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Depolarization in the age of misinformation

Depolarization in the Age of Misinformation | Jonathan Rauch, David Blankenhorn & Ciaran O'Connor

Braver Angels has never been shy about engaging our nation’s most sensitive political issues. Last year, we held a public debate on the 2020 election exploring themes of voter fraud, voter suppression, and disagreements about the outcome. Recently, we hosted a podcast with a guest who claimed that the January 6th riots were incited by liberal activists working in collusion with the FBI.

After initially taking down the podcast for violating its terms on misinformation, YouTube reinstated the episode after reviewing it in the context of our larger mission. On this episode of the podcast, Ciaran O’Connor hosts David Blankenhorn, president of Braver Angels, and Jonathan Rauch, author of The Constitution of Knowledge, for a wide-ranging discussion on depolarization in the age of misinformation, bridge-building across the epistemological divide, and the Braver Angels approach to controversial content.


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President Trump Should Put America’s AI Interests First
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Photo by Luke Jones on Unsplash

President Trump Should Put America’s AI Interests First

In some ways, the second Trump presidency has been as expected–from border security to reducing the size and scope of the federal government.

In other ways, the president has not delivered on a key promise to the MAGA base. Rather than waging a war against Silicon Valley’s influence in American politics, the administration has, by and large, done what Big Tech wants–despite its long history of anti-Trumpism in the most liberal corners of San Francisco. Not only are federal agencies working in sync with Amazon, OpenAI, and Palantir, but the president has carved out key alliances with Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, and other AI evangelists to promote AI dominance at all costs.

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medical expenses

"The promise of AI-powered tools—from personalized health monitoring to adaptive educational support—depends on access to quality data," writes Kevin Frazier.

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Your Data, Your Choice: Why Americans Need the Right to Share

Outdated, albeit well-intentioned data privacy laws create the risk that many Americans will miss out on proven ways in which AI can improve their quality of life. Thanks to advances in AI, we possess incredible opportunities to use our personal information to aid the development of new tools that can lead to better health care, education, and economic advancement. Yet, HIPAA (the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act), FERPA (The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act), and a smattering of other state and federal laws complicate the ability of Americans to do just that.

The result is a system that claims to protect our privacy interests while actually denying us meaningful control over our data and, by extension, our well-being in the Digital Age.

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New Cybersecurity Rules for Healthcare? Understanding HHS’s HIPPA Proposal
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New Cybersecurity Rules for Healthcare? Understanding HHS’s HIPPA Proposal

Background

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted in 1996 to protect sensitive health information from being disclosed without patients’ consent. Under this act, a patient’s privacy is safeguarded through the enforcement of strict standards on managing, transmitting, and storing health information.

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A case for optimism, risk-taking, and policy experimentation in the age of AI—and why pessimism threatens technological progress.

Getty Images, Andriy Onufriyenko

In Defense of AI Optimism

Society needs people to take risks. Entrepreneurs who bet on themselves create new jobs. Institutions that gamble with new processes find out best to integrate advances into modern life. Regulators who accept potential backlash by launching policy experiments give us a chance to devise laws that are based on evidence, not fear.

The need for risk taking is all the more important when society is presented with new technologies. When new tech arrives on the scene, defense of the status quo is the easier path--individually, institutionally, and societally. We are all predisposed to think that the calamities, ailments, and flaws we experience today--as bad as they may be--are preferable to the unknowns tied to tomorrow.

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