Tag: groupthink

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Reader Warns , “intelligence will be mistakenly perceived by the deranged mob as intransigence, and the people who express it attacked and “canceled”

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“We’ve imbibed so much fear-mongering propaganda, and done so in such a docile, unquestioning manner, that we have suffered psychological damage. Six months of psyops has produced a great deal of mental and emotional scar tissue. We’ve impaired our ability to think, not only as individuals, but also collectively at every level–local, county, state, as a country, and as a species (globally). Groupthink is putting us in a deeper and deeper rut of stupid every day now. The bad decisions we are making now will have untoward ramifications for years or even decades unless sanity somehow re-emerges and is allowed to prevail. The problem is, intelligence will be mistakenly perceived by the deranged mob as intransigence, and the people who express it attacked and “canceled”.

The dynamic of Groupthink is now kicking into higher gear. Demented minds are collectively producing poorer and poorer decisions. If we don’t soon get a hold of ourselves as a society, the edifice of reasoned self-government we’ve been building for the past few centuries here on this side of the Atlantic will continue to weaken. It might even collapse.”

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There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble

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Groupthink produced a failure of the “wisdom of crowds” and an underestimate of Trump’s chances.

By Nate Silver

Filed under The Real Story Of 2016

Published Mar. 10, 2017

This is the ninth article in a series that reviews news coverage of the 2016 general election, explores how Donald Trump won and why his chances were underrated by most of the American media.

Last summer, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in what bettors, financial markets and the London-based media regarded as a colossal upset. Reporters and pundits were quick to blame the polls for the unexpected result. But the polls had been fine, more or less: In the closing days of the Brexit campaign, they’d shown an almost-even race, and Leave’s narrow victory (by a margin just under 4 percentage points) was about as consistent with them as it was with anything else. The failure was not so much with the polls but with the people who were analyzing them.

The U.S. presidential election, as I’ve argued, was something of a similar case. No, the polls didn’t show a toss-up, as they had in Brexit. But the reporting was much more certain of Clinton’s chances than it should have been based on the polls. Much of The New York Times’s coverage, for instance, implied that Clinton’s odds were close to 100 percent. In an article on Oct. 17 — more than three weeks before Election Day — they portrayed the race as being effectively over, the only question being whether Clinton should seek a landslide or instead assist down-ballot Democrats:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-really-was-a-liberal-media-bubble/

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Free speech is so last century. Today’s students want the ‘right to be comfortable’

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Free speech is so last century. Today’s students want the ‘right to be comfortable’

Student unions’ ‘no platform’ policy is expanding to cover pretty much anyone whose views don’t fit prevailing groupthink

Have you met the Stepford students? They’re everywhere. On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture halls or surreptitiously policing beer-fuelled banter in the uni bar. They look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in their company will know that these students are far more interested in shutting debate down than opening it up.

I was attacked by a swarm of Stepford students this week. On Tuesday, I was supposed to take part in a debate about abortion at Christ Church, Oxford. I was invited by the Oxford Students for Life to put the pro-choice argument against the journalist Timothy Stanley, who is pro-life. But apparently it is forbidden for men to talk about abortion. A mob of furious feministic Oxford students, all robotically uttering the same stuff about feeling offended, set up a Facebook page littered with expletives and demands for the debate to be called off. They said it was outrageous that two human beings ‘who do not have uteruses’ should get to hold forth on abortion — identity politics at its most basely biological — and claimed the debate would threaten the ‘mental safety’ of Oxford students. Three hundred promised to turn up to the debate with ‘instruments’ — heaven knows what — that would allow them to disrupt proceedings.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9376232/free-speech-is-so-last-century-todays-students-want-the-right-to-be-comfortable/