The Consilience Project and good faith communication

This post is a collection of quotes from the Consilience Project paper, The Endgames of Bad Faith Communication (2022). I recommend reading the paper. There are 2 quotes listed below chronologically.

1. "Restoring public trust in good faith communications is possible. But it requires both a cultural shift toward civic virtues and a redesign of the technologies and social processes that structure civic discourse."

2. "Digital communications technologies make possible new forms of democracy, as well as new civic communications infrastructure supportive of the good faith exchange essential to open societies. But these possibilities remain unactualized."

The Consilience Project and propaganda

This post is a collection of quotes from the Consilience Project paper, We Don't Make Propaganda! They Do! (2021). I recommend reading the paper. There are 2 quotes listed below chronologically.

1. "...we argue that propaganda can be thought of as the 'evil twin' of education. They often look the same, but with some careful examination, their differences become apparent."

2. "The propagandists' complete sources and data are simply never made accessible to the propagandized. A good teacher though, will consider exactly the same text as their student and aim to pass on the responsibility for understanding all of the data and more."

The Consilience Project and information warfare

This post is a collection of quotes from the Consilience Project paper, It's a MAD Information War (2021). I recommend reading the paper. There are 2 quotes listed below chronologically.

1. "Techniques of information warfare (such as propaganda) have been developed and expanded by scientists for decades, with much success. We argue that arms races in the context of information wars lead to the same end state as arms races in conventional warfare: mutually assured destruction."

2. "There are potential futures in which the technology currently being used to create information weapons of mass destruction could be used to create the most powerful educational infrastructures humans have ever experienced."

Martin Luther King Jr. and mutual understanding

Photo source: Wikimedia Commons

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) was an American minister best known for his contributions to the civil rights movement in the United States. The rest of this post is some quotes from King.

Mutual understanding

"Every word and deed must contribute to an understanding with the enemy and release those vast reservoirs of goodwill which have been blocked by impenetrable walls of hate." (Loving Your Enemies, Christmas 1957)

"The strong man holds in a living blend strongly marked opposites... The philosopher Hegel said that truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in the emergent synthesis which reconciles the two." (Strength to Love, 1963)

"...I am convinced that men hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don't know each other and they don't know each other because they don't communicate with each other and they don't communicate with each other because they are separated from each other. And God grant that something will happen to open channels of communication, that something will happen because men of goodwill will rise to the level of leadership." (Address to Cornell College, 1962)