure – something that has never happened in the modern world – becomes highly likely.

A food deficit could result in billions starving. Hoarding will happen, as it always has, at the global level, as powerful people snatch food from the mouths of the poor.

even if every nation keeps its promises under the Paris agreement, which currently seems unlikely, global heating will amount to between 3C and 4C.

Thanks to our illusion of security, we are doing almost nothing to anticipate this catastrophe, let alone prevent it. This existential issue scarcely seems to impinge on our consciousness

Every food-producing sector claims that its own current practices are sustainable and don’t need to change

But this is just one of our impending crises. Antibiotic resistance is, potentially, as deadly as any new disease. One of the causes is the astonishingly profligate way in which these precious medicines are used on many livestock farms

Pharmaceutical companies are failing to invest sufficiently in the search for new drugs. If antibiotics cease to be effective, surgery becomes almost impossible

Childbirth becomes a mortal hazard once more. Chemotherapy can no longer be safely practised. Infectious diseases we have comfortably forgotten become deadly threats. We should discuss this issue as often as we talk about football. But again, it scarcely registers.

Sunk costs within the fossil fuel industry, farming, banking, private healthcare and other sectors prevent the rapid transformations we need. Money becomes more important than life.

this could be the moment when we begin to see ourselves, once more, as governed by biology and physics, and dependent on a habitable planet. Never again should we listen to the liars and the deniers. Never again should we allow a comforting falsehood to trounce a painful truth. No longer can we afford to be dominated by those who put money ahead of life. This coronavirus reminds us that we belong to the material world.

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.”

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.

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

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.”

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?

I met with Kahneman

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.”

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.”

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).

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?”

Nevertheless, I did not feel that reading Mindware and taking the Coursera course had necessarily rid me of my biases

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

most promising are a handful of video games. Their genesis was in the Iraq War

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

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.

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,

“The literature on training suggests books and classes are fine entertainment but largely ineffectual. But the game has very large effects. It surprised everyone.”

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

That’s because real people — and yes, even professional economists — tend to process the parallel rise of prices and wages in quite different ways.

In brief, researchers have found that we tend to internalize the gains due to inflation and externalize the losses. These different processes yield different emotional responses.

Let’s start with higher prices. Sticker shock hurts. Even as someone who closely studies the inflation statistics, I’m still often surprised by higher prices. They feel unfair. They undermine my spending power, and my sense of control and order.

younger folks — anyone under 60 — had never experienced sustained inflation rates greater than 5 percent in their adult lives. And I think this explains why they’re so angry about today’s inflation.

Even though wages tend to rise hand-in-hand with prices, we tell ourselves a different story, in which the wage rises we get have nothing to do with price rises that cause them.

But then my economist brain took over, and slowly it sunk in that my raise wasn’t a reward for hard work, but rather a cost-of-living adjustment

Internalizing the gain and externalizing the cost of inflation protects you from this deflating realization. But it also distorts your sense of reality.

The reason so many Americans feel that inflation is stealing their purchasing power is that they give themselves unearned credit for the offsetting wage rises that actually restore it.

in reality, higher prices are only the first act of the inflationary play. It’s a play that economists have seen before. In episode after episode, surges in prices have led to — or been preceded by — a proportional surge in wages.

While older Americans understood that the pain of inflation is transitory, younger folks aren’t so sure. Inflation is a lot scarier when you fear that today’s price rises will permanently undermine your ability to make ends meet.

Perhaps this explains why the recent moderate burst of inflation has created seemingly more anxiety than previous inflationary episodes.

More generally, being an economist makes me an optimist. Social media is awash with (false) claims that we’re in a “silent depression,” and those who want to make American great again are certain it was once so much better.

in reality, our economy this year is larger, more productive and will yield higher average incomes than in any prior year on record in American history

And because the United States is the world’s richest major economy, we can now say that we are almost certainly part of the richest large society in its richest year in the history of humanity.

The income of the average American will double approximately every 39 years. And so when my kids are my age, average income will be roughly double what it is today. Far from being fearful for my kids, I’m envious of the extraordinary riches their generation will enjoy.

Psychologists describe anxiety disorders as occurring when the panic you feel is out of proportion to the danger you face. By this definition, we’re in the midst of a macroeconomic anxiety attack.

There was the illusion that a secure Jewish community would remain so.

In 2013 the A.D.L. recorded just 751 antisemitic incidents in the United States. In 2023 the organization counted 8,873 incidents, an increase of over 1,000 percent.

Backward in literary circles, where being identified as a Zionist — even if it’s of the most progressive kind or has little to do with an author’s work — can lead to ostracism and cancellation.

Unless this changes, the American Jewish community is on its way to living how the European Jewish community has for decades: apprehensive, suspected and under ever increasing layers of private and state protection.

There was the illusion that, having achieved a sense of belonging in America, we would keep it.

Today there’s a palpable sense of things going backward. Backward in the Ivy League, where Jewish enrollment has plummeted and Jewish students feel unwelcome and at times threatened.

That included over 1,000 bomb threats to Jewish institutions, thousands of acts of vandalism and harassment, the desecration of graves and more than 160 physical assaults

There was the illusion that antisemitism was a fever-swamp prejudice, to which virtually all educated people were immune.

For those versed in statistics, or Jewish history, this going backward has a term: regression toward the mean

Backward in social justice organizations, many of no apparent relevance to the Middle East, that nonetheless feel called to demand the end of the Jewish state.

People attracted to grand theories of everything, as intellectuals often are, tend to gravitate toward singular causes, sweeping solutions, unsuspected “facts” and decisive explanations.

A century ago, the grand theories were about the evils of capitalism or the hierarchies of race — and Jews wound up on the wrong end of both theories. Today, the grand theory concerns so-called settler colonialism.

Zionism, which since the days of the Maccabees has been the most enduring anticolonial struggle in history, is now the epitome of what college activists seem to think is colonialism, the only solution to which is its eradication

When people argue that education is the answer to bigotry, they often forget that bigotry is a moral failing, not an intellectual one — and few people are more dangerous than educated bigots.

Finally, there was the illusion that America was different, that it couldn’t happen here, that our neighbors and colleagues would never abandon us, that, as a people and a government, America would do right by the Jewish people at home and abroad.

That’s one illusion I still hold dear. My mother came to the United States after World War II as a stateless, penniless refugee; she, and therefore I, owe this country everything. I desperately want to believe that what’s happened since last year on college campuses won’t go far beyond the quads; that Joe Biden won’t be the last Democratic president to also be a sincere Zionist; that the Republican Party will snap out of the populism and nativism into which Trump has sunk it, which invariably produces antisemitism; that Black America won’t turn sharply against the Jews; that America’s exhaustion with being the world’s de facto policeman won’t lead it to forsake small countries faced with aggressive totalitarian neighbors; that Greene and Rashida Tlaib will never hold leadership positions in their parties; that young Americans drawn to anti-Israel politics will rethink their radicalism as they grow older; that envy won’t replace admiration as the way average Americans view personal and communal success; that an America that exists somewhere between Morningside Heights in Manhattan and Berkeley, Calif., still hasn’t lost its moral decency and common sense.

I want to believe all this. I’m just finding it harder than ever to do so.

There is a moving passage in “Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood” in which the German historian Joachim Fest recalled that his Catholic father, Johannes, had a personal fondness for their Jewish friends, along with his analysis of where German Jews had gone wrong politically: “They had, in tolerant Prussia, lost their instinct for danger, which had preserved them through the ages.”

There are larger strategic and perhaps moral ones. Namely: Are we going to be proud Jews or (mostly) indifferent ones? And if proud, what does that entail?

To have been born a Jew is the single most fortunate thing that ever happened to me. It is a priceless moral, spiritual, intellectual and emotional inheritance from my ancestors, some of whom were slaughtered for it. It’s a precious bequest to my children, who will find different ways to make it their own. It is therefore worth the time it takes to explore and worth the cost — including, tragically, the cost in bigotry and violence — it so often extracts.

To be a Jew obliges us to many things, particularly our duty to be our brother’s, and sister’s, keeper. That means never to forsake one another, much less to join in the vilification of our own people. It means to participate in the long struggle for our survival not only against enemies who mean us harm but also against those who excuse those enemies or those whose moral apathy speeds their way.

There are a few thoughts packed into that sentence. First, there is a natural moral order to the universe. There is a way things are supposed to be — more important than economic wealth or even a person’s life.

Second, moral actions are connected to each other. If somebody tears at the moral order by drawing blood through the lash of slavery, then that wrong will have to be paid for by the blood of the sword. History has meaning. It’s not just random events

That injury shows up today as geographic segregation, the gigantic wealth gap, the lack of a financial safety net, but also the lack of the psychological and moral safety net that comes when society has a history of affirming: You belong. You are us. You are equal.

Fourth, sin travels down society through the centuries. Lincoln was saying that sometimes the costs of repairing sin have to borne generations after the sin was first committed.

the African-American (and the Native American) experiences are unique and different. Theirs are not immigrant experiences but involve a moral injury that simply isn’t there for other groups.

Slavery and the continuing pattern of discrimination aren’t only an attempt to steal labor; they are an attempt to cover over a person’s soul, a whole people’s soul.

Third, sin is anything that assaults the moral order. Slavery doesn’t merely cause pain and suffering to the slave. It is a corruption that infects the whole society. It is a collective debt that will have to be paid

I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations,” with mild disagreement. All sorts of practical objections leapt to mind.

Coates’s essay seems right now, especially this part: “And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations — by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences — is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. …

What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices — more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.”

We’re a nation coming apart at the seams, a nation in which each tribe has its own narrative and the narratives are generally resentment narratives. The African-American experience is somehow at the core of this fragmentation — the original sin that hardens the heart, separates Americans from one another and serves as model and fuel for other injustices.

The need now is to consolidate all the different narratives and make them reconciliation and possibility narratives, in which all feel known.

That requires direct action, a concrete gesture of respect that makes possible the beginning of a new chapter in our common life.

Reparations are a drastic policy and hard to execute, but the very act of talking about and designing them heals a wound and opens a new story.

Philip promulgated the entire body of decrees in Spain in July 1564

The Spanish Church at the time of Philip's accession was in dire need of reform

Its limited budget and resources (a mere 45 inquisitors were responsible for 8 million Spaniards) meant that it could not possibly carry out this broad range of duties

His long conflict against the Turks was motivated as much by a sense of Spain's strategic needs in the Mediterranean as by any desire to join the Pope on a religious crusade against the 'Infidel'

May festivals were banned, and plays, public meetings, business and games were prohibited inside churches, but the attempt to ban bullfighting on holy days was a miserable

The government, fearing that the revolt might spread or that it might attract Turkish support, dispatched 20,000 Spanish troops, commanded by Philip's half-brother Don Juan, to restore order

the Spanish Church as a whole was unenthusiastic about the monarchy's reforming efforts, only gradually and reluctantly adopting Tridentine standards of education, behaviour and dress

After the victory at Lepanto in October 1571, at which 117 Ottoman ships were captured and dozens more sunk for the loss of only 20 Christian ships, Philip's propagandists trumpeted both Philip's faith and the blessings of God upon Spain

After intervening in France in the 1590s, he was outraged to discover that the Pope recognised Henry IV as the rightful ruler of France and was working to obtain his conversion to Catholicism

Yet while religion may not have been dominant in Philip's considerations during the 1570s, it appears to have become more influential towards the end of his reign

In the 1580s and 1590s Philip allowed himself to be drawn into the French Civil Wars, intervening militarily between 1590 and 1598

Overall, it seems that, as the reign progressed, Philip allowed religious considerations to loom ever larger in his shaping of foreign policy

the Pope, as ruler of the Papal States, felt threatened by the power of Spain, which controlled the Italian states of Naples, Sicily, Sardinia and Milan

The Papacy traditionally sought room for diplomatic manoeuvre by playing Spain off against the other great Catholic power, France, but the weakness of late sixteenth-century France made this impossible, and the Pope's consequent reliance upon Spanish arms against Ottoman and Protestant threats only made him more resentful.

The Pope constantly hectored Philip to embark upon crusades against the Turks, against Elizabeth of England, against heresy in the Netherlands, but Philip, knowing full well the costs of such an aggressive policy, resisted until the 1580s. Thereafter Philip, at war with England, France and the Netherlands,

But when Pius V sought to follow up the victory at Lepanto with a crusade against the Turks in the Eastern Mediterranean, Philip demurred, preferring 'to gain some benefit for my own subjects and states from this league and all its expenses rather than employ them in so risky an undertaking as a distant expedition in the Levant

Philip is often portrayed as a 'champion of Catholicism' and the evidence of his religious policy at home and abroad largely bears out this judgement

The fear of its introduction froze the … heretics of Italy, France and Germany into orthodoxy… It condemned not deeds but thoughts … it arrested on suspicion, tortured till confession, and then punished by fire

They paint a more positive picture of a regime striving, certainly, to purify the nation, but also to educate and reform its morals and worship

On the one hand, the power of the State and the Inquisition appears less all-pervasive than we once believed; and on the other, the Spanish people themselves appear as both the agents of the Inquisition and its principal 'victims'

Privately, Obama told his aide Ben Rhodes that not even the 1994 Rwandan genocide merited a strong U.S. response. Without announcing a new era of foreign-policy “realism,” Obama brought it into being.

When Chamath Palihapitiya said that Americans should “take care of our own backyard” before pointing fingers at other countries, he was voicing a widespread belief.

When they come up as a policy issue, we look for ways to justify doing nothing. We are all realists now.

the mind stops seeking and absorbing news of them, and so, in a sense, they cease to exist. Their nonexistence stems from and reinforces the profound self-absorption into which Americans have sunk in the past decade.

the demise of these mechanisms has soured Americans on the idea of human rights itself. Because we no longer think we can change the behavior of the world’s oppressors—because the cost of trying will be too high—we no longer think much about human rights at all.

The idea that solidarity with the oppressed here should naturally extend to the oppressed everywhere—an internationalist idea that long ago defined the left—has died,

along with the global system in which the U.S. played an intermittent, usually two-faced, often incompetent, occasionally effective role as the self-proclaimed upholder of human rights as a universal value.

But instincts have a way of outlasting ideas. Within most Americans lies a buried feeling that they should care about the torment of the Uyghurs.

This is Kanter’s style of activism—it’s personal. He gets in a dictator’s face, nose to nose, chest to chest, as if Xi Jinping is a bully throwing cheap shots and committing flagrant fouls and everyone else is afraid to call him out. “Someone had to do it,” Kanter told me.

some players asked him to unfollow them on social media, and not one has spoken out on his behalf. “Maybe they don’t know enough about it,” he told me. “But I feel like the fear of losing money, the fear of losing business, the fear of losing endorsement deals …” He didn’t complete the obvious thought. “And also, sometimes they do not care enough about what’s going on outside America.”

indifference, and not the pervasive influence of Chinese contracts and sneaker endorsements, is the most interesting thing about the league’s unfriendly response to Freedom’s campaign for global human rights. Of course young players want to win lucrative deals while they can, but most people in the league don’t even experience a conflict between money and principle. The latter has disappeared. It’s as if Freedom is putting all that money in jeopardy for a self-indulgent whim—as if he’s taken a tactless interest in matters that don’t concern him.