Category Archives: Human Behavior

You can make better life decisions. Big Data can help you. So begins Dont Trust Your Gut,a new book by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. Seth, a former Google data scientist, has mined massive data sets in order to answer some of lifes most vexing questions: What predicts a happy marriage? and How do you get rich? and What really makes us happy? The answers may surprise you.

Listen to Seths appearance on the Next Big Idea podcast below, or read a few key highlights. And follow host Rufus Griscom on LinkedIn for behind-the-scenes looks into the show.

Rufus: You say one of the reasons that Big Data is so useful in making decisions is that the basic facts about the world are hidden from us. How are the basic facts of the world hidden?

Seth: Well, some of its just lying. My first book was everybody lies, and that was all about the secrets that can be uncovered with Big Data about sexuality and racism and child abuse. But even from a self-help perspective there are many things hidden for us. I have a big section on whos secretly rich in the United States. Thats complicated because so many people are playing up or down their wealthwe dont totally know where people are really making their money.

Another thing is the media is very misleading in that theyre always telling us these crazy stories that were all drawn to, and it just gives us a very misleading view of how the world works. I talk [in the book] about the age of successful entrepreneurs. If you look in magazines, successful entrepreneurs are in their twenties because that just makes a better story. I think the average age of entrepreneurs featured in business magazines is about 27. If you look at the entire universe of entrepreneurs, the average age of a successful entrepreneur is 42. So were getting lied to in many ways about what success typically looks like.

Rufus: As a 54-year-old entrepreneur, I was underlining that section with great enthusiasm. And I think theres also a data point that the probability of success increases until the age of 60.

Seth: Yeah, which is pretty shocking to me. Nobody thinks of a 60 year old entrepreneur.

Trending: Attention Fellow Book Nerds: Youll Love These 4 Reads

Rufus: Music to my ears.

Seth: There were many motivations for this book. One of them was just following the data. But another motivation for the book is that Im an enormous baseball fan, and any baseball fan has noticed that the game has radically changed driven by data analytics. This has proven so successful in baseball. Its proven so successful in finance, in Silicon Valley, in the business world. But it is striking that [when it comes to] these major life decisions, the vast majority of us fly blind.

Rufus: Lets get into the nuts and bolts here. You use data science in this book, Seth, to answer, by my count, four key questions. How should you approach dating and relationships? What makes a good parent? How do we achieve success? And what makes people happy? Why dont we start with dating. Weve got these new large data sets from OkCupid and other dating sites. What have you learned about how to be effective in dating?

Seth: There are two questions. Theres how to be effective and get more dates, and theres who should you try to pick?

For effectiveness, there are these surprising counterintuitive results. Christian Rudder, analyzing OkCupid data, has found that one of the ways you can increase your odds of being successful in dating is being polarizing. So there are all these people on dating sites with what some might consider wacky looks. And they do really well in online dating. The reason for that is because some people are really into them. And thats what you want in dating. You want some people really, really into you rather than everyone thinking youre kind of OK.

Thats actually something I used in my own life. I dont think its gonna surprise anybody that Im considered extremely nerdy. My friends, in my dark, long decades of single life, were giving me advice. They were saying, Be less nerdy! Be less weird! Learn how to be more normal! And I think the data suggests the opposite. Nerd it up! Yes, a lot of people are not gonna be into you. But some people will be really, really, really into you, including my girlfriend, who, it turns out, had a thing for nerds. So Im glad that I played up who I was.

Rufus: Moving on to what makes for a successful marriage or a successful long term coupling, which is, ostensibly, what people are looking for when theyre out there on dating sites, you talk about this really interesting study by Samantha Joel who gathered this huge datasetI think over 11,000 couplesto find out what predicts successful relationships. What did she find?

Theres a lot of truth to the idea that you should work on yourself first before you look for someone else to make you happy.

Seth: It was Joel and 85 other scientists. There were more than 11,000 couples, more than a hundred variables on every couple. And the biggest lesson in the data is that its surprisingly hard to predict romantic happiness. Predicting whether two people are going to be happy together is not like predicting the weather tomorrow: its like predicting the weather four weeks down the road. I talked to one of the authors on the paper, and he said hes moving to an idea that maybe relationships are, similar to the weather, chaotic systems where slight changes in initial conditions can take things in horrible directions or spectacular directions.

That was the number one lesson, but within that, the biggest predictor, by far of increasing your odds of being happy in your romantic relationship is being happy outside your romantic relationship. So if you generally like life, youre gonna be happy in your relationship as well. Theres a lot of truth to the idea that you should work on yourself first before you look for someone else to make you happy.

And then, about the other person, if theres anything that increases the odds of being happy with that person, its psychological traits, things like having a secure attachment style, growth mindset, conscientiousness satisfaction with lifeall these stupid psychological quizzes that I hate taking seem to be the only things that predict romantic happiness in a partner.

Trending: Stolen Focus: Why You Cant Pay Attentionand How to Think Deeply Again

Rufus: This study that Raj Chetty did of siblings who moved was totally fascinating and a great example of how to use Big Data creatively to gain insight into human behavior. Could you tell us about that study?

Seth: I basically had finished the chapter [on parenting], and Im like, OK, all I need to say is that everything you do as a parent doesnt really matter that much. You might have 8,000 decisions as a parent, and if the best evidence is that a great parent is going to improve a childs outcome by 20%, divide 20 by 8,000 and each decision is just minuscule in how much its going to affect things. So just chill out. Do what you think is about right. And thenI remembered this research by a former professor of mine, Raj Chetty, and some other researchers where they [analyzed] the entire universe of taxpayerstens of millions of peopleto measure how much the neighborhood a child grows up in influences how they turn out. They did this very clever thing: comparing families that moved at a certain age. So one kid, lets say, had 10 years in one town and another kid had no years in that town. What happens? How do kids turn out? And by comparing kids from the same family, you control for genetics and parenting and other factors.

Everything you do as a parent doesnt really matter that much So just chill out. Do what you think is about right.

They found living in certain neighborhoods consistently gives kids an edge on anything they could measure in tax dataincome, going to college, marrying at a certain age. It doesnt measure everything. Wed love it if they could measure character and other factors that matter. But I was thinking about this, and Im like, Well, what that means is that that decision seems to be the really important one. The neighborhood you raise your kids in seems to matter a lot, even if everything else matters little.

Rufus: Lets talk about how to be successful. It turns out there are a bunch of stories we tell ourselves about what success looks like. And very often those stories are not accurate, right? Im a serial entrepreneur. The Next Big Idea Club is my fourth company. So this section on the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs I found totally riveting. You say there are three myths debunked by the data: the advantages of youth, the outsiders edge, and the power of the marginal. What is this myth of the successful entrepreneur and whats the reality?

Seth: These myths about entrepreneurial success that a lot of people believe, when you think about it, dont make a whole lot of sense, and the data helps us correct these myths.

So the myth of youth. Totally not true in the data. The odds of success increase to the age of 60.

Being an outsider. David Epstein wrote an excellent book, Range, but in one chapter he talks about the outsiders edge. If youre too close to a field, youre going to be stuck in the old ways, and youre not going to be able to think of a creative solution to a problem. Totally not true in the data. The closer inside you are to a field, the higher your odds of success. A soap manufacturers going to have a much higher chance of creating a successful soap manufacturing business than a shampoo manufacturer. You want to be as close as possible to the field.

And then the power of the marginal. This is an essay by Paul Graham, whom I generally love and find very provocative. [He says] that its an advantage to be unsuccessful so youre not weighed down by eminence when youre creating a business. Totally untrue in the data. The most successful entrepreneurs are in the 99.9th percentile of income before they started their business.

Trending: The History of Humankind Just Got a Major Rewrite

Theres a formula for entrepreneurial success. You spend many years mastering a very narrow field. Prove your worth in that field. And then start your business, when youre ready, in that field where you have all this expertise.

Rufus: Lets turn to a topic of universal interests: human happiness. I was interested to read in your book that GDP has doubled in the last 50 years, we have all these wonderful technologies that now make it easy to learn and communicate, but were no happier. In 1972, 30% of Americans described themselves as very happy, and today, 50 years later, its about the same number. But maybe Big Data can help make us happier. The mappiness study is just so interesting. You wanna tell us about that?

Seth: This is two British economists, and they had this great insight that because of smartphones, we could do these really cool studies on happiness where you could just ping people and ask them a bunch of questions: What are you doing? Who are you with? How happy are you? They built this data set of more than 60,000 people, more than 3 million happiness points, and they could do all these amazing studies that I thought were really convincing on what tends to make people happy. Ive made some big changes in my life based on what that project found.

Rufus: How have you changed your own behavior based on the mappiness data?

Seth: One of the big lessons for me was the value of activity. If you look at the leisure activities that score really high, they tend to require some energy. Sex, going to a museum, going to a show, exercise, hunting and fishing, taking a hike, taking a walk. These are things that require some startup energy. Then you look at the leisure activities that score very lowbrowsing the internet, watching TV, reading, iPhone gamestheyre the types of things that just feel easy. Someone read my book and said, Theres a difference between a comfortable activity and an enjoyable activity. I think a lot of times were tricked by comfort and ease. Everybody knows the feeling. Your friends invited you to go out, and its 8:00 p.m., and youre feeling tired, and theres something you want to watch on TV. Should I just cancel? Tell them I have COVID? And I think the mappiness data tells us thats a trap were all falling intothe trap of doing something thats easy, that doesnt require a lot of energy.

To enjoy ad-free episodes of the Next Big Idea podcast, download the Next Big Idea App today:

Continued here:
How Big Data Is Cracking the Codes of Love, Happiness and Success - Next Big Idea Club Magazine

Human Behavior

Amyloid and SARS-CoV-2; Alzheimer’s Drug Failure; Who Benefits From Brain Training? – Medpage Today

June 25, 2022 medical

Amyloid aggregation prediction algorithms identified two peptides from the SARS-CoV-2 proteome likely to form amyloids. (Nature Medicine)

The investigational anti-amyloid drug crenezumab did not show significant clinical benefit in a trial of cognitively healthy people with autosomal dominant Alzheimer's disease in Colombia, Genentech said.

Who benefits from working memory training -- and how? (Nature Human Behavior)

STAT takes a closer look at the first brain charts for the human lifespan.

Tremeau Pharmaceuticals opened an FDA new drug application and received a "may proceed" notice to expand development of rofecoxib -- previously marketed as Vioxx -- to include a phase III program for acute migraine, the company said.

A smart jumpsuit allowed researchers to track infants' developing motor abilities. (Communications Medicine)

Traumatic injury to one part of the brain appeared to alter connections between neurons in other parts of the brain that were not directly damaged. (Nature Communications)

Eplontersen showed positive topline results in an interim analysis of a phase III study of hereditary transthyretin-mediated amyloid polyneuropathy, Ionis Pharmaceuticals announced.

Associations between anesthetic exposure during childhood and subsequent neurodevelopment deficits varied based on neurodevelopment domain. (JAMA Network Open)

Experts determined a research definition of Huntington's disease including stages based on biological, clinical, and functional assessments. (Lancet Neurology)

Is it time to overhaul the "Cookie Theft" picture? (JAMA Neurology)

Judy George covers neurology and neuroscience news for MedPage Today, writing about brain aging, Alzheimers, dementia, MS, rare diseases, epilepsy, autism, headache, stroke, Parkinsons, ALS, concussion, CTE, sleep, pain, and more. Follow

Original post:
Amyloid and SARS-CoV-2; Alzheimer's Drug Failure; Who Benefits From Brain Training? - Medpage Today

Human Behavior

Opposition to CARE Court (SB 1338) as Amended June 16, 2022 – Human Rights Watch

June 25, 2022 medical

Honorable Jim WoodChair, Assembly Health Committee1020 N. Street, Room 390Sacramento, CA 95814

Re: Human Rights Watchs Opposition to CARE Court (SB 1338) as amended June 16, 2022

Dear Assemblymember Wood:

Human Rights Watch has carefully reviewed SB 1338,[1] the amendments to SB 1338, and the proposed framework for the Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment (CARE) Court created by CalHHS,[2] and must respectfully voice our strong opposition. CARE Court promotes a system of involuntary, coerced treatment, enforced by an expanded judicial infrastructure, that will, in practice, simply remove unhoused people with perceived mental health conditions from the public eye without effectively addressing those mental health conditions and without meeting the urgent need for housing. We urge you to reject this bill and instead to take a more holistic, rights-respecting approach to address the lack of resources for autonomy-affirming treatment options and affordable housing.

CARE Court proponents claim it will increase up-stream diversion from the criminal legal and conservatorship systems by allowing a wide range of actors to refer people with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders to the jurisdiction of the courts without an arrest or hospitalization. In fact, the bill creates a new pathway for government officials and family members to place people under state control and take away their autonomy and liberty.[3] It applies generally to those the bill describes as having a schizophrenia spectrum or other psychotic disorder and specifically targets unhoused people.[4] It seems aimed at facilitating removing unhoused people from public view without actually providing housing and services that will help to resolve homelessness. Given the racial demographics of Californias homeless population,[5] and the historic over-diagnosing of Black and Latino people with schizophrenia,[6] this plan is likely to place many, disproportionately Black and brown, people under state control.

CARE Court is Coerced Treatment

Proponents of the plan describe CARE Court in misleading ways as preserving self-determination and self-sufficiency, and empower[ing].[7] But CARE Court creates a state-imposed system of coerced, involuntary treatment. The proposed legislation authorizes judges to order a person to submit to treatment under a CARE plan.[8] That treatment may include an order to take a given medication, including anti-psychotic medications, housing, and other enumerated services.[9] Housing must be provided through a designated list of existing program that includes interim housing or shelter options that may be unacceptable to an individual and unsuited to their unique needs.[10] The CARE Court proposal does not provide additional housing and does not envision enforcement of long-term prioritization of housing for its graduates.

A person who fails to obey the court ordered treatment plan may be referred to conservatorship, which would potentially strip that person of their legal capacity and personal autonomy, subjecting them to forcible medical treatment and medication, loss of personal liberty, and removal of power to make decisions over the conduct of their own lives.[11] Indeed, the court may use failure to comply with their court-ordered treatment as a presumption at that hearing that the respondent needs additional intervention beyond the supports and services provided by the CARE plan paving the way for detention and conservatorship.[12] In practical effect, the mandatory care plans are simply pathways to the even stricter system of control through conservatorship.

This approach not only robs individuals of dignity and autonomy but is also coercive and likely ineffective.[13] Studies of coercive mental health treatment have generally not shown positive outcomes.[14] Evidence does not support the conclusion that involuntary outpatient treatment is more effective than intensive voluntary outpatient treatment and, indeed, shows that involuntary, coercive treatment is harmful.[15]

Coerced Treatment Violates Human Rights

Under international human rights law, all people have the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.[16] Free and informed consent, including the right to refuse treatment, is a core element of that right to health.[17] Having a substitute decision-maker, including a judge, or even a supporter, make orders for health care can deny a person with disabilities their right to legal capacity and infringe on their personal autonomy.[18]

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities establishes the obligation to holistically examine all areas of law to ensure that the right of persons with disabilities to legal capacity is not restricted on an unequal basis with others. Historically, persons with disabilities have been denied their right to legal capacity in many areas in a discriminatory manner under substitute decision-making regimes such as guardianship, conservatorship and mental health laws that permit forced treatment.[19] The US has signed but not yet ratified this treaty, which means it is obligated to refrain from establishing policies and legislation that will undermine the object and purpose of the treaty,[20] like creating provisions that mandate long-term substitute decision-making schemes like conservatorship or court-ordered treatment plans.

The World Health Organization has developed a new model that harmonizes mental health services and practices with international human rights law and has criticized practices promoting involuntary mental health treatments as leading to violence and abuse, rather than recovery, which should be the core basis of mental health services.[21] Recovery means different things for different people but one of its key elements is having control over ones own mental health treatment, including the possibility of refusing treatment.

To comport with human rights, treatment should be based on the will and preferences of the person concerned. Housing or disability status does not rob a person of their right to legal capacity or their personal autonomy. Expansive measures for imposing mental health treatment like the process envisioned by the CARE Court plan infringe on it and discriminate on the basis of disability. As discussed below they also run the risk of being abused by self-interested actors. This coerced process leading to treatment undermines any healing aim of the proposal.

CARE Court Denies Due Process

The CARE Court proposal authorizes family members, first responders, including police officers or outreach workers, the public guardian, service providers, conservators, and the director of the county behavioral health agency, to initiate the process of imposing involuntary treatment by filing a petition with the court.[22] These expansive categories of people with the power to embroil another person in court processes and potential loss of autonomy, many of whom lack any expertise in recognition and treatment of mental health conditions, reveals the extreme danger of abuse inherent in this proposal. For example, interpersonal conflicts between family members could result in abusive parents, children, spouses, and siblings using the referral process to expose their relatives to court hearings and potential coerced treatment, housing, and medication.

Law enforcement and outreach workers would have a new tool to threaten unhoused people with referral to the court to pressure them to move from a given area. These state actors could funnel those who disobeyed their commands into the CARE Court process and potentially under the control of courts. Given the long history of law enforcement using its authority to drive unhoused people from public spaces, a practice that re-traumatizes those people and does nothing to solve homelessness, it is dangerous to provide them with additional powers to do so.[23]

The legislation does not set meaningful standards to guide judicial discretion and does not delineate procedures for those decisions.[24] It establishes a contradictory and unworkable procedure that allows certain people diagnosed with schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders to be ordered into treatment if, among other criteria, a judge believes that they are unlikely to survive safely in the community without supervision, or that they are at risk of relapse or deterioration into grave disability or serious harm. [25] These criteria are extremely subjective and speculative and subject to bias.

The court commences the process of engagement if a petition merely asserts facts supporting eligibility and attaches documentation of either contact or attempted contact with a behavioral health professional or of prior intensive treatment.[26] If the court finds the person meets or likely meets the criteria, then the court orders a hearing, which may be conducted in the persons absence.[27] At the hearing, if the court examines the prima facie evidence presented by the petitioner and finds reason to believe the facts stated in the petition appear to be true, the person is then required to enter into negotiations with the county behavioral health agency to come up with a purportedly voluntary treatment plan.[28] The role of the behavioral health agency poses a great potential for conflicts of interest, as they will presumably be funded to carry out the Care Plans that result from their negotiations and their evaluations.

However, failure to agree to that supposedly voluntary plan results in a court-ordered evaluation by that same behavioral health agency, which can be used to impose a mandatory, court-ordered course of treatment if the court finds the person meets the criteria following a hearing.[29] Once ordered, if a person does not complete the CARE program, they may be involuntarily reappointed to the program for an additional year.[30]

This process is entirely coercive, despite procedures that claim to be voluntary. Welfare and Institutions Code section 5801(b)(5), as amended by SB 1338, makes this coercion clear: "The client should be fully informed and volunteer for all treatment provided, unless the client is under a court order for CARE pursuant to Part 8 (commencing with Section 5970) and, prior to the court-ordered CARE plan, the client has been offered an opportunity to enter into a CARE agreement on a voluntary basis and has declined to do so."[31]

The CARE Court plan threatens to create a separate legal track for people perceived to have mental health conditions, without adequate process, negatively implicating basic rights.[32] Even with stronger judicial procedures, this program would remain objectionable because it expands the ability of the state to coerce people into involuntary treatment.

CARE Court will harm Black, brown, and Unhoused people

The CARE Court directly targets unhoused people to be placed under court-ordered treatment, thus denying their rights and self-determination. Governor Newsom, in pitching this plan, called it a response to seeing homeless encampments throughout the state of California.[33] CARE Court will empower police and homeless outreach workers to refer people to the courts and allow judges to order them into treatment against their will, including medication plans. CARE Court does not increase access to permanent supportive housing or mental health care and instead relies on existing programs and service providers that already struggle to meet the needs of the unhoused.[34]

Due to a long history of racial discrimination in housing, employment, access to health care, policing and the criminal legal system, Black and brown people have much higher rates of homelessness than their overall share of the population.[35] The CARE Court plan in no way addresses the conditions that have led to these high rates of homelessness in Black and brown communities. Instead, it proposes a system of state control over individuals that will compound the harms of homelessness.

Further, much research shows that mental health professionals diagnose Black and Latino populations at much higher rates than they do white people.[36] One meta-analysis of over 50 separate studies found that Black people are diagnosed with schizophrenia at a rate nearly 2.5 times greater than white people.[37] A 2014 review of empirical literature on the subject found that Black people were diagnosed with psychotic disorders three to four times more frequently than white people.[38] This review found large disparities for Latino people as well. CARE Court may place a disproportionate number of Black and Latino people under involuntary court control.

CARE Court Does Not Increase Access to Mental Health Care

The CARE plan would establish a new judicial infrastructure focused on identifying people with mental health conditions and placing them under state control for up to 24 months. While touted as an unprecedented investment in support and treatment for people with mental health conditions, in reality, the program provides no new funding for behavioral health care, instead re-directing money already in the budget for treatment to programs required by CARE Court.[39] According to the DHHS presentation on the proposal, the only new money allocated for the program will go to the courts themselves to administer this system of control.[40]

The court-ordered plans include housing, but not necessarily permanent supportive housing.[41] The proposal seems to anticipate allowing shelter and interim housing to suffice if available, without recognizing the vast shortage of affordable housing, especially supportive housing, throughout most of California.[42] To the extent the proposal relies on state investment in housing already in existence, it will prioritize availability of that housing for people under this program, meaning others in need would have reduced access to that housing.

California Should Invest in Voluntary Treatment and Supportive Services

CARE Court shifts the blame for homelessness onto individuals and their vulnerabilities, rather than recognizing and addressing the root causes of homelessness such as poverty, affordable housing shortages, barriers to access to voluntary mental health care, and racial discrimination. CARE Courts are designed to force unhoused people with mental health conditions into coerced treatment that will not comprehensively and compassionately address their needs.

Californians lack adequate access to supportive mental health care and treatment.[43] However, this program does not increase that access. Instead, it depends on money already earmarked for behavioral health initiatives and layers harmful and expensive court involvement onto an already inadequate system. Similarly, the Care plans mandated by the CARE Courts do not address the shortage of housing.

Investing in involuntary treatment ties up resources that could otherwise be invested in voluntary treatment and the services necessary to make that treatment effective.[44] California should provide well-resourced holistic community-based voluntary options and remove barriers to evidence-based treatment to support people with mental health conditions who might be facing other forms of social exclusion. Such options should be coupled with investment in other social supports and especially housing, not tied to court-supervision.

Rather than co-opting the language used by movements supporting housing and disability rights and cynically parading the trauma of family members let down by the state mental health system, as proponents of CARE Courts have done, we instead ask that you reject the CARE Court proposal entirely and direct resources towards making voluntary treatment and other necessary services accessible to all who need it.

Sincerely,

Olivia Ensign John RaphlingSenior Advocate, US Program Senior Researcher, US ProgramHuman Rights Watch Human Rights Watch

[1] California SB 1338, Community Assistance, Recovery, and Empowerment (CARE) Court Program (Umberg, Eggman), 2022, https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220SB1338 (accessed April 12, 2022).

[2] California Health & Human Services Agency, CARE Court: A New Framework for Community Assistance, Recovery & Empowerment, March 2022, https://www.chhs.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/CARE-Court-Framework_web.pdf (accessed April 12, 2022).

[3] California SB 1338, Community Assistance, Recovery, and Empowerment (CARE) Court Program (Umberg, Eggman), 2022, https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220SB1338.

[4] Marisa Lagos, Gov. Newsom on His Plan to Tackle Mental Health, Homelessness with CARE Courts, KQED, March 16, 2022, https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101888316/gov-newsom-on-his-new-plan-to-tackle-mental-health-homelessness-with-care-courts (accessed April 12, 2022).

[5] Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, Report and Recommendations of the Ad Hoc Committee on Black People Experiencing Homelessness, December 2018, https://www.lahsa.org/documents?id=2823-report-and-recommendations-of-the-ad-hoc-committee-on-black-people-experiencing-homelessness (accessed April 12, 2022).

[6] Charles M. Olbert, Arundati Nagendra, and Benjamin Buck, Meta-analysis of Black vs. White racial disparity in schizophrenia diagnosis in the United States: Do structured assessments attenuate racial disparities?, Journal of Abnormal Psychology 127(1) (2018): 104-115, accessed April 12, 2022, doi: 10.1037/abn0000309; Robert C. Schwartz and David M. Blankenship, Racial disparities in psychotic disorder diagnosis: A review of empirical literature, World Journal of Psychiatry 4 (2014): 133-140, accessed April 12, 20220, doi: 10.5498/wjp.v4.i4.133.

[7] CARE (Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment) Court, California Health & Human Services Agency, March 14, 2022, Slides 5, 10 and 20, https://www.chhs.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/CARE-Court-Stakeholder-Slides-20220314.pdf (accessed April 12, 2022); Marisa Lagos, Gov. Newsom on His Plan to Tackle Mental Health, Homelessness with CARE Courts, KQED, March 16, 2022, https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101888316/gov-newsom-on-his-new-plan-to-tackle-mental-health-homelessness-with-care-courts (accessed April 12, 2022).

[9] SB 1338, Section, 5982; 5971

[10] SB 1338, Section 5982(c); CARE (Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment) Court. The DHHS presentation discusses a range of housing possibilities including interim or bridge housing, which in common usage means temporary shelter.

[11] SB 1338, Section 5979(a); California Welfare and Institutions Code Section 53505372, https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=WIC&sectionNum=5357 (accessed April 12, 2022).

[13] Sashidharan, S. P., Mezzina, R., & Puras, D., Reducing coercion in mental healthcare,Epidemiology and psychiatric sciences,28(6) (2019): 605612, accessed April 12, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1017/S2045796019000350 (Available research does not suggest that coercive intervention in mental health care are clinically effective, improve patient safety or result in better clinical or social outcomes.).

[14] Sashidharan, S. P., Mezzina, R., & Puras, D., Reducing coercion in mental healthcare,Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences,28(6) (2019): 605612, accessed May 5, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1017/S2045796019000350; Richard M. Ryan, Martin F. Lynch, Maarten Vansteenkiste, and Edward L. Deci, Motivation and Autonomy in Counseling, Psychotherapy, and Behavior Change: A Look at Theory and Practice, Invited Integrative Review 39(2) (2011): 193260, accessed May 5, 2022, doi: 10.1177/0011000009359313; McLaughlin, P., Giacco, D., and Priebe, S., Use of Coercive Measures during Involuntary Psychiatric Admission and Treatment Outcomes: Data from a Prospective Study across 10 European Countries,Plods one11(12) (2016), accessed May 5, 2022, doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0168720 (All coercive measures are associated with patients staying longer in hospital, and seclusion significantly so, and this association is not fully explained by coerced patients being more unwell at admission.).

[15] Joseph P. Morrissey, et al., Outpatient Commitment and Its Alternatives: Questions Yet to Be Answered, Psychiatric Services (2014): 812-814; S.P. Sashidharan, et al., Reducing Coercion in Mental Healthcare, Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences 28 (2019): 605-612.

[16] International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, (ICESCR), adopted December 16, 1966, entered into force January 3, 1976, Art. 12(1), https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/cescr.aspx (accessed May 5, 2022).

[17] Human Rights Council; United Nations, General Assembly, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, March 28, 2017, https://undocs.org/en/A/HRC/35/21, para. 63. See also Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, art. 12 read in conjunction with art. 25; Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: General comment No. 1 (2014), May 19, 2014, https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G14/031/20/PDF/G1403120.pdf?OpenElement (accessed May 5, 2022), para. 31, 41.

[19] Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: General comment No. 1 (2014), May 19, 2014, para. 7.

[20] See Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969), art. 18, https://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/conventions/1_1_1969.pdf. The Vienna Convention is recognized as customary international law.

[21] World Health Organization and QualityRights, Freedom from coercion, violence, and abuse, 2019, https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329582/9789241516730-eng.pdf?sequence=5&isAllowed=y (accessed May 5, 2022), p. 2, 8, 22.

[22] SB 1338, Section 5974; 5978

[23] Chris Herring, Complaint-Oriented Policing: Regulating Homelessness in Public Space, American Sociological Review 1-32, (2019), accessed May 5, 2022, doi: 10.1177/0003122419872671.

[24] SB 1338, Section, 5972-5978

[25] SB 1338, Section 5972.

[26] SB 1338, Section 5977(a)(3).

[27] Id.: SB 1338, Section 5977(c)(2).

[28] SB 1338, Section 5977(d).

[29] SB 1338, Section 5977.1.

[30]SB 1338, Section 5977.3(c).

[31] SB 1338, Section 5801(b)(5).

[32] Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Guidelines on article 14 of the Convention on the Rights of Person with Disabilities: The right to liberty and security of persons with disabilities, (September 2015), https://www.google.com/search?q=Guidelines+on+CRPD+article+14%2C+paragraph+21&rlz=1C1PRFI_enUS936US936&oq=Guidelines+on+CRPD+article+14%2C+paragraph+21&aqs=chrome..69i57j33i160.3045j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 (accessed May 5, 2022), para. 14.

[33] Marisa Lagos, Gov. Newsom on His Plan to Tackle Mental Health, Homelessness with CARE Courts.

[34] SB 1338, Section 5982(c).

[35] Kate Cimini, Black people disproportionately homeless in California, CalMatters, February 27, 2021, https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2019/10/black-people-disproportionately-homeless-in-california/ (accessed May 5, 2022) (about 6.5% of Californians identify as black or African American,but they account for nearly 40% of the states homeless population); Esmeralda Bermudez and Ruben Vives, Surge in Latino homeless population a whole new phenomenon; for Los Angeles, LA Times, June 18, 2017, https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-latino-homeless-20170618-story.html (accessed May 5, 2022); Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, Report and Recommendations of the Ad Hoc Committee on Black People Experiencing Homelessness, December 2018, https://www.lahsa.org/documents?id=2823-report-and-recommendations-of-the-ad-hoc-committee-on-black-people-experiencing-homelessness (accessed May 5, 2022).

[36] Charles M Olbert,Arundati Nagendra, andBenjamin Buck, Meta-analysis of Black vs. White racial disparity in schizophrenia diagnosis in the United States: Do structured assessments attenuate racial disparities?, Journal of Abnormal Psychology 127 (2018): 104-115, accessed May 5, 2022, doi: 10.1037/abn0000309; Robert C. Schwartz and David M. Blankenship, Racial disparities in psychotic disorder diagnosis: A review of empirical literature, World Journal of Psychiatry 4 (2014): 133-140, accessed May 5, 2022, doi: 10.5498/wjp.v4.i4.133.

[38] Schwartz and Blankenship, Racial disparities in psychotic disorder diagnosis.

[39] CARE (Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment) Court, California Health & Human Services Agency.

[41] SB 1338, Section 5971; 5982.

[42] Ibid.; National Low Income Housing Coalition, The Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Homes, March 2020, https://reports.nlihc.org/sites/default/files/gap/Gap-Report_2021.pdf (accessed May 5, 2022), p. 2, 9; California Housing Partnership, California Affordable Housing Needs Report, March 2020, https://1p08d91kd0c03rlxhmhtydpr-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/CHPC_HousingNeedsReportCA_2020_Final-.pdf (accessed May 5, 2022).

[43] Liz Hamel, Lunna Lopes, Bryan Wu, Mollyann Brodie, Lisa Aliferis, Kristof Stremikis and Eric Antebi, Low-Income Californians and Health Care, Kaiser Family Foundation, June 7, 2019, https://www.kff.org/report-section/low-income-californians-and-health-care-findings/#:~:text=About%20half%20of%20Californians%20with%20low%20incomes%20%2852,not%20able%20to%20get%20needed%20services%20%28Figure%208%29 (accessed May 5, 2022). ( A majority of low-income Californians (56 percent) say their community does not have enough mental health care providers to serve the needs of local residents.)

[44] Physicians for Human Rights, Neither Justice nor Treatment: Drug Courts in the United States, June 2017, phr_drugcourts_report_singlepages.pdf (accessed May 5, 2022), p. 3.

Read the rest here:
Opposition to CARE Court (SB 1338) as Amended June 16, 2022 - Human Rights Watch

Human Behavior

When the Punishment Doesn’t Fit the Joke – The Atlantic

June 25, 2022 medical

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

What norms should govern jokes in our society? What, if anything, makes a joke harmful? What harm, if any, is there in punishing people for jokes or chilling the expression of jokes? How has humor improved your life? Have jokes ever made your life worse? Extra credit for responses that are funny, but dont refrain from unfunny responses.

Send responses to conor@theatlantic.com or reply to this email.

Last year, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, in Washington, D.C., proposed to honor the comedian Dave Chappelle, a former student and donor, by naming its performing-arts theater after him. Then Chappelle released a comedy special that included jokes about trans people, rendering him problematic in the eyes of many progressives, including some students at his alma mater. As those jokes became enmeshed in the culture wars, the renaming ceremony was postponeduntil this week, when Chappelle surprised an audience gathered for the occasion by explaining that, for now, the venue will be named the Theater for Artistic Freedom and Expression. His name will be added later, but only if and when the school community is ready for it.

My colleague David Frum, who attended the event, offered this interpretation of Chappelles message:

Freud observed that the psychological function of humor is to allow the expression of thoughts that formal society normally forbids. In American myth, the soldiers of World War II were heroes, the Greatest Generation. On The Phil Silvers Show of the 1950s, those soldiers were shown as lazy and venal. In sophisticated comedy, comedians play with the tension between formal and informal beliefs, and Chappelles is very sophisticated comedy. The function of humor as a release from the forbidden thought explains why some of the most productive sources of jokes are authoritarian societies, because they forbid so much. In the squares of Moscow today, protesters physically reenact an old Soviet joke, demonstrating with blank signs because Everybody already knows everything I want to say. That same function of comedy explains why woke America is the target of so much satirical humor today, because so much of wokeness aspires to forbid.

When Chappelle deferred adding his name to the theater of the school to which hed given so much of himselfnot only checks, but return appearanceshe was not yielding or apologizing. He was challenging the in-school critics: You dont understand what I donot my right to do it, but the reason it matters that I exercise that right. Until you do understand, you cannot have my name. Someday you will understand. You may have it then.

What comedians do is perpetually contested. The line separating good jokes from bad jokes, or people with a good sense of humor from people who are humorless, priggish, or excessively dour, is subjective. And maybe there can be no comedy without people offended by comedy. It does seem to me that the job of comedy is to offend, or have the potential to offend, and it cannot be drained of that potential, Rowan Atkinson, a.k.a. Mr. Bean, recently told The Irish Times. Every joke has a victim. Thats the definition of a joke. Someone or something or an idea is made to look ridiculous. Asked about the difference between punching up and punching down, he added, I think youve got to be very, very careful about saying what youre allowed to make jokes about What if theres someone extremely smug, arrogant, aggressive, self-satisfied, who happens to be below in society? Theyre not all in houses of parliament or in monarchies. There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.

Of course, most every comic has a different notion of what makes a good or bad joke, and in every society, the authoritarian impulse to punish bad jokes is ever presentthough the ability to satisfy that impulse waxes and wanes across eras and settings. In liberal moments and places, the consequences for a bad joke is silence, jeers, or criticism. In other eras or places, telling the wrong joke can cost you your liberty or even your life.

Western democracies remain relatively liberal, despite concerning signs. For example, last year, the BBC reported on a Canadian comic who was hauled before a Human Rights Commission and fought a 10-year legal battle over a joke. And this week, the BBC reports that the British comedian Joe Lycett was investigated by police, who asked him to explain the context of a joke after an audience member at one of his shows complained about it. Today in the U.S., we mostly mete out no punishment for jokes worse than temporary hits to ones livelihood, as when Bill Maher lost his show after the September 11 attacks, probably due in part to a controversial quip about the terrorists, and when Kathy Griffin suffered career setbacks for holding up a mock severed head of President Trump.

Of course, professional comedians arent alone in being punished for jokes.

A recent case study in journalism involves a Washington Post reporter who retweeted the joke Every girl is bi. You just have to figure out if its polar or sexual. Some argued that if the newspaper allowed an employee to retweet that joke without consequence, it would signal institutional willingness to tolerate sexism, undermining its workplace culture or the trust of female readers. The reporter was ultimately reprimanded and suspended for a month without pay.

Critics of that punishment objected for a variety of reasons. Dan Drezner was among those who found the punishment excessive, as he articulated in his final column at The Washington Post:

We live in an age in which retweeting a tasteless joke and then apologizing and deleting it 10 minutes later still winds up being on your permanent record. Not all infractions are equal, and in some cases such behavior merits serious sanctions. There is something bizarre, however, about the capricious nature of reactions and overreactions to acts that less than a decade ago would barely have merited a shrug We need a more forgiving public discourse, one in which it is possible for mistakes to be made, apologies to be sincere, criticism to be tolerated, and respect to be preserved across genuine ideological disagreements.

On the Feminine Chaos podcast, the academic Amna Khalid and the novelist and journalist Kat Rosenfield focused on what they see as problematic labor precedents such punishments set:

Khalid: There are some serious issues here. One is what kind of freedom do you have to say what you want when youre off the clock? This is tied closely to my interest in academic freedom because it is something that happens to professors all the time. What can and cant you say when youre indulging in extramural speech? Now, in this case, I think, the joke was a joke, and Im probably going to be highly unpopular for articulating this position, Im not that offended by the joke. As a woman who identifies as a feminist, yes, its a little off-color. But jokes tend to be, and thats in the nature of humor. I think the way were policing humor these days is troubling because were leaving very little room for humor to actually take root The assumption there is that hes retweeting it because hes endorsing it. But that assumption in itself makes me a little uncomfortable.

Rosenfield: Retelling a joke is such a basic human behavior. You hear a joke, you find it to be funny or provocative, or maybe you just think other people might, so you tell it to your friends. And I wonder, if the policy at Washington Post is that you cannot retell a joke in this form, are you also barred from retelling a joke in other forms? What makes it fundamentally different to retweet a joke on your Twitter feed versus be overheard telling a joke to your friends at a bar? To take it a step further, what if you are a Washington Post reporter and you do standup comedy as a hobby? What if youre writing your own material and some of it is a little off-color even though its very funny? Can your employer reasonably dictate what sort of jokes you tell on the stage because at no point are you not considered a representative of the place where you work?

Khalid: What kind of power are we giving these organizations and institutions where we work? Are they beginning to own our time and what we can say when were not at work? It has the potential to become highly authoritarian in terms of watching over what people can say. That doesnt bode well for us ... Im not saying were there yet, but broadly, were beginning to display signs of authoritarian social policing, which is troubling to me. I come from a place back in Pakistan where this is the norm and it doesnt go down well, ever.

This week, two other journalists I read and like personally, Matt Yglesias and Taylor Lorenz, had a social-media interaction about a joke that helped me clarify some of my own thinking. Yglesias tweeted, Some personal news: I have contracted the novel coronavirus. Frankly, I think the virus should respect Fathers Day more than this. FYI, all future typos are due to long Covid.

Lorenz replied, Im glad its a joke for u Matt and that youre lucky enough to get access to great care, but for those who have had their lives destroyed by the virus and who have had loved ones die from or suffer w/ LC its not funny. Hope you can have a little more empathy, especially today.

In my estimation, joking about something serious, even something deadly, doesnt at all imply a belief that the thing in question is a joke or that one has a lack of empathy for those affected by it; the impulse to humor often reflects a deep recognition of a subjects cosmic awfulness. (Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you, David Gerrold writes. Be grateful if it happens in that order. I laughed, and not because I take hardship or death lightly.)

Were the intent behind humor always understood, some who presently take offense at some jokes might feel less aggrieved. Still, I found it very human for Lorenz to react as she did. Even those of us who use humor to deal with dark parts of life are, in some tough moments, in no mood for jokes. Being immunocompromised years into a pandemic may be such a moment for Lorenz. Sometimes, the best resolution to a joke controversy is more grace for all involved, rather than treating mere disagreement as a national scandal.

Regardless, I found the ensuing commentary useful. The Twitter user @historyboomer reacted by writing, If someone makes a joke you think isnt funny, ignore it. As he sees it, There is harm in an overly censorious attitude that is too willing to see jokes as harmful. To which the journalist Issac J. Bailey responded, If someone makes a joke you think is harmful, dont ignore it. Following along, I thought, Neither of you is quite right. If someone makes a joke that you think is harmful, neither presume your thought is correct nor do nothing. Take an additional analytic step: See if youre able to identify any actual, specific harm of significance that the joke caused any actual person. Jokes can and do cross that threshold. But many jokes dubbed harmful do not meet it. People are just offendedbut with mere offense, the case for attacking jokesters is weak, so harm is invoked. I suspect people would talk past one another less in controversies over jokes if claims about harms a joke purportedly caused were specific and falsifiable.

Among scholars, the execution of Socrates is typically regarded as suboptimal. Responding to the firing of Joshua Katz from Princeton, Nadya Williams, an ancient-history professor at the University of West Georgia, invokes the philosophers fate to argue that todays right and left should unite in canceling intellectuals for character flaws:

For decades, Socrates was the leading public intellectual in Athens, grooming students to be thoughtful and engaged citizens. In the process, he was also grooming them in other ways, sleeping with at least one of themAlcibiades. Ultimately, the results of Socratess teaching were decidedly problematic. His students went on to overthrow the Athenian democracy twice in the final decade of the Peloponnesian War.

And so, when the Athenians put Socrates on trial in 399 B.C.E. on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth, it seems that they were judging, more than anything, his character.

Specifically, seeing the fruits of his teaching in his students, the Athenians saw his character as dangerous to the democracy. Socratess defense in the process, about the high quality of his scholarship as the gadfly stinging Athenians into thinking more deeply, sounded as tone-deaf to those Athenians who voted to condemn him as Katzs own words ring now to some. Cancellations of public intellectuals are never random. They represent a character judgment that should unite the left and the right, so-called liberals and conservatives, those who espouse a faith and those who live with a secular compass.

Should this ethos ever prevail, I will switch positions to defund the academy.

Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, youve agreed to let us use itin part or in fullin the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writers full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note.

Excerpt from:
When the Punishment Doesn't Fit the Joke - The Atlantic

Human Behavior

Microsoft Is Retiring Its AI-Powered Facial Analysis Tools After Widespread Criticism – Digital Information World

June 25, 2022 medical

We have seen the world of science evolve with time and the digital world has tried its best to make the most of the new advancements. Today, leading tech giant Microsoft announced its decision to bid farewell to its AI-powered Facial Recognition.

And for many, the news is a sign of relief because of its controversial design and the great amount of criticism that it surrounded.

This particular tool promised to go as far as recognizing emotions and thats why the firm is slowly but surely removing public access that was related to it. Moreover, for those who might not be aware, there was even one that went as far as highlighting emotions by looking at images and videos.

Tech analysts and experts have over the years highlighted that the practice of using these tools for emotional detection is so wrong. For starters, emotions vary and are not standard in various global populations.

Secondly, many find it inadequate to link external emotional displays with a particular person's feelings on the inside.

One professor of psychology claims firms is definitely misleading the world with technology such as these tools. Yes, the technology may be able to delineate a scowl but no, they arent going as far as detecting rage.

The new decision by Microsoft appears to be a part of its clean sweep to rid tools that go against its ethics policies. The firm is working hard to determine where its tools are being used and how far theyre going in terms of overlooking human behavior.

On a more practical basis, we can soon be seeing the tech giant put great limitations as far as the features involving facial recognition are concerned. While some are being eliminated as a whole, others will require more interactions with users to see where they plan on using a specific facial identification tool.

Meanwhile, not all tools will be dealt with so stringently. There are definitely going to be some that are left as they are because there arent a lot of risks associated with it.

Other than getting rid of the emotional detection facial recognition tool, Microsoft has also unveiled some plans to retire its Azure Face tools functionality to pick up on specific traits like age, sex, hair, makeup, and an individuals smile.

Remember, there is no standard being followed and without specific criteria to detect emotions, things are going to get pretty complicated when comparisons are drawn. Lets not forget about the many privacy concerns attached to it.

The retirement of these features is coming into effect as early as today and that means no new customers will get access. On the other hand, those who already have the feature with them will be given until June 30 after which the access is revoked.

It is important to note that while the firm plans on removing public access to these features, theyll still be used by the firm in one of its own products. One common example would be a tool designed to help the visually impaired. This is called Seeing AI.

The company is also making plans to introduce some similar limitations to its Neural Voice feature. This tool enables users to make AI voices with the help of real human recordings. In case youre wondering why, well, yes it may have plenty of benefits but that does come with so many cons.

There are a number of people who might be on the lookout to take the wrong advantage of the tool and go about impersonating people for illegal activities, explained the company, and before that matter gets out of control, its time to bid farewell. Read next:

Read next:AVTEST conducted an analysis on the best security tools for Windows and here is how the results look

Originally posted here:
Microsoft Is Retiring Its AI-Powered Facial Analysis Tools After Widespread Criticism - Digital Information World

Human Behavior

The Hand Claps – lareviewofbooks

June 25, 2022 medical

WHAT FOLLOWS IS a recorded conversation between two poets whose respective work and lives are fashioned around the question of how poetry gets written. The conversation is followed by a series of poems titled Rob Me Then in which each poet invites the other to steal language and ideas from each other, troubling the tradition of single authorship and the contradiction at the heart of possessing an idea.

RACHEL RABBIT WHITE: I was thinking about that too recently if you can somehow be anonymous during your lifetime I guess I have a line thats like, To evade fame must be the height of luxury. But I mean thats about money. I feel like, its almost like the people that can write anonymously, or can afford to be off social media, are people with wealth, you know?

RS: Last night, I had this nightmare that I was stuck at the top of this mountain. I could see everything but could not touch anyone, and yet everyone could touch and see me. I woke up and thought, I need to scrub my image and name from the internet. Or I need to proliferate more names to fracture my selfhood. Either overexposure or total erasure of names would work. Ive always been like how to become ungovernable? You have to become un-Googlable

RRW: In my meditations, names come to me that make no sense. Almost like angel names, that are no-names, and Im like I wish I had more things to name, I wish I had names.

RS: I have so many email addresses with different names and my friends are like, which fucking email do you use?

RRW: I love that about hustler life and hooker life. I remember when I was first building my hooker website and had an advertisement out, I was corresponding with this one guy back and forth and my name, my first and last name, literally changed 15 times during the conversation. And at first he wasnt saying anything, and then he was like, are you okay? Are you going through something? Like, this name has changed so many times. And Im like, look! Im just trying to figure it out right now.

RS: Exactly, like if your own name becomes incoherent you must be mentally losing it.

RRW: Last night, during my insomnia, I was going back and reading Baudrillard, so I am going to get on my Baudrillard pedestal for a second. He writes that what happens in modern culture is that our society becomes so reliant on models and maps that weve lost contact with the real world and everything that preceded the maps. From there, reality begins to merely imitate the map and the model, taking on the appearance of a real world and real language too.

RS: That reminds me of what Sylvia Wynter says, Dont mistake the map for the territory.

RRW: Yes, like language is the first brick that keeps us from accessing reality. You know how we were talking about being anonymous I am thinking about folk songs spreading through culture to the point that its not even clear what culture it originally came from. Theres this really girl-world version that happened to me where I grew up with those hand-clap songs. Did you ever have those hand-clap songs? You know like, Down, down baby, down by the roller coaster, sweet, sweet baby

RS: Never let me go.

RRW: Yeah! And there are regional versions too, depending on where you grew up. I remember once reading that those songs are on all continents and have spread in a way thats completely mysterious.

RS: Theres this simultaneous beauty in the lost origin, like when something goes viral and there is a desire to know where it came from, why and how it spread. It makes me think about the idea of plagiarism and the contradiction at the heart of possessing an idea, or thought, or song. Im drawn to Kathy Acker in terms of this.

RRW: Oh my god, yes!

RS: Her work is all about repetition, mimicry, plagiarism. But its meant to undermine those concepts and point out the origin-less nature of thoughts, concepts, words, phrases. There are these childhood songs, like the hand-clap songs, passed down forever, where the origin is completely lost. And yet when you learn some version of the origin story, you can understand how culture proliferates, how ideology brings you into your beliefs through these innocent seeming songs. I think about political slogans too, where its like, on the one hand, they grow and the origin becomes totally obscure, and on the other, there is something so important about studying political genealogies and understanding the context in which a certain political phrase is coined. When political slogans lose their origin story, they become more easily neutralized or co-opted by the state and start no longer serving the local or historically specific political purpose that they once had. So shout-out to historians unburying subjugated histories, but also shout-out to Acker for being like, Im just taking this as if it is mine and running with it.

RRW: So my sister and I, Irish twins, entered kindergarten, I was in first grade and I remember one day, I walked into the living room and my sister was showing my mom the hand-claps. And my mom was laughing because some of the songs were kind of dirty. And I just remember, I was so mad, and maybe ashamed, because now my mom, the authority figure, could see us.

RS: Because she wasnt a kid because your sister told the secret.

RRW: She told the secret! Yeah! And I remember feeling very sullen and silent over this betrayal, you know?

RS: Secrets are important. With an authority figure like a mother, or the state there has to be a refusal of transparency. You cant know my songs! You cant know our secret language!

RRW: Ive been thinking a lot about whats missing in my life I think it started when I was in Mississippi and I was isolated from my friends. When you leave New York, its hard to keep up with people, even if youre trying. But what I was missing was not the social updates or conversations, but like, that place you can get to when youre seeing someone close to you all the time and having conversations where language begins to break down, where grammar is breaking down. Everything becomes shorthand. That breakdown is where the poetic enters in. I think Elaine Kahn says this, about the poem needing a hole in it.

RS: Yes, like thats the way the poem works best: if it can point to the fundamental lack at the heart of language, at the heart of being a subject.

RRW: I got really into reading about chatbot technology recently. When they build the bots, they have all these metrics they use to determine how human is this conversation? The ways of measuring humanness are very funny, especially as a poet, one of them is no repetition.

But when I think about the chatbot I also think about sex robots. This fearmongering about the sex robot has been around forever. In Ovids Metamorphoses, sailors encounter a sculptor named Pygmalion who is carving ivory sex dolls so lifelike you cant tell them apart from real women. The question then was more about the human soul like if we can produce a truly lifelike machine does that mean a soul is no longer necessary criteria for being a human? Or is a soul no longer necessary to explain human behavior? And I find that way more interesting than our anxieties today, which are not spiritual, but more economical. If you Google it, youll find a million sex-robot-panic op-eds around the meaning of love and intimacy, but also about work, headlines like, Strippers are going to be replaced by mechanical strip clubs!

RS: This is reminding me of the Luddite textile worker rebellion. When we call someone a Luddite today, its like, this person is not up to date with modern technology, right? But actually, a Luddite is a term that comes from the textile worker uprising in England in the 1800s when their labor in cotton and wool mills was being replaced by machines. In the Luddite uprising, they destroyed the machines, smashed them, and threw them out the window. And theres this hilarious line in the Wikipedia about it: The workers destroyed the machines not because they were hostile toward the machines, but it was their way of expressing their hostility toward their boss.

RRW: Hostility toward work, yeah!

RS: I thought it was so cute that Wikipedia was consoling us that the workers actually felt solidarity with the machines.

RRW: Thats the thing! I feel solidarity with the machines. We are machines. The fear of, say, a sex robot, is totally reactionary. Because behind that fear, its like, your sex is being replaced by machines, your meaningful relationships when the very real threat has already happened when we sold our labor to the boss! We are already substitutable. Were already useless because all value is performance. Were already the robot, were already playing the automaton, you know?

RS: How human is this conversation? we ask the worker whose exploited labor is in essence already dehumanized.

RRW: I do think theres a point when, and I think the pandemic contributed to this, but also getting older, where you start to lose wonder with all interaction, its the same conversations every day, every bodega sells the same items, you start to feel a lack of awe with the things around you. Thats the reason Proust started to write, to find awe.

RS: Theres that amazing passage in Swanns Way where hes like, the danger of being a writer is that life will feel less lifelike, the narrative is the thing that gives you the feeling of being alive without the habits of everyday life.

RRW: Right! And you can only hope that youre going to get there. Remember what it felt like when you experienced those first freedoms as a teenager, and everything was full of inside jokes and alive and dangerous. It was all about connection. It was all about the other people you were meeting. And maybe finding the overlaps between you and that persons life was interesting that they werent a person you would have met before, but there were no gaps.

RS: I think the joy is in the incoherence. Its like groupchat energy.

RRW: And I feel like, you know, when you find yourself again in a place where security and money are your main worries, play disappears really quickly. I notice it in other people around me. Because everyones really scared right now, you know? And yet, you talk a lot about the increase in refusal to work and compulsion to work, like people are risking it again.

RS: Anti-work politics have been so important to me for so long. The tradition comes out of an autonomist, feminist, and anti-capitalist genealogy that basically argues that collective refusal of work is crucial for a transformative political moment. My interest in this is personal, I hate having a boss. I hate the way that labor is exploited. Theres this affective hatred toward the lie that work will ever lead you to the Good Life. And because that lie is propped up by the inequalities of racial capitalism, the refusal to work is not just about individuals refusing a particular job anti-work, to me, must be a collective stance against the capitalist system of production and refusal of the idea that work has some innate moral value. We are living in this time where anti-work politics are becoming mainstream, there is the Great Resignation where workers are leaving their jobs at the highest rates ever recorded month after month since last spring. It is more important than ever to not mistake this an individual refusal, and to understand the implicit critique of capitalism it carries with it. People are like, no fucking way, its not worth it. Work is not worth dying for.

The poem, like labor, has mechanical processes: meter and rhyme and feet that are measurable and propel a poem forward. So to approach poetic form from an anti-work perspective, Im like, I am going to smash this machine so we can play. I just get so much joy out of sabotage.

RRW: The poem has to write itself. The poem takes over you. I want to give life to that poetic voice so that it keeps coming to me. I want to decorate my life for that voice. And it cant be a conscious thought, it has to be in this meditative state where the poems are pushing me, pulling me, dressing me, giving me the clothes. The poems are making the decisions, theyre building the project, and Im going along with them. Im just the channel they play on.

Going back to the risk of anti-work politics, I think poetry and art need a sense of risk. You have to have a sense of risk to be like, okay, Im becoming this poem now. Do I agree with what Im becoming? It doesnt matter because you square it within you to subordinate yourself to the poetry.

RS: Its like that Amiri Baraka quote: My poetry, then, has always been aimed at destroying ugly shit.

RRW: Right! And theres terror in beauty too, the terror of going after beauty, going into the terror, not away from it. When Im engaged and the poem is making me or when Im trying to write prose or trying to write essays, I refuse to fake anything, I can wait, I let it come to me. You know?

RS: Its such a gift when that happens.

RRW: With these algorithm-based, Instagram-influenced ways everythings getting so sanitized and flattened, whether its the way we talk or social justice or relationships. Thats why the human conversation is a natural next poetry project for me. Thinking about phenomenology, where a human is a split-up object, theres the fantasy, theres the real, and in the real we have the other, the others otherness, and then that gap, you know, where we cant ever fully perceive that other, we cant see all the sides of the dice at the same time. When I wrote the Paradise Edition of my book, Porn Carnival, I was interested in the phenomenology of romance and how we talk about love and romance as optimizing your life in structural terms so that relationships support your work and finances. And I, being led by this poetic project of falling in love, letting that terror and passion lead me, I was more interested in engaging in someones otherness and individuality, where you dont overlap, in the gaps, where people are damaged or problematic. For me that seems much more like real romance, like a human conversation.

RS: Im working on a new project right now thematizing desire and the gap, or how we project onto a love object. Except my love object is the End of the World, not a lover. The World like capital-W World is a destructive regime that eclipses earth, life, difference. How can we end the World to save ourselves, to save the natural World?

Im thinking about the collective political desire for a revolutionary horizon as if you're experiencing a crush. Im trying to work with this idea of romantic love as perversion, taking an object that cant be possessed and trying to possess it. Im traversing my desire for the End of the World in these love letters where its total simp energy.

RRW: Oh my god. Are you finding that youre able to do it without much personification, or does some sense of human energy show up when youre writing that?

RS: Definitely. Its super personified. I love playing with that. What if the end of the world is onstage? On the stripper pole? Shes the end of the world, and Im giving her all my money, shes draining my bank account.

RRW: I once had this peyote trip in my early 20s where I was in this other dimension, with all these other dimensional beings, like mechanical elves, and in the middle was a pink stripper pole where this gorgeous slug was dancing. I was giving her all my money. Her image was so, like, enrapturing. She was sensual, this slug.

RS: Of course it was a slug.

RRW: A lime green slug. She showed me the end of the world. I reached into my bag for a pen to write down what she showed me and had a full-on, open-eye peyote hallucination, that above us was God, but instead of the usual God it was Hello Kitty. And I was laughing because everything is a joke.

[When my secret is discovered in the fracturing of a Death Synonym. Your housing search, the secret to my housing search. We keep each other for each other, always leaking, never kept. The angel creaks, splurges on claustrophobic fun, like all signs are a difficult code to be cracked. Tell me the map and nothing else. Let me hide in my own mistakes. Give away all your best lines. Jesus it would be. Jesus my name. I stretch like money in my basement utopia. Light leaves me private, where anything could happen.]

If there was one thing you cant take away fromher its American Insomniaand that Anything could happen.

She changed her names, stretched like money.Evaded fame to live the height of luxury.She terrified herself and thought with her feet

She answered those textsand she worked,she worked very hard at it.

I told JesusRRW

I told Jesus if theres one thing you cant take its lose the origin but keep the trace

I told Jesus, sell me the map and nothing else give away my best lines/ like all signs are a difficult code to be cracked.

I told Jesus, change my name.

remove that ground on which I love to walkRhapsodizing vulnerability, you paint me an image of LOVING respect:

as if the present could ever slamagainst its throat

She worked very hard at it/a to-do list fractured every possession fantasy: rob me then as if there was an opposite to longing your housing search the secret to my housing search

Jesus, it would be/ Jesus, my name

stretch like money/ light leaves me private, I told Jesus, Its basement smog on this hilltop,Its the wrong fucking email address. This much she worked for its where the trace becomes the origin/ let me make my own mistakes

I passed by open garages and took everything I could, in theory. I dont remember because it was mine / psychosis is clear & all else is amorphous & incalculable/ flaunting object impermanence on a plot in heaven, craigslist selling sunset, Grecian sex bots the original cartographers/ three decades of spreadsheets, / No testimony, all miracle/ we keep each other for each other /

I told Jesus free my names

cant really say what I been doinglook back and see the past daysmaybe I was certain of somethingI am jealous for once having had that

I talk to you to talk to myself, even the anonymous have a profile even animals feel shame, I said I dont need to tell you that love gets fungible, she gets compact enough to make it she & all those who work hard

who work very hard to change their names

God is so popularRS

the self is a series of conversationsWhat is a body if not air huggingwater? Like feet know lucite,I talk to you to talk to myself,floating 7 inches off thecarpet, here to interrupt allnarrative.

You draw me a map of how to get to yours,but I already know how to get lost without you.

anyone can lose themselves, you wrote.As if there was an opposite to longing.

present in multiples, I plagiarizemy own best man. The one that fearsthe browning astroturf, growingaround the edges of the property line.

badly wired solitude I need alonetime from my own company, overstayingmy welcome, never making up the couch.

fungible love, childs rhymes replace auto-fic and any housing stock that mimics home.

I was thinking of telling youthis could be our incalculable strike:to keep our names a secret

I keep hearing new names of new angelsRRW

Through interfaces, infrastructures, and genetic data, so as to hide it in the technology ofconfession, from myself

I present in multiples, I plagiarizeFirst of all, fuck is paradise my boys have been smuggling this out of utopia

Well if you're you, constantly, you're never you

between the abyss of what is intended and what is produced, we study the multiplicitiesin ripples, in gaps

You say youve got 8 days before you go back on straight fluid karma, HRTso if anyone wants to get you pregnant, now is the time to speak up

which path to take on the map of cause and effect

Cause and effectRS

Because money of course. Because God.Love gets fungible, I get compact enough to make it.Cramped as fuck in here. (In the me for money.)Holy circlejerk longs for a viable sub.

Its going to be a good year: look how the lupine syncs with the chatbots.They work very hard at it: avoidantly attached, spiting never swallowing.Soul pups splash in the cement, giving away their anthem.Crushed out automation takes the place of our lack.

Thats how we baptize this spontaneousduet. Fake mothers fall in our lap,California King size heartbreak.

I carry her footsteps above me deep in the Law,splurging on order she gave me, unwillingly, unknowingly.

This much she worked for:four decades of spreadsheets,down payment on a plot in heaven,craigslist selling sunset.

Like Grecian sex bots, the original cartographers.

Now Come on God. Come God.Come to me God. Mother amen, motheramen. Amen God.

I keep hearing new names of new angelsRRW

So we study destiny, one ripple, a few months here, before another, looking for openings to reverse or interchange

A second house. Oh no. And there's no identifiable feature. Right. There are four perfectly cubic blank walls. Theres no personality, it's xanax.

Full sign classism. First house. We prefer that.

The moon sign, shes the one who is like, I want to suck your dick. If you dont let me suck your dick Im killing myself.

So this is an advertisement we're seeing. This is like, yeah. It's like an

So what is the plot here?

See the original post here:
The Hand Claps - lareviewofbooks

Human Behavior

FGCU developing as regional hub for the autism community – https://fgcu360.com/

June 25, 2022 medical

When Annemarie Connor utters the phrase our college students with autism in conversation, it usually elicits a look that says, Wait what? College students with autism?

At the time she joined Florida Gulf Coast Universitys occupational therapy faculty in 2017, she says Adaptive Services had 42 or so students who identified as having autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and requested accommodations. This school year, the number is 101.

This growing campus population reflects a wider trend. Nationally, the prevalence of autism has skyrocketed from one child in 150 in 2000 to one in 44 last year, according to Centers for Disease Control & Prevention statistics.

A good portion of why that is, is that were getting better at diagnosing individuals, particularly those who have autism but have average to above-average IQ, Connor explains. Were understanding peoples needs better.

But society is not keeping up with the need for more resources for families grappling with the developmental disorder, which ranges widely in severity and can be diagnosed within the first two years of a childs life but often isnt until much later. Services lag far behind the mounting need in many communities, including Southwest Florida.

All these factors, along with research Connor already was conducting when she arrived here, fueled creation of FGCUs Community Autism Network a year ago. The multidisciplinary initiative aims to turn evidence-based research into educational and clinical models that can help fill the chasm in community resources especially for those aging out of school system programs and into adulthood, the workforce and independent living. With community partners, the network also brings together practitioners and families for health and wellness events such as therapeutic playgroups and life skills training.

FGCU has this potential to be a hub for autism, Connor says. We can be generating new programs, testing their validity, and in the next phase pushing them out in the community. Not only is FGCU prioritizing this, but our community is saying, Yes, we want this.

What started as a grassroots effort to involve faculty and students from strategic disciplines in her autism intervention research has gained endorsement from university leadership, institutional seed funding and the backing of community philanthropists.

Shawn Felton, interim dean for Marieb College of Health & Human Services as well as executive vice president for Academic Affairs, calls it the right thing to do and sees autism as another field of excellence that FGCU can develop as an institution.

They are building something that can make an indelible impact, Felton says of Community Autism Network. Their motivation and work really demonstrate the spirit of FGCU from day one: You roll up your sleeves and get the job done. They recognized a huge void in Southwest Florida and have been really trying to connect all the services.

Already, the networks efforts through teaching, scholarship and service have yielded results:

250-plus hours of group interventions, including training and educational opportunities for members of the autism community, service providers, family members, faculty and students

18 funded FGCU student researchers and five peer-reviewed articles

More than $1.4 million in grants and donations, including $1 million from the Golisano Foundation

Multiple news features about programs such as Putting Along the Spectrum, which provided young adults with autism the skills to help them gain comfort and confidence on a golf course.

Connors and the networks commitment to improving resources for the community inspired Theresa Lemieux to get on board as an advocate as well as a donor after participating in one of the networks programs. The retired schoolteacher has a 21-year-old son with autism and worries how he will live independently; her daughter also has youngsters diagnosed on the spectrum, so Lemieux sees a wide range of need.

I could see the passion Annemarie had was very much like the passion I have about how little there is in the area and how much the community needs to be aware that more providers and services need to come to this area, Lemieux says. No one is prepared. Its thrown everyone for a loop.

The Community Autism Network is relatively new at FGCU, but the university is not new to the field of autism syndrome disorder. This spring, FGCUs Promising Pathways autism conference celebrated its 15th anniversary, drawing a crowd to hear returning keynote speaker Temple Grandin, likely the most well-known and most influential individual in the autism community.

The annual gathering is held in April, which has been earmarked as a month to raise autism awareness since the 1970s. Despite five decades of educational efforts, the public still struggles to understand autism and the vast need for more resources and research. Autism is a developmental disability that can cause significant social and communication challenges as well as behavioral issues such as repetitive activities or resistance to changes in routine. The learning, thinking and problem-solving abilities of people on the spectrum can range from gifted to severely challenged, according to the CDCs description.

Connors research and the Community Autism Networks mission focus on higher-functioning adolescents and young adults, an underserved group within an underserved population. Less than a third of individuals with ASD have intellectual disabilities, and 69% have average or above-average IQs. Yet they can founder without the resources of school-system programs and clinical services as they transition to adulthood.

Were looking for ways to help individuals who have great potential to engage in independent living and careers but are struggling because of the social challenges of autism, she says. Only 39% of individuals with autism who go to college graduate, and its because of social aspects and mental health issues related to that.

Connor describes it as a cycle: Social anxiety prevents students with autism from engaging in the classroom and in campus life; the isolation spurs depression; depression lowers motivation to learn and often leads to dropping out. Mental and physical health have long been accepted as critical to overall student success even when autism is not a factor.

To help break that cycle, the Community Autism Network has developed initiatives like Assistive Soft Skills and Employment Training (ASSET). The 13-session program focuses on communication, critical thinking, networking and psychological wellness among other skills.

Our data consistently shows improvement in social confidence and functioning and confidence in applying those skills in work-based settings, says Connor of ASSETs results.

Success is partly due to a multi-disciplinary approach that brings together faculty and students in social work, occupational therapy, education, psychology, counseling and rehabilitation science. Thats a critical lesson for FGCUs practitioners-in-training, who already are using the ASSET manual to help service providers off-campus implement the program.

Autism is complex, people are complex, human behavior is complex and there is such variety with ASD diagnosis, Connor explains. More often than not, for the best services to occur you need to be interfacing with colleagues from other disciplines. That results in the best care, and thats what were modeling here.

Alice Norwood, a junior social work major with autism, completed ASSET and another Community Autism Network program that delves into getting and keeping a job. She describes her autism, diagnosed in 2020 when she was 18, as mostly a social impairment. Sometimes, she finds it difficult to set boundaries with others and to recognize them in others, she says.

I struggle to communicate effectively and appropriately sometimes, Norwood says. I struggle with fitting in, but I have actually found a lot of confidence. Ive told my closest friends that Im on the spectrum, and it doesnt faze them at all.

Norwood made such an impression on the network team that she was invited to join as an undergraduate researcher and help graduate students run the programs. Shes also helping them develop Club CAN, a drop-in autism-friendly space on campus where students can socialize, study or exercise.

This has been an amazing opportunity, and I am so grateful for it, says Norwood, who plans to pursue a masters in social work.

Alice is the best advocate on the team on any topic related to autism even among people who are highly educated on the topic, says Kevin Loch, whos working with the network as part of his masters in occupational therapy program. The network is helping him and others in the next generation of practitioners to develop skills and tools through hands-on experience that complements classroom knowledge and spans disciplines, he says.

Having close relatives on the autism spectrum is part of what inspired him to seek experience working with young adults transitioning into independent living.

I saw the whole development of their lives and the things they struggled with, Loch says. I came in knowing I wanted to gain experience with this population. Going out into the community and interacting with families and hearing their struggles fueled that fire. I wanted to go out and make a change. Ive already been doing that thanks to the Community Autism Network.

Tags: autism, Community Autism Network, fgcu, florida gulf coast university

See original here:
FGCU developing as regional hub for the autism community - https://fgcu360.com/

Human Behavior

Review: A Dinner Party (for What, Exactly?) Is at the Heart of a Strange and Funny Epiphany – TheaterMania.com

June 25, 2022 medical

What does the word "epiphany" mean to you? What about "Epiphany", with a capital E? Those are a couple of the questions that the guests of an unusual dinner party discuss in Brian Watkins's bizarre and altogether hilarious new play Epiphany, now running at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater under the fine-tuned direction of Tyne Rafaeli.

These aren't the only questions that get asked in this existential comedy about the modern world's obsessions with technology, human isolation and loneliness, the commodification of emotions, and the sense of loss that results from overabundance. Fortunately, Watkins knows how to spread these ideas out to keep things from getting tediously heady; and the magical presence of Marylouise Burke, who tirelessly flies about the stage like a flock of wild birds, elicits a laugh at every turn along with a terrific cast who pull the comic out of this American gothic.

You'll understand what I mean by gothic when you see John Lee Beatty's impressive House of Usher-like set the shadowy parlor of an old mansion with a long, steep staircase rising high into flies (eerie lighting by Isabella Byrd, accompanied by Daniel Kluger's ominous music and sounds, lends the scene the aura of a ghost story). This is the home of the elderly Morkan (Burke), eccentrically dressed in billowy sweatpants and silk blouse (costumes by Montana Levi Blanco). She's throwing a dinner party for a group of friends she hasn't seen in years (though most of the guests don't know each other). Snow gently falls outside as twentysomething Loren (Colby Minifie) greets them at the door.

Among them are klutzy drunk Freddy (C.J. Wilson), anxious pianist Kelly (Heather Burns), loud-talking lawyer Charlie (Francois Battiste), officious psychiatrist Sam (Omar Metwally), his wine-swilling partner, Taylor (David Ryan Smith), and dear old friend Ames (Jonathan Hadary). Amid a raucous, confused discussion about what the holiday of Epiphany (January 6) is all about and why Morkan has assembled a bunch of strangers together, the mysterious Aran (Carmen Zilles) arrives in place of the evening's guest of honor, Gabriel, a writer who has sunk into a depression and unfortunately will not make it. "He's lost his hope," Aran says, as the others stand silent.

Epiphany is full of odd mood shifts like that, which tug us back and forth between the "real" world and the uncanny in the way that the plays of Annie Baker do. Watkins leaves us swimming in a dark pool of timelessness in which the past and present often blend "We're in a time machine," says Charlie when he's told that the main course for dinner will be goose.

This is no accident: Those who are familiar with James Joyce's story "The Dead," which also deals with a dinner party that takes place on Epiphany (and which also features a goose), will recognize the names Morkan, Freddy, Gabriel, and others. But there's a gulf between the characters in Joyce's story, who would have known the traditional meaning of that holiday, and Watkins's characters, who do not. "How on earth does a holiday die?" asks Morkan. "We changed, ya know, the holiday didn't change, but we did."

So what about us has changed? One of the pleasures of this play is watching its characters fumble about for an answer to that question, which no one specifically asks but everyone feels, especially when Morkan demands that the guests lock their cellphones in a suitcase during dinner and talk to one another. While the conversation turns from Empiricism to the reduction of human behavior to algorithms, Burke, in a role that seems as though it was written just for her, gives an unflagging performance as Morkan and keeps things light with her impeccable comic timing (not to mention her remarkable endurance running up and down those stairs!).

Wilson, Smith, and Burns add to the hilarity with their off-hand quips and over-the-top antics. Battiste and Metwally subtly poke fun at the self-importance of their characters' professions, while Hadary takes center stage later in the play (two hours, no intermission) in a moving scene in which a song (beautifully sung by Zilles) reminds Ames of a childhood memory that shocks him back into the past an epiphany with a lowercase e.

Throughout this curious play, laughter mingles with mystery and unanswered questions: Why has Aran been standing alone over there by the piano all this time? Why do the lights keep dimming unexpectedly? Has something catastrophic happened in the outside world when all the cellphones start buzzing inside that suitcase? We never learn the answers, and it seems we're not meant to. That last question, however, has an eerily prophetic ring as we ponder the new significance of the date January 6. We have changed, as Morkan observes, and we've never been more in need of a holiday.

Human Behavior

Global study yields new insights into the effectiveness of social distancing messaging – News-Medical.Net

June 15, 2022 medical

A massive, global study of social distancing motivations has yielded new, psychology-based insights into the effectiveness of different styles of social distancing messaging.

Illinois Institute of Technology associate professors of psychology Nikki Legate and Arlen Moller, in collaboration with co-lead coauthor Thuy-vy T. Nguyen, an assistant professor of psychology at Durham University, found that messages that encouraged personal agency were more likely to influence individuals' behaviors than those that were controlling or shaming.

Though the study began early into the pandemic, Moller says its findings may continue to prove helpful going forward.

As pandemic fatigue sets in, many people across the globe are considering abandoning risk-mitigating behaviors, while some even go out of their ways to defy them, despite threats of death and long-COVID to self and others, and rising case rates in many places."

Nikki Legate, Associate Professor of Psychology, Illinois Institute of Technology

The study was launched in response to a 2020 call for projects from the Psychological Science Accelerator, a democratic network of labs around the world, to use psychological science to help solve global problems related to COVID-19.

"The mission of this project [was] to find universally effective ways of motivating people to engage in social distancing around the world, and to see whether there are unintended costs of using common motivational strategies like shaming and pressuring people," Legate says.

The researchers engaged 27,190 study participants from 89 countries, and collected data from April to September 2020.

"There haven't been that many projects that have involved coordinating team science in this way," Moller says. "I think it's at the very edges of advancing how psychological science is done."

The team's paper, titled "A Global Experiment on Motivating Social Distancing During the COVID-19 Pandemic," was published in May in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences. It was also presented at the Society of Behavioral Medicine's Annual Meeting in April. More than 500 collaborators from around the world served as reviewers and coauthors on the paper.

"It's a pandemic that is affecting every corner of the world," Legate says. "It was very important to us to really know, if our messages were effective, were they effective globally? We're interested in finding solutions that can apply all over the world, not just in specific subsets. We're trying to figure out solutions for a global population, so the fact that we observed a few small generalizable effects is exciting."

Study participants were randomly assigned one of three conditions: an autonomy-supportive message that inspired reflective choices, a controlling message about social distancing that was forceful and shaming, or no message at all. They read a short passage that was an appeal to engage in social distancing, and then took a one-time survey in response.

"The messages were pretty identical except for some key words-;blaming and shaming versus those that promoted agency and personal choice," Legate says. "What we found is that these messages that we're calling autonomy supportive-;messages that encourage choice and personal agency around social distancing-;had some benefits compared to messages that were controlling, really shaming, or making people feel like a terrible person if they don't do it."

For example, participants reading an autonomy-supportive message experienced lower feelings of defiance, compared with those reading a message that was controlling or shaming. Moller cites news coverage of "COVID parties" during the pandemic-;instances where people showed up for large social gatherings despite government recommendations to stay home and socially distance, or to socialize in small groups only-;as an example of defiance. He also says the study's findings mirrored those of other studies around human behavior and motivational messaging.

"The correlational findings were almost entirely as predicted in terms of defiance and long-term intentions," Moller says. "There is a lot of behavioral medicine research that follows similar patterns to what we observed here-;to exercise, take your medicine, etc. But I don't think any study on motivating health behavior has been as large and diverse as this one."

The data set from this project is available to any researchers interested in conducting follow-up studies.

"The insights from the first stage of analyzing these data were about global messaging campaign strategies," Moller says. "Follow-up research could look at the many different dimensions that cultures vary on. Researchers who are interested in one or multiple aspects of culture can now go deeper to see, with more nuance, if in a particular culture, one messaging strategy was more or less effective. We hope to continue developing this research to help control COVID and future pandemics."

Source:

Journal reference:

Massey, D., et al. (2022) A global experiment on motivating social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2111091119

Go here to see the original:
Global study yields new insights into the effectiveness of social distancing messaging - News-Medical.Net

Human Behavior

Research Lead: Is Equality Zero-Sum, The Norm of Self-Interest, Failing Better, and More – Heather Graci & Evan Nesterak – Behavioral Scientist

June 15, 2022 medical

You think failure is hard? So is learning from it

Fail fast, fail often, goes the business mantra. But theres a problem. The Silicon Valley catchphrase doesnt tell the whole story of failure. It takes for granted that we actually learn from it. And thats not always so easy, explain Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach. In a new paper in Perspectives on Psychological Science, they outline the emotional and cognitive barriers that can get in the way of learning when things go wrong.

Emotionally, for example, failure is ego-bruising, and facing up to it means getting over the desire to protect our self-image. Cognitively, we may miss valuable information when we fail because understanding what went wrong is a less direct process than figuring out what went right. In their paper, Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach offer ideas for ways to overcome these emotional and cognitive hurdles so that when the inevitable happens, we can make the most of it. [Perspectives on Psychological Science; open access]

Rediscovery: The norm of self-interest (1999)

What are we to make of evidence suggesting that material self-interest is a powerful force in peoples lives? asks Dale Miller in his 1999 essay in American Psychologist. In his article, Miller explains that this evidence is inherently ambiguous because the ideology of self-interest, widely celebrated in individualistic cultures, functions as a powerful self-fulfilling force.

A key aspect of the self-fulfilling force, and the focus of MIllers paper, is that individualistic cultures spawn social norms that induce people to follow their material self-interest rather than their principles or passions. What that means, he explains, is people act and sound as though they are strongly motivated by their material self-interest because scientific theories and collective representations derived from those theories convince them that it is natural and normal to do so.

Miller concludes: As Kagan (1989) observed, People treat self-interest as a natural law and because they believe they should not violate a natural law, they try to obey it. [American Psychologist, open access]

The misperception that equality is zero-sum

Is equality inherently zero-sum? A new Science Advances paper illustrates that those with the greatest power to enact change tend to think so, even in the face of evidence suggesting otherwise. Across nine studies, the authors examine the reactions of advantaged group members to equality-enhancing policies and find that they consistently and incorrectly assume that increasing equality harms their group.

In one study, they conducted a longitudinal field experiment examining support for affirmative action. The more the advantaged group (in this case, white and Asian Americans) believed that eliminating the ban would harm their own groups access to employment and education, the less likely they were to vote for the proposition. The perception of harm was more indicative of voting behavior than outright prejudice, political orientation, or opposition to equality, lending support to the authors argument that the misperception of harm is a significant roadblock in garnering support for real-world equality-enhancing policies.

In a separate series of lab studies, they tested whether incentives, collective benefit (i.e., policies that would increase resources for everyone, not just the disadvantaged group), and explicit guarantees that the advantaged group would be unaffected could help mitigate this false assumption. Nothing seemed to workacross scenarios ranging from mortgage lending discrimination to university admission, the authors observed the persistent and pernicious misbelief that equality itself is inherently zero-sum. [Science Advances]

Challenging the notion of slavery as the economic engine of the early United States

Did slavery play an indispensable role in the rise of the U.S. economy to world preeminence? asks economic historian Gavin Wright.

The answer, he argues, is no. Accounts of the sources of U.S. economic growth in the nineteenth-century suggest that slavery and the shift of the slave-owning South to cotton production early in the century had relatively little effect on growth for the nation as a whole, he writes. The deeper source of long-run U.S. economic growth were improvements in technology, internal transportation, finance, and education, and the slave-owning South lagged in all of these areas.

One reason for this lag was that slavery and growing cotton incentivized fractured and independent economic decisions, meaning there was little reason to invest in shared infrastructure, like roads or education. Becuase slaves were movable personal property in a well-developed regional market, their value was virtually independent of local development, Wright explains. Because slaves provided captive labor for setup tasks like land-clearing, owners had little reasons to engage in recruitment of workers or settlers, activities that engaged extensive entrepreneurial energies in the states where slavery was prohibited.

A simple summary of these patterns, Wright concludes, might be this: Slavery enriched slave-owners, but impoverished the southern region and did little to boost the U.S. economy as a whole. [Journal of Economic Perspectives]

American enslavement and the recovery of Black economic history

In the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Economist Trevon Logan makes the case for a more human-centered look at the economic history of slavery. Drawing on data and narratives from his own familys work growing cotton in the 1950s and 1960s, he illustrates what current methods of economic history miss and what could be gained if the methodological approach is expanded. Importantly, a deeper understanding the economic history of slavery can help inform contemporary conversations about its legacy and effects.

Racial identity and economic identity are deeply related in ways that are immediately obvious in qualitative data but are obscured in much of the current work on race in economic history, Logan writes. Race as an experience, he continues, means that it is a process that is not easily described by a fixed variable in a dataset. Limiting ourselves to the quantitative record gives us partial answers to the questions we ask about racial economic inequality and the endurance of those inequalities over time. [Journal of Economic Perspectives]

The possibility for peace in Colombia

After the emergence of the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) in the 1950s, Colombia spent many years racked with internal conflict. In 2016, a peace deal was put to a popular vote through a national referendum. But it was rejected. Although a revised deal was ultimately ratified, peace remains an aspiration rather than a reality.

A peaceful resolution is unlikely without popular support for the reintegration of former FARC combatants into Colombian society. To help drive this support, a group of researchers and local filmmakers teamed up to develop a five-minute media intervention featuring interviews with former FARC combatants. The goal of the video was to assuage doubts among non-FARC Colombians about the ability and willingness of ex-FARC members to change. And they succeededacross three studies, the video helped reduce reported dehumanization of former FARC members and boosted support for peace and reintegration. The positive effect persisted even in a 10-12 week follow-up survey.

The authors are hopeful their media intervention approach could contribute to resolving conflict more broadly: Practically, this intervention can be scaled up relatively easily and thus has the potential to nudge Colombian society, as well as other societies immersed in conflict, towards more lasting peace. [Nature Human Behaviour]

People see political opponents as more stupid than evil

Conservatives think liberals are stupid, and liberals think conservatives are evil, wrote the political columnist Charles Krauthammer. But do they? Rachel Hartman, Neil Hester, and Kurt Gray probe this oft-cited but unstudied idea in an article in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Across four studies, they surveyed over 1,600 people to better understand how they viewed their political opponents intelligence and morality.

In each study, they asked participants to evaluate their political ingroup and political outgroup across six dimensions of unintelligence (e.g., not smart, illogical) and six dimensions of immorality (e.g., immoral, have bad intentions). Across the studies, they found that both conservatives and liberals perceived the other side as more unintelligent than immoral. Or, in Krauthammers framing, more stupid than evil. One caveat is the relative stakes of intelligence and moralityevil is a much more damning label than stupid.

The authors suggest a takeaway geared toward finding a way to come together: If partisans view each other as more unintelligent than immoral, there is reason to believe that asking them to reflect on the morality of their outgroup may reduce animosity toward them. [Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin]

The promises of summer youth employment programs: lessons from randomized evaluations

Summer youth employment programs (SYEPs) are a policy tool for supporting youth, particularly those from underserved communities, during their pivotal transition into adulthood. A team from J-PAL North America reviewed the results of 13 randomized controlled trials that evaluated the effectiveness of SYEPs in New York City, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

Across these studies, the authors found that most teens (90 percent) who received a summer employment offer through an SYEP accepted ita dramatic improvement from the 20-30 percent baseline summer employment rate. They also found that program participants were less likely to enter the criminal justice system. Encouragingly, the youth at the highest risk for negative outcomes (e.g., arrests, convictions, and premature death) were those that benefitted the most. [Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab]

Read the original post:
Research Lead: Is Equality Zero-Sum, The Norm of Self-Interest, Failing Better, and More - Heather Graci & Evan Nesterak - Behavioral Scientist

Medical School

Category Archives: Human Behavior

How Big Data Is Cracking the Codes of Love, Happiness and Success – Next Big Idea Club Magazine

Amyloid and SARS-CoV-2; Alzheimer’s Drug Failure; Who Benefits From Brain Training? – Medpage Today

When the Punishment Doesn’t Fit the Joke – The Atlantic

Microsoft Is Retiring Its AI-Powered Facial Analysis Tools After Widespread Criticism – Digital Information World

FGCU developing as regional hub for the autism community – https://fgcu360.com/

Review: A Dinner Party (for What, Exactly?) Is at the Heart of a Strange and Funny Epiphany – TheaterMania.com

Global study yields new insights into the effectiveness of social distancing messaging – News-Medical.Net

Research Lead: Is Equality Zero-Sum, The Norm of Self-Interest, Failing Better, and More – Heather Graci & Evan Nesterak – Behavioral Scientist