Open Question March 11: Free Speech, but who draws the lines? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdx9n317Wpw 

Free speech rules and culture today have a huge impact on the future:

• Tech companies + algorithms determine who gets heard in 'public'... so government vs citizen doesn't touch today's real power struggles

• AI: when you can clone anyone’s voice or face, what’s protected and what’s harm?

• Political shifts: old arguments on who's defending or restricting speech (and why) don't hold, making it a topic where fresh thinking actually matters. Eg: The political left (eg ACLU defending neo-Nazis' right to march) used to be standard bearers, where now, the left is more likely to argue that unregulated speech causes real harm to marginalized communities.

This conversation will inform a live interview tomorrow with Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the leading free speech advocacy and litigation organization in the United States. A graduate of Stanford Law School, he has led FIRE since 2001, growing it from a six-person operation to a 120-person powerhouse, and is the co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind (with Jonathan Haidt)

#openquestion 

Open Question March 11: Free Speech, but who draws the lines? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdx9n317Wpw 

Free speech rules and culture today have a huge impact on the future:

• Tech companies + algorithms determine who gets heard in 'public'... so government vs citizen doesn't touch today's real power struggles

• AI: when you can clone anyone’s voice or face, what’s protected and what’s harm?

• Political shifts: old arguments on who's defending or restricting speech (and why) don't hold, making it a topic where fresh thinking actually matters. Eg: The political left (eg ACLU defending neo-Nazis' right to march) used to be standard bearers, where now, the left is more likely to argue that unregulated speech causes real harm to marginalized communities.

This conversation will inform a live interview tomorrow with Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the leading free speech advocacy and litigation organization in the United States. A graduate of Stanford Law School, he has led FIRE since 2001, growing it from a six-person operation to a 120-person powerhouse, and is the co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind (with Jonathan Haidt)

#openquestion 

AMA with Jeffrey Ladish. Wednesday 2/4 at 2:00 PM CT

Executive director of Palisade Research; studying AI loss of control risks.

A Love Letter to NFL Football. The Super Bowl is happening this weekend and with it, the end of the football season.  It seems a fitting time for me to reflect on the little love affair I’ve had with NFL football for the past six years.  It is a bit odd that I picked up football later in life. But like many strange love stories, it started during the Covid shutdown. 

I was living alone in Dallas, feeling isolated.  My friends there were fearful about contracting the virus, so I found myself spending long stretches of time without human company. Football entered my world simply because it was one of the few places where real humans were doing a real thing, live, in front of me.  I watched casually, at first, not caring who won, but eventually I found myself rooting for players and their teams simply because I’d learned their stories:  the traded-too-many-times guy who finally thrived, the rookie wide receiver who shocked everyone with a miracle catch, the gifted quarterback who’d spent most of his career buried on a loser team where quarterbacks go to die, only to suddenly be traded to a team where he could thrive.  The beauty was that I didn’t pull for just one team…I had several favorites!  Watching live football on TV gave me some flavor of the aliveness I valued and was missing.  

Recently, my brother, who has watched football his entire life, and understands the game on a much deeper level, has been teaching me about the formations, the strategies, the “chess” behind what can look, at first glance, like guys just crashing into each other. It’s been fun to talk or text with him during games. I noticed we always seemed to pull for the same teams and there’s something touching about that.  What is it about these specific teams and players that we both value?  My roommates started watching with me and learning football.  Then other non-football friends started joining us to watch and experience the “People magazine” version of football through my live commentary.  It has become a kind of communal celebratory activity and so much fun.

And now the Super Bowl is here. I’m excited, of course, but instead of feeling the familiar sadness as the season ends, I feel kind of excited about all the time I’ll have available in the off-season. Maybe I’m just a little tired, but it has me wondering whether my love affair with football is more permanently on the wane, making way for new experiences.  

I want to be in the aliveness of this beautiful existence and there are many places to find that.  And regardless of where that aliveness goes from here, I have loved the world of NFL football.

Anything that you, gentle readers, have committed significant time to that you are considering stepping back from or have recently dropped?

Looking for bridges in views about the second Trump administration. I'm currently aware of four views:

• This is the worst thing ever, I'm terrified
• This is the best thing ever, I'm thrilled
• I don't pay attention to politics, so far my life feels exactly the same
• Some of the changes seem pretty cool so far, but we'll see

Where are the middle grounds? I want to know how to build bridges in my personal connections when politics comes up these days.

SlutCon- Inspiration to bravely step forward. I come from a long line of deeply christian people. Literally some of the first Puritans to come to America were my ancestors. Just yesterday, I was trying to get a sense of how I come across and a person asked me if I was religious due to my general demeanor- golden hair, near glowing blue eyes, fair skin, and some kind of aura that radiates “I memorized bible verses for fun as a child.”

Given this, I think some may find it surprising that when my SF bay girlfriends said they were going to host “Slutcon” that I jumped on the opportunity to participate. I’ve felt hesitant to share that I’m associated with an event using “slut” in the name- fears about people in my professional network shunning me, my family finding out and thinking I’ve gone off the deep end, or potential future partners writing me off. 

Over the past year or so, the organizers of this event, a little slice of bay poly culture, have grown to be people I deeply admire and am really grateful to be building friendships with. Part of my writing is an attempt to do the thing that I admire in them which I’ll try to name.

Something that I don’t think people could possibly know until they experience an event like this is how wholesome and considerate this group of organizers is on the whole. The content seems to confuse a lot of people, as I read comment after comment on twitter of folks unwilling to suspend some cluster of beliefs related to the correlation of pro-sex and being an evil or an STI riddled person. It’s just not true. And I get it– some group somewhere in the world may have these afflictions but it’s not here in bay poly culture, and it’s not at SlutCon.

Instead, there is careful planning: imagining what would bring 120 men delight while also honoring the desires and boundaries of the 60 volunteer women. There’s next-level consideration: from serving allergy-conscious food to building support systems for anyone who’s found themselves past an emotional limit. There is an unmatched openness to feedback: if something goes awry the organizers want to hear about it, there’s a true desire to build better. 

A quick vignette on that for those in my circles that are not familiar- there’s a general culture in the bay of graciously seeking out and receiving feedback. This isn’t like a passive survey your company may send out to get feedback- there are people here with open personal feedback forms soliciting anonymous feedback. And beyond feedback, there is a culture of accountability to feedback. Across various events or social groups, it is common to see detailed accounts of any instances of misconduct- who was involved, what happened, how the organizers failed, what steps are being taken to prevent future occurrences, and the steps being taken with those involved. This is so common that it’s easy to release shame about having done something bad and instead feel motivated to do better. 

Above all, when I’m around the men and women of this community, I feel deeply connected to an ethos that believes good exists in all beings, that there is too much misplaced societal shame, and we should create spaces that cultivate deeper looking, that teach us to love one another better, to find more joy in connection, and yeah- to feel maximum pleasure where it’s available. I see this group as brave, and Aella is definitely a figurehead, putting her authentic self out for all to see, and it’s true of her friends too. 

What I admire most about this group is how they radiate some combination of authenticity mixed with ethos driven by desire to do good AND, despite how risky the content makes it to, they step forward. Being around them, I feel more whole myself and I’m inspired to drink the metaphorical kool-aid.

I’m grateful to be inspired by witnessing their joy and freedom, their pleasure-filled faces after a super-hot make out session at the event they made happen. I’m proud to be affiliated with their creation even if someone wants to call me a slut as a slur. 

I loved the event, in all it’s contradiction, vulnerability, wholesomeness. 

Stay tuned for more reflections including:

• The surprising data on men not completing their boob-touching homework

• My soapbox of “contrived spaces” and how to experience realness everywhere

• Feeling heartbreak while flirting 

• And… The inaugural Strip Circling (™) experience that had people beating down the door to get in

Austin's Proposition Q - A misleading text that really grinds my gears. I've received multiple texts from various groups with this language:

We can debate the merits of Proposition Q separately; what I am worked up about is the absolutely false language about "Trump cuts" to city services like fire, EMS, parks, etc. The federal government doesn't fund municipal services*. The federal government shouldn't fund municipal services, and in fact our fire, EMS, and police being independent of the federal government is a fundamental part of states' rights or how our government is intentionally structured. EVEN if I don't support defunding the police, it was absolutely within Austin's right to do so, and that had nothing to do with federal funding. 

*there are grants that impact some of these services, like the transportation grant Trump did cancel that would include parks over the new I-35, but that is not fundamentally a park funding grant.

How Google and AI are Killing Travel Blogs Like Mine

I just finished reading this blog post by Amanda Williams, a travel blogger of 15 years, on the impact of Google's "helpful content" algo changes and AI on her ability to financial sustain herself.

And man- I might sound dumb here, but I totally had not connected the dots re: how AI will absolutely destroy ad revenue for creators-- specifically creators that produce written content. 

Ad placement is driven by site visitors, and AI totally bypasses the need for a site visit. Instead, it harvests the information from blogs like Amanda's and puts it in a neat list along with the content of 10 other bloggers so a person trying to find the top sites to visit in Paris never needs to even visit the site. 

This is a problem in that, bloggers like Amanda have to switch strategies-- she now needs a new means of making money to continue producing trustworthy travel content. That might be creating a substack with individual subscribers, creating courses, etc. But her content likely won't be publicly available in the future, non-harvestable by AI... and that's a problem too in that AI's knowledge sources are going to get worse and worse. 

Also, I just can't imagine that the 1:1 subscriber model won't be a losing game for soooo many great writers/creators. It's very different to be a person creating content that people are willing to pay for month over month, especially in niche fields like travel, instead of being paid by relevant brands through ads. 

What do y'all think?

Looking for bridges in views about the second Trump administration. I'm currently aware of four views:

• This is the worst thing ever, I'm terrified
• This is the best thing ever, I'm thrilled
• I don't pay attention to politics, so far my life feels exactly the same
• Some of the changes seem pretty cool so far, but we'll see

Where are the middle grounds? I want to know how to build bridges in my personal connections when politics comes up these days.

Left Media Bias bigger than i realized. No matter how you measure (print media, online, page views, paid subscribers, followers, etc) US media leans heavily left, to an extent that surprised me. Most ways I tried back-of-the napkin math have right + right-leaning news sources being below 10%… and even the most generous assessments that include lost of neutral/other outlets still have left + left-leaning above 50% (meaning 5:1 liberal to conservative is the lowest estimate i could find).

Context

The US is pretty evenly split in terms of the two major parties:
> 45% of U.S. adults Republican-ish, 44% Democrat-ish Gallup 2022

Some sources

• Allsides Here’s Allsides review
  their media bias on Allsides.com here’s the site’s own assessment of its own bias
• Googling the top 25 most-subscribed news channels in the United States, and
• Even the more left leaning LLMS can’t help but point out this as a fact of modern media.

Takeaways

• First, this gives me empathy for Republicans. Many American conservatives feel like the underdog, regardless of how much power or influence they yield, because in a very real way, they’re not represented in a substantial part of the public narrative making machine—the media—proportionally. The perception of bias is true despite their being popular conservative outlets with sizable audiences, and as a result the left has influence on public opinion.Impact on Public Trust (but also how come Republicans aren’t better at getting media subscribers?)

• Second, how come Republicans, who are stereotypically thought of us as having more business acumen or money or something, are getting so handily beaten in the media?

• Third, I try not to get involved in politics because I’m scared of loosing connection or turning people off of the value of relatefulness because of my takes, even if they’re nuanced. We’re very good at otherizing people and forgetting to look at nuances. I’m certain I lack nuance. I don’t want a difference of political opinion to get in the way of our connecting. I started writing up this for the TTT email (which I ended up deciding not to send) but I realized others are deeply esconced in politics and way smarter and more educated in the field than I, so I decided to not go there. But here on uptrusting.com I think it’s a cool opporutnity to test; could also be a nice road to empathy, or self-empathy, depending on our identifications.