Adam Kahane helped bring peace to Colombia, but says ending our climate stalemate may be harder. “That’s because in Colombia, in South Africa, in Thailand, in Sudan, everybody agreed that [their situation] wasn’t working and if they kept going the way they were going they were in real danger. The thing that makes [resolving] issues, […]
Confusion and ambiguity
A mix of stimuli always surrounds people. The stimuli have no meaning apart from what the individuals make of it. In other words, the environment is a product of the persons, not something outside of them. If people want to create shared meaning, they need to talk about their experience in close proximity to its […]
Changing the conversation
Transforming our institutions of conversation. Changing the way we communicate is the way we change organizations. Changing the conversation is about understanding and influencing participation. It is often about asking different kind of questions and pointing to different kinds of issues. There can be no change without changes in the patterns of communication. The goal […]
Philosophy can make the previously unthinkable thinkable
We should see one important social function of practical ethicists as widening the Overton window and pushing the public and political debate towards reasoned deliberation and respectful disagreement. In the mid-1990s, Joseph Overton, a researcher at the US think tank the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, proposed the idea of a ‘window’ of socially acceptable […]
Information Attacks against Democracies
Democracy is an information system. That’s the starting place of our new paper: “Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy.” In it, we look at democracy through the lens of information security, trying to understand the current waves of Internet disinformation attacks. Specifically, we wanted to explain why the same disinformation campaigns that act as a stabilizing influence […]