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"Mercier writes of renewing the “fragile chains of trust” *—that is, shoring up institutions and bodies of experts, and holding them accountable for more accurate communication with the larger public." I would love to see more accurate communication with the public from institutions. It is disheartening to see institutions settle for simple messages that ignore complexity and even prevent complexity from being explored by oversimplifying. People are smarter than that and it just results in disengagement from anyone of a different mind.

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Yes, I agree. Ignoring complexity is one of the besetting vices of our time, in my view. Institutional messaging is pretty appalling much of the time, and that may be the inevitable result of large institutions using bureaucratese combined with a favored ideology. I think Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" is perennially compelling and maybe more than ever now. Of course, I always need to remind myself that there's often a "demand side" for simplistic, crude, or ideologically-saturated communication, an audience that may want to read or hear it, and expects to read or hear it. This makes the trust problem a collective action problem for both institutional leaders and/or spokespeople as well as the citizenry in general. That's why I'm finding the research and perspectives of Mercier, Page, and Williams I mentioned here better at explaining what's at work with communication and trust problems, and the constant flashing of the terms "misinformation" and "disinformation" isn't especially helpful in rebuilding those "fragile chains of trust."

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I just saw this post from Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel in their Power of Us substack:

"How Institutions Can Create Social Cohesion," Their research on institutions and trust looks very appropriate for the times we're in.

https://powerofus.substack.com/p/how-institutions-can-create-social

Apt quote here: "Without trusted institutions to create a broader cohesion, people will likely fall back on more parochial identities and nepotistic social networks. The social fabric starts to fray. Things come undone. Corruption and discrimination is likely to follow."

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I thought I'd pass this along as well, though some readers here may already have heard about it--Stanford's "Strengthening Democracy Challenge". It's a initiative to promote evidence-based interventions for decreasing polarization and increasing trust in politics, culture, and civil society in general. There is a research paper on the site here that's well worth reading. In. my opinion, this is what libraries need to do--more evidence-based approaches in programming, collaborating with either academics or community organizations, to increase trust, rather than aligning with ideologies and identitarianism that divide and increase polarization.

https://www.strengtheningdemocracychallenge.org/challenge-info

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