Psychology – Page 10 – a sibilant intake of breath

Fry on the brain and memory

It may not be easily accessible to non-Audible subscribes, but Stephen Fry’s 12-part series “Inside Your Mind” is thought-provoking, informative, and excellent. He does a great job as a science popularizer and communicator, sharing experimental research without jargon and in a consistently accessible and engaging way.

So far, I have found the episode on memory to be especially intriguing, with the idea that memories aren’t records stored in static form like journal entries but rather ephemeral in-the-moment creations arising from the work of many parts of the brain, and neurologically very similar to imagining a future situation.

Fry associates the idea with Charles Fernyhough’s “Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts”, which I have added to my non-dissertation reading list.

Open thread: Identity politics

Back in September, The Economist devoted a week’s letters page to responses to their article “How did American ‘wokeness’ jump from elite schools to everyday life?“.

A couple make particularly interesting points:

Your warning on the dangers of wokeism would leave many of the old thinkers on the left turning in their graves. The stunt pulled by the illiberal left is their assertion that they are the champions of the marginalised. I do not doubt many are sincere, just as the leaders of the Catholic church were sincere in the Inquisition. Religious fundamentalists of all sorts are sincere. But thinking you know best does not qualify for making a better world. Unless you are willing to debate your ideas openly, you are by definition an authoritarian conservative.

The modern-day book-banners, no-platformers, deniers of free speech and opponents of universalism in the name of identity politics are not of the left, the liberal left or even the New Left of the 1960s. As a student in the 1960s, I marched to demand free speech, the end of the war on Vietnam and civil rights. We were condemned as communists and beaten if unlucky to be near a police baton. Voltaire and John Stuart Mill inspired us. This is what Eric Hobsbawm, a British Marxist, had to say on identity politics:

The political project of the left is universalist, it is for all human beings… It isn’t liberty for shareholders or blacks, but for everybody… It is not fraternity only for old Etonians or gays, but for everybody. And identity politics is essentially not for everybody but for members of a specific group.

The Economist has got the ball rolling in the right direction.

Tor Hundloe

Emeritus professor

University of Queensland

Brisbane, Australia

I would quibble that people unwilling to publicly debate ideas could have any non-pluralistic political ideology, from authoritarian conservatism to authoritarian communism.

The second touches on something I have personally experienced in activist meetings:

One thinks of Michael Macy’s sociology experiments illustrating how, when faced with an illogical group consensus, individuals tend to publicly agree and even condemn dissenters, while privately expressing concern.

Unsupported theories, such as those of the illiberal left, that have taken root in societies require brave individuals to break the cycle and express their disagreement, regardless of the condemnation. But someone else can go first.

Anonymous

New York

I have the sense that most people make most decisions impulsively or intuitively, and the in-the-moment feeling of going along with consensus seems like it will always be more agreeable than the feeling of friction or tension with those around you. The trouble with decisions made intuitively is that they are often based on superficial consideration of a small amount of readily available and emotive data.

Political coalition building and Canada’s antivax blockades

Emma Jackson has an interesting article on the mega-libertarian “Freedom Convoy” protests and what they reveal about coalition building:

Whether we want to admit it or not, there’s a lot that the anti-mandate movement is getting right from an organizing and movement-building perspective.

For starters, in stark contrast to the Left, the past few days have revealed how much better the Right is at meeting people where they’re at.

Instead of building an insular movement restricted to people who agree with each other 93 per cent of the time, the Right has successfully tapped into widely held resentment and built a mass on-ramp for people with highly divergent views. It’s why the Freedom Convoy isn’t just being ardently defended by white supremacists on Rebel News, but also by anti-vaccine Green Party supporters in the inboxes of mainstream environmental organizations.

…

Insularity has prevented the left from reaching the mainstream. We have an opportunity to examine our tendency to build organizations that feel more like exclusive clubs for the “already woke,” than they do welcoming spaces for political education and transformation where people feel deeply valued and needed.

Jonathan Smucker reminds us: “Politics is not a clubhouse. Politics is messy. It is meeting everyday people where they are. It’s not an enclave. It’s not being the enlightened, ‘super‑woke’ people together, learning a special vocabulary, shaking our heads and wagging our finger at all these backward other people. That is a manifestation of the same social elitism that is actively structured by neoliberal society. Instead, politics needs to be woven into the fabric of all of our lives.”

Jackson is aspiring to a populist progressive movement that advances the whole left-wing agenda of economic redistribution, racial justice, further corporate regulation, and so on. I am more interested in the politics of building a consensus around fossil fuel abolition to avoid catastrophic climate change, in which agreement on other issues isn’t a prerequisite for legitimate participation. I think that will have to be comprised of people who broadly disagree about many political issues, but who nonetheless accept that maintaining the planetary stability which is the foundation of all political projects must be prioritized. A fired-up, more inclusive movement which still advocates for the entire progressive shopping list won’t do that, and arguably feeds polarization with the idea that only a new progressive society can fight climate change. Instead, it needs to become an issue where the voters who elect the mainstream centre-right and cente-left parties that form governments will demand rapid and substantial action, and not be placated about promises that someone else will solve the problem by a ‘net zero’ 2050.

Restoring and sustaining a democratic politics that can confront the challenge of climate change requires cultivating a politically influence branch of the conservative movement which respects empirical evidence instead of choosing what to believe based on their ideology. I don’t think anyone can see the path from here to there (and events like these trucker blockades are strengthening the fantasist wing), but I think it must involve a retreat from maximilist positions and arguments that one group’s entire political agenda must be implemented as the only way forward.

Target: January 31st

I can’t recall ever feeling as stuck with anything as I do with the dissertation. There are so many ‘to do’ items, so many of them depend on others being finished in order to be possible to complete themselves, and there isn’t any day-to-day or week-to-week pressure to keep me focused.

To rekindle the terror which is so often the basis of writing projects being completed, I have promised a 200 page version of my four core chapters edited down by the end of the month. That should address my committee’s most significant comments, and at least leave a text of the write length for any future changes.

The nocebo effect

Everyone is aware of the placebo effect, in which a mock or inert intervention like a sugar pill in a clinical trial will nonetheless produce what seem like real effects to the people who receive it. The nocebo effect is the opposite: where people exposed to something harmless can experience apparent ill effects because they believe it is harmful.

A recent study found nocebo effects to be widespread with the COVID-19 vaccines: “the ‘nocebo effect’ accounted for about 76% of all common adverse reactions after the first dose and nearly 52% after the second dose.”

This is a reminder about the humility we need to maintain when interpreting our own medical experiences. Just because something came after something else doesn’t mean the first thing caused the second, and just because an effect seems psychologically or emotionally connected to a cause does not mean there is an empirical or causal connection.

Grinching

It’s a tough, strange time right now because of COVID.

Despite the predictable (and predicted) health consequences, governments are not willing to introduce restrictions which would help control this awful wave. They know that the politics of shutting down Christmas would be awful, both for enraged households that feel like they deserve for the pandemic to be over and for businesses that rely crucially on this period for profitability.

Then when it comes to adherence to the restrictions, almost everyone seems to see them as too onerous for themselves personally, given the ways they would prefer to spend their time. Everyone seems to have some nonsense rationalization about how someone else is doing worse things so their choices are fine, or that the omicron variant is nothing to worry about so we should let it spread. And so, inadequate policies become even more inadequate as implemented.

Having not travelled ‘home’ to Vancouver since 2010, I am used to lonely Christmases. I normally feel alienated from the population because their choices show that they prioritize their own entertainment and travel over protecting the Earth. That alienation is magnified this year, with people unwilling to even protect themselves.

I don’t know how we get away from a mindset where people feel such entitlement and lack of responsibility to others, but it’s one that is imperilling us on multiple fronts.

Cohen historical theory

Avner Cohen provides a great summary of writing history (here under the particular limitations of studying Israel’s nuclear arsenal):

The narrative I offer, then, is by nature incomplete and interpretative. Like all narratives, it is not written from God’s-eye view; rather, it is a story told through incomplete human and archival sources.

Cohen, Avner. “Before the Beginning: The Early History of Israel’s Nuclear Project (1948–1954).” Israel Studies 3.1 (1998): 112-139.

Hayhoe on zombie climate denier arguments

Every day I’m bombarded with objections to the evidence for human-caused climate change. Most of them sound respectably scientific, like “climate changes all the time; humans have nothing to do with it.” It’s “the Sun,” or “volcanoes,” or “cosmic rays” that are making it happen, or “it’s not even warming,” some argue.

…

Scientists call these “zombie arguments.” They just won’t die, no matter how often or how thoroughly they’re debunked. And because they won’t die, it’s clear that, when it comes to climate change, you do have to be able to talk about some of the science. But what you don’t have to do is follow it down the rabbit hole. And you don’t have to become a climate scientist, either. The basics are extremely simple, the objections are very common and easily answered, and it makes sense to have a short response at hand.

Not only that, but as I mentioned before, most scientific-sounding objections are really just a thin smoke screen for the real problems. Climate denial originates in political polarization and identity, fueled by the mistaken belief that its impacts don’t matter to us and there’s nothing constructive or even tolerable we can do to fix it. Again, this isn’t only a U.S. problem: an analysis of people across fifty-six countries found that political affiliation and ideology was a much stronger indicator of their opinions on climate change than their education, their life experiences, or even their values.

…

For hundreds of years, we’ve been living as if there’s no tomorrow, running through our resources, putting our entire civilization at risk. And climate scientists are like physicians who have identified a disease that is affecting every member of the human race, including themselves, and no one wants to listen to them.

Hayhoe, Katharine. Saving Us: A Climate Scientists’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World. Simon & Schuster. 2021. p. 38–9, 64

Don’t ask about the dissertation

There’s a cliché that you should never ask a PhD student about their dissertation in conversation and, based on my experiences since my project officially began in June 2018, there are several reasons why this is sound advice. In short, the PhD and dissertation process is frustrating to hear described and, when a student is asked to do so, the predictable responses from the person inquiring are a small-scale rebellion about why the more vexing parts of the process are the way they are, followed by frustration from the listener toward the student because they dislike how they didn’t get the uplifting story they wanted about a useful project soon to be completed. Saying that you’re just expressing sympathy and sincere support for the completion of the project doesn’t help, because it still carries the implication that somehow if a student just behaves in the right way their problems will disappear, making them in a roundabout way the student’s own fault for not being able to apply the wisdom of a quick amateur analysis.

People without recent personal experience in a PhD program have little experiential basis for understanding what’s involved, often manifested as a view that special accommodation should be made for you or that the system ought to be promptly changed because of your suffering. That misses the bureaucracy of higher education, as well as suffering as a background condition of most graduate work. The only way out is to suffer through, and adding the second-hand frustrations of observers to your mental landscape will just exacerbate your own feelings of frustration and powerlessness.

Best to talk about something else.

Hayhoe on climate change and differing morals

“How do I talk about this … to my mother, brother-in-law, friend, colleague, elected official?” I’m asked this question nearly everywhere I go.

…

Usually, they’ve already given conversation a try. They’ve boned up on a few alarming scientific facts. They’ve tried to explain how fast the Arctic is melting, or how bees are disappearing, or how carbon dioxide levels are rising. But their attempts have fallen flat. Why? Because the biggest challenge we face isn’t science denial. It’s a combination of tribalism, complacency, and fear. Most don’t think climate change is going to affect them personally, or that we can do anything reasonable to fix it; and why would they, if we never talk about it?

It’s important to understand what’s happening to our world and how it affects us. But bombarding someone with more data, facts, and science only engages their defenses, pushes them into self-justification, and leaves us more divided than when we began. On climate change and other issues with moral implications, we tend to believe that everyone should care for the same self-evident reasons we do. If they don’t, we all too often assume they lack morals. But most people do have morals and are acting according to them; they’re just different from ours. And if we are aware of these differences, we can speak to them.

Hayhoe, Katharine. Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World. 2021. p. xi-ii