The capacity to be an “I”

Differentiation means the capacity of a family member to define his or her own life's goals and values apart from surrounding togetherness pressures, to say “I” when others are demanding “you” and “we.” It includes the capacity to maintain a (relatively) nonanxious presence in the midst of anxious systems, to take maximum responsibility for one's own destiny and emotional being. It can be measured somewhat by the breath of one's repertoire of responses when confronted with crisis. The concept should not be confused with autonomy or narcissism, however. Differentiation means the capacity to be an “I” while remaining connected.

Edwin Friedman, Generation to Generation

What Fake News is NOT

Some people will mislabel rumors, hoaxes, and real news stories they don’t like as “fake news.” Another area of confusion is stories that result from mistaken or bad journalism.  

Sometimes well-respected news organizations get it wrong: sources can lie, documents can be faked, and reporters can mishear quotes. Sometimes new information changes the basic understanding of what is known publicly. You wouldn’t call this fake news since the motivation for posting the original (but mistaken) information wasn’t to deceive. What can make the situation worse: is the financial pressure of shifting away from legacy media (like newspapers) into the digital world, leaving the news industry scrambling to figure out how to support quality journalism financially. 

Between the pressure to meet social media engagement quotas and competition with other publications, writers often don’t get the necessary time to craft thoughtful and nuanced stories—or possess the power to reject an assignment over concerns about amplification.

Inaccurate details, such as reporting that four people are dead in a plane crash instead of six, can result from an honest mistake. The wrong number might have been heard or written down.

During breaking news, information will quickly shift as bits trickle into news organizations. It takes time to get a clear overall picture of what’s happening. Sometimes law enforcement officials or public relations professionals get the story wrong and send inaccurate information. At those times, news organizations are simply repeating mistakes. This is most likely to happen when only one source of information available whenever a story breaks.

Legitimate news sources will report the truth—as best they know it at the time. But as new information comes in, the story can shift. Just like with scientific research, this meandering pathway is just part of the process of getting to the truth.

It’s worth noting that the approach of legacy news organizations (The Washington Post, CNN) differs from new media outlets (BuzzFeed News, Politico). Traditional outlets aim at objectivity or neutral-voice reporting, where the focus is on being balanced, keeping the journalist’s opinions out of reports. More recently launched news sites are likely to focus on immediacy and transparency over neutrality and update readers whenever more information is known. Each approach presents different weaknesses for reporters to overcome. Of course, commentators may reference news information but are not acting as neutral reporters. Opinion pieces are often confused with basic news reporting. Pay attention whether you are reading a news report, an editorial, a guest blogger, a review, a disguised ad, or a comment.

The bottom line: be skeptical and bring a critical mind with you to everything you read. Keep in mind that “fake news” can be about something else besides the truth. As University of Southern California media scholar Mike Ananny has said, it is often “a struggle between [how] different people envision what kind of world that they want.”

Here are some tips for determining if a story is likely reliable. An organization does not need to tick off all these qualifiers in order to be considered authentic and accurate, but the more you see red flags pop up, the more a healthy skepticism is in order.

You’ll notice these are “tips” and not a checklist. Checklists can oversimply the nuances of discernment into black-and-white boxes.

More about spotting fake news

Four Kinds of News Sites

1-Quality news brands (like the BBC and The Washington Post) have earned their reputations over time as consistently reliable news sources (not perfect, but more trustworthy). Savvy readers don’t expect as much from 2-inconsistent outlets that sometimes show bias but are not “fake” (Huffington Post, Fox News). In these cases, some information may be misleading by the way an issue is framed. Then there are 3-satirical news sites (The Onion, Clickhole, and The Babylon Bee). The articles and videos are intentionally fake but intended to be funny or make a point. They aren’t designed to fool anyone. 4-Fake news sites deliberately fabricate stories. (RT News, The Globe) Packaged as legitimate journalism, these articles may mix some truth with outright lies to deceive readers or gain clicks. Fact-checkers distinguish between misinformation, where the sharer may not realize the information is fraudulent, and disinformation, where the creator/sharer knows the information is false. In each case, the motivation of the sharer can be different.

Google searches for “Fake News” since 2014

The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics encourages journalists to “seek truth and report” and “be accountable and transparent” while doing it. Looking for these qualities is an effective way to separate the fake and the real.

Letting go of the old life

Change can happen at any time, but transition comes along when one chapter of your life is over and another is waiting in the wings to make its entrance. Transition does not require that you reject or deny the importance of your old life, just that you let go of it. Far from rejecting it, you are likely to do better with the ending if you honor the old life for all that it did for you. It brought you everything you have. But it is time for you to let it go of it. It's time to let it go.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

Novel

Life is God's novel. Let him write it. -Isaac Bashevis Singer

Forget it

Forget about the consequences of failure. Failure is only a temporary change in direction to set you straight for your next success. –Denis Waitley

The Power of Touch

A study of NBA players found the best teams touch each other a lot, while the losing teams seldom touch each other.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley looked at what happened between teammates during the 2009 season and found the most touch-prone were the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, two of the league’s top teams at the time. The mediocre Sacramento Kings and Charlotte Bobcats were at the bottom of the touch list. The same held true for individual players. The study took into account the possibility of teams high-fiving just because they were winning and adjusted accordingly. Even when the high expectations surrounding the more talented teams were taken into account, the correlation persisted.

A warm touch reduces stress by releasing hormones that promote a sensation of trust. This can free up the part of the brain that regulates emotion so it can engage in problem-solving.

The investigators also tested couples, finding with more touching came greater satisfaction in the relationship. Previous research has suggested students receiving a teacher's supportive touch on the arm or back or arm were much more likely to volunteer in class, and a sympathetic touch from a doctor gives patients the feeling that a visit lasted twice as long as it actually did.

Stephen Goforth

The best moments of our lives

The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen. For a child, it could be placing with trembling fingers the last block on a tower she has built, higher than any she has built so far; for a swimmer, it could be trying to beat his won record; for a violinist, mastering an intricate musical passage. For each person, there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expend ourselves.

Such experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur. The swimmers muscles might have ached during his most memorable race, his lungs might have felt like exploding, and he might have been dizzy with fatigue – yet these could have the best moments of his life. Getting control of life is never easy, and sometimes it can be definitely painful. But in the long run optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery – or perhaps better, a sense of participation in determining the content of life –that comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything else we can conceivably imagine.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow

Now

A good plan executed now is better than the perfect plan tomorrow. -George S. Patton

12 Fact-Checking Sites

Most fact-checking sites give out-sized space to political issues. This misses a deal of quality journalism published in other areas (health, environment, religion, etc.). Also, a complaint leveled at fact-checkers is that they will sometimes fall into “selection bias”—the tendency to pick apart stories promoting views with which they disagree.  

Fact-Checker                     News Literacy Project

FactCheck.org                    Politifact

Hoaxy                             Snopes        

Irumor Mill                      SourceWatch                   

Media Bias Fact Check        Truth or Fiction

MetaBunk Washington Post Fact Checker

More about fake news

Language that Ignites

Language that speaks of hopes, dreams, and affirmations (“You are the best!”), this kind of language--let’s call it high motivation--has its role. High motivation is not the kind of language that ignites people. What works is.. speaking to the ground-level effort, affirming the struggle. Phrases like, “Wow, you really tried hard,” or “Good job, dude,” motivate far better than empty praise.

Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code

The Remarkable Thing

The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day.  –Charles Swindoll

A Caterpillar

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly. -Buckminster Fuller

In the dark

Faith sees best in the dark -Søren Kierkegaard

14 Recent Articles about Running an AI Company

Censorship slows China's AI advances - Axios

Google brings AI to US broadcast of Paris Olympics – Reuters

OpenAI says chat bots will soon be able to perform human-level reasoning - Axios

A.I. Needs Copper. It Just Helped to Find Millions of Tons of It. – New York Times 

OpenAI working on new reasoning technology under code name ‘Strawberry’ – Reuters

AI's problem: The missing revenues - Axios

OpenAI illegally stopped staff from sharing dangers, whistleblowers say - The Washington Post

Microsoft Quits OpenAI’s Board Amid Antitrust Scrutiny – Wall Street Journal  

AI Investors Are Starting to Wonder: Is This Just a Bubble? – New York Magazine  

OpenAI Scale Ranks Progress Toward `Human-Level' Problem Solving – Bloomberg

AI companies are finally being forced to cough up for training data – MIT Tech Review

OpenAI promised to make its AI safe. Employees say it ‘failed’ its first test. - The Washington Post

California advances unique safety regulations for AI companies despite tech firm opposition – Associated Press  

In the AI era, data is gold. And these companies are striking it rich – Fast Company

The digital twin baby boom in the AI industry - Axios

A Hacker Stole OpenAI Secrets, Raising Fears That China Could, Too – New York Times

For AI Giants, Smaller Is Sometimes Better - Wall Street Journal

To Live Fully

It is a law of human life as certain as gravity:  To live fully, we must learn to use things and love people.. not love things and use people.

The Limits of Science

There is this strain, especially among popular communicators of science, that if you don’t look at the world through a scientific lens, then what’s the point; you’re just fooling yourself; you’re living in a world of delusions.  

But my pushback to that is, I’m a professional scientist; the vast majority of decisions that I make in my everyday life are not based on the scientific method. When I’m trying to pick what to have for dinner tonight, or who to fall in love with, I’m not using the scientific method, I’m just following my gut —literally when it comes to dinner. I’m just using other tools than the scientific method to arrive at conclusions and decisions.

There are many, many questions that science does not have a solid answer on, and may not ever have a solid answer on. And it’s perfectly legitimate for people to turn to other modes of inquiry and investigation into this beautiful, messy world that we live in, to seek answers and comfort from that.

Astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter quoted in Undark

The Line

“The line separating good and evil passes, not through states, nor between classes nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart." -Alexandr Solzhenitsyn 

Solzhenitsyn endured many years in a Russian Gulag (labor camp) and could write that statement with conviction. Many men did not survive the terrible weather and the harsh treatment in the Gulag.

Solzhenitsyn was dying while interned — until a fellow prisoner showed him unexpected kindness, changing his attitude and refreshing his spirit. He survived to become one of Russia's most well-read and revered writers

Stephen Goforth

Time Alone

Find a regular time and place to be alone. People in transition are often still involved in activities and relationships that continue to bombard them with cues irrelevant to their emerging needs. Because a person is likely to feel lonely in such a situation, the temptation is to seek more and better contact with others; but the real need is for a genuine sort of aloneness in which inner signals can make themselves heard. Doing housework after the kids leave for school or paperwork with the office door shut are not being alone in the sense I am talking about.

The old passage rituals provide the person with this experience of deep aloneness, often in a wilderness setting. (Interestingly, the Hebrew word for the “wilderness” in which Jesus, Moses, and Buddha spent time during critical periods of their lives is the same word that means ‘sanctuary.” This unmappable “nowhere” was also, as several of these heroes were explicitly told, holy ground.) Traditionally, time spent in such “sanctuaries” was a continuous period; but you many have to plan your time to accommodate your own life situation. One person manages that getting up every morning forty-five minutes ahead of the rest of the family and sitting quietly in the living room with a cup of coffee. Another jogs regularly after work for a half an hour. Another plays ocean sounds and temple bells on his car stereo whenever he drives along. Still another has cleaned out a little storage room off the upstairs hall and sits quietly alone in there for an hour after supper.

William Bridges, Transitions

21 Recent Articles about AI & Legal Issues

YouTube will use AI to snip copyrighted music and not silence your whole video – Tech Radar

Three senators introduce bill to protect artists and journalists from unauthorized AI use – Engadget

Chevron’s downfall highlights need for clear artificial intelligence laws - FedScoop 

The AI Shakeup: New Tech Innovations and the Future of Corporate Law – JD Supra

Decoding US Copyright Law and Fair Use for Generative AI Legal Cases – Medium

Two 80-something journalists tried ChatGPT. Then, they sued to protect the ‘written word’ – Associated Press  

Colorado’s Landmark AI Act: What Companies Need To Know – Skadden

Record labels sue two AI startups for copyright infringement – Axios

Deepfakes and the First Amendment: Are Deepfakes Illegal? – Freedom Forum

What Do You Do When A.I. Takes Your Voice? – New York Times

AI Legal Tools Could Be Too Pricey For Those Most In Need – Law360

Drake threatened with lawsuit over diss track featuring AI Tupac – The Verge

AI is creating fake legal cases and making its way into real courtrooms, with disastrous results – The Conversation

Generative AI For Legal Professionals: What To Know And What To Do Right Now – Above the Law 

Gen AI Shows Promise — And Peril — For Pro Se Litigants - Law360 

AI hustlers stole women’s faces to put in ads. The law can’t help them. – The Washington Post

 Generative AI Is Challenging a 234-Year-Old Law – The Atlantic

George Carlin’s estate settles lawsuit over AI comedy special – Washington Post

How GenAI can enhance your legal work without compromising ethics – Reuters Legal

Calif.'s Top Judge Launches Task Force To Probe AI Uses - Law360

How Dow Jones is building a framework to tackle AI copyright challenges – Journalism.co