Currents 044: Zak Stein on Propaganda and the Information War

Zak Stein & Jim have a wide-ranging talk inspired by two recent Consilience Project essays on the information war & propaganda... Zak Stein & Jim have a wide-ranging talk inspired by two recent Consilience Project essays on the information war & propaganda. They discuss the culture wars as a case of mutually assured destruction, distinguishing education from propaganda, developing widespread resistance to propaganda, epistemic nihilism, key indicators of propaganda, the function of thought-terminating clichés, a typology of propaganda, leaders' failure to educate rather than propagandize regarding Covid vaccines, modulating noise & chaos in the information ecosystem, redirecting technological innovation toward new goals of educational development, and much more. Episode Transcript Zak’s Website JRS: EP57 Zak Stein on Education in a Time Between Worlds JRS: EP60 Zak Stein on Educational Systems Collapse JRS: EP62 Zak Stein on Education, Tech & Religion JRS: EP 113 Zak Stein on Hierarchical Complexity "It's a MAD Information War" - The Consilence Project "WE DON'T MAKE PROPAGANDA! THEY DO!" - The Consilience Project JRS: EP143 Robert Tercek on the Metaverse "The science literacy paradox: Why really smart people tend to have the most biased opinions" On Bullshit, by Harry G. Frankfurt Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, by Jacques Ellul Zachary Stein is a writer, educator, and futurist working to bring a greater sense of sanity and justice to education. He studied philosophy and religion at Hampshire College, and then educational neuroscience, human development, and the philosophy of education at Harvard University. While a student at Harvard, he co-founded what would become Lectica, Inc., a non-profit dedicated to the research-based, justice-oriented reform of large-scale standardized testing in K-12, higher-education, and business. He has published two books. Social Justice and Educational Measurement was based on his dissertation and traces the history of standardized testing and its ethical implications. His second book, Education in a Time Between Worlds, expands the philosophical work to include grappling with the relations between schooling and technology more broadly. He writes for peer-reviewed academic journals across a range of topics including the philosophy of learning, educational technology, and integral theory. He’s a scholar at the Ronin Institute, Co-President and Academic Director of the activist think-tank at the Center for Integral Wisdom, and scientific advisor to the board of the Neurohacker Collective, as well as a co-founder of The Consilience Project.