March 1, 2020

Pluralistic Ignorance?

- Snip

“ Rather than voting their own preferences, Democrats try to figure out who everyone else would vote for. They are trying to act like pundits. But just like the pundits, voters don’t know which candidates are most likely to have the broadest appeal. And sometimes their assumptions are just wrong.

Social scientists have their own jargon-laden name for what is going on — pluralistic ignorance. It could play an outsized role in determining the results of the 2020 Presidential election.

The pluralistic ignorance process goes like this: You feel a certain way. So do most other people. But you don’t realize other people feel the same way you do. You think it’s just the opposite. You behave based on your false beliefs about other people, rather than behaving in a way that is true to yourself.

It’s “pluralistic” because you are holding onto two sets of beliefs at once — your true beliefs and what you think other people believe. It is “ignorance,” because you are wrong about other people’s beliefs.

It is also a shared ignorance. You think your favorite candidate can’t get elected because you assume most people would not vote for that candidate. Lots of other people are doing the exact same thing – they have the same favorite candidate that you do, but they also assume that other people won’t vote for the candidate. That candidate can end up dropping out of the race or getting defeated, not because people didn’t believe in that candidate, but because of the pluralistic ignorance of thinking their own belief in the candidate was not shared, when it was. Too many people end up voting based on their mistaken beliefs about other people’s preferences, rather than their own preferences, which really are popular.”

-snip


https://psychcentral.com/blog/how-voters-psych-themselves-out-and-choose-the-wrong-candidate/#.Xll0AYSrhX8.twitter

March 1, 2020

We deserve to have Elizabeth Warren as our President. She would not draft policies by

sticking her finger in the wind to see how the wind blows....yet professed supporters are
abandoning their vote for her in exactly that fashion...a finger in the wind.

Either you believe she is the most capable or you don’t. I simply do not understand abandoning her.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/opinion/sunday/elizabeth-warren-2020.html?referringSource=articleShare

March 1, 2020

Found this NPR article on the Coronavirus and more. Extremely interesting.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/02/20/807742861/new-research-bats-harbor-hundreds-of-coronaviruses-and-spillovers-arent-rare
Snip-

“Which brings us to this current coronavirus outbreak. As soon as it started, EcoHealth Alliance's longtime collaborators in China (principally researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital) compared the new virus with the bat samples they'd collected. They found an extremely close match.”

February 20, 2020

Vigorous challenging and questioning is not

attacking. It’s debating.

Defend thy positions.

February 19, 2020

Tonight will be interesting because we will hear and see an unfiltered Bloomberg.

I think he will be dwarfed by the moment. I don’t think he has the stuff to be presidential.