If any of those people might be interested in China in the meanwhile, feel free to put them in touch - I’m helping recruit teaching staff at a Chinese university at the moment. DM for contact details.
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Literally crashed the website
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Best gluten free beer I’ve found is New Grist by Lakefront Brewery in Milwaukee, WI, available, likely, nationwide via distribution; when we moved, I asked my new local liquor store if they could get it and they’ve been stocking it ever since.
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Thanks, yeah, pessimism does me no good. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens when the vaccine actually becomes available to under-65s.
I suppose I was too harsh with the translation too. Technically, the poll did not provide a “hell no” option, it was phrased in terms of “when”, not “if”. So, the 30 % just have no plan to get vaccinated in the foreseeable future, meaning they might not be hardcore antivaxx loonies, and they might still be susceptible to societal pressure.
That said, I do still keep hearing about people eligible to get vaccinated and not doing so.
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There is quite a strong link between the media publicising all those who are NOT having the vaccine to a drop in vaccination rates. Its as if it makes it more acceptable to not do it if you hear about lots of others not doing it.
It absolutely does. This pandemic has really hammered home to me how people are tribal, and how the internet has had a dramatic effect on what “tribe” means these days.
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At least here in the states I’m more and more convinced that we are a nation divided less by politics than by information. Most* people are reasonable and drawing definsible and supportable conclusions, just from a different set of information.
Plenty of blame to go around for how it came to this. Not many ideas for how to re-engage and get our way out of it.
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I don’t think I see it that way. My experience has been that presenting people with information, or logical arguments, hardly ever changes what they think.
Jonathan Haidt seems to think that political outlook is shaped by basic differences of temperament, and I do see some evidence for that. But it also seems to me that people’s views get shaped by their social milieu. Or as someone wrote years ago (I forget who), you can’t argue someone out of a belief they weren’t argued into.
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Jonathan Swift I think.
Although its probably been attributed to Mark Twain at some point - most things are…
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That or Oscar Wilde
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Definitely saw Abraham Lincoln post it to Twitter in conversation with Gandhi.
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This does seem to be more or less true, but not completely. David McRaney (https://youarenotsosmart.com/) has a lot to say on this subject, and what he says fascinates me. One thing he points out is that people are actually (mostly) quite easily persuaded by arguments that have something like a demonstrable mathematical basis. But those situations are like trolley problems: they don’t really apply to real life.
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People get stubborn about their beliefs, so whenever they are given information that matches information they have been given and immersed in automatically gets more credence than information that denies or contradicts their beliefs. Sometimes to the point that they will utterly ignore solid fact in place of whatever it is they want to believe instead. Flat Earthers, for instance, but also plenty of other conspiracy theories.
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The thing I have found most useful in changing people’s beliefs is giving them a face-saving exit. Most people find it difficult to say “I was wrong”, so if one can offer an alternate narrative, such as “I was deceived by experts” or “I didn’t have this new information” , they’re much more willing to accept it.
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I think that might be oversimplified. I’ve read, for example, of a rather dramatic demonstration some chemistry teachers do: measure out a certain weight of sodium hydroxide and dissolve it in water; measure out a certain weight or volume of aqueous hydrochloric acid; mix them together thoroughly; and then take a swallow of the resulting solution, where the two chemicals have neutralized each other to form common salt. That does have a demonstrable mathematical basis, but it certainly does apply in real life—or else the teacher would end up in the emergency room.
The same applies to a lot of engineering calculations, from bridge building to interplanetary navigation to the wiring in your walls.
Such things are harder to come up with in matters of human behavior, to be sure. That’s why we’re generalizing from personal experience in this conversation.
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This actually seems to apply to me too. It’s just much harder for me to detect. And I resent other people detecting it in me. On the whole, it’s easy to notice when other people are being cranks, and not when we are. But there’s reasonable evidence to suggest that the dividing line between ‘them’ and ‘us’ is tricky to draw.
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I will posit that credibility dominates reason when it comes to persuasion. If we want to change people’s minds, we need to develop credibility more than craft arguments. Credibility comes from a lot of sources. One of the easiest ones is to listen first.
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To distill my initial thought, though, I wasn’t focused on changing people’s minds. More saying it is a much more interesting/fruitful and less contentious conversation to discuss what information you’ve heard rather than what conclusions/opinions you’ve arrived at. I, for one, am more likely to learn something from the former conversation rather than the latter.
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I’m worried I triggered a derailment here. Many apologies. So…
How are you today?
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Today I went into work for a full day for the first time in over a year (I’ve been working from home) to do an induction for a graduate who is joining my team. A couple of things struck me but worst of all:
- I Lost an hour of my day in commuting, I previously felt like this was hardly any commuting but now felt hard done by.
- My plans to get some lunch nearby were ruined as everywhere was closed for either lockdown or the football.
Still despite being exceedingly hangry I’m glad to have a job and to be back to working from home tomorrow.
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… all right.
Podcast recording on Saturday went a bit wrong (the primary recorder did very badly in the open air, which is odd because it’s worked before; secondary used a headset that turned out to echo my partner’s audio onto my track, so I was stripping that out bit by bit), but the edit is done and it’s ready for upload on Wednesday.
Monday is still Perl Weekly Challenge day and that’s always good fun. (I’m also doing it in Ruby, Python and Rust as a way of getting fluent with them. And wondering whether I should add PostScript. But I’m still really enjoying Rust in particular.)
I seem to have a handle on my mild depressive tendencies (not enough to mess up my life, just enough to be annoying) at least for the moment.
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I’ll have to check that out. Looks like no where super close to me has it, but somewhere near a friend of mine does, so I’ll probably ask him to grab me some next time he’s headed this way.
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