31 January 2017
The RSA: A Field Guide to Lies | Daniel Levitin
We are bombarded with more information each day than our brains can process. It’s raining bad data, half-truths, and even outright lies in amongst the facts. But how can we know if we are being sold mistruths? Neuroscientist and New York Times bestselling author Daniel J. Levitin visits the RSA to help us sort the wheat from the digital chaff. We may expect newspapers, bloggers, the government, and Wikipedia to be factually and logically correct, but they so often aren’t. We need to think critically about the words and numbers we encounter if we want to be successful at work, at play, and in making the most of our lives. This means checking the plausibility and reasoning—not passively accepting information, repeating it, and making decisions based on it.
FiveThirtyEight: Trump Is Doing What He Said He’d Do
Almost all of the actions that Trump has undertaken, however, are consistent with statements and policy positions he issued repeatedly on the campaign trail and during the presidential transition. It was more than a year ago that Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” for instance. (Friday’s executive order stops short of that, but Trump allies such as Rudy Giuliani have spoken of the order as a legal workaround that seeks to accomplish the same objectives as a Muslim immigration ban.) Another executive order called for building a border wall with Mexico, which was perhaps the signature policy position of Trump’s campaign. And Trump might even try to “make Mexico pay for it” by imposing a tariff on Mexican imports — although most economists argue such a tariff would really make American consumers pay for the wall, via higher prices. [...]
Why, then, does Trump’s first week and a half in office seem so surprising, even to those of us who weren’t expecting a kindler, gentler Trump? One could wryly remark that it’s a surprise whenever presidents actually keep their promises. But a longstanding body of research from political scientists suggests that this shouldn’t be a surprise. Presidents actually do make a good-faith effort to keep most of their promises. [...]
I don’t have a good answer to this question yet, but it could be the one that Trump’s presidency turns upon. If his supporters took him literally, they’ll presumably see a lot to like so far. But many of these policies have tenuous public support beyond Trump’s base. If this is the framework, then Trump is just continuing with the strategy he’s bet upon all along — doubling down on support from his base — and his approval ratings will probably oscillate within a relatively narrow band of 40 percent to 45 percent support. With Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress and having a geographic advantage in the way their votes are distributed, that mediocre rating wouldn’t necessarily do much to constrain Trump in the near term, although ratings toward the lower end of that range might be enough to make the House of Representatives competitive in 2018.
Salon: This is your brain on knockoffs: The science of how we trick ourselves into not believing our eyes
In that case, Berenson’s gut reaction was right. The “American Leonardo” was sold in 2010 as by a “follower of Leonardo da Vinci, probably before 1750,” not by the master himself. But in other cases, the gut reaction may prove right, but your brain can toy with you, and convince you otherwise. Readers of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” will know the phenomenon: He opens the book with the story of experts initially thinking that the Getty Kouros (a theoretically archaic Greek life-sized statue of an athletic male nude) was “wrong,” identifying it as a fake “in the blink of an eye.” But these renowned specialists convinced themselves that it was authentic, after much debate and careful consideration, and the museum bought it. It turned out not to be. Gladwell kicks off his book with this story because it demonstrates his main point: that our initial instinct tends to be correct, but overthinking things can get in the way. That “there can be as much value in the blink of an eye, as in months of rational analysis.” We run into “analysis paralysis” when we have too much information and we complicate the thinking process. A “thin-slicing” decision, made quickly and based on a reduced amount of data, is often the most accurate, he argues. [...]
This pleasure principle may be why experts seek a manifestation of their expertise, to say “yes, this is by Velazquez.” It is far less satisfying to say, “It’s not by Velazquez, I don’t know who it’s by.” While there might be reward in catching something as a copy or a forgery by spotting the anachronism, this is associated with negativity, and it is rarely as targeted as “Yes, this is by Velazquez.” It is usually a double negative, “No it’s not by Velazquez, I’m afraid, and I don’t know who it’s by.” Thus the brain seems wired for experts to find clues that feed its reward in recognition, essentially feeding its ego (what Gladwell describes as “psychological priming” and “implicit association”), which plays into the hands of the forger. [...]
In 2011, Martin Kemp, an Oxford art history professor, ran an experiment referenced in Ragai’s book, in which 14 non-specialists were shown genuine and fake “Rembrandt” paintings while undergoing brain scans. A painting was shown to them and they were told it was by Rembrandt. Another painting was shown to them and they were told it was a fake. By measuring the pleasure centers of the brain, Kemp concluded that “the way we view art is not rational.” Being told a work was authentic (whether or not it actually was) activated pleasure centers when it was shown, which was not the case when the viewer was told it was inauthentic (even if it was actually the real deal). It’s all about anticipation. If you’re poured a glass of wine and told it’s a 1955 Chateau Lafite Rothschild, you’ll enjoy it much more than if you’re told it’s a 2015 Trader Joe’s wine-in-a-box, whichever it truly happens to be. (For more on this, see my eBook single on wine forgery).
The Conversation: In Australia, land of the ‘fair go’, not everyone gets an equal slice of the pie
How does Australian society match up against these goals? For a start, there is an ongoing problem with poverty in Australia, with recent research suggesting that the relative poverty rate has been between 10% and 14% of households since 2000 (where the poverty rate is set at 50% of median income).
Around 5% of households were suffering from what is known as “deep exclusion”. Australians with a long-term medical condition or disability were particularly vulnerable, as were indigenous people. People lacking a year 12 qualification and those in public housing also had higher levels of deep exclusion. [...]
However, a 2007 study by Andrew Leigh found that Australia had a higher level of mobility than the US. As he put it in his 2013 book, “in the United States, the heritability of income is similar to the heritability of height. But in Australia, income is only about half as heritable as height”. A 2016 study reached broadly similar conclusions to Leigh, finding that Australia has “a relatively large amount of income mobility”. [...]
In 2011, the OECD reported that according to 2008 figures, “the average income of the top 10% of Australians was … nearly 10 times higher than that of the bottom 10%”. Australia is once again more equal than the US, but more unequal than the OECD average.
The Intercept: Suspect in Quebec Mosque Attack Quickly Depicted as a Moroccan Muslim. He’s a White Nationalist.
A MASS SHOOTING at a Quebec City mosque last night left six people dead and eight wounded. The targeted mosque, the Cultural Islamic Center of Quebec, was the same one at which a severed pig’s head was left during Ramadan last June. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the episode a “terrorist attack on Muslims.” [...]
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer exploited the attack to justify President Trump’s ban on immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries. “It’s a terrible reminder of why we must remain vigilant and why the President is taking steps to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to our nation’s safety and security,” Spicer said at this afternoon’s briefing when speaking of the Quebec City attack. [...]
The actual shooting suspect is 27-year-old Alexandre Bissonnette, a white French Canadian who is, by all appearances, a rabid anti-immigrant nationalist. A leader of a local immigration rights groups, François Deschamps, told a local paper he recognized his photo as an anti-immigrant far-right “troll” who has been hostile to the group online. And Bisonnette’s Facebook page – now taken down but still archived – lists among its “likes” the far right French nationalist Marine Le Pen, Islam critics Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the Israeli Defense Forces, and Donald J. Trump (he also “likes” the liberal Canadian Party NDP along with more neutral “likes” such as Tom Hanks, the Sopranos and Katy Perry).
Al Jazeera: Mehdi Hasan on the rise of "fake" populists
Reality Check: The rise of ‘fake’ populism.
Mehdi Hasan on right-wing elitists who masquerade as ordinary folk.
CityLab: Barcelona Bans New Hotels in the City Center
For Barcelona’s tourism industry, the past week may have marked the end of an era. While Spain’s second city has seen galloping, almost uncontrollable growth in tourism since the millennium, the city voted Friday to adopt the most drastic ban on new vacation accommodations yet seen in any European city.
In the city center, all new hotel beds are banned, period. In a small area encircling the city center, new hotel beds will be permitted, but only to replace those in hotels that have closed. In Barcelona’s suburbs, new hotel beds will be permitted, but only under strictly limited conditions—land that has previously been earmarked for housing, for example, will be completely off limits. [...]
If these measures seem extreme, it’s because local frustration at the excesses of the tourist industry has been bubbling over for some time. A city of 1.6 million inhabitants, Barcelona received 32 million visitors last year, most of them concentrated in late spring and summer. These tourists are of course a cash cow, but they have pushed up the price of rents and reduced the number of available apartments for locals while providing jobs that are often poorly paid and merely seasonal. They have also squeezed businesses catering to locals out of the downtown, leaving a trail of tourist stores that are dull, generic, and sell goods with little real connection to the city’s culture. This has given some overburdened parts of the city the air of a theme park—one where you wait in line a lot and don’t have that much fun.
Quartz: If nutrition labels looked like this, your attempts to quit sugar might actually work
This image, which resurfaced on Reddit earlier this month, is part of an ad campaign from the German consumer interest group Verbraucherzentrale Hamburg.
The images (seen here, with ingredients in German) make the easily misread or overlooked information on nutrition labels hard to ignore. Slim-Fast is full of sugar. A brand of cereal called “Fitness” is full of sugar.
Yes, nutrition information is right there on the label. But those grams are hard to conceptualize, and food marketers can easily take advantage of that confusion. For example, the kid-friendly drink Capri-Sonne (or Capri Sun, as it’s known in North America) looks a lot healthier in this ad…
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)