Denial ain't just a river in Egypt. -Mark Twain

ICYMI:

Yes, in case you missed this, it's quite remarkable.  No questions necessary here.  Just your comments.

Thanks for viewing and recommending.

The moon and a pizza pie

When the moon hitsa your eye
Like a biga pizza pie, that's amore

Non riesco a capire

Non capisco

Howa is a moon gonna hita  your eye?
Why a moon be like a pizza pie?
Ifa a pizza pie hitsa my eye, it not gonna be amore.

It'sa gonna be fastidioso.

SO why someone make a stupid saying like this, I wanna know.


 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Bt_uJvlKK8

Trump's Power of Persuasion

According to one observer, Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, Donald Trump's rhetorical style is a masterpiece of persuasion. Consciously or not, Trump has mastered the art of speaking to our intuitive-emotional unconscious minds to persuade people to his side.

On his blog, Adams describes his take on the human condition like this: “For new readers of this blog, my starting point is the understanding that human brains did not evolve to show us reality. We aren’t that smart. Instead, our brains create little movies in our heads, and yours can be completely different from mine.”

Adams is an aficionado of hypnosis and the art of persuasion via rhetorical tricks. He knows something about human cognitive biology. Rhetorical tricks can fool our cognitive biological processes to create realities the speaker wants to create, regardless of how well or poorly tethered to objective reality they may be. Those tricks are persuasive to our unconscious minds. For the most part, the tricks bypass conscious reasoning. Tricks can and do make us believe that false realities are true.

After hearing Trump in the first primary debate, most people thought Trump's performance was the death knell of Trump's candidacy. By contrast, Adams saw in Trump's rhetorical style the makings of an election victory based on his mastery of the art of persuasion. In an interview with Caroline Winter for Bloomberg Businessweek ( Mar. 27 - Apr. 2 2017 issue, pages 58-61), Winter writes of the debate: “In August 2015 viewers of the first Republican primary debate could be forgiven for thinking that Donald Trump was finished. “You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals,” the moderator, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, said to him. “You once told a ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?” Trump didn’t act contrite, or statesmanlike, as conventional candidates might have done. Instead, he interrupted Kelly with another nasty dig, about Rosie O’Donnell, and volunteered that he’d probably insulted others, too. Many pundits proclaimed that the response cemented Trump’s unelectability.”

Winter writes that Adams saw in Trump's performance “something different. In that moment, he realized that Trump might be a kindred spirit—a fellow “Master Wizard,” Adams’s term for experts in hypnosis and persuasion. Watching the debate alone at home, he grew excited. “I really got out of my chair and said, ‘Whoa, there’s something happening here that’s not like regular politics,’ ” Adams recalled. As he saw it, Trump had deftly defanged Kelly’s accusations by replacing them with a powerful visual: the iconic O’Donnell, “who is very unpopular among his base,” Adams said. “It was the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.” A week later, he published a blog post titled ‘Clown Genius.’ In the 3D world of emotion, where Trump exclusively plays, he has set the world up for the most clever persuasion you will ever see.”

The persuasive techniques that Trump uses include deft application of the powerful unconscious bias called anchoring[1] in a game of 3-dimensional emotional chess.

Finally, Winter observes in her article “Of Trump, he [Adams] wrote: “There is an eerie consistency to his success so far. Is there a method to it? ... Probably yes. Allow me to describe some of the hypnosis and persuasion methods Mr. Trump has employed on you.” At a time when virtually the entire professional political class was convinced Trump would self-immolate, Adams’s essay reframed his actions as the deliberate work of a political savant. Trump, he wrote, was using such “Persuasion 101” tricks as “anchors,” “intentional exaggeration,” and “thinking past the sale” to wage “three-dimensional chess” against his opponents and the media, including Kelly and Fox News. “Now that Trump owns Fox, and I see how well his anchor trick works with the public,” Adams concluded, “I’m going to predict he will be our next president.” . . . . “My predictions are based on my unique view into Trump’s toolbox of persuasion, . . . . I believe those tools are invisible to almost everyone but trained hypnotists and people that study the science of persuasion.””

Adams is a Trump supporter. He sees his blog as doing a public service. He is right about performing a public service by helping to describe why Trump's rhetorical style is so powerful.


Questions: Assuming that Adams is right and Trump is a master of persuasion, does that mean that Trump will always work toward the right thing using his powerful talent? In other words, is it possible that a Master Wizard always acts in the public interest, or can there be White Hat, Black Hat and various shades of Grey Hat Master Wizards?


Footnote:
1. According to Wikipedia, “anchoring is a cognitive bias that describes the common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered (the "anchor") when making decisions. During decision making, anchoring occurs when individuals use an initial piece of information to make subsequent [unconscious] judgments. Once an anchor is set, other [unconscious] judgments are made by adjusting away from that anchor, and there is a bias toward interpreting other information around the anchor.”

B&B orig: 4/1/17; DP: 8/11/19

Tribalism Can Change Perceptions of Truth

Morally objective or relative? 

A religious pregnant woman seeking an abortion argues in court that her deeply held religious beliefs are that that “a nonviable fetus is not a separate human being but is part of her body and that abortion of a nonviable fetus does not terminate the life of a separate, unique, living human being.” The woman is arguing violation of the establishment clause by being forced by state law to wait (i) 72 hours to have her abortion, and (ii) read a pamphlet that states that life begins at conception, which she argues is a nonmedical religious viewpoint she rejects as false.

Writing for Scientific American, cognitive scientist Matthew Fisher and colleagues (downloadable here) raise the questions of if and how polarized American political discourse affects perceptions of truth. Fisher is not asking if being an objectivist shapes behaviors. For example, some research evidence shows that objectivists tend to shy away from relativists or objectivists with opposing beliefs. The hypothesis is that it's not worth listening to anyone who disagrees with the objectivist's personal beliefs. That point requires new research to answer.

Instead Fisher asks this: Is it possible that when objectivists interact with people who disagree with their beliefs, they experience subtle mindset shifts that alter the degree to which they are objectivist about challenged beliefs? Existing research is clear that people vary in their degree of relativism and objectivism. What is not yet known is if or how mindsets change in response to belief challenges under various social circumstances. Fisher’s research suggests that polarization and how people approach disagreements, cooperatively to learn vs competitively to win, affects how truth is perceived.

The winning vs learning experiment in rhetoric 

Fisher describes one experiment that he and his colleagues ran to begin answering the ‘mindset shift’ question. (Mindset shift is my term for the phenomenon - Fisher didn't label it) In the win vs learn experiment, Fisher paired people with opposite views on abortion, gun control and other issues. The pairs would engage in an online conversation under one of two sets of instructions. The first group was instructed that the conversation was competitive and a winner would be assessed. The second group instructed that the conversation was intended to be informational to assess how well each participant came to understand the other's beliefs and basis for them.

Not surprisingly, the online conversations in first group sounded exactly like current, emotionally charged and polarized political rhetoric. It was mostly useless. By contrast, the second group conversations had a civilized tone and generally revealed the reasons for why people believed as they did.

The participants were then assessed for what effects, if any, could be detected in mindsets. Fisher asked: “But would these exchanges in turn lead to different views about the very nature of the question being discussed? After the conversation was over, we asked participants whether they thought there was an objective truth about the topics they had just debated.”

The tentative answer is yes: “Strikingly, these 15-minute exchanges actually shifted people's views [i.e., caused mindset shift]. People were more objectivist after arguing to win than they were after arguing to learn.”

Given that result, ‘arguing’ in the learning mode seems like a misnomer. When one is learning without the fact- and logic-destroying motivation to win, maybe it's better to call it conversing. In terms of brain biology, debating to win doesn't have the same biological effect as conversing to learn.

If the results here hold up to additional research and are found to be influential, there could be important implications for politics. First, Americans would do well to reject the winner take all attitude that increasingly characterize polarized political debate and rhetoric. Second, one should acknowledge that the objectivist mindset has been actively fostered for decades by the two-party system, especially republicans and their no-compromise ideology. That no-compromise mindset is now growing on the left, presumably in reaction to its rise on the right. That rejection of civility for moral absolutes constituted a profound betrayal of the American people and democratic norms. Unless one is an intractable moral objectivist,[1] it may also constitute a threat to American democracy and values.


Footnote:
1. To test whether you tend toward moral relativism or objectivism, here's a self-assessment test. “This short word problem has proven remarkably successful in assessing people's tendency to look at multiple possibilities, an indication of a relativist moral sensibility. Try the test and see in which camp you belong.”

The green blocks problem There are five blocks in a stack. In this stack, the second block from the top is green, and the fourth is not green. Is a green block definitely on top of a non-green block?
A. Yes
B. No
C. Cannot be determined



B&B orig: 2/4/18; DP 8/11/19

Some Info About Viruses and Covid-19

Here is some virology. The first ~5 minutes of the first video are good for non-scientists and the first ~8½ minutes of the second video are good for non-scientists. After that, it starts to get more technical.

Darned technical stuff. 🙁

About viruses and humans

About Covid-19

My sincere thanks to 別對牛彈琴 (aka SIASD) for bringing these videos to my attention.

Time to play that "Who should Joe Biden pick as VP" game.

OK FOLKS:
I hope I don't get too much grief over some of my comments below, but my opinions are MINE, and I would still like to hear YOURS.

As we are figuring out, Biden desperately needs to make a wise pick for VP, someone who is passionate and can sock it to Trump, but also articulate (which Biden isn't), and someone who will appeal to a broad range of voters.

ALAS, he made a commitment to select a female - which might be a good idea since there are some awesome female leaders out there - but also some awesome male leaders (AndrewCuomo).

SO let me get the ball rolling:

My choices AND why or why not:

Let me first address the elephant in the room - should the pick automatically be a woman of color?
NO (as it shouldn't be automatic)  - but considering there are some damn good ones out there, maybe?

IF it has to be a woman of color, no to Stacy Abrams or Kamala Harris (Abrams too dull, Kamala too angry), but here is a name for you - Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms


She checks off all the boxes: articulate, strong-minded, passionate, and yes, being attractive helps (this is America after all) 

NO - NEVER to Hillary Clinton, but I would support the pick of Elizabeth Warren 


Two reasons: she would help bring in the progressive vote AND she would drive Trump absolutely bonkers (OR should I say - more bonkers than he already is) 

I would also say no to Gretchen Whitmer but if Biden wanted to draw more of the Hispanic vote, why not Catherine Cortez Masto?


Again, she has popular appeal, is well spoken, and would bring passion to an otherwise stale Democratic ticket.

OF COURSE, my #1 choice would be:


NOW YOUR TURN FOLKS:

Who would you pick - or not pick - and WHY?