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Learning

Spotting misinformation

Read Psychological Inoculation against Misinformation: Current Evidence and Future Directions

Much like a viral contagion, misinformation can spread rapidly from one individual to another. Inoculation theory offers a logical basis for developing a psychological “vaccine” against misinformation.

Getting people to invent misinformation themselves helped them spot it better:

Building on these findings, researchers have sought to test technique-based inoculation through gamified interventions… The active participation in the generation of misinformation encourages a critical reflection on the tactics used to influence, triggering the generation of internal refutations. This represents the refutational preemption element of inoculation theory and, more specifically, an example of active inoculation, a procedure whereby the counterarguments or “mental defenses” are generated by participants themselves…

People take cues about whether to believe information from what other people think of it:

The number of likes or the valence of comments on a given post represent a form of “social proof,” indicating an implicit consensus that interest in and support for the post is high. News consumers may rely on social heuristics when making judgements about online news… Although the game successfully reduced reliability judgements of misinformation headlines regardless of whether these were administered alone or with social proof, the lowest reduction was seen when social proof showed high approval of the headline…

It’s harder for people to recognize misinformation when it comes from politically trusted/ aligned sources:

With respect to misinformation, recent evidence suggests that individuals may be susceptible to even nonpolitical misinformation when the associated source is politically congruent, an effect mediated by perceived credibility of the news source… Results from our pilot study showed that despite source effects being present on the pretest (i.e., participants in conditions where the source was politically congruent were significantly worse at identifying misinformation), a significant effect of inoculation occurred regardless of condition, such that participants lowered their reliability judgments of misinformation postintervention.

Via People trust themselves more than they trust the news. They shouldn’t. by Jacob L Nelson, Zeve Sanderson, and Seth C Lewis (Columbia Journalism Review)

 

Also watch:

 

See also:

The old classic, lying with statistics

Critical Ignoring

Notes from the SPARKS Conference 2022: Day 2

Correlation does not equal causation: tree planting episode

Don’t blame lack of climate action on scientists

Internet era life skills

The mirror world

Categories
Lifestyle Mental Health

Confronting Sources of Guilt and Overwhelm in the House

Bookmarked How to cleanse your home of negative emotions – The Aesthetics of Joy by Ingrid Fetell Lee by Ingrid Fetell Lee (The Aesthetics of Joy by Ingrid Fetell Lee)

If you’re looking for a clean slate for the new year, go beyond decluttering to purge your home of regret, guilt, shame, and overwhelm and create more space for joy in the year to come.

Guilt, shame, anxiety, regret: these emotions can take up residence in our homes without us realizing. And while all emotions have a purpose, dwelling on (or with) them when we’re not actively processing them can weigh us down. This is because when triggers for difficult emotions are present in our space, it’s impossible to escape their influence.

Guilt arises out of things that we feel we should do, but haven’t done for one reason or another. I have a tendency to leave things out to remind myself to do them… Guilt can also come from self-betrayal: when you violate your commitments to yourself.

Where to look for guilt in your home:

  • Unfinished projects
  • Items related to hobbies or habits you haven’t made time for
  • Things you bought but never used
  • The pile of books to read that you’ve lost interest in
  • Gifts you feel like you should keep, but don’t actually like

A major source of regret is spending. If you’ve spent money on something you don’t use, or you’ve overspent, the item can feel like a reminder of lack of self-control or foolishness.

Where to look for regret in your home:

  • Things you overspent on, but no longer love
  • Things that remind you of choices or hurts that you’re struggling to leave behind

Anywhere where our true selves rub up against the judgments of others, be they family or society, can be a place where shame might creep in. The closet, the bathroom, or the kitchen — places related to the body — are especially prone to being sources of shame.

Where to look for shame in your home:

  • “Skinny clothes”
  • Clothes you don’t like but feel you need to wear to look “presentable”
  • Books, music, or other media that you feel you should like but don’t actually enjoy

If you look around your home and feel overwhelmed, it may be because you have a lot of things in your home that are demanding your attention… each of these is a reminder of an action you need to take… Overwhelm can also come from broken systems.

Where to look for overwhelm in your home:

  • Piles that need to be sorted
  • Broken things
  • Things in need of maintenance
  • Places where you repeatedly notice a sense of frustration or friction
  • Organizational systems that aren’t working well

Anything that makes you feel on your guard can aggravate anxiety.

Where to look for anxiety in your home:

  • Things that are uneven or wobbly
  • Awkward things that don’t quite fit or feel uncomfortable to use
  • Things that jangle your senses with unpleasant noises or textures
  • Sharp edges that you have to be careful around
  • Fragile things you’re always worried about breaking
  • Formal decor that you worry about messing up

I’m a very mise en place / out of sight is out of mind person, and I do tend to leave things out as reminders for myself. But that’s not in keeping with the kanban method I also try to practice of picking your next work and keeping all my to-do’s in one spot. I used to have a “project shelf” in the garage but stopped putting stuff in there after we had some water and mouse problems — but I think I need to reinstate it, perhaps in a new home.

Right now I’m trying to address the overwhelm factor – and also the equity of housework – by not doing all the little stuff that needs doing myself, but instead making a list that DH and I each spend ten minutes twice a week knocking out. This is in contrast to Gretchen Rubin’s rule that if it takes less than two minutes you should just do it right away — because I can easily blow half an hour doing these little tasks and then feel resentful that I did extra housework when I already do the lion’s share, even discounting cooking time. I still deal with a lot of things immediately to prevent task buildup, but hold off on things like refilling the olive oil ewer and hand soap when it’s low.

Categories
The Internet Websites

The webpunk ethos

Liked The indie web by an author (jamesg.blog)

A friend, Mark, has equated the indie web to the British punk music scene, a rich part of the nation’s culture. Punk music is about creativity. Pushing the boundaries. Expressing emotions. It defines its own rules. Those rules change. This, I think, is a good characterisation of the indie web. Be yourself. Push boundaries. Above all, have fun.

Categories
Activism Political Commentary Society

What does life look like?

Liked Why did images of early pregnancy cause such a firestorm on TikTok? by Lux Alptraum (The Verge)

Images of what an early pregnancy looks like rattled through social media recently, creating an unexpected backlash for abortion rights commentators.

@auntiekilljoy #greenscreen they need to show these images at every political debate about abortion #feminism #abortion #fyp ♬ original sound – Jessica Valenti

(link to TikTok)

I took an ethics class in college, and one of our topics was abortion. Tl;dr it’s hard to argue that an unimplanted blastocyst — a tiny bundle of cells that grows for a few days before attaching to the uterine wall — is a human being entitled to the same rights as me, a fully formed adult*. And even after implantation, the tissue doesn’t look like what we’d think of as a human for a long time, per the above TikTok.

* Basically it requires belief in a soul. I don’t believe in souls. So passing laws that prohibit drugs that inhibit implantation — which are based on this belief — means politicians are imposing someone else’s religious beliefs on me. Which is not constitutional.

Basically anti-abortion advocates are lying and manipulating the public by using images from the very small portion of later-term abortions to weigh on people’s emotions and take away women’s right to an abortion before then. They know that it’s hard to show most people that tiny bundle of tissue and tell them it has more rights than they do.

And this is why truth matters.

 

From the MYA network:

You might be surprised to learn that pregnancies nine weeks and under have no visible embryo.  And at six weeks of pregnancy the so-called “heartbeat” is just electrical activity of cells, before an actual heart is formed.  Approximately 85% of all abortions in the US happen before 9 weeks of pregnancy.

Categories
Getting Shit Done Personal Growth

Wonderful Wasted Time

Quoted Waste time (A Working Library)

Ruefle begins the titular essay in her collection with the statement, “I don’t know where to begin because I have nothing to say,” and then proceeds, as elsewhere in the book, to say a great deal:

John Ashbery, in an interview in the Poetry Miscellany, talks about wasting time: “I waste a lot of time. That’s part of the [creative process]….The problem is, you can’t really use this wasted time. You have to have it wasted. Poetry disequips you for the requirements of life. You can’t use your time.” In other words, wasted time cannot be filled, or changed into another habit; it is a necessary void of fomentation.

— Mary Ruefle

“For there is so little time to waste during a life. [Mary Ruefle]” What a lovely corrective to the advice we’re usually given, that wasting time is slothful or indolent. And note that Ruefle is careful not to suggest that wasted time is invisibly productive. This isn’t a backhanded lifehack—it’s a defense of inefficiency.
— Mandy Brown

Categories
Writing

NaNoWriMo 2021: Day Nine

Wrote for 70 minutes. Two 30-minute hourglasses of focused writing time. Added 599 words.

Expanded and completed the conversation I was working on yesterday, wrapping the scene. Started writing the following scene — the second to last! — and realized that what I had outlined didn’t match with a comparable real-life example. Did a shift on the fly, mostly writing exposition. Tomorrow I’ll need to figure out how and where to segue into scenes for a few things that should be on-page.

Started writing earlier tonight, after dinner in the 7-o’clock hour rather than waiting till 8. A good move. No gathering tonight, so I was on my own again.

Categories
Cool

Post Offices in the Middle of Nowhere

Bookmarked America’s postal service is a rural lifeline—and it’s in jeopardy (National Geographic)

Rural post offices and mail carriers connect our smallest towns to the world and provide a sense of community. But a burdensome financial structure, and lack of federal aid amid a pandemic, threaten their future.

Wood building with blue trim
The Ophir post office in Colorado is the second smallest in the U.S., but the most photographed
Categories
Activism History Science

The colonial stink of museums

Replied to America’s Museums Fail to Return Native American Human Remains by an author (propublica.org)

The remains of more than 100,000 Native Americans are held by prestigious U.S. institutions, despite a 1990 law meant to return them to tribal nations. Here’s how the ancestors were stolen — and how tribes are working to get them back.

Something is very, very wrong with museums.

It’s despicable enough to steal the cultural heritage of people whose homes your nation has colonized, and it’s another altogether to refuse to return human fucking remains.

How colonialist to claim that an institution is the most appropriate place for human remains simply because there isn’t a written record of heritage — to dismiss oral histories as evidence. How unethical and vile to use that excuse to keep people’s ancestors as “specimens” to study. How paternalistic to claim that a museum can better caretake people’s remains than any tribe who would honor the person once embodied.

Continue reading “The colonial stink of museums”
Categories
Activism Art and Design

Politicized Design: escaping oppressive systems with participatory movements

Watched Politicizing Design from the Grassroots by Bibiana Oliveira SerpaBibiana Oliveira Serpa from Futuress

Drawing from popular activist movements in Latin America, this talk explores the possibilities for the politicization of design.

In her PhD thesis that she recently defended for the Design program of the State University of Rio de Janeiro (ESDI/UERJ) in Brazil, Bibiana delved into her experiences as an active member of different civil society grassroots movements to reveal some of the political, ethical, and practical issues that permeate the transformative action of these collectives.

Through Militant Research Methodology and inspired by her action in the fields of popular education and feminism, she traced paths for a possible politicization of the Design field. In this conversation, Bibiana shares some of the lessons she learned from this journey, articulating four axes she considers crucial for the politicization of Design: ontology, epistemology, practice, and content.

Presented by Bibiana Serpa, a PhD visual designer from Brazil

Design & Opressão (Design and Oppression Network)

Articulação de Mulheres Brasileiras

What is militant research?

  • aims to educate people politically
  • participatory — cannot only research
  • acts in the “context of discovery” not “context of justification” — not seeking to support an existing theory, but to learn
  • always collective

Process of politicization

social movements are self-educating and self-transforming –> politicization

politicization = political learning — “a relational and experiential process”

Continue reading “Politicized Design: escaping oppressive systems with participatory movements”
Categories
Fantasy

Read Piranesi

Read Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.

There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.

Knew nothing about this going in. Strong mood, soothing feel to the way Piranesi relates to the house and lives, then lots of tension as you figure out what’s happening and then watch the character figure out what’s happening. Epistolary style worked well for this. A few slow pages at the start when I wasn’t sure what it was but got drawn in pretty quickly. A smooth read. I wasn’t sure how it would end but thought it was done quite well.