Leiden City of Science References, Part 1

My friend and colleague Meta Knol, Director of the Leiden 2022 City of Science, asked yesterday for Twitter’s thoughts on “the most engaging, interesting, mind blowing, and inclusive websites and/or online campaign[s]” in the field of art and/or science.

A lot of ideas came to mind! And I thought it would be easier to list them out here than to blast out a series of Tweets.

I decided to focus on unusual science sites rather than art and culture. I also tried to think about what kinds of digital and digital-physical things (sites, apps, platforms, products, convenings) I would want to have rattling around in my mind if I were putting together a year long festival of science.

I’ve broken my thoughts into 5 categories, Websites & Channels; Platforms; Campaigns & Happenings; Media & Products; and Convenings, Places, & Activities. I can see that I definitely have a Western, English language, American/European bias and perspective on things, and I’d be eager to learn of new sites and resources that are more relevant in other contexts. Who is the most popular science blogger in India? Who is doing citizen science in West Africa? I’d really like to know!

A lot of this is just content in its most basic form, writing and speaking – blogging and vlogging — or using other people’s platforms (like Google Earth). I don’t think one needs to build fancy/expensive new websites, apps, or technology platforms to surprise and delight people, especially at first. Nobody cares that Derek Muller’s Veritasium videos are on YouTube and not his own Website or app — they just want to hear what he has to say. (Though the ethics of 3rd party platforms requires careful consideration.)

I also have a bias towards looser, more informal, more bottom-up kinds of productions than one would typically find from cultural and scientific institutions; more “How can we see or reveal the know-how / curiosity / creative capacity of this community?” than “How can we tell the community what we want them to know?”

As I was looking for articles and info about some of these efforts I could feel the influence of formal education — school-based learning. Not that I think school is a bad thing (!), but there’s a tendency for that particular lens with its requirements for standards of learning, formal evaluation, etc. to kind of drain away the open-ended curiosity and joy-of-learning that I find so appealing in so many of these projects. This was particularly evident with projects like Google Earth and Google Expeditions, where the tone of conversation about classroom goals quite overwhelmed the simple beauties of exploration, curiosity, and wonder seen in the experiences of the kids.

The first two categories I came up with — Websites, and Channels and Platforms — are below, and I’ll put the others in subsequent posts.

Here’s a Jamboard showing my initial brainstorm, though I’ve since pared away some ideas and added some new ones.

Websites & Channels


Individual Healthcare Professionals & Epidemiologists on Twitter

  • What: Someone, maybe Farhad Manjoo at the NY Times, observed that individual medical practitioners have been doing an outstanding job of communicating to the public during the pandemic crisis.

  • Why: An example of people in platforms and informal networks doing good.

  • Press/info: …

  • Sample: via Charlie Warzel: “In a 35-tweet thread on Monday, Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, laid out the case for social distancing in American cities.” (Inglesby’s tweets start here: https://twitter.com/T_Inglesby/status/1237138117464715270

SciShow

Teen Vogue

The Brain Scoop

Veritasium

Vi Hart

Wait but Why

Platforms

Bill Nye the Science Guy


BLACK and STEM (#blackandstem)

Creative Commons, Open Science

Experiment.com

Google Cardboard / Expeditions

Google Earth / Google Sky / Google Treks / Google Street View

IEEE Spectrum

  • What: Magazine/blog from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

  • Why: Great writing and content point-of-view at the intersection of science, technology, and society. Nice balance between technical and non-technical language.

  • Website: https://spectrum.ieee.org/

  • Press/info: …

  • Sample: Pick anything on the homepage (good information architecture example of putting your content up front!), https://spectrum.ieee.org/

Instructables

Khan Academy

Minecraft / Minecraft Education Edition

MIT Open Courseware

Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA)

TED & TEDx

TikTok

Wikipedia

YouTube

Zooniverse

* * *

Other post in this series: Part 2: Campaigns and Happenings | Part 3: Media and Products | Part 4: Convenings, Places, Activities

“This has been a striking repudiation of the idea that there is an online and an offline world, and that what is said online is in some way kept online. I hope that this eliminates the conception from people’s minds.”
—
Renee DiResta, Stanford Internet Observatory, as quoted in Twitter and Facebook Lock Trump’s Accounts After Violence on Capitol Hill, by Kate Conger, Mike Isaac and Sheera Frenkel, New York Times, 6 January 2021

Some reading on "change"

A few weeks ago a friend asked me for reading recommendations on the subject of “change” — by which she meant how the world is changing, how society is changing, and how change happens within organizations and groups.

We throw around the word change a lot but what does it really mean to people? How do we make change happen? We don’t discuss this very often, and the question of why that is came up at a recent talk I gave for the German Federal Cultural Foundation's Digital Fund.

I recommended, to my friend, the following books and articles as a starting point. These resources, among many more, have helped me get a feel for what change is and how people think about it from a variety of perspectives.

For my own work I’m focusing in on the idea that change itself is changing — and my work for the Smithsonian, the United Nations, the Museum of Solutions in Mumbai, and others has been about re-shaping institutions (or creating new ones) to deal with the fact that change is now faster, more disruptive, more surprising, and more complex than it has ever been before. This new kind of change poses enormous risks for society if we can’t increase the speed and clarity with which we deal with the world around us. (Take our sclerotic response to the climate emergency, for example.)

Indeed, we may soon look back on 2020 and say, “Wow, I wish things were as calm and mellow as they were back then.”

Change and Human Factors

Surgical Checklists Save Lives — but Once in a While, They Don’t. Why?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/magazine/surgical-checklists-save-lives-but-once-in-a-while-they-dont-why.html
By Siddhartha Mukherjee, New York Times, 9 May 2018

”What happened? How could an idea that worked so effectively in so many situations fail to work in this one? The most likely answer is the simplest: Human behavior changed, but it didn’t change enough.”

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds: New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds
By Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker, February 27, 2017 issue

This article covers the hypothesis that what we think of as human intelligence arose not to enable us to solve complex, scientific and logical problems but to give us the wits necessary to avoid getting screwed (killed, ostracized, marginalized) by our social group. This idea explained a lot about the phenomena of fake news, conspiracy theories, and Trumpism for me.

“Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments. Among the many, many issues our forebears didn’t worry about were the deterrent effects of capital punishment and the ideal attributes of a firefighter. Nor did they have to contend with fabricated studies, or fake news, or Twitter. It’s no wonder, then, that today reason often seems to fail us. As Mercier and Sperber write, ‘This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.’”

Change, Networks & Communities

Twitter and Tear Gas: The power and fragility of networked protest
https://www.twitterandteargas.org/
By Zeynep Tufekci, 2017

Do yourself a favor and read everything by Zenyep. Here is her work in The Atlantic, and here’s a nice profile of her in the New York Times.

“…The ability to use digital tools to rapidly amass large numbers of protesters with a common goal empowers movements. Once this large group is formed, however, it struggles because it has sidestepped some of the traditional tasks of organizing. Besides taking care of tasks, the drudgery of traditional organizing helps create collective decision-making capabilities, sometimes through formal and informal leadership structures, and builds a collective capacity among movement participants through shared experience and tribulation. The expressive, often humorous style of networked protests attracts many participants and thrives both online and offline, but movements falter in the long term unless they create the capacity to navigate the inevitable challenges.”


Emergent Strategy
(via Google books, with links to local libraries and booksellers)
By Adrienne Maree Brown, 2017

“We learned that every member of the community holds pieces of the solution, even if we are all engaged in different layers of the work. We learned to look for telltale signs that actions were community based. One indicator that things are off is when impacted communities and people of color get involved and they are put in the role of “performing the action,” for example, having their photos taken, being spokespeople, or being asked to endorse or represent work they don’t get to lead, etc., while most of the background organizing is still dominated by the folks who aren’t impacted and won't be around long term to sustain the campaign or to be held accountable. At its worst, this approach builds up hope and encourages local communities to take risks, and then abandons them with the results.”

Bunch of Amateurs: A search for the American character
(via Google books, with links to local libraries and booksellers)
Jack Hitt, 2012

“Innovation is supposed to happen one of two ways. There is the Great Galilean Aha!—the Instantaneous, practically divine revelation—and the Edisonian Grind, the slow-motion epiphany involving the unending effort for the inventor who lives in the lab struggling through trial and error until he arrives at the answer. […] But amateurs show that there is another path to innovation that doesn’t yet have a movie shorthand—the collaborative, marginal effort that culminates in a Great New Thing.”

A Sense of Urgency
https://www.kotterinc.com/book/a-sense-of-urgency/
By John Kotter, 2008

Kotter’s research indicates that 70% of change initiatives fail, and the thing that unifies the best and most successful initiatives is “a sense of urgency.” This book is worth its weight in gold just for its description of the “false urgency” that is seen inside many organizations, and the concrete, tactical descriptions of what actual urgency is and how to develop it.

My favorite story from the book is about Caroline Ortega, a 27-year-old mid-level employee in a data management firm, and her experience raising urgency within her organization.

This short podcast from Harvard Business Review gives a pretty good summary.

Kotter’s other books, including Leading Change and The Heart of Change: real-life stories of how people change their organizations, are also excellent — good places to start if you’re interested in organizational change.

25 years of Wired predictions: Why the future never arrives
https://www.wired.com/story/wired25-david-karpf-issues-tech-predictions/
By DAVID KARPF, 18 September 2018

David Karpf read every issue of Wired magazine from cover-to-cover to see what he could learn about how the Wired community views the world.

“WILLIAM GIBSON IS said to have remarked that ‘the future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.’ Paging through the first 25 years of WIRED, what’s most striking is that the future never becomes evenly distributed. Sure, everyone gets on Facebook and uses Google, but the dinosaurs never die outright, and the new age of abundance never quite gains its inviolable foothold. The future just keeps arriving, mutating, bowing to the fickle pressures of advertising markets and quarterly earnings reports.”

“Wired’s early visions of the digital future, the mistake that seems most glaring is the magazine’s confidence that technology and the economics of abundance would erase social and economic inequality. The digital revolution’s track record suggests that its arc doesn’t always bend toward abundance—or in a straight line at all. It flits about, responding to the gravitational forces of hype bubbles and monopoly power, warped by the resilience of old institutions and the fragility of new ones.”

Tactical Urbanism: Short-term action for long-term gain
Volume 1: free pdf / Commercial press version via Google Books, with links to local libraries & book sellers)
By Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia, 2015

“It’s easier for any of us to envision what the future can be if you can see it, touch it and taste it as well. Instead of looking at a piece of paper, we want people to experience it.” (Quoting Pat Brown, instigator of a local project in Memphis, Tennessee.)

“Too often, cities only look to big-budget projects to revitalize a neighborhood. There are simply not enough of those projects to go around. We want to encourage small, low-risk, community-driven improvements all across our city that can add up to larger, long-term change.” (Quoting Memphis mayor A. C. Wharton.)
 

Environmental change

Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html  
By Nathaniel Rich, New York Times, 1 August 2018

A harrowing, beautifully written story about the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989 — “the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change.”

“We have less time than we realize, said an M.I.T. nuclear engineer named David Rose, who studied how civilizations responded to large technological crises. ‘People leave their problems until the 11th hour, the 59th minute,’ he said. ‘And then: Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?’ — My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? […]

”Few of these policy geniuses were showing much sense. They understood what was at stake, but they hadn’t taken it to heart. They remained cool, detached — pragmatists overmatched by a problem that had no pragmatic resolution.”
(The scene described was at the so-called Pink Palace conference, a gathering of climate scientists and policy experts, in 1980.)

The Insect Apocalypse Is Here: What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html
By Brooke Jarvis, New York Times Magazine, Nov. 27, 2018

Another harrowing story about the collapse of ecosystems, revealing the degree to which we humans struggle to comprehend incremental, planetary-scale change.

“Scientists have begun to speak of functional extinction (as opposed to the more familiar kind, numerical extinction). Functionally extinct animals and plants are still present but no longer prevalent enough to affect how an ecosystem works. […] Like the slow approach of twilight, their declines can be hard to see. White-rumped vultures were nearly gone from India before there was widespread awareness of their disappearance. Describing this phenomenon in the journal BioScience, Kevin Gaston, a professor of biodiversity and conservation at the University of Exeter, wrote: “Humans seem innately better able to detect the complete loss of an environmental feature than its progressive change.”

Winning Slowly is the Same as Losing: The technology exists to combat climate change – what will it take to get our leaders to act?
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/bill-mckibben-winning-slowly-is-the-same-as-losing-198205/
By Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone, 1 December 2017

Economist and environmentalist Bill McKibben has been writing powerfully about the climate emergency for over 20 years. His books Eaarth (two “a’s”, because, as he argues, our current Earth is much different than the old one) and Deep Economy helped me form my first ideas about the urgent need for climate action. Here are McKibben’s 17 articles for Rolling Stone — pick one at random and start reading.

“If we don’t win very quickly on climate change, then we will never win. That’s the core truth about global warming. It’s what makes it different from every other problem our political systems have faced.”

The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
By Tim Urban, January 22, 2015

This 2-part post on Wait, But Why is a good, accessible primer on Artificial Intelligence and it gives a glimpse of what the runaway acceleration of technological change could yield.

“When it comes to history, we think in straight lines. When we imagine the progress of the next 30 years, we look back to the progress of the previous 30 as an indicator of how much will likely happen. [But] in order to think about the future correctly, you need to imagine things moving at a much faster rate than they’re moving now. […] And if you spend some time reading about what’s going on today in science and technology, you start to see a lot of signs quietly hinting that life as we currently know it cannot withstand the leap that’s coming next.”

Change and the future

William Gibson Has a Theory About Our Cultural Obsession With Dystopias
https://www.vulture.com/2017/08/william-gibson-archangel-apocalypses-dystopias.html
By Abraham Riesman, Vulture, 1 August 2019

How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gibson-keeps-his-science-fiction-real
By Joshua Rothman, New Yorker, December 16, 2019 issue

A couple of stunning, difficult, quirky profiles of novelist William Gibson.

“Many works of literary fiction claim to be set in the present day. In fact, they take place in the recent past, conjuring a world that feels real because it’s familiar, and therefore out of date. Gibson’s strategy of extreme presentness reflects his belief that the current moment is itself science-fictional. ‘The future is already here,’ he has said. ‘It’s just not very evenly distributed.’

Q: How do you account for the recent surge in popular fiction about the collapse of civilization into dystopia or Armageddon?}

Gibson: This could be a case of consumers of a particular kind of pop culture trying to tell us something, alas. Seriously, what I find far more ominous is how seldom, today, we see the phrase “the 22nd century.” Almost never. Compare this with the frequency with which the 21st century was evoked in popular culture during, say, the 1920s.”

What perpetual war looks like in America
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/what-perpetual-war-looks-like-in-america/2019/08/04/8f89c95a-b6da-11e9-a091-6a96e67d9cce_story.html
By Philip Kennicott, The Washington Post, August 4, 2019

The idea, from the Washington Post’s cultural critic, that America’s civil war is already here — it just doesn’t look like we had imagined it.

From a scene outside a Hooter’s restaurant in El Paso, Texas, after a mass shooting in August, 2019.
“The eyes of the Hooters [restaurant] owl stare at us, as if through large goggles, wide open with shock and horror. In front of the restaurant, men and women in military fatigues, some with helmets, others dressed more provisionally, hurry past, bearing a formidable arsenal of weapons and communications gear. This is what war looks in America, a surreal juxtaposition of familiar logos and brand names and a now all-too-familiar display of police response.”

Homo Deus: A brief history of tomorrow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Deus:_A_Brief_History_of_Tomorrow
By Yuval Noah Harari, 2017

I saw Yuval Harari give a short, impassioned talk about the dangers of AI to a group of elderly philanthropists at a birthday party in Israel a few years ago. There must have been 1,000 people there and one-by-one you could see the comprehension, and then the shock and fear, wash across their faces: How can this be?

“In the coming decades it is likely that we will see more Internet-like revolutions, in which technology steals a march on polities. Artificial intelligence and biotechnology might soon overhaul our societies and economies — and our bodies and minds too — but they are hardly a blip on the current political radar. Present-day democratic structures just cannot collect and process the relevant data fast enough, and most voters don't understand biology and cybernetics well enough to form any pertinent opinions. Hence traditional democratic polities is losing control of events, and is failing to present us with meaningful visions of the future… Ordinary voters are beginning to sense that the democratic mechanism no longer empowers them. The world is changing all around, and they don't understand how or why. Power is shifting away from them, but they are unsure where it has gone…The sad truth is that nobody knows where all the power has gone.”

The pandemic is a portal
https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca
By Arundhati Roy, Financial Times, April 3, 2020

The novelist Arundhati Roy on how coronavirus threatens India — and what the country, and the world, should do next. 

“The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these. […] Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in their lives than looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police. Of all the people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s words especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border [over 500km away].

‘Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us’, he said. 

‘Us’ means approximately 460 million people.

[…]

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

* * *

Excerpts from these and other books/articles are posted to this blog, tagged #change. 

…Also this slide deck/talk of mine, How Change Happens, might be useful for people thinking about creating institutional or sector-wide change.

…And while I'm at it, a draft foreword of my book, The Age of Scale, is about the topic of accelerating change: 

German Federal Cultural Foundation Digital Fund

german cultural foundation.png

Last week I gave a keynote for a convening of new grantees from the Kulturstiftung des Bundes / German Federal Cultural Foundation's Digital Fund, which just made an impressive award of €13.2m in grants to 15 projects by 32 organizations.

The talk addressed 3 main questions identified by the Digital Fund's director, Julia Mai.

  1. What does digital society look like in the future?

  2. What role should cultural institutions play in the future?

  3. How can cultural institutions shape & respond to digital change?

Here are the slides, with annotations, references, and links: Digital Culture and the Shaking Hand of Change

Hiring Head of Exhibit Creation, Museum of Solutions, Mumbai

Cross posting from LinkedIn; updated position announcement at the bottom [November 24].

The Museum of Solutions (MuSo) in Mumbai is seeking a Head of Exhibit Creation to join its growing team.

I have had the honor of helping to bring this new museum to life and I can say that this will be a fantastic and rewarding adventure of a lifetime for the right candidate. This person, this team, can make a real difference in the world.

MuSo is a new, world-class children’s museum being developed by the JSW Foundation and partners in Mumbai, India. MuSo’s vision is to inspire, enable, and empower children to make meaningful change in the world together, today.

The museum’s programs and exhibits are designed to cultivate the knowledge, skills, and actions kids need to tackle the challenges they see around them and make progress on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. MuSo will be the first interactive and immersive learning environment of its kind for children in India.

The Head of Exhibit Creation will be responsible for all aspects of exhibition design and fabrication for MuSo’s purpose-built 6,000 square meter museum building, scheduled for partial opening in 2021.

Please see the attached position announcement (pdf) for the more details, and help spread the word! Or drop me a line if you'd like to be involved in some other way.

Note that the position announcement was updated on November 24 to clarify the work location, benefits, and to slightly de-emphasize technical/architectural requirements. Thanks!

Such was their belief

DURING SUBSEQUENT VISITS TO NEPAL, I WOULD CONTINUE TO HEAR stories about the power of these challenge grants. One of our projects, Himalaya Primary School, was located on the outskirts of Kathmandu, in a poor community whose economy depended on the local brick factories. The local soil was conducive to brickmaking, and six soot-belching factories surrounded the village. On a site visit to check on progress, I met the headmaster. He proudly recounted how he'd visited each factory to ask for support in building a new school. He reminded each factory owner that the workers’ ‘wages were so low that parents could not afford to contribute to the challenge grant. But Room to Read required each community to coinvest, so he proposed an innovative solution: each factory owner would donate 10,000 bricks, and Room to Read’s money would be used to buy cement, window frames, desks, and to pay for skilled labor to erect the walls. His sales strategy succeeded, and once again I was blown away by the ingenuity of the communities with which we partnered.

Two days after my visit to Himalaya Primary School, Dinesh took me into the foothills of the mountains west of Kathmandu. Our destination was the village of Katrak, which perched on a hillside overlooking verdant rice fields. Dinesh parked our rented truck along the side of the road, and with a head nod and a shout of “Jhane ho. Orolo” (Let’s go! Uphill), he announced to me that we had a steep hike in front of us.

At 8 a.m. the sun was already burning down on us, and my pace slowed as I stopped for applications of sun cream and gulps from my water bottle. On frequent occasions women with large bags hoisted onto their backs rushed past me, heading up the trail. I could not hope to match their pace, even though I was carrying only my water bottle and a Nikon. I asked Dinesh if they were returning from the market. He laughed and asked whether I realized that these women were carrying cement. I must have looked perplexed, so he explained.

When the local government of the village of Katrak requested Room to Read’s help, Dinesh and Yadav (our civil engineer in charge of the School Room program) said that they would provide half the resources if the village could come up with the other half. The head of the village development committee told our team that the village was poor, with more than 95 percent of parents living on subsistence farming. What little economy the village had was simple barter, and as a result few parents could afford to put money into the project.

Yadav explained that contributions other than cash would count toward the challenge grant. As an example, parents could

prove their commitment to education and the new school by donating labor. The women we saw this morning had responded to the call. Each morning, a group of them would wake up before sunrise, walk an hour downhill to the roadside where the cement bags were being stored, and then walk 90 minutes back up to the village. The bags weighed 50 kilos—110 pounds—and some mothers were making the trip twice in one day. Dinesh reminded me that this was a farming village, and that the women would still have to spend their day in the fields.

We crested the hill and on the building site saw 20 men, presumably the fathers, digging the foundation and beginning to put up the walls. I asked one of the mothers if I could try picking up her bag of cement. I nearly threw my back out as I struggled to get the bag above my waist. The mothers were greatly entertained, and the group around me grew larger as I failed to impress them as Hercules.

I outweighed these women by at least 50 pounds. Most of them probably survived on two bowls of rice and lentils per day. Such was their belief in the power of education to provide their children with a brighter future that they were willing to make any sacrifice. I felt inspired and vowed to work even harder to find the funding to enable more of these challenge grants. I also vowed that I'd get to the gym to lift weights a bit more often.

From Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, John Wood's inspiring book about founding Room To Read.
“There are incremental advances that happen in all kinds of things. Every once in a while there’s just this iconic leap. Soloing El Cap is just this quantum leap. ”
— Peter Croft, a professional rock climber, on Alex Honnold’s free solo climb of Yosemite’s El Capitan in June 2017. From Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin's Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo.

Double bind

After one information session, I asked my main Russian intelligence briefer about what we could do. She was young, a Russian-speaker, and philosophical about disinformation. She shrugged her shoulders. Not because she wasn’t concerned about it, but because the dark genius of disinformation is that it worked a little like double-bind theory. If you engaged disinformationists—which is what they wanted—they won; if you did not engage them, they won. They tapped into prejudice and ignorance and grievance. They weren’t so much creating resentment as aggravating it. Yes, facts mattered, but since they did not really engage with the world of facts, it didn’t have much of an effect. At the end of the day, she said, they didn’t acknowledge that empirical facts even existed. Their goal was to persuade everyone else of that, too.
Information Wars (2020) by former TIME editor and Obama administration Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Richard Stengel. Page 243

Everyone's an expert on messaging

“One of the things I’d noticed in government is that people who had never been in media, who had never written a story or produced one, who didn’t know about design or graphics, who didn’t understand audiences or what they liked, seemed to think it was easy to create content. People had the illusion that because they consumed something, they understood how it worked.”
Information Wars (2020) by former TIME editor and Obama administration Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Richard Stengel. Page 94.

In a later passage, Stengel continues,

The thing I discovered as the “communications guy” was that everyone’s an expert on messaging. People feel they can chime in on messaging in a way they would not about trade negotiations or nuclear disarmament. But there was never much discussion about what in the private sector would be a key concern: audience. Whom exactly do we want to message to? People are very quick to say, Let’s counter their message, but no one really talked about whom we counter it to or what we counter it with.

All that stuff about democracy and fairness and diversity

“All the questions I got were fundamentally the same. People around the world asking, ‘All that stuff you’ve been telling us for so long — about democracy and human rights and fairness and diversity — it’s not really true, is it?’ American public diplomacy is ultimately about values. And now people around the world were saying that this story was a fiction. It’s not as though people around the world had never said that before. We’d been called hypocrites long before Donald Trump decided to run for president. But we’d never had someone running for president who so explicitly rejected those values both in his ideology and in his behavior. That was something new.”
The view from 2016, from Information Wars (2020) by former TIME editor and Obama administration Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Richard Stengel. Page 326

Six-page narratives

We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of “study hall.” Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely. Some have the clarity of angels singing. They are brilliant and thoughtful and set up the meeting for high-quality discussion. Sometimes they come in at the other end of the spectrum.
[…]
The traditional kind of corporate meeting starts with a presentation. Somebody gets up in front of the room and presents with a powerpoint presentation, some type of slide show. In our view you get very little information, you get bullet points. This is easy for the presenter, but difficult for the audience. […] If you have a traditional ppt presentation, executives interrupt. If you read the whole 6 page memo, on page 2 you have a question but on on page 4 that question is answered.

Below, Amazon’s Vice President and Distinguished Engineer Brad Porter comments further in The Beauty of Amazon's 6-Pager, 2015:

The down side to the 6-pager is that writing a good six-page evidence-based narrative is hard work. Precision counts and it can be hard to summarize a complex business in 6 pages, so teams work for hours preparing the document for these reviews. But that preparation does two things.

First, it requires the team writing the document to really deeply understand their own space, gather their data, understand their operating tenets and be able to communicate them clearly. The second thing it does is a great document enables our senior executives to internalize a whole new space they may not be familiar with in 30 minutes of reading thus greatly optimizing how quickly and how many different initiatives these leaders can review.