Sebastian

–by Sebastian There are a bunch of media discussions about various voters being inappropriately afraid of violence in cities that I am deliberately not going to link because focusing on per capita numbers doesn't get to the way our brains work.  We want to get to them eventually, but I don't think you can without … Read more

by Ugh I mean, come on.  My 9 year old could have come up with that.   I haven't been around in a while, I hope everyone is healthy and otherwise doing well. Open thread.

–By Sebastian H 30 years ago my mother was in a car accident.  She was stopped in the left hand turn lane of a major intersection.  Someone blew through the light, T-boned another car, which spun around the intersection so violently it was able to hit my mother's van on three different sides.  She got … Read more

–by Sebastian Lots of things scare me about Trump.  So many that it is really hard to focus on one.  Which I'm half-convinced is a strategy, or at least a fortuitous-for-him habit that Trump has of throwing up so many crazy things that you can't grasp any one*. One of the few tenuous strands of … Read more

–by Sebastian I feel like am barely treading water about the Trump Presidency.  It creates such a huge number of scary possibilities that I don't know how to form a good plan about what to do about it.  I normally like to tackle the big picture and then fill in details, but I can't do … Read more

–by Sebastian Tobias Rose-Stockwell has an interesting piece on polarization.  The main takeaway for me was "Contact increases empathy.  Insulation Kills it".  Though the insight that the brain sees "thousands of people believe something" and "millions of people believe something" as essentially the same thing is also important.  Tobias talks about the dynamic which reinforces … Read more

It is generally received wisdom that a large part of Trump's success in the Republican primaries was a result of a collection action problem from there being too large of a field.  Each individual candidate realized that whomever moved against Trump first was likely to get burned badly.  Each of the candidates believed that if … Read more

–by Sebastian By far the biggest thing about voting is that it is very tribal. The easiest predictor of how anyone will vote is to identify the tribe they voted for last time. For most people that changes at most ONE time in their entire lifetime. Now of course it is a feedback loop–the parties … Read more

–by Sebastian I was reviewing old posts and I came across this on cybershaming It is also the topic of a recent Black Mirror Episode (which is a series that I'm enjoying quite a bit). Ten years have passed since I published that original article, and experience with the topic has suggested to me that … Read more

–by Sebastian Leaders who fan the flames of xenophobia so that their followers lash out are evil.  Leaders who structure their systems such that a large portion of the population are on the edge of lashing out are fools.  Trump and his ilk are bad people.  But we are fools for letting it come to … Read more