#cass sunstein

[sophiaphile]

"Like The New York Times, CNN and network news programs, it [PowerPoint] appears to be neutral, unbiased and free of any leanings one way or another. Just as a hammer does not tell you what kind of house to build, Microsoft would like us to think...that their product is merely a neutral tool. It is faceless, and it is what you put into it that counts.

However, every piece of software comes with its own set of biases and tendencies. The most obvious bias and the easiest to see in PowerPoint, is the Auto Content Wizard, a feature that makes outlines of presentations with bullet points for those who feel they don't know how to make a presentation themselves...

However, there are more subtle sets of biases at work. The way the PowerPoint is structured and the various options provided have not only been limited...but they have been designed assuming, a priori, a specific world view. The software, by making certain directions and actions easier and more convenient than others, tells you how to think as it helps you accomplish your task. Not in an obvious way or in an obnoxious way or even in a scheming way. The biases are almost unintentional, they are so natural and well-integrated. It is possible that the engineers and designers have no intention of guiding and straightening out your thinking; they simply feel that the assumptions upon which they base their design decisions are the most natural and practical. You are thus subtly indoctrinated into a manner of being and behaving, assuming and acting, that grows on you as you use the program."

—David Byrne, "Exegesis," Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information

[as-told-by-sura]

Ahaaaa… !!

[insidewarp]

The day is known as Högertrafikomläggningen, which translates to “the right-hand traffic diversion,” or H-day for short.  It was the day Sweden changed from driving on the left side of the road to the right.  The move was initiated to align Sweden with the other Scandinavian countries.  The fear was that drivers would get confused, turning the wrong way or getting too close to other cars when attempting to overtake them.  That would seem to be a perfectly reasonable fear.  Surprisingly, however, the switch did not result in a rise in motor accidents,   On the contrary, the number of accidents and fatalities plunged!  The number of motor insurance claims went down by 40 percent.

Tali Sharot and Cass Sunstein

[mauriciomeschoulam]

Extremismo de derecha y el plan para derrocar al gobierno alemán

Artículo publicado originalmente en El Universal: https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/opinion/mauricio-meschoulam/extremismo-de-derecha-y-el-plan-para-derrocar-al-gobierno-aleman

Era 2020, plena pandemia. Se reportaba que aproximadamente unas 48,000 municiones y alrededor de 62 kilogramos de explosivos habían desaparecido de la unidad militar de mayor élite en Alemania, el Mando de Fuerzas Especiales, conocido en alemán por las siglas KSK. En ese entonces, Berlín reportaba que, de los más de 600 soldados que estaban siendo investigados por la Oficina de Contrainteligencia Militar por sospechas de extremismo, unos 20 pertenecían a las KSK. Ya no cabía duda, la penetración institucional del extremismo de derecha era enorme. Esto fue reconfirmado apenas hace unos días cuando las autoridades alemanas, con asistencia de las de países como Austria e Italia, desmantelaron un plan para derrocar al gobierno en Berlín. Más allá de conocer los detalles de ese plan concreto que están revelando las investigaciones, vale la pena examinar varios elementos que enmarcan estos hechos, a manera de contexto. Esto incluye, tanto las distinciones como las conexiones entre las extremas derechas políticas y el extremismo violento, sus creencias e ideología, los procesos de radicalización de determinadas personas y su capacidad de penetrar instituciones y gobiernos. Todo esto, a fin de pensar en qué acciones se deberían tomar si se desea atender el fenómeno desde su raíz. Van unas notas al respecto.

Un plan para derrocar al gobierno alemán

Lo que sabemos es que, en un operativo que involucró a más de 3,000 efectivos, las autoridades alemanas allanaron 150 viviendas e instalaciones y detuvieron a 25 personas que formaban parte de un plan para tomar el control del gobierno alemán. Entre los detenidos se encontraban un príncipe alemán, se reportó, una exparlamentaria de extrema derecha, un militar en activo y exmiembros de la policía y fuerzas especiales de élite. El plan incluía asaltar el Capitolio alemán, arrestar a los legisladores y ejecutar al canciller. Un príncipe descendiente de la nobleza alemana (Heinrich XIII) asumiría el cargo de nuevo jefe de Estado, y la exparlamentaria de extrema derecha llevaría a cabo una purga nacional.

Este plan, si bien representa una escalada, no constituye en modo alguno, una situación aislada.

El Reichsbürger, sus creencias, el “Día X” y las teorías aceleracionistas

Las personas detenidas la semana pasada, forman parte de un grupo llamado Reichsbürger (los Ciudadanos del Reich), una agrupación que no es nueva, pero que había sido vista como muy marginal entre los grupos de extrema derecha de Alemania. Este grupo está constituido por una red dispersa de unas 20,000 personas con distintas creencias asociadas a conspiraciones (NYT, 2022).

Para ellos, por ejemplo, la Alemania actual no es una nación soberana, sino una corporación creada por las potencias aliadas que le vencieron en la segunda guerra mundial. Por tanto, su misión es recuperar esa soberanía perdida, lo que se conseguirá exclusivamente a través de tomar por asalto las instituciones, el gobierno, y efectuar una purga de quienes hoy controlan el país.

Llegará así, un día en el que la democracia alemana, tal y como la conocemos, colapsará. Ese día es conocido en este sistema de creencias como el “Día X”.

Quizás habrá quienes piensen que sería imposible siquiera imaginar un golpe de Estado exitoso en Alemania. Pero para entender mejor lo que motiva a agrupaciones como esta, se requiere incorporar las teorías “aceleracionsitas”. Independientemente de la eficacia de golpes específicos, lo que estas corrientes desean, es “acelerar” la inevitable confrontación, guerra civil, o colapso institucional. El hacerse de explosivos, el asesinar a personalidades o atacar un Capitolio (todos estos hechos han ocurrido o han sido planeados recientemente en Alemania), lo que hace es acelerar el inevitable choque para el que hay que estar preparados, y enfrentarle sin temor.

El rol internacional de teorías de conspiración, antisemitismo, QAnon y coyunturas

Esta serie de creencias e ideologías van mucho más allá de lo local, y se conectan más cada vez con ideologías afines en otras partes del globo. Es decir, más allá de las peculiaridades del Reichsbürger, es imposible entender su pensamiento actual sin vincularlo con sus componentes globales. Señalo algunos: (a) las teorías de conspiración, (b) el antisemitismo internacional, (c) las teorías QAnon, y (d) coyunturas como la crisis de refugiados, la pandemia y los movimientos anti-Covid.

Considere lo siguiente: De acuerdo con Cass Sunstein (2016), el mayor predictor de que alguien crea en una teoría conspirativa es su creencia previa en otra conspiración. Si una persona ya pensaba, por ejemplo, que los ataques del 9/11 fueron obra interna de Washington, se vuelve altamente probable que otro tipo de teorías conspirativas penetre en su sistema de creencias. Las teorías conspirativas, nos explica el autor, funcionan como cascada. En todo ello, el internet juega un rol crucial. Según investigación que hemos documentado en este espacio, las teorías conspirativas son usualmente el primer punto de acceso a través del cual las personas se vinculan con este sistema global de creencias y van construyendo sus propias visiones sobre la realidad.

De manera tal que, si alguien ya creía, por ejemplo, que el mundo está “dominado por los judíos” desde las finanzas hasta el cine o la política, es más factible que teorías como QAnon o como la idea de que la pandemia es una conspiración, ganen su atención (y que, por cierto, se vincule a los judíos en todo el esquema). Esto, a su vez, se comparte en internet y el mismo sistema se va alimentando y creciendo con interpretaciones propias y ajenas.

Pensemos en este ejemplo: hay un sector en Estados Unidos que piensa que existe un “Estado Profundo” peleando una guerra en contra de Trump; que el mundo es dirigido secretamente por un grupo de pedófilos satánicos que operan una red de tráfico de niños. De acuerdo con esta teoría, personalidades como Obama, Hilary Clinton, George Soros, o celebridades como Tom Hanks u Oprah Winfrey, están incluidas en este grupo selecto. Trump, en esta narrativa, habría sido reclutado por militares para deshacerse de esta red y por ello, los conspiradores se mantienen luchando en su contra. Según se ha reportado, estas teorías proceden de una persona o grupo anónimo que utilizaba el nombre “Q”, quien alegaba que tenía acceso directo a secretos de gobierno. Actualmente se les conoce como las teorías QAnon, un fenómeno que en su momento era absolutamente marginal, pero que paulatinamente ha ido ganando adeptos y se ha convertido en parte de la conversación central. Su penetración en internet y redes sociales es inmensa.

En Alemania los grupos extremistas de derecha han adoptado y adaptado las teorías QAnon del “Estado Profundo” a sus propias realidades percibidas. Más aún, el incremento en la actividad en internet y redes sociales de personas con ideologías afines, se intensificó primero, durante la crisis de refugiados (crisis que, desde su perspectiva, fue incentivada por el gobierno de Merkel para seguir vulnerando la nacionalidad, la cultura y los valores alemanes), y luego durante la pandemia, en su visión, un componente más de la conspiración global.

Penetración instituciones alemanas: de la política a la opción violenta

Como dijimos, lo que llama la atención en el caso alemán, es la penetración institucional. Hay una gran cantidad de reportes que indican cómo es que, entre la policía, en las fuerzas de élite y de seguridad, además de los partidos políticos de ese país, la cantidad de personas con creencias como las descritas ha ido aumentando.

Esto no significa que todas las personas que tienen ideología de derecha radical confluyan con la violencia. Sin embargo, ya desde 2021, un informe anual de la agencia de inteligencia nacional conocida por su acrónimo alemán BfV, indicaba que alrededor del 40% de los extremistas de extrema derecha en Alemania apoyan el uso de la violencia con fines políticos. Ello tampoco implica que ese 40% esté tomando las armas o participe del plan que fue revelado la semana pasada. Pero sí nos habla acerca de un avanzado proceso de radicalización de una parte de esas personas.

Como explica Fathali Moghadam (2010), la radicalización se da a través de peldaños en una escalera ascendente que las personas suben conforme perciben que se agotan las vías pacíficas de participación política, y que solo la violencia puede conseguir los objetivos que buscan. A pesar de su proceso individual, la gran mayoría de las personas se queda ahí, sin hacer nada más. Un puñado, no obstante, sí decide ascender la escalera y opta por la violencia. Así, en Alemania hemos visto el crecimiento de la derecha radical política en las últimas décadas (incluso tras sus retrocesos más recientes, cuando se observa por regiones, se puede apreciar con claridad los avances que señalo). Pero de todo ese espectro, actualmente hay unas 33 mil personas que están siendo investigadas por las autoridades como parte del extremismo violento mencionado.

Síntesis y acciones a seguir

Lo que estamos observando es un complejo fenómeno en un sector de la población alemana, el cual incluye convicciones propias, un número importante de teorías de conspiración con décadas de antigüedad, además de otras nuevas. En esa manifestación juegan un rol importante las nuevas herramientas de tecnología y comunicación—que les permiten conectar sus ideas con las de otros grupos afines, y a su vez compartir las propias dentro y fuera de su país—la explosión de las cascadas conspirativas alimentadas por coyunturas como la crisis de refugiados o la pandemia. El tema es que esta expresión no se queda en un movimiento ideológico marginal, sino que ha mostrado procesos de radicalización individuales y organizacionales, además de una creciente capacidad de penetrar en instituciones hasta exhibir, con toda seriedad, planes como los revelados la semana pasada.

La labor para contrarrestar un fenómeno como ese, no es, por tanto, exclusivamente una de “contraterrorismo”. Es decir, las agencias de inteligencia y seguridad deben, por supuesto, trabajar como lo han hecho, para detener planes, situaciones de crisis o de la violencia que se ha expresado en ataques o asesinatos. Pero hay además de ello una norme tarea política, social, educativa y mediática, que se tiene que implementar no solo en ese país sino en muchos más, la cual incluye desde medidas para comprender esta manifestación de manera mucho más honda, hasta el diseño de políticas y estrategias colaborativas para detectar y enfrentar esta serie de tendencias desde su raíz. En otra entrega detallaremos lo que se ha hecho en esas direcciones y hablaremos de lo que ha funcionado, de lo que no, y lo que falta en este esfuerzo constante de seguir aprendiendo.

Instagram: @mauriciomesch

TW: @maurimm 

13 de diciembre, 2022

[judgingbooksbycovers]

On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, and What Can Be Done

By Cass R. Sunstein.

Design by Karl Spurzem.

[trmpt]

Cass R. Sunstein

[paullovescomics]

Nonfiction books that I read in the second half of 2023, part 1 of 2

[moingay1cuonsach]

‘Cú hích - Phiên bản cuối cùng’ của tác giả Nobel 2017

Sau hơn một thập kỷ ra mắt, ‘Cú hích’ – quyển sách nổi tiếng của tác giả Nobel 2017 Richard H. Thaler và người đoạt giải Holberg 2018 Cass R. Sunstein, vừa được tái bản với nhiều cập nhật và sửa đổi gần như mới. Ngay khi ra mắt vào năm 2008, quyển sách “Cú hích – Nudge” của bộ đôi tác giả Richard H. Thaler và Cass R. Sunstein đã lập tức trở thành một trong những quyển sách bán chạy trên toàn cầu…

[blueiscoool]

Connie Converse: The 'Genius' of a Singer Who Was Ahead of Her Time - Then Disappeared

Connie Converse failed to find fame as a singer-songwriter in the 1950s, then mysteriously disappeared without a trace. On the 100th anniversary of her birth - and approaching the 50th anniversary of her disappearance - she's now remembered as a great lost talent.

In January 1961, an unknown Bob Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village with a guitar in his hand and $12 in his pocket, on his way to revolutionising popular music with his poetic, personal songs.

Maybe he brushed past Connie Converse as she went the other way. She moved out of the New York neighbourhood that same month, after a decade of struggling to get significant attention for her own intimate, sophisticated and beautiful songs.

There is a parallel universe where Converse was the one who got the big break, and she is a household name.

At least, that’s the theory put forward in a recent book called How To Become Famous – not a manual, but about why some talented people become successful and others stay in the shadows.

It imagines a world where Converse is "widely known" as "the most original, and perhaps the greatest, of the folk singers of the 1950s and 1960s", who influenced everyone from Dylan to Taylor Swift, and for whom "a Nobel Prize is not out of the question".

Musician and author Howard Fishman, who published Converse’s biography, To Anyone Who Ever Asks, last year, also thinks Converse could have made it big.

"I love to think about an alternate reality in which Connie Converse’s music did receive the recognition it deserved in its own time, and she became a recognised for the musical genius that she was," he says.

"I almost think a better version of American cultural history could have happened, had that been the case."

But How To Become Famous author Cass Sunstein concedes that Converse wasn't better than Dylan. She also faced barriers because she was a woman. And perhaps her clever, melodic and mostly melancholic songs just never quite had mass appeal.

They dealt with subjects like loneliness, promiscuity, quarrelling lovers, and frequenting saloons in the afternoons. It's certainly hard to imagine them really catching on in the early 50s, an age dominated by schmaltzy crooners, folk purists and show tunes.

"She didn't sound like anybody else that was making music in her own day," says Fishman. "And she doesn't sound like anybody else making music now, to my ears."

British singer Vashti Bunyan became a Connie Converse convert after a recommendation from US DJ David Garland, the first person to play her songs in 2004.

"I couldn't believe that they were [recorded] so long ago, it was the 1950s," Bunyan says. "And just to hear her speaking in a way that I would have always wanted to speak was very moving.

"She was completely ahead of her time, and it must have been very hard for her. She must have felt isolated.

"If she had any ambition for her songs, she must have known how good they were, how clever and funny and wonderful they were, and poetic. But other people didn't seem to recognise that kind of genius writing at the time."

Bunyan knows what it's like to have her music "rediscovered" decades later. She released an album in 1970, which has gained cult status in more recent years. She says their stories are very different, but agrees there is an allure to the idea of "the discovery of something from so long ago".

"And how lucky that she was recorded," she says. "Connie was recorded by her friends, and none of those recordings were supposed to be commercially released.

"But it's so wonderful that they have been, that they have been found. And it makes you wonder about all the other people that weren't."

Converse was recorded at the home of one of her friends and champions, Gene Deitch, but she never released any music in her time. She performed for small groups of supporters, but never played a proper concert. She made one TV appearance, but that led nowhere.

Ellen Stekert, a folk historian who was also performing in the 1950s, believes Converse was just "too different" to have "made it".

"I think she was wonderful. I think she was totally out of sequence of any kind of cultural impulse," she says.

"She was self-contained, and also self-isolated. It was too bad somebody could not break through that."

Converse did have her supporters, but any female singer at that time needed to be backed by a man with the right connections, Stekert says. And Converse was socially awkward, and not good at self-promotion.

"Unfortunately, she didn't have much social understanding of things. She did not have a very good rapport, I think, with people.

"Evidently, she had very bad teeth and her body odour also was fairly prominent. And those are two factors in middle-class America that will make sure you don't make it any place."

Converse worked for a printing company and then for the Institute of Pacific Relations. After leaving New York in 1961, she became editor of the Journal for Conflict Resolution in Michigan, and her intellectual activities, and peace and anti-racism activism, were highly regarded.

But then, her life seemed to lose purpose and direction. On 10 August 1974, a week after her 50th birthday, she posted letters to family and friends, telling some she was returning to New York.

She drove out of Ann Arbor and has not been heard from since. Neither her body nor her car was found.

A new life?

"As far as we know, she never made it to New York," Fishman says.

"As far as we know, she never made it anywhere.

"I'd love to think that she started a new life somewhere else, and that she lived more years. But who knows?"

On Saturday 3 August, exactly 100 years after Converse’s birth, Fishman is in her home town - Concord, New Hampshire - for a ceremony to give the singer her first official recognition.

Her music has gradually spread over the past 20 years. So, too, has her story, and the mystery of her disappearance is often the first thing that gets people's attention.

"The unfortunate and darkly poetic thing is that she needed to disappear in order for us to see her," Fishman says. "That was the hook that was needed for us to pay attention to her.

"But what I always say is, don't focus on how she disappeared, focus on how she lived, because her life is so much more fascinating and meaningful, and has so much more to teach us than the fact that at age 50, she felt that she had to vanish."

By Ian Youngs.

[lizziethereader]

September 2022 wrapup

September just wasn’t it for me both in terms of quantity and quality. I mean, I finally got around to read the His Dark Materials series (the first three books, at least) and really enjoyed the first one but other than that and the great time I had with Cyrano de Bergerac, this really was a ‘meh’ month. 

favorite of the month: Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand and The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

nonfiction reads (1): Noise by Daniel Kahneman, Oliver Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein

classics (1): Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand

poetry (1): Poems of food and drink edited by Peter Washington

graphic novel (1): This one summer by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki [illustrator]

[psloanclass]

This ain’t Texas (ooh) – Ain’t no LITTERING (hey)

Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein is one of my favorite books as a nerdy girl that loves behavioral econ. The one anecdote that really stuck out to me (that I tell other people about, including my family members in Dallas) discusses the origins of Texas’ slogan: Don’t Mess With Texas.

The book dives into how the slogan was really a nudging campaign to get people to stop littering on the highway by appealing to the masculine, cowboy, redneck highway billboard viewer to get them to read the billboard, resonate with it, and translate it to an action of not littering on the highway. This really exemplifies the power of nudges and the importance of catering your nudge to your target audience (along with the funny benefit of doing so in a subtle manner).

Photo Sources:

[1] https://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/beyonce-texas-hold-em/

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna5151681

[mariacallous]

Marianna Spring is the BBC’s first disinformation and social media correspondent, a post best described as prolonged recumbence on a bed of very sharp nails. She is also a plucky and dogged investigative reporter who has repeatedly dived into the cesspit of online hatred and misinformation with the aim of trying to understand, rather than merely ridicule or condemn it. For her pains, Spring has already received – and deserved – some professional awards. But she has also been the target of some of the most vicious targeted attacks that any journalist has had to face: of the 14,488 social media posts targeting staff that the BBC logged between January and June 2023, for example, 11,771 related to her. Any journalist who can endure such an onslaught and remain sane deserves respect.

Among the Trolls is her compelling account of what the dark underbelly of contemporary liberal democracies looks like now. Much of it involves conspiracy theories – those who believe them and those who profit from them. But Spring’s gaze widens into an exploration of the collateral damage such theories cause, not only to individual believers and their families but in the way they undermine the deliberative capacity of democracies. She looks at the way technology has created a world in which, as Jonathan Swift famously put it, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it” – but one in which even blatant falsehoods endure long past their sell-by date because the internet never forgets. And she recounts, in graphic and depressing detail, the unspeakable things that people do and say online. But she also makes some heroic attempts to contact the trolls behind the slurs, sometimes with really interesting results.

All in all, this is a compelling guided tour of a dystopian underworld that most sensible people would prefer to ignore. It also suggests why such wilful blindness would be terminally unwise. If we needed a case study in the dangers that online-fuelled conspiracy theories can pose to society, then Covid-19 would be hard to beat. It was, Spring writes, “a gateway to more sinister conspiracies”: a third of respondents to a research survey said that the pandemic had made them more suspicious of official explanations of terrorist attacks. The number of avoidable deaths resulting from misinformation and anti-vaccination campaigning, for example, is uncountable, but it’s significant. Misinformation costs lives. And even today we are having to cope with outbreaks of diseases such as measles that were until recently avoidable.

The temptation du jour is to conclude that many of the ills of the modern world can be ascribed to social media. HL Mencken long ago nailed that misconception. “For every complex problem,” he wrote, “there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” Close reading of Spring’s conversations with believers in conspiracy theories and trolls gives a hint of what underpins their behaviour and convictions. Many of them felt threatened or insecure because of what had happened to them in life. They felt undervalued or unappreciated by their peers, patronised by those in power and baffled by the inexplicable things that were happening in wider society.

What’s striking about Spring’s approach is her empathic capacity to try to understand what the legal scholar Cass Sunstein disdainfully called the “crippled epistemology” of conspiracy theorists. Given the abuse to which she has been subjected, this is remarkable. But, although Spring doesn’t spell this out, it also provides a clue to why liberal democracies are being undermined by conspiracy theories. The people she has been talking to are often living proof of what it’s like trying to get by in a society increasingly shaped by an economic ideology in which inequality is a feature, not a bug: it’s what neoliberalism is designed to do. The terrifying levels of social exclusion in modern “prosperous” democracies bear testimony to that. And the widespread popularity of conspiracy theories is a symptom of it.

What this means is that we need to acknowledge that networked technology is not the cause of our current ills. It’s a necessary factor but not a sufficient explanation for the mess democracies are in. And tackling it requires a frank admission that our politics are probably the main driving force of public disaffection. Which is the last thing that politicians fixated on the next election are likely to concede.

So our current reflex reactions to the problem – incredulity or disdain – won’t work. If people’s sense of identity is tied up with their beliefs, then they’re unlikely to be persuaded that most vaccines are not dangerous. Just as (Mencken again) it’s impossible to get someone to understand a proposition if his or her wealth depends on not understanding it. Many conspiracy theories are “self-sealing” – ie, impervious to facts. If there is a single cheery thought to emerge from this fine piece of journalism it is that, sometimes, empathy works. Instead of browbeating a supposedly deluded believer with facts, why not try understanding how they came to believe the things they do? Which is what Marianna Spring has tried to do. And it needn’t be futile. The pity is that, as they say in Silicon Valley, empathy doesn’t scale.

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There

By Tali Sharot and Cass R. Sunstein.