In Reality

Truth–and the institutions that defend it–are under attack. What can the rest of us do? In this episode of In Reality, co-hosts Eric Schurenberg and Joan Donovan are joined by Jonathan Rauch, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of ‘The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth’. In this captivating discussion, Jonathan unpacks what is best described as a crisis of knowledge in Western culture, the result of a multi-front challenge to citizens’ ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.What has always bound Western societies together in a shared sense of reality, Rauch explains, is a commitment–not to a set of pre-ordained beliefs but rather to a process of constantly testing claims against objective experience to determine which claims are true. Rauch calls this process ‘The Constitution of Knowledge’ because, like the US Constitution, it relies on a system of checks and balances to prevent the truth from being defined only by those in power. Up to this point, we have implicitly trusted institutions like science, medicine, government and media–what Rauch calls “the reality-based community”--to safeguard the process.Social media, however, has short-circuited all of this. Social media makes no attempt to test the claims that appear in its content, and instead revels in broadcasting claims to millions online at Internet speed, without regard to whether they are true or not. Social media exalts popularity over expertise, speed over reflection and division over consensus. It’s no surprise that trust in the reality-based community is crumbling, and many citizens are no longer sure where to turn for truth. By the interview’s end, though, Rauch expresses cautious optimism. At the moment, fake news, misinformation and extremist propaganda (from both sides) seem to have the upper hand. But truth has a singular advantage: It describes the world as it really is. It works–while falsehoods inevitably collide with reality and fail. The reality-based community–and reasonable citizens outside those institutions–have their work cut out for them, Rauch says. But in the end, they will win. Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

In this episode of In Reality, Kathleen Belew, University of Chicago historian and author of ‘Bring The War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America’, joins co-hosts Eric Schurenberg and Joan Donovan. In a fascinating conversation, Belew outlines how social media and the tactics of disinformation energized the white power movement that reached a watershed moment in the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.Belew traces the current white supremacist surge to a movement that took root among veterans returning from the Vietnam war. The movement is made up of a number of loosely affiliated groups, whose ideology and goals changed little over the past 45 years. Indeed, the storming of the U.S. Capitol eerily recalled a similar event in the 1978 neo-Nazi handbook ‘The Turner Diaries’. Belew explains how these groups opportunistically latched on to the economic and racial resentments that brought Donald Trump to power and then used social media to communicate, organize and radicalize members. Belew explains that white power movements have no intention of “making America great again” and instead agitate for the overthrow of democracy. To really make America great, she concludes, Americans need a better understanding of our government and our imperfect history. We can then address questions of what has made America great in the past and what remains to be done to make it great again.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

In this episode of In Reality, co-hosts Eric Schurenberg and Joan Donovan sit down with Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, technical fellow for AI at LinkedIn and a former distinguished technical lead for responsible AI at Facebook. Before this, Joaquin led the Applied Machine Learning team at Facebook, creating the algorithms that made Facebook advertising so effective. It’s safe to say Facebook would not be the profit behemoth it is today without the innovations he introduced.2011 saw the broad public adoption of social media and the democratization of public voice that it enabled. The benefits for democracy were immediately apparent in movements like the Arab Spring, which held special meaning for Joaquin as a native of Morocco. After the 2016 election in the US and the 2018 Cambridge Analytica data scandal, however, Joaquin realized that the tools he helped create could be misused and began to devote himself to AI ethics and responsible use of the technology at Facebook, a mission that he carries on at LinkedIn. You could say that the arc of Joaquin’s career parallels that of society’s evolving relationship to social media.  The optimism that defined social media’s early adoption has been replaced by an alarmed awareness that its obvious benefits come with consequences–a polluted information stream, political polarization and erosion of the institutions needed to uphold  democracy. Joaquin is now deeply involved in leading efforts to minimize the harms that social media can unleash. “We’ve come to realize that  anything open will be exploited,” sums up In Reality co-host Joan Donovan, “and it is time for us to take the measure of that”. Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

In the first episode of In Reality, co-hosts Eric Schurenberg and Joan Donovan are joined by Rob Reich, Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Stanford University and Author of System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot.At its birth, social media promised to be a tool to promote democracy. Instead, it has become the accelerant to a firestorm of lies and, far from democratizing power has concentrated it among a few social media giants. “Mark Zuckerberg is now the unelected mayor of three billion people,” says Rob Reich. “That is unacceptable.” How did things go so wrong? Reich blames, what he calls, the “engineering mindset” of social media’s inventors and the financial ecosystem that supports them. Along with co-authors Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein, Reich teaches a class on technology and ethics at Stanford University, the high temple of the engineering mindset. He knows what he is talking about! Engineers seek to “optimize” for a specific, measurable outcome without regard to social ramifications. Thus, for example, algorithms designed to give social media users engaging content to wind uploading news feeds or search results with content that triggers outrage, hatred or fear. Engagement—measured by clicks or time spent on the site climbs exponentially as a result--but at an enormous social cost.   Reich believes that the solutions lie in tempering the optimization mindset with regulations that weigh a technology’s social costs against its effectiveness, much as stop signs moderate optimal traffic flow in the interests of safety. Listen and judge for yourself. His ideas require political resolve to execute, to be sure. But the need is urgent. Democracy is at stake.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com