On Monday night, I was deep in the internet somewhere when a message popped on my phone from a friend.
How about much need in this moment?
Hidden Brain uses science and stories to help us understand our best and worst habits as humans. Doomscrolling happens to be one of the worst and one I find myself all to wrapped up in these days. And there is a reason:
The bad news captures our attention and for that matter, any news, anything that unfolds quickly is more likely to be bad because it's easy for something to go wrong very quickly than for something to go right.
- Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University
Change compounds over time. It’s hard to capture that on some random Sunday headline in November. It’s easier to focus on the change that happened quickly and that isn’t usually positive. In this episode, Steven suggests that to see beyond this doom and gloom of the headlines and see change in progress, we must look at data.
As long as bad things haven't gone to zero (which they never will) then the news will always present a biased sample of the state of the world. Not because they are dishonest or because it's fake news. It's real news, but it's just not a representative sample.
- Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University
For a moment, I dreamt of a news dashboard that could paint a wholistic view of progress overtime. In a time of pandemic, when there are stark reminders of racial injustice, political divide, and climate change all around us, it’s hard to imagine looking at the world through a set of rose colored glasses. “The point is not that you are wrong to be skeptical of claims of progress, but that knee jerk skepticism has now become so automatic for lots of us that we don't even stop to realize that we are doing it,” host Shankar Vedantam shares.
Statistics have the value of treating every life as equally valuable. Statistics tell the story of 137 thousand people being pulled out of extreme poverty on a daily basis, as has happened on average every day for the last 25 years (source). That isn’t in the news.
With 78 ODEs now collected, we have each collected stats on our life. We can start to form of dashboard. We can use metrics of curiosity, interest, and joy to help inform the stories we tell and the ones we look forward to create.
Take a look at the last 78 days. What progress or themes do you see on your dashboard?
This is your weekly, Sunday Roundup. Please submit (via this form) a picture of your favorite ODE from week 11, October 12 - 18 along with the title of the other ODEs you wrote. You have until Tuesday at 5 pm EST to submit your ODEs for the previous week. Wednesday you will receive the Midweek Pause with everyone’s ODEs.
If you missed a week of submissions, you are welcome to go back and submit for previous weeks at any time.
Be well,
Katie