Not sure if this is still going on, but when I was in med school there was a big focus on making doctors more empathetic and kind and just better people by exposing us to humanities. Meanwhile right after med school most residents work 80+ hours a week and we are surprised when these sleep deprived residents working an intense 80 hour week and dealing with lean staffing standards (i.e. covering a lot of patients at once, meaning it’s going to take awhile for many patients to be seen) are cranky and seem overly efficiency focused! I don’t think reading is going to be the answer to that…
"< latest tech outrage > is why we need to force all these STEM bros to read books! they would be empathetic if only they'd take one (1) humanities class!!!!"
"But does that decline necessitate democratic decline?"
“The liberal world by definition is literate,” and argued that the inverse is also true.
Strongly disagree. We are in an age of data, and the future of informing the public is with data, not descriptive storytelling. The checks and balances in a democracy are not dependent on a nation of literary geniuses. If a president rises to power based on charisma rather than the public reading in-depth about their career or agenda, that is fine. The key thing is that he or she chooses well-qualified individuals to run the Federal Reserve, DoD, and other institutions, not partisan hacks.
Suppose you run a media company and you need to keep the public informed when attention spans are at an all-time low. Stop being cynical about it and think of a way to do it. You can quantify how trustworthy politicians are, and this will give voters the most important thing they need.
My writing on Sousveillance makes the case for this, and I even started rating potential 2028 candidates on trust using PolitiFact data myself. Spread the word please!
Great points raised in this piece. I agree about the importance of debate. In the 80’s there was a series of debates I believe on PBS called “The Constitution, That Delicate Balance”. It is still easily accessed on line or from libraries and in my view is a model of liberal debate featuring former presidents, teachers, senators, judges, educators etc debating important Constitutional issues.
Not sure if this is still going on, but when I was in med school there was a big focus on making doctors more empathetic and kind and just better people by exposing us to humanities. Meanwhile right after med school most residents work 80+ hours a week and we are surprised when these sleep deprived residents working an intense 80 hour week and dealing with lean staffing standards (i.e. covering a lot of patients at once, meaning it’s going to take awhile for many patients to be seen) are cranky and seem overly efficiency focused! I don’t think reading is going to be the answer to that…
"< latest tech outrage > is why we need to force all these STEM bros to read books! they would be empathetic if only they'd take one (1) humanities class!!!!"
There is an error above. You repeated the phrase "Consider the Lincoln-Douglas debates:" twice in this article.
"But does that decline necessitate democratic decline?"
“The liberal world by definition is literate,” and argued that the inverse is also true.
Strongly disagree. We are in an age of data, and the future of informing the public is with data, not descriptive storytelling. The checks and balances in a democracy are not dependent on a nation of literary geniuses. If a president rises to power based on charisma rather than the public reading in-depth about their career or agenda, that is fine. The key thing is that he or she chooses well-qualified individuals to run the Federal Reserve, DoD, and other institutions, not partisan hacks.
Suppose you run a media company and you need to keep the public informed when attention spans are at an all-time low. Stop being cynical about it and think of a way to do it. You can quantify how trustworthy politicians are, and this will give voters the most important thing they need.
My writing on Sousveillance makes the case for this, and I even started rating potential 2028 candidates on trust using PolitiFact data myself. Spread the word please!
https://turingpolice.substack.com/p/the-case-for-sousveillance
https://turingpolice.substack.com/p/putting-my-money-where-my-mouth-is
Great points raised in this piece. I agree about the importance of debate. In the 80’s there was a series of debates I believe on PBS called “The Constitution, That Delicate Balance”. It is still easily accessed on line or from libraries and in my view is a model of liberal debate featuring former presidents, teachers, senators, judges, educators etc debating important Constitutional issues.