OB-GYNs leaving Texas

What happens in states where OG\B-GYN can no longer provide women with reproductive health care without engaging in criminal activity? They leave the state to practice elsewhere.

Increasingly red states have inferior health care with poorer health care outcomes for women.

For more click here.

This is another example of how poor social policies contribute to lower quality of life for people who live under the jurisdiction of those policies.

"Enshittification" is the word of the year

From The Guardian

We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit,” author Cory Doctorow said earlier this year.

In 2022, Doctorow coined the word “enshittification”, which has just been crowned Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year. The dictionary defined the word as follows.

“The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”

Editor's note: The internet and all the methods of digital communication promised to make human communication more effective and efficient and to help us, as human beings, become smarter.

As is true with everything in life there are adverse side effects and a downside or shadow side to the phenomenon. In many ways the internet and digital communication have enhanced our human interactions and functions, and in other ways it is has made our interactions and functioning more frustrating, anxiety inducing, and dysfunctional.

The hope that as we gain more experience with these tools we, humans, will learn how to use them more effectively and efficiently. In the meantime, enshittification, is something we are challenged by and must learn how to manage efficaciously.

How does disinformation go viral?

 

Across groups, social influences also produce noise. If someone starts a meeting by favoring a major change in the company’s direction, that person might initiate a discussion that leads a group unanimously to support the change. Their agreement might be a product of social pressures, not of conviction. If someone else had started the meeting by indicating a different view, or if the initial speaker had decided to be silent, the discussion might have headed in an altogether different direction—and for the same reason. Very similar groups can end up in divergent places because of social pressures.

Kahneman, Daniel; Sibony, Olivier; Sunstein, Cass R.. Noise . Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition. 

Sometimes what Kahneman et al. call “informational cascades” is called “peer pressure.” Solomon Ashe and other social psychologists demonstrated this dynamic decades ago.

We have colloquial sayings like “Better to go along to get along,” and “When in Rome you do as the Romans do,” and “Why go against the grain?” and “Don’t upset the apple cart,” and “You shouldn’t disturb the status quo.”

Keeping with the title of their book, the authors write that informational cascades are “noise.” Indeed they are. A major contributor to informational cascades is power and what are sometimes called “opinion leaders.” The first story told about the incident, event, or topic "frames" the future discussion to which any subsequent offering will be compared. "Disinformation" often goes viral in this way with the first story constantly being spread as subsequent commentors try to rebut it.

When posts on social media go "viral" they demonstrate what Kahneman is calling an "informational cascade."

To what extent are you an opinion leader in the groups you participate in? When have you been the leader and when have you been subject to another leader and group pressure? Have you ever participated in an organizational decision which didn’t seem right to you but you went along because you did not want to challenge the developing majority opinion of the group?

Noise is well worth reading as it provides a deeper understanding of the disinformation so rampant in our society in our digital age.

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