Question UCLA Communications Essay For this exercise: Start by watching the following video. For the most part, it’s an overview of the concepts we’ve been working on this week. But I want you to pay particularly close attention to it when it discusses Availability Cascades. 10 BEST IDEAS | Thinking Fast And Slow | Daniel Kahnerman | Animated Book SummaryLinks to an external site. It’s important to note that this video was created in 2016, several years before the killing of George Floyd re-energized the Black Lives Matter movement. Consider these questions: Do you think the Availability Cascade effect contributed to media coverage of police brutality in 2020? If so, to what extent? Why or why not? In the Availability Cascade examples given by Cass and Sunstein in their original study (Love Canal and the Alar Apple Scare) they assert that in both of those cases, availability cascades turned “relatively minor stories” into major events, causing an overreaction. Do you agree? In your view, did this happen with police-brutality coverage in 2020? If yes, to what degree? As you will have noticed, Availability Cascade Theory can be used to politicize — to, essentially, clothe a pre-existing opinion with the legitimacy of social science. In your view, what is the best way to control for that possibility in applying Availability Cascade Theory to the police-brutality question? Share your analysis in a 750- to 1,500-word briefing. Overview For your final project, you’ll seek out a piece of media that you believe is dishonest and, deploying your new-found bullshit-busting skills, outline why and how. The piece of media you select has to be a large one; an article or blog post won’t work unless it’s very large and influential. Popular choices for this include documentary films and nonfiction books. You can’t pick anything that we’ve used as a case study in class, but it’s OK if it’s been mentioned on the discussion board. Formatting This assignment is worth 5 points. To submit it, just enter the following information in the text box: Title of topic Type (film, book, series of articles, etc.) Details (why you think it’s bullshit) By the way, if there’s a piece of media that’s widely disparaged as BS, but you think is getting an unfair rap, you can totally turn this assignment around and make the case for why something is NOT bullshit, if you like. Instructions Please visit this board at least once per week, interact with at least two postings and/or post original findings or comments of your own, each time, for a total of at least four posts (two per week) on this board. This one will expire at the end of the day Sunday of Week 4. Let’s Start With This I’d like to start our discussion with this article from 2015, when Oklahoma State University conducted a survey of popular attitudes toward regulatory policy on food labeling: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/01/17/over-80-percent-of-americans-support-mandatory-labels-on-foods-containing-dna/ (Links to an external site.) Please read the article, then click the link at the very end of it to go to the blog of Jayson Lusk, the ag-economist who did the study. Please read the whole article, including the graph of responses to the survey questions, then click in the “addendum” in the last line to read the follow-up post and read that. Note the reference to “availability entrepreneurs” in the last paragraph. Do you think Dr. Lusk’s intention is to subtly suggest that critics of genetic engineering are parasitic scaremongers looking to whip up unreasonable popular hysteria into an availability cascade so they can cash in on it? What do you think? Is there a political valence at work here? A case of confirmation bias perhaps? Do you see the question about warning labels about DNA in food as a legitimate question in the context in which it appears?
