Winnowing time

A visit to a virtual middle-school classroom is the perfect antidote to latent depression.

Hiking boots and toilet paper, by Carol L. Douglas. This still life could be my current self-portrait.
After a Zoom conversation that mentioned birding, my Facebook feed was filled with birding suggestions. Several people insisted that I was experiencing confirmation bias, the tendency we all have to interpret situations in a way that confirms our own beliefs, experiences, and ideas. In other words, I was just noticing ads that had been there all the time.
One area in which we all suffer confirmation bias is the area of stress and grief. A recently-bereaved person feels other, smaller shocks acutely. A depressed person is hypersensitive to the ‘heartache, and the thousand natural shocks/That flesh is heir to.
Tin foil hat, by Carol L. Douglas. Or perhaps this is my current self-portrait.
Right now, western culture is in a state of heightened stress and grief. Much has been lost, even by those who have not directly experienced illness or death in the current pandemic. Our jobs, our activities, and our economic and social freedom are curtailed. We’re all keenly feeling the ‘slings and arrow of outrageous fortune.’ Is this just confirmation bias, or are there in fact a lot of things going wrong right now?
As a natural introvert, I’m not finding the isolation difficult. Instead, I’m cycling through my own problem: the as-yet-undiagnosed gastric ailment I brought home from Argentina. It incapacitates me for periods of about 48 hours and then disappears for several days. When I’m in its grip, I’m reminded of the black dog that lurks just outside my tent. My father and his mother both died of depression, and my mother attempted suicide at the end of her life. I escape depression, in part, by keeping myself frenetically busy.
This is a real self-portrait, drawn twenty years ago when I was in the midst of my cancer treatment.
That’s learned behavior. Hard work was how my parents kept depression at bay until they were too old to outrun it. However, we all get tired eventually, and I’ll be no exception. Addressing this question has been on my to-do list for a number of years, but it’s only when illness knocks me down that I remember it. The problem is, of course, that there’s no easy answer. Nor does faith provide insulation against pain and decline. As Hebrews 9:27 cheerfully notes, we’re all appointed once to die.
Meanwhile and more immediately, there’s the question of how to revitalize my current business practice. Yesterday I taught my first Zoom class. My usual practice is to move from student to student, contemplate each painting, talk with the artist about what he’s doing, and then make suggestions. This is difficult on video, because people can either look at their phones or have them pointed at their canvases, but not both.
Buffalo Grain Mills, by Carol L. Douglas. Like my home town, I’m worn.
On the other hand, in the classroom, the dialogue is mainly between me and each individual student. Because my Zoom students had to turn their work to the screen to show it to me, it made class more of a streaming critique session. That was surprisingly more helpful than a ten-minute critique at the end of each class. It gives me something to build on for next week.
I made a guest appearance in Chrissy Pahucki’s virtual middle school art class at Goshen Central School in New York. Initially, I had trouble finding my way around Google Meet, but kids are not only naturally adept at technology, they’re courteous in guiding adults.
But kids can always make me smile. Photo courtesy of Chrissy Spoor Pahucki.
Chrissy expected they would ask questions for twenty minutes. It went on for twice that long, and I’m not sure they were finished when we finally pulled the plug. Pre-teens and teenagers are among my favorite people on the planet: they’re cheerful, innocent, inquisitive—the perfect antidote to creeping nihilism.

How did that happen?

My beady little eye on the world.
Since I had no use for either major-party candidate, I went to bed early last night. As the wits were saying, the bad news was that one of them would be elected. However, my phone pinged at 11 PM. It was a friend who is an ardent Hillary supporter, talking about how she wanted to die. After chatting with her, I went on Facebook and saw innumerable shocked and angry posts. (I’m an artist from New York, so the majority of my friends are liberal.) The same people who’d been celebrating all day yesterday for electing the first woman president were posting things along the lines of, “I’m trying to understand. How did this happen?”
In the 1950s, psychologist Leon Festinger developed a theory of cognitive dissonance, which basically says that holding contradictory beliefs is stressful and people will do anything to squirm out of it. The more deeply held the belief, the stronger the dissonance. Among the strategies we use to cope is confirmation bias. This is our tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms our preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. When we read and remember information selectively (and we all do), we are engaging in confirmation bias.
Today our best friends are machines that do that biasing for us. The average American spends 11 hours a day using electronic gadgets. All of these have some kind of confirmation bias built in (the channels you select, for example, affect the news and commercials you see) but the most insidious are your computer and your smart phone.
Yes, your computer is watching you, and yes, it is developing a profile for you based on the sites you visit, your search terms, your purchases and social media profile. That’s relatively innocuous when it comes to what salad dressing you buy, but in 2012, the major parties started using the same tools to target political ads. We started seeing advertising that reinforced, rather than challenged, our beliefs.
Our clickstreams also influence the results we get when we are searching. Google has complicated (and patented) algorithms that say that when we search for A, B, and C, the result will be offered in a particular order. That’s based on user history, and it has a tendency to lump us into herds.
Then there’s the fallacy that you choose your friends. Every time you open Facebook, it scans and collects all the posts made by all your friends and ranks them. The algorithm is complicated and hidden, but how frequently you interact with the poster is certainly part of it. So too is hiding similar posts.
Needless to say, you very rapidly weed out the people you don’t particularly like, the ones you find boring, or—in many cases—the ones who disagree with you. Most users only see the top few hundred posts, which they’ve selected through their own internal biases. The machine then takes over and reinforces these biases. The posts you favor influence the posts you see. This is why last night so many people posted things like, “But I don’t know a single person who supported him!”
This creates terribly bad assumptions about our group behavior and further polarizes us. It’s why so many of us were blindsided by the results. I’m not saying you should ditch your computer—heck, I want you to continue reading my blog—but I am saying that you need to test its version of reality.