Idea for a Truth versus Tribal Phone App

Sometimes we utter streams of words to report what we actually perceive or believe. Other times we utter streams of less-than-true words to signal loyalty to a tribe. Could someone please invent a hi-tech phone app help us? The app would have two lights:

Green: the person is sincerely trying to describe the world as it is.

Red: The statement is uttered regardless of truth value primarily to stay in good standing with a tribe.

As Jonathon Haidt wrote:

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.

We're never going to get rid of the human tendency to say false things in order to please their tribe. This goes way way back, including a thing that I've learned in Catholic school: a virgin can give birth. People look at you with confusion and glazed eyes when you ask them (as I really did in Catholic school): "I'm having trouble believing that. That seems like nonsense." But then they utter it again and again every Sunday. But even if we can't get rid of tribal statements that parade as truth statements, can someone please (I'm uttering this tongue in cheek) invent a device so we can clearly in immediately get some guidance when the tribal statement looks like a factual statement?

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Data-Driven Portrait of Wokeness

I've followed psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams for years and really enjoy his rigorous scientific analysis of many aspects of the world. He recently posted: "12 Things Everyone Should Know About Wokeness: A data-driven look at the rise, effects, and psychology of one of the major cultural movements of our time." Many of his conclusions about wokeness, but not all, seem to be true to those of us who simply are watching what's going on around us. You've got the link to his article now and I would highly recommend reading the details, but I will give you the titles to though sections of his article on wokeness:

1. The woke worldview is associated with depression and anxiety

2. Women are more woke than men

3. Younger people are more woke than older ones

4. Many people pretend to be more woke than they are

5. Safe-space culture may function as reverse CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy)

6. Many woke views are inaccurate

7. Woke people underestimate minority success

8. Woke ideas may foster dislike of majorities rather than concern for minorities

9. The woke may secretly look down on those they see as oppressed

10. Many interventions favored by the woke don’t work

11. Wokeness took off in the 2010s

12. We may have hit “peak woke” - or maybe not

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20 Human Cognitive Biases Explained by Steve Stewart Williams

Excellent summary of 20 cognitive biases by psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams.  His Intro:

The human mind is a remarkable piece of biological engineering. It’s capable of an astonishing range of feats like inventing calculus, composing rock operas, and putting spacecraft on other planets. But it’s also capable of an equally astonishing range of predictable reasoning errors. Psychologists call these cognitive biases, and they’re as common as the common cold.

In this post, I’ll outline 20 major biases that distort our judgments about evidence, ourselves, and the world. Once you learn about them, you’ll start seeing them everywhere: in politics, in the news, on social media - and occasionally even in your own thinking. (Mostly, though, in other people’s.)

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US Public Health COVID Policies Exploited Three Classic Human Frailties

Kenny Carmody:

Three of the most disturbing psychological experiments in modern history placed in a Venn diagram with COVID policy sitting precisely at their intersection.
Carmody's analysis on X is spot on:

Most people know the Milgram experiment. Ordinary people administering what they believed were lethal electric shocks to strangers because an authority figure in a white coat told them to continue. We wrote about this. COVID replicated it at planetary scale, the doctors, the neighbours, the employers, the family members who enforced mandates with a zeal that had nothing to do with science and everything to do with institutional obedience.

But the other two are equally important and far less discussed.

The Asch Conformity Experiment demonstrated something even more fundamental. Solomon Asch showed in the 1950s that a significant majority of people will deny the evidence of their own eyes will give an answer they know to be factually wrong, simply because everyone else in the room is giving that answer. Not because they were threatened. Not because they were paid. Because the social pressure of the group was sufficient to override direct sensory experience.

This is what masking a healthy population, cancelling Christmas, and demanding that people treat their neighbours as biological threats actually accomplished. It was not about any of those things specifically. It was about training an entire population to override their own perception and defer to the group consensus, however absurd that consensus became.

And then the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 study abandoned early because it spiralled so rapidly out of control, showed that ordinary people assigned roles of authority over other ordinary people will, within days, begin to abuse that authority in ways they would have found unthinkable before the role was assigned. The guards became cruel not because they were cruel people but because the structure gave them permission and the institution backed them up.

We watched this happen in real time.

The COVID marshals. The border agents turning families away. The hospital administrators barring visitors from dying patients. The teachers reporting parents. The neighbours calling police on children playing in parks. The HR departments gleefully processing terminations for the unvaccinated. Ordinary people, handed a role and a uniform of institutional approval, discovering capacities for cruelty that their pre-2020 selves would not have recognised.

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