ICYMI: Study Finds Some Meateaters Experience ‘Meat Disgust’, Too https://t.co/mH3lpPI1hp
— Modern Farmer (@ModFarm) May 18, 2021
"Let’s share African American barbecue culture’s glorious past, vibrant present, and expansive future. Not as a revival or some sort of fresh breath on the glowing embers of a dying culinary tradition, but to make barbecue storytelling more inclusive." https://t.co/9Y06t087Fd
— Civil Eats (@CivilEats) May 19, 2021
I had a fun and expansive chat with the legendary @bethanymac12 about the craft of investigative journalism, how she saw through Enron, and the fine line between fraud and visionary.
— Joseph Walker (@JosephNWalker) October 12, 2020
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I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I’ve been a journalist for over 20 years, writing books and articles for Time, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal and all kinds of places, and I did not know these lessons. After spending more than 50 hours in training for various forms of dispute resolution, I realized that I’ve overestimated my ability to quickly understand what drives people to do what they do. I have overvalued reasoning in myself and others and undervalued pride, fear and the need to belong. I’ve been operating like an economist, in other words — an economist from the 1960s.So even though all human beings are rational, it does not mean that they exercise rationality equally or in the same way. And we should not ignore the role that emotion, both in good and bad ways, can affect our judgment and reasoning.
For decades, economists assumed that human beings were reasonable actors, operating in a rational world. When people made mistakes in free markets, rational behavior would, it was assumed, generally prevail. Then, in the 1970s, psychologists like Daniel Kahneman began to challenge those assumptions. Their experiments showed that humans are subject to all manner of biases and illusions.
Researchers have a name for the kind of divide America is currently experiencing. They call this an “intractable conflict,” as social psychologist Peter T. Coleman describes in his book The Five Percent, and it’s very similar to the kind of wicked feuds that emerge in about one out of every 20 conflicts worldwide. In this dynamic, people’s encounters with the other tribe (political, religious, ethnic, racial or otherwise) become more and more charged. And the brain behaves differently in charged interactions. It’s impossible to feel curious, for example, while also feeling threatened.Can journalism be salvaged with the lessons/strategies that Ripley puts forward? Not the MSM, I don't think, and it shouldn't. The press is an instrument for shaping opinion, not just reporting fact, and an instrument that the few or the elites would rather have under their control, and if they mean to produce conflict, they will produce conflict. Would there still be promotion of conflict in a small-scale political community? First, information would not be through someone making a living reporting the news, though it may be second-hand or third-hand or fourth-hand rather than first-hand. But in the case of serious disputes, this would not be addressed by "public opinion" or the swaying of "public opinion" to one side or the other, but by the community, either through a designated authority or some other recognized intermediary. The modern press is parasitical on oversized population centers and rarely fulfill the task that they claim to be serving.
In this hypervigilant state, we feel an involuntary need to defend our side and attack the other. That anxiety renders us immune to new information. In other words: no amount of investigative reporting or leaked documents will change our mind, no matter what.
Intractable conflicts feed upon themselves. The more we try to stop the conflict, the worse it gets. These feuds “seem to have a power of their own that is inexplicable and total, driving people and groups to act in ways that go against their best interests and sow the seeds of their ruin,” Coleman writes. “We often think we understand these conflicts and can choose how to react to them, that we have options. We are usually mistaken, however.”
Once we get drawn in, the conflict takes control. Complexity collapses, and the us-versus-them narrative sucks the oxygen from the room. “Over time, people grow increasingly certain of the obvious rightness of their views and increasingly baffled by what seems like unreasonable, malicious, extreme or crazy beliefs and actions of others,” according to training literature from Resetting the Table, an organization that helps people talk across profound differences in the Middle East and the U.S.
A group of panelists from Tuesday's Voices of Faith event in the Vatican came to Vatican Radio to discuss the issues facing women in the Church.
Posted by Vatican Radio - English Section on Saturday, March 12, 2016
Twitter introduced a set of special emoji on Tuesday for Pope Francis' historic visit to the U.S. The special characters...
Posted by Vatican Radio - English Section on Tuesday, September 22, 2015
George Seyfried, a student at a Jesuit high school in Connecticut in the U.S., said one of the reasons why he likes Pope...
Posted by Vatican Radio - English Section on Tuesday, September 22, 2015
Despite the curmudgeonly stereotype cultivated by Victor Meldrew in the BBC sitcom One Foot in the Grave, scientists found that older people view the world through rose-tinted spectacles, remembering the good times rather than the bad.
Researchers asked groups of 19 to 31-year-olds and 61 to 80-year-olds to view a series of photographs while analysing their brains’ activity.
They found that in older people, there were stronger connections between regions of the brain that process emotions and those known to be important for forming memories. The trend was particularly strong for processing positive information.
The results suggest that older people are much more likely to remember happy moments than their younger counterparts, the journal Cortex reports.
