Cuttings: October 2019

He, she, they … should we now clarify our preferred pronouns when we say hello? – article by Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian. "Little attention used to be paid to pronouns. In recent years, however, they have become a cornerstone of the culture wars.... pronoun introductions have become an established feature of some progressive spaces and university campuses. Many view this as a positive step towards a more nuanced understanding of gender. As Darius Hickman, a 23-year-old non-binary poet in New York says, these introductions mean people who don’t conform to traditional views of binary gender don’t feel alienated. 'Relying on clocking people’s gender based on appearances is harmful, especially since some people – oftentimes non-binary folks – can happen to look strictly binary, and a simple pronoun check makes things easier for everyone, including folks whose gender isn’t easy to tell.' But when gender is so complex and personal, is there really any such thing as a 'simple' pronoun check? At this stage, I should probably note that although I identify as a Progressive Lesbian™, the pressure of pronoun introductions often makes me feel uncomfortable. Actively announcing myself as a she/her makes it seem like I’m making my entire identity about my gender, which feels regressive. Further, while pronoun introductions are supposed to be about recognizing that gender is complex, it sometimes seems as though they – paradoxically – reinforce gender binaries. ... Wouldn’t it be better if we just worked towards a future where 'he' and 'she' weren’t weighted with so much meaning? What if we worked to break those limitations down instead?"

Social experiments to fight poverty – TED talk by Esther Duflo, the youngest person to win the Nobel prize in economics and the second woman to do so. Referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog.  "We have spent billions of dollars on aid. ... Has it done any good? ... Sadly, we don't know.
And worst of all, we will never know. And the reason is that -- take Africa for example.
Africans have already got a lot of aid. ... And the GDP in Africa is not making much progress. Okay, fine. How do you know what would have happened without the aid? Maybe it would have been much worse, or maybe it would have been better. We have no idea. We don't know what the counterfactual is.... So here are some other questions. ... Every year at least 25 million children do not get the immunization they should get. So this is what you call a 'last mile problem.' The technology is there, the infrastructure is there, and yet it doesn't happen. So you have your million. How do you use your million to solve this last mile problem? And here's another question.... Malaria kills almost 900,000 people every year, most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa, most of them under five. ... Bed nets are very cheap... Do you give the nets for free to maximize coverage, or do you make people pay in order to make sure that they really value them? How do you know? ... And a third question: Education. Maybe that's the solution, maybe we should send kids to school. But how do you do that? Do you hire teachers? Do you build more schools? Do you provide school lunch? How do you know? So here is the thing. I cannot answer the big question, whether aid did any good or not. But these three questions, I can answer them. It's not the Middle Ages anymore, it's the 21st century. And in the 20th century, randomized, controlled trials have revolutionized medicine by allowing us to distinguish between drugs that work and drugs that don't work. And you can do the same randomized, controlled trial for social policy. You can put social innovation to the same rigorous, scientific tests that we use for drugs. And in this way, you can take the guesswork out of policy-making by knowing what works, what doesn't work and why. And I'll give you some examples with those three questions...."

Crossing Divides: How a social network could save democracy from deadlock –  article by Carl Miller for BBC Click.  Referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "There is one thing that practically everyone can agree on: politics has become bitterly divided.... Yet what if it doesn't need to be this way? What if new ways can be found to break deadlocks and bring electorates back together?... For the last five years, Taiwan has been blending technology with politics to create a new way of making decisions. ... Their creation ... works by first seeking to crowdsource objective facts from those involved. Then users communicate with each other via a dedicated social media network called Pol.is, which lets them draft statements about how a matter should be solved, and respond to others' suggestions by either agreeing or disagreeing with them.... Pol.is lifted everyone out of their echo chambers. It churned through the many axes of agreements and disagreements and drew a map to show everyone exactly where they were in the debate. A number of different groups, with different attitudes, emerged.... There was no reply button, so people couldn't troll each other's posts. And rather than showing the messages that divided each of the four groups, Pol.is simply made them invisible. It gave oxygen instead to statements that found support across different groups as well as within them."

How liberalism became ‘the god that failed’ in eastern Europe – article by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes in The Guardian, based on their book The Light that Failed: A Reckoning. "In the spring of 1990, John Feffer, a 26-year-old American, spent several months criss-crossing eastern Europe in hope of unlocking the mystery of its post-communist future and writing a book about the historical transformation unfolding before his eyes.... East Europeans were optimistic but apprehensive. Many of those he interviewed at the time expected to be living like Viennese or Londoners within five years, 10 years at the most.... 25 years later, he decided to revisit the region and to seek out those with whom he had spoken in 1990. This time round, eastern Europe was richer but roiled by resentment. The capitalist future had arrived, but its benefits and burdens were unevenly, even crassly distributed. After reminding us that 'For the World War II generation in eastern Europe, communism was the "god that failed"', Feffer writes that 'For the current generation in the region, liberalism is the god that failed.'... Resentment at liberal democracy’s canonical status and the politics of imitation in general has played a decisive role. This lack of alternatives, rather than the gravitational pull of an authoritarian past or historically ingrained hostility to liberalism, is what best explains the anti-western ethos dominating post-communist societies today. The very conceit that 'there is no other way' provided an independent motive for the wave of populist xenophobia and reactionary nativism that began in central and eastern Europe, and is now washing across much of the world."