Through the Prism: A Blend of Boldness and Despair

This is your present and future,

and little can be done to stop it.

A fragmented media means

fragmented truths and standards.

Discerning reality will get harder.

They just allowed themselves to be guided by their own individuality.

The equation is simple: The more authoritarianism in the world, the more dissidents.

They wanted to live authentically in societies that asked them constantly to lie.

“A blend of boldness and despair in the same mind and the same person.”

What dissidents teach us is not to normalize.

They are outliers

not because they run toward oppositional views

but because they simply insist on pursuing

their interests,

their curiosities,

their desires and

unique ways of being human.

A statement is not fact;

Just because someone said it doesn’t mean it is accurate.

A fact is not data;

It may be an isolated truth and not representative.

Data is not evidence;

It may not be conclusive.

Evidence is not proof;

It may not be universal but instead limited to a specific context.

We need to contextualize and validate the information we share

— as well as the information shared with us.

The answer you find may not be as black and white as you want;

Life is nuanced like that.

Some politicians have promoted false information.

That is a testament to how quickly misinformation spreads

— and how hard it is to combat once it does.

The nonstop negative press about it has turned it into a political liability.

Please do not feed the fears.

When we help others,

it can boost our own happiness

and psychological well-being;

it boosts our physical health, too.

This is your present and future.

The above culled from the curated collection of articles that follow, largely shared without comment.

Axios AM: December 20, 2024

Media vs. Reporting

This reality highlights the difference between media (what people consume) and reporting (a set of standards for pursuing fact-based information). In the new world order, media and reporting are tossed together with a mix of truth, opinion, and nonsense.

This is your present and future, and little can be done to stop it. A fragmented media means fragmented truths and standards.

That puts even more pressure on you as a news consumer to discern what and who you can trust for reliable, actionable information. It demands skepticism and patience when hot news hits fast.

You need to be skeptical of people or sources unless you feel confident they routinely get it right. You need to be patient in not overreacting to — or oversharing — stories that hit your dopamine button.

Discerning reality will get harder.

What Dissidents Can Teach Us

These contemporary dissidents share a mindset, what Václav Havel once called an “existential attitude.” They did not wake up one day and decide to take on the regimes of their countries. They just allowed themselves to be guided by their own individuality—an Iranian woman who decides to no longer wear a hijab, a Uyghur teacher who tries to share his people’s history—and collided with societies that demanded conformity and obedience. Dissidents are born out of this choice: either assert their authentic selves or accept the authoritarian’s mafioso bargain, safety and protection in exchange for keeping one’s head down. Those rare few who just can’t make that bargain—they transform into dissidents.

The equation is simple: The more authoritarianism in the world, the more dissidents. And we are undeniably in an authoritarian moment. According to a report last year by the Varieties of Democracy Institute at the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden, when it comes to global freedom, we have returned to a level last seen in 1986. About 5.7 billion people—72 percent of the world’s population—now live under authoritarian rule. Even the United States, vaunted beacon of democracy, is about to inaugurate a president who openly boasts of wanting to be a “dictator on day one,” who regularly threatens to jail his opponents and sic the military on the “enemy within,” and who jokes about his election being the country’s last. . . .

The modern template for the dissident emerged in the postwar Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc satellites. After Stalin’s death in 1953, expressing discomfort with one’s place in the Communist paradise was no longer necessarily fatal, and a new underclass of pariahs--many poets and scientists among them--became a subversive force. One misconception about the Soviet dissidents is that they were revolutionaries; they were not, for the most part. They did not have a political project. They wanted to live authentically in societies that asked them constantly to lie. If their country was supposed to be one of laws, then they demanded that it abide by those laws. If there were obligations to uphold human and civil rights--like those mandated by the Helsinki Accords signed by the Soviet Union in 1975--those should be respected. The ideology behind this approach, to the extent that there was one, went by a particularly unsexy name: legalism. What angered these objectors to no end was the idea that they should look the other way, which is what the majority of people--for their own self-preservation--did. . . .

They are people who “don’t want to be versions of themselves that they can’t live with.” . . .

Nathans also pointed to another peculiar aspect of the dissident’s personality, “a blend of boldness and despair in the same mind and the same person.” Such people lived in circumstances where change felt impossible, at least within their lifetime. And yet they didn’t give up. “Dissidents have a remarkable ability to appreciate the hopelessness of what they’re trying to accomplish, but persevere nonetheless,” Nathans said. “They don’t treat hopelessness as a reason to be cynical or passive or do things that are just purely performative and symbolic.” . . .

What dissidents teach us is not to normalize. . . .

Crossing the Rubicon that Havel described, thinking and acting in ways consistent with one’s true self, involves blocking out the system of rewards and punishments that every society offers its members. Effort is required to become adept at what the Soviet poet (and exiled dissident) Joseph Brodsky once called “the science of ignoring reality,” seeing through the transactional and provisional surface of life to the meaningful depths of principle.

Dissidents are not just sitting behind glass waiting to be broken in case of emergency; they are keeping at bay the forces of repression and conformity as they exist in the world, right now. . . .

They are outliers not because they run toward oppositional views but because they simply insist on pursuing their interests, their curiosities, their desires and unique ways of being human.

How to Disrupt Misinformation with the “Ladder of Misinference”

The framework is constructed of four steps. They are:

A statement is not fact. Just because someone said it doesn’t mean it is accurate.
A fact is not data. It may be an isolated truth and not representative.
Data is not evidence. It may not be conclusive.
Evidence is not proof. It may not be universal but instead limited to a specific context.

For each step, each rung up the ladder, we risk exaggerating our claims when the supporting evidence becomes too flimsy. We may portray a statement as a fact, a fact as data, and so on, even when they aren’t. To prevent this misinference, Edmans notes, we need to contextualize and validate the information we share — as well as the information shared with us — to see which rung best supports the claim. . . .

“Information is never cast-iron proof — and that’s okay; it can still be useful. Perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of good. But when quoting a story, statistic, or study, we should be clear on what it is and what it isn’t, and not climb the ladder of misinference,” Edmans writes.

Even with the ladder of misinference, the answer you find may not be as black and white as you want. Life is nuanced like that.

Louisiana Forbids Public Health Workers from Promoting COVID, Flu and Mpox Shots

They were told by an assistant secretary in the department and another official that department leadership had a new policy: Advertising or otherwise promoting the COVID, influenza or mpox vaccines, an established practice there — and at most other public health entities in the U.S. — must stop. . . .

Staffers were also told that it applies to every aspect of the health department's work: Employees could not send out press releases, give interviews, hold vaccine events, give presentations or create social media posts encouraging the public to get the vaccines. They also could not put up signs at the department's clinics that COVID, flu or mpox vaccines were available on site.

The new policy in Louisiana was implemented as some politicians have promoted false information about vaccines and as President-elect Donald Trump seeks to have anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. And some public health experts are concerned that if other states follow Louisiana, the U.S. could face rising levels of disease and further erosion of trust in the nation's public health infrastructure. . . .

Staff at Louisiana's health department fear the new policy undermines their efforts to protect the public, and violates the fundamental mission of public health: to prevent illness and disease by following the science. . . .

The California Job-Killer That Wasn’t

In the six months after California’s new minimum wage came into effect in April, the state’s fast-food sector actually gained jobs and done so at a faster pace than much of the rest of the country. If anything, it proves that the minimum wage can be raised even higher than experts previously believed without hurting employment. That should be good news. Instead, the policy has been portrayed as a catastrophic failure. That is a testament to how quickly economic misinformation spreads—and how hard it is to combat once it does. . . .

Since the early 1990s, economists have conducted dozens of studies of more than 500 minimum-wage increases across the country. “The bulk of the studies conducted in the last 30 years suggest the effect of minimum wages on jobs is quite modest,” Arindrajit Dube, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who has conducted multiple meta-analyses of the minimum-wage literature, told me. “Sometimes they actually result in higher employment.” . . .

That doesn’t mean raising the minimum wage had no negative consequences. Reich and his co-author, Denis Sosinsky, found that the higher minimum wage caused menu prices in California fast-food chains to rise by about 3.7 percent. Reich points out that this number pales in comparison with the 18 percent raise that the average fast-food worker received because of the new law. . . .

Notwithstanding the law’s broadly positive real-world consequences, the nonstop negative press about it has turned it into a political liability. . . .

The biggest losers from this misleading narrative won’t be Californians themselves. It will be workers in the 20 states that still have a minimum wage at or below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE FEARS

When Kindness Becomes a Habit, It Improves Our Health

Whether it's volunteering at a local food bank, or taking soup to a sick neighbor, there's lots of evidence that when we help others, it can boost our own happiness and psychological well-being. But there's also growing research that it boosts our physical health too.