I am in no way optimistic about America, nor am I optimistic about the plight of the human species on this globe.
I have to admit that I feel the same way, and I love the author's straightforward honesty. I really respect that he is not afraid to call out the problems that he sees and expect people to be accountable for them, like what he says above about doing "something profoundly un-American, namely, recalling a sense of history." I almost want to clap.
One percent of the population owns 48 percent of the total net financial wealth. The top 10 percent owns 86 percent of the wealth, while the top 20 percent owns 94 percent of the wealth. Meanwhile, 80 percent of the population is experiencing stagnating and declining wages.
This is an important issue. It seems that society has always been set up to keep people more or less where they are, with the attention only on certain members and " the ordinary people limited to the assumption that their lives were less complex and one-dimensional" as the author says above. We should consider what the real reasons are behind this
Problem people become indistinguishable and interchangeable, which means that only one of them has to be asked to find out what all the rest of them think.
The author makes such a good point here. The tendency that people have to ignore individuality and lump together everyone that is different from themselves or everyone they don't understand or relate to is a huge contributing factor to stereotypes and racist ideas.
The goal is not to trust what I think I see. To understand that I shouldn’t believe my lying eyes.
I liked the way that this is phrased. It really gets right to the point of the issue. The idea is not to try to change the way our brains are hardwired, but to be more aware and conscious of what we decide to do with the information and to not let whatever biases or errors we have in our thinking influence us.
The gambler’s fallacy makes us absolutely certain that, if a coin has landed heads up five times in a row, it’s more likely to land tails up the sixth time. In fact, the odds are still 50-50.
This paragraph and the one after it make me realize how many of our thoughts and decisions are influenced by different biases. We tend to believe that we are not that easily influenced and that we can see the real truth, but it seems like we are much more personally biased than we are aware. Even in a situation that's not important, like this one with the coin flip, we are constantly making assumptions about all kinds of things and believing them, even though they might go against the truths that we know.
confirmation bias. That’s the effect that leads us to look for evidence confirming what we already think or suspect, to view facts and ideas we encounter as further confirmation, and to discount or ignore any piece of evidence that seems to support an alternate view.
Confirmation bias is definitely a major problem. Especially today, because the algorithms of the internet and social media are set up in a way that continually feed us more and more of what we already believe and agree with. People are constantly seeing mainly things that align with their personal view and begin to feel even more validated that they are more right than anyone else. This enhances confirmation bias because not only are people looking to confirm what they already believe, but what they already believe is pretty much all they come across.
(WHO) official suggested that virus transmission by asymptomatic people was “very rare,” the organization later rolled the claim back due to the number of unknowns.
I think the lack of consistency from the organizations that should have been reliable was a big source of frustration for people and something that fueled a lot of resentment for and retaliation against the strict guidelines. I often wondered why organizations like this would constantly make announcements about things they were not sure about rather than waiting until they had better information. I guess they were trying to appear competent and to provide people with information, but I think they made things worse many times.
Similarly, Greece has been widely praised for its “textbook crisis management,”22 due at least in part to the government’s prioritization of science.
My family is from Greece and I have to say that I have been so proud of the way that Greece has handled the pandemic and focused on science, without ever creating the politicized mess that happened here in America. And even though the science is not always perfect and has been hard to come by, it's the closest thing to a guideline that we have for the situation, and in Greece and the other countries mentioned, the people and governments just got it together and handled it rather than whining.
Digital surveillance that impinges on civil liberties has been employed to track the spread of the coronavirus and prevent future outbreaks.
I'm interested to see how different aspects of our lives change permanently after the pandemic is over, and what implications these changes will have on future issues, such as the civil liberties mentioned here. I think that people and the world in general have been through too great of a change to ever go back to what we knew as normal before. I often wonder about what normal will end up looking like.
countering homegrown and foreign disinformation,
I think this issue of false information during the pandemic has forced people to think more critically about what they hear or read, maybe more than they did before or about other subjects. And the phrase above this, "finding the right place for expertise," brings up the important point of how even our most "reliable" sources have been called into question, such as the the constantly changing information from the CDC, during a time when no one had definite answers.