Three books find truth under cultural and conceptual assault.
by Jim Holt August 22, 2005
People have been talking bull, denying that they were talking bull, and accusing others of talking bull for ages. “Dumbe Speaker! that's a Bull,” a character in a seventeenth-century English play says. “It is no Bull, to speak of a common Peace, in the place of War,” a statesman from the same era declares. The word “bull,” used to characterize discourse, is of uncertain origin. One venerable conjecture was that it began as a contemptuous reference to papal edicts known as bulls (from the bulla, or seal, appended to the document). Another linked it to the famously nonsensical Obadiah Bull, an Irish lawyer in London during the reign of Henry VII. It was only in the twentieth century that the use of “bull” to mean pretentious, deceitful, jejune language became semantically attached to the male of the bovine species—or, more particularly, to the excrement therefrom. Today, it is generally, albeit erroneously, thought to have arisen as a euphemistic shortening of “bullshit,” a term that came into currency, dictionaries tell us, around 1915.
If “bullshit,” as opposed to “bull,” is a distinctively modern linguistic innovation, that could have something to do with other distinctively modern things, like advertising, public relations, political propaganda, and schools of education. “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit,” Harry G. Frankfurt, a distinguished moral philosopher who is professor emeritus at Princeton, says. The ubiquity of bullshit, he notes, is something that we have come to take for granted. Most of us are pretty confident of our ability to detect it, so we may not regard it as being all that harmful. We tend to take a more benign view of someone caught bullshitting than of someone caught lying. (“Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through,” a father counsels his son in an Eric Ambler novel.) All of this worries Frankfurt. We cannot really know the effect that bullshit has on us, he thinks, until we have a clearer understanding of what it is. That is why we need a theory of bullshit.
Frankfurt's own effort along these lines was contained in a paper that he presented two decades ago at a faculty seminar at Yale. Later, that paper appeared in a journal, and then in a collection of Frankfurt's writings; all the while, photocopies of it passed from fan to fan. Earlier this year, it was published as “On Bullshit” (Princeton; $9.95), a tiny book of sixty-seven spaciously printed pages that has gone on to become an improbable best-seller.
Philosophers have a vocational bent for trying to divine the essences of things that most people never suspected had an essence, and bullshit is a case in point. Could there really be some property that all instances of bullshit possess and all non-instances lack? The question might sound ludicrous, but it is, at least in form, no different from one that philosophers ask about truth. Among the most divisive issues in philosophy today is whether there is anything important to be said about the essential nature of truth. Bullshit, by contrast, might seem to be a mere bagatelle. Yet there are parallels between the two which lead to the same perplexities.
Where do you start if you are an academic philosopher in search of the quiddity of bullshit? “So far as I am aware,” Frankfurt dryly observes, “very little work has been done on this subject.” He did find an earlier philosopher's attempt to analyze a similar concept under a more genteel name: humbug. Humbug, that philosopher decided, was a pretentious bit of misrepresentation that fell short of lying. (A politician talking about the importance of his religious faith comes to mind.) Frankfurt was not entirely happy with this definition. The difference between lies and bullshit, it seemed to him, was more than a matter of degree. To push the analysis in a new direction, he considers a rather peculiar anecdote about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. It was the nineteen-thirties, and Wittgenstein had gone to the hospital to visit a friend whose tonsils had just been taken out. She croaked to Wittgenstein, “I feel just like a dog that has been run over.” Wittgenstein (the friend recalled) was disgusted to hear her say this. “You don't know what a dog that has been run over feels like,” he snapped. Of course, Wittgenstein might simply have been joking. But Frankfurt suspects that his severity was real, not feigned. This was, after all, a man who devoted his life to combatting what he considered to be pernicious forms of nonsense. What Wittgenstein found offensive in his friend's simile, Frankfurt guesses, was its mindlessness: “Her fault is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying.”
The essence of bullshit, Frankfurt decides, is that it is produced without any concern for the truth. Bullshit needn't be false: “The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong.” The bullshitter's fakery consists not in misrepresenting a state of affairs but in concealing his own indifference to the truth of what he says. The liar, by contrast, is concerned with the truth, in a perverse sort of fashion: he wants to lead us away from it. As Frankfurt sees it, the liar and the truthteller are playing on opposite sides of the same game, a game defined by the authority of truth. The bullshitter opts out of this game altogether. Unlike the liar and the truthteller, he is not guided in what he says by his beliefs about the way things are. And that, Frankfurt says, is what makes bullshit so dangerous: it unfits a person for telling the truth.
Frankfurt's account of bullshit is doubly remarkable. Not only does he define it in a novel way that distinguishes it from lying; he also uses this definition to establish a powerful claim: “Bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.” If this is true, we ought to be tougher on someone caught bullshitting than we are on someone caught lying. Unlike the bullshitter, the liar at least cares about the truth. But isn't this account a little too flattering to the liar? In theory, of course, there could be liars who are motivated by sheer love of deception. This type was identified by St. Augustine in his treatise “On Lying.” Someone who tells a lie as a means to some other goal tells it “unwillingly,” Augustine says. The pure liar, by contrast, “takes delight in lying, rejoicing in the falsehood itself.” But such liars are exceedingly rare, as Frankfurt concedes. Not even Iago had that purity of heart. Ordinary tellers of lies simply aren't principled adversaries of the truth. Suppose an unscrupulous used-car salesman is showing you a car. He tells you that it was owned by a little old lady who drove it only on Sundays. The engine's in great shape, he says, and it runs beautifully. Now, if he knows all this to be false, he's a liar. But is his goal to get you to believe the opposite of the truth? No, it's to get you to buy the car. If the things he was saying happened to be true, he'd still say them. He'd say them even if he had no idea who the car's previous owner was or what condition the engine was in.
Frankfurt would say that this used-car salesman is a liar only by accident. Even if he happens to know the truth, he decides what he's going to say without caring what it is. But then surely almost every liar is, at heart, a bullshitter. Both the liar and the bullshitter typically have a goal. It may be to sell a product, to get votes, to keep a spouse from walking out of a marriage in the wake of embarrassing revelations, to make someone feel good about himself, to mislead Nazis who are looking for Jews. The alliance the liar strikes with untruth is one of convenience, to be abandoned the moment it ceases to serve this goal.
The porousness of Frankfurt's theoretical boundary between lies and bullshit is apparent in Laura Penny's “Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit” (Crown; $21.95). The author, a young Canadian college teacher and former union organizer, begins by saluting Frankfurt's “subtle and useful” distinction: “The liar still cares about the truth. The bullshitter is unburdened by such concerns.” She then proceeds to apply the term “bullshit” to every kind of trickery by which powerful, moneyed interests attempt to gull the public. “Most of what passes for news,” Penny submits, “is bullshit”; so is the language employed by lawyers and insurance men; so is the use of rock songs in ads. She even stretches the rubric to apply to things as well as to words: “The new product that will change your life is probably just more cheap, plastic bullshit,” she writes. At times, despite her nod to Frankfurt, Penny appears to equate bullshit with deliberate deceit: “Never in the history of mankind have so many people uttered statements they know to be untrue.” But then she says that George W. Bush (“a world-historical bullshitter”) and his circle “distinguish themselves by believing their own bullshit,” which suggests that they themselves are deluded.
Frankfurt concedes that in popular usage “bullshit” is employed as a “generic term of abuse, with no very specific literal meaning.” What he wanted to do, he says, was to get to the essence of the thing in question. But does bullshit have a single essence? In a paper published a few years ago, “Deeper Into Bullshit,” G. A. Cohen, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, protested that Frankfurt excludes an entire category of bullshit: the kind that appears in academic works. If the bullshit of ordinary life arises from indifference to truth, Cohen says, the bullshit of the academy arises from indifference to meaning. It may be perfectly sincere, but it is nevertheless nonsensical. Cohen, a specialist in Marxism, complains of having been grossly victimized by this kind of bullshit as a young man back in the nineteen-sixties, when he did a lot of reading in the French school of Marxism inspired by Louis Althusser. So traumatized was he by his struggle to make some sense of these defiantly obscure texts that he went on to found, at the end of the nineteen-seventies, a Marxist discussion group that took as its motto Marxismus sine stercore tauri—“Marxism without the shit of the bull.”
Anyone familiar with the varieties of “theory” that have made their way from the Left Bank of Paris into American English departments will be able to multiply examples of the higher bullshit ad libitum. A few years ago, the physicist Alan Sokal concocted a deliberately meaningless parody under the title “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” and then got it accepted as a serious contribution to the journal Social Text. It would, of course, be hasty to dismiss all unclear discourse as bullshit. Cohen adduces a more precise criterion: the discourse must be not only unclear but unclarifiable. That is, bullshit is the obscure that cannot be rendered unobscure. How would one defend philosophers like Hegel or Heidegger from the charge that their writings are bullshit? Not, Cohen says, by showing that they cared about the truth (which would be enough to get them off the hook if they were charged with being bullshitters under Frankfurt's definition). Rather, one would try to show that their writings actually made some sense. And how could one prove the opposite: that a given statement is hopelessly unclear, and hence bullshit? One proposed test is to add a “not” to the statement and see if that makes any difference to its plausibility. If it doesn't, that statement is bullshit. As it happens, Heidegger once came very close to doing this himself. In the fourth edition of his treatise “What Is Metaphysics?” (1943), he asserted, “Being can indeed be without beings.” In the fifth edition (1949), this sentence became “Being never is without beings.”
Frankfurt acknowledges the higher bullshit as a distinctive variety, but he doesn't think it's very dangerous compared with the sort of bullshit that he is concerned about. While genuinely meaningless discourse may be “infuriating,” he says, it is unlikely to be taken seriously for long, even in the academic world. The sort of bullshit that involves indifference to veracity is far more insidious, Frankfurt claims, since the “conduct of civilized life, and the vitality of the institutions that are indispensable to it, depend very fundamentally on respect for the distinction between the true and the false.”
How evil is the bullshitter? That depends on how valuable truthfulness is. When Frankfurt observes that truthfulness is crucial in maintaining the sense of trust on which social coöperation depends, he's appealing to truth's instrumental value. Whether it has any value in itself, however, is a separate question. To take an analogy, suppose a well-functioning society depends on the belief in God, whether or not God actually exists. Someone of subversive inclinations might question the existence of God without worrying too much about the effect that might have on public morals. And the same attitude is possible toward truth. As the philosopher Bernard Williams observed in a book published in 2002, not long before his death, a suspicion of truth has been a prominent current in modern thought. It was something that Williams found lamentable. “If you do not really believe in the existence of truth,” he asked, “what is the passion for truthfulness a passion for?”
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The idea of questioning the existence of truth might seem bizarre. No sane person doubts that the distinction between true and false is sharp enough when it comes to statements like “Saddam had W.M.D.s” or “The cat is on the mat.” But when it comes to more interesting propositions-assertions of right and wrong, judgments of beauty, grand historical narratives, talk about possibilities, scientific statements about unobservable entities—the objectivity of truth becomes harder to defend. “Deniers” of truth (as Williams called them) insist that each of us is trapped in his own point of view; we make up stories about the world and, in an exercise of power, try to impose them on others.
The battle lines between deniers and defenders of absolute truth are strangely drawn. On the pro-truth side, one finds Pope Benedict XVI, who knows that moral truths correspond to divine commands and rails against what he calls the “dictatorship of relativism.” On the “anything goes” side, one finds the member of the Bush Administration who mocked the idea of objective evidence by declaring, “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality [ http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=4393656 ].” Among philosophers, Continental poststructuralists like Bruno Latour, Jean Baudrillard, and the late Jacques Derrida tend to be arrayed on the anti-truth side. One might expect their hardheaded counterparts in Britain and the United States—practitioners of what is called analytical philosophy—to be firmly in the pro-truth camp. And yet, as Simon Blackburn observes in “Truth: A Guide” (Oxford; $25), the “brand-name” Anglophone philosophers of the past fifty years—Wittgenstein, W. V. Quine, Thomas Kuhn, Donald Davidson, Richard Rorty—have developed powerful arguments that seem to undermine the commonsense notion of truth as agreement with reality. Indeed, Blackburn says, “almost all the trends in the last generation of serious philosophy lent aid and comfort to the 'anything goes' climate”—the very climate that, Harry Frankfurt argued, has encouraged the proliferation of bullshit.
Blackburn, who is himself a professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, wants to rally the pro-truth forces. But he is also concerned to give the other side its due. In “Truth,” he scrupulously considers the many forms that the case against truth has taken, going back as far as the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras, whose famous saying “Man is the measure of all things” was seized upon by Socrates as an expression of dangerous relativism. In its simplest form, relativism is easy to refute. Take the version of it that Richard Rorty, a philosopher who teaches at Stanford, once lightheartedly offered: “Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.” The problem is that contemporary Americans and Europeans won't let you get away with that characterization of truth; so, by its own standard, it cannot be true. (The late Sidney Morgenbesser's gripe about pragmatism—which, broadly speaking, equates truth with usefulness—was in the same spirit: “The trouble with pragmatism is that it's completely useless.”) Then, there is the often heard complaint that the whole truth will always elude us. Fair enough, Blackburn says, but partial truths can still be perfectly objective. He quotes Clemenceau's riposte to skeptics who asked what future historians would say about the First World War: “They will not say that Belgium invaded Germany.”
If relativism needed a bumper-sticker slogan, it would be Nietzsche's dictum “There are no facts, only interpretations.” Nietzsche was inclined to write as if truth were manufactured rather than discovered, a matter of manipulating others into sharing our beliefs rather than getting those beliefs to “agree with reality.” In another of his formulations, “Truths are illusions that we have forgotten are illusions.” If that's the case, then it is hard to regard the bullshitter, who does not care about truth, as all that villainous. Perhaps, to paraphrase Nietzsche, truth is merely bullshit that has lost its stench. Blackburn has ambivalent feelings about Nietzsche, who, were it not for his “extraordinary acuteness,” would qualify as “the pub bore of philosophy.” Yet, he observes, at the moment Nietzsche is the most influential of the great philosophers, not to mention the “patron saint of postmodernism,” so he must be grappled with. One of Nietzsche's more notorious doctrines is perspectivism-the idea that we are condemned to see the world from a partial and distorted perspective, one defined by our interests and values. Whether this doctrine led Nietzsche to a denial of truth is debatable: in his mature writings, at least, his scorn is directed at the idea of metaphysical truth, not at the scientific and historical varieties. Nevertheless, Blackburn accuses Nietzsche of sloppy thinking. There is no reason, he says, to assume that we are forever trapped in a single perspective, or that different perspectives cannot be ranked according to accuracy. And, if we can move from one perspective to another, what is to prevent us from conjoining our partial views into a reasonably objective picture of the world?
Today, Richard Rorty is probably the most prominent “truth-denier” in the academy. What makes him so formidable is the clarity and eloquence of his case against truth and, by implication, against the Western philosophical tradition. Our minds do not “mirror” the world, he says. The idea that we could somehow stand outside our own skins and survey the relationship between our thoughts and reality is a delusion. Language is an adaptation, and the words we use are tools. There are many competing vocabularies for talking about the world, some more useful than others, given human needs and interests. None of them, however, correspond to the Way Things Really Are. Inquiry is a process of reaching a consensus on the best way of coping with the world, and “truth” is just a compliment we pay to the result. Rorty is fond of quoting the American pragmatist John Dewey to the effect that the search for truth is merely part of the search for happiness. He also likes to cite Nietzsche's observation that truth is a surrogate for God. Asking of someone, “Does he love the truth?,” Rorty thinks, is like asking, “Is he saved?” In our moral reasoning, he says, we no longer worry about whether our conclusions correspond to the divine will; so in the rest of our inquiry we ought to stop worrying about whether our conclusions correspond to a mind-independent reality.
Do Rorty's arguments offer aid and comfort to bullshitters? Blackburn thinks so. Creating a consensus among their peers is something that hardworking laboratory scientists try to do. But it is also what creationists and Holocaust deniers do. Rorty insists that, even though the distinction between truth and consensus is untenable, we can distinguish between “frivolous” and “serious.” Some people are “serious, decent, and trustworthy”; others are “unconversable, incurious, and self-absorbed.” Blackburn thinks that the only way to make this distinction is by reference to the truth: serious people care about it, whereas frivolous people do not. Yet there is another possibility that can be extrapolated from Rorty's writings: serious people care not only about producing agreement but also about justifying their methods for producing agreement. (This is, for example, something that astronomists do but astrologers don't.) That, and not an allegiance to some transcendental notion of truth, is the Rortian criterion that distinguishes serious inquirers from bullshitters.
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Pragmatists and perspectivists are not the only enemies Blackburn considers, though, and much of his book is taken up with contemporary arguments turning on subversive-sounding expressions like “holism,” “incommensurability,” and the “Myth of the Given.” Take the last of these. Our knowledge of the world, it seems reasonable to suppose, is founded on causal interactions between us and the things in it. The molecules and photons impinging on our bodies produce sensations; these sensations give rise to basic beliefs—like “I am seeing red now”—which serve as evidence for higher-level propositions about the world. The tricky part of this scheme is the connection between sensation and belief. As William James wrote, “A sensation is rather like a client who has given his case to a lawyer and then has passively to listen in the courtroom to whatever account of his affairs, pleasant or unpleasant, the lawyer finds it most expedient to give.” The idea that a sensation can enter directly into the process of reasoning has become known as the Myth of the Given. The late philosopher Donald Davidson, whose influence in the Anglophone philosophical world was unsurpassed, put the point succinctly: “Nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief.”
This line of thought, as Blackburn observes, threatens to cut off all contact between knowledge and the world. If beliefs can be checked only against other beliefs, then the sole criterion for a set of beliefs' being true is that they form a coherent web: a picture of knowledge known as holism. And different people interacting with the causal flux that is the world might well find themselves with distinct but equally coherent webs of belief—a possibility known as incommensurability. In such circumstances, who is to say what is truth and what is bullshit? But Blackburn will have none of this. The slogan “Nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief” can't be right, he claims. After all, if “John comes in and gets a good doggy whiff, he acquires a reason for believing that Rover is in the house. If Mary looks in the fridge and sees the butter, she acquires a reason for believing that there is butter in the fridge.” Not so fast, a Davidsonian might reply. Sensations do not come labelled as “doggy whiffs” or “butter sighting”; such descriptions imply a good deal of prior concept formation. What gives John a reason to believe that Rover is in the house is indeed another belief: that what he is smelling falls under the category of “doggy whiff.” Blackburn is obviously right in maintaining that such beliefs arise from causal interaction with the world, and not just from voices in our heads. But justifying those beliefs—determining whether we are doing well or badly in forming them—can be a matter only of squaring them with other beliefs. Derrida was not entirely bullshitting when he said, “Il n'y a pas de hors-texte” (“There is nothing outside the text”).
Although Blackburn concludes that objective truth can and must survive the assaults of its critics, he himself has been forced to diminish that which he would defend. He and his allies, one might think, should be willing to give some sort of answer to the question that “jesting Pilate” put to Jesus: What is truth? The most obvious answer, that truth is correspondence to the facts, founders on the difficulty of saying just what form this “correspondence” is supposed to take, and what “facts” could possibly be other than truths themselves. Indeed, about the only thing that everyone can agree on is that each statement supplies its own conditions for being true. The statement “Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white; the statement “The death penalty is wrong” is true if and only if the death penalty is wrong; and so forth. As far as Blackburn is concerned, any attempt to go beyond this simple observation by trying to mount a general theory of what makes things true or false is wrongheaded. That makes him, to use his own term, a “minimalist” about truth. By reducing truth to something “small and modest,” Blackburn hopes to induce its enemies to call off their siege.
The problem with this strategy is that it leaves us with little to care about. If truth necessarily eludes our theoretical grasp, then how do we know that it has any value, let alone that it is an absolute good? Why should we worry about whether our beliefs deserve to be called “true”? Deep down, we might prefer to believe whatever helps us achieve our ends and enables us to flourish, regardless of whether it is true. We may be happier believing in God even if there is no God. We may be happier thinking that we are really good at what we do even if that is a delusion. (The people with the truest understanding of their own abilities, research suggests, tend to be depressives.)
However one feels about the authority of truth, there is a separate reason for deploring bullshit; namely, that most bullshit is ugly. When it takes the form of political propaganda, management-speak, or P.R., it is riddled with euphemism, cliché, fake folksiness, and high-sounding abstractions. The aesthetic dimension of bullshit is largely ignored in Frankfurt's essay. Yet much of what we call poetry consists of trite or false ideas in sublime language. (Oscar Wilde, in his dialogue “The Decay of Lying,” suggests that the proper aim of art is “the telling of beautiful untrue things.”) Bullshitting can involve an element of artistry; it offers, as Frankfurt acknowledges, opportunities for “improvisation, color, and imaginative play.” When the bullshitting is done from an ulterior motive, like the selling of a product or the manipulation of an electorate, the outcome is likely to be a ghastly abuse of language. When it is done for its own sake, however, something delightful just might result. The paradigm here is Falstaff, whose refusal to be enslaved by the authority of truth is central to his comic genius. Falstaff's merry mixture of philosophy and bullshit is what makes him such a clubbable man, far better company than the dour Wittgenstein. We should by all means be severe in dealing with bullshitters of the political, the commercial, and the academic varieties. But let's not banish plump Jack.
The Remarkable Pattern Of Neuronal Activity In The Brain
Asleep or awake, brain activity is delicately balanced between inactivity and runaway catastrophe, according to a new study
kfc 01/14/2011
In recent years, neuroscientists have noticed a remarkable pattern in the way neurons fire in brain samples. This activity seems to occur in avalanches which vary in size with a distribution that is scale invariant.
Scale invariance is a somewhat counterintuitive phenomenon. It means that the scale at which you examine data makes no difference to the distribution you observe. In other words, the distribution looks exactly the same whether you look at it close up or from far away.
Scientists have seen this kind of behaviour, called criticality, in all kinds of systems: the size of earthquakes, forest fires, epidemics and so on--all have the same kind of distribution.
It occurs in systems that are delicately balanced between inactivity, where the changes are always small, to a state of overactivity where any change tends to be runaway.
But there is a problem with this way of thinking, say Tiago Ribeiro at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil and several pals. While neuroscientists have observed criticality in brain slices and in sleeping and awake animals, nobody has seen it in animals that are free to behave in any way they want.
This raises doubts about the relevance of criticality to brain function, say Ribeiro and co. Perhaps it only occurs in these artificial situations.
To settle the matter, Ribeiro have carried out the first measurements of neuronal avalanche distribution in 14 rats carrying out certain tasks and throughout their full sleep-wake cycle.
Ribeiro say their results show clear evidence of criticality throughout this cycle (although the same rats show a different pattern when anaesthetised).
During the experiments, the team introduced the rats to a new object and measured the pattern of firing before and afterwards. "Exposure to novel objects is a procedure known to increase firing rates, induce plasticity factors and promote dendritic sprouting in the cerebral cortex and hippocampus, leading to memory formation and learning of object identity," they say.
One idea is that this process of learning generates dramatic changes not just in firing rates but also in the distribution of avalanches that this creates. However, Ribeiro and co found no such change in the before and after signals.
Instead, brains seem to be optimized for the encoding of memory patterns across all natural states. "Indeed, the results are compatible with the hypothesis that individual memories are encoded by specific spike avalanches," they say.
That's an interesting result that will help to build consensus that the brain operates in a remarkable, delicately balanced state.
There's good reason to imagine why nature might choose such a state for the brain. Such systems have a richer variety of behaviour than others and would be better able to process data over a wider range of circumstances. "In theory, criticality provides many desirable features for the behaving brain, optimizing computational capabilities, information transmission, sensitivity to sensory stimuli and size of memory repertoires," say Ribeiro and co.
Understanding exactly how and why this criticality occurs will be an important focus of activity in the years to come.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1101.2434 [ http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.2434 ]: Spike Avalanches Exhibit Universal Dynamics Across The Sleep-Wake Cycle
Study: Students slog through college, but don't gain much critical thinking
An unprecedented study that followed several thousand undergraduates through four years of college found that large numbers didn't learn the critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills that are widely assumed to be at the core of a college education.
By Sara Rimer The Hechinger Report Originally published January 18, 2011 at 6:07 PM | Page modified January 19, 2011 at 9:50 AM
NEW YORK — An unprecedented study that followed several thousand undergraduates through four years of college found that large numbers didn't learn the critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills that are widely assumed to be at the core of a college education.
Many of the students graduated without knowing how to sift fact from opinion, make a clear written argument or objectively review conflicting reports of a situation or event, according to New York University sociologist Richard Arum, lead author of the study. The students, for example, couldn't determine the cause of an increase in neighborhood crime or how best to respond without being swayed by emotional testimony and political spin.
Arum, whose book "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses" (University of Chicago Press) comes out this month, followed 2,322 traditional-age students from the fall of 2005 to the spring of 2009 and examined testing data and student surveys at a broad range of 24 U.S. colleges and universities, from the highly selective to the less selective.
Forty-five percent of students made no significant improvement in their critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills during the first two years of college, according to the study. After four years, 36 percent showed no significant gains in these so-called "higher order" thinking skills.
Combining the hours spent studying and in class, students devoted less than a fifth of their time each week to academic pursuits. By contrast, students spent 51 percent of their time — or 85 hours a week — socializing or in extracurricular activities.
The study also showed that students who studied alone made more significant gains in learning than those who studied in groups.
Some educators note that a weakened economy and a need to work while in school may be partly responsible for the reduced focus on academics, while others caution against using the study to blame students for not applying themselves.
Students who majored in the traditional liberal arts — including the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and mathematics — showed significantly greater gains over time than other students in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills.
Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the least gains in learning. However, the authors note that their findings don't preclude the possibility that such students "are developing subject-specific or occupationally relevant skills."
Greater gains in liberal arts subjects are at least partly the result of faculty requiring higher levels of reading and writing, as well as students spending more time studying, the study's authors found. Students who took courses heavy on both reading (more than 40 pages a week) and writing (more than 20 pages in a semester) showed higher rates of learning.
The study used data from the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a 90-minute essay-type test that attempts to measure what liberal arts colleges teach and that more than 400 colleges and universities have used since 2002. The test is voluntary and includes real world problem-solving tasks, such as determining the cause of an airplane crash, that require reading and analyzing documents from newspaper articles to government reports.
New research indicates our intelligence can be improved by mental exercise. Gallery Stock
JUNE 11, 2011
Can we make ourselves smarter? In recent decades, scientists have accumulated increasing evidence that our intelligence, at least as measured by the IQ test, is sharply constrained by genetics. Although estimates vary, most studies place the heritability of intelligence at somewhere between 50% and 80%. It's an uncomfortable fact, but not all brains are created equal.
Which is why there's so much buzz about a forthcoming study that complicates this assumption. Researchers at the University of Michigan found that it's possible to boost a core feature of human intelligence through a simple mental training exercise.
In fact, when several dozen elementary- and middle-school kids from the Detroit area used this exercise for 15 minutes a day, many showed significant gains on a widely used intelligence test. Most impressive, perhaps, is that these gains persisted for three months, even though the children had stopped training.
Scientists typically describe intelligence as consisting of two distinct components: fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence refers to the general ability to solve new problems and recognize unfamiliar patterns. Crystallized intelligence, by contrast, consists of particular kinds of knowledge.
When children learn to count, for instance, they show gains on crystallized intelligence, even as their fluid intelligence remains constant. Scientists have typically regarded fluid intelligence as the aspect of our thinking that is most determined by genetics, since it can't be easily taught.
And yet these schoolchildren showed gains in fluid intelligence roughly equal to five IQ points after one month of training. The IQs of 68.2% of the populace fall within a 30-point range, so this is a significant change. These kids weren't learning facts they would soon forget. They were learning how to think better.
These improvements were triggered by a mental exercise known as the n-back task. The exercise is not fun, even when translated into videogame format. It begins with the presentation of a visual cue. For the kids in the experiment, the cue was the precise location of a cartoon character.
In the next round, the cue is altered—the cartoon character has moved to a new location. The job of the child is to press the space bar whenever the character returns to a spot where it has previously been, and to ignore the other irrelevant locations. As the children advance in the task, these locations move further back in time, forcing them to sort through an increasing amount of information.
How does this tedious exercise boost intelligence? The crucial change concerned the nature of the children's attention. After repeatedly playing the n-back game, the young subjects were better able to focus on the necessary facts. As a result, they squandered less short-term memory on irrelevant details, such as cartoon locations they didn't need to recall. The children "got better at separating the wheat from the chaff across a variety of different tasks," says John Jonides, a senior author on the paper.
There are two important caveats to this research. The first is that not every kid showed such dramatic improvements after training. Initial evidence suggests that children who failed to increase their fluid intelligence found the exercise too difficult or boring and thus didn't fully engage with the training.
The second caveat concerns the relevance of the mental improvement. Scott Barry Kaufman, a cognitive scientist at New York University who was not involved in the research, believes that while this study has "incredibly important potential implications," it's unclear if the children's performance changed on anything besides an abstract intelligence test.
Still, this research promises to change longstanding beliefs about the nature of intelligence. Our IQ scores may be bounded by our genes, but it looks as if it's possible to significantly increase measured intelligence after only a few hours of training. "Intelligence is a lot like height," Prof. Jonides says. "We know that how tall you are is largely determined by the height of your parents. But we also know that better nutrition can make everyone a lot taller. Perhaps the n-back task is just an ideal form of mental nutrition."
Although we can't choose the brain we've been given, we can choose what that brain is paying attention to. All it takes is a little practice.
Scientists discover how the brain encodes memories at a cellular level
This is a neuron. (Photo Credit: Sourav Banerjee)
Posted On: December 23, 2009 - 5:30pm
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have made a major discovery in how the brain encodes memories. The finding, published in the December 24 issue of the journal Neuron, could eventually lead to the development of new drugs to aid memory.
The team of scientists is the first to uncover a central process in encoding memories that occurs at the level of the synapse, where neurons connect with each other.
"When we learn new things, when we store memories, there are a number of things that have to happen," said senior author Kenneth S. Kosik, co-director and Harriman Chair in Neuroscience Research, at UCSB's Neuroscience Research Institute. Kosik is a leading researcher in the area of Alzheimer's disease.
"One of the most important processes is that the synapses –– which cement those memories into place –– have to be strengthened," said Kosik. "In strengthening a synapse you build a connection, and certain synapses are encoding a memory. Those synapses have to be strengthened so that memory is in place and stays there. Strengthening synapses is a very important part of learning. What we have found appears to be one part of how that happens."
Part of strengthening a synapse involves making new proteins. Those proteins build the synapse and make it stronger. Just like with exercise, when new proteins must build up muscle mass, synapses must also make more protein when recording memories. In this research, the regulation and control of that process was uncovered.
The production of new proteins can only occur when the RNA that will make the required proteins is turned on. Until then, the RNA is "locked up" by a silencing molecule, which is a micro RNA. The RNA and micro RNA are part of a package that includes several other proteins.
"When something comes into your brain –– a thought, some sort of stimulus, you see something interesting, you hear some music –– synapses get activated," said Kosik. "What happens next is really interesting, but to follow the pathway our experiments moved to cultured neurons. When synapses got activated, one of the proteins wrapped around that silencing complex gets degraded."
When the signal comes in, the wrapping protein degrades or gets fragmented. Then the RNA is suddenly free to synthesize a new protein.
"One reason why this is interesting is that scientists have been perplexed for some time as to why, when synapses are strengthened, you need to have proteins degrade and also make new proteins," said Kosik. "You have the degradation of proteins going on side by side with the synthesis of new proteins. So we have now resolved this paradox. We show that protein degradation and synthesis go hand in hand. The degradation permits the synthesis to occur. That's the elegant scientific finding that comes out of this."
The scientists were able to see some of the specific proteins that are involved in synthesis. Two of these –– CaM Kinase and Lypla –– are identified in the paper.
One of the approaches used by the scientists in the experiment was to take live neuron cells from rats and look at them under a high-resolution microscope. The team was able to see the synapses and the places where proteins are being made.
This article appears in other versions of the February 27, 2017 issue with the headline “That’s What You Think”.
The vaunted human capacity for reason may have more to do with winning arguments than with thinking straight. Illustration by Gérard DuBois
New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.
By Elizabeth Kolbert February 27, 2017 Issue
In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones.
Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times. Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note in only ten instances.
As is often the case with psychological studies, the whole setup was a put-on. Though half the notes were indeed genuine—they’d been obtained from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office—the scores were fictitious. The students who’d been told they were almost always right were, on average, no more discerning than those who had been told they were mostly wrong.
In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. The students were told that the real point of the experiment was to gauge their responses to thinking they were right or wrong. (This, it turned out, was also a deception.) Finally, the students were asked to estimate how many suicide notes they had actually categorized correctly, and how many they thought an average student would get right. At this point, something curious happened. The students in the high-score group said that they thought they had, in fact, done quite well—significantly better than the average student—even though, as they’d just been told, they had zero grounds for believing this. Conversely, those who’d been assigned to the low-score group said that they thought they had done significantly worse than the average student—a conclusion that was equally unfounded.
“Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.”
A few years later, a new set of Stanford students was recruited for a related study. The students were handed packets of information about a pair of firefighters, Frank K. and George H. Frank’s bio noted that, among other things, he had a baby daughter and he liked to scuba dive. George had a small son and played golf. The packets also included the men’s responses on what the researchers called the Risky-Conservative Choice Test. According to one version of the packet, Frank was a successful firefighter who, on the test, almost always went with the safest option. In the other version, Frank also chose the safest option, but he was a lousy firefighter who’d been put “on report” by his supervisors several times. Once again, midway through the study, the students were informed that they’d been misled, and that the information they’d received was entirely fictitious. The students were then asked to describe their own beliefs. What sort of attitude toward risk did they think a successful firefighter would have? The students who’d received the first packet thought that he would avoid it. The students in the second group thought he’d embrace it.
Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,” the researchers noted. In this case, the failure was “particularly impressive,” since two data points would never have been enough information to generalize from.
The Stanford studies became famous. Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can’t think straight was shocking. It isn’t any longer. Thousands of subsequent experiments have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding. As everyone who’s followed the research—or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today—knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?
Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber’s argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.
“Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves,” Mercier and Sperber write. Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove shrewd when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective.
Consider what’s become known as “confirmation bias,” the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them. Of the many forms of faulty thinking that have been identified, confirmation bias is among the best catalogued; it’s the subject of entire textbooks’ worth of experiments. One of the most famous of these was conducted, again, at Stanford. For this experiment, researchers rounded up a group of students who had opposing opinions about capital punishment. Half the students were in favor of it and thought that it deterred crime; the other half were against it and thought that it had no effect on crime.
The students were asked to respond to two studies. One provided data in support of the deterrence argument, and the other provided data that called it into question. Both studies—you guessed it—were made up, and had been designed to present what were, objectively speaking, equally compelling statistics. The students who had originally supported capital punishment rated the pro-deterrence data highly credible and the anti-deterrence data unconvincing; the students who’d originally opposed capital punishment did the reverse. At the end of the experiment, the students were asked once again about their views. Those who’d started out pro-capital punishment were now even more in favor of it; those who’d opposed it were even more hostile.
If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias. Imagine, Mercier and Sperber suggest, a mouse that thinks the way we do. Such a mouse, “bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around,” would soon be dinner. To the extent that confirmation bias leads people to dismiss evidence of new or underappreciated threats—the human equivalent of the cat around the corner—it’s a trait that should have been selected against. The fact that both we and it survive, Mercier and Sperber argue, proves that it must have some adaptive function, and that function, they maintain, is related to our “hypersociability.”
Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.” Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.
A recent experiment performed by Mercier and some European colleagues neatly demonstrates this asymmetry. Participants were asked to answer a series of simple reasoning problems. They were then asked to explain their responses, and were given a chance to modify them if they identified mistakes. The majority were satisfied with their original choices; fewer than fifteen per cent changed their minds in step two.
In step three, participants were shown one of the same problems, along with their answer and the answer of another participant, who’d come to a different conclusion. Once again, they were given the chance to change their responses. But a trick had been played: the answers presented to them as someone else’s were actually their own, and vice versa. About half the participants realized what was going on. Among the other half, suddenly people became a lot more critical. Nearly sixty per cent now rejected the responses that they’d earlier been satisfied with.
This lopsidedness, according to Mercier and Sperber, reflects the task that reason evolved to perform, which is to prevent us from getting screwed by the other members of our group. Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments.
Among the many, many issues our forebears didn’t worry about were the deterrent effects of capital punishment and the ideal attributes of a firefighter. Nor did they have to contend with fabricated studies, or fake news, or Twitter. It’s no wonder, then, that today reason often seems to fail us. As Mercier and Sperber write, “This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.”
***
Steven Sloman, a professor at Brown, and Philip Fernbach, a professor at the University of Colorado, are also cognitive scientists. They, too, believe sociability is the key to how the human mind functions or, perhaps more pertinently, malfunctions. They begin their book, “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone [ https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Illusion-Never-Think-Alone/dp/039918435X ]” (Riverhead), with a look at toilets.
Virtually everyone in the United States, and indeed throughout the developed world, is familiar with toilets. A typical flush toilet has a ceramic bowl filled with water. When the handle is depressed, or the button pushed, the water—and everything that’s been deposited in it—gets sucked into a pipe and from there into the sewage system. But how does this actually happen?
In a study conducted at Yale, graduate students were asked to rate their understanding of everyday devices, including toilets, zippers, and cylinder locks. They were then asked to write detailed, step-by-step explanations of how the devices work, and to rate their understanding again. Apparently, the effort revealed to the students their own ignorance, because their self-assessments dropped. (Toilets, it turns out, are more complicated than they appear.)
Sloman and Fernbach see this effect, which they call the “illusion of explanatory depth,” just about everywhere. People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people. In the case of my toilet, someone else designed it so that I can operate it easily. This is something humans are very good at. We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins.
“One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group.
This borderlessness, or, if you prefer, confusion, is also crucial to what we consider progress. As people invented new tools for new ways of living, they simultaneously created new realms of ignorance; if everyone had insisted on, say, mastering the principles of metalworking before picking up a knife, the Bronze Age wouldn’t have amounted to much. When it comes to new technologies, incomplete understanding is empowering.
Where it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain. It’s one thing for me to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I’m talking about. Sloman and Fernbach cite a survey conducted in 2014, not long after Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Respondents were asked how they thought the U.S. should react, and also whether they could identify Ukraine on a map. The farther off base they were about the geography, the more likely they were to favor military intervention. (Respondents were so unsure of Ukraine’s location that the median guess was wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.)
Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results. “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.
“This is how a community of knowledge can become dangerous,” Sloman and Fernbach observe. The two have performed their own version of the toilet experiment, substituting public policy for household gadgets. In a study conducted in 2012, they asked people for their stance on questions like: Should there be a single-payer health-care system? Or merit-based pay for teachers? Participants were asked to rate their positions depending on how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the proposals. Next, they were instructed to explain, in as much detail as they could, the impacts of implementing each one. Most people at this point ran into trouble. Asked once again to rate their views, they ratcheted down the intensity, so that they either agreed or disagreed less vehemently.
Sloman and Fernbach see in this result a little candle for a dark world. If we—or our friends or the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views. This, they write, “may be the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes.”
***
One way to look at science is as a system that corrects for people’s natural inclinations. In a well-run laboratory, there’s no room for myside bias; the results have to be reproducible in other laboratories, by researchers who have no motive to confirm them. And this, it could be argued, is why the system has proved so successful. At any given moment, a field may be dominated by squabbles, but, in the end, the methodology prevails. Science moves forward, even as we remain stuck in place.
In “Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us [ https://www.amazon.com/Denying-Grave-Ignore-Facts-That/dp/0199396604 ]” (Oxford), Jack Gorman, a psychiatrist, and his daughter, Sara Gorman, a public-health specialist, probe the gap between what science tells us and what we tell ourselves. Their concern is with those persistent beliefs which are not just demonstrably false but also potentially deadly, like the conviction that vaccines are hazardous. Of course, what’s hazardous is not being vaccinated; that’s why vaccines were created in the first place. “Immunization is one of the triumphs of modern medicine,” the Gormans note. But no matter how many scientific studies conclude that vaccines are safe, and that there’s no link between immunizations and autism, anti-vaxxers remain unmoved. (They can now count on their side—sort of—Donald Trump, who has said that, although he and his wife had their son, Barron, vaccinated, they refused to do so on the timetable recommended by pediatricians.)
The Gormans, too, argue that ways of thinking that now seem self-destructive must at some point have been adaptive. And they, too, dedicate many pages to confirmation bias, which, they claim, has a physiological component. They cite research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs. “It feels good to ‘stick to our guns’ even if we are wrong,” they observe.
The Gormans don’t just want to catalogue the ways we go wrong; they want to correct for them. There must be some way, they maintain, to convince people that vaccines are good for kids, and handguns are dangerous. (Another widespread but statistically insupportable belief they’d like to discredit is that owning a gun makes you safer.) But here they encounter the very problems they have enumerated. Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science. “The challenge that remains,” they write toward the end of their book, “is to figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief.”
“The Enigma of Reason,” “The Knowledge Illusion,” and “Denying to the Grave” were all written before the November election. And yet they anticipate Kellyanne Conway and the rise of “alternative facts.” These days, it can feel as if the entire country has been given over to a vast psychological experiment being run either by no one or by Steve Bannon. Rational agents would be able to think their way to a solution. But, on this matter, the literature is not reassuring.
Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.”
It’s not just supporters of President Donald Trump who are at risk.
By Erin Schumaker 02/24/2017 12:10 pm ET
You don’t have to be a Lady Gaga [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/topic/lady-gaga ] fan to disagree with the Facebook video Alex Jones posted before the pop star’s Super Bowl performance this month.
“She’s reportedly going to be on top of the Super Bowl, they’re saying she may cancel doing this, on top of the stadium, ruling over everyone with drones everywhere, surveilling them in a big swarm,” says conspiracy theorist Jones in the video. “To just condition them that I am the Goddess of Satan, ruling over you with the rise of the robots in a ritual of lesser magic.”
While this sounds ridiculous to the outside viewer, devotees will see this as yet another example of the powerful elite conspiring to overthrow the government.
It works like this: You feel socially excluded and begin believing conspiracy theories. Endorsing those theories, unsurprisingly, prompts your family and friends to exclude you even more. You’re left out again and again, so you double down on your conspiratorial beliefs.
The final stage of the cycle: You seek out a like-minded community that accepts and reinforces your conspiratorial beliefs.
“At that point they become unchangeable,” Study author Alin Coman, assistant professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, told The Huffington Post.
“Social exclusion leads to search for meaning,” Coman continued. “We believe that this search for meaning ‘overshoots’ in a way that makes people assign meaning to situations that are highly ambiguous and meaningless.”
Part one of the study included 119 participants recruited using Amazon Mechanical Turk. Participants wrote about a unpleasant experience they’d had with a close friend recently, then rated how socially excluded they felt after the event. Next, participants filled out a meaning in life questionaire, which included statements such as “I have discovered a satisfying life purpose.”
Finally, participants assessed how much they believed in the following conspiracy theories:
• Pharmaceutical companies withhold cures for financial reasons.
• Governments use messages below the level of awareness to influence people’s decisions.
• Events in the Bermuda Triangle constitute evidence of paranormal activity.
Part two of the study included 102 Princeton University students aged, on average, 20. The second part of the study mirrored the first, also requiring participants to write descriptions of themselves and the people they wanted to be, in addition to the exercises above.
Researchers concluded that when the participants felt excluded, they were more likely to endorse conspiracy theories.
And intelligent people aren’t immune to conspiracy theories, either.
Notably, many of the participants in Coman’s study were Ivy League students, a sharp contrast to the popular perception that conspiracy theorists are an uneducated lot.
“Even highly educated affluent individuals can fall prey to conspiracy theories and superstitious beliefs,” Coman said. “It can happen to anyone.”
And while the new study didn’t specifically address today’s post-factual political climate, Coman did have a few suggestions for disrupting the cycle if a friend or family member falls prey to a conspiracy.
First-line defenses include fostering inclusive environments and disputing unproven facts and conspiracies in group discussions settings.
You can also educate yourself about your own biases and take a critical look at your media consumption, experts believe. If you agree with every political post in your social media feed, as well as all of the pundits in the news shows you watch, you’re setting yourself up for confirmation bias [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-robert-johnson/the-dangers-of-confirmati_b_12960958.html ].
Confirmation bias, or seeking out information that supports your previously established beliefs, isn’t just lazy. It’s dangerous.
There’s also value in interacting with people on social media, and in the real world, who you disagree with. “Make an effort to connect and interact with individuals who hold dissenting views,” Coman said. “A society in which very few members feel excluded is probably more resistant to the propagation of misinformation.”
President Trump in the Oval Office this week. Doug Mills/The New York Times
By Roger Cohen FEB. 10, 2017
Fact-based journalism is a ridiculous, tautological phrase. It’s like talking about oxygen-based human life. There is no other kind. Facts are journalism’s foundation; the pursuit of them, without fear or favor, is its main objective.
But in this time of President Trump’s almost daily “fake news” accusations against The New York Times, and of his counselor Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts,” and of untruths seeping like a plague from the highest office in the land, there’s increasing talk of “real” or “fact-based” journalism.
That’s ominous. Fact-based as opposed to what other type? To state the obvious, fake news websites fed by kids in Macedonia to make a buck are not journalism. These sites use fabricated stuff in journalism’s garb to further political ends.
There’s a targeted “Gaslight” attack on journalists designed to make them doubt their sanity. It’s emanating from the White House and aims to drag everyone down the rabbit hole where 2+2=5.
Velocity trumps veracity. That is the puzzle and the menace of our age.
Speed and disruption have more psychological impact than truth and science. They shape the discourse. The debunking of a fake news story is seldom as powerful as the story itself. Trump says “X.” Uproar! Hordes of journalists scurry to disprove “X.” He moves on, never to mention it again, or claims that he did not say it, or insists that what he really said was “Y.”
People begin to wonder: Am I imagining this? They feel that some infernal mechanism has taken hold and is dragging them toward an abyss. The president is a reference point; if he lies, lying seeps deep into the culture. Americans start to ask: Will we ever be able to dislodge these people from power? What are they capable of?
Simon Schama, the British historian, recently tweeted [ https://twitter.com/simon_schama/status/827515099770396672 ]: “Indifference about the distinction between truth and lies is the precondition of fascism. When truth perishes so does freedom.”
The enormity of the defiling of the White House in just three weeks is staggering. For decades the world’s security was undergirded by America’s word. The words that issued from the Oval Office were solemn. It was on America’s word, as expressed by the president, that the European continent and allies like Japan built their postwar security.
Now the words that fall from Trump’s pursed lips or, often misspelled, onto his Twitter feed are trite or false or meaningless. He’s angry with Nordstrom, for heaven’s sake, because the department store chain dropped his daughter Ivanka’s clothing line! This is the concern of the leader of the free world.
Unpresidented!
I was struck by how Paul Horner, who runs a big Facebook fake-news operation, described our times in The Washington Post [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11/17/facebook-fake-news-writer-i-think-donald-trump-is-in-the-white-house-because-of-me/ ]: “Honestly people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
We’ve never seen anything like it because when hundreds of millions of Americans are connected, anyone, clueless or not, can disseminate what they like with a click.
Horner came up, during the campaign, with the fake news story that a protester at a Trump rally had been paid $3,500. It went viral. We’ve had fake news accounts of how Hillary Clinton paid $62 million to Beyoncé and Jay Z to perform in Cleveland, and how Khizr Khan, the father of the Muslim American officer killed in Iraq, was an agent of the Muslim Brotherhood. Fake news — BREAKING! SHOCKING! — swayed the election.
Now we have President Trump suggesting that the real fake news is his negative polls — along with CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post and any other news organizations that are doing their jobs: holding his authority to account and bearing witness to his acts. Stephen Bannon, Trump’s man of the shadows, thinks the media should “keep its mouth shut [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/business/media/stephen-bannon-trump-news-media.html ].” We won’t.
Sometimes I try to imagine what Trump’s Reichstag fire moment might be. In February 1933, a few weeks after Hitler became chancellor, fire engulfed the parliament in Berlin — an act of arson whose origin is still unclear. A recent New Yorker article by George Prochnik [ http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/when-its-too-late-to-stop-fascism-according-to-stefan-zweig ] quoted the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig on Hitler’s savage reaction: “At one blow all of justice in Germany was smashed.”
From a president who loathes the press, who insults the judiciary, who has no time for American ideals of liberty or democracy, and whose predilection for violence is evident, what would be the reaction to a Reichstag fire in American guise — say a major act of terrorism?
We can only shudder at the thought.
Facts matter. The federal judiciary is pushing back. The administration is leaking. Journalism (no qualifier needed) has never been more important. Truth has not yet perished, but to deny that it is under siege would be to invite disaster.
Remarks by President Trump at the Conservative Political Action Conference
Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center February 24, 2017
10:23 A.M. EST
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, everybody. So great to be with you. Thank you. (Applause.)
Great to be back at CPAC. (Applause.) The place I have really --
AUDIENCE MEMBER: We love you!
THE PRESIDENT: I love this place. Love you people. (Applause.) So thank you. Thank you very much.
First of all, I want to thank Matt Schlapp, and his very, very incredible wife and boss, Mercedes, who have been fantastic friends and supporters, and so great. When I watch them on television defending me, nobody has a chance. So, I want to thank Matt and Mercedes.
And when Matt called and asked, I said, absolutely, I'll be there with you. I mean, the real reason I said it -- I didn’t want him to go against me because that one you can’t beat. So I said, absolutely. And it really is an honor to be here.
I wouldn't miss a chance to talk to my friends. These are my friends. (Applause.) And we’ll see you again next year and the year after that, and I’ll be doing this with CPAC whenever I can, and I’ll make sure that we’re here a lot.
You know, if you remember, my first major speech -- sit down, everybody. Come on. (Applause.) You know, the dishonest media, they’ll say he didn’t get a standing ovation. You know why? No, you know why? Because everybody stood and nobody sat, so they will say he never got a standing ovation, right? (Applause.) They are the worst.
AUDIENCE: USA! USA! USA! (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: So -- sit down. (Laughter.) Donald Trump did not get a standing ovation. They leave out the part, they never sat down. They leave that out. So I just want to thank -- but you know, my first major speech was at CPAC. And probably five or six years ago -- first major political speech. And you were there.
And it was -- I loved it. I love the people. I love the commotion. And then they did these polls where I went through the roof, and I wasn’t even running, right? But it gave me an idea, and I got a little bit concerned when I saw what was happening in the country, and I said, let’s go do it. So it was very exciting. I walked the stage on CPAC. I’ll never forget it, really. I had very little notes, and even less preparation. So when you have practically no notes and no preparation, and then you leave and everybody was thrilled, I said, I think I like this business.
I would have come last year, but I was worried that I would be, at that time, too controversial. We wanted border security. We wanted very, very strong military. We wanted all of the things that we’re going to get, and people consider that controversial. But you didn’t consider it controversial. (Applause.)
So I’ve been with CPAC for a long time. All of these years, we've been together. And now you finally have a president. Finally. Took you a long time. Took you a long time. (Applause.)
And it’s patriots like you that made it happen, believe me -- believe me. You did it because you love your country, because you want a better future for your children, and because you want to make America great again. (Applause.)
The media didn't think we would win.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: They knew. (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: The pundits -- you’re right. They had an idea. The pundits didn't think we would win. The consultants that suck up all that money. Oh, they suck it up, they’re so good. (Laughter.) They’re not good at politics, but they’re really good at sucking up people’s money. Especially my opponent’s, because I kept them down to a minimum.
THE PRESIDENT: But the consultants didn’t think we would win. But they all underestimated the power of the people -- you. And the people proved them totally wrong. Never -- and this is so true, and this is what’s been happening -- never underestimate the people. Never. I don’t think it will ever happen again.
And I want you all to know that we are fighting the fake news. It’s fake -- phony, fake. (Applause.) A few days ago, I called the fake news “the enemy of the people” -- and they are. They are the enemy of the people. Because they have no sources, they just make them up when there are none. I saw one story recently where they said nine people have confirmed. There are no nine people. I don’t believe there was one or two people. Nine people. And I said, give me a break. Because I know the people. I know who they talked to. There were no nine people. But they say, nine people, and somebody reads it and they think, oh, nine people. They have nine sources. They make up sources.
They are very dishonest people. In fact, in covering my comments, the dishonest media did not explain that I called the fake news the enemy of the people -- the fake news. They dropped off the word “fake.” And all of the sudden, the story became, the media is the enemy. They take the word “fake” out, and now I’m saying, oh, no, this is no good. But that’s the way they are. So I’m not against the media. I’m not against the press. I don’t mind bad stories if I deserve them. And I tell you, I love good stories, but we won’t -- (laughter) -- I don’t get too many of them.
But I am only against the fake news media or press -- fake, fake. They have to leave that word. I'm against the people that make up stories and make up sources. They shouldn’t be allowed to use sources unless they use somebody’s name. Let their name be put out there. Let their name be put out. (Applause.) A source says that Donald Trump is a horrible, horrible human being. Let them say it to my face. (Applause.) Let there be no more sources.
And remember this -- and in not all in all cases. I mean, I had a story written yesterday about me in Reuters by a very honorable man. It was a very fair story. There are some great reporters around. They’re talented, they’re honest as the day is long. They’re great. But there are some terrible, dishonest people, and they do a tremendous disservice to our country and to our people. A tremendous disservice. They are very dishonest people, and they shouldn’t use sources. They should put the name of the person. You will see stories dry up like you’ve never seen before.
So you have no idea how bad it is, because if you are not part of the story -- and I put myself in your position sometimes, because many of you, you’re not part of the story, and if you’re not part of the story, then you sort of know. If you are part of the story, you know what they’re saying is true or not. So when they make it up, and they make up something else, and you saw that before the election -- polls, polls. The polls. They come out with these polls, and everybody was so surprised. Actually, a couple of polls got it right. I must say, Los Angeles Times did a great job. Shocking, because -- you know. They did a great job. (Applause.) And we had a couple of others that were right.
But generally speaking, I mean, I can tell you the network. Somebody said a poll came out. And I say, what network is it? And they’ll say, a certain -- let’s not even mention names right? Should we?
Well, you have a lot of them. Look, the Clinton new network is one. (Applause.) Totally. Take a look. Honestly. Take a look at their polls over the last two years. Now, you would think they would fire the pollster, right? After years and years of getting battered. But I don’t -- I mean, who knows, maybe they’re just bad at polling. Or maybe they’re not legit. But it’s one or the other. Look at how inaccurate -- look at CBS, look at ABC also. Look at NBC. Take a look at some of these polls. They’re so bad, so inaccurate.
And what that does is it creates a false narrative. It creates like this narrative that’s just like we’re not going to win, and people say, "Oh, I love Trump, but you know I’m not feeling great today. He can’t win. So I won’t go and vote. I won’t go and vote." It creates a whole false deal and we have to fight it folks. We have to fight it. They’re very smart, they’re very cunning, and they’re very dishonest.
So just to conclude -- I mean, it’s a very sensitive topic, and they get upset when we expose their false stories. They say that we can't criticize their dishonest coverage because of the First Amendment. You know, they always bring up the First Amendment. (Laughter.) And I love the First Amendment. Nobody loves it better than me. Nobody. (Applause.) I mean, who uses it more than I do?
But the First Amendment gives all of us -- it gives it to me, it gives it to you, it gives all Americans -- the right to speak our minds freely. It gives you the right and me the right to criticize fake news, and criticize it strongly. (Applause.)
And many of these groups are part of the large media corporations that have their own agenda, and it’s not your agenda, and it’s not the country’s agenda. It’s their own agenda. They have a professional obligation as members of the press to report honestly. But as you saw throughout the entire campaign, and even now, the fake news doesn’t tell the truth. Doesn’t tell the truth.
So just in finishing, I say it doesn’t represent the people. It never will represent the people. And we’re going to do something about it, because we have to go out and we have to speak our minds, and we have to be honest. Our victory was a win like nobody has ever seen before. (Applause.) And I’m here fighting for you, and I will continue to fight for you.
The victory and the win were something that really was dedicated to a country and people that believe in freedom, security, and the rule of law. (Applause.) Our victory was a victory and a win for conservative values. (Applause.) And our victory was a win for everyone who believes it’s time to stand up for America, to stand up for the American worker, and to stand up for the American flag. (Applause.) Yeah, there we should stand up. Come on. (Applause.) There we should stand up. Okay. (Applause.)
And, by the way, we love our flag. By the way, you folks are in here, the place is packed -- there are lines that go back six blocks. And I tell you that because you won’t read about it, okay? (Laughter.) But there are lines that go back six blocks. There is such love in this country for everything we stand for. You saw that on Election Day. (Applause.) And you’re going to see it more and more. (Applause.)
So we’re all part of this very historic movement, a movement the likes of which, actually, the world has never seen before. There’s never been anything like this. There’s been some movements, but there’s never been anything like this. There’s been some movements that petered out, like Bernie -- petered out. (Laughter.) But it was a little rigged against him -- superdelegate, superdelegate. She had so many delegates before the thing even started. I actually said to my people, how does that happen? (Laughter.) Not that I’m a fan of Bernie, but a lot of Bernie people voted for Trump. You know why? Because he’s right on one issue: Trade. He was right about trade.
Our country is being absolutely devastated with bad trade deals. So he was right about that, but we’ve got a lot of Bernie support. So actually, I like Bernie, okay? I like Bernie. (Applause.)
But I’m here today to tell you what this movement means for the future of the Republican Party and for the future of America.
First, we need to define what this great, great unprecedented movement is, and what it actually represents. The core conviction of our movement is that we are a nation that put and will put its own citizens first. (Applause.) For too long we’ve traded away our jobs to other countries -- so terrible. We’ve defended other nations’ borders while leaving ours wide open; anybody can come in.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: A wall!
THE PRESIDENT: Oh, we’re going to build the wall, don’t worry about it. We’re building the wall. We’re building the wall. In fact, it’s going to start soon, way ahead of schedule, way ahead of schedule. (Applause.) Way, way, way ahead of schedule. It’s going to start very soon. General Kelly, by the way, has done a fantastic job. Fantastic job he’s done. (Applause.)
And remember, we are getting the bad ones out. These are bad dudes. We’re getting the bad ones out, okay? We’re getting the bad -- if you watch these people it’s like, oh, gee, that’s so sad. We’re getting bad people out of this country, people that shouldn’t be -- whether it’s drugs or murder or other things. We’re getting bad ones out. Those are the ones that go first, and I said it from day one. Basically all I’ve done is keep my promise. (Applause.)
We’ve spent trillions of dollars overseas while allowing our own infrastructure to fall into total disrepair and decay. In the Middle East, we’ve spent as of four weeks ago $6 trillion. Think of it. And, by the way, the Middle East is in what -- I mean, it’s not even close -- it’s in much worse shape than it was 15 years ago. If our Presidents would have gone to the beach for 15 years, we would be in much better shape than we are right now, that I can tell you. (Applause.) Yeah, a hell of a lot better. We could have rebuilt our country three times with that money.
This is the situation that I inherited. I inherited a mess, believe me. We also inherited a failed health care law that threatens our medical system with absolute and total catastrophe.
Now, I’ve been watching -- and nobody says it -- but Obamacare doesn’t work, folks. I mean, I could say -- I could talk -- it doesn’t work. And now people are starting to develop a little warm heart, but the people that you’re watching, they’re not you. They’re largely -- many of them are the side that lost. You know, they lost the election. It’s like, how many elections do we have to have? They lost the election. (Laughter.)
But I always say, Obamacare doesn’t work. And these same people two years, and a year ago, were complaining about Obamacare. And the bottom line: We’re changing it. We’re going to make it much better. We’re going to make it less expensive. We’re going to make it much better. Obamacare covers very few people.
And remember, deduct from the number all of the people that had great health care that they loved, that was taken away from them; was taken away from them. (Applause.) Millions of people were very happy with their health care. They had their doctor, they had their plan. Remember the lie -- 28 times. “You can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan” -- over and over and over again you heard it.
So we’re going to repeal and replace Obamacare. (Applause.) And I tell Paul Ryan and all of the folks that we’re working with very hard -- Dr. Tom Price, very talented guy -- but I tell them from a purely political standpoint, the single-best thing we can do is nothing. Let it implode completely -- it’s already imploding. You see the carriers are all leaving. I mean, it’s a disaster.
But two years don’t do anything. The Democrats will come to us and beg for help. They’ll beg, and it’s their problem. But it’s not the right thing to do for the American people. It’s not the right thing to do. (Applause.)
We inherited a national debt that has doubled in eight years. Think of it -- $20 trillion. It’s doubled. And we inherited a foreign policy marked by one disaster after another. We don’t win anymore. When was the last time we won? Did we win a war? Do we win anything? Do we win anything? We’re going to win. We’re going to win big, folks. We’re going to start winning again, believe me. We’re going to win. (Applause.)
AUDIENCE: USA! USA! USA!
THE PRESIDENT: But we’re taking a firm, bold and decisive measure -- we have to -- to turn things around. The era of empty talk is over. It’s over. (Applause.) Now is the time for action. So let me tell you about the actions that we’re taking right now to deliver on our promise to the American people, and on my promise to make America great again.
We’ve taken swift and strong action to secure the southern border of the United States and to begin the construction of great, great border wall. (Applause.) And with the help of our great border police, with the help of ICE, with the help of General Kelly and all of the people that are so passionate about this -- our Border Patrol, I’ll tell you what they do. They came and endorsed me, ICE came and endorsed me. They never endorsed a presidential candidate before. They might not even be allowed to. (Laughter.) But they were disgusted with what they saw.
And we’ll stop it. We’ll stop the drugs from pouring into our nation and poisoning our youth. (Applause.) Pouring in, pouring in. We get the drugs, they get the money. We get the problems, they get the cash. No good, no good. Going to stop.
By stopping the flow of illegal immigration, we will save countless tax dollars, and that's so important because the tax -- the dollars that we're losing are beyond anything that you can imagine. And the tax dollars that can be used to rebuild struggling American communities -- including our inner cities. (Applause.)
We are also going to save countless American lives. As we speak today, immigration officers are finding the gang members, the drug dealers and the criminal aliens, and throwing them the hell out of our country. (Applause.) And we will not let them back in. They're not coming back in, folks. (Applause.) If they do, they're going to have bigger problems than they ever dreamt of.
I'm also working with the Department of Justice to begin reducing violent crime. I mean, can you believe what's happening in Chicago, as an example? Two days ago, seven people were shot --
AUDIENCE MEMBER: It's Iraq!
THE PRESIDENT: -- and, I believe, killed. Seven people. Seven people. Chicago, a great American city. Seven people shot and killed.
We will support the incredible men and women of law enforcement. (Applause.) Thank you. And thank them. I've also followed through on my campaign promise and withdrawn America from the Trans-Pacific Partnership -- (applause) -- so that we can protect our economic freedom. And we are going to make trade deals, but we're going to do one-on-one, one-on-one. And if they misbehave, we terminate the deal. And then they'll come back, and we'll make a better deal. (Applause.) None of these big quagmire deals that are a disaster. Just take a look -- by the way, take a look at NAFTA, one of the worst deals ever made by any country having to do with economic development. It's economic undevelopment as far as our country is concerned.
We're preparing to repeal and replace the disaster known as Obamacare. (Applause.) We're going to save Americans from this crisis, and give them the access to the quality healthcare they need and deserve.
We have authorized the construction, one day, of the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines. (Applause.) And issued a new rule. This took place while I was getting ready to sign. I said, who makes the pipes for the pipeline? Well, sir, it comes from all over the world, isn't that wonderful? I said, nope, it comes from the United States or we're not building one. (Applause.) American steel. If they want a pipeline in the United States, they're going to use pipe that's made in the United States, do we agree? (Applause.)
But can you imagine -- I told this story the other day -- can you imagine the gentleman -- never met him, don't even know the name of his company. I actually sort of know it, but I want to get it exactly correct. Big, big, powerful company. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the pipeline -- same thing with the Dakota, different place. They got their approvals, everything, in the case of Dakota, then all of a sudden they couldn't connect it because they had people protesting that never showed up before.
But with the Keystone -- so they spend hundreds of millions of dollars with bloodsucker consultants, you know, sucking the blood out of the company -- "don't worry, I use them all my life; okay, don't worry, we're going to get it approved, I'm connected, I'm a lobbyist, don't worry." Bottom line, Obama didn't sign it. Could be 42,000 jobs -- somewhere around there. A lot of jobs. Didn't sign it. But can you imagine -- he gave up. A year ago it was dead.
Now he's doing nothing, calling his wife, "Hello, darling, I'm a little bored, you know that pipeline?" That has killed us, that has killed our company. Knock, knock. "Mr. so-and-so, the Keystone pipeline, sir, out of nowhere, has just been approved." (Applause.) Now, can you imagine the expression? And you know the sad part? The same bloodsucking consultants that hit him for all the money and failed? They're now going to go back to him and say, didn't we do a great job? We want more money, right, because that's the way the system works. A little bit off, but that's the way the system works.
We're preparing bold action to lift the restrictions on American energy, including shale, oil, natural gas, and beautiful clean coal, and we're going to put our miners back to work. (Applause.) Miners are going back to work. (Applause.) Miners are going back to work, folks. Sorry to tell you that, but they're going back to work.
We have begun a historic program to reduce the regulations that are crushing our economy -- crushing. And not only our economy, crushing our jobs, because companies can't hire. We're going to put the regulation industry out of work and out of business. (Applause.) And, by the way, I want regulation. I want to protect our environment. I want regulations for safety. I want all of the regulations that we need, and I want them to be so strong and so tough. But we don't need 75 percent of the repetitive, horrible regulations that hurt companies, hurt jobs, make us noncompetitive overseas with other companies from other countries. That, we don't need. But we're going to have regulations. It's going to be really strong and really good, and we're going to protect our environment, and we're going to protect the safety of our people and our workers. (Applause.)
Another major promise is tax reform. We are going to massively lower taxes on the middle class, reduce taxes on American business, and make our tax code more simple and much more fair for everyone, including the people and the business. (Applause.)
In anticipation of these and other changes, jobs are already starting to pour back into our country -- you see that. In fact, I think I did more than any other pre-President -- they say President-elect. President-elect is meeting with Ford, he's meeting with Chrysler, he's meeting with General Motors. I just wanted to save a little time. (Laughter.) Because Ford and Fiat-Chrysler, General Motors, Sprint, Intel and so many others are now, because of the election result, making major investments in the United States, expanding production and hiring more workers. And they're going back to Michigan, and they're going back to Ohio, and they're going back to Pennsylvania, and they're going back to North Carolina, and to Florida. (Applause.)
It's time for all Americans to get off of welfare and get back to work. You're going to love it! You're going to love it. You are going to love it. (Applause.)
We're also putting in a massive budget request for our beloved military. (Applause.) And we will be substantially upgrading all of our military -- all of our military. Offensive, defensive, everything. Bigger and better and stronger than ever before. And hopefully, we'll never have to use it. But nobody is going to mess with us, folks. Nobody. (Applause.)
It will be one of the greatest military buildups in American history. No one will dare to question -- as they have been, because we're very depleted, very, very depleted. Sequester. Sequester. Nobody will dare question our military might again. We believe in peace through strength, and that's what we will have. (Applause.)
As part of my pledge to restore safety for the American people, I have also directed the defense community to develop a plan to totally obliterate ISIS. (Applause.) Working with our allies, we will eradicate this evil from the face of the Earth. (Applause.)
At the same time, we fully understand that national security begins with border security. Foreign terrorists will not be able to strike America if they cannot get into our country. (Applause.) And by the way, take a look at what's happening in Europe, folks. Take a look at what's happening in Europe. I took a lot of heat on Sweden. (Laughter.) And then a day later, I said, has anybody reported what's going on? And it turned out that they didn't -- not too many of them did. (Laughter.) Take a look at what happened in Sweden. I love Sweden. Great country. Great people. I love Sweden. But they understand I'm right. The people over there understand I'm right. Take a look at what's happening in Sweden. Take a look at what's happening in Germany. Take a look at what's happened in France. Take a look at Nice and Paris.
I have a friend -- he's a very, very substantial guy. He loves the City of Lights. He loves Paris. For years, every year, during the summer, he would go to Paris -- it was automatic -- with his wife and his family. I hadn’t seen him in a while. And I said, Jim, let me ask you a question: How’s Paris doing? "Paris? I don’t go there anymore. Paris is no longer Paris." That was four years -- four, five years -- hasn’t gone there. He wouldn’t miss it for anything. Now he doesn’t even think in terms of going there. Take a look at what’s happening to our world, folks, and we have to be smart. We have to be smart. We can’t let it happen to us. (Applause.)
So let me state this as clearly as I can: We are going to keep radical Islamic terrorists the hell out of our country. (Applause.) We will not be deterred from this course, and in a matter of days, we will be taking brand new action to protect out people and keep America safe. You will see the action. (Applause.)
I will never, ever apologize for protecting the safety and security of the American people. I won’t do it. (Applause.) If it means I get bad press, if it means people speak badly of me, it’s okay. It doesn’t bother me. The security of our people is number one -- is number one. (Applause.) Our administration is running with great efficiency, even though I still don’t have my Cabinet approved. Nobody mentions that. Do you know I still have people out there waiting to be approved? And everyone knows they're going to be approved. It’s just a delay, delay, delay. It’s really sad. It’s really sad. And these are great people. These are some great people. We still don’t have our Cabinet. I assume we’re setting records for that. That’s the only thing good about it is we’re setting records. I love setting records. (Applause.) But I hate having a Cabinet meeting and I see all these empty seats. I said, Democrats, please, approve our Cabinet and get smart on health care too, if you don’t mind. (Applause.)
But we’re taking meetings every day with top leaders in business, in science, and industry. Yesterday, I had 29 of the biggest business leaders in the world in my office -- Caterpillar tractor, Campbell’s Soup. We had everybody. We had everybody. I like Campbell’s Soup. (Laughter and applause.) We had everybody, and we came to a lot of very good conclusions, and a lot of those folks that are in that room are going to be building big, big massive new plants, and lots of jobs. And you know what? They’re going to be building them in this country, not in some other country. (Applause.)
We’re meeting with unions, meeting with law enforcement, and we’re meeting with leaders from all around the world, where the White House doors used to be totally closed -- they were closed, folks. You don’t realize that. They were closed. They’re now wide open. And they’re open for people doing business for our country and putting people to work. (Applause.)
And when they come into the White House, we’re translating these meetings into action. One by one, we’re checking off the promises we made to the people of the United States. One by one -- a lot of promises. And we will not stop until the job is done. We will reduce your taxes. We will cut your regulations. We will support our police. We will defend our flag. (Applause.) We will rebuild our military. We will take care of our great, great veterans. We’re taking care of our veterans. (Applause.)
We will fix our broken and embarrassing trade deals that are no good -- none of them. You wonder, where did the people come from that negotiated these deals? Where did they come from?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Government.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, they came also from campaign contributions, I must be honest with you. They’re not as stupid as you think. (Laughter.)
We will cut wasteful spending. We will promote our values. We will rebuild our inner cities. We will bring back our jobs and our dreams. So true. (Applause.) So true.
And, by the way, we will protect our Second Amendment. (Applause.) You know, Wayne and Chris are here from the NRA, and they didn’t have that on the list. It’s lucky I thought about it. (Laughter.) But we will indeed. And they’re great people. And by the way, they love our country. They love our country. The NRA has been a great supporter. They love our country.
The forgotten men and women of America will be forgotten no longer. That is the heart of this new movement and the future of the Republican Party. People came to vote, and these people -- the media -- they said, where are they coming from? What’s going on here? These are hardworking, great, great Americans. These are unbelievable people who have not been treated fairly. Hillary called them “deplorable”. They’re not deplorable.
AUDIENCE: Booo -- lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!
THE PRESIDENT: Who would have thought that a word was going to play so badly. That’s the problem in politics. One wrong word and it’s over. She also said irredeemable, but we won’t mention that.
The GOP will be, from now on, the party also of the American worker. (Applause.) You know, we haven’t been, as a group, given credit for this, but if you look at how much bigger our party has gotten during this cycle. During the early days when we had 17 people running -- the primaries -- millions and millions of people were joining. Now, I won’t say it was because of me, but it was, okay. (Applause.)
And we have an amazing, strong, powerful party that truly does want to see America be great again, and it will see it. And it’s going to see it a lot sooner than you think, believe me. A lot sooner than you think. (Applause.)
We will not answer to donors or lobbyists or special interests, but we will serve the citizens of the United States of America, believe me. Global cooperation -- dealing with other countries, getting along with other countries -- is good. It’s very important. But there is no such thing as a global anthem, a global currency, or a global flag. This is the United States of America that I’m representing. I’m not representing the globe. I’m representing your country. (Applause.)
AUDIENCE: USA! USA! USA!
THE PRESIDENT: There is one allegiance that unites us all, and that is to America. America -- it’s the allegiance to America.
No matter our background, or income, or geography, we are all citizens of this blessed land. And no matter our color, or the blood, the color of the blood we bleed, it’s the same red blood of great, great patriots. Remember. Great patriots. (Applause.)
We all salute, with pride, the same American Flag. And we are equal -- totally equal -- in the eyes of Almighty God. We’re equal. (Applause.) Thank you.
And I want to thank, by the way, the evangelical community, the Christian community. (Applause.) Communities of faith -- rabbis and priests and pastors, ministers -- because the support for me was a record, as you know, not only in terms of numbers of people, but percentages of those numbers that voted for Trump. So I want to thank you folks. It was amazing -- an amazing outpouring, and I will not disappoint you.
As long as we have faith in each other, and trust in God, then there is no goal, at all, beyond our reach. There is no dream too large, no task too great. We are Americans, and the future belongs to us. The future belongs to all of you. (Applause.) And America is coming about, and it’s coming back, and it’s roaring and you can hear it. It’s going to be bigger and better. It is going to be. It is going to be. Remember. And it’s roaring. It’s going to be bigger, and better, and stronger than ever before. (Applause.)
I want to thank you. And Matt and Mercedes, I want to thank the two of you, and all of the supporters that I have. I see them. They’re all over the place. You are really great people. I want to thank you.
And I want to say to you, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America. Thank you, folks. Thank you. (Applause.)
On this Friday, Feb. 24th 2017 edition of the Alex Jones Show, we cover Donald Trump at CPAC, as President Trump delivers another epic speech from the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference again slamming the "Fake news" media, the European immigration crisis and more. We'll cover the convention and continue exploring the migrant epidemic facing Sweden and the rest of Europe. On today's show we welcome music icon Joy Villa, who famously wore a Make America Great Again dress to the Grammys triggering countless leftist celebs.
Trump Is Damaging Press Freedom in the U.S. and Abroad
White House press secretary Sean Spicer clapped as President Trump spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday. Doug Mills/The New York Times
The unrelenting attacks on the news media damage American democracy. They appear to be part of a deliberate strategy to undermine public confidence and trust by sowing confusion and uncertainty about what is true. But they do even greater damage outside the United States, where America’s standing as a global beacon of press freedom is being drastically eroded.
This is not just a matter of United States prestige. At a time when journalists around the world are being killed and imprisoned [ https://cpj.org/reports/2016/12/journalists-jailed-record-high-turkey-crackdown.php ] in record numbers, Mr. Trump’s relentless tirades against “fake news” are emboldening autocrats and depriving threatened and endangered journalists of one of their strongest supporters — the United States government.
Of course the United States’ record on press freedom is far from perfect. During the Obama administration, aggressive leak investigations — including a record number of prosecutions under the 1917 Espionage Act — regularly ensnared [ https://cpj.org/reports/2013/10/obama-and-the-press-us-leaks-surveillance-post-911.php ] the press. But the United States has had tremendous moral influence when it spoke out about press freedom violations, and not just because of the commitment to the First Amendment. The fact that United States political leaders regularly withstood relentless criticism in the press gave them legitimacy when they called for the protection of critical voices in repressive societies.
For example, the Obama administration, through public statements and behind-the-scenes diplomacy, helped win the release of imprisoned journalists in Ethiopia and Vietnam. President George W. Bush regularly spoke out [ http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=77229 ] about press freedom violations, in places like Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
Earlier this month, the Venezuelan government suspended [ https://cpj.org/2017/02/venezuela-suspends-cnn-en-espanol-broadcasts.php ] CNN’s Spanish language network following accusations by President Nicolás Maduro that the network manipulates the news. President Trump was silent. Really, what could he say?
So far, Mr. Trump’s war on the media has been mostly a war of words. But those words have consequences. It is leaders of autocratic countries, not democracies, who make a point of telling journalists how they should do their job. Praising positive coverage while lashing out at reporters who write something critical gives succor to the likes of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, a country where news outlets have been shuttered and a record number of journalists imprisoned. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s attacks on the use of anonymous sources undermine the work of journalists reporting sensitive stories in repressive and dangerous environments from Iraq to Mexico, where source protection is a matter of life and death.
Mr. Trump’s attacks on the news media follow a political logic. They rally those among his supporters who despise the media for its perceived liberal bias; they erode the credibility of the media itself, undermining demands for accountability; and they serve as the ultimate distraction, in the most recent example deflecting public attention from reports that Trump administration officials are impeding the investigation into their ties to Russia.
Thus there is a risk that responding to Mr. Trump’s provocations will further advance his aims. Still, one point must be made: In President Trump’s carpet bombing of the news media, it is not just the United States’ global reputation that is collateral damage. Rather, it is the brave journalists on the front line who risk their lives and liberty to bring the world the news. It is to our great shame that they can no longer count on the support of the United States.
Joel Simon is the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists [ https://cpj.org/ ].
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