Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Go Doubt Yourself: Critical Thinking in Politics

Welcome back to Go Doubt Yourself - the series about Critical Thinking in Politics.

Case 002 opens on a close Democratic primary in New York City in 1998. Four candidates wanted the House seat Chuck Schumer was giving up, and the city rotates the order of candidates from district to district. Nobody set it up as an experiment, but that’s what it became: the same front-runners, on otherwise identical ballots, with only their position changing.

The result is uncomfortable for anyone who believes votes go to the better candidate. Being printed first was worth real votes, in a race whose final margin came in under 500. It wasn’t a one-off, either. The same tilt turned up all over the city that year, in Ohio, and in New Hampshire in 2016, for Trump and for Clinton alike.

Part Two brings Daniel Kahneman back to explain why voters never notice it happening, with a short arithmetic puzzle that trips up students at some of the country’s top universities. Watch for what the people who solved it wrote down before they got it right.In other news:The latest from The xAI Files, plus every records request I’ve filed and who still hasn’t answered.

I have nearly 13,000 pages of public records on xAI. Help me read the ones nobody has gotten to yet.

Everything I’ve written about AI in one place, from Memphis data centers to the Pentagon.

Catch up on The GriftMatrix: every episode of The Daily Grift, newest first.

Sources

Jonathan G. S. Koppell and Jennifer A. Steen, "The Effects of Ballot Position on Election Outcomes," Journal of Politics, 2004 Joanne M. Miller and Jon A. Krosnick, "The Impact of Candidate Name Order on Election Outcomes," Public Opinion Quarterly, 1998 Bo MacInnis, Joanne M. Miller, Jon A. Krosnick and others, "Candidate name order effects in New Hampshire," PLOS ONE, 2021: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0248049 Shane Frederick, "Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making," Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2005 Andrew Meyer and Shane Frederick, "The formation and revision of intuitions," Cognition, 2023 Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 98 (the certified primary result) Archival film, public domain, from the Internet Archive: A Day at the Fair (1947, Encyclopedia Britannica Films, Prelinger Archives), Wreckless (1935, Prelinger Archives), Behind the Freedom Curtain (1957, Prelinger Archives), The Boat (1921, Buster Keaton and Eddie Cline)

Welcome to my new podcast series: Go Doubt Yourself.Go Doubt Yourself is a short video series about critical thinking in politics. Same detective, different case. The Daily Grift follows the money; this one follows the reasoning, including mine. Each episode takes one habit of mind, shows it on something real that turned up in a feed, and hands you a check you can run yourself in under a minute. The episodes are a few minutes long and made to be watched on a phone - or you can subscribe to the audio-only versions. The links are in the sidebar.

This first case is from 2003. A Yale psychologist handed committed liberals and conservatives a news article about a made-up welfare plan. Half read a generous plan and half read a harsh one, and the article also said which party backed it. You can probably guess where this goes. The harder question is how the students explained their own choices afterward.

In Part Two, Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel-winning psychologist, explains the mental shortcut behind it. Stay for the last few minutes, where the students rate their own bias lower than everybody else’s.Chapters0:00 The experiment0:35 The cover story0:58 Two welfare plans1:36 The flip2:14 What the students said3:03 The show3:17 The expert witness4:03 The question swap4:42 Why nobody noticed5:22 Both sides do it5:46 Spotting it in others6:19 Case closed6:52 Next case7:07 Sign-offIn other news:The latest from The xAI Files, plus every records request I’ve filed and who still hasn’t answered.

I have nearly 13,000 pages of public records on xAI. Help me read the ones nobody has gotten to yet.

Everything I’ve written about AI in one place, from Memphis data centers to the Pentagon.

Catch up on The GriftMatrix: every episode of The Daily Grift, newest first.

Sources

* Geoffrey L. Cohen, “Party Over Policy: The Dominating Impact of Group Influence on Political Beliefs,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2003: https://ed.stanford.edu/sites/ed/files/party_over_policy_0.pdf

* Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)

* Archival film, public domain, from the Internet Archive: Tulsa, Oklahoma (ca. 1945, National Archives), From Trees to Tribunes (ca. 1931, Prelinger Archives), Going Places (1948, Prelinger Archives), A Day of Thanksgiving (1951, Centron Corporation, Prelinger Archives)

A new series from the maker of The Daily Grift, about critical thinking in politics. Each episode takes one habit of mind and tests it on something real from your feed. Episode 00 sets the table with two examples: a claim that ran in Reuters, the BBC and The Guardian after the June 2025 strikes on Iran, all three resting on a single speech, and a White House steel chart from January 2026 whose vertical axis began at 80 rather than 0, so a small rise read as a giant one.

Chapters0:00 Episode 000:05 Headlines0:21 The comment section0:45 Stubborn on both sides0:55 Telling people off1:18 The show1:22 Why we dig in1:38 The checks1:49 One speech, three outlets2:04 The steel chart2:21 What the series covers2:26 Asking before knowing2:45 Spotting it in yourself3:07 Holding a view loosely3:13 The question to keep3:21 Episode 1 preview3:27 Sign-off3:34 Where to find me

Subscribe on Substack: https://rachelandthecity.substack.comThe critical thinking hub: https://rachelandthecity.com/critical-thinking-hub/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/itsashameaboutrachelThe Daily Grift and the GriftMatrix: https://thegriftmatrix.com

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