Reminder what was handled when:
- Physiological (last week)
- Economic (last week)
- Intellectual (last/this week)
- State of inequality & incompetency (this week)
- Personal (this week)
Intellectual Part 2: How to navigate news
I think we can all agree that media mostly is not produced (anymore) to educate but to entertain and/or to get clicks.
So the question is: How should you filter information nowadays?
Well, first I will say that I am consuming a minimum of entertainment and news. So, I am not reading the usual newspaper websites, the German daily news; I am watching a minimum of entertainment stuff on Youtube to stay up to date about the newest outrage, gossip, and everyday stuff. This helps a lot when socializing with people.
- Mostly, I listen to podcasts of influencers in their several domains of expertise.
- My second main information flows are newsletters from influencers in their domain.
The reason for this very careful consumption of information is that I want to be in control of what I see, read, watch and listen to. Of course, it comes with the risk that you will be going on a trip in an echo chamber, just consuming media which confirms your point of view, but I believe that
- It can be mitigated with a diverse group of people you decide to consume their opinions on and
- It is much better than the alternative: letting yourself slip into the narrative of bringing you onto a "side".
One intellectual I like to listen to is Eric Weinstein. He posted a model on how to evaluate a piece of media published by somebody or an institution following a narrative. It helps in illustrating how the media stigmatizes certain nuanced points which challenge the status quo by portraying people who hold those views as prejudiced and/or intolerant.
A simplified version of the model:
The horizontal line (or x-axis in mathematical terms) represents the narrator's level of support for a particular policy initiative.
The vertical line (y-axis) represents some kind of moral virtue.
This divides the model into four quadrants which define the positions of people around a specific topic:
The four quadrants:
- The “Dupes”: People who believe they can infer someone’s true intentions, beliefs, or morality based on their support for, or opposition to, the policy initiative.
- “First-Principle Thinkers” or “contrarians”: They hold nuanced positions that oppose policy on the x-axis, but support moral virtue on the y-axis.
- “Troglodytes”: Those who oppose the x-axis policy and possess the moral vice represented by the lower half of the y-axis.
- “Rent seekers”: People or companies who have a vested interest in the x-axis policy because they profit from it, but do not produce much of anything of value in return.
Now that we know what the axes and quadrants represent, let's look at a blunt example to simplify the idea. The blunt example shall be the famous gender pay gap. Upfront: I do not have a clear opinion on this matter as it seems to be highly complex and dependent on a lot of factors. It is just easy to use in this case, which is why I am willing to choose it. I am not trying to make a point here.
Let's say there is a "First-Principle Thinker” who makes a nuanced point against “Equality of Outcome” which basically means that a woman should always earn as much as a man. His point is that we should strive for the opposing idea, which is “Equality of Opportunity” which is not focusing on gender but competency and includes all types of diversity (gender, race, origin, experience).
As Dupes think in simple truths, he/she would conclude that the opposition to the media narrative exemplifies the First-Principle Thinker's prejudice of gender which might end up in a defamatory statement like "So, you are saying, it doesn't matter that women are treated unfairly" or "So you are saying that women are less competent than men which is why they are being paid less".
Thus, the First-Principle Thinker gets portrayed as a misogynist, moving him/her from the first-principle quadrant to the "Troglodytes" quadrant as the Dupe can only think along with the media narrative dimension. To use a classical metaphor: They only see black (troglodyte position) and white (dupe position) instead of all the layers of gray in between.
In other words, it doesn’t matter what you actually say or do. Your virtue or lack thereof (your y-value) depends on how much you support the policy initiative (your x-value). So, in this case, if you don’t support a mandated equal-pay initiative for men and women, you must be prejudiced against women or misogynistic.
Is there a chance that the media landscape will change? I think it is basically impossible as long as the companies are depending on the income stream of creating what acquires, clicks, retweets, and comments as it is incentivizing the wrong type of content.
Subscription is the only way out in today's landscape of technology.
The technological solution would be an on-chain fact-checking mechanism based on blockchain. Nope, I am not an expert in blockchain technology but I like the potential of it for a more decentralized future, which is why I like to put this idea by much more intelligent people than myself out there:
Fundamentally, what it refers to, is the new paradigm of "trust" which was created by #Bitcoin's breakthrough. Put simply, it says that an Israeli, a Palestinian, a Japanese, a left-leaning, a conservative all agree on who has what Bitcoin on Bitcoin blockchain. It is essentially a way in a low-trust but high computational environment, to use computation to establish an agreement of (mathematical) facts. You could use this principle to generalize it to more financial instruments to establish global truth like tokens, loans, and derivatives.
Then, you might generalize it further to establish it in other areas, not using the typical proof-of-work or proof-of-stake but proof-of-location and proof-of-identity, which you can also put on a blockchain. So, it won't be the "paper of record" anymore, but the "ledger of record" which you would refer to.
An example of this would be Vitalik Buterin's donation of more than 1 billion $ to a fund to fight Covid-19 in India. To use the great Balaji Srinivasan's words: " [...] you link a tweet to prove that something happened and you refer to an on-chain record to prove that it happened."
If you think, "What the hell are you talking about?", I will try to write something up soon to explain the basics of what is going on related to blockchain technology at the moment. Especially, "Decentralized Finance", short DeFi is a huge playground which gets explored at the moment.
Perhaps you wanna help me write something up, Sören? Without you, I would not even know that this area exists.
The State of Inequality & Incompetency
For years and years, I thought that people knew what they were doing. At work, in life... Especially in politics and in the economy I was convinced that the matters at hand were just very complicated and therefore bad decisions or strategies were a natural part of struggling with complicated problems.
Turns out: I was wrong. People absolutely do not know what they are doing. Neither at work nor in their lives, not in the economy and especially not in politics. I do not want to sound rude or arrogant, but it is what it is.
I blame bureaucracy for it because it enables the "Peter Principle" which basically says that people in hierarchical organizations tend to get promoted to their "maximum level of incompetence" which leaves them at a position/function in which to they have no competence.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Let's dissect the issues.
I. Things are complex and not complicated
If you know me well, you know I am trying to live by Jordan Peterson's rule 10, which says "Be Precise in Your Speech".
The reason is that words are the very essence of your identity you create in your inner monologues and your presence perceived by others.
Back to the point: Things nowadays are partially very complicated. Nils Pflaeging defines "complicated" in his book "Komplexithoden" as the measure of our missing knowledge. A problem is complicated when we do not have sufficient knowledge in a particular field to comprehend it which can be tackled by acquiring more knowledge. An example would be to read a user guide before using a machine.
But things which change everyday life are actually "complex" which he defines as "the measure of the amount of surprises which you need to take into account.
Why is that important? Because the skillset to tackle the challenges is completely different.
II. The Covid-19 was both, but the focus should have been on fighting the complexity
Of course, researching a virus is complicated. The research of finding antidotes, medicine, treatments and ways of preventing getting infected is the job of virologists and epidemiologists. I am not arguing against it, and thankfully we have brilliant minds who were able to invent a vaccine which seems to at least contain the virus.
But handling it within a city, a state, a nation, a continent, within the world is a complex issue as it contains so many more factors than just the virus itself.
I won't get into the details, but at least in Europe the crisis was handled very badly. Not compared to other regions in the world, but just looking at it from what was communicated, committed, planned and done overall. To name a few things:
- How every country stopped collaborating and started focusing on themselves.
- The efficacy of masks
- The 2nd lockdown in autumn 2020, when everybody was caught by surprise that the virus did not disappear during the summer
- The poor management of acquiring vaccines, although being partially invented & produced in Europe
- The unbelievably complicated ways of getting state support as a small business when being impacted by the lockdowns
- The complete disaster in digital infrastructure when teachers needed to teach from home
That is actually a point I would like to discuss a bit deeper. Because I think that it is not well-understood how much impact the closing of schools had, especially on already disadvantaged children & teenagers.
As Scott Galloway has put it very well in his book "Post Corona": "The pandemic's most enduring impact will be as an accelerant". Examples, are changes in health care, office work vs. working from home, food deliveries, banking and consuming digital media. But, as he points out, one sector is moving slower than before: education.
Although knowing that this is an American statistic, I believe that this can easily be transferred to Germany/Europe:
While everybody fought about if and how to reopen schools, the next generations coping with the highest amount of complexity and uncertainty, did not learn reading and counting.
Who will bring these children back on track? Don't count on teachers as it turns out that they are underpaid, related to their responsibility to our society (as many other professions), under-resourced as the bureaucracy eats up their motivation, and the most important thing is that they are not treated with respect by parents and pupils. And I know that because my mother is a teacher.
The consequence, at least in Germany, is an existing lack of teachers.
Fehlende Lehrkräfte der Sekundarstufe 1 im Jahr 2020 und Prognose bis 2030 (Graphic is linked to source)
Another unfortunate thing that is not being discussed publicly enough is that wearing a mask during school seems to be harmful to children & young adults (6-17 years) according to a study conducted in Germany with ca. 26.000 children.
The authors checked the carbon dioxide levels of children breathing with masks. The federally accepted level in a room is 0.2%. The levels they measured were way higher (x6) than that and were reached after 3 minutes wearing either a surgical or an FFP2 mask.
Where is the incompetency coming from?
I really believe that during the last 20 years of rapid technological advancement in the workplace, humans were forgotten by incentivizing the wrong mindset and enforcing a framework of infantilization.
Adults with years and years of experience are being treated like children in many workplaces. All the compliance rules, the safety policies, the internal campaigns for motivation, the soft feedbacks, everything is cared for. These things are intoxicating the agency of human beings.
We need to reverse that. And we do need to do it fast, because otherwise every service you are requesting might be carried out by somebody incompetent, which requires you to follow up on every single step of your request as you cannot rely on their commitment to delivering it.
Industries without a high-competitive environment due to a gained trust relationship are tending, in my experience, towards lazy cultures like lawyers, notaries, accountants, federal institutions, insurance, health care, etc.
Personal
On the one hand, 2020 was such a blast because I could do what I wanted to do: Be alone, work without having a bad feeling about neglecting social relationships, spend time with my dearest, and stay contracted in an industry that took a huge blow despite the biggest economic crisis in a long time.
I have never had such high self-esteem as I learned that my skills (whatever they are) are highly demanded. I have never been in a better economic situation. I was never able to help my father as much as last year, which made me even prouder.
On the other hand, I felt the longing for a long-term relationship. I have a great example of why everybody who is in a relationship should be thankful:
A few weeks ago I had a phone conversation with one of my dearest friends. We talked about work and what is coming up. I told him that I had an offer of doing an international project which sounded very promising then. He congratulated me on it and opened up about having had thoughts during his vacation if "this" had already been "it" for him.
What he meant was that he has a secure job in a big corporation, he has ambitions to progress on this career, he is together with his girlfriend for almost 7 years and he thinks that every step he takes further is closing down options to experience more "cool stuff", like living in another country for a substantial amount of time.
While making clear that the options were only hypothetically closing down, I offered him the view that I would change places with him at any time. You could argue that "grass is always greener on the other side".
But the reason is that there is nothing in this world that is cooler than sharing experiences, the pain wins, losses, and progress within one's lane of life with another person. Period.
This is the learning and one of the reasons why I will be traveling next Friday to my origins in Italy with my dearest friends to show them where I am from and to introduce them to my Nonna. Because I never want to experience the feeling again that the only dear person to me (except for my family) who got to my Nonno is my ex-girlfriend who seemingly hates my guts.