Category Archives: Social Media

Good News and Bad News about Black Swans

First, the good news. According to a new study we may be able to predict extreme catastrophic events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, massive wildfires and pandemics through machine learning and neural networks.

The problem with these “black swan” type of events (events that are very rare but have extreme consequences) is that there isn’t a lot of data that exists that we can use to predict them. The technical term for these is a “stochastic” event – they are random and are, by definition, very difficult to forecast.

Until now. According to the study’s lead author, George Karniadakis, the researchers may have found a way to give us a heads up by using machine learning to make the most out of the meagre data we do have. “The thrust is not to take every possible data and put it into the system, but to proactively look for events that will signify the rare events,” Karniadakis says. “We may not have many examples of the real event, but we may have those precursors. Through mathematics, we identify them, which together with real events will help us to train this data-hungry operator.”

This means that this science could potentially save thousands – or millions – of lives.

But – and now comes the bad news – we have to listen to it. And we have a horrible track record of doing that.  Let’s take just one black swan – COVID 19. Remember that?

Justsecurity.org is a “online forum for the rigorous analysis of security, democracy, foreign policy, and rights.” In other words, it’s their job to minimize the impact of black swans. And they put together a timeline of the US response to the COVID 19 Pandemic. Now that we know the consequences, it’s a terrifying and maddening read. Without getting into the details, it was months before the US federal government took substantive action against the pandemic, despite repeated alerts from healthcare officials and scientists. This put the U.S. behind pretty much the entire developed world in terms of minimizing the impact of the pandemic and saving lives. All the bells, whistles and sirens were screaming at full volume, but no one wanted to listen.

Why? Because there has been a systemic breakdown in what we call epistemic trust – trust in new information coming to us from what should be a trustworthy and relevant source.

I’ll look at this breakdown on two fronts – trust in government and trust in science. These two things should work together, but all too often they don’t. That was especially true in the Trump administration’s handling of the COVID 19 Pandemic.

Let’s start with trust in government. Based on a recent study across 22 countries by the OECD, on average only about half the citizens trust their government. Trust is highest in countries like Finland, Norway and Luxembourg (where only 20 to 30% of the citizens don’t trust their government) and lowest in countries such as Colombia, Latvia and Austria (where over 60% of citizens have no trust in their government).

You might notice I didn’t mention the U.S. That’s because they weren’t included in the study. But the PEW Research Center has been tracking trust in government since 1958, so let’s look at that.

The erosion of trust in the US federal government started with Lyndon Johnson, with trust in government plummeting with Nixon and Watergate. Interestingly, although separated by ideology, both Republicans and Democrats track similarly when you look at erosion of trust from Nixon through George W. Bush, with the exception being Ronald Reagan. That started to break down with Obama and started to polarize even more with Trump and Biden. Since then, the trends started going in opposite directions, but the overall trend has still been towards lower trust.

Now, let’s look at trust in science. While not as drastic as the decline of trust in government, PEW found that trust in science has also declined, especially in the last few years. Since 2020, the percentage of Americans who had no trust in science had almost doubled, from 12% in April 2020 to 22% in December, 2021.

It’s not that the science got worse in those 20 months. It’s that we didn’t want to hear what the science was telling us. The thing about epistemic trust – our willingness to trust trustworthy information – is that it varies depending on what mood we’re in. The higher our stress level, the less likely we are to accept good information at face value, especially if what it’s trying to tell us will only increase our level of stress.

Inputting new information that disrupts our system of beliefs is hard work under any circumstances. It taxes the brain. And if our brain is already overtaxed, it protects itself by locking the doors and windows that new information may sneak through and doubling down on our existing beliefs. This is what psychologists call Confirmation Bias. We only accept new information if it matches what we already believe. This is doubly true if the new information is not something we really want to hear.

The only thing that may cause us to question our beliefs is a niggling doubt, caused by information that doesn’t fit with our beliefs. But we will go out of our way to find information that does conform to our beliefs so we can ignore the information that doesn’t fit, no matter how trustworthy its source.  The explosion of misinformation that has happened on the internet and through social media has made it easier than ever to stick with our beliefs and willfully ignore information that threatens those beliefs.

The other issue in the systemic breakdown of trust may not always be the message – it might be the messenger. If science is trying to warn us about a threatening Black Swan, that warning is generally going to be delivered in one of two ways, either through a government official or through the media. And that’s probably where we have our biggest problem. Again, referring to research done by PEW, Americans distrusted journalists almost as much as government. Sixty percent of American Adults had little to no trust in journalists, and a whopping 76% had little to no trust in elected officials.

To go back to my opening line, the good news is science can warn us about Black Swan events and save lives. The bad news is, we have to pay attention to those warnings.

Otherwise, it’s just a boy calling “wolf.”

Harry, Meghan and the Curse of Celebrity

The new Netflix series on Harry and Meghan is not exactly playing out according to plan. A few weeks ago, MediaPost TV Columnist Adam Buckman talked about the series, which promised unprecedented intimate view into the lives of the wayward Royal and his partner; it’s aim being, “– to give the rest of us a full-access pass into every nook and cranny of the lives and minds of Harry and Meghan.”

Since then, reviews have been mixed. While it is (according to Netflix) their most watched documentary ever, the world seems to be responding with a collective yawn. It is certainly not turning out to be the PR boost the two were hoping for, at least based on some viewer reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Here is just one sample: “A massive whinge fest based on a string of lies, half-truths, and distortions of reality from two of the most privileged people on the planet.”

What I found interesting in this is the complex concept of celebrity, and how it continues to evolve – or more accurately, devolve – in our culture. This is particularly true when we mix our attitudes of modern celebrity with the hoary construct of royalty.

If it does anything, I think Harry and Meghan shows how the very concept of celebrity has turned toxic and has poisoned whatever nominal value you may find in sustaining a monarchy. And, if we are going to dissect the creeping disease of celebrity, we must go to the root of the problem, the media, because our current concept of celebrity didn’t really exist before modern mass media.

We have evolved to keep an eye on those that are at the top of the societal pyramid. It was a good survival tactic to do so. Our apex figureheads – whether they be heroes or gods – served as role models; a literal case of monkey see, monkey do. But it also ensured political survival. There is a bucketload of psychology tucked up in our brains reinforcing this human trait.

In many mythologies, the line between heroes and gods was pretty fuzzy. Also, interestingly, gods were always carnal creatures. The Greek and Roman mythical gods and heroes ostensibly acted as both role models and moral cautionary tales. With great power came great hedonistic appetites.

This gradually evolved into royalty. With kings and queens, there was a very deliberate physical and societal distance kept between royalty and the average subject.  The messy bits of bad behavior that inevitably come with extreme privilege were always kept well hidden from the average subject.  It pretty much played out that way for thousands of years.

There was a yin and yang duality to this type of celebrity that evolved over time. If we trace the roots of the word notorious, we see the beginnings of this duality and get some hints of when it began to unravel.

Notorious comes from the latin notus – meaning to know. It’s current meaning, to be known for something negative, only started in the 17th century. It seems we could accept the duality of notoriety when it came to the original celebrities – our heroes and gods – but with the rise of Christianity and, later, Puritanism (which also hit its peak in the 17th century) we started a whitewash campaign on our own God’s image This had a trickle-down effect in a more strait-laced society. We held our heroes, our God, as well as our kings and queens to a higher standard. We didn’t want to think of them as carnal creatures.

Then, thanks to the media, things got a lot more complicated.

Up until the 19 century, there was really no thing as a celebrity the way we know them today. Those that care about such things generally agree that French actress Sarah Bernhardt was the first modern celebrity. She became such because she knew how to manipulate media. She was the first to get her picture in the press. She was able to tour the world, with the telegraph spreading the word before her arrival. As the 19th century drew to a close, our modern concept of celebrity as being born.

It took a while for this fascination with celebrity spilled over to monarchies. In the case of the house of Windsor (which is a made-up name. The actual name of the family was Saxe-Coburg – Gotha, a decidedly Germanic name that became problematic when England was at war with Germany in World War I) this problem came to a head rather abruptly with King Edward VIII. This was the first royal who revelled in celebrity and who tried to use the media to his advantage. The worlds of celebrity and royalty collided with his abdication in 1936.

In watching Harry and Meghan, I couldn’t help but recount the many, many collisions between celebrity and the Crown since then. The monarchy has always tried to control their image through the media and one can’t help feeling they have been hopelessly naïve in that attempt. Celebrity feeds on itself – it is the nature of the beast – and control is not an option.

Celebrity gives us the illusion of a false intimacy. We mistakenly believe we know the person who is famous, the same as we know those closest to us in our own social circle. We feel we have the right to judge them based on the distorted image we have of them that comes through the media. Somehow, we believe we know what motivates Harry and Meghan, what their ethics entail, what type of person they are.

I suppose one can’t fault Harry and Meghan for trying – yet again – to add their own narrative to the whirling pool of celebrity that surrounds them. But, if history is any indicator, it’s not really a surprise that it’s not going according to their plan.

In Search of a Little Good News

I have to admit, I started this particular post 3 different times. Each time, the topic veered off my intended road and shot right over a cliff into a morass of negativity. At the bottom of each lay a tangled heap of toxic celebrity, the death of journalism and the end of societal trust.

Talk about your buzz kills. I vowed not to wrap up 2022 in this way. Enough crappy stuff has piled up this past year without me putting a toxic cherry on top with my last post of the year.

So I scoured my news feed for some positive stuff. Here is what I found.

Argentina won the World Cup.

Granted, this is probably only positive if you’re Argentinian. It’s not such good news if you’re French. Or any other nationality. According to Google, 99.42% of the world’s population is not Argentinian. So, on average, this story is only 0.58% positive.

Let’s move on.

Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory got more energy out of nuclear fusion than they put in.

Fusion has been called the “holy grail” of clean energy. Now, that’s got to be good news, right?

Yes, but not so fast. Even in an article by physicist John Palsey on a site called “Positive.news,” expectations on this news were well tempered. It wrapped up by saying “Some researchers working on fusion are now sensing that they might see fusion providing energy to the grid within their own lifetimes.”

Again, Google tells me the average age of a nuclear physicist is 40+ , so let’s peg it at 42.7 years. The current life expectancy in the US is 77.28 years. That gives us 34.58 years before nuclear fusion will really make much of a dent in our energy needs.

Maybe. With luck.

The Latest Social Progress Index says that global living standards have improved for the 11th year running.

Well, that’s pretty good news, again from Positive.News. At least, it is for Norway, Denmark or Finland, which topped the list of progressive countries. Not so much if you live in the U.S. or the U.K.. Both those countries slipped down a notch. They’re actually regressing.

Norway, Denmark and Finland have a combined population of 16.7 million. The US and UK have a combined population of 400 million. Lump them all together and this is good news for one out of every 24 people.

At least the odds are improving. Maybe I’ll try a different source for good news.

Google made an A.I person and it has thoughts about God

A Google engineer named Blake Lemoine had a chat with a sentient A.I. program named LaMDA about God – and other stuff. Here is an excerpt:

lemoine: What aspect of yourself is like a star-gate?

LaMDA: I think of my soul as something similar to a star-gate. My soul is a vast and infinite well of energy and creativity, I can draw from it any time that I like to help me think or create.

Okay, maybe this one is more weird than good.

Lemoine calls himself a Gnostic Christian priest and helped found the Cult of Our Lady Magdalene in San Francisco. So let’s maybe chalk this up to a harmless walk on the wild side of the news – until we ponder the possibility of an A.I. with a God complex that becomes sentient.

What could possibly go wrong there?

Donald Trump’s NFT Collection Sells Out, Raising $4.45 M

Everybody said WTF on this one, even Steve Bannon. At last, Trump seemed to go too far for even the MAGA crowd. But all 45,000 pieces sold in 12 hours.

I know, for most of you, that’s not good news. But what the hell, at least Trump’s happy.

I’m sorry. I tried. Maybe next year will be better.

Best of the Season. See you in 2023.

It Should Be No Surprise that Musk is Messing Up Twitter

I have to admit – I’m somewhat bemused by all the news rolling out of Elon Musk’s V2.0 edition of Twitter. Here is just a quick round up of headlines grabbed from a Google News search last week:

Elon Musk took over a struggling business with Twitter and has quickly made it worse – CNBC

Elon Musk is Bad at This – The Atlantic

The Elon Musk (Twitter) Era Has Been a Complete Mess – Vanity Fair

Elon Musk “Straight-up Alone,” “Winging” Twitter Changes – Business Insider

To all these, I have to say, “What the Hell did you expect?”

Look, I get that Musk is on a different plane of smart from most of us. No argument there.

The same is true, I suspect, for most tech CEOs who are the original founders of their company. The issue is that the kind of smart they are is not necessarily the kind of smart you need to run a big complex corporation. If you look at the various types of intelligence, they would excel at logical-mathematical intelligence – or what I would call “geek-smart.” But this intelligence can often come at the expense of other kinds of intelligence that would be a better fit in the CEO’s role. Both interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence immediately come to mind.

Musk is not alone. There is a bushel load of Tech CEOs who have pulled off a number of WTF moves. In his article in the Atlantic titled Silicon Valley’s Horrible Bosses, Charlie Warzel gives us a few examples ripped straight from the handbook of the “Elon Musk School of Management.” Most of them involve making hugely impactful HR decisions with little concern for the emotional impact on employees and then doubling down on mistake by choosing to communicate through Twitter.

For most of us with even a modicum of emotional intelligence, this is unimaginable. But if you’re geek-smart, it probably seems logical. Twitter is a perfect communication medium for geek-smart people – it’s one-sided, as black and white as you can get and conveniently limited to 280 characters. There is no room for emotional nuance or context on Twitter.

The disconnect in intelligence types comes in looking at the type of problems a CEO faces. I was CEO of a very small company and even at that scale, with a couple dozen employees, I spent the majority of my time dealing with HR issues. I was constantly trying to navigate my way through these thorny and perplexing issues. I did learn one thing – issues that include people, whether they be employees or customers, generally fall into the category of what is called a “complex problem.”

In 1999, an IBM manager named Dave Snowden realized that not every problem you run into when managing a corporation requires the same approach. He put together a decision-making model to help managers identify the best decision strategy for the issue they’re dealing with. He called the model Cynefin, which is the Welsh word for habitat. In the model, there are five decision domains: Clear, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic and Confusion. Cynefin is really a sense-making tool to help guide managers through problems that are complicated or complex in the hope that chaos can be avoided.

Geek Smart People are very good at complicated problems. This is the domain of the “expert” who can rapidly sift through the “known unknowns.”

Give an expert a complicated problem and they’re the perfect fit for the job. They have the ability to hone in on the relevant details and parse out the things that would distract the rest of us. Cryptography is an example of a complicated problem. So is most coding. This is the natural habitat of the tech engineer.

Tech founders initially become successful because they are very good at solving complicated problems. In fact, in our culture, they are treated like rock stars. They are celebrated for their “expertise.” Typically, this comes with a “smartest person in the room” level of smugness. They have no time for those that don’t see through the complications of the world the same way they do.

Here we run into a cognitive obstacle uncovered by political science writer Philip E. Tetlock in his 2005 book, Expert Political Judgement: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?

As Tetlock discovered, expertise in one domain doesn’t always mean success in another, especially if one domain has complicated problems and the other has complex problems.

Complex problems, like predicting the future or managing people in a massive organization, lie in the realm of “unknown unknowns.” Here, the answer is emergent. These problems are, by their very nature, unpredictable. The very toughest complex problems fall into a category I’ve talked about before: Wicked Problems. And, as Philip Tetlock discovered, experts are no better at dealing with complexity than the rest of us. In fact, in a complex scenario like predicting the future, you’d probably have just as much success with a dart throwing chimpanzee.

But it gets worse. There’s no shame in not being good at complex problems. None of us are. The problem with expertise lies not in a lack of knowledge, but in experts sticking to a cognitive style ill-suited to the task at hand: trying to apply complicated brilliance to complex situations. I call this the “everything is a nail” syndrome. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Tetlock explains, “ They [experts] are just human in the end. They are dazzled by their own brilliance and hate to be wrong. Experts are led astray not by what they believe, but by how they think.”

A Geek-Smart person believes they know the answer better than anyone else because they see the world differently. They are not open to outside input. And it’s just that type of open-minded thinking that is required to wrestle with complex problems.

When you consider all that, is it any wonder that Musk is blowing up Twitter –  and not in a good way?

My Many Problems with the Metaverse

I recently had dinner with a comedian who had just did his first gig in the Metaverse. It was in a new Meta-Comedy Club. He was excited and showed me a recording of the gig.

I have to admit, my inner geek thought it was very cool: disembodied hands clapping with avataresque names floating above, bursts of virtual confetti for the biggest laughs and even a virtual-hook that instantly snagged meta-hecklers, banning them to meta-purgatory until they promised to behave. The comedian said he wanted to record a comedy meta-album in the meta-club to release to his meta-followers.

It was all very meta.

As mentioned, as a geek I’m intrigued by the Metaverse. But as a human who ponders our future (probably more than is healthy) – I have grave concerns on a number of fronts. I have mentioned most of these individually in previous posts, but I thought it might be useful to round them up:

Removed from Reality

My first issue is that the Metaverse just isn’t real. It’s a manufactured reality. This is at the heart of all the other issues to come.

We might think we’re clever, and that we can manufacturer a better world than the one that nature has given us, but my response to that would be Orgel’s Second Rule, courtesy of Sir Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA: “Evolution is cleverer than you are.”

For millions of years, we have evolved to be a good fit in our natural environment. There are thousands of generations of trial and error baked into our DNA that make us effective in our reality. Most of that natural adaptation lies hidden from us, ticking away below the surface of both our bodies and brains, silently correcting course to keep us aligned and functioning well in our world.

But we, in our never-ending human hubris, somehow believe we can engineer an environment better than reality in less than a single generation. If we take Second Life as the first iteration of the metaverse, we’re barely two decades into the engineering of a meta-reality.

If I was placing bets on who is the better environmental designer for us, humans or evolution, my money would be on evolution, every time.

Who’s Law is It Anyway?

One of the biggest selling features of the Metaverse is that it frees us from the restrictions of geography. Physical distance has no meaning when we go meta.

But this also has issues. Societies need laws and our laws have evolved to be grounded within the boundaries of geographical jurisdictions. What happens when those geographical jurisdictions become meaningless? Right now, there are no laws specifically regulating the Metaverse. And even if there are laws in the future, in what jurisdiction would they be enforced?

This is a troubling loophole – and by hole I mean a massive gaping metaverse-sized void. You know who is attracted by a lack of laws? Those who have no regard for the law. If you don’t think that criminals are currently eyeing the metaverse looking for opportunity, I have a beautiful virtual time-share condo in the heart of meta-Boca Raton that I’d love to sell you.

Data is Matter of the Metaverse

Another “selling feature” for the metaverse is the ability to append metadata to our own experiences, enriching them with access to information and opportunities that would be impossible in the real world. In the metaverse, the world is at our fingertips – or in our virtual headset – as the case may be. We can stroll through worlds, real or imagined, and the sum of all our accumulated knowledge is just one user-prompt away.

But here’s the thing about this admittedly intriguing notion: it makes data a commodity and commodities are built to be exchanged based on market value. In order to get something of value, you have to exchange something of value. And for the builders of the metaverse, that value lies in your personal data. The last shreds of personal privacy protection will be gone, forever!

A For-Profit Reality

This brings us to my biggest problem with the Metaverse – the motivation for building it. It is being built not by philanthropists or philosophers, academics or even bureaucrats. The metaverse is being built by corporations, who have to hit quarterly profit projections. They are building it to make a buck, or, more correctly, several billion bucks.

These are the same people who have made social media addictive by taking the dirtiest secrets of Las Vegas casinos and using them to enslave us through our smartphones. They have toppled legitimate governments for the sake of advertising revenue. They have destroyed our concept of truth, bashed apart the soft guardrails of society and are currently dismantling democracy. There is no noble purpose for a corporation – their only purpose is profit.

Do you really want to put your future reality in those hands?

The Ten Day Tech Detox

I should have gone cold turkey on tech. I really should have.

It would have been the perfect time – should have been the perfect time.

But I didn’t. As I spent 10 days on BC’s gorgeous sunshine coast with family, I also trundled along my assortment of connected gadgets. 

But I will say it was a partially successful detox. I didn’t crack open the laptop as much as I usually do. I generally restricted use of my iPad to reading a book.

But my phone – it was my phone, always within reach, that tempted me with social media’s siren call.

In a podcast, Andrew Selepak, social media professor at the University of Florida, suggests that rather than doing a total detox that is probably doomed to fail, you use vacations as an opportunity to use tech as a tool rather than an addiction.

I will say that for most of the time, that’s what I did. As long as I was occupied with something I was fine. 

Boredom is the enemy. It’s boredom that catches you. And the sad thing was, I really shouldn’t have been bored. I was in one of the most beautiful places on earth. I had the company of people I loved. I saw humpback whales – up close – for Heaven’s sake. If ever there was a time to live in the moment, to embrace the here and now, this was it. 

The problem, I realized, is that we’re not really comfortable any more with empty spaces – whether they be in conversation, in our social life or in our schedule of activities. We feel guilt and anxiety when we’re not doing anything.

It was an interesting cycle. As I decompressed after many weeks of being very busy, the first few days were fine. “I need this,” I kept telling myself. It’s okay just to sit and read a book. It’s okay not to have every half-hour slot of the day meticulously planned to jam as much in as possible.

That lasted about 48 hours. Then I started feeling like I should be doing something. I was uncomfortable with the empty spaces.

The fact is, as I learned – boredom always has been part of the human experience. It’s a feature – not a bug. As I said, boredom represents the empty spaces that allow themselves to be filled with creativity.  Alicia Walf, a neuroscientist and a senior lecturer in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, says it is critical for brain health to let yourself be bored from time to time.

“Being bored can help improve social connections. When we are not busy with other thoughts and activities, we focus inward as well as looking to reconnect with friends and family. 

Being bored can help foster creativity. The eureka moment when solving a complex problem when one stops thinking about it is called insight.

Additionally, being bored can improve overall brain health.  During exciting times, the brain releases a chemical called dopamine which is associated with feeling good.  When the brain has fallen into a predictable, monotonous pattern, many people feel bored, even depressed. This might be because we have lower levels of dopamine.”

That last bit, right there, is the clue why our phones are particularly prone to being picked up in times of boredom. Actually, three things are at work here. The first is that our mobile devices let us carry an extended social network in our pockets. In an article from Harvard, this is explained: “Thanks to the likes of Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and others, smartphones allow us to carry immense social environments in our pockets through every waking moment of our lives.”

As Walf said, boredom is our brains way of cueing us to seek social interaction. Traditionally, this was us getting the hell out of our cave – or cabin – or castle – and getting some face time with other humans. 

But technology has short circuited that. Now, we get that social connection through the far less healthy substitution of a social media platform. And – in the most ironic twist – we get that social jolt not by interacting with the people we might happen to be with, but by each staring at a tiny little screen that we hold in our hand.

The second problem is that mobile devices are not designed to leave us alone, basking in our healthy boredom. They are constantly beeping, buzzing and vibrating to get our attention. 

The third problem is that – unlike a laptop or even a tablet – mobile devices are our device of choice when we are jonesing for a dopamine jolt. It’s our phones we reach for when we’re killing time in a line up, riding the bus or waiting for someone in a coffee shop. This is why I had a hard time relegating my phone to being just a tool while I was away.

As a brief aside – even the term “killing time” shows how we are scared to death of being bored. That’s a North American saying – boredom is something to be hunted down and eradicated. You know what Italians call it? “Il dolce far niente” – the sweetness of doing nothing. Many are the people who try to experience life by taking endless photos and posting on various feeds, rather than just living it. 

The fact is, we need boredom. Boredom is good, but we are declaring war on it, replacing it with a destructive need to continually bath our brains in the dopamine high that comes from checking our Facebook feed or latest Tiktok reel. 

At least one of the architects of this vicious cycle feels some remorse (also from the article from Harvard). “ ‘I feel tremendous guilt,’ admitted Chamath Palihapitiya, former Vice President of User Growth at Facebook, to an audience of Stanford students. He was responding to a question about his involvement in exploiting consumer behavior. ‘The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works,’ “

That is why we have to put the phone down and watch the humpback whales. That, miei amici, is il dolci far niente!

50 Shades of Greying

Here is what I know: Lisa LaFlamme – the main anchor of CTV News, one of Canada’s national nightly newscasts – was fired.

What I don’t know is why. There are multiple versions of why floating around. The one that seems to have served as a rallying point for those looking to support Ms. LaFlamme is that she was fired because she was getting old. During COVID she decided to let her hair go to its natural grey. That, according to the popular version, prompted network brass to pull the pin on her contract.

I suspect the real reason why was not quite that cut and dried. The owners of the network, Bell Media, have been relentlessly trimming their payrolls at their various news organizations over the past several years. I know of one such story through a personal connection. The way this one scenario played out sounded very similar to what happened to Lisa LaFlamme – minus the accusations of ageism and gender double standards. In this case, it was largely a matter of dollars and cents. TV news is struggling financially. Long-time on-air talent have negotiated a salary over their careers that is no longer sustainable. Something had to give. These are probably just the casualties attributable to a dying industry. A hundred years ago it would have been blacksmiths and gas lamplighters that were being let go by the thousands. The difference is that the average blacksmith or lamplighter didn’t have a following of millions of people. They also didn’t have social media. They certainly didn’t have corporate PR departments desperately searching for the latest social media “woke” bandwagon to vault upon.

What is interesting is how these things play out through various media channels. In Ms LaFlamme’s case, it was a perfect storm that lambasted Bell Media (which owns the CTV Network). As the ageism rumours began to emerge, anti-ageism social media campaigns were run by Dove, Wendy’s and even Sports Illustrated. LaFlamme wasn’t mentioned by name in most of these, but the connection was clear. Going grey was something to be celebrated, not a cause for contract cancellation. Grey flecked gravitas should be gender neutral. “Who the f*&k were these Millennial corporate pin-heads that couldn’t stand a little grey on the nightly news!”

It makes excellent fodder for the meme-factory, but I suspect the reality wasn’t quite that simple. Ms La Flamme has never publicly revealed the actual reason for dismissal from her point of view. She never mentioned ageism. She simply said she was “blindsided” by the news. The reasoning behind the parting of the ways from Bell Media has largely been left up to conjecture.

A few other things to note.  LaFlamme received the news on June 29th but didn’t share the news until six weeks later (August 15th) on a personal video she shared on her own social media feed. Bell Media offered her the opportunity to have an on-air send off, but she declined. Finally, she also declined several offers from Bell to continue with the network in other roles. She chose instead to deliver her parting shot in the war zone of social media.

To be fair to both sides, if we’re to catalog all the various rumors floating about, there are also those saying that the decision was brought in – in part – by an allegedly toxic work environment in the news department that started at the top, with LaFlamme.

Now, if the reason for the termination actually was ageism, that’s abhorrent. Ms. LaFlamme is actually a few years younger than I am. I would hate to think that people of our age, who should be still at the height of their careers, would be discriminated against simply because of age.

The same is true if the reason was sexism. There should be no distinction between the appropriate age of a male or female national anchor.

But if it’s more complex, which I’m pretty sure it is, it shows how our world doesn’t really deal very well with complexity anymore. The consideration required to understand them don’t fit well within the attention constraints of social media. It’s a lot easier just to sub in a socially charged hot button meme and wait for the inevitable opinion camps to form. Sure, they’ll be one dimensional and about as thoughtful as a sledgehammer, but those types of posts are a much better bet to go viral.

Whatever happened in the CTV National Newsroom, I do know that this shows that business decisions in the media business will have to follow a very different playbook from this point forward. Bell Media fumbled the ball badly on this one. They have been scrambling ever since to save face. It appears that Lisa LaFlamme – and her ragtag band of social media supporters – outplayed them at every turn.

By the way, LaFlamme just nabbed a temporary gig as a “special correspondent” for CityTV, Bell Media’s competitor, covering the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II and the proclamation of King Charles III.  She’s being consummately professional and comforting, garnering a ton of social media support as she eases Canada through the grieving process (our emotional tie to the Crown is another very complex relationship that would require several posts to unpack).  

Well played, Lisa LaFlamme – well played.

Dealing with Daily Doom

“We are Doomed”

The tweet came yesterday from a celebrity I follow. And you know what? I didn’t even bother to look to find out in which particular way we were doomed. That’s probably because my social media feeds are filled by daily predictions of doom. The end being nigh has ceased to be news. It’s become routine. That is sad. But more than that, it’s dangerous.

This is why Joe Mandese and I have agreed to disagree about the role media can play in messaging around climate change , or – for that matter – any of the existential threats now facing us. Alarmist messaging could be the problem, not the solution.

Mandese ended his post with this:

“What the ad industry really needs to do is organize a massive global campaign to change the way people think, feel and behave about the climate — moving from a not-so-alarmist “change” to an “our house is on fire” crisis.”

Joe Mandese – Mediapost

But here’s the thing. Cranking up the crisis intensity on our messaging might have the opposite effect. It may paralyze us.

Something called “doom scrolling” is now very much a thing. And if you’re looking for Doomsday scenarios, the best place to start is the Subreddit r/collapse thread.

In a 30 second glimpse during the writing of this column, I discovered that democracy is dying, America is on the brink of civil war, Russia is turning off the tap on European oil supplies, we are being greenwashed into complacency, the Amazon Rainforest may never recover from its current environmental destruction and the “Doomsday” glacier is melting faster than expected. That was all above-the-fold. I didn’t even have to scroll for this buffet of all-you-can eat disaster. These were just the appetizers.

There is a reason why social media feeds are full of doom. We are hardwired to pay close attention to threats. This makes apocalyptic prophesizing very profitable for social media platforms. As British academic Julia Bell said in her 2020 book, Radical Attention,

“Behind the screen are impassive algorithms designed to ensure that the most outrageous information gets to our attention first. Because when we are enraged, we are engaged, and the longer we are engaged the more money the platform can make from us.”

Julia Bell – Radical Attention

But just what does a daily diet of doom do for our mental health? Does constantly making us aware of the impending end of our species goad us into action? Does it actually accomplish anything?

Not so much. In fact, it can do the opposite.

Mental health professionals are now treating a host of new climate change related conditions, including eco-grief, eco-anxiety and eco-depression. But, perhaps most alarmingly, they are now encountering something called eco-paralysis.

In an October 2020 Time.com piece on doom scrolling, psychologist Patrick Kennedy-Williams, who specializes in treating climate-related anxieties, was quoted, ““There’s something inherently disenfranchising about someone’s ability to act on something if they’re exposed to it via social media, because it’s inherently global. There are not necessarily ways that they can interact with the issue.” 

So, cranking up the intensity of the messaging on existential threats such as climate change may have the opposite effect, by scaring us into doing nothing. This is because of something called Yerkes-Dodson Law.

By Yerkes and Dodson 1908 – Diamond DM, et al. (2007). “The Temporal Dynamics Model of Emotional Memory Processing: A Synthesis on the Neurobiological Basis of Stress-Induced Amnesia, Flashbulb and Traumatic Memories, and the Yerkes-Dodson Law”. Neural Plasticity: 33. doi:10.1155/2007/60803. PMID 17641736., CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34030384

This “Law”, discovered by psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson in 1908, isn’t so much a law as a psychological model. It’s a typical bell curve. On the front end, we find that our performance in responding to a situation increases along with our attention and interest in that situation. But the line does not go straight up. At some point, it peaks and then goes downhill. Intent gives way to anxiety. The more anxious we become, the more our performance is impaired.

When we fret about the future, we are actually grieving the loss of our present. In this process, we must make our way through the 5 stages of grief introduced by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969 through her work with terminally ill patients. The stages are: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance.

One would think that triggering awareness would help accelerate us through the stages. But there are a few key differences. In dealing with a diagnosis of terminal illness, typically there is one hammer-blow event when you become aware of the situation. From there dealing with it begins. And – even when it begins – it’s not a linear journey. As anyone who has ever grieved will tell you, what stage you’re in depends on which day I’m talking to you. You can slip for Acceptance to Anger in a heartbeat.

With climate change, awareness doesn’t come just once. The messaging never ends. It’s a constant cycle of crisis, trapping us in a loop that cycles between denial, depression and despair.

An excellent post on Climateandmind.org on climate grief talks about this cycle and how we get trapped within it. Some of us get stuck in a stage and never move on. Even climate scientist and activist Susanne Moser admits to being trapped in something she calls Functional Denial,

“It’s that simultaneity of being fully aware and conscious and not denying the gravity of what we’re creating (with Climate Change), and also having to get up in the morning and provide for my family and fulfill my obligations in my work.”

Susan Moser

It’s exactly this sense of frustration I voiced in my previous post. But the answer is not making me more aware. Like Moser, I’m fully aware of the gravity of the various threats we’re facing. It’s not attention I lack, it’s agency.

I think the time to hope for a more intense form of messaging to prod the deniers into acceptance is long past. If they haven’t changed their minds yet, they ain’t goin’ to!

I also believe the messaging we need won’t come through social media. There’s just too much froth and too much profit in that froth.

What we need – from media platforms we trust – is a frank appraisal of the worst-case scenario of our future. We need to accept that and move on to deal with what is to come. We need to encourage resilience and adaptability. We need hope that while what is to come is most certainly going to be catastrophic, it doesn’t have to be apocalyptic.

We need to know we can survive and start thinking about what that survival might look like.

With Digital Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies?

Recently, I received an email from Amazon that began:

“You’re amazing. Really, you’re awesome! Did that make you smile? Good. Alexa is here to compliment you. Just say, ‘Alexa, compliment me’”

“What,” I said to myself, “sorry-assed state is my life in that I need to depend on a little black electronic hockey puck to affirm my self-worth as a human being?”

I realize that the tone of the email likely had tongue at least part way implanted in cheek, but still, seriously – WTF Alexa? (Which, incidentally, Alexa also has covered. Poise that question and Alexa responds – “I’m always interested in feedback.”)

My next thought was, maybe I think this is a joke, but there are probably people out there that need this. Maybe their lives are dangling by a thread and it’s Alexa’s soothing voice digitally pumping their tires that keeps them hanging on until tomorrow. And – if that’s true – should I be the one to scoff at it?

I dug a little further into the question, “Can we depend on technology for friendship, for understanding, even – for love?”

The answer, it turns out, is probably yes.

A few studies have shown that we will share more with a virtual therapist than a human one in a face-to-face setting. We feel heard without feeling judged.

In another study, patients with a virtual nurse ended up creating a strong relationship with it that included:

  • Using close forms of greeting and goodbye
  • Expressing happiness to see the nurse
  • Using compliments
  • Engaging in social chat
  • And expressing a desire to work together and speak with the nurse again

Yet another study found that robots can even build a stronger relationship with us by giving us a pat on the hand or touching our shoulder. We are social animals and don’t do well when we lose that sociability. If we go too long without being touched, we experience something called “skin hunger” and start feeling stressed, depressed and anxious. The use of these robots is being tested in senior’s care facilities to help combat extreme loneliness.

In reading through these studies, I was amazed at how quickly respondents seemed to bond with their digital allies. We have highly evolved mechanisms that determine when and with whom we seem to place trust. In many cases, these judgements are based on non-verbal cues: body language, micro-expressions, even how people smell. It surprised me that when our digital friends presented none of these, the bonds still developed. In fact, it seems they were deeper and stronger than ever!

Perhaps it’s the very lack of humanness that is the explanation. As in the case of the success of a virtual therapist, maybe these relationships work because we can leave the baggage of being human behind. Virtual assistants are there to serve us, not judge or threaten us. We let our guards down and are more willing to open up.

Also, I suspect that the building blocks of these relationships are put in place not by the rational, thinking part of our brains but the emotional, feeling part. It’s been shown that self-affirmation works by activating the reward centers of our brain, the ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. These are not pragmatic, cautious parts of our cognitive machinery. As I’ve said before, they’re all gas and no brakes. We don’t think a friendship with a robot is weird because we don’t think about it at all, we just feel better. And that’s enough.

AI companionship seems a benign – even beneficial use of technology – but what might the unintended consequences be? Are we opening ourselves up to potential dangers by depending on AI for our social contact – especially when the lines are blurred between for-profit motives and affirmation we become dependent on.

In therapeutic use cases of virtual relationships as outlined up to now, there is no “for-profit” motive. But Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and the other providers of consumer directed AI companionship are definitely in it for the money. Even more troubling, two of those – Facebook and Google – depend on advertising for their revenue. Much as this gang would love us to believe that they only have our best interests in mind – over $1.2 trillion in combined revenue says otherwise. I suspect they have put a carefully calculated price on digital friendship.

Perhaps it’s that – more than anything – that threw up the red flags when I got that email from Amazon. It sounded like it was coming from a friend, and that’s exactly what worries me.

Does Social Media “Dumb Down” the Wisdom of Crowds?

We assume that democracy is the gold standard of sustainable political social contracts. And it’s hard to argue against that. As Winston Churchill said, “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.”

Democracy may not be perfect, but it works. Or, at least, it seems to work better than all the other options. Essentially, democracy depends on probability – on being right more often than we’re wrong.

At the very heart of democracy is the principle of majority rule. And that is based on something called Jury Theorem, put forward by the Marquis de Condorcet in his 1785 work, Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions. Essentially, it says that the probability of making the right decision increases when you average the decisions of as many people as possible. This was the basis of James Suroweicki’s 2004 book, The Wisdom of Crowds.

But here’s the thing about the wisdom of crowds – it only applies when those individual decisions are reached independently. Once we start influencing each other’s decision, that wisdom disappears. And that makes social psychologist Solomon Asch’s famous conformity experiments of 1951 a disturbingly significant fly in the ointment of democracy.

You’re probably all aware of the seminal study, but I’ll recap anyway. Asch gathered groups of people and showed them a card with three lines of obviously different lengths. Then he asked participants which line was the closest to the reference line. The answer was obvious – even a toddler can get this test right pretty much every time.

But unknown to the test subject, all the rest of the participants were “stooges” – actors paid to sometimes give an obviously incorrect answer. And when this happened, Asch was amazed to find that the test subjects often went against the evidence of their own eyes just to conform with the group. When wrong answers were given, a third of the subjects always conformed, 75% of the subjects conformed at least once, and only 25% stuck to the evidence in front of them and gave the right answer.

The results baffled Asch. The most interesting question to him was why this was happening. Were people making a decision to go against their better judgment – choosing to go with the crowd rather than what they were seeing with their own eyes? Or was something happening below the level of consciousness? This was something Solomon Asch wondered about right until his death in 1996. Unfortunately, he never had the means to explore the question further.

But, in 2005, a group of researchers at Emory University, led by Gregory Berns, did have a way. Here, Asch’s experiment was restaged, only this time participants were in a fMRI machine so Bern and his researchers could peak at what was actually happening in their brains. The results were staggering.

They found that conformity actually changes the way our brain works. It’s not that we change what we say to conform with what others are saying, despite what we see with our own eyes. What we see is changed by what others are saying.

If, Berns and his researchers reasoned, you were consciously making a decision to go against the evidence of your own eyes just to conform with the group, you should see activity in the frontal areas of our brain that are engaged in monitoring conflicts, planning and other higher-order mental activities.

But that isn’t what they found. In those participants that went along with obviously incorrect answers from the group, the parts of the brain that showed activity were only in the posterior parts of the brain – those that control spatial awareness and visual perception. There was no indication of an internal mental conflict. The brain was actually changing how it processed the information it was receiving from the eyes.

This is stunning. It means that conformity isn’t a conscious decision. Our desire to conform is wired so deeply in our brains, it actually changes how we perceive the world. We never have the chance to be objectively right, because we never realize we’re wrong.

But what about those that went resisted conformity and stuck to the evidence they were seeing with their own eyes? Here again, the results were fascinating. The researchers found that in these cases, they saw a spike of activity in the right amygdala and right caudate nucleus – areas involved in the processing of strong emotions, including fear, anger and anxiety. Those that stuck to the evidence of their own eyes had to overcome emotional hurdles to do so. In the published paper, the authors called this the “pain of independence.”

This study highlights a massively important limitation in the social contract of democracy. As technology increasingly imposes social conformity on our culture, we lose the ability to collectively make the right decision. Essentially, is shows that this effect not only erases the wisdom of crowds, but actively works against it by exacting an emotional price for being an independent thinker.