Category Archives: Cognition

Face Time in the Real World is Important

For all the advances made in neuroscience, we still don’t fully understand how our brains respond to other people. What we do know is that it’s complex.

Join the Chorus

Recent studies, including this one from Rochester University, are showing that when we see someone we recognize, the brain responds with a chorus of neuronal activity. Neurons from different parts of the brain fire in unison, creating a congruent response that may simultaneously pull from memory, from emotion, from the rational regions of our prefrontal cortex and from other deep-seated areas of our brain. The firing of any one neuron may be relatively subtle, but together this chorus of neurons can create a powerful response to a person. This cognitive choir represents our total comprehension of an individual.

Non-Verbal Communication

“You’ll have your looks, your pretty face. – And don’t underestimate the importance of body language!” – Ursula, The Little Mermaid

Given that we respond to people with different parts of the brain, it makes sense that we use part of the brain we didn’t realize when communicating with someone else. In 1967, psychologist Albert Mehrabian attempted to pin this down with some actual numbers, publishing a paper in which he put forth what became known as Mehrabian’s Rule: 7% of communication is verbal, 38% is tone of voice and 55% is body language.

Like many oft-quoted rules, this one is typically mis-quoted. It’s not that words are not important when we communication something. Words convey the message. But it’s the non-verbal part that determines how we interpret the message – and whether we trust it or not.

Folk wisdom has told us, “Your mouth is telling me one thing, but your eyes are telling me another.” In this case, folk wisdom is right. We evolved to respond to another person with our whole bodies, with our brains playing the part of conductor. Maybe the numbers don’t exactly add up to Mehrabian’s neat and tidy ratio, but the importance of non-verbal communication is undeniable. We intuitively pick up incredibly subtle hints: a slight tremor in the voice, a bead of sweat on the forehead, a slight turn down of one corner of the mouth, perhaps a foot tapping or a finger trembling, a split-second darting of the eye. All this is subconsciously monitored, fed to the brain and orchestrated into a judgment about a person and what they’re trying to tell us. This is how we evolved to judge whether we should build trust or lose it.

Face to Face vs Face to Screen

Now, we get to the question you knew was coming, “What happens when we have to make these decisions about someone else through a screen rather than face to face?”

Given that we don’t fully understand how the brain responds to people yet, it’s hard to say how much of our ability to judge whether we should convey trust or withhold it is impaired by screen-to-screen communication. My guess is that the impairment is significant, probably well over 50%. It’s difficult to test this in a laboratory setting, given that it generally requires some type of neuroimaging, such as an fMRI scanner. In order to present a stimulus for the brain to respond to when the subject is strapped in, a screen is really the only option. But common sense tells me – given the sophisticated and orchestrated nature of our brain’s social responses – that a lot is lost in translation from a real-world encounter to a screen recording.

New Faces vs Old Ones

If we think of how our brains respond to faces, we realize that in today’s world, a lot of our social judgements are increasing made without face-to-face encounters. In a case where we know someone, we will pull forward a snapshot of our entire history with that person. The current communication is just another data point in a rich collection of interpersonal experience. One would think that would substantially increase our odds of making a valid judgement.

But what if we must make a judgement on someone we’ve never met before, and have only seen through a screen; be it a TikTok post, an Instagram Reel, a YouTube video or a Facebook Post? What if we have to decide whether to believe an influencer when making an important life decision? Are we willing to rely on a fraction of our brain’s capacity when deciding whether to place trust in someone we’ve never met?

Keep Those Cousins Close!

Demographic trends tend to play out on the timelines of multiple generations. Declining birth rates, increased life spans and widespread lifestyle changes can all have a dramatic impact on not only what our families look like, but also how we connect with them. And because families are the nucleus of our world, changes in families mean fundamental changes in us: who we are, what we believe and how we connect with our world.

I have previously written about one such trend – a surplus of grandparents. The ratio of grandparents to grandchildren has never been higher than it is right now, thanks to increased life expectancy and a declining birth rate. It’s closing in on 1:1, meaning for every child, there is one unique grandparent. As a grandparent, I have to believe this is a good thing.

But another demographic trend is playing out and this may not be as positive for our family structure. While the grandparent market is booming, our supply of cousins is dwindling. And – as I’ll explain shortly – cousins are a good thing for us to have.

But first, a little demographic math. In the U.S. in 1960, the average number of children per household was 3.62. This was a spike thanks to the post WWII Baby Boom, but it’s relevant because this generation and the one before were the ones that determined the current crop of cousins for people of my age.

My parents were born in the 1930s. If both of them had 3 siblings, as was the norm, that would give me 6 aunts or uncles, all having children during the Baby Boom. And each of them would have 3 to 4 kids. So that would potentially supply 24 first cousins for me.

Now, let’s skip ahead a generation. Since 1970, the average number of children per household in the U.S. has hovered between 1.5 and 2. If I had been born in 1995, that would mean I only had 2 aunts or uncles, one from my mother’s side and one from my father’s. And if they each had 2 children, that would drop my first cousin quota down to 4. That’s 20 less first cousins in just one generation!

But what does this lack of first cousins mean in real terms? Cousins play an interesting sociological and psychological role in our development. Thanks to evolution, we all have something called “kinship altruism.”  In the simplest of terms, we are hardwired to help those with which we share some DNA. Those evolved bonds are strongest with those with whom we share the most DNA. There is a hierarchy of kinship – topped by our parents and siblings.

But just one rung down the ladder are our first cousins. And those first cousins can play a critical role in how we get along with the world as we grow up. As journalist Faith Hill said, writing about this in The Atlantic, “Cousin connections can be lovely because they exist in that strange gray area between closeness and distance—because they don’t follow a strict playbook.”

As Hill said, cousins represent a unique middle ground. We have a lot in common with our cousins, but not too much. Our cousins can come from different upbringings, can span a wider range of ages than our siblings, can come from different socio-economic circumstances, can even live in different places. We may see them every day, or once every year or two. Yet, we are connected in an important way. Cousins play a critical role in helping us navigate relationships and learn to understand different perspectives. Having a lot of cousins is like having a big sandbox for our societal development.

If you overlay societal trends on this demographic trend towards fewer first cousins, the shift is even more noticeable. We are a lot more mobile now then our parents and grandparents were. Families used to generally live close to each other. Now they spread across the country. My wife, who is Italian, has almost 50 first cousins and almost all of them live in the same town. But that is rare. Most of us have a handful of cousins who we rarely see. We don’t have the advantage of growing up together. At a time when societal connection is more important than ever, I worry that this is one more instance of us losing the skills we need to get along with each other.

From my own experience, I have found that the relationship between my cousins is vital in negotiating the stewardship of our families as it’s handed off from our parent’s generation to our own. I personally have become closer to many cousins as – one by one – our parents are taken from us.  Through our cousins – we relive cherished memories and regain that common ground of shared experience and ancestry.

Paging Dr. Robot

When it comes to the benefits of A.I. one of the most intriguing opportunities is in healthcare. Microsoft’s recent announcement that, given a diagnostic challenge where their Microsoft AI Diagnostic Orchestrator (MAI-DxO) went head to head with 21 general-practice practitioners, the A.I. system correctly diagnosed 85% of 300 challenging cases gathered from the New England Journal of Medicine. The human doctors only managed to get 20% of the diagnoses correct.

This is of particular interest to me, because Canada has a health care problem. In a recent comparison of international health policies conducted by the Commonwealth Fund, Canada came in last amongst 9 countries, most of which also have universal health care, on most key measures of timely access.

This is a big problem, but it’s not an unsolvable one. This does not qualify as a “wicked” problem, which I’ve talked about before. Wicked problems have no clear solution. I believe our healthcare problems can be solved, and A.I. could play a huge role in the solution.

The Canadian Medical Association outlined both the problems facing our healthcare system and some potential solutions. The overarching narrative is one of a system stretched beyond its resources and patients unable to access care in a timely manner. Human resources are burnt out and demotivated. Our back-end health record systems are siloed and inconsistent. An aging population, health misinformation, political beliefs and climate change are creating more demand for health services just as the supply of those services are being depleted.

Here’s one personal example of the gaps in our own health records. I recently had to go to my family doctor for a physical that is required to maintain my commercial driver’s license. I was delegated to a student doctor, given that it was a very routine check-up. Because I was seeing the doctor anyway, I thought it a good time to ask for a regular blood panel test because it had been a while since I had had one. Being a male of a certain age, I also asked for a Prostate-Specific Antigen test (PSA) and was told that it isn’t recommended as a screening test in my province anymore.

I was taken aback. I had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a decade earlier and had been successfully treated for it. It was a PSA test that led to an early diagnosis. I mentioned this to the doctor, who was sitting behind a computer screen with my records in front of him. He looked back at the screen and said, “Oh, you had prostate cancer? I didn’t know that. Sure, I’ll add a PSA to the requisition.”

I wish I could say that’s an isolated incident, but it’s not. These gaps is our medical history records happen all the time here in my part of Canada. And they can all be solved. It’s the aggregation and analysis of data beyond the limits of humans to handle that A.I. excels at. Yet our healthcare system continues to overwork exhausted healthcare providers and keep our personal health data hostage in siloed data centers because of systemic resistance to technology. I know there are concerns, but surely these concerns can be addressed.

I write this from a Canadian perspective, but I know these problems – and others – exist in the U.S. as well.  If A.I. can do certain jobs four times better than a human, it’s time to accept that and build it into our healthcare system. The answer to Canada’s healthcare problems may not be easy, but they are doable: integrate our existing health records, open the door to incorporation of personal biometric data from new wearable devices, use A.I. to analyze all this, and use humans where they can do things A.I. and technology can’t.

We need to start opening our mind to new solutions, because when it comes to a broken healthcare system, it’s literally a matter of life and death.

The Question We Need to Ask about AI

This past weekend I listened to a radio call-in show about AI. The question posed was this – are those using AI regularly achievers or cheaters? A good percentage of the conversation was focused on AI in education, especially those in post-secondary studies. Educators worried about being able to detect the use of AI to help complete coursework, such as the writing of papers. Many callers – all of which would probably be well north of 50 years old – bemoaned that fact that students today are not understanding the fundamental concepts they’re being presented because they’re using AI to complete assignments. A computer science teacher explained why he teaches obsolete coding to his students – it helps them to understand why they’re writing code at all. What is it they want to code to do? He can tell when his students are using AI because they submit examples of coding that are well beyond their abilities.

That, in a nutshell, sums up the problem with our current thinking about AI. Why are we worried about trying to detect the use of ChatGPT by a student who’s learning how to write computer code? Shouldn’t we be instead asking why we need humans to learn coding at all, when AI is better at it? Maybe it’s a toss-up right now, but it’s guaranteed not to stay that way for long. This isn’t about students using AI to “cheat.” This is about AI making humans obsolete.

As I was writing this, I happened across an essay by computer scientist Louis Rosenberg. He is worried that those in his circle, like the callers to the show I was listening too, “have never really considered what life will be like the day after an artificial general intelligence (AGI) is widely available that exceeds our own cognitive abilities.” Like I said, what we use AI for now it a poor indicator for what AI will be doing in the future.  To use an analogy I have used before, it’s like using a rocket to power your lawnmower.

But what will life be like when, in a somewhat chilling example put forward by Rosenberg, “I am standing alone in an elevator — just me and my phone — and the smartest one speeding between floors is the phone?”

It’s hard to wrap you mind around the possibilities. One of the callers to the show was a middle-aged man who was visually impaired. He talked about the difference it made to him when he got a pair of Meta Glasses last Christmas. Suddenly, his world opened up. He could make sure the pants and shirt he picked out to wear today were colors that matched. He could see if his recycling had been picked up before he made the long walk down the driveway to pick up the bin. He could cook for himself because the glasses could tell him what were in the boxes he took off his kitchen shelf. For him, AI gave him back his independence.

I personally believe we’re on the cusp of multiple AI revolutions. Healthcare will take a great leap forward when we lessen our requirements for expert advice coming from a human. In Canada, general practitioners are in desperately short supply. When you combine AI with the leaps being made by incorporating biomonitoring into wearable technology, I can’t imagine how great things would not be possible in terms of living longer, healthier lives. I hope the same is true for dealing with climate change, agricultural production and other existential problems we’re currently wrestling with.

But let’s back up to Rosenberg’s original question – what will life be like the day after AI exceeds our own abilities? The answer to that, I think, is dependent on who is in control of AI on the day before. The danger here is more than just humans becoming irrelevant. The danger is what humans are determining the future of direction of AI before AI takes over the steering wheel and determines its own future.

For the past 7 decades, the most pertinent question about our continued existence as a species has been this one, “Who is in charge of our combined nuclear arsenals?” But going forward, a more relevant question might be “who is setting the direction for AI?” Who is it that’s setting the rules, coming up with safeguards and determining what data the models are training on?  Who determines what tasks AI takes on? Here’s just one example. When does AI decide when the nuclear warheads are launched.

As I said, it’s hard to predict where AI will go. But I do know this. The general direction is already being determined. And we should all be asking, “By whom?”

Media Modelling of Masculinity       

According to a study that was just released by the Movember Institute of Men’s Health, nearly two-thirds of 3000 young men surveyed in the US, the UK and Australia were regularly engaging with online masculinity influencers. They looked to them for inspiration on how to be fitter, more financially successful and how to increase the quantity and/or quality of their relationships.

Did they find what they were looking for?

It’s hard to say based on the survey results. While these young men said they found these influencers inspiring and were optimistic about their personal circumstances and the future social circumstances of men in general, they said some troubling things about their own mental health. They were less willing to prioritize mental health and were more likely to engage in risky health behaviors such as steroid use or ignoring their own bodies and pushing themselves to exercise too hard. These mixed signals seemed to come from influencers telling them that a man who can’t control is emotions is weak and is not a real man.

Also, not all the harm inflicted by these influencers was felt just by the men in their audience. Those in the study who followed influencers were more likely to report negative and limiting attitudes towards women and what they bring to a relationship. They felt that often women were being rude to them and that they didn’t have the same dating values as men.

Finally, men who followed influencers were almost twice as likely to value traits in their male friends such as ambition, popularity and wealth. They were less likely to look for trustworthiness or kindness in their male friends.

This brings us to a question. Why do young men need influencers to tell them how to be a better man? For that matter, why do any of us, regardless of age or sex, need someone to influence us? Especially if it’s someone who’s only qualification to dispense advice is that they happen to have a TikTok account with a million followers.

This is another unfortunate effect of social media. We have evolved to look for role models because to do so gives us a step up. Again, this made sense in our evolutionary past but may not do so today.

When we all belonged to a social group that was geographically bound together, it was advantageous to look at the most successful members of that group and emulate them. When we all competed in the same environment for the same resources, copying the ones that got the biggest share was a pretty efficient way to improve our own fortunes.

There was also a moral benefit to emulating a role model. Increasingly, as our fortunes relied more on creating better relationships with those outside our immediate group, things like trustworthiness became a behavior that we would do well to copy. Also, respect tended to accrue to the elderly. Our first role models were our parents and grandparents. In a community that depended on rules for survival, authority figures were another logical place to look for role models.

Let’s fast forward to today. Our decoupling with our evolutionarily determined, geographically limited idea of community has thrown several monkey wrenches into the delicate machinery of our society. Who we turn to as role models is just one example. As soon as we make the leap from rules based on physical proximity to the lure of mass influence, we inevitably run into problems.

Let’s go back to our masculinity influencers. These online influencers have one goal – to amass as many followers as possible. The economic reality of online influence is this: size of audience x depth of engagement = financial success. And how do you get a ton of followers? By telling them what they want to hear.

Let’s stare down some stark realities – well adjusted, mentally secure, emotionally mature, self-confident young males are less likely to desperately look for answers in online social media. There is no upside for influencers to go after this market. So they look elsewhere – primarily to young males who are none of the above things. And that audience doesn’t want to hear about emotional vulnerability or realistic appraisals of their dating opportunities. They want to hear that they can have it all – they can be real men. So the message (and the messenger) follows the audience, down a road that leads towards toxic masculinity.

Media provides a very distorted lens through which why might seek our new role models. We will still seek the familiar and the successful, but both those things are determined by what we see through media, rather than what we observe in real life. There is no proof that their advice or approach will pay off in the real world, but if they have a large following, they must be right.

Also, these are one-way “mentorships”. The influencers may know their audience in the aggregate, if only in terms of a market to be monetized, but they don’t know them individually. These are relationships without any reciprocity. There is no price that will be pad for passing on potentially harmful advice.

If there is damage done, it’s no big deal. It’s just one less follower.

Do We Have the Emotional Bandwidth to Stay Curious?

Curiosity is good for the brain. It’s like exercise for our minds. It stretches the prefrontal cortex and whips the higher parts of our brains into gear. Curiosity also nudges our memory making muscles into action and builds our brain’s capacity to handle uncertain situations.

But it’s hard work – mentally speaking. It takes effort to be curious, especially in situations where curiosity could figuratively “kill the cat.” The more dangerous our environment, the less curious we become.

A while back I talked about why the world no longer seems to make sense. Part of this is tied to our appetite for curiosity. Actively trying to make sense of the world puts us “out there”, leaving the safe space of our established beliefs behind. It is literally the definition of an “open mind” – a mind that has left itself open to being changed. And that’s a very uncomfortable place to be when things seem to be falling down around our ears.

Some of us are naturally more curious than others. Curious people typically achieve higher levels of education (learning and curiosity are two sides of the same coin). They are less likely to accept things at face value. They apply critical thinking to situations as a matter of course. Their brains are wired to be rewarded with a bigger dopamine hit when they learn something new.

Others rely more on what they believe to be true. They actively filter out information that may challenge those beliefs. They double down on what is known and defend themselves from the unknown. For them, curiosity is not an invitation, it’s a threat.

Part of this is a differing tolerance for something which neuroscientists call “prediction error” – the difference between what we think will happen and what actually does happen. Non-curious people perceive predictive gaps as threats and respond accordingly, looking for something or someone to blame. They believe that it can’t be a mistaken belief that is to blame, it must be something else that caused the error. Curious people look at prediction errors as continually running scientific experiments, given them a chance to discover the errors in their current mental models and update them based on new information.

Our appetite for curiosity has a huge impact on where we turn to be informed. The incurious will turn to information sources that won’t challenge their beliefs. These are people who get their news from either end of the political bias spectrum, either consistently liberal or consistently conservative. Given that, they can’t really be called information sources so much as opinion platforms. Curious people are more willing to be introduced to non-conforming information. In terms of media bias, you’ll find them consuming news from the middle of the pack.

Given the current state of the world, more curiosity is needed but is becoming harder to find. When humans (or any animal, really) are threatened, we become less curious. This is a feature, not a bug. A curious brain takes a lot longer to make a decision than a non-curious one. It is the difference between thinking “fast” and “slow” – in the words of psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. But this feature evolved when threats to humans were usually immediate and potentially fatal. A slow brain is not of any benefit if you’re at risk of being torn apart by a pack of jackals. But today, our jackal encounters are usually of the metaphorical type, not the literal one. And that’s a threat of a very different kind.

Whatever the threat, our brain throttles back our appetite for curiosity. Even the habitually curious develop defense mechanisms in an environment of consistently bad news. We seek solace in the trivial and avoid the consequential. We start saving cognitive bandwidth from whatever impending doom we may be facing. We seek media that affirms our beliefs rather than challenges them.

This is unfortunate, because the threats we face today could use a little more curiosity.

Paying the Price for Not Trusting

This will surprise no one, but a recent Gallup Poll showed professional trust in the U.S. at its lowest level since they started tracking it in 1999. In their index of 11 core professions, including nursers, bankers, business execs, Members of Congress and 7 others, the average honesty and ethics rates have dropped to the point where just 30% of those professions having high or very high ratings.

Those professionals who received the higher trust marks are nurses, teachers, military officers, pharmacists and doctors. Those in the medical categories have slipped since the pandemic but are still well in positive territory.

The least trusted professions? Car salesmen, advertising practitioners, TV reporters, Members of Congress and lobbyists. The percentage of respondents rating them as highly or very highly trustworthy and ethical was in the single digits for all but one of them (TV reporters). 

Again, not all that surprising. But what does this say about our society? Societal trust is the glue holds communities and nations together. If you’re a student of history, you’ll know that – without exception – cultures and societies with high levels of trust prosper over the long term and those that lack trust inexorably slip backwards.  Four years ago I wrote about this and used North and South Italy as examples. Southern Italy – partly because of geography that restricted widespread trade – historically had low levels of trust. You trusted your family, you may trust your paesani (townspeople) and that was about it. Northern Italy, with a more open geography and proximity to the rest of Europe, developed a widespread trading network that allowed the economies of renaissance City States like Venice, Florence and Milan to prosper, along with arts and culture. The difference between North and South Italy is startling, even to this day.

That is the price paid for distrust. Essentially, you can choose one of two paths: to trust or to fear. If you choose the later – as at least half of America has apparently done – understand that you are essentially choosing the strategy of the schoolyard bully, competing through fear and intimidation. Let’s take a closer look at that path with as objective a viewpoint as possible.

Bullying is a viable evolutionary survival strategy and it is common in nature. There are undeniably advantages to bullying. It gives you greater access to resources, such as food, shelter and sexual access. But it is a primal strategy and that defines its limits. It is dependent on the bully’s strength alone. It typically causes those being bullied to create new alliances, pushing them into a position where they must trust each other. And that creates a long-term advantage for the alliance, where they eventually gain strength from trusting each other while the bully loses strength by isolating itself. The Bully’s cycle always plays out the same way; gaining temporary advantage but eventually losing it in the long term as trust-based networks emerge. And – once lost – that advantage is very hard to regain.

It’s not just history where the advantage of trust has been proven. Game Theory looks at exactly these types of interactions. In one well-known scenario, the most successful strategy was called “Tit for Tat.” It starts with a default position of mutual trust and only moves to the offensive if one of the parties tries to defect from cooperating. Then, it goes into a cycle of zero sum back and forth retaliations. The advantage of this strategy is that it self-corrects towards trust. Only if that trust is broken does it retaliate. The benefits accrue during cooperation cycles and the strategy continually tries to move back to cooperation. Cooperation always beats confrontation.

As I said a few columns ago, it is a lack of trust in institutions that makes us think that everything is fundamentally broken. This distrust extends to everything but is particularly prevalent with trust in media and government. The Gallup Poll showed that TV reporters and Members of Congress are amongst the least trusted professions of those surveyed.

The Gallup Poll is backed up by the annual Edelman Trust Barometer study, which looks at institutional trust in government, business, media and NGOs (non-governmental not-for-profit organizations)  around the world, using 28 countries as its index. The decline in media and especially governmental trust over the past decade has been stunning, prompting CEO Richard Edelman to note, “Starting in 2005, we noticed the decline of belief in establishment leaders. Prime ministers, presidents, CEOs, and mainstream media lost their dominant status as opinion formers. Peer trust emerged, as friends and family depended on one another for advice and used social media as the connection point.”

This last point about peer trust is troubling. It essentially means a return to tribalism, this time mediated through social media. It really doesn’t sound all that different from the way society has operated in low trust and economically challenged regions such as Southern Italy for centuries now.

Trump, The Media and the Problem of “Pretty Good.”

A number of years back, I was in China for a conference and during a dinner thrown by the hosts for their international presenters, I was lucky enough to find myself sitting next to James Fallows, who was in China on assignment for the Atlantic. His dispatches back eventually became the book Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China.

It was my first trip to China and I was stunned by the apparent contradiction of the most entrepreneurial society I had ever seen under the rule of a Communist Regime. I asked James how China’s then leader, Hu Jintao, managed to maintain that seemingly impossible balance without widespread insurrection. He said something I’ll always remember: “As long as the Chinese people believe that their lives today are better than they were yesterday, and that they will be even better tomorrow, they will continue to follow their leader.”

That same very simple equation is what populists, some of whom may eventually become dictators, depend on – promising to make life better for their base. If you were Hitler, or Mussolini, or Francisco Franco, that was easy to do. Each of those countries and their economies were fundamentally broken in the 1920’s or 30’s. You didn’t have to be a genius to make things better for the average German, Italian or Spaniard. Just getting trains to run on time was a pretty big step in the right direction.

But that’s not the U.S.A. Things there are (or were) pretty good. Perfect? Not by a long shot. But pretty good.

You disagree? The plain facts are that at no time in history have people ate more, had more, did more or lived longer than right now. And that is doubly true for the U.S., who has about 5% of the world’s population but consumes about 20 to 25% of the world’s resources. Yes, there’s a lot that can be fixed (for instance, there are huge disparities in wealth and consumption), but things are pretty good. Especially in the U.S. of A.

So where does that leave a populist like Trump? Populists say that they – and they alone – can make life better tomorrow for their base. But when things are pretty good already, that’s a hard promise to keep. The U.S. – and the rest of the world – is a complex place that exists thanks to complex systems. The economy, financial markets, diplomacy, healthcare, immigration, education – all of these things are complex. And because of this complexity, the problems that do exist are what are called “wicked” problems – problems that have no quick or simple solution. In fact, they may have no solution at all.

Someone like Trump has no clue about complexity. He will spout inanely ignorant “fixes” and back them up with talking points that have no basis in reality.

Take Trump’s insanely stupid “tariff” solution he imposed just over a week ago. It wasn’t even 24 hours old when he started pulling it back because the U. S. economy started running off the rails. As I said a month ago, imposing a 25% blanket tariff is like doing open heart surgery with a hand grenade

And this is a big problem for Trump. He has no idea how to keep his promise to make life better for people in a complex environment.  It’s not just tariffs. The flurry of executive orders and the chainsaw massacre that is DOGE are similarly stupid solutions to complex issues. They are doomed to fail, which means the U.S. will inevitably slip backwards, rather than leap forward.

Trump will blunder for mistake to mistake, blowing up all the systems that made things “pretty good” in America. He is bulldozing through the complex international relationships that have enabled the U.S. to perch on top of the world order for 100 years. He is blowing up trade agreements and mutual defense pacts. He is pissing off every other country in the world with the exception of one: Russia.

As the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau just said – “Make that Make Sense.”

It would be easy to blame Donald Trump. But I won’t. He’s just being Trump, just like a shark is just being a shark. It would also be easy to blame the Republican sycophants that are letting him do this. But again – sharks will be sharks. They have evolved to swim towards blood. No, to truly assign blame, we have to ask “why” a few times.

Why was Trump put in the position where he could do this? He’s there because 77 million Americans voted for him. And why did they vote for him? Because they believed he could make things better tomorrow than they are today. It’s a pretty simple equation.

Let’s ask why one more time.  Why did they believe that Trump could save them? Ah! Now, we’re getting somewhere. The Media – our media – built this belief. They built it because there is no profit in saying things are “pretty good.”  The Media thrives by creating conflict. And so they built the belief that things were fundamentally broken and needed fixing. They created the illusion that there are simple solutions to complex problems. They allowed ignorance to flourish in an absence of reliable and objective reporting. They gave Trump the air he needed to breath.

The media – especially social media – also planted the false notion that we deserve better than “pretty good.” It has fostered the nonsensical equation that all of us should have the same as the richest of us.  We are entitled to it. And if we don’t get it, somebody is to blame. No one stops to think that the equation is mathematically impossible.

That is what we have to fix.

Curation is Our Future. But Can You Trust It?

 You can get information from anywhere. But the meaning of that information can come from only one place: you. Everything we take in from the vast ecosystem of information that surrounds us goes through the same singular lens – one crafted by a lifetime of collected beliefs and experiences.

Finding meaning has always been an essentially human activity. Meaning motivates us – it is our operating system. And the ability to create shared meaning can create or crumble societies. We are seeing the consequences of shared meaning play out right now in real time.

The importance of influencing meaning creates an interesting confluence between technology and human behavior. For much of the past two decades, technology has been focusing on filtering and organizing information. But we are now in an era where technology will start curating our information for us. And that is a very different animal.

What does it mean to “curate” an answer, rather than simply present it to you? Curation is more than just collecting and organizing things. The act of curation is to put that information in a context that provides additional value by providing a possible meaning. This crosses the line that delineates just disseminating information from attempting to influence individuals by providing them a meaningful context for that information. 

Not surprisingly, the roots of curation lie – in part – with religion. It comes from the Latin “curare” – “to take care of”. In medieval times, curates were priests who cared for souls. And they cared for souls by providing a meaning that lay beyond the realms of our corporal lives. If you really think about religion, it is one massive juxtaposition of a pre-packaged meaning on the world as we perceive it.

In the future, as we access our world through technology platforms, we will rely on technology to mediate meaning. For example, searches on Google now include an “AI Overview” at the top of the search results The Google Page explaining what the Overview is says it shows up when “you want to quickly understand information from a range of sources, including information from across the web and Google’s Knowledge Graph.” That is Google – or rather Google’s AI – curating an answer for you.

It could be argued that this is just another step to make search more useful – something I’ve been asking for a decade and a half now. In 2010, I said that “search providers have to replace relevancy with usefulness. Relevancy is a great measure if we’re judging information, but not so great if we’re measuring usefulness.” If AI could begin to provide actionable answers with a high degree of reliability, it would be a major step forward. There are many that say such curated answers could make search obsolete. But we have to ask ourselves, is this curation something we can trust?

With Google, this will probably start as unintentional curation – giving information meaning through a process of elimination. Given how people scan search listings (something I know a fair bit about) it’s reasonable to assume that many searchers will scan no further than the AI Overview, which is at the top of the results page. In that case, you will be spoon-fed whatever meaning happens to be the product of the AI compilation without bothering to qualify it by scanning any further down the results page. This conveyed meaning may well be unintentional, a distillation of the context from whatever sources provided the information. But given that we are lazy information foragers and will only expend enough effort to get an answer that seems reasonable, we will become trained to accept anything that is presented to us “top of page” at face value.

From there it’s not that big a step to intentional curation – presenting information to support a predetermined meaning. Given that pretty much every tech company folded like a cheap suit the minute Trump assumed office, slashing DEI initiatives and aligning their ethics – or lack of – to that of the White House, is it far-fetched to assume that they could start wrapping the information they provide in a “Trump Approved” context, providing us with messaged meaning that supports specific political beliefs? One would hate to think so but based on Facebook’s recent firing of its fact checkers, I’m not sure it’s wise to trust Big Tech to be the arbitrators of meaning.

They don’t have a great track record.

Strategies for Surviving the News

When I started this post, I was going to unpack some of the psychology behind the consumption of the news. I soon realized that the topic is far beyond the confines of this post to realistically deal with. So I narrowed my focus to this – which has been very top of mind for me lately – how do you stay informed without becoming a trembling psychotic mess? How do you arm yourself for informed action rather than becoming paralyzed into inaction by the recent fire hose of sheer WTF insanity that makes up the average news feed.

Pick Your Battles

There are few things more debilitating to humans than fretting about things we can’t do anything about. Research has found a strong correlation between depression and our locus of control – the term psychologists use for the range of things we feel we can directly impact. There is actually a term for being so crushed by bad news that you lose the perspective needed to function in your own environment. It’s called Mean World Syndrome.

If effecting change is your goal, decide what is realistically within your scope of control. Then focus your information gathering on those specific things. When it comes to informing yourself to become a better change agent, going deep rather than wide might be a better strategy.

Be Deliberate about Your Information Gathering

The second strategy goes hand in hand with the first. Make sure you’re in the right frame of mind to gather information. There are two ways the brain processes information: top-down and bottom-up. Top-down processing is cognition with purpose – you have set an intent and you’re working to achieve specific goals. Bottom up is passively being exposed to random information and allowing your brain to be stimulated by it. The way you interpret the news will be greatly impacted by whether you’re processing it with a “top-down” intent or letting your brain parse it from the “bottom-up”

By being more deliberate in gathering information with a specific intent in mind, you completely change how your brain will process the news. It will instantly put it in a context related to your goal rather than let it rampage through our brains, triggering our primordial anxiety circuits.

Understand the Difference between Signal and Noise

Based on the top two strategies, you’ve probably already guessed that I’m not a big fan of relying on social media as an information source. And you’re right. A brain doom scrolling through a social media feed is not a brain primed to objectively process the news.

Here is what I did. For the broad context, I picked two international information sources I trust to be objective: The New York Times and the Economist out of the U.K. I subscribed to both because I wanted sources that weren’t totally reliant on advertising as a revenue source (a toxic disease which is killing true journalism). For Americans, I would highly recommend picking at least one source outside the US to counteract the polarized echo chamber that typifies US journalism, especially that which is completely ad supported.

Depending on your objectives, include sources that are relevant to those objectives. If local change is your goal, make sure you are informed about your community. With those bases in place, even If you get sucked down a doom scrolling rabbit hole, at least you’ll have a better context to allow you to separate signal from noise.

Put the Screen Down

I realize that the majority of people (about 54% of US Adults according to Pew Research) will simply ignore all of the above and continue to be informed through their Facebook or X feeds. I can’t really change that.

But for the few of you out there that are concerned about the direction the world seems to be spinning and want to filter and curate your information sources to effect some real change, these strategies may be helpful.

For my part, I’m going to try to be much more deliberate in how I find and consume the news.  I’m also going to be more disciplined about simply ignoring the news when I’m not actively looking for it. Taking a walk in the woods or interacting with a real person are two things I’m going to try to do more.