Being the adult you needed as a kid by giving out snacks

https://v.redd.it/d54afvz80vud1

People think they already know everything they need to make decisions

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/10/people-think-they-already-know-everything-they-need-to-make-decisions/

The world is full of people who have excessive confidence in their own abilities. This is famously described as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people who lack expertise in something will necessarily lack the knowledge needed to recognize their own limits. Now, a different set of researchers has come out with what might be viewed as a corollary to Dunning-Kruger: People have a strong tendency to believe that they always have enough data to make an informed decision—regardless of what information they actually have.

The work, done by Hunter Gehlbach, Carly Robinson, and Angus Fletcher, is based on an experiment in which they intentionally gave people only partial, biased information, finding that people never seemed to consider they might only have a partial picture. "Because people assume they have adequate information, they enter judgment and decision-making processes with less humility and more confidence than they might if they were worrying whether they knew the whole story or not," they write. The good news? When given the full picture, most people are willing to change their opinions.

Anand Menon on racism: the UK has made progress, but this year’s riots show there’s a long way to go

https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2024/10/04/anand-menon-on-racism-uk-has-made-progress-but-far-right-riots-show-theres-a-long-way-to-go/

Writing this, I’ve come to realise how appallingly selfish I’ve become. How my relative security made me blind to the insecurity of others. In my anxiety not to appear hypervigilant, I’d not called out as clearly as I should have the careless and provocative rhetoric, the talk of immigrants as vermin, the scaremongering about an “invasion”, the lazy elisions of “British” and “British-born”.

One of the big changes between then and now is the presence of social media and the ease with which fake news can spread (like claims the Southport murderer was an Islamicist who had arrived in a small boat). This has resulted in the paradox pointed out by Sunder Katwala that, in a society with ever-fewer racists, there might be wider experience of racist abuse and threat than was the case 20 years ago.

I’m still sensitive. So, too, I imagine, are all those who were on the receiving end of the casual, cruel, continuous racism of the 1970s. I hope my recollections about my childhood help explain why.

The $1,000 Wheelchair

https://newmobility.com/not-a-wheelchair/

How the YouTubers from JerryRigEverything are Making Affordable Wheelchairs Without the Red Tape