NOW REPORTING FROM BALTIMORE. A private, non-commercial blog begun in support of the federal Meaningful Use REC initiative, and Health IT and Heathcare improvement more broadly. Moving now toward important broader STEM and societal/ethics topics. Formerly known as "The REC Blog."
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Showing posts with label #OnDisinformation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #OnDisinformation. Show all posts
Thomas H. Costello, Gordon Pennycook, David G. Rand
ABSTRACT
Conspiracy theory beliefs are notoriously persistent. Influential hypotheses propose that they fulfill important psychological needs, thus resisting counterevidence. Yet previous failures in correcting conspiracy beliefs may be due to counterevidence being insufficiently compelling and tailored. To evaluate this possibility, we leveraged developments in generative artificial intelligence and engaged 2,190 conspiracy believers in personalized evidence-based dialogues with GPT-4 Turbo. The intervention reduced conspiracy belief by ~20%. The effect remained 2 months later, generalized across a wide range of conspiracy theories, and occurred even among participants with deeply entrenched beliefs. Although the dialogues focused on a single conspiracy, they nonetheless diminished belief in unrelated conspiracies and shifted conspiracy-related behavioral intentions. These findings suggest that many conspiracy theory believers can revise their views if presented with sufficiently compelling evidence.
There's a lot of detail in the Science Magazine "Artificial Arguments" related articles. Trying to restrain my skepticism until after I've plowed through all of it
apropos of thte pressing political timeline—45 days to the 2024 presidential election—any useful disinfo/ conspiracy-thinking mitigation applications they can sustain via replication will be on a much longer time scale.
Thanks for this. It goes almost verbatim to my long-standing concern about how 2024 may well play out. We are now only 45 days out from the election. I have downloaded Ari’s new book and begun reading it. I encourage everyone else to do it likewise. The prologue alone will blow your mind.
Remember that if Trump’s principal focus is denying 270 to throw it to the House, he starts out only needing Supreme Court backing of three justices should a supportive SCOTUS intervention be necessary; he doubtlessly already has Alito and Thomas in the bank. He will of course go through all the melodramatic motions of filing every lame objection in every venue possible just like he did in 2020, but all of that stuff to me is now just requisite sideshow noise. Denying 270 is the last-resort key. IMO it explains his lackluster final approach dilettante campaigning and bizarre ALL CAPS bleatings.
And, this is the ongoing quality of our political discourse.
And, GOP Senator JD Vance (the #HillbillyIshtar guy) reportedly is filing a bill to prevent the federal government from issuing any Covid19 mask mandates applicable to air travel, public transit, and school systems.
Also, for your entertainment, GOP hard-righties are threatening to shut down the federal government when the fiscal year expires in 25 days on September 30 by refusing to pass a new fiscal year budget or continuing resolution if their various loony demands are not met.
IN OTHER NEWS
"Chairman," LOL
Ahhh... Baltimore. Once again we're under a Code Red this week. Looking at close to 100F and humid most of the week. Local TV weather prediction is saying today (Sept 6th) will be the hottest day of our year. Ugh.
UPDATE
American Democracy Perseveres—For Now Antibodies against authoritarianism are still working, but the U.S. system remains under immense strain. By Tom Nichols
Democracy is under attack around the world; in the United States, the summer brought good news and bad news. The institutions of democracy are still functioning, but not for long if enough Americans continue to support authoritarianism…
We’re already seeing this unwinding in slow motion. Donald Trump and many on the American right (including the national Republican Party) have made clear their plans to subvert America’s democratic institutions. They made continuous efforts to undermine the will of the voters at the state level, most notably in Georgia, after the 2020 presidential election, and then they tried to overrule the results at the national level by setting a mob on Congress on January 6, 2021. If Trump returns to the Oval Office, he and his underlings will set up a system designed to set up a series of cascading democratic failures from Washington to every locality they can reach….
They intend to pack courts with judges who are loyal to Trump instead of to the Constitution. They want to destroy an independent federal civil service by making all major civil servants political appointees, which would allow the right to stuff every national agency with cronies at will. They want to neuter independent law-enforcement institutions such as the FBI, even if that means disbanding them. They will likely try to pare down the senior military ranks until the only remaining admirals and generals are men and women sworn not to the defense of the United States but to the defense of Donald Trump, even if that means employing military force against the American public…
Trump, of course, has since made the promise to drop pardons like gentle rain from the sky. America’s democratic immune system, however, is for now still functioning. The courts have done their duty even when elected officials have refused to do theirs. (Imagine how much healthier American democracy would be right now if the Senate had convicted Trump in his second impeachment. Alas.) Trump is now under indictment for 91 alleged crimes, and Jack Smith seems undaunted in his pursuit of justice.
Likewise, the major ringleaders of January 6—all but one, I should say—have been convicted of seditious conspiracy, among other crimes, and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. Some of these supposed tough guys ended up blubbering and pleading for mercy in a federal courtroom, but to no avail. The would-be Oath Keepers centurion Stewart Rhodes and a leader of the Proud Boys, Ethan Nordean, each got 18 years, a record broken yesterday when a Trump-appointed federal judge sent the ex–Proud Boys chair Enrique Tarrio inside for 22 years, meaning he will be sitting out the next five presidential elections.
This is the good news, but none of it will matter if Trump returns to the White House…
…I still have faith that most people, when faced with the choice, will continue to support the constitutional freedoms of the United States—but only if they understand how endangered those freedoms are.
And, Tom Nichols is no "liberal," not even close to being on the "Left."
Trump and I are ~the same age (I'm 4 months older). And I too am from the NYC area (W. Long Island just adjacent to Trump's Queens Borough). Though I've been aware of him and his gauche nouveau-riche antics for decades, he never hit my radar fully (the world being chronically overpopulated with narcissistic grifters) until he started in on that lowbrow "Obama Birtherism" stuff that first surfaced in the national media in early 2011.
Five years later I had the increasingly gnawing anxiety that he would win the 2016 election. Nearly all libs thought Hillary was a Lock.
Oopsie.
Five weeks after his dark "American Carnage" Jan 20th 2017 inauguration ceremony, my late younger daughter was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, which claimed her life in April 2018. That entire period, from 2016 through this day has been a bizarre metastasizing shitshow that shows no signs of materially abating. Four years ago I got dx'd with Parkinson's. The stress has gotta be a factor. The latest developments aren't helping matters. Mr. dyskinesiac dysphoric.
Not how I wanted to spend the final 10% or so of my life. But, then, my personal first-world frustrations are trivial in the context of existential global crises affecting far more people way more severely. Recall...
As I write this sentence we have 438 days to the 2024 national U.S. elections. Less than 15 months.
Ugh. Should I assume you've been paying attention?
____
DONALD TRUMP'S RHETORICAL GOULASH STATEMENT AFTER HIS ATLANTA "ARREST"
“I really believe this is a very sad day for America, this should never happen. If you challenge an election, you should be able to challenge an election, I thought the election was a rigged, election, a stolen election, and, I should have every right to do that, as you know, you have many people that you’ve been watching over the years do the same thing, whether it’s Hillary Clinton, or Stacey Abrams, or many others, when you, uhhh… have that great freedom to challenge, otherwise you’re going to have very dishonest elections, what has taken place here is a travesty of justice, we did nothing wrong, I did nothing wrong, and everybody knows it. I’ve never had such support, and that goes with the other ones too, what they’re doing is election interference, what they’re trying to do is interfere with an election, there’s never been anything like it in our country before, this is their way of campaigning, and this is one instance, but you have three other instances, it’s election interference. So I want to thank you for being here, we did nothing wrong at all, and we have every right, every single right to challenge an election that we think is dishonest, and we think it’s very dishonest, so, thank you very much, and I’ll see you all very soon. Thank you very much.”
And, should that not suffice to get your exculpatory eloquence juices flowing, Sarah Palin is pleased to help out on Fox News:
“Do you want us to be in a civil war? Because that’s what’s going to happen.We’re not going to keep putting up with this, and Eric, I like that you suggested that we need to get angry. We do need to rise up and take our country back. I would say the RNC though—that’s what’s lacking when it comes to collective anger that can be healthy, and it can be useful… where is the RNC—they hold the purse strings to the party, they hold, they hold the funds that could be helpin’ out in this situation, they have the platform, and yet they’re too timid—a buncha frickin’ RINOs, so, the RNC, they better get their stuff together, or, ya have to ask them too, What do they want as an outcome of this? Civil War?”
Please. Reliably babblelicious.
OK, QUICK DIVERSIONARY EMOTIONAL HEALTH BREAK FROM ALL OF THIS SUFFOCATING MAGA MENDACITY
Astonishing 29 yr old British musical genius Jacob Collier and his jaw-dropping tribe. Pure goodness.
Pure goodness. By the way, these young people are about way more than dramatic high-tech liveshow production. Below, Jacob and some of his band walking the streets of a Paris open-air flea market:
Do yourselves a favor, glom onto these young artists. I certainly have. I had my 43 mo old Grandson Calvin watch the London concert song with me the other day. He was mesmerized.
MONDAY, 28TH, ANOTHER QUICK DIVERSION
Prior to re-focusing on the shitstorm. Just ran across this review in Science:
In The Dawn of a Mindful Universe, physicist Marcelo Gleiser attempts to save the world by way of a pessimistic but spiritual application of the Drake equation—the mathematical framework used to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations likely to exist in the Milky Way Galaxy. Gleiser has written a number of stimulating books on the existential implications of modern science, and here he continues that trajectory in what he calls a manifesto of “urgency and hope.” His goal is to change humanity’s collective mindset to divert us from the “delusional and suicidal” climate path on which we find ourselves by reframing the stories we tell ourselves about the Universe and about humankind.
The Dawn of a Mindful Universe is a wide-ranging, fast-paced journey from the pre-Socratics to Star Trek. It is both a story of the evolution of the Universe and life and a story of our understanding of them—a very wide scope for a relatively short book, which means that not every topic gets equal coverage or analysis. At times, this leads to some unevenness, but it is a worthwhile price to pay for gems such as Gleiser’s insightful discussion of the multiverse as a secular “God of the gaps.”
Gleiser’s overall goal is to chart how we came to value ourselves over nature and, in parallel, came to think that the Universe should be full of life-forms like us. He argues instead for a “post-Copernican” mindset, one that embraces the preciousness of our planet over its similarities to other worlds. Here, he builds on his earlier writings about the limitations of science to cast doubt on the uniformity principles used to assume that life is common in the Universe, warning readers not to extrapolate what we know about life on Earth to the rest of the cosmos. His arguments echo those made by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who stressed the contingency of life’s emergence and development, arguing that if a single event had been different, we might not be here…
Going against the tide of opinion, Gleiser argues that the failure so far to find life elsewhere means that we are, essentially, the only intelligent beings in the Milky Way—a conclusion he uses to call for a resacralization of nature. We should embrace a biocentric view that life must be protected as something unique and endangered, he maintains…
As with the long-standing tradition of natural theology, it seems unlikely that The Dawn of a Mindful Universe is going to convince anyone who does not already agree with Gleiser’s position that the biosphere needs protecting. However, it will no doubt provide ammunition and many interesting ideas to those who already believe.
Just a tad passive-aggressive in that final review sentence? A waft of imputed "confirmation bias affinity?" I guess I'll have read the book to see. Although, have I already waived my 5th Amendment privilege, tipped my hand?
Props to the reviewer for noting the late Stephen Gould (while it wasn't an explicit endorsement, we'll take all we can get). I am all in on "The Drunkard's Walk Theory of Evolution."
The Left Wall of Zero Cells. Popper problems (?) notwithstanding, that's about as Occam's Razor as paleo-biological evolution assertions get. You need but 3 foundational, starting-line assumptions (all of them true): [1] a stable, low-entropy local environment hospitable to replicating microbial life (in our case carbon-polymer-based); [2] the left wall-bounded emergence of such replicable microbial life; and [3] a LOT of ensuing time. What follows is nothing beyond the empirical Random Walk and its upshot by time x.
Billions of years hence on this run, you get stuff like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin, Tucker Carlson ... and films like "Don't Look Up."
Helluva price to pay for Jacob Collieret al.
A price unequally distributed, woefully.
apropos of the topic, see my prior cites of this book:
AUG 30TH UPDATES
No one wants to appear before a judge as a criminal defendant. But court is a particularly inhospitable place for Donald Trump, who conceptualizes the value of truth only in terms of whether it is convenient to him. His approach to the world is paradigmatic of what the late philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined as bullshit: Trump doesn’t merely obscure the truth through strategic lies, but rather speaks “without any regard for how things really are.” This is at odds with the nature of law, a system carefully designed to evaluate arguments on the basis of something other than because I say so. The bullshitter is fundamentally, as Frankfurt writes, “trying to get away with something”—while law establishes meaning and imposes consequence…
