The patient is certainly alive and, fortunately, is not in the “red zone”. Pathology remains within the normal limits, not all is lost. It is necessary to continue the course of treatment, possibly making certain adjustments. At the same time, we are forced to reiterate that the Gorchakovs have not yet been found in vaccine diplomacy. Nor the Talleyrands, apparently.

the cross-border movement of goods and services (1), capital (2) and labour resources (3)

The first is dependence on the political environment.

a third failure — this time consular and legal.

the issue of international mutual recognition of vaccine certificates and QR codes arises.

Protectionism breeds patriotism among consumers.

the second failure of vaccine diplomacy — already at the trade and economic level.

Vaccine supermarkets did not open.

Maybe a kind of vaccine supermarket could be formed at the global level, albeit one which is much more important and “close at hand” at the local level.

the first failure of vaccine diplomacy — with regards to science and technology.

all the participants in the world arena must unite in the face of a global catastrophe; collaboration rather than competition is chosen among politicians and professional diplomats, and most importantly, of course, among scientists.

Preventing the Next Pandemic — Vaccine Diplomacy

not-yet-fully-established political science constructs

“Their target are the tenuously middle class. People who feel the system squeezing them and feel their grip on solvency slipping away. Who feel the gig economy strangling them. And they’re pitching them with, ‘This is your chance,’” Olson said. “‘You just need to bet on the right coin. You just need to bet on the right meme at the right time. You just need to bet on the right ape, and you can cash out. You can escape.’”

the audience for those stories are people with a lot more to lose.

Those narratives are usually told via press releases, company announcements, or news coverage where the only voices present are the ones who stand to gain the most.

the ones holding that bag could end up being average people who were simply taken in by a good story.

This has already happened with mana on a couple of occasions. In the two days following Facebook’s rebrand to Meta, the price of mana which, at the time, had rarely scraped above $1, skyrocketed to $3.71. At the time, news outlets— starting with niche crypto-enthusiast sites like CoinDesk, then later CNBC—reported the rising price of mana and interpreted it as positive interest in “the metaverse.”

Decentraland

“People need to kind of have a narrative behind it. Because at the end of the day, you're just buying numbers in a computer,”

Decentraland’s pitch is that using NFTs makes land in its gameworld scarce and, thus, valuable.

in a world where anyone could feasibly create an infinite amount of alternative Manhattans that are just as easy to get to.

“They're selling their tokens that give you permission to build within their space. So you’re effectively buying into their service.”

Decentraland or the Sandbox

In these articles, executives from Metaverse Group, a self-described “virtual real estate” company, described buying plots of land in “the metaverse” as akin to buying property in Manhattan long before the city developed.

this nebulous future is going to happen.

Services like Meta’s Horizon Worlds and Microsoft’s Mesh don’t interact with each other, they’re just separate VR apps.

in writing a rulebook for algorithms

its Dynabench platform.

Much of the value in the collaboration comes from the feedback that humans give the algorithms.

add to operational costs

Companies that can develop AI algorithms with stronger explanatory capabilities will be in a better position to win the trust of consumers and regulators.

applying multiple explainability standards will most likely be more complex and costly—because a company would, in essence, be creating different algorithms for different markets and would probably have to add more AI to ensure interoperability.

To deploy such AI, firms will need to be able to explain how an algorithm defines similarities between customers, why certain differences between two prospects may justify different treatments, and why similar customers may get different explanations about the AI.

to predict default risks and maintain real-time credit ratings.

it may turn out that the applicant’s zip code is what makes the difference, with otherwise solid applicants from Black neighborhoods being penalized.

if the only difference between two applicants is that one is 24 and the other is 25, then the explanation would be that the first applicant would have been granted a loan if he’d been older than 24.

Local explanations offer the rationale behind a specific output—say, why one applicant (or class of applicants) was denied a loan while another was granted one.

But all an end product’s components and how they combine and interconnect will need to be explainable.

lack the advanced skills in mathematics or computer science needed to understand such a formula, let alone determine whether the relationships specified in it are appropriate.

All you have to do is share its formula.

The GDPR already describes “the right…to obtain an explanation of the decision reached” by algorithms, and the EU has identified explainability as a key factor in increasing trust in AI in its white paper and AI regulation proposal.

When people make a mistake, there’s usually an inquiry and an assignment of responsibility, which may impose legal penalties on the decision-maker.

system audits, documentation and data protocols (for traceability), AI monitoring, and diversity awareness training.

Average statistics can mask discrimination among regions or subpopulations, and avoiding it may require customizing algorithms for each subset.

which brings us to the next factor.

the way they differ across populations

It’s difficult for people to accept that machines can process highly contextual situations.

human judgment is trusted more, in part because of people’s capacity for empathy

mechanical and bounded—think optimizing a timetable or analyzing images—software is regarded as at least as trustworthy as humans.

Amazon ultimately decided not to leverage AI as a recruiting tool but rather to use it to detect flaws in its current recruiting approach.

which might make people likely to defer to the algorithms more often than they should.

increase human decision-makers’ accountability

fallen back on standard antidiscrimination legislation

exploring four factors:

the potential scale of bias: Any flaw could affect millions of people, exposing companies to class-action lawsuits of historic proportions and putting their reputations at risk.

no agreed-upon definition of fairness

to code some concept of fairness into the software, requiring that all outcomes meet certain conditions.

If that data is biased, then the AI will acquire and may even amplify the bias.

AI systems that produce biased results have been making headlines. One well-known example is Apple’s credit card algorithm, which has been accused of discriminating against women, triggering an investigation by New York’s Department of Financial Services. But the problem crops up in many other guises: for instance, in ubiquitous online advertisement algorithms, which may target viewers by race, religion, or gender, and in Amazon’s automated résumé screener, which filtered out female candidates. A recent study published in Science showed that risk prediction tools used in health care, which affect millions of people in the United States every year, exhibit significant racial bias. Another study, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, found that the software used by leading hospitals to prioritize recipients of kidney transplants discriminated against Black patients.

to guide executives through those tasks, drawing in part on concepts applied to the management of strategic risks.

“On Artificial Intelligence—A European Approach to Excellence and Trust” and its 2021 proposal for an AI legal framework

put smaller European companies at a considerable disadvantage

Some argue that curbing it will hamper the economic performance of Europe and the United States relative to less restrictive countries, notably China, whose digital giants have thrived with the help of ready, lightly regulated access to personal information of all sorts.

It is precisely on account of the humility the Lord had instilled in the mind of Calvin that I am drawn to him.

Humility is the supreme virtue according to Calvin, not only in attitude but in all of life.42

"Calvinism is the doctrine that teaches that God picks those He wants and condemns those He doesn't want."

Modesty and Humility

The technologies of humility I propose would require us to improve our skills of normative forecasting: to ask whether we framed our questions right; to draw in marginalized and uncomfortable viewpoints; to review our history of crises with less triumphalist eyes; and always to identify who is most vulnerable if we go wrong, and who would bear the costs.

the absence of mechanisms for generating, even temporarily, a sense of a common purpose in the United States, the very failing that Kaufman also bewail

The U.S. self-understanding of a technologically superior society, able to cure any ill with a well-timed technological fix, has to be sure enjoyed wide currency in the post-colonial world, but that technocratic vision is precisely what needs to be shaken in the aftermath of the pandemic, with a turn toward humility as I suspect White would agree.

this results in an over-valuation of predictive, technical knowledge in relation to insights from history, sociology and politics

there are deep-seated, systematic, institutional commitments to ways of knowing—civic epistemologies as I call them—that consistently demote some kinds of knowledge at the expense of others.

Her emphasis was on more biological knowledge and better management, not absence of political understanding and resulting lack of control.

Instead of worrying about the political context into which their decisions would land, they repeatedly focused on closing gaps in our scientific knowledge of how pandemics arise and spread

rather a set of “institutional mechanisms” designed to incorporate “memory, experience, and concerns for justice into our schemes of governance and public policy.”

we could all do better to stay grounded, conscious of our humble natures, fragilities, and interdependence.

the problem is that we don’t agree on this priority, not that we are too certain in our evaluations of risk.

It is just that the governors of Florida and Texas have a very different set of priorities and values from those that Jasanoff embraces.

the United States also lacks shared values

The U.S. Achilles’s heel is not lack of humility; it is a toxic social ideology rooted in a blind obsession with individual freedom.

virulent opposition to social reciprocity, to any sense of a common and mutual commitment to one another as members of a shared community

One potential consequence is that while the United States suffered over 244 excess deaths per 100,000 population since March 2020, cumulative excess deaths have totaled only 93 per 100,000 in Vietnam and 150 per 100,000 in Cuba, despite being substantially poorer countries.

“we embraced preparedness when we should have opted for precaution.”

The Afghan army in the summer of 2021 seemed formidable when judged by advanced weapons and numbers of soldiers but proved to be a proverbial “paper tiger” by evaporating overnight when challenged militarily.

the most fundamental ethical question posed by prediction is not how we can better assess whether certain events will take place; it’s what we should do once it is clear they cannot be avoided.

The burden of responsibility is reliably passed around until it simply dissipates into resignation to the status quo.

Buridan’s ass

we are too uncertain to select from, we postpone a decision until one course of action seems inevitable.

a neoliberal tool for shifting burdens onto individuals, rather than pursuing structural change

Existential ethics, she argued, requires us to act in the face of these constraints, not in spite of them.

we become aware of the contingency of our lives—and our responsibility in shaping them

the avoidance of choice.

not-knowing and not-doing:

the failure to act

how our present actions are directly contributing to bringing about, or at least making more likely, certain kinds of futures

to ourselves as knowing and acting subjects.

is right to point to the limitations of a “preparedness” regime, with its distinctive approaches to global risk assessment.

The more relevant virtue in preparing for the next crisis is willingness to improve, expand, and integrate our knowledge.

While it directs us to reflect on what we cannot do, it does not help us make better choices on things we can do.

It can serve to excuse not knowing what was in fact knowable, and not being prepared for what we should have seen coming.

The problem was not in the aspiration to preparedness but with a technocratic approach to preparedness that sidelined certain variables as irrelevant and ignored political realities and citizens’ needs.

Consistently missing was knowledge about social and political factors

a different kind of knowledge that would have allowed for better planning could have been pursued but wasn’t

All three assumed public buy-in and full compliance. Their assumptions about political unity were naïve

The Global Health Security Index model did not include variables on political polarization and trust, income inequality, racial disparities, or the marginalization of groups and regions in its calculations.

those who are involved in seeking knowledge and making policy have some control over what it looks like.

from choices about where to put our limited resources of time, money, and attention.

Any decision about what knowledge to pursue is also a decision about what areas of uncertainty and ignorance we can live with—whose problems we can safely ignore

We must pay attention to the possibility of mistakes and take precautions to make them less costly.

Scientists themselves are usually the first to acknowledge uncertainty and non-knowing due to these limitations.

It is almost a truism that scientific knowledge is inherently uncertain, fallible, and incomplete.

some inherent limitations of scientific inquiry are appropriately faced with humility

we acknowledge the likelihood of mistakes and accept the possibility of defeat rather than being confident in our predictions and capacity for control.

Jasanoff grounds her plea for humility in the uncertainty and unpredictability that characterize such crises.

Hume notoriously dismissed humility as a “monkish virtue,” arguing that it is neither useful nor agreeable to the self or to others.

umility has not always been among the popular virtues.

re too often based on the supposed greater rationality and modernity of Western societies.

The result is not a world unified in confronting illnesses all too capable of crossing national borders, but rather one in which the needs of the Western world are always put first.

we must care about the dying child of a distant land not because her suffering is intrinsically objectionable, but because the diseases of elsewhere can easily become our own.

The microbe that felled one child in a distant continent yesterday can reach yours today and seed a global pandemic tomorrow.

“to prevent, protect against, control and provide a public health response to the international spread of disease in ways that are commensurate with and restricted to public health risks, and which avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade.”

humanism must be a central component of the humility

they are rooted in a distinctively Western vision of a history of self-styled superiority to the rest of the world

too confidently acting upon such imperfect knowledge.

The proposal, in short, meant risking the lives of tens of thousands of Muslims in a spurious effort to protect European lives and economic interests

the French delegation proposed suspending all maritime traffic into and out of Arabian ports. In effect, pilgrims who did not wish to remain in Mecca would be condemned to a perilous journey across the Arabian desert and most likely death from disease or dehydration.

866 the third International Sanitary Conference—an early forerunner of the World Health Organization (WHO)—convened in Constantinople at the request of the French government,

Humility demands just that kind of self-abnegation from power and policy: to win greater knowledge because it sees from the margins as well as the center, and deeper wisdom because it acknowledges the imperfections of human understanding.

The technologies of humility would have us reflect longer and harder on the obligations we incur when acting on imperfect knowledge, by adopting the perspectives of those who are acted upon or are themselves not able to intervene.

the technologies of humility may be less humble than the techniques of prediction.

to “inspire and mobilize the public.”

why people did not trust the experts when their children’s health was at stake

Had technologies of humility been more actively integrated into our schemes of governance and planning, we would not have missed phenomena such as vaccine hesitancy until they arrived on our doorstep as if unannounced.

to be sure we are asking the best questions.

But precaution, as a foil to preparedness, invites us to reflect with humility on the unknown unknowns, the surprises lurking beyond the imaginations of the best-trained minds that end up hurting those least able to defend themselves.

Hamburg spoke about “efforts to identify critical gaps in knowledge that would affect the contours and control measures for this pandemic.”

Garbage in, garbage out, as the computer scientists put it: everyone knows that bad inputs produce flawed outputs, and predictions are only as good as the data they rest on.

With massive advances in data science and technology, humankind is in a position to process information about almost anything that moves on the planet at sweeping scales and speeds.

early in the trajectory of emergence, more will be unknown than known, and decisionmakers will have to act on incomplete information.

the GHSI assumed that all nations agree it is in their collective best interest to act in unison in a pandemic. Sadly, the chronicle of COVID-19—from the still unresolved question of how the virus first infected humans, to the surprising persistence of vaccine hesitancy—contradicts that basic assumption.

securing public health and public safety requires human beings to give up aspects of their liberty in the interests of a common good

Nor had U.S. governance ever involved the centralized control that the nation’s leading public health experts yearned for.

Fast forward to October 2021. According to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center, the United States, which led the GHSI as top scorer in preparedness, has the highest number of recorded COVID-19 deaths in the world, a staggering 740,000. The UK, ranked number two in the GHSI, has recorded more total deaths than any EU country. More tellingly, Britain ranks ahead of most major EU countries in deaths per 100,000 population.

none of the authors paid much attention to the swiftly moving, shape-shifting events, cutting across geopolitical lines, that impede rational analysis and effective response during an actual pandemic.

All three documents—the GHSI, the playbook, and the Fineberg editorial—earn high marks as delineations of steps that intelligent and decisive policymakers should take in their efforts to be prepared for emerging infectious diseases.

It was a valiant attempt to identify all the relevant questions that should be asked at the onset of an outbreak, compiled with the earnest attention that one might expect in a first-rate “policy analysis exercise” at one of our top public policy schools.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the United States and the United Kingdom scored highest while small, war-torn, and politically unstable states fared worst, with North Korea, Somalia, and Equatorial Guinea bringing up the rear in national capacity.

The short answer is that we embraced preparedness when we should have opted for precaution.

Why did we not know when the information was there to be known? Why were we caught unprepared?

what we can do but who might get hurt, what happened when we tried before, whose perceptions were systematically ignored, and what protections are in place if we again guess wrong.

technologies of humility: institutional mechanisms—including greater citizen participation—for incorporating memory, experience, and concerns for justice into our schemes of governance and public policy.

Decades of effort to protect human health and the environment suggest that the choice is not so stark or binary.

Humility, by contrast, admits that defeat is possible

Preparedness, in short, is a heroic, can-do posture, bravely denying the possibility of defeat.

What I offer here is a plea for humility, not merely as a stance of modesty vis-à-vis the powerful and still poorly understood forces of nature and society, but also as a practice of reasoning and policy that accepts uncertainty as its foundation and harm mitigation as its goal.

Can one operationalize the precautionary mindset as a positive alternative to the known failures of prediction?

to enable and justify prudent forward movement to serve the common good, even when the consequences of acting cannot be completely known

Yet precaution remains deeply controversial. Critics frequently dismiss it as a recipe for inaction and stagnation.

reveals overconfidence in the pictures of nature and society on which predictions were based.

What I offer here is a plea for humility as a practice of reasoning and policy that accepts uncertainty as its foundation and harm mitigation as its goal.

People are led astray by confirmation bias, where they pay attention to data that confirms their idea, and they escalate commitments by continuing to advocate for their plans even in the face of negative information.

You want people to propose ideas and be passionate about them, but you also want them to be totally honest about the potential negatives.

“What are the key assumptions, and what data will make them flawed?”

his team failed to dissect a crucial assumption — that the invasion by some 1,400 Cuban exiles would lead to a popular uprising against the Castro regime.

You can also ask a colleague to play devil’s advocate, where you ask them, for the sake of argument, to take the opposing view. But make sure to get the opposing view on the table.

a “climate in which people feel free to express work-relevant thoughts and feelings.”

‘Hey, we’re going to have this meeting. I know you have a particular viewpoint, and I think it’s very important that it gets heard, so I’d like to make sure you share it with the group.’”

Why? First, it frames the problem to be debated. If the problem is too general, the discussion will go all over the place; if it’s too narrow, that will limit the options. So spend time thinking about the best question. And make sure it isn’t leading, meaning it doesn’t bias the answers. Second, it signals that you want real debate, not just a charade of one. Third, it invites people with different ideas to speak up.

Why? First, it frames the problem to be debated. If the problem is too general, the discussion will go all over the place; if it’s too narrow, that will limit the options. So spend time thinking about the best question. And make sure it isn’t leading, meaning it doesn’t bias the answers. Second, it signals that you want real debate, not just a charade of one. Third, it invites people with different ideas to speak up.

Biases create opportunities, but they also surround them with behavioral and social traps that prevent strategists recognizing and acting upon them, which means that mainstream managers often lack the insight, capabilities, and self-confidence needed to disrupt the status quo — and all the more so if that status quo was their creation in the first place. To avoid those traps, be a smart contrarian: Lean into cognitive dissonance, cast a wide net, embrace diversity, and stay on the outside.

If you are to leverage diversity, you should avoid relying on consensus.

targeting counter-stereotypical applicants with decent debt/income ratio and credit scores

The ideas of the people in elite networks tended to converge as the networks did not change much, which trapped them in their prior experiences and made them less likely to evaluate new ideas differently from the way they had evaluated prior ideas.

a smart contrarian – someone who looks for business practices that don’t make sense, who’s not too reliant on a small group of like-minded people, who can embrace diversity, and who’s happier on the sidelines. Let’s look at what that involves.

They dismiss ideas that challenge their assumptions about how the world works, make judgments based on stereotyping, and create cultures that limit their choices.

Quantum computers solve many problems exponentially faster and with less energy consumption than classical, or binary, computers.

"The game allows you to organize pieces that, like in life, are coming at you faster and upside down, in such a way that they’ll literally leave the screen. It’s like a microcosm of what you’re trying to do in life, except you’re doing it on the screen in a more concrete and tangible way,” she says.

“When we’re seeking ways to soothe ourselves, we often use a version of something that has worked in the past, even the distant past,”

“To clarify, the paragraph about Xinjiang in the letter is only for expressing the original intention of compliance and legality, not its intention or position.”

Our lives, after all, are defined by what we choose to pay attention to.

anything you’ve always said you wanted to do or learn but didn’t have time for.

to “microdose” on fun

by prioritizing the people and activities that are the most likely to create it for you.

personal fun “magnets,”

Think of times when you laughed with other people and felt completely engrossed in the experience. What were you doing? Who were you with? What made the experience feel so good?

“Fake” fun is my term for activities that take up our leisure time, but they don’t inspire playfulness or connection, or result in the total engagement that happens with flow.

When people are having actual fun, they report feeling focused and present, free from anxiety and self-criticism.

And “flow” describes the state of being fully engaged and focused, often to the point that you lose track of time.

Connection

Playfulness

playful people are better at managing stress.

Digital Platforms and Global Value Chains

Where Is the iPhone Made?

Last-minute pressure from China and India resulted in heavily watered-down language in the final agreement: Rather than calling on countries to accelerate the “phasing out of coal and subsidies for fossil fuels,” the agreement’s final language states the goal of “accelerating efforts toward the phase-down of unabated coal power and inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.” This is not simply a matter of semantics. The text is littered with phrases like “requests” and “calls upon” and “invites” and “encourages,” starkly reminding us that the pact is not binding.