Good morning! We have several new people (welcome!), so here’s a brief word of explanation. The Thursday book review is Ascending Bookstacks’ main course. Friday’s link-drop is dessert. I serve up four links that I encountered over the past week and hope you’ll enjoy too! (All meal metaphors break down eventually). Usually we’ll just jump right in—so here we go.
Wikipedia Wisdom?
I hear a lot about political and ideological polarization—how it’s destroying societies, fracturing families, and breaking elections. 1 Neuroscientist Kris De Meyer, for example, has warned repeatedly that polarization pushes communities into irreconcilable realities—with potentially violent outcomes. Social scientists have found some evidence to support his De Meyer’s concern. (One radical solution may be to ditch social media and its filter bubble altogether).
Yet Wikipedia seems to be the one place where polarization is a desirable good. A couple years ago, Brian Gallagher interviewed James Evans and Misha Teplitskiy, who had just published “The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds” in Nature Human Behaviour. The researchers argued that, despite polarization’s negative connotations, thier “analysis reaveals that polarized teams consisting of a balanced set of ideologically diverse editors produce articles of a higher quality than homogenous teams.”
So, Wikipedia produced better pages when ideologically opposed editors worked together. Ideologically unbalanced or uniform groups, in contrast, produced lower quality pages.
Here’s how the researchers described it to Gallagher:
Evans: More collective insight is generated when you draw people who have non-random and minimally overlapping sets of information or knowledge exposures and you put them in a forum that’s well-regulated by a set of norms, which can be appealed to and are, in fact, appealed to. I was really struck by the fact that people often experience this. When they experience balanced debates on these sites, they really described the process as painful and beleaguered but the outcome as satisfying.
Teplitskiy: Ideologically diverse teams end up debating more. These people are carrying different bits of knowledge. When they bring it together, they’re spending more effort to aggregate it into good content. Even aside from increased effort, we’re also finding that the kinds of debates they have are a bit more focused. They zero in on a smaller set of issues and really hash out those issues that are presumably most problematic. They end up having more conflict and rely on policies more for regulating what we call their “task conflict,” or conflict that’s oriented around creating content, and they also have a lower relational conflict—they gang up on each other less and harass each other less on a personal level compared to more unbalanced teams. Those that are more balanced have a lower harassment prevalence.
Fascinating. You can read the whole interview here (and a fun article that maps Wikipedia editors here).
Sustainable Churches
Many faith groups talk about sustainability and stewardship—but what can it look like in practice? This article by Lisa Wells over at Orion Magazine walks with religious folks working to restore humane ecologies. She argues that Abrahamic religions can bring a new form of commitment to the environmental justice movement. Take this section, for example:
Rewilders have proposed different methods for living sustainably in the wilderness of the Anthropocene, 2 for “undoing domestication” and “fostering biodiversity,” but most of their methods come down to commitment. Committing to the health and wellbeing of a particular community and bioregion, and in so doing, overcoming their estrangement from the land and getting to know their home.
The Christians’ word for this is “covenanting.” I asked the theologian Ched Myers what it meant to “covenant” with the land.
“It’s like a marriage,” he said. When you form a covenant with a person or a place, you take a stand, and that person or place becomes the locus of all your work. “Making a covenant with another person is about committing to them,” he explained, “not just until they’re no longer useful, or attractive, or titillating or interesting, but committing to that person as an expression of limits. I’m going to focus my energy relationally in this covenant because life can flourish within it. The kind of life that sits at the dying person’s bedside. The kind of life that endures the worst of the other.”
The article does not, unfortunately, explore the environmental traditions outside the Abrahamic faiths or explore Catholic works on stewardship, but it remains a thought-provoking read. The article is excerpted from Wells’ new book, Believers, which I’ll be ordering from the library soon. You can read the full article here and find her book here.
Welcome to the Neighborhood?
Ever think about digital privacy? The DuckDuckGo newsletter recently shared this Bloomberg article by Sarah Holder and Fola Akinnibi that may give you pause. Flock, a startup with rather Orwellian flair, markets license plate readers to homeowners associations (HOAs) and police departments as tickets to the “crime-free future.”
Here’s how Holder and Akinnibi describe it: 3
Essentially an Android phone with a high definition camera strapped to a pole, each small Flock device costs about $2,500 a year. The readers focus narrowly on the street and snap pictures day and night, storing images of vehicles for 30 days.
Boasting rapid growth during the pandemic, Flock has captured photos of more than a billion vehicles in more than 1,200 U.S. cities across 40 states, and installed cameras in thousands of homeowners’ associations. The company raised $150 million in a July funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with a stated goal of reducing crime in America by 25% over the next three years by deterring and solving cases. There are no plans to rest at 25% — Flock’s mission is to “eliminate crime” entirely.
Neighborhoods can task HOA leadership with the cameras’ contents, or they can send images directly to local police departments.
To privacy advocates, Flock’s cameras cast too wide of nets with too few safeguards. Again, Holder and Akinnibi:
This worries privacy and civil liberties advocates, who warn that this is the latest way individuals are trading away their — and potentially their neighbors’ — personal information. On top of that, outsourcing vehicle tracking to neighborhoods allows law enforcement to increase its eyes on the street while dodging public regulations and budgetary restrictions. Concentrating these tools in homeowners’ associations, which already tend to be in neighborhoods that are wealthier and less racially diverse than surrounding metro areas, could compound inequities in policing, putting police at the beck and call of more privileged residents, while contributing to over-policing in other neighborhoods.
“We tend to know that people make really bad decisions and we as a society tend to make bad decisions when we’re afraid,” said Evan Greer, the deputy director of Fight for the Future, a non-profit that advocates for digital rights and against surveillance. “When we have an industry that only makes money when people are afraid, there are some real fundamental issues that need to be addressed.”
I tend to agree.
There are some really excellent books and articles out there about privacy, state surveillance, and surveillance capitalism. We’ll dive into one with a Thursday review soon! For now, I think private surveillance cameras create spectacles for TikTok as often as (or, cynically, more often than) they protect civil liberties.4
Catholic Social Justice
I’ve listened to Fr. Josh Johnson’s weekly “Ask Father Josh” podcast from Ascension Press for almost a year. Fr. Josh is such a joyful witness—singing, joking, and laughing as he prays with his listeners’ questions. It’s delightful.
In this week’s episode he spoke with Catholic speaker Mari Pablo about Connected: Catholic Social Teaching for This Generation, a program they helped put together with Ascension Press, and Catholic social teaching in general. Mari Pablo said that their Connected program focuses on the environment, life issues, race, poverty, and family—and now I want to read it!
Their conversation really resonated with me, especially this part of the exchange: [lightly edited for clarity]
I think that it’s unfortunate, a lot of people have been indoctrinated in some of our Catholic circles, they have been presented with a partial Gospel but not the fullness of what the Church teaches. The fullness of what the Church teaches is so beautiful, and I think if we could just open ourselves up to this gift that God wants to offer us, then there won’t be as much division . . . because we’ll all be thinking with the mind of the Church that Jesus Christ gave us two thousand years ago, as opposed to thinking with the minds of our political parties. I think a lot of people are more rooted in their politics than they are in Jesus Christ and [his] Church . . . The more we study the Church’s teachings, the more we’re like, ‘Oh, I get it now’ . . . In the early church the Apostles, they were devoted, it says in Acts 2:42, to prayer, worship, fellowship—but also to study . . . And I think that’s where a lot of us get off—we don’t prioritize study, academic study of the Catechism, of the Sacred Scriptures, of the Compendium of Catholic Social Teachings, like all these resources are totally available to us!
Couldn’t have said it better. There’s so much to learn and live!
You can find the rest of the episode here.
That’s it for this week. And again, if you’re new to the list, welcome!
Have a great weekend.
If you enjoyed this newsletter, please consider sharing it with a friend!
If you want to learn more about polarization, this course page has a fantastic list of readings.
The “Anthropocene” (anthropos = human) is a term that geologists and environmental scholars use to describe earth’s geological era (layer of the earth’s crust) defined by human intervention. There are a few alternative terms, like the Pyrocene, Capitalocene, and Plantationocene, but the terms express similar emphases on human intervention and concerns over environmental degradation. See the linked texts for more info.
I often share articles from news and commentary sites that use paywalls. Often, they’ll let you read one or two articles before forcing you to sign in. I 1000% want us all to support good journalism, but I also appreciate open access to knowledge. If you need one-time access to a page, turning off scripts with the Brave browser or toggling reader view in Vivaldi or Firefox will usually get you through to the good stuff.
There are, of course, cases when cameras capture or deter crimes, but I think overarching privacy concerns are nevertheless worth pursuing.