Is the food category of “ultraprocessed” useful for consumers? To answer that I am going to take a huge detour, but I promise to return to this question.

Humans like heuristics. What this means is that we use a lot of cognitive short cuts to help us deal with a complex world in an efficient manner. Many of these heuristics are likely evolved, since they appear to be fairly universal. For example, we tend to look at the left most digit to get a quick estimate of the size of a number. That is exactly why marketers prices things as $19.99 rather than $20.00 – that really does work. There is also the availability heuristic – we estimate how common something is by how easily we can bring examples to mind. Since we don’t often have access to comprehensive statistics, this can serve as a useful metric.

The problem with heuristics, however, is that they are not strictly true or accurate. We sacrifice precision and accuracy for speed and convenience. This can be perfectly rational. If you can get 90% of the way to an answer with 10% of the effort, is it really worth making the other 90% of the effort to get that last 10% accuracy? In everyday life, probably not. The cost-benefit is not there, it will just slow you down for little gain.  If you are a scientist, however, then absolutely. That’s your job. But it seems to be also true that we evolved our common heuristics in a pre-industrial society, and now we are applying them to the extremely complex world we have erected for ourselves. So those heuristics break down much more often and much more catastrophically. We some some analytical critical thinking to adapt our thinking to the modern age.

Let’s apply the concept of heuristics to healthy eating. Most people are not nutritional experts, and yet in developed societies there is an increasingly complex array of food choices. Further, we evolved in a world where the primary nutritional concern was getting enough calories, and that’s pretty much it. Our bodies adapted to the food we had available to us, and we just had to keep from starving. Today people living in developed countries live with calorie abundance. Eating for optimal health, and an extended life expectancy, requires navigating often complex nutritional advice – glycemic index, trans-fats, vitamin levels, and macronutrient balance. Our evolved hunger, if you will, is not adapted to these choices. We have to use our frontal lobes.

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My wife and I had nothing scheduled yesterday, so we took the opportunity to vote early. On election day, everyone votes in their voting district. For early voting, the entire town votes in one location at the public library. When we arrived at the polling location we encountered long lines – longer than we have in past elections. Initially I thought this was due to unusually high early voter turnout, and that was likely partly the cause. But the main cause was completely unnecessary inefficiency in the voting process, which is what I really want to write about today.

Let me start by saying that voting is sacred to any democracy. Given that it is a critical right that should not be denied any citizen, it is the responsibility of the state to ensure that all voters have reasonable access to voting and the process should not be unduly burdensome. For this reason I think election day should be a national holiday. I also endorse early voting and voting by mail – voting should be as easy as possible within the confines of voting security. America has incredibly secure elections, with insignificant fraud. Since 2016 there have been only 513 proven cases of voter fraud out of 685 million votes.

But I am now talking about something which has nothing to do with election security, but rather with simple efficiency. For elections efficiency is mission critical, because we need millions of people to go through a secure system in a short amount of time. Anything that decreases efficiency even a tiny amount can not only inconvenience voters, it can potentially disenfranchise them. With that in mind, let me describe the process of voting I experienced yesterday.

There were three lines, separated alphabetically by street name. I get why this was necessary, because they want to keep a paper trail of who voted and this is organized by street. But this created unequal lines, and for much of my wait the middle line had no people in it, meaning that the workers at the corresponding table were idle while the others were backed up. They didn’t have a workflow to deal with this contingency. They also had inadequate signage – you could not read the signs at the front of each line from the back of each line. But that was something they were in the process of correcting while I was there.

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I am back from an almost three week trip to LA, Sydney and Christchurch. Sorry I did not have time to keep up with my blog over that period – in which we recorded four live SGU shows, produced three days of conference content, put on two stage shows, and hosted several other events. It was a tremendous amount of fun, but also a great deal of work. I am now jet-lagged and fighting off the remains of a viral infection I picked up along the way.

Such trips always reinvigorate my dedication to science communication and scientific skepticism. I appreciate every conference-goer who came up to tell me about their personal journey and the role the content I have helped produce had played in it. I thought I would share some further observations from the trip.

First, while the skeptical movement, such as it is, has been through a lot, it is still alive and well. The crowds we are able to attract to these events remain robust, and in fact are larger than many past events. There is a lot of enthusiasm for science and critical thinking. There is also a deep hunger for developing the skills to navigate our increasingly complex world. How do we deal with what social media, growing misinformation, deep fakes, and now artificial intelligence has wrought?

People also have a deep desire for community – the kind of community that comes from getting physically together for a shared purpose, not just online.  The number of people we can reach in these physical conferences and meetings is much smaller than online, but I think it remains a critical complement to online content. It also reinforces what I think many of use have learned from the “social media” phenomenon. Online communities are not the same as in-person communities, just online. People interact differently in person and online. The dynamics of social media were simply not what many of us expected. I don’t think we should abandon social media (although I know people who make a reasonable argument that we should), but rather we need to have a more realistic view of its strengths and weaknesses, its vulnerabilities and psychological effects.  Continue Reading »

It is now an accepted narrative within the media that the US has become increasingly polarized. We just had our 250th celebration, and it seems to have further polarized our nation rather than bring it together. It is important, however, to put this polarization into perspective. We discuss this topic on my (relatively) new podcast, Political Reality, which I host with political scientist, Andres Jones Rooy.

First, we have to define what we mean by political polarization – mainly a divergence of ideology and policy preferences. How similar or far apart are Americans on average in terms of their political beliefs and preferences? It certainly feels as if such polarization is increasing, but political scientists have been confronted with a dilemma  – they cannot find this polarization in the data. Left and right (Democrat and Republican) do differ in many policy preference, but those differences are a lot less than most people think, and they are not increasing over time. It turns out, most people favor common sense policies that are somewhere in the middle on most issue, with Democrats skewing a little left and Republican skewing a little right. Further, people’s core concerns are all just about the same. We all want relative safety, fair prices, and good job opportunities.

There are a few exceptions to this lack of increasing polarization, including two policy issues – abortion and global warming. Over the last 20 years there has been a little increase in the policy differences on these issues. But that’s it. Another exception is a demographic one. There has been increasing polarization within our elected officials. Senators and Representatives are becoming more polarized, even while their constituents are not.

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I recently installed a new printer on my system. Now, before you have an “OK, Boomer” knee-jerk reaction – I am a fairly tech-savvy user. I am not an IT professional, but have used computers literally since the 1970s and have kept up with the tech enough to be a confident user. I was therefore frustrated when the experience was…less than enjoyable. I was lured into installing the printer via the app. I falsely assumed that such apps serve the same function that “wizards” (remember those) did in the past, walking you effortlessly through the installation process. I also have had the experience of just plugging a printer into a USB port and having it automatically be recognized, installed, and then function just fine.

It’s been a while since I needed a new printer (I don’t use them much anymore, but I do occasionally need to print something), so I was surprised and frustrated at how long and complicated the process was. I felt I was entering in the same information multiple times, looking up numbers, following QR codes, and answering ambiguous questions. I got it to work, but it took up a far bigger chunk of my life and my mental resources than I was happy with. I later learned that the app is not there to make my life easier, but to lock me in as a customer to upsell me more stuff.

This is not an isolated incident. Again – I am trying really hard not to become an old curmudgeon. I am trying to be objective. But I do think that as one gets older, you can more easily see patterns, and your tolerance for recurrent incompetence and stupidity fades away. As a computer user, I lived through the early years of IRQ settings, manually installing drivers, and compatibility nightmares. But I was a somewhat early adopter and I pushed the limit with upgrades, so I put up with it. Then the industry evolved, with helpful wizards, then plug-and-play, then universal connectors. I did not fully realize, however, that we were past peak-convenience. It’s still much better than in the early days, and you can still have a good user experience, but there seems to be increasing unnecessary complexity, bloatware, and simply horrible user interfaces. I am constantly fending off attempts at sending me push notifications, gathering my data, solicitation for in-app purchases, and intrusive ads. Forget about spam and scams, which are a daily nuisance. Yeah, I know there are ways to handle such things – but that is still my point. It’s all on me, and it’s a constantly evolving landscape.

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To what extent do social media algorithms, and YouTube’s specifically, contribute to user’s views becoming more extreme and even radicalizing? That’s a complicated question, but researchers tried to tackle it and have come up with some interesting results.

First let’s define some terms (as the researchers did). An echochamber is a social media information ecosystem (such as a specific forum, blog, or content provider) that shares a common view, ideology, or narrative. The researcher use this precise definition: “a bounded, enclosed media space that has the potential to both magnify the messages delivered within it and insulate them from rebuttal.” A rabbit hole is a recommendation algorithm that leads a user from their initial content interest into a widening circle of related content. This is an iterative dynamic process that does not necessarily involve more viewpoint homogeneity or more extreme views. A “radicalization pathway” means that some combination of user behavior and platform algorithms leads a use to more and more extreme content and views. The trick in research is separating cause and effect – do extreme users seek extreme content, or does extreme content make users more extreme?

The researchers start, as is commonly the case, with a review of existing research. It’s probably not as bad as you are imagining. The research generally shows that users do tend to stay within mild ideological echochambers, and that this phenomenon is largely driven by user behavior, not platform algorithms. This makes sense – people will tend to sort themselves into groups of like-minded people. There is research showing this going back to 1940, long before social media. But this also refers to the average behavior, with a lot of variance. There are some sites on social media that are extreme echochambers, with careful curating of content and users. I have seen this defended as creating a “safe space” for a certain group. Those who do not follow the ideology of the group are tagged as “trolls” and quickly purged. But most of social media does not fall into this category.

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It is old news that all the tech we now live with is constantly gathering data about us. It is important, however, not to become complacent about this or to assume the situation cannot or is not getting worse. Pretty much every piece of digital technology that we interact with likely is gathering some personal information about you which is used to target advertising and to sell to third parties. Regulations in most countries are inadequate and fail to keep up with technological changes.

One of the latest venues to soak up information about you may be surprising – your car. Cars are increasingly computerized, and they typically collect driving behavior data – how fast your drive, how hard you break, and how tight you make turns. But also, some vehicles have cameras facing the driver which means they can detect your behavior visually. Sometimes this is sold as a safety feature, to tell if you are too sleepy or inebriated to drive. Sometimes this is part of a system to get your insurance company to reduce your rates if you think you are a safe driver. But often it is done without disclosure. Recent GM was found guilty of collecting and selling such data without the permission of the user, and was banned for doing so for five years. But many other car manufacturers also do this.

All they really have to do is bury some disclosure deep in the user agreement, which functionally nobody reads, and they are covered. You may have the ability to opt-out of such data selling. Of course, putting the burden on the end user to find and read any such disclosures and then go through the steps necessary to opt out of data selling is a huge problem. In fact insurance companies will buy data from car companies and then use that data to increase your insurance premiums, without you opting into any of it.

The basic fact is that collecting data from users, packaging that data and then selling it to third parties is a huge industry. It is estimated that globally this is a $240 billion industry. When that kind of money is on the line, companies are going to do everything they can to capitalize on it, while avoiding legal issues by either flying under the radar or hiding behind legal fig leaves (like the buried consumer disclosures). They will also use that money to lobby the government to let them continue to do so, or even to mandate certain things that will help this industry. For example, some car monitoring technology is sold as a safety feature, and it can legitimately be used for this purpose. Others are convenience features, like GPS. But once all the sensors and cameras are in place, they will soak up all the data they can – because that data is worth billions.

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It is long past time the US eliminated gerrymandering, the drawing of district lines specifically for the purpose of favoring one political party, across the board. This requires either a 50 state agreement, or action at the federal level. This has been a problem since near the beginning of our democracy, and seems to be getting worse. We are now in the middle of a mid-decade tit-for-tat rash of gerrymandering that is extremely anti-democratic, so it’s a good time to raise this as an issue voters should definitely understand and prioritize.

As a quick aside – this is not a “political” blog, which does not mean that I never discuss political issues or topics with a political dimension. It partly means that I try my best to by non-partisan, and to avoid purely political value-judgements. I recognize this is an impossible ideal – we all have our biases and perspectives that color our thinking on topics in subtle ways. But we can try. Also, this is not a strictly science blog, it covers science, critical thinking, and media savvy, which are part of what we call scientific skepticism. Recently I started a video podcast, Political Reality, with co-host Andrea Jones Roy, who is a political scientist, for the purpose of applying scientific skepticism to political topics. This is also not a partisan show, and is mostly part civics lesson and part fact-checking. With that in mind, I thought I would write about what science and critical thinking have to say about gerrymandering, given that this is a topic in the news recently, although not as much as I think it should be. We also did cover this topic on Political Reality.

The term gerrymander dates back to 1812 when Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry redistricted his state’s representative districts in order to favor his party, the Democratic Republicans. One of the districts looked like a salamander, leading the Boston Gazette to quip that it was really a “Gerry-mander”, and the name stuck. (Ironically, the two parts of that term, gerry and mander, both kinda sound like they mean “rig”, but the word has nothing to do with that.) Since then all political parties have used gerrymandering to gain unfair advantage. This stems from some features of US politics.

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Remember The Last Starfighter from 1984? In that movie a trailer-park kid with limited prospects spends his time on an arcade-style video game, Starfighter. He plays the game so much that he beats the final level, and it turns out he is the first person to ever do so. He is heavily criticized for spending so much time playing a game, which is seen as a sign of boredom and lack of ambition – a waste of time. The twist (42 year old spoiler incoming) is that the game was actually a test (the Excalibur test – a deliberate reference to King Arthur) to find a skilled pilot for an actual real-life starfighter. He goes on to save the galaxy from invasion.

The interesting premise of the movie is that playing a video game is not only a test of real-life skill, but can be used to train such skill. In 1984 this was  kind of a new idea, and appealing to a generation of kids newly hooked on video games. Video games have been significantly mainstreamed over the last half century, but there is still a bit of a cultural stigma attached to them – they are seen as the realm of dorks and geeks, with inevitable jokes about how avid video gamers with “never get laid” (or something to that effect). Since the beginning of their popularity parents have worried, with such worry being fed by a sensationalist media, that video games were going to “rot” their kids’ brains, turn them into losers who can never get a skilled job, and might even cause violent behavior. Every mass shooting someone brings up violent video games.

But the evidence simply does not support these concerns. One big problem with the research is that it shows correlation only, not causation. Sure, people who play aggressive video games tend to be more aggressive, but that doesn’t mean the game is the cause. Further, there are many confounding factors, and more recent research shows that violence in the game is not the key feature. It has more to do with the level of difficulty and the resulting frustration that seems to raise aggression, not violence in the game. More competitive and difficult games tend to be more stimulating, regardless of the level of violence. The bottom line – after decades of research, systematic reviews conclude: “There is insufficient scientific evidence to support a causal link between violent video games and violent behavior.”

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Many people might find this to be an easy question and simple concept – what is your favorite color? In fact it was used as the quintessential easy question by the bridge guardian in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But it is a good rule of thumb that everything is much more complicated than you think or than it may at first appear, and this is no exception. We recently had a casual discussion about this topic on the SGU, and it left me unsatisfied, so I thought I would do a deeper dive. Perhaps there is a neuroscientific answer to this question.

The panel differed in their reactions to the question of favorite color (we were just giving our subjective feelings, not discussing research or evidence). Cara felt that “favorite color” is largely arbitrary. Kids are asked to pick a favorite color, which they do (under pressure) and then often just stick with that answer as they get older. She also felt the question was meaningless without context – are you referring to clothes, cars, house color, or something else? Jay was at the other end of the spectrum – he has a strong affiliation for the color orange which gives him a pleasant feeling. The rest were somewhere in between these two extremes.

I knew there had to be a science of “favorite color”, which I thought might be interesting. Indeed there is – and it is interesting.

First, what is the distribution of favorite color, across the world and demographically? Blue is, far and away, the most favorite color, in most countries across the world, so it seems to be very cross-cultural. It is also the favorite across age groups and gender. The second-most favorite color is either green, red, or purple. Brown is almost universally the least favorite color. Gender has an effect on favorite color, with more women favoring pink, and reds in general (but still preferring blue overall). Republicans still prefer blue over red, but more Republicans prefer red than Democrats. There are country-specific differences as well. Red is a higher preference in China than many other countries, for example.

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