How Minds Can Change

Flower of a carrion plant 

“. . . . the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. . . . cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. . . . . the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.” -- Democracy For Realists: Why Elections Do not Produce Responsive Governments, Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, 2016



The New York Times reports that increasing numbers of people approve of the president’s handling of the coronavirus epidemic despite his obvious failures and lies. Polling from last week indicated that approval by independents rose by 8% from early March, and Democratic approval was up 6%. What is extremely important for understanding the cognitive biology and social reality of politics is what effect this new perception of a false reality is having on the minds of some people whose minds have changed.

The NYT writes this about one person who changed his mind and the related social phenomenon:

“Justin Penn, a Pittsburgh voter who calls himself politically independent, favored Joseph R. Biden Jr. in a matchup with President Trump until recently. But the president’s performance during the coronavirus outbreak has Mr. Penn reconsidering. 

‘I think he’s handled it pretty well,’ he said of the president, whose daily White House appearances Mr. Penn catches on Facebook after returning from his job as a bank security guard. ‘I think he’s tried to keep people calm,’ he said. ‘I know some people don’t think he’s taking it seriously, but I think he’s doing the best with the information he had.’ 

Although Mr. Penn, 40, said he did not vote for Mr. Trump, his opinion of the president has improved recently and he very well might back him for a second term.  

‘There are people who haven’t even heard Trump that much, while the rest of us have been obsessed,’ said Matt Grossmann, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University. ‘Those people are paying attention and seeing Trump a lot.’ 

Every modern president has seen their approval surge after significant national crises, although those bumps have diminished in size in recent administrations, as the country’s politics became more polarized. President Barack Obama gained just seven points after U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.”

Two points stand out. First, Mr. Penn sees presidential competence in the press conferences. He is oblivious to the underlying reality of the president’s incompetence, lies and self-centered arrogance that dominated at least until about two weeks ago. The president, his administration and supporters like Fox News say nothing whatever about the real reality of the situation. The degree of incompetence the president has displayed so far is buried.

Those buried facts are completely out of mind. Penn’s comment, ‘I think he’s doing the best with the information he had’ is clearly false, but that is completely unknown to him. Penn’s false perception of reality spills over to and changes his broader perception of the president. He now considers voting to re-elect the president. That is human cognitive biology on display. It is not rational, but it is both human and fairly common.

Second, the president is taking advantage of a crisis by not acting like the bumbling jackass he usually is. Someone on his staff finally got through to the president as somehow got the president to stop being his normal rancid self. He has toned his narcissism and stupidity down enough to be able to simply harvest the spontaneous goodwill that is inherent in national crises. Human cognitive biology and social forces lead many people to support a president they would not otherwise support.

All an incompetent, uncaring leader has to do to harvest that gift of human goodwill in time of crisis is appear to be something close to competent and caring. People’s minds will do the rest and unconsciously shift personal sentiment from neutrality or opposition to support.

Flower with bee flying by

DANGER DANGER

With all the concerns surrounding Covid 19, with all the people in the U.S. suffering from TDS, with all the concerns about the Environment, everyone is missing the biggest danger to our mental and physical well being that exists out there:

WE CONSUME TO MUCH


WE put ketchup on fries, hot dogs, hamburgers, mac and cheese, and EGGS for crying out loud!
I have seen people squirt SO much ketchup on their food they lose the taste of the food they are eating.
WHY?
Is Ketchup an addictive drug? Habit forming? Pretty?

Why Doctors Are Saying You Should Stop Eating Ketchup Immediately

In fact, a normal bottle of Heinz ketchup contains the equivalent of 33 tablespoons of sugar, which looks like this in a standard bottle.

7 Reasons Why You Should Never Eat Ketchup

Don't assume I want that red s*it with my fries.

https://www.delish.com/cooking/a47252/7-reasons-you-should-never-eat-ketchup/

THAT'S JUST, LIKE, MY OPINION, MAN

Ketchup Is a Garbage Condiment and You're a Moron if You Use It

https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/why-ketchup-is-not-good-for-you

It’s Time To Talk About How Awful Ketchup Is

Tell your tastebuds to catch up.

OK, so ketchup is hands down the shittiest condiment ever. This thick, red, vinegary, sludge has plagued some of our favorite meals.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/pedrofequiere/lets-talk-about-how-fucking-awful-ketchup-is

THIS PUBLIC HEALTH ANNOUNCEMENT BROUGHT TO YOU BY YOUR FAVORITE NEIGHBORHOOD SNOWFLAKE 

Another Increment in Mind Reading Technology

For the wonks in the crowd

In recent years, an area of research called brain-machine interface (BMI) technology has made incremental progress in reading minds and translating that into useful outcomes. A technical report in Nature Neuroscience describes another incremental improvement, namely an increase in the speed and accuracy of reading minds using electrodes that set on the surface of the brain.

The paper describes the state of the art like this:

“In the last decade, brain–machine interfaces (BMIs) have transitioned from animal models into human participants, demonstrating that some amount of motor function can be restored to tetraplegics—typically, continuous movements with two degrees of freedom. Although this type of control can be used in conjunction with a virtual keyboard to produce text, even under ideal cursor control (not currently achievable), the word rate would still be limited to that of typing with a single finger. The alternative is direct decoding of spoken (or attempted) speech, but heretofore such BMIs have been limited either to isolated phonemes or monosyllables or, in the case of continuous speech on moderately sized vocabularies (about 100 words), to decoding correctly less than 40% of words.”

A BBC article summarizes the results like this:

“Scientists have taken a step forward in their ability to decode what a person is saying just by looking at their brainwaves when they speak. They trained algorithms to transfer the brain patterns into sentences in real-time and with word error rates as low as 3%. Previously, these so-called "brain-machine interfaces" have had limited success in decoding neural activity. The earlier efforts in this area were only able decode fragments of spoken words or a small percentage of the words contained in particular phrases. Four volunteers read sentences aloud while electrodes recorded their brain activity. The brain activity was fed into a computing system, which created a representation of regularly occurring features in that data.”

As usual, there are cautions to consider. First, the electrodes need to be placed on the brain. That is highly invasive. Second, it took a lot of electrodes to attain high word reading accuracy. Third, the decoded speech was spoken, not read from text, and limited to 30-50 sentences with a 250 word vocabulary.

What was extremely interesting was the ability of the BMI and software to learn. The word decoder they used was not just classifying sentences based on structure because accuracy increased by adding new sentences that were not used in the original tests. That data was interpreted to mean that the machine interface can identify single words, and not just whole sentences. If that is true, then it could be possible to decode sentences never encountered in a training set. The authors commented: “Although we should like the decoder to learn and exploit the regularities of the language, it remains to show how many data would be required to expand from our tiny languages to a more general form of English.”

When the computer system was trained on brain activity and speech from one person before training on another, the decoding results improved. That was interpreted to mean that the technique may be transferable across people.

Obviously, this line of research will be pursued. It is too important to not pursue it.

Why this could be important

It is not clear how far mind reading technology can progress. Research over the next ~10 years should start to clarify what inherent limits, if any, there will be in how far it can progress. If one day it is possible use machines that can read minds without invasive procedures, the impact on society could be enormous. For example, people testifying in court probably would not be able to lie and deceive nearly as well as they can now. In theory, the mind could be contradicting oral lies and deceit. Politicians making statements to the public could also similarly be fact checked in real time for lies and deceit.

The thought experiment is this: What is going in in your mind when you lie to someone? How can you really know all that is going on up there in brainlandia? Specifically, you may not consciously think of the lie itself, but your unconscious mind by be thinking, ‘that's a big, fat whopper I just told’. If that turns out to be true, or even if your conscious mind cannot help but think, ‘that's a big, fat whopper I just told’, imagine how different the world would probably be.[1]

For better or worse, this line of research will continue. We will find whatever impassible limits there may be. If there are none, then mind reading machines just might transform the world in one of at least three ways. First would be a world of far less lying and deceit by rich and powerful people and by crooks and liars, more civility, and more widespread prosperity and well being. Second, would be about the opposite. Third would be something in between.

Footnote: 

1. Yes, I know. Many people, maybe most, will instantly and strongly object to such an outrageous intrusion on their privacy and maybe even their freedom. That is a legitimate concern. That is why one wants to live in a civilized democracy that operates under the rule of law and social comity. We all know what will happen if mind reading technology is in the hands of demagogues, tyrants, murderers and kleptocrats. They will use it against political opposition, not themselves. 

More evidence that no two people are alike --

just look at how those brains work differently

The President Accidentally Speaks Some Truth for a Change

Salon and other sources are reporting that the president openly admitted that the Trump Party (formerly the GOP) has to suppress voters to allow republicans win elections. That is blatantly authoritarian and anti-democratic. Salon writes:

“Trump admits "you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again" if voting access expanded -- Trump says the quiet part out loud on the GOP not wanting higher turnout

President Donald Trump on Monday came right out and admitted his Republican Party would soon be defunct if voting in the United States was easier in a way that allowed more citizens to vote in elections, telling a national television audience it was a good thing that Democratic proposals for increased voting protections and ballot access were left out of last week's coronavirus relief package.

The comment came during an interview with Fox & Friends, the president's go-to show for positive coverage.

‘The things they had in there were crazy,’ Trump said of the voter protection and expansion proposals in the bill. ‘They had things—levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again.’

As the Washington Post's Aaron Blake noted:

Trump didn't expand on the thought. But he clearly linked high turnout to Republicans losing elections. The most generous reading of his comment is that he was referring to large-scale voter fraud resulting from the easier vote-by-mail options; Trump has in the past baselessly speculated about millions of fraudulent votes helping Democrats in the 2016 election. The more nefarious reading would be that allowing more people to participate in the process legally would hurt his party because there are more Democratic-leaning voters in the country.

That's apparently true, but you typically don't see Republicans expressing the sentiment so directly. Generally, they'll connect tighter voting rules such as Voter ID to protecting the integrity of the process.”

It is amazing that Trump actually stated truth. Trump Party excuses about voter fraud and election integrity are deflections from the reality that they win elections by disenfranchising voters. That is authoritarianism, pure and simple.

It will be interesting to see how Trump Party blowhards spin this. There are two reliable ways to spin it. The first is this:

The second is this:

I suspect that both tactics will be used and the one that seems most effective will become the go-to Trump Party lie about the truth.

On the other hand, could this be something that Trump just made up? That is always a possibility. Pelosi and crew now have a profound moral responsibility to show us exactly was was in the bill about voting rights and every other thing that got taken out. The public has every right to see how it  has been deceived, lied to, betrayed and manipulated.

Or, do the two parties shield themselves from transparency by some norm or law that says that the public cannot see exactly how the two parties operate when making their disgusting sausage of lies, deceit and self-dealing?