The Next Web

There’s an obvious gender imbalance in technology and voice assistants. Whether it’s Siri, Cortana, Alexa, or another female voice telling you when to turn right on Google Maps, it’s most commonly an AI ‘woman’ who takes our commands.

With so much female servitude in our smart devices, along with the rapid deployment of AI, it should come as no surprise that technology is hardwiring sexism into our future — but Q, the world’s first genderless voice, hopes to eradicate gender bias in technology.

Created by a group of linguists, technologists, and sound designers, Q hopes to “end gender bias” and encourage “more inclusivity in voice technology.” They recorded the voices of two dozen people who identify as male, female, transgender, or non-binary in search for a voice that typically “does not fit within male or female binaries.” To find this voice, the Q team conducted a test involving over 4,600 people, who were asked to rate the voice on a scale of 1 (male) to 5 (female).

From this experiment, audio researchers were able to define a frequency range which is gender neutral. They recorded several voices, working on the pitch, the tone and the format filter and finally achieved “Q.”

Despite the underrepresentation of women in AI development, it’s no coincidence that almost all voice assistants are given typically female names, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Apple’s Siri. According to several studies, regardless of the listener’s gender, people typically prefer to hear a male voice when it comes to authority, but prefer a female voice when they need assistance.

While a genderless voice is a step in the right direction towards inclusivity, technology cannot progress and move away from gender bias without diversity in creative and leadership roles. Gendered voice assistants reinforce deeply ingrained gender biases because the data being used in machine learning training is based upon human behavior — robots are only sexist because the humans they learn from are.

Q is not only challenging gender stereotypes, but also encouraging tech companies to take societal responsibility when it comes to diversity and inclusivity.

Quartz

Since 2013, Making Caring Common, an initiative from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has tried to make the college admissions process saner. It has encouraged admissions officers to prioritize not the quantity of students’ achievements but rather the quality of their ethical and academic engagement to make the admissions process more fair.

In a recent report released ahead of schedule, the project shines a spotlight on the role parents and high schools play. The college admissions process is an ethical test, and many parents and high schools are failing, write the authors, led by Richard Weissbourd, a psychologist who founded Making Caring Common.

“College admissions may well be a test for parents, but it’s not a test of status or even achievement—it’s a test of character,” the report states.

Too often parents turn to high-priced tutors to bolster their kids’ scores and write their essays for them. Sometimes they also seek to sabotage other teens’ efforts in a bid to secure a place for their own offspring.

“In an effort to give their kids everything, these parents often end up robbing them of what counts,” says the report.

The study does not spare high schools, saying they “do little to challenge parents engaging in ethically troubling behavior.” In focusing too much on a handful of selective colleges, they fail to learn who the kids really are and what might be best for them.

The authors didn’t intend to release the report so soon, but they rushed it out after the Justice Department charged 50 people, including 33 parents, in a brazen bribery scheme to help kids cheat on exams, or pretend they were star athletes, to get into elite universities. Weissbourd, who has spent years on the thorny problem of how to make college admissions more fair and take pressure off kids, says one of his greatest fears is that parents will see the scandal and write it off as unrelated to them.

“I fear that parents won’t see themselves in this,” he says. Of course, the alleged bribery ring was both illegal and “mind-bogglingly unethical and dumb.” But the lack of consciousness about equity? He argues that’s way more common. Helping kids write their college essays, allowing them to fudge their extracurriculars or volunteering, hiring high-priced tutors to help with the applications? “It gives their kids unfair advantages,” he says.

He cites a survey from this month’s report in which parents say they prioritize caring over achievement, but estimate that other parents significantly prioritize achievement over caring. Believing that makes it easy to justify an at-all-cost mentality

Some see little connection between breaking the law and being (legally) ambitious. But the focus of Weissbourd’s work is not to stop parents from helping, but to stop them from doing everything they can—even if it’s ethically dubious—to give children a leg up. Ambition is fine—it should just come from the kids, not the parents.

“The essence of being ethical is attending to equity and fairness in every aspect of your life, not doing that selectively,” he says. “College admissions should not be an exception.”

The report cites research showing that qualities including empathy, self-awareness, gratitude, curiosity, the ability to understand multiple perspectives, and a sense of responsibility for one’s communities “are at the heart of both doing good and doing well in college and beyond.”

But that’s not always what parents or schools prioritize. They often focus more on what it takes to get in, falling back on the excuse that “everyone is doing it” and “it would be unfair to my child not to help.” If the stakes are high, they reason, it’s OK to do what it takes.

Weissbourd, as well as most child psychologists, would agree this is simply false (never do for a child what they can do for themselves) and hurts the kids, as well as the admissions process.

The reports offers advice, including some obvious yet often ignored points:

“Keep the focus on your teen.” It’s not about you.

“Follow your ethical GPS.” They are learning from you through the process. What will they learn?

“Use the admissions process as an opportunity for ethical education.”

“Be authentic.” Have honest conversations about what is happening (i.e., “I am not writing your essay,” and why).

“Help your teen contribute to others in meaningful ways.” They do not need to found an orphanage in a poor country to check the community service box.

“Advocate for elevating ethical character and reducing achievement-related distress.” Tell schools that five advanced-placement courses is too many for most 16-year-olds.

“Model and encourage gratitude.”

Most of us parents want the best for our kids. And many of us are plenty ambitious enough, for ourselves and our kids. That’s nothing to be ashamed about. But we should not crowd out their ambition with ours. As the report says: “Is getting into a particular college really worth more than compromising our teen’s or our own integrity?”

For most of Facebook’s existence, a prospective advertiser listing a job or a home or a loan could have kept the ad from reaching women or people over 55 or those with an “ethnic affinity” for African Americans.

When ProPublica documented this in late 2016, housing rights advocates were shocked. After all, it was exactly this kind of exclusionary practice that activists in the 1960s and 1970s had fought to end. And here they saw a dropdown box that literally said, “EXCLUDE African Americans.” While Facebook slowly (and imperfectly) changed its processes in response to the new scrutiny, civil-rights groups filed a series of lawsuits over these and other practices.

Yesterday, after more than two years of negotiations, the plaintiffs of five separate cases announced that they’d reached a settlement that will require Facebook to rebuild the way it sells advertising for housing, employment, and credit services. The company has committed to build “a separate advertising portal for creating housing, employment, and credit (‘HEC’) ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger that will have limited targeting options, to prevent discrimination” by September, according to the National Fair Housing Alliance summary of the settlement.

In addition, all housing ads will be viewable on a public portal, presumably on the model of the company’s political-ad archive. And Facebook agreed to limit how advertisers employ “lookalike” audiences, which—though it is difficult to prove—might have provided a backdoor for discriminatory advertisements.

Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg presented the changes as a result of the company’s increased “understanding” of the problems in its system, and painted them as another step towards fairness.

The civil-rights groups called it a landmark settlement that had important implications. Lisa Rice, president and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance, one of the plaintiffs, said that Internet companies had disclaimed responsibility for advertisements placed on Facebook by relying on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 law that provides immunity for networked platforms for content that their users post. Though the argument was never adjudicated, the plaintiffs obviously disagreed.

“It’s not just that Facebook was innocuously sort of providing a platform, but that it designed the platform in a way that helped to spur discrimination,” Rice said in a conference call with reporters. “If you think about it in a more historical context, Facebook was operating a digital system that allowed restrictive covenants to be implemented when it came to housing.”

The settlement is yet another sign that civil-society groups and governments have begun to claw back some of the privileges that the technology industry had extended to itself. Amazon now has to charge sales tax, after years of skating around it. Gig workers have sparked movement on legislation around their employment status. The pressure is turning up on the novel antitrust issues presented by the dominant internet companies. It turns out that businesses in cyberspace must also take on the obligations and legal restrictions that every brick-and-mortar company already did.

“The internet does not provide a blank check to tech companies to flout our civil-rights laws,” said Jahan Sagafi, an attorney at Outten & Golden LLP, who helped represent the plaintiffs.

One key law at issue is the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the capstone of the civil-rights era, which passed in the tumultuous wake of the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. Though it was an important statement, it did not contain strong enforcement provisions until the Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988. Absent further legislation from Congress to deal explicitly with the digital realm, this settlement marks a key moment in extending the Act’s protections online.

With the settlement agreement signed, the battle will turn to implementation. For example, Facebook faced questions about the usability of its interface for the archiving of political advertising. But unlike with the ad archive—which Facebook created on its own—the company has agreed to biannual meetings for three years with the plaintiffs in the settlement to check on the progress of the new tools. Rice called it a “trust but verify” system.

The good news is: by the end of the year, civil-rights protections will be equal on Facebook and the media platforms that came before it. The bad news is: all the years before that was true.

When viewers first met Sharon Morris and Rob Norris, the protagonists of Amazon Prime’s Catastrophe, the two had just embarked on a dizzying, if also unorthodox, romance. After a six-night stand with Sharon during a business trip to London, the Boston-based advertising executive learns a month later that “Sharon London Sex”—as the Irish woman is saved in his phone throughout the show—is pregnant. Soon after, Rob moves to London to begin an earnest attempt to turn their dire circumstances into something approximating a happily ever after.

Catastrophe, which released its fourth and final season last Friday, has offered a caustic but warm-hearted exploration of the mundane tribulations that follow the grandiose gestures and sweeping declarations of early courtship. It’s a show, above all, about the work of love and the incomparable rewards of that labor. Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney, who also serve as executive producers and the show’s writers, play their Morris and Norris counterparts with equal parts relatable misanthropy and tenderness. Their lightning-fast banter elevates the drudgery of life after love’s first gasps to a kind of partner sport.

In the first three seasons, Rob and Sharon endured a slog of obstacles, among them Rob’s adjustment to London; the premature birth of their son, Frankie; the near-immediate arrival of their second child; a false sexual-harassment claim and ensuing employment lapse; the death of Sharon’s father; a faint brush with infidelity; and the recovering alcoholic Rob’s slowly building relapse. Season 3 ended with a jolt: Rob crashed into another car while drunk, and confessed to a frantic Sharon that he wouldn’t pass the mandatory breathalyzer test.

The Season 4 finale finds the couple once again navigating perilous territory. After their planned beach vacation is overtaken by the news of Rob’s mother’s death and the logistics of her funeral, he and Sharon fight about a central fissure in their marriage toward the end of the episode: “From the day I met you, I’ve struggled to make you happy, and it never works,” Rob tells Sharon, “Have you ever done one thing—I mean one thing—just for me?” She balks: “What—other than grow and feed and raise all of your babies?” It’s a tense exchange, a fight that could easily portend the demise of their union.

But the scene soon gives way to a far more poignant moment, in which the two sit beachside as Sharon attempts to smooth their fight, and her husband’s grief, while also informing him that she’s pregnant, a fact Rob had already deduced: “I saw the test in the trash can,” he notes. “You left it, like, on top of the pile of trash.” After a quick deliberation, Sharon offers a tentative question, an inquiry and a plea: “Do you think you we would have ended up together? I mean, if you hadn’t got me pregnant. The first time.” After all the two have faced, Rob’s reply, a characteristically crass and sincere rejoinder, functions as a thesis statement both for the series and for long-term partnerships in general: “If I met you right now, I’d still want to fuck you for a week. And get you pregnant. And marry you. And mess it all up from there.”

That Catastrophe is capping its run with Season 4 is at once devastating for loyal viewers—selfishly, I want as many episodes of the series as Horgan and Delaney are willing to give—and evidence of the show’s self-awareness. The series, and its finale, ends on a note so apt it stops a hair short of cliché. In the final scene after the beachside exchange, an initially reluctant Rob follows a skinny-dipping Sharon into the water after he notices a sign that indicates the water is unsafe to swim in because of rip currents. The two embrace in the ocean after Rob lumbers in to reach her, and the camera pans away as they swim back to shore. When the shot fades, the two are still adrift—but together.

It’s as gorgeous and transcendent a finale as the series deserves. Season 4, more meditative and tonally heavy than Catastrophe’s preceding installments, ends the show with an eye toward Rob and Sharon’s future, in addition to that of their stellar supporting crew, and an insistence that love is, fundamentally, a series of promises. (As well as a parade of gentle roasts—in Episode 3, for example, Sharon tells an alabaster turtleneck-clad Rob that he looks like “a college poetry teacher who tells girls he invented the MeToo hashtag.”) Even when Rob and Sharon’s commitment to one another wavers, Horgan and Delaney’s conviction in their show never does. In moments of conflict, the series finds its leads engaging one another with the kind of candor that deepens their relationship and viewers’ investment in it.

Notably, Season 4’s moments of tension do not emerge, as they did in earlier seasons, primarily because of Rob and Sharon’s children or the pair’s adjustment to parenthood itself. Prior to the beachside adventure, the pair had already been presented with a number of potentially life-altering circumstances. Rob was offered a job in Boston by an old friend, played by an oddly cast David Alan Grier. (Another forgivable distraction is that the final episode, with its reflective sky an aesthetically pleasing tapestry of pinks and oranges, is visibly not set in Massachusetts.) Catastrophe wrestles with the guilt Rob feels about being away from his family, particularly his mother, before her death.

In its treatment of Mia Norris’s funeral, Catastrophe also offers a touching tribute to the late actor Carrie Fisher, who gave one of the final performances of her life in the show’s third season. As Rob’s sister, Sydney, the impeccably cast Michaela Watkins is electric onscreen and a grounding presence for her brother in his darker moments (like when their estranged alcoholic father arrives unannounced). At Mia’s funeral, Rob shares a eulogy that alternates between bemused appreciation and reverence, while threading in political commentary in Mia’s singularly brash voice: “She raised money for spinal surgeries for kids through her eBay sales. I guess there’s a button on eBay where you can donate, and—and that’s what she did,” Rob said to a small crowd. “Her friend Sally gave me an email that she sent her. I’ll read it: I heard about these babies. Their spines are like corkscrews, but once they have these surgeries, it’s beautiful. They can play hockey or rollerblade. I mean, I wouldn’t have to do it at all if this government gave a rat’s ass about disabled kids. … I bet Mike Pence spends his Sundays throwing disabled kids out of windows.”

The reference to the vice president, and to America’s punishing healthcare system, is one of several nods to Delaney’s own recent battles with the weight of grief (and to the writers’ politics). To watch the actor, who recently lost his 2-year-old son after the boy was found to have a malignant brain tumor, play a bereaved adult child on Catastrophe is a heartrending experience. But, like the series itself, the weighty finale buoys the struggles of its characters, creators—and perhaps also its viewers—with a simple reassurance: drifting, no matter how far, isn’t as scary when you’re not alone.

Harvard Business Review

Five years ago I read Daniel Markovitz’s argument for migrating to-do lists into calendars. Since then, my productivity has at least doubled.

That momentous (at least for me) article describes five problems with the to-do list. First, they overwhelm us with too many choices. Second, we are naturally drawn to simpler tasks which are more easily accomplished. Third, we are rarely drawn to important-but-not-urgent tasks, like setting aside time for learning. Fourth, to-do lists on their own lack the essential context of what time you have available. Fifth, they lack a commitment device, to keep us honest.

This was enough for me. I converted from my religiously observed to-do list (daily work plan) to this calendar system, also known as timeboxing (a term borrowed from agile project management). All five of Markovitz’s criticisms of to-do lists have manifested for me. In a study we conducted of 100 productivity hacks, timeboxing was ranked as the most useful. And over the last few years, I have also discovered several additional benefits of timeboxing, which I would like to share.

First, timeboxing into a calendar enables the relative positioning of work. If you know that a promotional video has to go live on a Tuesday and that the production team needs 72 hours to work on your copy edits, then you know when to place the timebox. In fact, you know where to place the timebox: it’s visual, intuitive, obvious. Working hard and trying your best is sometimes not actually what’s required; the alternative — getting the right thing done at the right time — is a better outcome for all.

Second, the practice enables you to communicate and collaborate more effectively. If all of your critical work (and maybe just all of your work, period) is in your calendar, colleagues can see it. So not only are you more likely to plan your work to accommodate others’ schedules (the paragraph above), others are able to check that your work schedule works for them. Shared calendars (with attendant privacy options) are the norm in the corporate world now, with Microsoft and Google leading the way.

Third, it gives you a comprehensive record of what you’ve done. Maybe you get to the end of a blistering week and you’re not even sure what happened? It’s in your calendar. Or a performance review looms — what were the highs and lows of the last six months? It’s in your calendar. Or you’re keen to use an hour to plan the following week and need to know what’s on the horizon. It’s in your calendar. Just make sure you have your own personal (i.e. not exclusively employer-owned) version of this data, or someday it won’t be in your calendar.

Fourth, you will feel more in control. This is especially important because control (aka volition, autonomy, etc.) may be the biggest driver of happiness at work. Constant interruptions make us less happy and less productive. Timeboxing is the proper antidote to this. You decide what to do and when to do it, block out all distractions for that timeboxed period, and get it done. Repeat. Consistent control and demonstrable accomplishment is hugely satisfying, even addictive. This is not just about productivity (largely external), this is about intent (internal, visceral) and how we feel.

Fifth, you will be substantially more productive. Parkinson’s law flippantly states that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Although it’s not really a law (it’s more of a wry observation), most of us would concede that there is some truth to it (especially as it pertains to meetings). A corollary of this observation in practice is that we often spend more time on a task than we should, influenced by the time that happens to be available (circumstantial) rather than how long the work should really take (objective). Disciplined timeboxing breaks us free of Parkinson’s law by imposing a sensible, finite time for a task and sticking to that. Although it’s hard to precisely quantify the benefits of any time management or productivity measures, this is clearly enormous. Just take a commonplace example: do you habitually take two hours (cumulatively, often drawn out over multiple sessions) to complete a task that really could have been done in a single, focused, time-boxed hour? If the answer is yes, then your personal productivity might be double what it is right now.

The benefits of calendarized timeboxing are many, varied, and highly impactful. The practice improves how we feel (control), how much we achieve as individuals (personal productivity), and how much we achieve in the teams we work in (enhanced collaboration). This may be the single most important skill or practice you can possibly develop as a modern professional, as it buys you so much time to accomplish anything else. It’s also straightforwardly applied and at no cost. Box some time to implement a version of this that works for you.

I’m a journalist deep in my bones. Like a lot of people in newsrooms, I came to the profession young (at 15, in my case), and have spent more than 45 years at it now—as a reporter, as an editor, as the press critic at the Los Angeles Times, writing books about media, and even running two think tanks that studied the field. One of the books I co-authored with Bill Kovach, The Elements of Journalism, is a text on press responsibility that is used worldwide.

Journalists, to me, are heroes. But when I started writing novels a few years ago—and had to imagine how all the players in a story might think—I realized that, in political fiction at least, journalists don’t make great protagonists. Their grasp of the story, in the end, is too fragmentary. They are rarely let inside the rooms where the secret intrigue plays out. And given the particular requirements of political thrillers, they are even less likely than others to save the day.

Journalists make fine heroes in a lot of other fiction, especially crime novels; reporters are truth seekers, after all, and in real life, it is not uncommon for them to help solve crimes, including murders (from the Golden State Killer in Sacramento to the Grim Sleeper serial killer in Los Angeles, it’s a long list).

But the basic structure of most crime fiction is retrospective. A terrible deed has been done, and now the hero must find out who is responsible. The plot is driven by solving a puzzle, most of the pieces of which are already in front of you. That is something a variety of types of characters can do: reporters, cops, private investigators, and even—in the case of English drawing rooms—little old ladies. The heroes of crime fiction might share some traits in common. As a group, they are shrewd and driven, with an eye for detail and a gift for inductive reasoning. But many people, not just journalists, have those skills.

Political fiction is a different genre. What compels the action in political stories is not a crime that has already happened, but, usually, a villain’s drive for power, which sets in motion a plan or chain of events that must be stopped. The story is canted forward, not backward. And it is less about facts already in evidence than about dynamic desires and relationships.

The classic political thrillers of the 1960s exemplify this structure. In Seven Days in May, a messianic right-wing general plans a military coup to overthrow a weak president. In Fail Safe, Machiavellian hard-liners push for a preemptive strike on Russia after U.S. computers offer a false signal that the Russians might be attacking first. In The Manchurian Candidate, the North Koreans are allied with a power-hungry Washington matron who hopes to seize the presidency for her husband. The heroes in these stories have to do more than figure out the dastardly plan. They also have to stop it—in most cases at the last minute—from reaching its conclusion. “Plot to shoot the president discovered, news at 11” might not cut it. The hero needs to run into the rafters of the auditorium and grab the gun before the shot is fired.

Often, this action takes place behind closed doors. In conventional crime fiction, the final revelations tend to be public—the crime was probably news in the first place, and so, often, is its resolution. Political thrillers, in contrast, usually hinge on the need to keep explosive information from coming to light. At the end of Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, for example, the hero (a policeman) has buried the assassin in an unmarked grave. A terrible secret—that the French president came very close to being murdered by his political opponents—has been buried with him. For the reader, the thrill of the ending comes from being let in on a dangerous secret about which the public will never fully know. Journalists are awkward here: They are in the business of telling secrets, not keeping them.

Journalists also might not have access to the right secrets to begin with. Part of the fun of political fiction is in seeing behind the scenes of government and diplomacy and watching the psychology of power at play. In those circumstances, it helps to have a protagonist inside the room—not one waiting outside asking questions.

Advise and Consent, Allen Drury’s intricate story of a Senate confirmation, is a good example. Drury was a New York Times reporter. But as if to underscore how irrelevant journalists are to the action, the reporters in his novel do not even have names. They’re identified only by publication. They ask mostly silly questions. And the poor scribes are given neither physical features nor private thoughts. It is Drury’s backhanded way of conveying how power in Washington really works, and how little of it is in the newspapers.

Instead, the key character in Drury’s novel is Senate Majority Leader Bob Munson, the man tasked with getting the White House’s nominee approved. He is one of the few characters in the drama whom everyone confides in, which makes him a useful storytelling choice. He is also one of the few people who understands and even sympathizes with the motivations of people on all sides, which helps Drury get at the complexity of the story he wants to convey.

Think of the heroes of so much political fiction, and there aren’t many reporters among them; rather, they tend to be people close to the seat of power, with relationships that give them special insight into the motives of other key characters, including the antagonists. In The Manchurian Candidate, the hero is a military intelligence officer and former prisoner of war who realizes there is something wrong with his former friend. In Seven Days in May, it is an army officer who painfully discovers that his former mentor appears to be losing his mind. In Don Winslow’s cartel trilogy about the drug wars, the hero is a DEA agent locked in a blood feud with his old friend, a drug lord. In Gore Vidal’s Lincoln, readers watch Lincoln himself through the eyes of his young aide, John Hay, and much of what makes the book compelling is seeing the president’s skill, intelligence, and subtle grace, which even many in his own Cabinet seem to miss.

My own new book, The Good Lie—about how Washington reacts to a terrorist incident abroad—includes a lot of the nuts and bolts and challenges of investigative reporting, especially coverage of national-security matters: where and how reporters meet intelligence sources and develop their trust, how they avoid technology that could get them caught, and how the whole process is different from what’s in the movies. There is a good deal about the motives of intelligence sources as well. Many of the journalists in my book are heroic. They keep breaking important stories that reveal some of the lies being told in Washington and help propel the plot forward. But in the end the exposés reveal only parts of the true story—not the whole of it.

Journalists in real life lay out the facts they can ascertain. Yet they rarely have all the facts of a case. And they eventually learn that the facts, on their own, almost never add up to the whole truth. Those of us who work in news can determine the who, what, and where of an event with a fair degree of certainty. But we are always on softer ground when it comes to motive: Why did the president do what he did? Journalists might try to answer, but they will never do so definitively. Yet it’s those very questions of motive that animate political novels, which have the same goal as all fiction: to add the why and how to our understanding of the world.

Stephen King has described good fiction as “the truth inside the lie.” In other words, it’s a way to try to comprehend the things that you cannot fully know or understand if you stick entirely to what is observable in the factual world. Good thriller writers—whether they are working in crime or political fiction—try to reveal something true while they entertain, often by taking real-life situations and tweaking them, just a little, to explore their wider implications. Then they throw deep and compelling characters into those situations and explore how they will react emotionally and morally.

For a novelist who’s trying to tell the truth about politics, journalists can be important players in the drama. They dig, ask uncomfortable questions, and reveal facts that are part of the puzzle. But if a true villain were ever to set a terrible plot in motion, journalists are not likely to stop it by themselves—in real life or in fiction.

OM MALIK

Earlier this morning, while drinking my morning tea and sifting through my morning reads (on Feedbin, if you want to know), I came across a brilliant piece of journalism from Jennings Brown, a writer for Gizmodo. He unmasked a fabulist and fake doctor who passed himself off as a scientist and an expert psychiatrist on sexual issues. It is a smart piece of old fashioned reporting, which included double checking the claims, picking up the phone, having a conversation or four, and yes, using Google and other databases. It is what a reporter is supposed to do. Kudos to Brown and the editors at Gizmodo.

Less heartening is the fact that, before Brown got to him, the so-called sex doctor fooled many, many major news outlets. One has to wonder about the sheer lack of quality control in their editorial departments. And then there were so-called academic journals that help buff up the false claims of fabulists like this individual, whose name I will not dignify by typing. The fake doctor’s rise to fame is a reminder of the well-worn warning not to believe everything you read on the Internet. It is astonishing that, in this day and age, none of the publications even bothered to check this quack’s claims. They took him and his absurd research at face value, dazzled by his attention-grabbing quotes that they used to drum up headlines less valuable than the nutrients in a fast-food burger.

If we want Facebook to flag fake news, then what is the responsibility of the media itself? Brown’s story did not just reveal one bad apple; it revealed something structurally unsound with the barrel that rotten apple was floating around in — our national media landscape. It’s time we built something new.

Let’s take a minute and think about how information flows today. The answer is simple: like it always has. It comes from word of mouth, from friends and family, from colleagues, and sometimes from established news outlets. In the past, we would call our friends and discuss a story on the phone. Later, we would email them new links with a comment or two. Some of us started blogs for sharing information. Facebook and Twitter took it all to the next level. They made information flow faster and further.

“When you look at social media, people share fake news more because it’s novel, exciting,” Cailin O’Connor, co-author of The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread said in an interview with the Nautilus magazine.

Her co-author, James Owen Weatherall, spoke with the same interviewer. “The memes we see on Twitter or on Facebook don’t really say anything,” he said, “they conjure up an emotion—an emotion associated with an ideology or belief you might have. It’s a type of misinformation that supports your beliefs without ever coming out and saying something false or saying anything.”

In the past, we might have shared some kooky stuff with a person or two. Then we began putting that same stuff on social networks and sharing it with a few hundred people. These people could, in turn, do the same with no more effort than a click of their mouse. As there were more outlets, there was a desire to stand out. Thus many started using headlines we now call clickbait. These headlines were often put on top of marginal information, but it got attention. The algorithms of social networks are configured to focus on clicks and sharing — “engagement,” as they say in Silicon Valley. More engagement means the social networks promote the content to more people. That is how you get the anti-vaccine movement. And that is how you get fakers playing doctor presented as medical experts.

In the modern media world, where clickbait is the tool to drive attention (and thus, advertising) many media checks-and-balance have fallen victim to the relentless speed of information. It is no surprise, then, that trust in media is evaporating.

Look, I understand when it comes to the Internet and media, we can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Some think-tankers without any real idea of how business actually works might want to come up with a digital tax to save news, but that is defying the very notion of the Internet. Most don’t understand the fertility of the network. For me, the Internet was, is and will always be a great giver. I worked for a dot-com, started a blog, turned that blog into a business. I strongly believe that the Internet will continue to help sprout many ideas. It allows many flowers to bloom, but in between these flowers, we have some weeds that we need to start pulling.

For starters, I would argue that everyone — the media organizations, big corporations such as Apple and Google, and others who are part of the media ecosystem should work on developing a rating system where instead of just flagging a single article, the entire publication is rated based on the truth in its work.

For example, if six out of ten stories are based on facts, then they are worth a readable rating. If in the future, their articles are deemed false, then they get dinged for it. If movies, music, and photos can be rated, why not media outlets? It seems that community-rated trust metrics aren’t good enough as a trust metric, so the industry might need a different tactic.

Journalists must remain open to new technology. As they did when dot-coms and blogs came around, many in the media react to the concept of automated news creation with disdain and fear. What most are missing is that automation, machine learning, and other new technologies are merely tools for creating better journalism.

Sadly, the media establishment rarely focuses on such issues. Take, for example, the Knight Foundation’s recent announcement that it was going to give away $300 million over five years to various groups. Something about it struck me as very odd.

None of the money was going towards projects and technologies that actually help the media and its practitioners adapt to the changing world, where network and machines drive the narratives faster than humans can control them. None of the money is going towards experiments that help surface the right information for the readers, such as Current Status.

Knight Foundation and its approach to our media problems is a continuation of the same conventional thinking that has allowed the big advertising technology companies to take control of media. No wonder, Google, Facebook, Apple, and others control a majority of the distribution and consumption of the product made by media outlets.

The only thing left in control of the outlets themselves is their brand. The stronger the brand, the stronger the bond with its customers (aka readers.) The best way to strengthen that bond is to invest in trust, and the best way to do that is not fall prey to the easy lucre of clickbait.

The consequences of long-term damage from misinformation at network scale are becoming so real that, at this point, it should be viewed as a collective emergency for everyone, including media organizations, not-for-profits, and Internet platforms. It could be said that misuse or misunderstanding of technology got us into this mess. Still, I am confident that, with the proper approach, there is also a technological solution. It will need boldness, betting on the future and less blaming others.

Washington Post

Before Beto O’Rourke became the darling of liberal online donors, his top financial backers hailed from a different set entirely — wealthy businessmen who have sought political influence by collectively donating millions of dollars to Republicans.

Several of El Paso’s richest business moguls donated to and raised money for O’Rourke’ s city council campaigns, drawn to his support for a plan to redevelop El Paso’s poorer neighborhoods. Some later backed a super PAC that would play a key role in helping him defeat an incumbent Democratic congressman.

For his part, O’Rourke worked on issues that had the potential to make money for some of his benefactors. His support as a council member for the redevelopment plan, which sparked controversy at the time because it involved relocating low-income residents, many of them Hispanic, coincided with property investments by some of his benefactors.

As a congressman, he supported a $2 billion military funding increase that benefited a company controlled by another major donor. That donor, real estate developer Woody Hunt, was friends with O’Rourke’s late father. Hunt also co-founded and funds an El Paso nonprofit organization that has employed O’Rourke’s wife since 2016.

“We shared a common goal,” said Ted Houghton, a local financial adviser and longtime O’Rourke donor who raised money for former Texas governor Rick Perry, a Republican, and helped steer millions in state transportation funding to the city. “The common goal was we needed to move El Paso in a different direction.”

O’Rourke, who emerged in 2018 as a national Democratic sensation in his narrow loss to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), launched his campaign for president on Thursday promising a new era of unity as he campaigned through small towns in eastern Iowa. The Iowa caucuses in early February will kick off the 2020 primary season.

In contrast to the aspirational image he has fostered in recent years, however, O’Rourke’s political career traced a more traditional path for a Texas politician — winning support from a typically pro-GOP business establishment interested in swaying public policy. Born into one politically potent family and married into another, he benefited repeatedly from his relationships with El Paso’s most powerful residents, including several nationally known Republican moneymen.

The former congressman’s GOP ties are likely to become an issue as he enters a crowded Democratic presidential primary field that has so far leaned leftward. Supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have already criticized O’Rourke’s voting record as insufficiently liberal.

Republicans are also piling on. A recent ad by the Club for Growth, a conservative group with a focus on cutting taxes, described O’Rourke’s pushing a redevelopment scheme “to bulldoze a poor Hispanic neighborhood.”

“O’Rourke, because of his charisma, can kind of pull off some of this behind-the-scenes power peddling,” said El Paso historian and activist David Romo, who has long opposed the business community’s push to redevelop downtown. “He was the pretty face in the really ugly gentrification plan that negatively affected the most vulnerable people in El Paso.”

O’Rourke and his allies did not see it that way. At the start of his career, O’Rourke went door-to-door to sell the plan, crafted by the Paso Del Norte Group, a dues-paying alliance of business and community leaders on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

O’Rourke, his mother, his wife and his father-in-law, William Sanders — one of the most prominent real estate investors in the country — had all been members of the group, which included many of the financial backers of O’Rourke’s early campaigns. Sanders led a private investment group that was buying up downtown properties, as some other donors to O’Rourke’s campaigns were doing.

The plan initially called for seizing land in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods through eminent domain — the same tactic that O’Rourke has opposed as part of the Trump administration’s plan to build a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico. Faced with accusations of a potential conflict of interest, O’Rourke eventually agreed to recuse himself from city council votes on the plan, which was later shelved as real estate struggled during the 2008 recession.

The local business leaders who have supported O’Rourke’s career say they were brought together by a common vision for improving the city.

It is a mission that until recently was the north star of O’Rourke’s political career.

“There was this point where it really came into focus how exceptional this community is, the people, the border, the connection to the rest of the world,” O’Rourke told The Washington Post. “I’ve worked hard to try to make sure that every El Pasoan could benefit from living in a thriving binational community.”

Once O’Rourke got to Congress, he made cleaning up corruption in government a priority. He stopped taking money from political action committees after his first term, promised to support term limits for members of Congress, and sponsored bills to provide partial public financing for campaigns and limit donations to national party committees.

At the same time, O’Rourke continued to receive large amounts of money from employees of companies run by major donors. Employees of one of his father-in-law’s former companies, Strategic Growth Bank, including Sanders himself, gave $57,400 during O’Rourke’s 2014 and 2016 House campaigns. Employees of El Paso-based Western Refining, including its chairman, Foster, gave $10,600 in 2014.

Hunt Companies’ employees, including Hunt, gave $60,300 to O’Rourke in the 2014 and 2016 cycles, more than the employees of any other business, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

O’Rourke worked in Congress to promote a military funding issue that directly affected Hunt’s business. Hunt Companies boasts of being the nation’s largest builder and manager of privatized military housing in the country. In 2015, the Obama administration persuaded Congress to cut troop stipends for those units.

Until then, troops who lived in the privatized units on bases would receive a monthly stipend equal to their projected rent. But when the cuts became law in 2014, the stipend was to be gradually reduced. As a result, providers of base housing were faced with either reducing their rents and losing revenue or risking the loss of tenants by asking soldiers to pay out of pocket.

In response, Hunt Companies’ lobbyists billed $380,000 in 2017 and 2018 for work that included contact with Congress on military housing and defense appropriations issues. During this period, O’Rourke’s office listed restoring the money for privatized housing as the 13th of 15 priorities in an internal database shared with Republican leaders, according to a person familiar with the work of O’Rourke’s congressional office.

With the support of Republican leaders of the House Armed Services Committee, who had opposed the initial housing stipend cuts, the defense spending bill that passed in 2018 included an increase in funding for privatized housing that the Congressional Budget Office estimated would cost taxpayers an additional $2 billion between 2019 and 2023. O’Rourke voted for the bill, which President Trump signed.

O’Rourke’s spokesman said Hunt played no role in O’Rourke’s support for the measure.

“These cuts would directly and adversely impact access to housing for service members and their families at El Paso’s Fort Bliss and other large military bases across Texas,” Evans said.

In an interview, Hunt said he did not pressure O’Rourke on issues that affected the businessman’s enterprises.

“I did not contact or otherwise leverage my personal relationship with Representative O’Rourke on any change in the base housing allowances for privatized housing or on any other legislative issues that might have affected Hunt Companies,” he said. Hunt donated to both O’Rourke and Cruz during the 2018 U.S. Senate campaign but did not publicly endorse either in the general election.

The benefits to the O’Rourke household from Hunt’s largesse were not limited to political donations. Hunt co-founded and has funded the Council on Regional Economic Expansion and Educational Development, or CREEED, a philanthropic effort to improve the academic performance of El Paso-area students.

O’Rourke’s wife, Amy, a former elementary school teacher and charter school founder, reported earning $146,085 between 2016 and 2018 as a consultant for CREEED.

“She uses her background in education to direct the local nonprofit’s Choose to Excel program, aimed at increasing graduation rates in the community, closing the achievement gap for El Paso students, and helping strengthen college and career readiness,”Evans said.

O’Rourke’s work as a congressman has put in contact with Hunt in other ways as well. In 2015, O’Rourke’s office organized a two-day conference on expanding cross-border trade. The first panel discussion featured Hunt and Foster’s wife, Alejandra de la Vega, who owns retail stores on both sides of the border. Foster spoke at an event later in the schedule.

Before they took the stage, O’Rourke rose to make opening remarks. He thanked Woody Hunt “for making this possible.”

Bloomberg

The U.S. college-admissions scandal — in which rich people paid bribes to get their kids accepted — strikes at the heart of cherished American ideals of fairness and meritocracy. But it also reflects a deeper problem: the blocked transition to a new, more diverse elite.

Although the alleged bribery happened at some of the world’s most prestigious institutions — including the University of California, Yale University and my own alma mater, Stanford — by itself it doesn’t prove that meritocracy is a complete sham. It involved only a small percent of elite school spots, which are themselves only a small fraction of the higher education system. Also, people have been charged with crimes. This will discourage similar tricks in the future, and will reduce the prestige of the institutions involved. From now on, employers looking over the resume of a Yale or Stanford graduate might wonder whether they got admitted because of real skill or rich parents.

But outright bribery is just the tip of the iceberg. Far more extensive and entrenched is the legacy admissions system, which is perfectly above-board and legal. Harvard University, for example, is one-third legacies. And the admissions process itself is just one link in a long chain of factors that give rich kids privileged access to college: exclusive schools, test prep, tutors, expensive consultants. These factors help explain why rich kids with low test scores are more likely to graduate college than poor kids with high test scores

When the rich hoard the top spots in the university system, students from low-income and disadvantaged minority backgrounds suffer. In a pair of papers, economists Stacey Dale and Alan Krueger found that admittance to an elite university tended to benefit black and Hispanic households, and households with lower educational backgrounds, much more than other kids. In other words, all those tutors and donations and bribes are earning rich kids only a modest return in terms of future earnings, while shutting out poor and minority kids for whom a spot at Yale could easily make the difference between success and failure in life.

These “dream hoarders,” as Brookings researcher Richard Reeves calls them, are pernicious in other ways that are hard to measure. Perhaps most important, they have racially ossified the American elite. The children of rich Americans are mostly white, since their parents and grandparents got rich when the country was mostly white (and when structural racism kept black people, by far the biggest minority at the time, out of the elite). But the young up-and-coming talent of America is mostly not white.

As Harvard Business School economist William Kerr documents, the U.S. has benefited massively in recent decades from substantial flows of high-skilled immigration. Most of that influx has come from Asia and Africa. But smart kids with parents from the Philippines, India or Nigeria don’t tend to have the money and connections to buy their way into top colleges. The barriers are even higher for kids of working-class immigrants, many of whom hail from Mexico and other Latin American countries. They don’t just lack connections and money: Their parents and community members typically lack the education and experience needed to point them in the direction of Harvard, much less help them get in. For black Americans living in poor segregated neighborhoods, the challenges are often even steeper.

Tons of talent is going undiscovered in the U.S., while the elite is overpopulated with rich, well-connected mediocrities. That would be bad enough in any society. But because it comes at a time when America’s racial composition is rapidly changing, it looks even more starkly unfair. Just as Jewish Americans were shut out of the elite for decades after they arrived en masse on American shores, nonwhite Americans are being shut out today.

Exclusion is bound to produce frustration among the country’s young strivers. Social media is already full of small signs of this anger. Even the lawsuit alleging anti-Asian discrimination at Harvard is not really about affirmative action (as some claim), but about the unfair advantages being monopolized by a rich white elite. If left unaddressed, this mismatch between an ossified, wealthy, mostly-white old guard and a population of frustrated, young, largely poor non-white achievers will keep festering, much to the detriment of the nation.

The solution is to encourage a changing of the guard. Eliminate legacy admissions at colleges, and try harder to discover talented students in poor and disadvantaged communities. Companies can help by casting a wider net in their hiring and recruiting, paying less attention to Ivy League names on resumes, and going out of their way to look for talent among people who come from different demographics than the existing executives. At the government level, more equal funding for public schools would also help a lot.

The country is changing, and the elite must change with it.

Fast Company

Meritocracy has become a leading social ideal. Politicians across the ideological spectrum continually return to the theme that the rewards of life–money, power, jobs, university admission–should be distributed according to skill and effort. The most common metaphor is the “even playing field” upon which players can rise to the position that fits their merit. Conceptually and morally, meritocracy is presented as the opposite of systems such as hereditary aristocracy, in which one’s social position is determined by the lottery of birth. Under meritocracy, wealth and advantage are merit’s rightful compensation, not the fortuitous windfall of external events.

Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic. In the U.K., 84% of respondents to the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey stated that hard work is either “essential” or “very important” when it comes to getting ahead, and in 2016 the Brookings Institute found that 69% of Americans believe that people are rewarded for intelligence and skill. Respondents in both countries believe that external factors, such as luck and coming from a wealthy family, are much less important. While these ideas are most pronounced in these two countries, they are popular across the globe.

Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called “grit,” depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing.

This is to say nothing of the fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story. In his book Success and Luck, the U.S. economist Robert Frank recounts the long-shots and coincidences that led to Bill Gates’s stellar rise as Microsoft’s founder, as well as to Frank’s own success as an academic. Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best.

According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.

This is surprising because impartiality is the core of meritocracy’s moral appeal. The “even playing field” is intended to avoid unfair inequalities based on gender, race, and the like. Yet Castilla and Benard found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate. They suggest that this “paradox of meritocracy” occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides. Satisfied that they are just, they become less inclined to examine their own behavior for signs of prejudice.

Meritocracy is a false and not very salutary belief. As with any ideology, part of its draw is that it justifies the status quo, explaining why people belong where they happen to be in the social order. It is a well-established psychological principle that people prefer to believe that the world is just.

However, in addition to legitimation, meritocracy also offers flattery. Where success is determined by merit, each win can be viewed as a reflection of one’s own virtue and worth. Meritocracy is the most self-congratulatory of distribution principles. Its ideological alchemy transmutes property into praise, material inequality into personal superiority. It licenses the rich and powerful to view themselves as productive geniuses. While this effect is most spectacular among the elite, nearly any accomplishment can be viewed through meritocratic eyes. Graduating from high school, artistic success, or simply having money can all be seen as evidence of talent and effort. By the same token, worldly failures becomes signs of personal defects, providing a reason why those at the bottom of the social hierarchy deserve to remain there.

This is why debates over the extent to which particular individuals are “self-made” and over the effects of various forms of “privilege” can get so hot-tempered. These arguments are not just about who gets to have what; it’s about how much “credit” people can take for what they have, about what their successes allow them to believe about their inner qualities. That is why, under the assumption of meritocracy, the very notion that personal success is the result of “luck” can be insulting. To acknowledge the influence of external factors seems to downplay or deny the existence of individual merit.

Despite the moral assurance and personal flattery that meritocracy offers to the successful, it ought to be abandoned both as a belief about how the world works and as a general social ideal. It’s false, and believing in it encourages selfishness, discrimination, and indifference to the plight of the unfortunate.