Why people stick with the status quo and how to change their minds

In their book Merchants of Doubt that I reviewed very favorably here, authors Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway make the case that those people and business interests that oppose the scientific consensus that goes against their business and ideological interests (like the perils of smoking tobacco, second-hand smoke, acid-rain, the ozone hole, and climate change) base their opposition strategy on exploiting the way people make decisions.
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The color of cars and accidents

Whenever I have bought a car, I tend to choose the color purely on the basis of how it looks and, of course, on my personality. Given the dullness of the latter, it should be no surprise that my choices in the past have been either steel gray or more recently dark gray. I had never considered the issue of how color relates to crash frequency. It appears that white cars are the least prone to accidents while black cars are the most.

Black cars are notably more dangerous to drive than white cars for reasons of visibility already. A study by Monash University Accident Research Centre in Australia, which studied crash data across the country from 1987 to 2004, found that compared to white cars as a baseline, crash risk was higher for just about every other common color, including red, blue, silver, green, gray, and, yes, black. Black performed the worst by every measure: In daylight, the chance of crash is 12% higher than that of white cars. At dawn and dusk, that jumps to 47%—though your relative risk of getting into an accident at that time is lower at those hours, the authors point out. Monash’s study was consistent with at least one other, from the University of Granada, which determined that yellow was a safe alternative to white.

I was surprised that black was worse even in daytime.

My dark grey car looks black at night which means that my choice was not good as far as accidents go. To be frank, I just do not like white or any of the other colors so I may just have to stomach the increased risk and hope that careful driving partially compensates.

This is so infuriating

One of the big successes of science has been the steady eradication of diseases that once ravaged so many people across the world. So it is frustrating when some diseases are making a comeback because of the misinformation spread by opponents of vaccinations. The latest example of this backsliding is that four European countries (Albania, the Czech Republic, Greece and the UK) that once had been declared measles-free have had that status revoked by the World Health Organization because of new outbreaks.
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New study suggests that optimists tend to be healthier and live longer

According to a large-scale longitudinal study, people who are optimistic tended to live longer than those who are not, and it even increased the chances of ‘exceptional longevity’, the term used for people who live to be 85 or more.

The team split about 70,000 women into four equally sized groups, based on their scores for optimism. They then compared lifespan for the most optimistic with the least, taking into account factors including age, sex, race, education, depression and other health conditions present at the outset.

The results show the most optimistic group of women had a lifespan almost 15% longer than the least.

Similar results were seen in men, even though optimism was measured slightly differently. When the team compared the fifth of men boasting the highest optimism scores with the least optimistic, they found the most positive men had lifespans almost 11% longer.

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Einstein’s debt to philosophy and Hume

Recently it seems to have become fashionable among some scientists, mainly physicists, to harshly disparage philosophy in general and the philosophy and sociology of science in particular. This was not so in times gone by, especially during the time of ferment at the dawn of the twentieth century with the development of theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. While they were developing various successful computational techniques, people struggled to figure out what these theories meant because they seemed to defy our intuitions of how matter behaved at very small scales and when it was traveling very fast.
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The ‘Two Generals’ problem

Tom Scott explains what is known as the Two Generals problem in computer information theory, something that I had never heard of before, and how it can have real world implications, such as a recent case where the lack of awareness of the need to address this problem led to a food delivery company sending multiple orders to the same addresses.

A new form of carbon manufactured

All life on Earth is carbon-based which of course makes this molecule of considerable interest for scientists. A carbon atom has 6 electrons which means that it has four electrons in the valence shell and results in it being able to form different kinds of chains and combinations, such as buckminsterfullerenes (often shortened to just ‘fullerenes’, more popularly known as ‘buckyballs’) that consists of 60 carbon atoms in the shape of a geodesic sphere.
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The bicycle: The vehicle that really should not work

Anyone who has ridden the bicycle knows how hard it is to learn to do so. I learned to ride in the time-honored way, with my father holding the seat to keep it from falling to the side and running behind me as I pedaled, and then after some time slowly letting go without my knowledge, while still running behind to catch me if I fell. After a few such attempts, I was able to ride alone. The feeling of exhilaration at not toppling over is something I still remember. I used the same method to teach my younger daughter but my older daughter learned to ride on her own, pedaling a bit and putting her foot down when in danger of falling over, until the pedaling parts got longer and longer and suddenly she was off.
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Hasan Minhaj on the opioid drug crisis

It is hard to be funny when you are talking about the massive destruction that is being caused by the indiscriminate use of pain-killing drugs, and Minhaj’s episode of Patriot Act on this topic is only sporadically funny. It seemed like he felt obliged to throw in some jokes since his is technically a comedy show, but his heart was not really in it, especially since he has known people who succumbed to early deaths due to these highly potent drugs like fentanyl, where even a tiny amount can kill you and many users are not even aware that the drugs they are taking contain fentanyl mixed in.
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That sums it up pretty well

Kevin Drum says that all the major religions have objectively been having a bad few decades in comparison with science’s achievements, but that despite that religious extremism is on the rise worldwide.

The last few decades sure have been bad ones for organized religion. Conservative Christians have decided that the sum total of the Bible is about reestablishing the sex and gender mores of the 19th century. Liberal Protestantism is so unassuming that hardly anyone even remembers it exists. The Catholic Church has been responsible for the deaths of millions in Africa thanks to its mindless belief that God hates condoms. Much of Islam has been taken over by the toxic Saudi strain. Israel has turned into an apartheid state. Hindus in India are apparently now dedicated to creating a religiously pure state. And even Buddhists have been acting badly lately.

Meanwhile, science keeps churning out new wonders. Cell phones. The internet. Cures for cancer. Robotic prosthetics. Solar panels on rooftops. Talking computers. Antidepressants. Google Maps. Cheap genome sequencing. Virtual reality. Machine learning. Meatless meat. Missions to Mars. Electric cars. Fiber optics.

None of the points he makes surprised me. But what did was his statement that Israel is now an apartheid state. Not only that, he did not get any pushback for that in the comments, either.

Drum is very much in the mainstream of Democratic establishment politics, someone who favors people like Hillary Clinton and Kamal Harris and does not care much for Elizabeth Warren and especially Bernie Sanders. So his casual throwing in of Israel as an apartheid state, a sentiment that the party establishment definitely does not endorse, and the lack of any defense of Israel by his blog’s readers, is another sign that Israel’s discriminatory policies can no longer be denied or ignored and that the Democratic political establishment is increasingly disconnected from its base.