I’ve spent the past few days traveling from New Delhi to Dubai and Amman, and I have an urgent message to deliver to President Biden and the Israeli people: I am seeing the increasingly rapid erosion of Israel’s standing among friendly nations — a level of acceptance and legitimacy that was painstakingly built up over decades. And if Biden is not careful, America’s global standing will plummet right along with Israel’s. I don’t think Israelis or the Biden administration fully appreciate the rage that is bubbling up around the world, fueled by social media and TV footage.
Thomas L. Friedman
Monthly Archives: February 2024
The Circle
Circles have been used as structures for meeting communally for thousands of years. Some of the earliest known tribes and native people across all continents used Circles, sometimes called councils, to meet to discuss the most important matters their communities faced. In this sense, Circles are natural to us and are not anything new. In many ways, the Valor Circle is a new spin on an ancient practice.
Valor Collegiate Academies
Putin, Truth, and Scapegoating
Reader’s Comments
Re: “The NFL and the Egalitarian Cultural Revolution”
Dan Brook
As a racial side note, when Blacks do what Travis Kelley did to his coach, they are often called hostile and thugs. Likewise when Black rappers sing similar lyrics to Johnny Cash’s lyrics.
Mary Hudson
Amazing how the 49ers changed their “mission” and how it has spread throughout the organization. The NFL’s Inspire Change initiative is very encouraging.
Re: NewsGuard
Roger Marsden
Doesn’t mean so much until we scrutinize their analysis by article. They might have their own biases, which might show up on particular issues. Who scrutinizes the scrutinizer? What was the name of that science “skeptic” guy – he always seemed like a bullshitter. And then there is Snopes – I never put much faith in them. The thing about Ukraine is that the narrative is so firm – difficult for any news source or individual to challenge it. Even firmer than Israel used to be. Ukraine has been pulverized, many dead, billions spent – easy for Americans to say it’s worth it – what about the dead, their families and those communities? Worth it for them? What if we had just consented and compromised on those (Russian-speaking) regions that were the points of contention? And it continues on and on – our media, politicians, and military “leaders” have talked at various phases about how Russia is weakening and Ukraine is doing so much better than expected. Sounds kinda like bullshit. I don’t claim to truly know what the agendas are, but the opinion that says this is about the US wanting to weaken and destabilize Russia seems kinda of plausible – and make billions in profit while they’re doing it.
Putin, Truth, and Scapegoating
By Wade Lee Hudson
Some critics blame the West for the Ukraine War. They say because Putin felt threatened by NATO’s expansion, he understandably invaded Ukraine to defend Russian interests. Moreover, they think Ukraine perhaps should’ve given its Russian-speaking Eastern regions independence. Some say the United States is so imperialistic and hypocritical it has no right to judge Russian imperialism. Others say the situation is too ambiguous to justify arming Ukraine.
However, Putin has long made clear his desire to restore the Russian Empire. In 2021, he published a 5,000-word essay entitled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” During his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, he falsely claimed that 862 was the year of the “establishment of the Russian state.” He considered the collapse of the Soviet Union a terrible disaster. He worried that a liberal democracy on his doorstep would serve as an example to encourage a popular revolt in Russia.
The neighboring Baltic states, former Soviet satellites, knew this and feared it. Putin’s 2008 invasion of Georgia, his heavy-handed handpicking pro-Russian brutal Ukrainian leaders (which backfired in 2004 and 2014), and his seizure of Crimea in 2014 reinforced their fears. The 2022 invasion of Ukraine confirmed them.
NATO expansion was not a one-way street. The West did not push its way in. The Baltic states assertively sought NATO membership to protect themselves.
A post-World War Two global consensus opposed countries changing borders forcibly. This consensus helped stabilize the world. Reversing Iraq’s seizure of Kuwait strengthened this consensus. A Russian victory in Ukraine would undermine it. This dangerous precedent could open the door to similar wars of aggression that would destabilize the world.
The United States has a rich imperialistic history. After World War Two, it has tried to dominate other countries with “soft imperialism.” Its motives aren’t pure, but the U.S. hasn’t expanded its borders with military force. The West supported the pro-democracy Ukrainian revolt, but it didn’t lead it (as Putin tried to do). Russian militarism is a whole other ballgame. Drawing a moral equivalence between Russian and American imperialism doesn’t hold up.
The West shares responsibility for the Ukraine War. It could have done more to stop it. Nevertheless, the West must try to hold Putin accountable for his crimes by arming Ukraine.
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You can hold immoral criminals, autocrats, and bureaucrats accountable without dehumanizing them, or condemning them as less than human. You can avoid scapegoating, or putting total blame on them. It’s important to avoid demonizing Putin.
Putin, Netanyahu, and Trump are symptoms of systemic problems. As such, they’re replaceable. Remove them, and others take their place. They’re not the most serious problem. The primary problem is the System.
The self-perpetuating System encourages everyone to climb social ladders and look down on those below, try to dominate them, exploit them as much as possible, and submit to those above. As Fluke author Brian Klaas said, “This sort of system…operates with optimization and efficiency as its main priorities.”
The drive to optimize, enhance efficiency, and maximize profits is relentless. Gaining more wealth, power, and status becomes a self-centered end rather than a means to higher goals. The System teaches people to be selfish, and selfishness breeds more selfishness. Controlling this excessive self-seeking aggrandizement is imperative.
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Some critics claim it’s impossible to know anything with certainty. Some refrain from making any moral judgment. These arguments are irrational and reprehensible.
Unfortunately, the Internet has spawned a powerful way to undermine truth: trolling. As Jonathan Rausch wrote in 2018,
Unlike ordinary lies and propaganda, which try to make you believe something, disinformation tries to make you disbelieve everything. It scatters so much bad information, and casts so many aspersions on so many sources of information, that people throw up their hands and say, “They’re all a pack of liars.”…
The decentralized, swarm-based version of disinformation that has come to be known as trolling. Trolls attack real news; they attack the sources of real news; they disseminate fake news; and they create artificial copies of themselves to disseminate even more fake news. By unleashing great quantities of lies and half-truths, and then piling on and swarming, they achieve hive-mind coordination. Because trolling need not bother with persuasion or anything more than very superficial plausibility, it can concern itself with being addictively outrageous. Epistemically, it is anarchistic, giving no valence to truth at all; like a virus, all it cares about is replicating and spreading….
All it can do is spread confusion and demolish trust…. Some trolls find it amusing to give offense (what they call “triggering”); some style themselves protesters against political correctness; and some love the thrill of vandalism and defiance. But there are other, less nihilistic reasons….
By insisting that all the fact checkers and hypothesis testers out there are phonies, trolls discredit the very possibility of a socially validated reality and open the door to tribal knowledge, personal knowledge, partisan knowledge, and other manifestations of epistemic anarchy….
Trolls…mock truth, sling mud, trash credentials, ridicule testing, and all the rest. Instinctively, the champions of the constitution of knowledge defend their values—but when they do, they “feed the troll”….
In 2013, …@backupwraith tweeted, “i firmly believe that @realDonaldTrump is the most superior troll on the whole of twitter.” Whereupon @realDonaldTrump took the trouble to tweet back: “A great compliment!” We can’t say he didn’t warn us….
What we could not foresee was a perfect storm of technological, economic, and political changes, all working to the disadvantage of the constitution of knowledge…. First, social media created a distribution platform for disinformation…. Second, software learned to hack our brains. Sophisticated algorithms and granular data allowed messages and images to be minutely tuned and targeted…. Third, the clickbait economy created a business model. Disinformation went from vandalistic to profitable…. Because accurate reportage is orders of magnitude more expensive to produce than disinformation, the economic advantage of real news vaporized…. Politicians and nation-states weaponized trolling….
The promotion of “alternative facts” by Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway, during a Meet the Press interview on January 22, 2017, was an official endorsement of trolling. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer had claimed the crowd at Trump’s inauguration was “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration.” When Chuck Todd challenged this falsehood, Conway defended Spicer by saying she was offering alternative facts.
The same year, key Trump adviser Steve Bannon said, “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Russia’s ongoing avalanche of disinformation weakens confidence in the ability to know the truth.
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Human beings engage in right action based on the best available information about what’s true and false and what’s right and wrong. They have no choice. Inaction is action.
Knowing the truth often isn’t easy, and some conclusions are less certain than others. Fortunately, the Enlightenment led to methods that help humans make these decisions.
One such tool is “the wisdom of crowds.” Wikipedia says, “The wisdom of the crowd is the collective opinion of a diverse independent group of individuals rather than that of a single expert.” The classic example involves hundreds of people guessing the number of gumballs in a large jar. The average of the guesses has a better chance of being more accurate than any one guess.
Another example is a trial by a jury of peers. Deliberative democracy experiments have demonstrated that randomly selected individuals can make solid recommendations about public policy after they’re given some basic facts at the outset. The Irish General Assembly has enabled randomly selected citizens to make impactful recommendations for changes in public policy. Electing representatives, referendums and initiatives are examples of relying on collective wisdom. These methods aren’t totally reliable, but they’re better than the alternatives.
Wikipedia is a collaborative reliable source of factual information. Google’s very useful ranking of sources relies heavily on how many sites link to a page. Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes, Quora, Internet Movie Database, and others aggregate many user evaluations, which most people find valuable. These methods rely on the wisdom of crowds. Ironically, artificial intelligence, infamous for generating false content, can help define truth.
The crowd can be wrong, but most people find these collaborations to be a reliable starting point before making their final decisions.
These methods flow from the Enlightenment and its ways of forming (tentative) consensus concerning what is true — including the scientific method and its controlled, double-blind experiments that independent experiments must replicate.
In “The Constitution of Knowledge,” Jonathan Rausch asks, “Who can be trusted to resolve questions about objective truth?” He responds
The best answer turns out to be no one in particular…. After the invention of the printing press…experimenters and philosophers…removed reality-making from the authoritarian control of priests and princes and placed it in the hands of a decentralized, globe-spanning community of critical testers who hunt for each other’s errors…. The network’s norms and institutions assembled themselves into a system of rules for identifying truth: a constitution of knowledge.
Though nowhere encoded in law [like nations’ constitutions], the constitution of knowledge has its own equivalents of checks and balances (peer review and replication), separation of powers (specialization), governing institutions (scientific societies and professional bodies), voting (citations and confirmations), and civic virtues (submit your beliefs for checking if you want to be taken seriously)….
One rule is that any hypothesis can be floated. That’s free speech. But another rule is that a hypothesis can join reality only insofar as it persuades people after withstanding vigorous questioning and criticism. That’s social testing. Only those propositions that are broadly agreed to have withstood testing over time qualify as knowledge, and even they stand only unless and until debunked….
In 2017, CNN fired three senior journalists for getting a story wrong,… CNN showed that, unlike Trump, it adheres to standards of verification [as do other mainstream media organizations]….
The results have been spectacular, in three ways above all. First, by organizing millions of minds to tackle billions of problems, the epistemic constitution disseminates knowledge at a staggering rate…. Second, by insisting on validating truths through a decentralized, non-coercive process that forces us to convince each other with evidence and argument, it ends the practice of killing ideas by killing their proponents (with) a marketplace of persuasion, because the only way to establish knowledge is to convince others you are right. Third, by placing reality under the control of no one in particular, it dethrones intellectual authoritarianism and commits liberal society foundationally to intellectual pluralism and freedom of thought.
Rausch argues
The troll army will encounter a disadvantage. Trolls have swarms, but the constitution of knowledge has institutions…. Creating knowledge is inherently a professionalized and structured affair…. (It) requires time, money, skill, expertise, and intricate social interaction…. But at the core of the constitution of knowledge, by its very nature, are professional networks.
The distinguishing characteristic of journalism is professional editing…. The distinguishing characteristic of academic research is professional review…. Modern jurisprudence, policy development, and intelligence collection would be unthinkable without institutions like the courts, law schools, and think tanks, as well as agencies like the Congressional Budget Office, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Central Intelligence Agency, and many others—all staffed and run by elaborately trained people who exchange detailed knowledge across specialized channels, using protocols developed over decades and centuries. To be an accomplished scholar or journalist requires years of training and acculturation, which only institutions can provide….
Troll networks are acephalous [without a head], which makes them self-organizing and persistent…. They cannot approach the institutional depth of the communities built up around the constitution of knowledge, nor do they try. Instead, they relentlessly attack the institutions at the heart of those communities, hoping to make the public see professional academics and journalists as scammers peddling biased personal opinions….
How much damage the troll attack inflicts depends on a lot of things, but it depends most on how successfully the institutions rally to improve their performance and defend their values…. Trump’s attacks on the press seem to have strengthened its resolve and its popularity…. The courts and law enforcement have also responded resolutely, even bravely…. Whether Facebook and Google can get a handle on the problem remains to be seen….
On Quora, members post questions and rank the answers. A recent question was, “Where can one find real news, not opinionated news, just the facts on what is going on in the world? Does such a news service exist?” The highest-rated answer is:
Yes, they do. They are called wire services. I would start with the Associated Press and the Reuters News Agency. Wire services operate under a different set of rules than the newspapers, cable news and websites you visit. They have much stricter rules about what they send out. The AP is owned and operated by news outlets around the country who pay a fee for the service. The AP and Reuters, therefore, have no pressure to sell news, they have pressure to get it right. If they make mistakes, they lose customers. Go to your favorite websites and see how many stories come from the AP and Reuters. I talk much more about these issues in my book Broken News: Journalism in Crisis.
In March 2018, media entrepreneur and award-winning journalist Steven Brill co-founded NewsGuard, which fights fake news by providing reliability ratings for over 7,500 U.S. websites as well as specific Google search results. Their 60 editors, powered by multiple AI tools, post ratings that help online readers distinguish between legitimate news sources and those allegedly designed to spread misinformation.
NewsGuard-approved sites include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Democracy Now, and BuzzFeed. Sites they label unreliable include Fox News, InfoWars, Sputnik, RT, and WikiLeaks.
The Guardian and many other sites have reported favorably on NewsGuard, whose 27 investors play no role in the determination of ratings. NewsGuard makes money by licensing access to its database of independent ratings to companies, educational organizations, hospital systems, and other entities, including Microsoft. Individuals can pay $2.95 per month to get the ratings.
Oren Etzioni, Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington where he helped to pioneer meta-search, online comparison shopping, machine reading, and open information extraction, is the founder of TrueMedia.org, another promising use of AI to fight political deepfakes.
Experts and mainstream news organizations don’t always get it right. Their main problem is what they is what they don’t cover; biases influence these decisions. They could do more to examine important neglected issues. Nevertheless, projects like NewsGuard and the wire services can help users decide where to start. Broad collaboration and honest debate can help get a handle on the truth.
Arrogance, however, is a significant barrier. Ego gets in the way. The temptation to seek and hold “the Secret” is enormous. Going against the grain and challenging conventional assumptions is often valid, but ego-driven stubbornness is a real danger.
With today’s disinformation and misinformation overload, finding reliable sources of reasonably accurate information is essential for helping to determine a moral course of action.
Spinoza and “God”
What he denies is that God exists as a being or intelligence separate from the rest of the universe…. Spinoza’s argument is disconcertingly simple. God is “a being absolutely infinite,” and the idea of infinity “involves no negation”: it would be contradictory to say that there is some quality an infinite being does not possess or some space it does not occupy…. If God exists, then he must be absolutely everywhere; not even our own bodies and minds can be separate from him.
Baruch Spinoza and the Art of Thinking in Dangerous Times
The Constitution of Knowledge
Trump showed himself to be an attentive student of disinformation and its operative principle: Reality is what you can get away with…. Previous presidents and national politicians. They may spin the truth, bend it, or break it, but they pay homage to it and regard it as a boundary. Trump’s approach is entirely different…. He was asserting that truth and falsehood were subject to his will…. The lying reflects a strategy,… a national-level epistemic attack: a systematic attack, emanating from the very highest reaches of power, on our collective ability to distinguish truth from falsehood….
From The Constitution of Knowledge”
social-emotional learning
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How one school is centering social-emotional learning
At Valor Collegiate Academy in Nashville, helping students thrive personally and academically through a weekly social-emotional learning practice called Circle is central to their values. The school encourages students to share what’s going on in their lives and to accept support, creating a community of care. According to one student, “It’s half-way between a group therapy session and an AA meeting.” (read more) [posted in Social/Education] On PBS Newshour here.
The NFL and the Egalitarian Cultural Revolution
By Wade Lee Hudson
Challenges to top-down power are spreading. Compassion-minded people are developing ways to empower people rooted in mutual respect. In his February 16 Washington Post column, Fareed Zakaria affirmed “bottom-up systems” that cultivate “organic communities, rooted in freedom and choice, built bottom-up not top-down.” Changes within the National Football League also illustrate aspects of this cultural revolution.
During this year’s Super Bowl, when he was angry about not being in the game, Travis Kelce, Kansas City Chief’s star tight end, walked up to his coach, yelled at him, bumped into him, and knocked him off balance. The coach, Andy Reid, shrugged it. off.
Bill Belichick, the former New England Patriots coach who led the NFL’s greatest dynasty, would never have responded that way. He was an authoritarian control freak who abused his players, including his premier quarterback, Tom Brady. His style has become outdated. Since he and the Patriots parted ways last year, no team has hired him.
Recently, Burke Robinson, a Stanford University management lecturer, helped the San Francisco 49ers to winning records with a new collaborative formula. This approach emphasizes the collective embrace of collaboratively defined core values and principles that provide a precise sense of direction.
The 49ers place their core values into two categories. “Talent” includes objective factors: speed, physical toughness, character traits, scheme fit, and football IQ. “Spirit” includes subjective personal qualities: loves the game, contagious enthusiasm, mental toughness, dependable on commitments, accountable to self and others.
They say their players “will represent our core values and beliefs in both their talent and spirit. We firmly believe that players who embody these core values will change the culture and reestablish the 49er Way — a Brotherhood that will lead us back to competing for championships year after year.”
General Manager John Lynch says, “Culture is the people you surround yourself with. We’ve got to bring quality people to have a great culture… We’re all a product of our experiences.” He says the team “indoctrinates” all of their people in this culture.
He considers their vision “our beacon that reminds us who we are and what we’re trying to be… If you’re on a sailboat, you have to know which port you’re heading for. Everybody in this building has got to know (what exactly we want). We’ve got to be able to articulate that. It’s got to be crystal clear.”
The 49ers emblazon their vision statement, place it on walls, and laminate it for distribution. It’s the “guiding light” for the entire organization.
This unity started upstairs with a collaborative process between the coaching staff and scouting department. It then spread and nurtured strong locker room cohesiveness.
“We haven’t been afraid to tweak the vision statement a little bit when things have changed,” Lynch said.
Others in the NFL are learning from the 49ers. Teams have hired away three coaching assistants as their head coach and selected two of the four participants in that original vision statement meeting as their General Manager.
Countless innovative projects in other arenas are developing similar approaches, even within hierarchical organizations. Key elements include maximizing collaboration on all levels. Articulating a written vision that everyone understands and embraces. Ensuring everyone has a voice and feels heard. Developing a collective culture that affirms both measurable goals and intangible personal qualities. Attention to the importance of culture. An intentional commitment to establishing new structures that cultivate personal and collective growth. Cultivating joy and contagious enthusiasm. Mutual support for self-development.
The Compassionate Humanity Community website has long affirmed these ideas.
Cultural changes in the NFL are also manifest in its Inspire Change social justice initiative. The NFL has dedicated more than $300 million to grants approved by the Player-Owner Social Justice Committee. This project “drives further progress” in police-community relations, criminal justice reform, education, and economic advancement. It is
aimed at reducing barriers to opportunity, particularly in communities of color, and showcasing how the NFL family is working together to create positive change. Inspire Change comes to life at all levels of the league — current and former players: NFL teams and ownership; and throughout the league office.
The Criminal Justice Reform component Just City
will continue its Clean Slate advocacy, which has sealed the criminal histories of hundreds of people and eliminated statewide barriers to expungement; expand Court Watch to bring more transparency and accountability to local criminal courts; and build out its Public Data Accountability Project.
The Police-Community Relations component includes the Vera Institute of Justice which “will partner with cities nationwide to implement policies that reduce the scope of law enforcement responses to health and social issues.”
These reforms are not revolutionary in and of themselves. Nevertheless, they plant seeds for an egalitarian cultural revolution. These seeds increase awareness of the need for more fairness and kindness throughout society.
Maybe someday, people who see the need for more mutual respect, bottom-up power, economic security for all, and personal and community empowerment will come together and demand compassionate changes in public policy, knowing it will be necessary to be in the streets in massive numbers, engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience as needed.
Navalny
“To live is to risk it all. Otherwise, you are just an inert chunk of randomly assembled molecules drifting wherever the universe blows you.”
Aleksei A. Navalny
Aleksei A. Navalny
Seeing Addiction Clearly
February 14
Seeing Addiction Clearly
Americans fundamentally believe that people who suffer from addiction are morally flawed, and somehow don’t deserve all the help that we can give them.
Elon Musk: “Ultra Hardcore”
To be a man is to dominate others. This is what I absorbed as a boy: masculinity means mastery, power, control. To be socialized into manhood is to gain a love of hierarchy and a willingness to do whatever is necessary to preserve your own position within it. … (For Elon Musk these) avenues of escape…provided a terrain where the mandates of masculinity could be fulfilled, via conquests of a more cerebral sort.
“Ultra Hardcore” Ben Tarnoff