The media won't get less politicized. News consumers must get smarter.

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The internet is parasitic on traditional media sources, says Keith Whittington. Traditional news outlets do the hard reporting to generate the facts and notable opinions that other outlets respond to.

The greatest challenge to truth in journalism is that social media presents news stories out of context; we no longer see news among other news articles, and we may only ever see the headline without the detail and nuance required.

Media institutions are working to tackle these challenges, but until then it is our responsibility as citizens and consumers to get smarter about how we navigate news feeds and the hyper-partisan press.

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KEITH WHITTINGTON:

Keith E. Whittington is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He is the author, most recently, of "Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech", as well as "Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present".

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TRANSCRIPT:

KEITH WHITTINGTON: Traditional media outlets remain extraordinarily important to how we communicate and develop ideas. They've not been completely displaced by Facebook and Twitter and the like. In lots of ways, the internet is parasitic on traditional media sources because it's those traditional news outlets that are doing the hard reporting, for example, that generates the facts that other people are responding to. They still generate a lot of the sustained and sophisticated development of opinion and development of viewpoints that others wind up responding to elsewhere. So we have not yet reached a point where I think the traditional media is irrelevant to our public conversation, but they're certainly challenged in new ways.

And in part they're challenged because there is new competition, that there are other people and other mechanisms for communicating to a mass audience than what we've traditionally relied on with newspapers and with broadcast media or cable news and the like. But they're also challenged by the way information is conveyed in a modern environment. People consume the news differently than they once did. So for example, even if they're consuming news that was generated by a newspaper, they may not be reading it in a newspaper; it's coming packaged very differently. They may be coming across it through a Facebook feed, for example, where the thing they're most immediately encountering is not the news article in the context of lots of other news articles as they turn the page, they're scanning down the entire page. Instead, what they're encountering is a headline. And the headline either makes them turn away or draws them into the article. In many cases, the headline is all they know about the article because they never actually click through and read the more detailed discussion in the news article itself, for example. But instead, all they know is the headline. And as a consequence, I think, traditional media has been struggling to figure out how to convey the crucial parts of the information they need to convey in the headline itself. They want the headline to be enticing so it will draw people into the larger story, but they also have to very careful that the headline is not misleading, so the headline really does convey the core point of the underlying information so that the people who, in fact, walk away with nothing more than the headline are not getting a misimpression about what's being conveyed underneath.

That has attracted a lot of attention lately in terms of thinking about misleading headlines and misleading statements. For example, if a public figure or a government official says something that's not true, it's traditionally the case the media will often include that information directly in a headline itself, knowing that the reader will then dive into the article and the article will lay out the context for it. It might explain what's mistaken...

To read the full transcript, please go to https://bigthink.com/sponsored-institute-for-humane-studies/partisan-media

Michio Kaku: Genetic and digital immortality are within reach

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Through the Connectome Project we may soon be able to map the pathways of the entire human brain, including memories, and create computer programs that evoke the person the digitization is stemmed from.

We age because errors build up in our cells — mitochondria to be exact.

With CRISPR technology we may soon be able to edit out errors that build up as we age, and extend the human lifespan.

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MICHIO KAKU

Dr. Michio Kaku is the co-founder of string field theory, and is one of the most widely recognized scientists in the world today. He has written 4 New York Times Best Sellers, is the science correspondent for CBS This Morning and has hosted numerous science specials for BBC-TV, the Discovery/Science Channel. His radio show broadcasts to 100 radio stations every week. Dr. Kaku holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York (CUNY), where he has taught for over 25 years. He has also been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, as well as New York University (NYU).

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TRANSCRIPT:

MICHIO KAKU: The rate at which we are learning about longevity Gives one pause. It makes you realize that perhaps digital and genetic immortality are Within reach. Already, in Silicon Valley, there are companies which, for a price, will digitize everything known about you your credit card transactions, your emails, Instagrams. Everything known about you can be digitized. And we have something called the Connectome Project, which will map the pathways of the entire human brain all your memories, all your quirks, personalities, everything digitized. And we'll put it on a disk. And for the most part, we'll put it in a library. Today, you go to the library, and you take a book out About Winston Churchill. In the future, you'll go to the library and talk to Winston Churchill, because all his speeches, his mannerisms, his memories, his letters, Have been digitized. I would love to talk to Einstein. I would love to talk to him, even if it's a computer program that has digitized everything known about him his work, his writings, His speeches, everything, and a holographic image, so that I can talk to him. And one day, we might be digitized, as well. We'll be able to talk to our great-great-great-great-great grandkids, and they'll be able to talk to their great-great-great-great-great Ancestors, as well. Because we become immortal. Not only that, but we're now beginning to isolate the genes which control the aging process. First of all, let's take a car. Where does aging take place in a car? Aging takes place in the engine. Why? That's where you have moving parts and combustion. Well, where, in the cell, do we have the power house of a cell? Mitochondria. Bingo, we now know where most of the errors build up in a cell. And with CRISPR technology, we may be able to edit out the errors that build up and extend the human lifespan. For example, a mouse can live to be about roughly two years of age, and then it dies of old age. But the Greenland shark can live to be over 400 years of age. And that's just not hearsay. By looking at the eyeball of the Greenland shark, it adds layers at a very precise rate in the eye. By analyzing and counting the layers, we see that the Greenland shark can live almost 500 years in age. So in other words, genetically speaking, it may be possible to extend the human lifespan. So genetic and biological immortality are definitely in the cards.

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What if all humanity had to do to save itself was listen?

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Many of the things that we experience, are our imagination manifesting into this physical realm, avers artist Dustin Yellin.

People need to completely rethink the way they work together, and learn from one another, so that we can build better systems. If not, things may get "really dark" soon.

The first step to enabling cooperation is figuring out where the common ground is. Through this method, despite contrary beliefs, we may be able to find some degree of peace.

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DUSTIN YELLIN

Dustin Yellin is an artist who lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is the founder and director of Pioneer Works, a multidisciplinary cultural center in Red Hook, Brooklyn that builds community through the arts and sciences to create an open and inspired world.

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TRANSCRIPT:

DUSTIN YELLIN: I think that everything is invented, right? So I think civilization is a hallucination, or civilization is a sculpture. Everything that we experience we've also in many ways created. So whether it's this chair that I'm sitting in, or the cameras that are pointed on me, and the lights that are on, and the energy that supplies those lights, and the way the building is constructed out of concrete and steel that we're sitting in right now that's literally sitting on a street inside of a city inside of these weird borders we've called New York, and this thing that we've called America, which is, again, is just a narrative we all agree on.

These things are all invented. Therefore, the future and what we want to see out of the future and create is also completely malleable, and completely a blank slate, and completely possible for us to choose if we're going to go into this imminent demise and catastrophic sort of cataclysmic of ecological disaster or we are going to figure out ways to move and make energy without a carbon footprint that's going to eat us up, et cetera, et cetera. So again, I do think that it's all our imagination manifesting into this physical realm.

we're really at a precipice right now where it's going to — where — where humans are going to knock humans off the earth. And so I can't think how important of a time it is for people to come together and work together on these issues. And yet it's sort of the antithesis of what we see happening with the rise of populism, and with our current policies, and with also these collective fictions that we adhere to like borders, and the state, and religion, and all these real false narratives that we've been concocting for centuries and now aren't working for us, and yet we're still adhering to.

So I think it is a time where humans have to completely rethink the way that they work together, the way that they learn from each other, and the way that they build the systems from which they're going to govern into the future. Because if not it's going to be really, really dark really, really soon.

F Scott Fitzgerald said that a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind simultaneously and still retain the ability to function. So as much as one wants to tell someone, you know, that there's no way that they will ever see what they're seeing, in a way it's more productive to listen. And if we could all start listening to each other, that's a start. And if we could all start finding the things — if we could all start highlighting the things that potentially we agree on, because there must be some of those, opposed to the things that we completely disagree on, maybe then we can start to build structures to find some sort of peace.

And I do wonder why we're not convening more the leadership of our economic engines. I don't understand why people aren't coming together across political divides and across corporate divides to work together not on their bottom lines but on how to figure out new systems. Because there is this group of incredible people who have built these crazy new kingdoms which are corporations that should kind of walk away from the economic interests for a minute and figure out how they can all work together. Because I think together as a group there is a way forward, but right now it seems that nobody's convening. We also have such a vacuum of leadership in our country that nobody has the convening power right now to bring people together to work together. And I find that to be one of our issues that we need to figure out.

Where do atoms come from? Billions of years of cosmic fireworks

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Michelle Thaller's "absolute favorite fact in the universe" is that we are made of dead stars.

The Big Bang, when it went off, produced basically three elements: hydrogen, helium, and lithium.

Every atom more complex had to be formed inside a star. Over time, stars such as the sun produce things like carbon and oxygen.

They don't really get much more far off the periodic table than that. If you want to go any farther than the element iron, then you actually need a very violent explosion, a supernova explosion.

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MICHELLE THALLER

Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astronomer who studies binary stars and the life cycles of stars. She is Assistant Director of Science Communication at NASA. She went to college at Harvard University, completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif. then started working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Spitzer Space Telescope. After a hugely successful mission, she moved on to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in the Washington D.C. area. In her off-hours often puts on about 30lbs of Elizabethan garb and performs intricate Renaissance dances. For more information, visit NASA.

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TRANSCRIPT:

MICHELLE THALLER: Don, you've asked a question that's related to what I think is my absolute favorite fact in the universe, and that is that we are made of dead stars. And that's literally true. The atoms in our bodies were actually created inside the cause of stars that then exploded, and died, or unraveled into space.

And so your question about the periodic table is very interesting. What was the periodic table like at the beginning of the universe, the moment of the Big Bang? Well, one thing I can say, it was a lot simpler. The Big Bang, when it went off, produced basically three elements. Almost everything was hydrogen. There was a little bit of helium, and a tiny, tiny little smattering of lithium as well.

So those three elements were around just a couple of minutes after the formation of the universe, but nothing else. And that's actually not a theory. That's actually something we can observe. One of the wonderful things about being an astronomer is, as you look out into space, farther and farther away, the light has taken longer to get to you. And the farthest we can see is actually back to a time only about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. And really, at that time, there was nothing but very hot hydrogen gas, and a little bit of helium and lithium as well.

So everything larger than that, every atom more complex had to be formed inside a star. Over time, stars like the sun are pretty good, over the life cycle, at producing things like carbon and oxygen. They don't really get much more far off the periodic table than that. If you want to go any farther than the element, iron, you actually need a very violent explosion, a supernova explosion.

The cores of very massive stars and by that, I mean stars that are 10, 20, maybe even as much as 50 times the mass of the sun, their cores are much hotter, because the gravity crushes things down, and the temperature goes up many, many millions of degrees hotter than inside the sun. So these stars can actually form bigger and bigger atoms. The hotter the temperature, the denser the core, the more you can ram things together and actually form bigger and bigger atoms over time.

But there's a very special thing that happens when you get to the atom, iron. And it's something you've actually heard about but you may never have thought of. And that when people think about getting energy out of a nuclear reaction you've heard about fusion reactions. So like a fusion bomb, actually, takes hydrogen, fuses it together to make helium, and that creates energy. And that's a nuclear bomb. The sun also runs on that particular reaction, fusing hydrogen together. But then you also heard that there's something called fission. And this is how, say, a uranium bomb would work. A uranium nucleus has many, many particles inside it you actually get energy out of breaking it up and forming two smaller nuclei that are actually a bit denser, and they hold together better. And so you get energy out of breaking them apart...

To read the full transcript, please go to https://bigthink.com/videos/big-bang

Lateral thinking: The reason you’ve heard of Nintendo and Marvel

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Since the explosion of the knowledge economy in the 1990s, generalist inventors have been making larger and more important contributions than specialists.

One theory is that the rise of rapid communication technologies allowed the information created by specialists to be rapidly disseminated, meaning generalists can combine information across disciplines to invent something new.

Here, David Epstein explains how Nintendo's Game Boy was a case of "lateral thinking with withered technology." He also relays the findings of a fascinating study that found the common factor of success among comic book authors.

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DAVID EPSTEIN:

David Epstein is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Range: Why Generalist Triumph in a Specialized World and The Sports Gene. He has master's degrees in environmental science and journalism and has worked as an investigative reporter for ProPublica and a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. He lives in Washington, DC.

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TRANSCRIPT:

DAVID EPSTEIN: One of the researchers I spoke with was himself an innovator and was picked by R&D Magazine as the Innovator of the Year. But he also studied innovation. And what he found in studying patent databases is maybe a change in the importance of specialists and generalists over time. And he defined this by looking at people's work histories.

So, creators who are very specialized did all their work in one or a small number of areas of technology as classified by the US Patent and Trademark Office. Creators who were more broad spread their work across a large number of technology classes, sometimes merging many into one project. And since about the 1990s, the explosion of the knowledge economy, what he found was that these more generalist inventors, or sometimes they were even polymaths with some depth and breadth, were making larger and larger and more and more important contributions whereas the specialists, who were still very important, were often making less impactful contributions.

And he thinks that this is part of the rise of rapid communication technologies, that the information created in many cases by specialists is so rapidly and thoroughly disseminated that there are many more opportunities than ever before to invent something new by taking things that aren't new and combining them in new ways. And one of my favorite examples of this is a Japanese man by the name of Gunpei Yokoi, who didn't score well in his electronics exams so he had to settle for a job in Kyoto as a machine maintenance worker at a playing card factory while a lot of his peers went off to big companies in Tokyo.

He realized that he wasn't equipped to work at the cutting edge, but that so much information was easily available that specialists were overlooking that he could just combine older and well understood technologies in ways that specialists couldn't see because they didn't have a broad enough view. In doing that, he started a toy and game operation at that playing card company -- that playing card company is called Nintendo -- and he continued combining old technologies for his magnum opus, the Game Boy. All of the technology was long out of date by the time it appeared and yet it became the best-selling video game console of the 20th century.

Yokoi called his creative philosophy 'lateral thinking with withered technology'. What he meant by lateral thinking was taking information from one area that may not be new, but just bringing it somewhere else where suddenly it's new to that area, combining technologies in ways that other people hadn't. By withered technology, he meant this older, well understood, often cheaper technology so he didn't have to worry about competing at the cutting edge.

And that's a nice story, but I think it also fits with multiple studies of patent research that show in many cases the biggest impacts come not from the people who drilled the deepest into a technological class, but those who spread their work across a large number of technological classes. And incidentally, there are analogous findings in other industries. In a really interesting study of comic book creators, researchers guessed at what would make comic book creators make commercially valuable comics, and also what would make them more likely to make a blockbuster comic. And it was a great study because they could track...

To read the full transcript, go to https://bigthink.com/videos/lateral-thinking-the-reason-youve-heard-of-nintendo-and-marvel

Louis C.K., #MeToo, and accountability: Why binary thinking doesn't help

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The collective suffering society is going through with the #MeToo movement is the earmark that real change is happening, says comedian Pete Holmes. Abusers need to acknowledge their wrongdoing and, where possible, be open about their evolution and growth.

Comedian Louis C.K.'s abuses and return to the stage have divided the comedy community and society on a broader scale. The debate predominately has two narratives: Either C.K. is a monster, or he is a symbol of artistic freedom.

The truth, says Holmes, is likely in the middle, and our need to take a binary stance won't help us confront and grow from these complicated issues.

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PETE HOLMES

Pete Holmes is a comedian, writer, cartoonist, "Christ-leaning spiritual seeker", and podcast host. His wildly popular podcast, You Made It Weird, is a comedic exploration of the meaning of life with guests ranging from Deepak Chopra and Elizabeth Gilbert to Seth Rogen and Garry Shandling.

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TRANSCRIPT:

PETE HOLMES: Obviously we're going through a spiritual evolution right now, and that involves a lot of suffering on everybody's part. And that's where growth comes. We'd all like to increase pleasure and minimize pain, but the truth is, suffering, even collective suffering that we're going through, is often the earmark that some real change is happening.

When I look at what's happening with #MeToo, my heart breaks basically for everybody involved. I think it's interesting -- I did a radio show where we were talking about Louis, and it was so interesting to me to see the comedians that saw Louis as a symbol of artistic freedom. They were arguing, 'He doesn't have to apologize.' And then I was saying, 'You're absolutely right, he doesn't. But wouldn't it be nice? Wouldn't it be great if he did?'

Because, like it or not, he's become a symbol. And I know he never asked for that, but he's become a symbol. And if he shared his growth -- and by the way, I'm a Louis optimist. I think he's capable of doing this, and if he sees this, I hope that he will and I'm hopeful that he will. I actually think he might. If he uses this platform and this becoming of a symbol to share his growth and his suffering and his development and his evolution, like it or not -- I know he never asked for that -- there's probably millions of people that would take that in a positive way, that would unhinge some of their calcified spots and maybe they'd grow with him.

Does he have to do that? No. But this is my point. So to these comedians, Louis represents, 'Nobody tells me what I can talk about.' Because he went back on stage and he was making all these dark jokes. And people were like, why isn't he talking about his abuse and what he did? And they were like, he doesn't have to. And I was like, ah, OK. So to them, he's a symbol of liberty, agency, artistic freedom. Great. Fine. To other people, though -- and we need to sit in the middle of these things, not either-or; it needs to be both-and -- to other people, he represents abusers.

And page one of the abuser handbook, especially if it's in your family, is if you're abused -- and he feels like he's in our family, doesn't he? He's like a relative. He's in our homes, he's on our phones, he's in our ears. He's part of us, and so he feels familial. And if you're going to do something like that, and we all know it, and if an abuser acts like nothing happened, that's page one of the abuser's handbook, is to be at Thanksgiving and just act like it didn't happen. So you're opening up a cosmic wound. So, to this side, Louis becomes a symbol of deceit and abuse.

Where's the truth? It's somewhere in the middle. Because on this side, I see people going -- I feel the fear -- going: If this is how we're going to whip this person for his ugliness -- and his... ugliness is the right word -- how are they going to respond to my ugliness, maybe if it's not even of the same caliber? But it makes us afraid. Is this what we're going to do? Are we going to beat people up? Are we going to spit on them and shame them and strip them of everything? We get afraid.

But I also -- my heart breaks, obviously, for the people that are going (this is bringing up a global unconsciousness): 'When I see him, I see my abuser.' It breaks my heart. But the truth is definitely somewhere in the middle. And it's a lot quieter, I think, than we're being. Because it's real fun to ring all the bells and bang all...

For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/louis-c-k-metoo-and-accountability-why-binary-thinking-doesnt-help

Container Store CEO Kip Tindell’s Business Philosophy (Archival)

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Having set company-wide goals, The Container Store has "liberated" its employees to choose their own paths to achieve them.

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KIP TINDELL

Kip Tindell has been at the helm of The Container Store since it first opened its doors in Dallas, Texas, in 1978. Now, the "storage solutions" company has over 39 stores and offers over 10,000 products designed to hold everything from prescription pills to wrapping paper.

As detailed in Kip's book Uncontainable, The Container Store has produced 15 to 20 percent annual sales growth since its founding and has been on FORTUNE magazine’s list of "100 Best Companies to Work For" for the last decade running.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How does an employee-centric business lead to long-term gains?

Kip Tindell: When we opened our Houston store, it was doing about triple what we anticipated and all of the principles, all of the values were kind of falling by the wayside, and it didn’t feel like our business. It felt like somebody else’s business. We couldn’t hire enough people, we didn’t like the people we were hiring. And at that point, we just realized that if you were having trouble with an employee, you couldn’t just go out and eat Mexican food with them and straighten everything out. There was just getting to be too many people. And so we would have to, in for form of stories, in the form of culture, write down, speak what the business philosophies and principles really were, repeat them over and over again. Get everyone to talk about these things. And really, make sure that they were kind of guiding our... Basically what we’ve done is we’ve agreed on a set of "ends," and we’ve liberated everyone in the company to choose the means to those ends that they think is most appropriate, because life it too situational and retail is certainly too situational for anyone to think that they’re smart enough to tell employees how to behave in any given setting. So there’s really radical empowerment, but we’re not going in a thousand different directions, we’re all going in the same direction toward the same ends because of that.

So whereas, the average retailer... the average retailer, embarrassingly enough only invests eight hours in each first-year employee. And we invest 272 formal hours of training with each first-year employee. And we can do that because people have joined The Container Store, and thank God they never leave. And so growth challenges you to really formalize and communicate those to make sure they are straight in your own mind and you know...

The other thing is the employees are so proud of these philosophies. They’re so proud to be working for a kind of a values-driven organization. The other thing is that in this conscious capitalism model where you’re balancing the needs of all stakeholders, not just the shareholder, the employees, the community the environment, the vendors, you can’t tell the difference between the vendors and employees at The Container Store. We forge these incredible relationships with our vendors that give us a huge competitive advantage.

I think that’s probably the most intellectually stimulating aspect of business that I’ve discovered that the balancing act of the stakeholder model where you may put the employee or the customer first, but it’s a balanced thing between all stakeholders of the business as opposed to just focusing on the shareholder. That’s fun. And it’s not just fun, and it’s not just altruistic, it works. That’s the hardest thing about talking about conscious capitalism to people.

People think that we’re just being altruistic. No, if all you wanted to do was to make as much money as possible, as rapidly as possible, I would submit to you that this methodology is the best way to get there.

Question: What is your concept of "Wake?"

Kip Tindell: W-A-K-E, like a boat’s wake. Very simple, but you know, we all... I mean everything you do and everything you don’t do impacts your business and the people around you far, far more than you think it does. Something that we talk about, not just with our young employees but everybody—even arrogant people have no idea of the power of their wake. If you build an organization where everyone’s really conscious of their wake... well actually, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” You know that corny movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life?” That’s my favorite movie because it shows so beautifully the power of one guy’s wake. Right? And everybody’s like that...

To read the full transcript, go to https://bigthink.com/videos/how-an-employee-first-culture-can-succeed

‘Civility’ is a loaded word, and we need it more than ever

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Often, disenfranchised groups are seen as acting uncivil when they protest their conditions, such as the civil rights movement, the #metoo movement, and others.

In this way, the word 'civility' can be subverted to refer to maintaining the status quo. Instead, we should reframe our idea of civility as a respect for human dignity, rather than mere politeness.

The opinions expressed in this video do not necessarily reflect the views of the Charles Koch Foundation, which encourages the expression of diverse viewpoints within a culture of civil discourse and mutual respect.

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ELI PARISER:

Eli Pariser has dedicated his career to figuring out how technology can elevate important topics in the world. He is the co-founder of Upworthy and bestselling author of The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You.

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TRANSCRIPT:

ELI PARISER: There's been a big conversation about civility and the need for civility online, and I actually kind of don't love that word because often what it means to people is kind of respect for the norms or the authority of a group that's in power. And so it's often the case in society that rabble-rousers and people who are lower on the power spectrum are seen as being uncivil. And, in fact, if you look back at the civil rights movement or a lot of the most important movements in American history that expanded peoples dignity and agency, they were seen at the time as kind of, like, impolite. And so there's a danger with civility that it's essentially saying like, it's essentially code for let's just kind of keep things as it is and keep whoever is powerful in society in power. I think the other meaning beneath it, though, that I think is really important is kind of this idea of human dignity and respect. And that, I think, is critical, and it has been really lost from so much of our online conversation. And it's partly this kind of humble feeling of, I only have part of the truth. I can be wrong, and I need other people to help me find a better view of the world. And if I put my piece of the truth together with your's, maybe we'll, like, figure out something together. I think part of it is a sense that within each human being is something that is uniquely precious and that it's our job when relating to people to try to find that thing and understand that thing and protect that thing.

And that's what makes us human. And so, how can we have a conversation where that's kind of the starting point rather than the sort of starting out assuming the worst of each other. And so I think that, you know, how do we bring that sense of respect for each others, you know, the amazing thing that it is to be a unique human individual back into this context where we're encouraged to see each other as little tiny icons and as like reduced stereotypes of each other. That seems like the critical threshold to cross.

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What’s wrong with the internet? We’d rather “display” than communicate.

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Disruptive technologies tend to regress humanity back to our default mode: deeply ingrained tribalism.

Rather than using the internet to communicate, many people use it to display their colors or group affinity, like tribespeople wearing face paint. Fake news spreads faster than truth in these tribal environments.

How can we solve this problem without censorship? Platforms like Facebook and Google are tilting the playing field to be more pro-truth by asking people to stop, think, and take responsibility.

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JONATHAN RAUCH:

Jonathan Rauch is the author of six books and many articles on public policy, culture, and government. He is a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a contributing editor of The Atlantic, and recipient of the 2005 National Magazine Award.

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TRANSCRIPT:

JONATHAN RAUCH: A lot of people are trying to figure out what's changed in this world we suddenly find ourselves in, with fake news and alternate facts. Well, it turns out that human beings are not really wired to be logical creatures that pursue objective truth. We're wired to be tribal creatures that try to ingratiate ourselves with our group and improve our status within that group. And the way we do that, often, is by displaying outrage, and anger, and hostility to the other group. Well, we've always been like that, and we've always had these disruptions where new technologies come along and give people the ability to act like tribalists.

So first thing that happened when the printing press was created in the 15th century is people started using it to spread fake news about witches, creating a witchcraft panic all over Europe in which many people were killed. And it took generations to figure out how to build institutions like publishing houses, and editorial standards, and so on, that taught us how to use publishing in a way that helped us spread truth rather than spread falsehoods. Well, we seem to be in the same kind of transition right now. When social media started, we all thought, this is going to be a positive revolution, because it's going to enable people to communicate with each other all over the world, trade information, form affinity groups -- freedom at its best. Turns out we were wrong. It turns out what social psychologists knew all along but what we forgot to notice is that when you give these kind of big, open platforms, people tend not to use them to communicate, they tend to use them to display; they want to show their group affinity. So we're kind of like the tribespeople painting our faces and standing on the hillside, shaking our spears at the tribespeople on the next hill, expressing hostility, and solidarity, and insulting people in order to show that we're who we're with. It turns out that this kind of communication, display, outrage, highly emotional stuff, is contagious. Some psychologists think it's almost literally addictive. And if you're in a clickbait model where you're rewarded financially for people clicking on your stuff, well, your content is going to gravitate toward the outrage, the tribalism, the hyper-partisanship, the fake news, the conspiracy theories. So we all thought the internet would be a place that would be good for truth, or at least neutral for truth. It turns out it's not. It's a place that tends to be hostile to truth, because the fake news spreads faster.

So here's the big challenge today, and here's the interesting way that Google and Facebook are trying to address it: Can you tilt the playing field back so it's a little bit more pro-truth, so that you can guide users in the direction of material that's true and away from material that's false without being heavy handed, without censorship, without blocking, without forcing them to read this instead of that? None of those companies want to do that. And that's what they're doing. What they're working with, which makes a lot of sense to me, is Facebook won't take down fake news, stuff that fact checkers have said is just plain false, but it will demote it on the Facebook news feed so you don't see it quite as prominently. And it turns out that that's very helpful in just kind of nudging people in the direction of fact-checked stuff. And if they click on something and try to repost it, and it's fake, they'll get a notice that says, 'Hey, this has been checked. Here's the context...

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Is nationalism ever a force for good?

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Nationalism isn't always a bad thing. When a country doesn't have self-confidence, and a collective sense of identity, that is also a problem. The optimal situation, in the case of nationalism, is that a nation's citizens have a healthy amount of it.

For instance, as Jared Diamond points out in this video, Finland seems to have a nationalism based in reality — and largely founded on their unique language. It imbues them with an innate pride but doesn't compel them to conquer the world.

Also, nationalism that is used to be inclusive, rather than exclusive, can help a nation transcend its darkest moments.

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JARED DIAMOND

Jared Diamond, a noted polymath, is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among his many awards are the U.S. National Medal of Science, Japan's Cosmos Prize, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of the international best-selling books Guns, Germs, and Steel; Collapse; Why Is Sex Fun?; The World Until Yesterday; and The Third Chimpanzee, and is the presenter of TV documentary series based on three of those books.

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TRANSCRIPT:

JARED DIAMOND: What about nationalism for a country? Is it good or is it harmful? Well, that's like asking about self-confidence and ego strength for a person. If a person has confidence and ego strength, is that good or bad? You can have too much of it and it's harmful if you are so full of yourself that you ignore other people. If, on the other hand, you lack confidence and you depend upon other people for your own image, then you don't have the courage, you don't have the identity, you don't have the sentiment to deal with your own issues. With nationalism today, there are countries that seem to me that have a healthy nationalism. I regard Finland, a country that I love as having a healthy nationalism based on reality.

The Finns speak the Finnish language. Nobody else in the world speaks the Finnish language. It's a beautiful, but very difficult language. It's the root of Finnish national identity. The Finns have a national epic, the Kalevala, in the Finnish language. And every Finn can recite the Kalevala, Of Americans and English people can recite Shakespeare. So the Finns have a healthy national identity focused on their language, their culture, and also their history, and what they've been able to overcome. There are countries that have excessive national identity. There are for example, people who would regard Germany during the 1930s during the Hitler era, as having had excessive national identity. Today, it seems to me that Germany has a healthy national identity.

Germany's national identity is not based on going out and conquering the world and acquiring [INAUDIBLE],, but recognizing that there are wonderful things about Germany that distinguish Germany from other countries. German's long history with the German language, the language of Martin Luther, that unifies Germans Protestants and Catholics, the government support for the arts in Germany, the emphasis on the importance of the community in Germany as opposed to the rights of individuals. In the United States and Los Angeles, anybody can build a house with any architectural plan that you like. And so there's no attractiveness to neighborhoods. In Germany, there is attractiveness in the neighborhoods. So it seems to me that Germany has a healthy national identity today. It did not in the 1930s. Chile has a healthy national identity. After Chile recovered from the trauma of a military government in 1990.

When a democratic government came back, it would have been so obvious for the democratic government to try to take revenge on the military government's leaders who had tortured and killed so many Chileans. But the first speech by Chile's new democratic government in 1990 was that he wanted to build a Chile for all Chileans, a wonderful expression. That's real national identity. A Chile for all Chileans means a country where the tortured and their relatives can live together with the torturers. It sounds terrible, but that's the only way that Chile could get out of the horrors of their military government. But that depended upon Chileans having a sense of national identity that transcended the horrible things that had happened in Chile.