Episode 13 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics Part 2: Just the Facts
Jeff and Darron continue their conversation about the difficulties of having political conversations. They discuss how we determine what’s true and how our conscious perceptions might not reflect reality to the extent that we believe, how well-meaning people looking at the same evidence can come to different conclusions based on their prior life experiences, how our lived reality is socially constructed to a degree of which we are generally unaware, and how all of these factors interact in the context of our current information environment to make political discussions particularly fraught and ripe for disagreement over even our most basic assumptions about reality. Finally they discuss what we might do as individuals to try and make our own conversations less acrimonious and more productive.
Notes:
2:10 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 06 - “What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics”
3:07 - See “U.S. Media Polarization and the 2020 Election: A Nation Divided” (Pew Research Center, 2020)
3:45 - See “American News Pathways Project,” “How Americans Navigated the News in 2020: A Tumultuous Year in Review,” and “Misinformation and competing views of reality abounded throughout 2020” (Pew Research Center, 2021)
4:45 - See “The COVID Confidence Conundrum” (Gallup, 2020), “How misinformation is distorting COVID policies and behaviors” (Brookings, 2020), and “Covid’s Partisan Errors” (New York Times, 2021)
10:11 - Watch “How We Figured Out That Earth Goes Around the Sun” from the SciShow Space YouTube channel
10:45 - See the “Copernican Revolution” entry from Britannica
14:17 - The Atlantic
15:40 - Listen to You Are Not So Smart Episode 200 - “Socks and Crocs”
16:02 - See “The inside story of the ‘white dress, blue dress’ drama that divided a planet” (Washington Post, 2015)
17:00 - See “‘The dress’, 5 years on” (Pascal’s Pensees, 2020), and “Two Years Later, We Finally Know Why People Saw “The Dress” Differently” (Pascal Wallisch writing for Slate, 2017), and “Illumination assumptions account for individual differences in the perceptual interpretation of a profoundly ambiguous stimulus in the color domain: ‘The dress’” (Journal of Vision, 2017)
18:40 - See “Disambiguation of ambiguous figures in the brain” (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2013)
19:15 - The Brain Science podcast
19:45 - See “Liberals and Conservatives React in Wildly Different Ways to Repulsive Pictures” (The Atlantic, 2019)
20:00 - Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aaronson
22:35 - Laplace’s demon
26:36 - See “Imagination inflation: Imagining a childhood event inflates confidence that it occurred” (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1996) by Elizabeth Loftus Et al.
27:40 - See “Three kinds of propaganda, and what to do about them” by Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing, 2017)
30:06 - Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway
30:30 - See “Merchants Of Doubt: How The Tobacco Strategy Obscures the Realities of Global Warming” (Farnam Street, 2016)
32:48 - For more on the concept of “negative partisanship” and it’s role in our politics see “‘Negative Partisanship’ Explains Everything” (Politico Magazine, 2017), the research the article is based on, “The rise of negative partisanship and the nationalization of U.S. elections in the 21st century” (Electoral Studies, 2015), and “How Hatred Came To Dominate American Politics” (FiveThirtyEight, 2020)
34:59 - See “Confirmation bias”, and the “Cognitive bias cheat sheet” and “What Can We Do About Our Bias?” by Buster Benson writing for Better Humans
35:14 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 12 - “A New Enlightenment: The Age of Cognitivism”
35:40 - See “You Think You Want Media Literacy… Do You?” (or watch the video) by Danah Boyd (Data & Society, 2018)
37:13 - Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
38:38 - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass
38:48 - “Phrenology” and “Scientific racism”
40:09 - Social reality
40:30 - See “Trust and Distrust in America” and “Key findings about Americans’ declining trust in government and each other”, and “Trust and Mistrust in Americans’ Views of Scientific Experts” (Pew Research Center, 2019)
40:05 - See “Why Chimpanzees Don’t Hold Elections: The Power of Social Reality” (Undark, 2021) excerpted from Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
43:12 - Watch Carol Tavris and Elliot Aaronson describe “The Pyramid of Choice” and how it leads to justification of actions and leads to further action and self justification
45:10 - See “Our Consensus Reality Has Shattered” (The Atlantic, 2020)
46:19 - Anthony Giddens
49:32 - Tyler Cowen
50:07 - Listen to Episode 116 of the Mindscape Podcast - “Teresa Bejan on Free Speech, Civility, and Toleration”) - an interview with Teresa Bejan, political scientist and author of Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration
51:09 - Naive realism
53:14 - See “Truth Decay” - a 2018 report from the RAND Corporation
57:35 - See “Bad science in the headlines. Who takes responsibility when science is distorted in the mass media?” (EMBO Reports, 2006), “Opinion: The media is ruining science” (Washington Post, 2016), “How the media warp science: the case of the sensationalised satnav” (The Guardian, 2017), “Fake science: Who's to blame when the media gets research wrong?” (National Post, 2018), or “Hyped-up science erodes trust. Here’s how researchers can fight back.” (Vox, 2019)
58:38 - See “Op-Ed: I called Arizona for Biden on Fox News. Here's what I learned” by Chris Stirewalt
1:00:43 - As Jeff will note in a minute, this is false, for more see “Shattering the infertility myth: What we know about Covid-19 vaccines and pregnancy” by reproductive endocrinologist and infertility specialist, Dr. Eve Feinberg, who is also an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. For an extremely reasonable and respectful take on vaccine hesitancy and talking with people who may be expressing reservations about vaccination, I recommend listening to a recent episode of The Dispatch Podcast from March 26 which features an excellent interview with former CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden
1:01:17 - Listen to “Coronavirus, Variants, and Vaccination” (The Dispatch Podcast, 2021)
1:03:19 - Another thing to be aware of when conducting online information searches is the potentially pernicious filter bubble effect, which was first identified by activist Eli Pariser and described in his 2011 book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You. According to Wikipedia, a filter bubble is the result from personalized searches when a website algorithm (like Google’s, YouTube’s, or Facebook’s, for example) selectively guesses what information a user would like to see based on information about the user, such as location, past click-behavior and search history. One outcome of this effect is that how we search and what we click affects what we see in future searches, so that unless we are actively trying to counter the effect through various technological and personal search habit countermeasures, we see a flood of articles, posts, and videos that support our current opinions and perspectives to ensure that we enjoy what we see, which captures our attention and keeps us clicking. Eventually, due to the human tendency to believe that what we see is all there is, combined with a general lack of awareness that what we are seeing online is being filtered, we end up in personally tailored echo chambers, where we might begin to believe that everyone thinks like us, and we forget that other perspectives exist. In this example, a person who has previously searched for, or clicked on, information about why vaccines are bad will see very different results from someone who has previously searched for or clicked on information of why vaccines are safe and efficacious.
1:04:54 - Watch Eli Pariser’s 2011 TED Talk “Beware Online ‘Filter Bubbles’”, and see “How Filter Bubbles Distort Reality: Everything You Need to Know” (Farnam Street, 2017)
1:05:48 - See “Facebook Built the Perfect Platform for Covid Vaccine Conspiracies” (Bloomberg Businessweek, 2021)
1:07:14 - Difficult Conversations by by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen
1:10:48 - See “Social media and the challenge of managing disagreement positively” (Pascal’s Pensees, 2017) - click here for diagram image
1:13:23 - See the “How To Understand Your Enemy” episode of The Good Fight podcast, which features an interview with political science professor Dr. John Hibbing
1:13:37 - Austin Bradford Hill
