20210506

Thu May 6 06:00:01 EDT 2021 ======================================== Slept from ten-thirty to seven. Mostly cloudy. Chance of rain in the morning, then rain in the afternoon. Highs in the mid 50s. South winds up to 5 mph shifting to the northeast around 5 mph early in the evening. Chance of rain 80 percent. Work ---------------------------------------- - 11 AM disaster plan review (pandemic edition) Done. - email Heidi report of disaster call Done. - call Newegg about VS monitor No. - review credit card statement No. - rents reporting No. Half-hour walk at lunch. Cloudy. A few rain drops. Saw a crow, robins, a blue jay, two ducks, and a seagull. Home ---------------------------------------- Took out trash, vacuumed. Chatted with Jay a bit on Signal. Jay shared: https://aeon.co/essays/why-humans-find-it-so-hard-to-let-go-of-false-beliefs > In a 2003 study, Geoffrey Cohen, then a professor of psychology at Yale, now at Stanford University, asked subjects to evaluate a government-funded job-training programme to help the poor. All subjects were liberal, so naturally the vast majority (76 per cent) favoured the policy. However, if subjects were told that Democrats didn’t support the programme, the results completely reversed: this time, 71 per cent opposed it. Cohen replicated this outcome in a series of influential studies, with both liberal and conservative participants. He showed that subjects would support policies that strongly contradict their own political beliefs if they think that others like them supported those policies. Despite the social influence, obvious to an outsider, participants remained blind to it, and attributed their preferences to objective criteria and personal ideology. This would come as no surprise to social psychologists, who have long attested to the power of the group over the individual, yet most of us would doubtless flinch at the whiff of conformity and the suggestion that our thoughts and actions might not be entirely our own. > For Kahan, though, conformity to group beliefs makes sense. Since each individual has only negligible impact on collective decisions, it’s sensible to focus on optimising one’s social ties instead. Belonging to a community is, after all, a vital source of self-worth, not to mention health, even survival. Socially rejected or isolated people face heightened risks of many diseases as well as early death. Seen from this perspective, then, the impulse to fit our beliefs and behaviours to those of our social groups, even when they clash with our own, is, Kahan argues, ‘exceedingly rational’. Ironically, however, rational individual choices can have irrational collective consequences. As tribal attachments prevail, emotions trump evidence, and the ensuing disagreement chokes off action on important social issues. > In this other reality, marked by the global rise of populism, lies have morphed into an expression of identity, a form of group membership. In the US, the UK, Germany, Austria, Italy, Poland, Brazil and India, populists have captured a growing disenchantment with the status quo by pitting ‘the people’ against ‘the elites’, and attacking so-called elitist values – education, evidence, expertise. > For Paluck, this was ‘an empirical and theoretical puzzle’, prompting her to wonder if beliefs might be the wrong variable to target. So she turned to social norms, reasoning that it’s probably easier to change what we think others think than what we ourselves do. In 2012, Paluck tested a new approach to reducing student conflict in 56 middle schools in New Jersey. Contrary to popular belief, some evidence suggests that, far from being the product of a few aggressive kids, harassment is a school-wide social norm, perpetuated through action and inaction, by bullies, victims and onlookers. Bullying persists because it’s considered typical and even desirable, while speaking up is seen as wrong. So how do you shift a culture of conflict? Through social influence, Paluck hypothesised: you seed supporters of a new norm and let them transmit it among their peers. In some schools, Paluck had a group of students publicly endorse and model anti-bullying behaviours, and the schools saw a significant decline in reported conflicts – 30 per cent on average, and as much as 60 per cent when groups had higher shares of well-connected model students. Listened to tilderadio and wrote some Go. https://twitter.com/mathowie/status/1390069875809210371 > thinking about the one time I got to attend a real NASA space launch and noticed a room on the side of the main control room and was told it's where an independent team controls a self-destruct button in case a rocket is headed to say, Paris, and I'd never heard of it before. 🚀 🧨 Servings: grains 5/6, fruit 1/4, vegetables 2/4, dairy 2/2, meat 1/3, nuts 0.5/0.5 Breakfast: bean and veggie burrito, apple Brunch: coffee Lunch: salami wrap, cucumber Dinner: cheese curls

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