Biden, Xi and the evolution of cooperation
Feb 07,2021 - Last updated at Feb 07,2021
CLAREMONT, California I do not know whether US President Joe Biden, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and their foreign-policy advisers have read Robert Axelrod’s classic book on international relations, “The Evolution of Cooperation”. But they should heed Axelrod’s central insight about how countries can benefit from cooperation and punish cheating.
Through countless simulations, Axelrod, now a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, found that the most beneficial long-term strategy for an actor such as a nation-state is to cooperate first and then play tit-for-tat. In other words, a country will gain in the long run if it offers a goodwill gesture and then responds in kind to its opponent’s subsequent moves.
When rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, the assault hinted at the risks of politics unmoored from facts. That can threaten the very fabric of society.
That an incoming U.S. president devoted part of his inaugural address to insist that facts are, in fact, factual reveals just how much of a beating the truth has taken. Over the past five years, politics have motivated huge swaths of the American public to abandon not just facts, but also the system of logic and standards of evidence used to establish facts in the first place. This phenomenon is widely known as “post truth.”
When rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, the assault hinted at the risks of politics unmoored from facts. That can threaten the very fabric of society.
That an incoming U.S. president devoted part of his inaugural address to insist that facts are, in fact, factual reveals just how much of a beating the truth has taken. Over the past five years, politics have motivated huge swaths of the American public to abandon not just facts, but also the system of logic and standards of evidence used to establish facts in the first place. This phenomenon is widely known as âpost truth.â
RFE/RL Welcomes Back Jamie Fly As President
February 04, 2021
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WASHINGTON Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s (RFE/RL) Board of Directors has named Jamie Fly as the company’s President and CEO, effective February 16, 2021. Mr. Fly resumes his leadership of RFE/RL after serving in the role from August 2019 to June 2020.
“I am excited to return as RFE/RL President to lead the organization during these challenging times,” said Fly. He continued, “I am proud of the journalists and staff at RFE/RL who, despite the pressures of the pandemic and challenges to RFE/RL’s commitment to journalistic integrity and editorial independence, continued to focus on their mission on the front lines of media freedom to bring unbiased news and information to those who need it most. It will be an honor to be working side by side with them once again.”
The combination of political divisiveness and the COVID-19 pandemic led to fake news running rampant on social media in 2020. That s not really news; but you might be surprised at how fake news was shared. According to The German Marshall Fund of the United States, verified Twitter users shared a significant percentage of deceptive website news by the end of the year.
The GMF discovered that false content producers and manipulators received nearly one third (47 million) of the 155 million verified-account shares in Q4 2020. Overall, false-content-producer shares increased by over 160%, and manipulators increased by nearly 120%, while all US websites increased by a mere 14% in 2020. This has led false-content producers and manipulators to, respectively, triple and double their verified account shares since 2018.