Stress Testing Our Democracy: A Conversation with Barton Gellman<br /> Episode 384 of Sam Harris podcast<br /> https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/384-stress-testing-our-democracy

Suggested by Flancian at FoTL

Maybe a democracy can work, if it's voting system works well enough.

Book Review: ‘Where Tyranny Begins,’ by David Rohde by [[David Greenberg]]

Looks like a good overview book of DJT's policies with respect to erosion of democracy in America.

read article Sun 8/25/2024 7:01 PM

Useful stat

for - democracy of the sacred - illusion of Maya - poverty mentality

democracy of - the sacred - illusion of Maya - Theoretically, we should all be able to awaken to the sacred, because THAT is what we all are! - And yet, most of us are so deluded that we cannot access that experience - Maya's illusion of separation is so strong - Poverty mentality is so strong

These Three Books Help Put the US Election in Perspective by [[Matt Hooper]]

How do equity, capabilities and democracy relate to a Degrowth use of technology?

G0v

The g0v movement, or g0v, (pronounced gov-zero /ɡʌvziroʊ/) is an open source, open government collaboration started by Chia-liang Kao ("clkao"), ipa, kirby and others in late 2012 in Taiwan.

The Computational Democracy Project

We bring data science to deliberative democracy, so that governance may better reflect the multidimensionality of the public's will.

quote likely from Incontro con la Olivetti (Giorgio Ferroni, 1950) via the Archivio Nazionale Cinema Impresa

via https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1e5gz0i/in_me_non_c%C3%A8_che_futuro/

for - authoritarian regime playbook - take gradual steps to degrade democracy - Trump given permission to perform anti-democratic actions that don't raise red flags

Comment by chrisaldrich: Something about this is reminiscent of WordPress' mission to democratize publishing. We can also compare it to Facebook whose (stated) mission is to connect people, while it's actual mission is to make money by seemingly radicalizing people to the extremes of our political spectrum.

This highlights the fact that while many may look at content moderation on platforms like Facebook as removing their voices or deplatforming them in the case of people like Donald J. Trump or Alex Jones as an anti-democratic move. In fact it is not. Because of Facebooks active move to accelerate extreme ideas by pushing them algorithmically, they are actively be un-democratic. Democratic behavior on Facebook would look like one voice, one account and reach only commensurate with that person's standing in real life. Instead, the algorithmic timeline gives far outsized influence and reach to some of the most extreme voices on the platform. This is patently un-democratic.

Populisme is cherrypicking on aspects of democracy. Their interpretation of democracy is something completely different.

also, what impact did these programs in the late 40s and early 50s have on subsequent events in the 60s and 70s as these cohorts continued to age?

How does culture tie us all together? Does shared culture necessarily mean a regression to some mean?

Compare this with the cultural pressure of religious identity in America which does seem to press toward a particular way of thinking, living, and being.

Check Fink to see where the seeds of this idea of linking education and democracy sprouted...

TL's references for this:<br /> Leon Fink, Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 13–14; Robert B. Fisher, “The People’s Institute of New York City, 1897–1934: Culture, Progressive Democracy, and the People” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1974), 1, 9; Hugh S. Moorhead, “The Great Books Movement,” (PhD diss. University of Chicago, 1964), 110–111.

some of the cultural democratization at that time presumed free time as well as conscious choice to make the effort... what about those who have patience for neither?

what about the economic choices to participate or not?

evidence?

We hear this regularly, and it seems intuitive, but... where is the proof of this...

Just how "informed" ought a person to be? How critical? Everyone is "critical", the internet is full of criticism, but not necessarily in the sense meant here.

He and others are usually talking about some perceived "perfect democracy" which doesn't really exist in actuality.

Multiplatform meaning capable of running on two or more running hardware platforms (windows and desktop), however for marketing purposes it also includes channels and to promote products or services. It involves creating and distributing content across different online and offline platforms simultaneously, targeting various demographics and consumer touchpoints. Digital describes electronic technology that generates, stores and processes data in terms of positive and nonpositive states. Finally democracy meaning ruled by the people to make decisions

Lacy, Tim. The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. https://amzn.to/3R2rCox.

12:00 assassinations of many african leaders. Muammar Gaddafi, patrice lumumba of congo, sir abubakar tafawa balewa of nigeria, thomas sankara... history is repeating itself, only the actors are changing. -- 50 years ago, the empire called this "war on communism", nowadays the empire calls this "war on terror" or "war on nationalism" or "fighting for democracy" or "fighting for freedom"... and the empire will ALWAYS find useful idiots to fight for these lies, because human stupidity is the most stable resource of all, human stupidity is infinite.

The great Alexander's empire collapsed,<br /> the empire of the ancient Romans<br /> and the empire of Napoleon fell into ruins,<br /> they were built on the power of weapons.

But the Empire of New Rome<br /> has existed for almost 1500 years<br /> and will last for who knows how long,<br /> because it rests on the most solid foundation:<br /> the stupidity of humans.

-- Otto von Corvin

democracy is just a sign of decadence.<br /> boomers dreaming of pretty ideas, living in good times, creating hard times for their children

I find it hard to believe that equality is "the very cornerstone of our democracy".

Futures of Democracies Conference – Reykjavík - 2024

• for: steps towards a democracy collaborative

• description

  • two steps to form a democracy collaborative
    • more inclusive ownership
    • building the next system of capital

• for: definition epistemic fragmentation, no agreement on basic facts, political polarization, adjacency - epistemic fragmentation - polarization - democracy

• definition: epistemic fragmentation

  • when major parts of society disagree on basic facts
• adjacency between
  • epistemic fragmentation
  • polarization
  • democracy
• adjacency statement
  • democracy is critical to solving our challenges but it won't function if there is so much epistemic fragmentation that we can't agree on basic facts

• for: quote - luxury cannot be democratized, 1% - democracy, elites - democracy, adjacency - luxury - democracy, luxury is not democratic, luxury is inequality, Andre Gorz, Terrestrial website, adjancency - luxury - democracy, quote luxury

• quote

  • ... By its design as by its original destination, the car is a luxury good. And luxury, in essence, cannot be democratized: if everyone has access to luxury, no one benefits from it; on the contrary: everyone cheats, frustrates and dispossesses others and is cheated, frustrated and dispossessed by them.
• author: Andre Gorz
• date: Sept. 25, 2023

• publication: Terrestrial

  • https://www.terrestres.org/2023/09/25/jadore-la-bagnole-andre-gorz-repond-a-macron/

• comment

  • insightful comment reveals an adjacency between luxury and democracy that is obvious in hindsight, but missed seeing in foresight!

• adjacency between:

  • luxury
  • democracy
• adjacency statement
  • luxury is, by definition a premium artefact so by definition is beyond the reach of most people. It is therefore un-democratic by design.

mob rule. democracy really is just mob rule

The dramatic increase in economic specialization of humanity driven by the Industrial Revolution has many benefits to societies, but it also has detrimental effects when the core knowledge and shared base of the society is lost.

Certainly individuals have a greater reliance on specialists for future outcomes (think about the specialization of areas like climate science which can have destructive outcomes on all of humanity or public health outcomes with respect to vaccines and specialized health care delivery), but they also need to have a common base of knowledge/culture and the ability to think critically for themselves to be able to effect necessary changes, particularly when the pace of those changes is more rapid than humans have generally been evolved to accept them.

This is an extreme statement which bundles together a lot without direct evidence.

Written in an era in which there was a lot of pro-Democracy and anti-Communist discussion, Hutchins is making an almost religious statement here which binds education and democracy in the ways in which the Catholic church bound education and religion in scholasticism. While scholasticism may have had benefits, it also caused a variety of ills which took centuries to unwind into the Enlightenment.

Why can't we separate education from democracy? Can't education of this sort live in other polities? Hasn't it? Does critical education necessarily lead to democracy?

What does the explorable solution space of admixtures of critical reasoning and education look like with respect to various forms of government? Could a well-educated population thrive under collectivism or socialism?

The definition of "natural slavery" here is contingent and requires lots of context, particularly of the ways in which Aristotle used it versus our current understanding of chattel slavery.

Interesting history and possible solutions.

Dewey on the humanization of work front running the dramatic changes of and in work in an industrial age?

Note here the potential coupling of democracy and education as dovetailing ideas rather than separate ideas which can be used simultaneously. We should take care here not to end up with potential baggage that could result in society and culture the way scholasticism combined education and religion in the middle ages onward.

Graeber and Wengrow seem to indicate otherwise.

• for: democracy - by device, quote, quote - Barry Chudakov, quote - democracy by device
• quote
  • We are in the midst of a remarkable social and civic experiment, democracy by device
• author: Barry Chudakov

• for: titling elections, voting - social media, voting - search engine bias, SEME, search engine manipulation effect, Robert Epstein
• summary
  • research that shows how search engines can actually bias towards a political candidate in an election and tilt the election in favor of a particular party.

• for: search engine manipulation effect, SEME, voting, voting - bias, voting - manipulation, voting - search engine bias, democracy - search engine bias, quote, quote - Robert Epstein, quote - search engine bias, stats, stats - tilting elections
• paraphrase
• quote
  • In our early experiments, reported by The Washington Post in March 2013,
    • http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/could-google-tilt-a-close-election/2013/03/29/c8d7f4e6-9587-11e2-b6f0-a5150a247b6a_story.html?ref=hackernoon.com
  • we discovered that Google’s search engine had the power to shift the percentage of undecided voters supporting a political candidate by a substantial margin without anyone knowing.
  • 2015 PNAS research on SEME
    • http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512.full.pdf?with-ds=yes&ref=hackernoon.com
    • stats begin
    • search results favoring one candidate
    • could easily shift the opinions and voting preferences of real voters in real elections by up to 80 percent in some demographic groups
    • with virtually no one knowing they had been manipulated.
    • stats end
    • Worse still, the few people who had noticed that we were showing them biased search results
    • generally shifted even farther in the direction of the bias,
    • so being able to spot favoritism in search results is no protection against it.
    • stats begin
    • Google’s search engine 
      • with or without any deliberate planning by Google employees 
    • was currently determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the world’s national elections.
    • This is because Google’s search engine lacks an equal-time rule,
      • so it virtually always favors one candidate over another, and that in turn shifts the preferences of undecided voters.
    • Because many elections are very close, shifting the preferences of undecided voters can easily tip the outcome.
    • stats end

• for: Hiliary Clinton could have won, voting, democracy, voting - social media, democracy - social media, election - social media, facebook - election, 2016 US elections, 2016 Trump election, 2016 US election, 2016 US election - different results, 2016 election - social media
• interesting fact
  • If Facebook had sent a "Go out and vote" message on election day of 2016 election, Clinton may have had a boost of 450,000 additional votes
    • and the outcome of the election might have been different

• for: polycrisis, collapse, tweedledums, tweedledees, wicked problem, social mess, stuck, stuckness, complexity
• title
  • Is This How Political Collapse Will Unfold?
• author
  • Dave Pollard
• date
  • Aug 3, 2023
• comment
  • thought provoking
  • honest, diverse, open thinking
  • a good piece of writing to submit to SRG / Deep Humanity analysis for surfacing insights
  • adjacency
    • complexity
    • emptiness
    • stuckness
      • this word "stuckness" stuck out in me (no pun intended) today - so many intractable, stuck problems, at all levels of society, because we oversimplify complexity to the point of harmful abstraction.

• definition

  • Tweedledums

    • This is a Reactionary Caste that believes that salvation lies in a return to a non-existent nostalgic past, characterized by respect for
      • authority,
      • order,
      • hierarchy,
      • individual initiative, and
      • ‘traditional’ ways of doing things,
    • governed by a
      • strict,
      • lean,
      • paternalistic elite
    • that leaves as much as possible up to individual families guided by
      • established ‘family values’ and
      • by their interpretation of the will of their god.

  • Tweedledees

    • This is a PM (Professional-Managerial) Caste that believes that salvation lies in striving for an impossibly idealistic future characterized by
      • mutual care,
      • affluence
      • relative equality for all,
    • governed by a
      • kind,
      • thoughtful,
      • educated,
      • informed and
      • representative
    • elite that appreciates the role of public institutions and regulations, and is guided by principles of
      • humanism and
      • ‘fairness’.
  • references
  • Aurélien
    • https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/reality-would-like-a-word
  • source
  • led here by reading Dave Pollard's other article
    • https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2021/09/13/something-better-than-democracy/
    • which was the result of a Google search on "better than democracy"

• for: community, loss of community, alienation, separation, anonymous neighborhoods, representative democracy, unrepresentative democracy, together alone
• adjacency
  • community
  • representative democracy
  • anonymous neighborhoods
• comment
  • makes me think of this article:
    • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Finthesetimes.com%2Farticle%2Findustrial-agricultural-revolution-planet-earth-david-korten&group=world
  • I've long felt that modernity has hollowed out the original meaning of "community"
• quote
  • modernity has hollowed out the word community
• author
  • James Gien Wong
  • Stop Reset Go

• for: broken system, voting, low turnout, low voter turnout, together alone
• adjacency
  • low turnout
  • low voter turnout
  • alienation
  • anonymous neighbourhoods
  • anonymous community

• for: animal decision-making
• adjacency
  • animal herding behavior and
  • direct democracy
• claim
  • herds and flocks of many other animals (other than human) use a form of direct democracy in making decisions
  • Alphas do not alone make decisions, as leadership often rotates
  • The law of "two feet (or four" tests the group's readiness for consensus and the "first follower" principle
  • dissenters and unpersuaded group members are free to go off and look for another group
    • except at critical times such as
      • breeding season
      • under threat

• for: democracy, governance, alternative governance
• title
  • Something Better Than Democracy
• author
  • Dave Pollard
• date Sept 13, 2023
• source
  • https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2021/09/13/something-better-than-democracy/

Two of the driving reasons behind the Great Books project were improvement of both education and democracy.

The democracy portion was likely prompted by the second Red Scare from ~1947-1957 which had profound effects on America. Published in 1952, this series would have considered it closely and it's interesting they included Marx in the thinkers at the end of the series.

Things have not improved measurably since the 1950s apparently. The drumbeat has only gotten worse.

How would Robert Hutchins view the new millennium?

These are much pithier versions of what Robert Hutchins is getting at when he's talking about the importance of the Great Conversation with respect to Democracy.

experience’ (1916: 101).

The Kennedy administration became culturally associated with Camelot because Jacqueline Kennedy mentioned her husband's affinity for the show in an interview with Theodore H. White for LIFE Magazine following his death and quoted the show's closing lyric: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.”

Somewhat curious that there's T. H. White of The Once and Future King and a separate Theodore H. White who interviewed Jackie Kennedy following her husband's death with mentions of Camelot.

Is there a better direct quote from Locke for this indirect one?

Oddly, large portions of the religious right and Republican right are highly subservient to authority while simultaneously espousing the idea of "freedom".

Apparently the base definition of "freedom" on the right has shifted in large portions of American culture.

• Consumption corridors are proposed as the way to live what we all consider a good life, within planetary boundaries.
• Citizen engagement and deliberative democracy are key to co-creating a system that works for us all

Why is this bad? We have such shortages in the trade schools now.

Is this back to the bias of the "wisest parent"

This is an older text John Dewey was considered a founder in one of the two main branches of American Pragmatism. The writing style can be dated. This makes it hard to comprehend.

The topic sentence is not always the first sentence. If it is stated in the paragraph it is still an explicit topic sentence. If you have to infer the topic sentence it is an implicit sentence.

Good writers never trust their audiences to infer nothing. Assume they know knowthing. Define everything.

A real motive and real outcome is also important as a learning outcome is cdntral to Dewey's thought.

He sees schools, while rejecting the industrial model, as the engine to drive societal reform.

Learning is best as a Lived Experience is central to Dewey's thinking.

If we know that schools, by their nature impact character-building what role does the teacher play in character building? In teaching ethics?

Where is the line between the explicit character building schools do and what falls under the domain of parents?

Have we over played

"no industrial model of education"

Could it be direct instruction in well managed classrooms are the most efficient way for students to learn?

Wait is that the industrial model? The scientifically proven model? Does the science only work because it is the statistics of the industrial era?

Was this the better model?

Schools are a relatively new human invention

This is an interesting thought. Any reform you have on schols will impact society as a whole.

The State of Connecticut just took away local control of the reading curriculum. You must pick from five pre-approved curriculum........

Just five....so much for local control of schools

Hey #EDu106 this is a good philosophical question for you to chew on.

Can you square socialism and individualism

Is Dewey's call for schools to be Democracy factories indoctrination? What does indoctrination mean from critics of Public School? Are they correct?

How do you feel about charter schools? Do they destroy democracy?

Ask the children being dug up In Canada in schools for Indigenous Children if schools were tools for democracy.

Literacy can not be separated from culture. Words can be used to give or take away power.

What power should parents have with charter schools? Homeschooling?

A central tenant in the American Republic and form of liberalism is a protection of the minority from tyranny of the majority.

Does Dewey violate this principle with with this thesis? Who is the best and wisest parent? Who gets to decide?

Why is what is wise for one parent wise for my kid?

see: Markoff, John. “Where and When Was Democracy Invented?” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 4 (October 1999): 660–90. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417599003096.

This site is a cesspool of authoritarian, fascist-apologist, conspiracist mind-mangling content. It's a good place to find out what kinds of bizarre notions people (particularly Catholics of an authoritarian bent) are being fed, and consuming — ridiculous fabrications and warped interpretations of the sort contributing (with giddy joy) to the suffocation of democratic inclinations and institutions.

The site does have some interesting images. I think this will be an inspiration for some dystopian and horror fiction ideas.

!- quotable : growing impact of democratic citizenry affect the steering institutions of governance

!- role of participatory democracy : governance

!- comment - this is what bottom-up rapid whole system change relies upon - Indyweb / SRG / TPF aspires to create such a global space

!- cities actions : can be done without eliciting ire of nation state - bike shares - pedestrian zones - insulated buildings - renovated ports - congestion fees - car emission limits - furnace specifications - fuel upgrades - white paint roofs - cities are the right level for focusing on effective global climate action

!- claim : cities can mitigate corrupted democracy and foster global cooperation - ie. C40 or ICLEI (also Covenant of Mayors) - cities are not plagued by the problems of state actors who cannot reach any meaningful agreement at COP conferences

!- nation states : all practice a corrupted form of democracy - captured by money, business, banking interests, corporate-owned media - supreme court supports corporations - Citizens United treats corporations as persons, - Buckly vs Valeo treats money as speech - These cases corrupt democracy by giving money constitutional legitimacy - faux charitable lobbies like Americal Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) buys off lawmakers to act on behalf of corporations - democracy is trapped within national sovereignty and cannot respond across borders to global challenges like climate change - very ineffective global cooperation/response

!- crisis: democracy - big money, special interests, tyranny of me - has shaped the climate crisis

!- claim : we live in a corrupted and minimalist democracy with the consequence that we lack generational thinking - privilege individiual, special-interesting thinking - only ask citizens to express their private preferences - confound opinion and knowledge - we even deny expert science, believing it is tantamout to democratic thinking !- claim : within this minimalist, corrupted version of democracy, present thinking trumps future thinking - we do not apply generational thinking aka Edmund Burke - Burke's idea of generational thinking conceptualizes an ideal democracy that encompasses past, present and future generations - generational thinking requires a space of prudent deliberation rather than present-mind thinking only

!- Key concept : deliberative democracy of competent, participative citizens driving long term policy decisions is ideal for confronting climate change - transform self-centered individual to group-centered - shift from Me to We (invert the M) - shift from short term to long term thinking - intersubjective scientific knowledge

!- Title: Democracy and Climate Change: How Cities Can Do What States Can't !- Author: Benjamin Barber

.

!- inadequacy : concept of democracy - government policies are decided by the rick through their lobbyists - and is actually a form of oligarcy / plutocracy and corruption

Tarkowski has only seen a few more participatory server governance set-ups, most are 'benevolent dictator' style. Same. I have seen several growing instances that have changed from 'dictator' to a group of moderators making the decisions. You could democratise those roles by having users propose / vote on moderators. It's what we do offline in communal structures.

Our media and social media systems have been structured along with the people who use them such that debate is stifled because information doesn't flow coherently across the political partisan divide.

https://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2022/11/25/defederation-and-governance-processes/

Urban rural divide in the ancient Athenians had effects on wealth as well.

Για το πως αποκαλουμε τα πολιτευματα.

Read in juxtaposition with the knowledge of orality and along with Graeber & Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, one could certainly argue that there are other ways of knowing which provide potentially better pathways to democracy.

Further, the simple fact of basic literacy doesn't necessarily encourage democracy. Take a look at the January 6th (2021) insurrectionists who were likely broadly literate, but who acted more like a damaged oral society and actively subverted democracy.

Literacy plus "other things" are certainly necessary for democracy. How do we define these other things, and then once we have, is literacy still part of the equation for democracy?

In a democracy, is it not just rule by majority, but rule by the most organized that ends up dominating the society?

Perhaps C. Wright Mills' work on the elite has some answers?

The Republican party's use of organization to create gerrymandering is a clear example of using extreme organization to create minority rule. Cross reference: Slay the Dragon in which this issue is laid out with the mention of using a tiny amount of money to careful gerrymander maps to provide outsized influences and then top-down outlines to imprint broad ideas from a central location onto smaller individual constituencies (state and local).

Context: Lindsey Graham had just proposed a bill for a nationwide abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

McConnell's position seems to be one that choice about abolition is an option, but one which is reserved for white men of power over others. This is painful because that choice is being left to people without any of the information and nuance about specific circumstances versus the pregnant women themselves potentially in consultation with their doctors who have broad specific training and experience in the topics and issues at hand. Why are these leaders attempting to make decisions based on possibilities rather than realities, particularly when they've not properly studied or are generally aware of any of the realities?

If this is McConnell's true position, then why not punt the decision and choices down to the people directly impacted? And isn't this a long running tenet of the Republican Party to allow greater individual freedoms? Isn't their broad philosophy: individual > state government > national government? (At least with respect to internal, domestic matters; in international matters the opposite relationships seem to dominate.)

tl;dr:<br /> Mitch McConnell believes in choice, just not in your choice.

Here's the actual audio from a similar NPR story:<br /> https://ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/me/2022/09/20220914_me_gop_sen_lindsey_graham_introduces_15-week_abortion_ban_in_the_senate.mp3#t=206

McConnell is also practicing the Republican party game of "do as I say and not as I do" on Graham directly. He's practicing this sort of hypocrisy because as leadership, he's desperately worried that this move will decimate the Republican Party in the midterm elections.

There's also another reading of McConnell's statement. Viewed as a statement from leadership, there's a form of omerta or silent threat being communicated here to the general Republican Party membership: you better fall in line on the party line here because otherwise we run the risk of losing power. He's saying he's leaving it up to them individually, but in reality, as the owner of the purse strings, he's not.

Thesis:<br /> The broadest distinction between American political parties right now seems to be that the Republican Party wants to practice fascistic forms of "power over" while the Democratic Party wants to practice more democratic forms of "power with".

Martin Gurri holds that we need to reconfigure our democracy where the public cannot be walled off or controlled by politicians or institutions because the digital revolution flattened everything.

Beatrice Webb was using her custom note taking system in the lead up to the research that resulted in the publication of Industrial Democracy (1897).

Is there evidence that she was practicing this note taking/database practice earlier than this?

Some might even say you have a duty to criticize your government's policies.

Oh the ironies of this as he was talking about a small proportion of the population at the time, a large swath of which (namely enslaved persons with no power) had no arms to protect themselves against him.

His definition of "freemen" was painfully limiting for someone speaking about freedom in such lofty terms.

Active learning is a pedagogical structure whereby a teacher presents a problem to a group of students and has them (usually in smaller groups) collectively work on the solutions together. By talking and arguing amongst themselves they actively learn together not only how to approach problems, but to come up with their own solutions. Teachers can then show the correct answer, discuss why it was right and explain how the alternate approaches may have gone wrong. Research indicates that this approach helps provide a deeper understanding of the materials presented this way, that students score higher on exams and are less likely to either fail or drop out of these courses.

Active learning sounds very similar to the sorts of approaches found in flipped classrooms. Is the overlap between the two approaches the same, or are there parts of the Venn diagrams of the two that differ, and, if so, how do they differ? Which portions are more beneficial?

Does this sort of active learning approach also help to guard against "group think" as the result of comparing solutions from various groups? How might this be applied to democracy? Would separate versions of committees that then convene to compare notes and come up with solutions improve the quality of solutions?

Emphasis on mortal characters' strengths as Athens or those supporting Athens build support for democracy. Aeschylus may have known and fought alongside people with similar personalities, strength of individual mortals also emphasized (unlike one divine, absolute ruler in EoG).

Further, while EoG represents the rise of good to conquer evil, The Persians shows how one bad ruler (out of hubris and greed) of an otherwise good kingdom can become an antagonist -more complex setup than EoG

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/trs/97-21/97-21.html

A view of internet technology from 1998. It's filled with techno-utopianism, but provides some thought and admonishment against watching out for design which may have future deleterious consequences.

It's a bit amazing how many problems he highlights as relatively easily solvable are still unsolved and largely untouched: search/search engines, academic publishing workflows, democracy, and general digital humanism.

What are the problems here in such a democratic process online or even in a modern context?

People who aren't actually stakeholders feel that they're stakeholders and want to control other's actions even when they don't have a stake. (eg: abortion)

People don't have time to become properly informed about the ever-increasing group of topics and there is too much disinformation and creation of fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Thoughtful deliberation does not happen.

The quality of legislation has dropped instead of increased.

Bikeshedding is too easy.

What if instead of electing people who run, we elected people from the electorate at random? This would potentially at least nudge us to have some representation by "one of the least of these". This would provide us to pay more attention to a broader swath of society instead of the richest and most powerful. What might the long term effects of this be?

Highlights of some important humanist problems that haven't had nearly enough work on the internet. Instead we allow rampant capitalism of certain areas without forcing companies to spend time working at the harder problems.

Social media has to some extent democratized the access to media, however there are not nearly enough processes for creating negative feedback to dampen ideas which shouldn't or wouldn't have gained footholds in a mass society.

We need more friction in some portions of the social media space to prevent the dissemination of un-useful, negative, and destructive ideas swamping out the positive ones. The accelerative force of algorithmic feeds for the most extreme ideas in particular is one of the most caustic ideas of the last quarter of a century.

In modern literate contexts, it is easier to establish doubletalk in oral contexts than it is in written contexts as the written is more easily reviewed for clarity and concreteness. Verbal ticks like "you know what I mean", "it's easy to see/show", and other versions of similar hand-waving arguments that indicate gaps in thinking and arguments are far easier to identify in writing than they are in speech where social pressure may cause the audience to agree without actually following the thread of the argument. Writing certainly allows for timeshiting, but it explicitly also expands time frames for grasping and understanding a full argument in a way not commonly seen in oral settings.

Note that this may not be the case in primarily oral cultures which may take specific steps to mitigate these patterns.

Link this to the anthropology example from Scott M. Lacy of the (Malian?) tribe that made group decisions by repeating a statement from the lowest to the highest and back again to ensure understanding and agreement.

This difference in communication between oral and literate is one which leaders can take advantage of in leading their followers astray. An example is Donald Trump who actively eschewed written communication or even reading in general in favor of oral and highly emotional speech. This generally freed him from the need to make coherent and useful arguments.

Democracy in the age of social media. (n.d.). EXPeditions - Meet the World’s Best Minds. Retrieved February 5, 2022, from https://www.joinexpeditions.com/exps/43

Hiding in Plain Sight: Democracy’s indigenous origins in the Americas by David Graeber and David Wengrow in Lapham's Quarterly https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/democracy/hiding-plain-sight

Nationalistic, racial, and cultural blinders have led us to posit broadly accepted (positive) ideas like democracy as having developed and grown out of Western ideas rather than attributing them to historical cultures and societies all over the world.

To most Americans today, this in an incredibly radical statement. Worth pulling up the reference and seeing the evidence on this.

Given the reference, this is more attributable to David Graeber.

Sam Coates Sky. (2021, December 16). For posterity this is what the Joy Morrissey now deleted tweet said: Https://t.co/IZHX2tZrGs [Tweet]. @SamCoatesSky. https://twitter.com/SamCoatesSky/status/1471428868573732876

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/12/10/trump-lawyer-pence-biden-524088

Weekend—Switzerland votes to support government COVID-19 measures. (n.d.). ForexLive. Retrieved December 3, 2021, from https://www.forexlive.com/news/!/weekend-switzerland-votes-to-support-government-covid-19-measures-20211129

I am just realizing that I was not listening to The New York Times about the strikes spreading across the United States of America. Of course, the editors would not want to be causing this mass panic or a labour movement.

I was learning about this from Democracy Now!

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/facebook-papers-democracy-election-zuckerberg/620478/

Adrienne LaFrance outlines the reasons we need to either abandon Facebook or cause some more extreme regulation of it and how it operates.

While she outlines the ills, she doesn't make a specific plea about the solution of the problem. There's definitely a raging fire in the theater, but no one seems to know what to do about it. We're just sitting here watching the structure burn down around us. We need clearer plans for what must be done to solve this problem.

EuroPCom. (n.d.). Retrieved October 10, 2021, from https://cor.europa.eu/en/events/Pages/europcom.aspx

This is the water we swim in.

This is Water by David Foster Wallace

This is a painful burn by the writer Alex Beam.

Perhaps worth modifying for Donald J. Trump?

From the perspective of the American experiment and the evolution of democracy, Donald J. Trump was a dead white male who had the bad luck to still be alive."

Bai, H. (2021). Fake News Known as Fake Still Changes Beliefs and Leads to Partisan Polarization [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/v9gax

Zuckerman, E. (2021). Demand five precepts to aid social-media watchdogs. Nature, 597(7874), 9–9. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02341-9

Nice overview of work in the space for fixing monopoly in social media space the at the moment. I hadn't heard about Fukuyama or Daphne Keller's versions before.

I'm not sure I think Dorsey's is actually a thing. I suspect it is actually vaporware from the word go.

IndieWeb has been working slowly at the problem as well.