URLs du Jour

2021-12-12

  • Confirmation bias on parade. And the clown car participants are accumulated by @libsoftiktok:

    I don't see the word "alleged" in there anywhere, do you?

    Just a refresher:

    Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values.

    Exercise for the reader: What "prior beliefs or values" do these people share?


  • So this is maybe the best question of the year. From Ronald Bailey, a Reason article out from behind the paywall: Why Is It So Hard To Admit When You're Wrong?

    Today, if you are a member of one of the two major American political parties, you are statistically likely to dislike and distrust members of the other party. While your affection for your own party has not grown in recent years, your distaste for the other party has intensified. You distrust news sources preferred by the other side.  Its supporters seem increasingly alien to you: different not just in partisan affiliation but in social, cultural, economic, and even racial characteristics. You may even consider them subhuman in some respects.

    You're also likely to be wrong about the characteristics of members of the other party, about what they actually believe, and even about their views of you. But you are trapped in a partisan prison by the psychological effects of confirmation bias. Being confronted with factual information that contradicts your previously held views does not change them, and it may even reinforce them. Vilification of the other party perversely leads partisans to behave in precisely the norm-violating and game-rigging ways they fear their opponents will. It's a classic vicious cycle, and it's accelerating.

    Will things get better in 2022? I confidently claim they will not, and (guess what?) I'll meet you back here in January 2023, and either gloat or (gulp) admit I was wrong.

    But I won't be wrong.


  • You can pledge allegiance to a team. Or you can be free. Former lefty Liel Leibovitz took The Turn. We can only hope that more people follow.

    And then came The Turn. If you’ve lived through it yourself, you know that The Turn doesn’t happen overnight, that it isn’t easily distilled into one dramatic breakdown moment, that it happens hazily and over time—first a twitch, then a few more, stretching into a gnawing discomfort and then, eventually, a sense of panic.

    You may be among the increasing numbers of people going through The Turn right now. Having lived through the turmoil of the last half decade—through the years of MAGA and antifa and rampant identity politics and, most dramatically, the global turmoil caused by COVID-19—more and more of us feel absolutely and irreparably politically homeless. Instinctively, we looked to the Democratic Party, the only home we and our parents and their parents before them had ever known or seriously considered. But what we saw there—and in the newspapers we used to read, and in the schools whose admission letters once made us so proud—was terrifying. However we tried to explain what was happening on “the left,” it was hard to convince ourselves that it was right, or that it was something we still truly believed in. That is what The Turn is about.

    You might be living through The Turn if you ever found yourself feeling like free speech should stay free even if it offended some group or individual but now can’t admit it at dinner with friends because you are afraid of being thought a bigot. You are living through The Turn if you have questions about public health policies—including the effects of lockdowns and school closures on the poor and most vulnerable in our society—but can’t ask them out loud because you know you’ll be labeled an anti-vaxxer. You are living through The Turn if you think that burning down towns and looting stores isn’t the best way to promote social justice, but feel you can’t say so because you know you’ll be called a white supremacist. You are living through The Turn if you seethed watching a terrorist organization attack the world’s only Jewish state, but seethed silently because your colleagues were all on Twitter and Facebook sharing celebrity memes about ending Israeli apartheid while having little interest in American kids dying on the streets because of failed policies. If you’ve felt yourself unable to speak your mind, if you have a queasy feeling that your friends might disown you if you shared your most intimately held concerns, if you are feeling a bit breathless and a bit hopeless and entirely unsure what on earth is going on, I am sorry to inform you that The Turn is upon you.

    An interesting and moving essay. I encourage your perusal of the entire document.


  • The ACLU has passed its sell-by date. Jacob Sullum says that it's (at least) time for a name change; The ACLU's Push To 'Cancel' Student Debt Shows How Far It Has Strayed From Defending Civil Liberties.

    Is forgiving student debt, 92 percent of which is held by the federal government, a good idea? Although I don't think that policy would be fair or sensible, I recognize that reasonable people of good faith disagree. But one thing is beyond serious dispute: The Constitution does not guarantee a right to a debt-free college education. To put it another way, continuing to collect payments on student loans violates no one's civil liberties.

    So why is the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which ostensibly exists to defend constitutional rights, collecting signatures for a petition urging the Biden administration to "cancel up to $50,000 in student debt per borrower by the end of 2021"? This initiative is yet another sign that the venerable organization has strayed so far from its historic mission that it is becoming indistinguishable from myriad progressive advocacy groups. That's a shame, since a consistent defense of civil liberties is the ACLU's raison d'être and the singular reason why its work deserves wide support.

    Not to mention: Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both of them earning $174K/year in salary, demanding that taxpayers pony up to pay off their student loans. If they weren't so antisemitic, I'm pretty sure they would have recognized the similarity to the classic definition of chutzpah.


  • You never go full moral panic. But they did, according to Mike Masnick at Techdirt: CNN Goes Full Moral Panic About Kids And Social Media.

    CNN, the news organization that, until recently, employed Chris Cuomo, and still employs Jeffrey Toobin, and is (for the moment at least) owned by AT&T which funded an entire extremist propaganda TV network just to appease President Trump (not to mention being absolutely terrible on privacy issues), wants you to hate social media. There may be reasons to hate on social media, but it's difficult to take CNN seriously when it presents itself (1) as some unbiased party in this discussion, and (2) puts forth an article that is nothing more than blatant moral panic propaganda about kids and social media.

    Are there dangers to kids on social media? Maybe! Are there benefits for kids on social media? Maybe! Does the article only present one side full of anecdotes without any actual data? You bet. The article presents a couple of anecdotes about teens with depression, and then just insists that it's because of social media. Apparently it may surprise CNN's reporters to learn this, but teenagers (and adults) have been dealing with depression for a long, long time, including before social media existed. Again, it's entirely possible that social media creates image problems for teens, but the article repeatedly just insists its true without evidence. It opens with a pure anecdote that is designed to pull at the emotional heart strings.

    And if you want to see if CNN can pull at your emotional heartstrings, click over. (Classic allusion in headline.)