Ducks, Rabbits and Politics

A familiar optical illusion from more than 100 years ago by an unknown German artist asks viewers if they see a duck or a rabbit. Some see a rabbit first and then realize it could also be a duck, and vice versa. It has been reproduced many times for many purposes, but I think it is particularly illustrative of the political situation in America.

Newscasters and citizens puzzle over the divisiveness, and the answer is simple. In politics, some people see a “duck” and some see a “rabbit.” But unlike the optical illusion, many refuse to see both or even admit that the other exists. The Democrats blame the divisiveness on the president, at a convention filled with negative messages and predictions of disaster. They insist it is a “rabbit,” and the president and his backers, misguided “duck” people are dangerous.

The Republicans send the opposite message with no possibility of compromise because it’s definitely a duck. It can’t be both; even if sometimes each side is wrong, those errors are amplified into end-of-the-world scenarios. Divisiveness is inevitable.

It’s impossible to get the truth – that there is a little bit of validity in both viewpoints – because the media is complicit. Here is an observation from a book published thirty years ago called Reality Isn’t What It Used To Be, and if anything, it’s truer today than ever: “The media take the raw material of experience and fashion it into stories; they retell the stories to us, and we call them reality.” Different outlets are creating many different realities, but the realities they create must fit their pre-established stance on each issue – in this example, is it a duck or a rabbit? 

What passes for the news today is more closely related to a morality play from the Middle Ages than to an objective delivery of facts. The stories must have drama, good guys fighting bad guys. And who fits those roles is dictated by the underlying assumptions. So we get similar stories about the same facts that, after the story creation process is complete, bear little resemblance to each other. If there is no easy way to make your side the good guys, the story is buried or omitted.

This is obvious to anyone watching or reading the news carefully. It’s as if CNN/New York Times and Fox exist in different universes. They construct for us different realities without apology. Editors lose their jobs over opinions or headlines that don’t conform. One local television station in Indiana advertising for a news reporter listed as one of the qualifications: must be a good storyteller. The goal of investigation is to build a story in support of their accepted reality.

So we find ourselves in a political power struggle where any concession is seen as surrender, where every event has at least two interpretations, where every single subject and virtually every opinion become political, where last week’s issues disappear in a rush to cover the latest controversy. There is always another side as politicians tell their own stories and accuse others of telling lies or intentionally misleading.

The real events, pseudo-events (like the recent political conventions), behaviors and quotations are fictionalized to promote the designated heroes and villains. Social media compounds the problem not only by repeating favored stories and attacking the other side, but also by acting as a source of fresh stories, memes or opinions for further development. 

As soon as the rabbit-seers take a position, the duck-seers publicize the opposite side, and vice versa. Solving the problems takes a back seat to proving who is right about the rabbit or the duck. And everyone knows they are right, because they heard it from their favorite storyteller, and usually ignore or mock the rival storyteller.

This is not going to change after the election, no matter the outcome. Our enemies and economic rivals around the world are watching and laughing, not at one side or the other, but at the ridiculousness of the self-inflicted chaos. 

Flashback – Twenty-Three Months to Solve the Problem

Time’s running out! In early-December 2018 shortly after the last election, with the usual accusations of voter suppression by requiring a photo ID, I suggested that with 23 months to the election, concerned citizens had plenty of time to solve the problem themselves. Here is the original post.

[Generally, I avoid topics that touch even indirectly on politics, but this subject has overtones of responsibility – doing something about a situation instead of trying to blame it on luck, circumstances or another person or group.

I get so tired of hearing about the supposed voter suppression because citizens have trouble identifying themselves at the polls. Now we are 23 months away from the next major election, and it’s time to do something about it instead of moaning or accusing after the fact, as has been the practice for many years. There is a better solution than fighting about whether or not the laws must be changed.

Spread the word. If anyone you know cannot for any reason obtain a photo identification, figure out what is necessary, take some time away from work or other interests and help them out. It probably only takes a couple of hours, depending on the efficiency of the local DMV. 

Another faster, but slightly more expensive option would be to help the person get a passport. Last time I renewed mine, I found a local pharmacy that takes passport pictures, and I spent less than an hour to drive there and leave with my photo. The rest can be done through the mail. (Some UPS locations also have this service.)

Every nursing home I’m familiar with runs a shuttle for these kinds of errands. People confined to their own homes must have someone to check on them periodically. Perhaps the same organizations that arrange for voters without transportation to get to the polls on Election Day could set up one or two ID days for those unable to make their own arrangements. With 700 days left to find a few hours to solve this problem for everyone we know, next time there should be no excuse!

As with so many other problems, we look to the government to fix it when a simple solution is within our reach.]

Now (August 2020) with only 2 months left, I wonder if anyone took the initiative, or will we hear the same cries and complaints from the people who want new laws when all that was ever needed is a little foresight and personal responsibility.

Conflicting Stories About Mind Control

Sometimes all the critical thinking in the world can’t completely resolve an issue, but it can get you closer than gut reaction, Facebook or the news media.

This journey began when I read Outnumbered: Exploring the Algorithms That Control Our Lives by David Sumpter, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. It tells about the effects of technology and the Internet on our lives. “Using the data they are constantly collecting about where we travel, where we shop, what we buy, and what interests us, they can begin to predict our daily habits, and increasingly we are relinquishing our decision-making to algorithms.”

That seems scary, but one reassuring, and somewhat surprising, observation was that commercial and political discussions and arguments on social media and even those by professional persuaders like politicians and advertisers don’t do much to move us off our established positions. You’ll struggle to move someone from one side to the other no matter how good your data; a more likely reaction will be increased resistance (Democrat/Republican, Coke/Pepsi).

Next stop, The New York Review of Books. Here I found a review of The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis, author of Money Ball and other best sellers. In it he “recounts the complex friendship and remarkable intellectual partnership of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the psychologists whose work has provided the foundation for the new behavioral science.” Their work is summarized in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) that gives numerous examples of how intuition, fast thinking, frequently leads us in the wrong direction. (I referred to this idea last Monday.)

Later in the article the reviewer begins to elaborate: “Lewis does not discuss the ways in which the same behavioral science can be used quite deliberately for the purposes of deception and manipulation, though this has been one of its most important applications.” But wait a minute! That idea would contradict the point mentioned above.

To support a premise that “Lewis does not discuss,” the reviewer spends several paragraphs worrying that Trump’s 2016 victory moved this new understanding of behavioral science from “making the world a better place” to “a darker story in the public mind…. News outlets have claimed that although Obama’s and Clinton’s teams both used social media, data analytics, and finely grained targeting to promote their message, Trump’s team, according to Forbes, ‘delved into message tailoring, sentiment manipulation and machine learning.’… If this sinister level of manipulation seems far-fetched, it nevertheless reflects the boasts of Cambridge Analytica, the company they employed to do this for them.” 

The implication is that this must be take very seriously, but four paragraphs later the reviewer concedes that whether Cambridge Analytica did or even could do what they claimed consists primarily of a sales pitch.

Finally, I turned to Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe by Hugo Mercier, a cognitive scientist at the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris. He believes that people are less gullible than we tend to think. We often hear stories of obvious scams involving Nigerian princes and prepaid debit cards, but, like plane crashes, these stories make the news because they are rare and shocking, not because they are common. Again, people tend to resist rather than blindly accept new ideas.

Mercier also uses Cambridge Analytica, which according to the Guardian newspaper “allowed democracy [to be] highjacked,” as an example. On page 139 he writes, “In fact it was a scam.” He goes on to say, “In reality, its influence was nil” and that the political analysts “never saw ‘any evidence that it worked’” feeling it was based on “pop psychology BS.”

Who do I trust about the power of persuasion generally or Cambridge Analytica’s (and Russian bots') past or future influence on US elections? I trust Sumpter and Mercier, not a NYBooks reviewer speculating on something the author didn’t discuss in the book, then hedging about how true it is. Experience and these authors teach me that swaying people through psychological manipulation is highly unlikely.

Flashback – Why Is Color So Important?

My very first entry of 2013 addressed the power of color in decision-making in areas as different as medication and car buying. The point of these examples was to show how Americans are influenced by superficial characteristics, an indication of problems in the dimension of perspective. These many years later the media and certain groups are again focusing on color differences, particularly skin color, treating it as more important than substance and character. It seems we have made little progress since I wrote this.

[This thought about perspective was inspired by recent medical news about the color of pills and by a slightly older story about the color of cars. Perspective is about distinguishing between what’s important and what’s trivial, hence, living according to real values rather than values imposed by society. People strong in perspective look past external appearances and tend to adopt a lifestyle based on moderation. Common examples of poor perspective include the Black Friday stampedes and the accumulation of debt from buying to satisfy our wants and impulses or to impress others.

A key lesson is that appearances are often deceptive when it comes to judging what's really important.  Nevertheless, examples abound showing how people are overly influenced by external factors, in the following cases by color alone.

The first is a health report that came out earlier this week. Studies show that when the color of medication is changed, there is a greater a tendency for people to stop taking it. This occurred 27 to 50 percent of the time, and it is not a trivial problem. “Failure to take a prescribed medication — a behavior known as non-adherence — costs $290 billion annually in additional health complications, according to the New England Healthcare Institute.” Apparently generic medication, less expensive but identical to the brand name drug, may be manufactured by several companies. They don’t coordinate with each other on the color, nor do they take great pains to maintain consistency within each company.  People look at their pills and don’t recognize them or are confused by the color. Over-reliance on visual cues causes them to make poor decisions about continuing medication.

The influence of something as superficial as color extends beyond the health field. As this article points out, “BuyingAdvice.com [has found] that if a car is not available in the preferred color, 40 percent of drivers will decide to change brands.” With all the factors involved in deciding which car to buy:  safety, reliability, fuel economy, price, warrantee, insurance costs, and others; isn’t it surprising that 40% would switch brands – Ford instead of Toyota or Kia instead of Subaru – just because they can’t find the color they want? This is especially surprising since, when sitting inside a car, it’s very difficult to tell what color the car is! The color is visible only to other people. It could be ugly green or bright pink and you’d never know it until you got out.

When making major decisions, it's critical to put substantial factors ahead of superficial ones. Based on these stories alone, color is one of those external factors that wrongly holds considerable sway in decision making. A good New Year’s resolution might be to try to be less influenced by appearance and other external factors. Maybe we can start with pills and cars and work our way up to people.]

Acting and Reacting

Is the world getting safer or more dangerous? Data about crime, wars and accidental deaths indicate that life this century is much safer than it was in the past. These events are very noticeable and easily measured. On the other hand, we often ignore or excuse less immediate dangers that arise as our interactions with the world become more complex.

As I have been describing behavioral examples of errors in the five key dimensions over the last 10 years, it becomes clearer that much of the human race is still attacking twenty-first century problems with cave-man level of skills. Just as the hunter-gatherers required immediate reactions to survive, when they heard a rustling in the bushes that may or may not be a snake or predator, humans retained those instincts, following a course of acting first and analyzing later. 

Likewise the practice of not trusting or even attacking people from a different tribe or with a different belief system carries over today in many forms. “My god is better than your god” is not necessarily ancient grounds for confrontation. It happens in a modified form daily on social media.

These instant reactions and mini-superstitions come to us immediately, before we have a chance to engage our critical thinking. Thus critical thinking is often omitted from our decision process, used only to justify or rationalize actions after the fact.

Several recent books describe this psychological phenomenon in detail: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman; Nudge, by Thaler and Sunstein; and The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg are among them. They tell how, as humans evolved, we developed mechanisms to be able to make quick decisions in times of panic or emergency. We react instantly, responding to emotional triggers often before we are aware of them. We are more comfortable following our established patterns of behavior. These programmed, intuitive reactions saved our ancestors, but they serve us poorly today.

That explains in part the need for COVID-19 bail out packages. According to Market Watch: “A shocking number of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.” One survey says it’s at least half, another estimates 74%, as “one in four families making $150,000 a year or more are living paycheck-to-paycheck” and three in ten families having no emergency savings. No wonder it’s a crisis! The article says people are struggling.

This problem keeps coming up year after year, yet there is no change. 

Apparently what people need is something called financial literacy. An article in Ideas.TED from late last year asks: How financially literate are you?” and tells “3 things you should know about your money.” These three things are not close to rocket science: knowing how much money is coming in vs. how much you are spending; knowing your credit score and knowing how much credit card debt you have. Do we really need seminars and newsletters to teach people how to spend less than they earn to have a little left over at the end of the pay period or to read a credit card bill? These are third-grade skills.

Don’t blame it on credit cards or the eagerness of banks to lend customers more money than they can afford to borrow. These excuses are a cop-out. But this problem arose only in the last half-century or so. The world gets increasingly complex while we still try to cope using our cave-man instincts, act now and analyze later.

Critical thinking does not come naturally. It’s hard work and can sometimes be unpleasant. But it’s increasingly needed to keep up with the new products and services that technology throws at us at an ever-accelerating pace.

Flashback - How Big is Big?

Over seven years ago I wrote about how those numbers used so casually by the news media and politicians to describe government spending are unbelievably large. Most people can’t and don’t even try to imagine the size of them. At one time numbers this big were only used to describe the vastness of outer space. Today government spending is astronomical.

Here is the original post, with the updated spending and debt numbers in parentheses to show not only the size but the growth as Washington continues to ignore the problem.

[As discussions of the budget and debt limit make the news, we hear about billions and trillions of dollars. These numbers are so enormous that I can’t even picture them.

A million is big, but the Roman Empire, as big as it was, managed well with no Roman Numerals higher than 1000 (M). Today, Americans dream of having a million dollars. Everyone "wants to be a millionaire." Based on the average income of about $50,000, it takes 20 years just to earn $1 million (before taxes). At the rate of a dollar a minute, it would take almost 2 years (without sleeping) to spend it all. A million miles is the distance an average automobile driver in the US travels in about 74 years. To most of us, a million is a very big number.

A billion is one thousand million. If you threw a billion one-dollar bills into a fire at a rate of one per second, you could keep it burning for 32 years. A billion dollars represents the earnings for 500 of those average households over a lifetime. A billion miles equals 2,093 trips to the moon and back. These days we hear billions of dollars treated like pocket change.

A trillion is one thousand billion or a million million. It's a huge number. It’s hard to imagine any comparison that even makes sense. A $17 trillion-dollar debt ($26.5 trillion) divided equally among all the citizens of the US comes out to $54,000 ($80,300) each, $216,000 ($321,200) for a family of four.  A child born today is instantly $54,000 ($80,300) in debt. If you took a trillion one-dollar bills and glued them together at the edges, you could construct a quilt over 100 miles long and 40 miles wide. It could cover the entire states of Delaware and Rhode Island, plus the District of Columbia with some left over. A trillion seconds is more than 410 lifetimes, back to the time of the Neanderthals. It takes all the drivers in the US working together about 7½ years to burn a trillion gallons of gasoline.

A trillion is an inconceivably huge number. Even a billion is very, very large, yet in the coming weeks and months we will hear news reporters and politicians mentioning billions and trillions of dollars like they are commonly understood. Doesn’t the fact that our government owes nearly $17 trillion ($26.5 trillion) that we and our children are responsible for deserve more than this ho-hum treatment?]

One Last Time: GMOs

It seems I’ve written about GMO misinformation and false beliefs about once a year including One More Time: GMOs in August 2016 and more recently, GMO Myths Persist early last year. I’ve also used GMOs as one example of how manufacturers and advertisers use labeling such as no-GMOs as a proxy for purity of their product to play on the gullibility of the grocery-buying public – even in cases where there was never a GMO alternative on the market such as tomatoes, oranges/orange juice, green beans and peanut butter. (I like some of these products, but the label is merely a scare tactic, and I feel like I am supporting a bunch of liars when I buy their products.)

I’m sure that’s why one of my loyal readers sent me a short email with a link to this story to get me fired up again.

The message is simple and straightforward, “With the quality of arable land declining and seawater encroaching on fertile cropland, researchers are trying to find a way to make crops grow in seawater.” One possible solution is to develop salt-tolerant crops through gene editing to deal with the fact that a rise in sea levels is beginning to contaminate rivers and the aquifers used to irrigate fields, “particularly those low-lying areas close to vast river deltas.” It is estimated that excess salt is causing annual crop loss around the world at the astounding level of $27 billion.

Scientists have been working for decades using traditional breeding methods to develop a viable variety of rice to grow in saltier water, but the more likely solution will involve some genetic modification. Some researchers are going so far as to try to modify crops with “the goal of soon growing them in floating farms placed in sea-flooded plains or anchored directly in the ocean” – hydroponics on an immense scale using salt water.

Growing rice or corn on the ocean seems like science fiction, but as farmland is disappearing, unless someone does something soon, people will starve.

A major roadblock to any such action is the continuing resistance to anything GMO. This website lists countries that allow GMO farming and those that ban it, but may allow the products to be imported. “Although many EU countries do not grow GMOs, Europe is one of the world’s biggest consumers of them.” It’s obvious that resistance is primarily political, from activists and those consumers that eagerly buy into their message. It is “generally driven not by science, as the independent science organizations in every major country have come out with public statements that GM products are safe.” 

It comes down to critical thinking. The disappearance of arable farmland is blamed on climate change, and people will scream about the US backing out of the Paris Accords as science denial. On the other hand, many of those same people will parrot the anti-GMO propaganda without any concern for real science. 

In the end which is the deadlier decision, the one that shows a disregard for the welfare of your fellow human beings: a.) refusing to wear a mask in public or b.) blindly supporting the anti-GMO activists whose endorsement of a false purity may lead to mass starvation? 

Flashback – Hydration and Littering

Almost three years ago I wrote the following about how the incessant advice about hydration was mostly bogus, promoted by the bottled water industry and misinformed social media users. This week I ran across this Guardian article, “The truth about hydration” that reinforces everything I wrote back then. In the middle of a hot summer with TV meteorologists parroting the same reminders, it’s a good time to review.

[“The federal government announced Wednesday it will eliminate a policy that allowed national parks like the Grand Canyon to ban the sale of bottled water in an effort to curb litter.”  Fox News explains that the rules were set up in 2011 because empty bottles scattered throughout some of the parks had become a major problem.  One problem was the emphasis on bottled water.  They did not ban the sale of other beverages, such as sugary soft drinks that are typically made of sturdier plastic.  The policy was obviously not completely thought through in the first place, setting them up as an easy target for objections.

Those objections did come and the National Park Service officials changed their minds.  But instead of just admitting they were wrong or banning the rest of the soft drinks, they said they wanted to "expand hydration options for recreationalists, hikers, and other visitors to national parks."  Falling back on the idea of hydration they tried to make it sound like a health-related decision.  There are a couple of questionable aspects to this.

Later in the article is one sentence that probably gets more toward the truth:  “ The bottled water and beverage industry have previously lobbied aggressively to keep bottled water at U.S. national parks.”  As in most cases, follow the money.

But what is all this about hydration?  This is one of those urban myths that people just won’t drop.  I even heard someone talking about pre-hydration the other day, comparing drinking lots of water (or sports drink) to applying sunscreen before you go out.

More and more experts are coming forward with contrary, more balanced advice.  Here is an example.  “Drink when you're thirsty. Stop drinking when your thirst is quenched. Obey that one rule and there is no risk of dehydration,” says Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a University of Pennsylvania kidney specialist.

Later on in that hydration article is a statement that shouldn’t surprise anyone: “Much research on human hydration [is] funded in part by bottled water industry.”

  

Another study found “no connection between hydration and the performance of athletes.”  It reiterates the sound, moderate advice to drink when thirsty.  There is no need to go overboard or walk through life tethered to a water bottle.

The final point is about bottled water itself.  I have elaborated on this subject in the past.  With a few rare exceptions or in emergency situations, bottled water is typically no purer than tap water and sells at a hundred times the price.  From time to time the bottled water companies are taken to task by some government agency for questionable practices or claims.  Some merely use tap water from another location.  Most recently a lawsuit cites Poland Spring Water for deceiving customers by “bottling common groundwater that doesn’t meet the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's definition of spring water.” 

Lately I’ve noticed in some airports an absence of the usual drinking fountains outside restrooms.  The only option is to buy the bottles from the vendors.  Again, follow the money.

Yes, it is important to have water with you when hiking in a national park (or anywhere).  It is smart (critical thinking) to buy a water bottle or canteen for the occasion and fill it at the tap or refill it at a drinking fountain. It is responsible not to throw bottles or any kind of litter around the trails or campgrounds. It shows perspective to understand that it’s unnecessary to pre-hydrate or take other extraordinary actions.  Drink when you are thirsty; it’s as simple as that.  So many of these problems can be easily solved by right behavior rather than by government regulations.]

Wanted: A New National Anthem

The New National Anthem Committee is accepting applications. The current anthem has several flaws that must be addressed.

First, it is very difficult to sing. Second, the only verse that is usually sung is far too long. This becomes obvious by the fact the fans at sporting events get bored and restless, unable to maintain an attitude of respect and reverence toward the flag and country all the way to the end, whooping and hollering well before the last note has sounded. Starting criteria will be: easier to sing and shorter.

The current anthem is also objectionable for other reasons. One passage in the third verse, a verse most Americans didn’t even know existed until a controversy arose a few years ago, is by one interpretation objectionable and does not reflect twenty-first century values. (Note that this interpretation did not reflect twentieth century values when the anthem was adopted either, but general ignorance of its existence rendered the issue moot for over 80 years.)

The lyrics are about a war, sometimes called the second war for American independence. But the subject of war, any war, can be offensive to some.

Furthermore, the author, also a lawyer, had a mixed background. Francis Scott Key was a slave owner, but freed some of his slaves in the 1830s, paying one ex-slave as his farm foreman. He publicly criticized slavery and gave free legal representation to some slaves seeking freedom, but he also represented owners of runaway slaves.

When submitting a possible replacement anthem, this is important to remember. It is no longer acceptable to have wrong values and reform or to make a mistake and apologize. Every accusation of wrongdoing is tantamount to guilt in the court of public opinion with no statute of limitations. Mistakes or misstatements 30, 50 or 200 years ago have the same force as if they had happened yesterday. There is no forgiveness, so the work of any author submitted will be judged first by the purity of the author’s actions and reputation.

Finally and needless to say, the inclusion of the word “God” will lead to objections and immediate disqualification. Also, the use of words like “Free” and “Brave” are discouraged, as they are anathema to a society nearly devoid of responsibility, where the first instinct is to “sue the bastards,” or at least find someone else to blame for the slightest problem. Offense, supposed injury and victimhood get attention and sympathy; whereas personal responsibility, which used to be considered heroic based on previous American values and culture, is discouraged. Free and brave don't reflect the ethos of the time.

In short, avoid trying to be aspirational lest it be branded as being unrealistic and unrepresentative.

Send submissions to the New National Anthem Committee. Include email address and street address, the latter in case the Committee finds anything in the submission offensive or  objectionable in any way so that next time we are in your neighborhood we can vandalize your property and call it exercising our free-speech rights to protest.