Responsible Organising a Stakeholder Conference. Another case of Natural stupidity/Dysrationalia

Yesterday, Finland's Swedish-speaking business school - Hanken - organized the Responsible Organising a Stakeholder Conference. As part of the conference was the GODESS institute, which focuses on gender, organisation, diversity, inclusiveness, and social sustainability. The keynote, a professor in psychology, made an attack on men. Then some other scholars promoted the implementation of EATs flawed diet-proposal, and for lunch participants were only offered a vegan alternative. And despite promoting themselves with words like diversity, inclusiveness, and social sustainability, the conference-climate did the opposite - promoted conformity, exclusiveness, and just being socially unsustainable. I left the venue with my questions unanswered. 7 pages.

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Yesterday I attended a conference called Responsible Organising a Stakeholder Conference at Finland's Swedish speaking Business School Hanken.

Länk till källan

There were some warning signs. For example, the organizers had announced that they would only offer a vegan option for lunch.

Free lunch at a free conference is just a great thing. Finland has >110 000 poor kids who would love to attend the conference just for the free lunch. So, being offered a free lunch is of course just great. But why vegan stuff which has proven to be unhealthy and unsustainable?

At 09.15 the keynote speech was given by Kopano Ratele, a professor of psychology at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. The keynote was moderated by Charlotta Niemistö, Director of the GODESS Institute at Hanken School of Economics.

And according to the vision and mission statements:

Professor Ratele has written of book:

But why on Earth is a professor of psychology writing about men's but not women's violence?

Members of our species are prone to mental fallacies. For example:

• Confirmation bias, the tendency to apply the same theory on all situations, or search for information which fits the conviction (Nickerson, 1998; Wason, 1960, 1966; 1968; Wason och Shapiro, 1971).
  
  
• Natural stupidity – our species propensity to rely on information which are either prototypical (Kahneman och Tversky, 1972), available (Tversky och Kahneman, 1973), or just easy to access (Kahneman and Tversky, 1977).
  
  
• Dysrationlia – the inability to think and behave [epistemic and instrumental] rationally despite adequate intelligence (Stanovich, 1993, 2011, 2016).
  
  
• Myside bias – a psychological disinclination to abandon a favored hypothesis (Stanovich, West och Toplak, 2013).
  
  
• Continued Influence Effect – Misinformation continues to influence memory and reasoning about an event, despite the misinformation having been corrected (Cacciatore, 2021).

These biases interact in a reinforcing loop.

In order to escape the bias-loop, I propose Rational Entrepreneurial thinking (Österberg, 2021, chapter 3). The model suggests that we use three established theories in concert:

• epistemic vigilance (Sperber et al. 2010).
  
  
• numeracy (Brooks och Pui, 2010). Note. Numeracy is the foundation for instrumental and epistemic rational thinking (Stanovich, 2011, 2016).
  
  
• disjunctive reasoning (Stanovich, 2009) in concert.

Scientific studies on domestic violence show that women are perpetrators of physical violence in at least half of the cases (Archer,2000, 2004; Bergkvist, 2002; Bates, Graham-Kevan och Archer , 2014; Bates och Graham-Kevan, 2016; Bates, 2018; Bates, Kaye, Pennington och Hamlin, 2019; Crick och Grotpeter, 1995; Thornton et al. 2012).

Listen to Dr Elizabeth Bates: Intimate Partner Violence.

Read about Violent women:

Charmayne McEwen, 22, jailed for more than six years for 'cruel and sadistic' torture of man.

EXCLUSIVE: Chilling note a mum-of-four desperate from more kids wrote before she killed her ex by setting him on fire as her children slept in the next room: 'It won't be an accident... it will be him').

In Finland, a mother was sentenced to life in prison after murdering her child's father: Hovrätten dömer kvinna för mord på ex-man i Eckerö, HBL

And recently, a mother was arrested because she tried to murder her 5-year-old son (HBL).

At academic conferences, the tradition holds that after a talk, the speaker invites the audience, most often fellow academics, to ask questions, including questioning what the speaker just said. This talk was no exception. So I raised my hand.

When I got the microphone I introduced myself as a psychological scientist, and by stating what international science says about domestic violence. Then I stated the obvious question to Dr Ratele: the one about method? Did Dr Ratele use RCTs, questionnaires or what?

Dr Ratele didn't have an answer. Instead he started to mumble about something. And then I was cut off.

Then we had a coffee break, and of course, the organizers who promoted diversity and inclusion, chose to exclude me - the expert with a diverse viewpoint.

After the keynote and coffee break there were panel sessions and workshops. I had chosen to listen to a panel discussion called Health-promoting sustainable food system.

But the panel didn't present research about food and nutrition in general, they promoted the infamous diet promoted by the ex.wife of the hotel mogul Petter Stordalen (probably paid with his money), Gunhild Stordalen: EAT.

The sad part was that the panel-people didn't follow academic tradition, that is, report on the pros and cons of the proposed diet. Instead they just promoted it as a way to promote health among people and to improve the climate.

But when the paper was published in early 2019, professor Frank Mitloehner at UC Davis sent an email to EATs science director Fabrice DeClerck who responded with the following:

The EAT organization made clear that their proposed diet had little to do with climate. After scrutinizing the paper, Dr Mitloehner also remarked that EATs proposed diet resembles a vegan diet. Read the whole article by Dr Mitloehner: EAT-Lancet’s environmental claims are an epic fail. And the Commission knows it.

EATs proposed diet was also scrutinized for its health claims by nutrition psychiatrist Georgia Ede who also remarked that EATs proposed diet resembles a vegan diet. See full presentation:Dr. Georgia Ede - 'EAT-Lancet's Plant-Based Planet: Food in the (Mis)Anthropocene'.

If one takes a look at humans' anthropological record, we find that our ancestors, Australopithecus afarensis, started to eat bone marrow from big dead animal some 3.6 million years before the present (McPherron et al. 2010; Thompson et al. 2019). Bone marrow is dens in nutrients, especially those not found in vegetarian options. As a consequence of this new diet, their brains started to expand, from the occipital lobe and forward, and their intestinal systems shrank (Aiello and Wheeler, 1995). This is consistent with current science which shows that we as a species need animal source food to sustain physical and mental health (Adesogan et al. 2020; Balehegn et al 2019; Ede, 2019).

I have a decent understanding about nutrition, the anthropological record, and the flaws of EATs proposal (Österberg, 2020), and I must admit that I was a bit surprised to listen to a group of scholars uncritically promoting the diet both for health reasons and to support climate. I mean, that was dismissed years ago.

It's common knowledge that veganism is unsustainable for health. This is manifested in the fact that only 2 % of a normal population chose the option to abstain from animal source food, half of them experimenting with the vegan option. But 85 % give within a year (Herzog, 2014).

People who make the decision to abstain from animal source food also have issues with mental health and social relations (Dobersek et al. 2020, 2021; Plante et al. 2019).

Exactly who came up with the idea to abstain from the food that opened the door for our species is written in the stars, but the first signs may be found in the archaeological records from the Epipaleolithic period, when our ancectors first settled (Hodder, 2018). And after the first agricultural revolution, findings show that people who switch to a vegetarian diet suffered from stunting (Mummert et al. 2011).

More recently, Swedish scientist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) argued that we should institute a vegan diet:

“Drawing on the passage in Genesis (1:29-31) in which God Institute a vegan diet, Swedenborg said that meat-eating corresponds to the fall from grace in the Garden of Eden and was, therefore, the point of entry of sin and suffering into the world” (Phelps, p. 149)”.

After Swedenborg, movements started to influence other people to abstain from animal source food. In 1850, American vegetarian society was founded. Thirteen years later, the Seventh day adventist church was established. One of its leaders of the movement, a teenage girl by the name of Ellen G. White (1827-1915), argued that meat, milk, and butter were responsible for 'carnal urges' - impure thoughts in men. Another member, physician John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943), developed breakfast cereals as a replacement for animal source food (Österberg, 2019).

So again, at a conference that claims to promote diversity and inclusiveness, I tried to ask some questions?

But again, I was met by rejection, and exclusion. I also overheard someone in the audience, or from the organizers, saying: - it's a meta analysis, referring to EATs flawed paper.

Then we had lunch, vegan stuff which was announced already during the invitation for the conference. But even though I had made a remark during registration that veganism is unsustainable and really unhealthy, according to science, and asked for normal food, my request was ignored. Again, exclusion and conformity. Fortunately I brought some meat to put on the rice they served.

The organizers will read this and just not understand why I didn't submit to them. The phenomenon is called group-think. In the 1950s, three social psychologists infiltrated a doomsday-sect who conformed to the idea that the Earth would be swamped by a flood on Dec. 21 1954. On page three they wrote:

“A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point”.

During the conference, I disagreed, but they turned away. I showed them facts and figures (also above), but they questioned my sources. I appealed to logic, but they failed to see my point.

After the lunch, a scholar talked about her relations to horses, and I realized I was running out of time and left the venue with unanswered questions.

Also read: When did our species start eating meat? The case of vegan proponent Dr Marcus Vinnari

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