Psybertron Asks

This time, the “Backfire Effect”, like confirmation bias, but where more counter evidence deepens the conviction in the original belief. From Dave McRaney via David Gurteen.

The backfire effect push[es] those who [-] put more thought into the matter farther [away] from the gray areas.

As social media [-] progresses, confirmation bias and the backfire effect will become more and more difficult to overcome […].

As information technology progresses, the behaviors you are most likely to engage in when it comes to belief, dogma, politics and ideology seem to remain fixed. In a world blossoming with new knowledge, burgeoning with scientific insights into every element of the human experience, like most people, you still pick and choose what to accept even when it comes out of a lab and is based on 100 years of research.

In a world where everything comes to you on demand, your beliefs may never [actually] be challenged.

And flame wars can only intensify

Most online battles follow a similar pattern, each side launching attacks and pulling evidence from deep inside the web to back up their positions until, out of frustration, one party resorts to an all-out ad hominem nuclear strike. If you are lucky, the comment thread will get derailed in time for you to keep your dignity, or a neighboring commenter will help initiate a text-based dogpile on your opponent.

What should be evident from the studies on the backfire effect is you can never win an argument online. When you start to pull out facts and figures, hyperlinks and quotes, you are actually making the opponent feel as though they are even more sure of their position than before you started the debate.

Also put me in mind of this “false neutrality“.
Similar, but different.

Nice piece from Antonio Damasio

Thanks to Marsha on MD for posting the link. Topical for me right now because of the Iain McGilchrist I am currently reading. The indecision of rationality. In the clip we don’t hear what the specific brain lesion / abnormality is, but this is very much about the left-brain being out of touch with the right-brain and the somatic self – its immediate, emotional, holistic, wiser, more-real gut-feelings, etc. Left-brained rational analysis is a very poor substitute for a decision – it’s autistic.

Not ready to blog a review of McGilchrist yet. A massive and deeply researched tome – hundreds of references per chapter. The first half is excellent – very comprehensive collection of sources illustrating left and right brain behaviours and their interdependencies – particularly the “right > left > right” loop pattern – real-world-experience before abstracted-analysis before value-judgement-and-action. His thesis is that “the western mind” is suffering from the left-brain gaining dominance (the Emissary over its Master to coin the Nietzschean phrase in his title) as a disease – a mental disorder. In the second half of the book, which I’m only part through – he applies this notion to the schools of thought from the pre-Socratics to the post-Modern. Less convincing arguments than the first half, but a clear agenda, consistent with so much other reading.

Like Haidt’s Happiness, the ultimate message appears to be wisdom in balance.

[Post Note : Should make it clear here, Damasio is talking about rational vs emotional impairment, not specifically about left-right brain differences – as I noted, the particular lesion is not explained in the short clip. Similarly although McGilchrist IS talking about left-right brain interactions, he does not characterise their difference as simply rational vs emotional, more narrow / closed vs broad / potential. Need to listen to and/or read the wholes.]

I can see I am going to have to find another theme / template for the blog. Still like the power and flexibility of WordPress so I think I’ll stick with it, but it is a bit geeky to maintain all the features of themes and widgets, despite the integrated UI’s in the Dashboard. A fair degree of lottery in finding a theme that 100% supports the actual features you use, and being 99% open source also a lottery in whether bugs get noticed / addressed, even if you offer to pay. Everything ends up lowest common denominator.

The update will be an excuse for a clear-out / clean-up, but the primary motivation is that the comment feature of the current Blaze New Media / Moonlight theme has a bug in forcing the subscribe and submit buttons right to the foot of the page, where the reader is unlikely to find them – as defined by the length of the side-bar, even if the post itself  is only a few lines long. I have experimented at various times with having a different side-bar or no side-bar for the single post & comment forms, but it just adds to the admin overload, whenever you need to add or change things.

Most themes work fine for simple blogs – but I have ten years worth of posts, pages categories and links, linked every which way. Some of the simplistic previous posts & comments widgets just don’t hack it.

Also disappointing that the Google search widget, which can do more than the in-built WordPress search function, even within the blog content, is now disabled by Google, disapproving of automated searches launched from third-party pages. Pity.

Grrrr. I suspect bog-standard Google Blogger has caught up on most available features these days ? Tempting to switch back, again.

Coincidence seeing this news story today about pollinators in urban gardens vs rural farming and wild environments.

In our current rented town garden situation we have just a few pots of flowers, and after a minor infestation of aphids a couple of weeks ago, I noticed the flowers were teeming the last few days with hover flies. Many different varieties and sizes, some only about 4mm long, some almost pass for honey bees – but all hover flies – 20 or more on each pot. Never been aware of so many before.

I understood hover-flies were carnivores, eating aphids and the like, but most of them are dropping into the flower heads for nectar so far as I can tell, even onto the anthers of the lilies.

(PS got rid of the aphids and green-fly by physically picking off and washing with very dilute household detergent – effective as ever.)

Archival vérité film “Magic Trip – Ken Kesey’s Serach for a Kool Place” just being released, based on over 40 hours of 1964 footage.

Thanks to Dan on MD for the link.

Mentioned seeing Public Image Ltd in Oslo back in June and being blown away with the quality of the band and the gig. Not seen or heard of PiL since their Album (1986) album and had the tracks from that and Metal Box (1979) as MP3’s on and off over the years. Apart from that like most people I’d been treated to the odd glimpse of John Lydon on I’m a Celeb … and on the Country Life Butter ad, and never really occurred to me that Johnny was still seriously in the music biz.

As I blogged at the time my expectations were pretty low, so the contrast between those and the reality was marked. Really impressed with Johnny’s delivery, professional and passionate, and the current PiL band is remarkably good – the best PiL ever Johnny says. New members since 2009: Lu Edmonds on assorted 6-stringed instruments and keyboard / synth – marvellous sounds including great renditions of the older PiL favourites; Bruce Smith on drums – no band ever worked without a strong drummer and most recent member Scott Firth bassist, including electric fretless stand-up bass plus assorted keyboard / synth – more than a rhythm section.

He / they won a MoJo lifetime achievement award in July, presented by Hawkwind’s Dave Brock. Johnny is happy and the band are writing and producing new material. Looking forward to the product and more live gigs.

Can’t help seeing parallels between NotW Phone Hacking (#hackgate) affair and the BP Macondo disaster.

It’s about management communications. Clearly multiple layers of management are there to share the load, not to communicate upwards (beyond reporting) every piece of information and decision with which they are involved. They are employed to “deal with it”, and good upper managers delegate to them for that reason.

To some degree as well as the efficiency aspect of the division of labour, there is an element of legitimate “plausible deniability” (*), sharing responsibilities too. Hierarchically lower staff cannot shed responsibility simply by communicating upwards. The buck stops with the responsible. In normal running, things can’t really work any other way. The question is how to spot when things are going wrong, going wrong on a scale that might effectively “bet the whole company”, and raise the communications accordingly. (Same in the Met, same in NewsCorp, same in BP)

Continuing the Parliamentary Committee in real time :

Tom Watson – interviewing Rupert Murdoch – is unfairly insisting he answer “why” questions about decisions made or not made in the operating companies. Murdoch is very patiently trying to answer them, but clearly his son is better placed to respond. Watson should focus on questions of “what” Rupert knew and when, before pursuing why. I agree with Alan Sugar tweeting http://twitter.com/#!/Lord_Sugar that the guy is pointlessly trying to humiliate the old man …

Much better line of questioning by Phillip Davies MP to James Murdoch. And Alan Keen hits the nail on the head with the question of what kinds of thing do have to be reported upwards … and James Murdoch comes back with the scale of the business and delegation issues (above) … hope this line gets pursued further.

Damian Collins too puts is finger on the communication culture question – people communicating what their manager “want” to hear – Rupert correctly pointing it it’s a manager’s job to see through that. Of course the conspiracy theorists want to find all sorts of pre-meditated strategies and cover-ups, but experience says, these will be communications cock-ups, that need to be understood and solved.

Oh and here we go … protester attacks Rupert with a plate of shaving foam … and his wife clocks the perp in the face. Bloody shambles. Well done to all for continuing after only 10 mins break …

And Louise Mensch too hits the right note – culture inured to long-standing illegal blagging and hacking of “fair-game” people in public life (as old as competitive free journalism surely), overstepped into the domain of innocents and victims …

I honestly don’t believe either of the Murdoch’s knew anything or were kept from knowing anything they expected to know, at the time.

Rebekah Brooks coming up …

Now Tom Watson’s questions much better directed, at what we might expect the editor to know – but again hindsight confusing him as he asks questions about the period before she was editor as well.

So much focus now in the use of PI’s and covert means. See separate post on legitimacy.

(*) The illegitimate equivalent of plausible deniability is “wilful blindness” – deliberately ignoring the availability of information you should know. There is a strange sense in the world of social media that because everything can be communicated everybody “should” know everything, whereas reality still demands a “need to know” approach. Clearly, Murdoch is embarrassed to admit there was indeed a good deal more he should have known.

Post Note – the implications about larger and smaller out-of-court settlements – all would have been nominally “confidential” sure, but some people – with Max Clifford on their side – were clearly much better at negotiating the value of any given settlment. The NewsCorp agreement to settle would always have been on legal advice that it was case they would be likely to lose – the actual amount would then have been a negotiation, which probably bore little relation to any “damage” in the content of the case. Again I suspect Murdoch junior is being pretty honest.