Red Mosquito

Simple Torture wrote:As he was giving that statement, I thought to myself, "It's pretty weird that he doesn't go by his real name now that he's a diplomat. I wonder what his real name is?" I figured his Wikipedia page would list him as "Theodore Francis 'Rex' Tillerson" or something like that. Nope, his name is Rex. He has a dog's name.

dimejinky99 wrote:

doug rr wrote:

If that isn't the biggest Fuck you he can give to Puerto Rico I don't know what is. He actually turned up just to do that. Appalling.

wease wrote:

dimejinky99 wrote:

doug rr wrote:

If that isn't the biggest Fuck you he can give to Puerto Rico I don't know what is. He actually turned up just to do that. Appalling.

Yeah. What the fuck are they gonna do with paper towels anyway. Sop up the water from the hurricane? They’re not even Bounty for Christ’s sake.

doug rr wrote:

wease wrote:

dimejinky99 wrote:

doug rr wrote:

If that isn't the biggest Fuck you he can give to Puerto Rico I don't know what is. He actually turned up just to do that. Appalling.

Yeah. What the fuck are they gonna do with paper towels anyway. Sop up the water from the hurricane? They’re not even Bounty for Christ’s sake.

Viva makes a better paper towel than bounty

wease wrote:

doug rr wrote:

wease wrote:

dimejinky99 wrote:

doug rr wrote:

bune wrote:

wease wrote:

doug rr wrote:

wease wrote:

dimejinky99 wrote:

doug rr wrote:

Love the bottom right, "ha, you got paper towels." "WTF am I supposed to do now?"

McParadigm wrote:

Monkey_Driven wrote:I'm consistently blown away by how many people fell for this moron's nonsense.

Hatfield wrote:

Monkey_Driven wrote:I'm consistently blown away by how many people fell for this moron's nonsense.

Fell?! Still falling!

My college roommate. Most of my extended family. My parents!

What the f*** is wrong with these people's rational thought monitors?!

In September 2016, in collaboration with my colleagues Richard West and Maggie Toplak, I published a book titled The Rationality Quotient. In it, we described our attempt to create the first comprehensive test of rational thinking. The book is very much an academic volume, full of statistics and technical details. We had expected our academic peers to engage with the statistics and technical details, and they did begin to do just that after its publication.

But then the November 8, 2016 United States presidential election intervened.

The nature of my email suddenly changed. I began to receive many communications containing gallows humor, like “Wow, you’ll sure have a lot to study now” or “We sure need your test now, don’t we?” Many of these emails had the implication that I now had the perfect group to study—Trump voters—who were obviously irrational in the eyes of my email correspondents.

Subsequent to the election, I also received many invitations to speak. Several of these invitations came with the subtle (or sometimes not-so-subtle) implication that I surely would want to comment—after first giving my technical talk, of course—on the flawed rational thinking of the voters who had done this terrible thing to the nation. One European conference that solicited my participation had as its theme trying to understand the obviously defective thinking not only of Trump voters, but of Brexit voters as well. The wordy conference prospectus clearly presumed that every educated person would view any opposition to increased globalization as obviously irrational. I—the author of a rational thinking test—was seen as the ideal candidate to give the imprimatur of science to this conclusion. No less insistent have been friends and relatives who assume that I am the perfect person to affirm their view that a substantial number of people who cast ballots for Trump were irrational in their thinking.

Rather than reply to these emails, or give all the talks requested, or affirm all of the leading questions addressed to me, I thought it would be more efficient to write this single essay and disappoint all of my progressive correspondents at once. I am very sorry, progressives, to have to tell you that the Trump voters were, in fact, not irrational—or at least no less rational than the Clinton voters. Several kinds of analyses in cognitive science support this conclusion.

McParadigm wrote:I actually find quite a lot wrong with it, though I won't have time to go over it all today. My masters is in CogPsy, and he's accurate here when he says he's being pedantic. The professional definitions of "rationality" are exact enough, and conditioned enough, that he's really arguing against a term that is different than the one that is socially, colloquially understood.

That said, I agree that irrationality is not the common problem. Remember when Trump voters were rabid for ending Obamacare, and then the light went on that ACA was Obamacare? Suddenly a large portion of them became less rabid about it. They recognized their personal interest in maintaining it, and adjusted accordingly.

But that same example demonstrates the actual problem, here. They didn't even have the information to know that they were voting against their best interest. The problem is a large group of people who are caught up in a propogandous echo chamber, who can't deliver rational, informed votes because MORE OF THEM THOUGHT PIZZAGATE WAS REAL than believed the climate was changing at all...not man-made, just...at all.

And that's what people are thinking about when they talk of rationality. They mean the cult of personality. The ability to be buy in that Vegas was a liberal conspiracy. The shock in learning that Obamacare is the ACA.

McParadigm wrote:I actually find quite a lot wrong with it, though I won't have time to go over it all today. My masters is in CogPsy, and he's accurate here when he says he's being pedantic. The professional definitions of "rationality" are exact enough, and conditioned enough, that he's really arguing against a term that is different than the one that is socially, colloquially understood.

That said, I agree that irrationality is not the common problem. Remember when Trump voters were rabid for ending Obamacare, and then the light went on that ACA was Obamacare? Suddenly a large portion of them became less rabid about it. They recognized their personal interest in maintaining it, and adjusted accordingly.

But that same example demonstrates the actual problem, here. They didn't even have the information to know that they were voting against their best interest. The problem is a large group of people who are caught up in a propogandous echo chamber, who can't deliver rational, informed votes because MORE OF THEM THOUGHT PIZZAGATE WAS REAL than believed the climate was changing at all...not man-made, just...at all.

And that's what people are thinking about when they talk of rationality. They mean the cult of personality. The ability to be buy in that Vegas was a liberal conspiracy. The shock in learning that Obamacare is the ACA.

dimejinky99 wrote:So having been warned off picking a fight with North Korea he's now retreating to picking one with Iran. Or is he trying to pick both fights?

Guys. Your president is a fucking psychopath