1/18 (Tue.) Good and bad of 2022 Host:Shirley

[Shirley Hsu]

Hi, everyone, I am Shirley, the host for this coming Tuesday.
At the beginning of the year, let's discuss the topic "Good and bad of 2022", which may inspire and motivate yourself to live better in this new year.

Good and bad of 2022
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/25/what-bi ... -2022.html


Declining trust makes it harder to tackle big challenges
I’ve had a lot of people ask me recently if I’m still optimistic about the future. While the answer is yes, being an optimist doesn’t mean ignoring problems. I am deeply troubled by one challenge in particular.
The pandemic has been a massive test of governance. When the pandemic finally comes to an end, it will be a tribute to the power of global cooperation and innovation. At the same time, this era has shown us how declining trust in public institutions is creating tangible problems and complicating our efforts to respond to challenges. Based on what I’ve seen over the last couple of years, I’m more worried than I’ve ever been about the ability of governments to get big things done.
We need governments to take action if we’re going to make progress on challenges like avoiding a climate disaster or preventing the next pandemic. But declining trust makes it harder for them to be effective. If your people don’t trust you, they’re not going to support major new initiatives. And when a major crisis emerges, they’re less likely to follow guidance necessary to weather the storm.
This decline in trust is happening all over the world. The 2021 Edelman Trust Index shows worrying drops across the globe. Part of it is understandable: Any time you have a really big crisis like a pandemic, people look for someone to blame. Governments are an obvious target.
But this trend toward less trust in government didn’t start in 2020. The pandemic only made clearer what had already been happening.
So, who or what is to blame? It’s clear that increased polarization is a significant driver. This is especially evident here in the United States, although we’re far from alone. Americans are becoming more divided and more deeply entrenched in their political beliefs. The gap between the left and the right is becoming a gulf that’s harder and harder to bridge.
There are many reasons for this growing divide, including a 24-hour news cycle, a political climate that rewards headline generation over substantive debate, and the rise of social media. I’m especially interested in understanding the latter, since it’s the most technologically driven.
Digital communication has profound benefits in terms of helping people collaborate, stay in touch, and share things with each other. But social media has played a huge role in spreading misinformation that makes people suspicious of their governments. Social media feeds have become so personalized that you don't see factual information if it doesn't align with your profile.
I believe that governments need to regulate what you can and can’t use social media for. In the United States, this topic has raised a lot of free speech questions. But the reality is that our government already has all sorts of norms around communication.
You can’t slander someone or trick them out of their money by promising something you don’t deliver on. Network TV shows can’t show explicit sex scenes or use certain profane language before 10 p.m. in case children are watching. These rules exist to protect people. So why couldn’t our government create new rules to protect them from the most tangible harms created by social media? They wouldn’t be easy to enforce, and we’d need public debate about exactly where the lines should be, but this is doable and really important to get done. A video falsely claiming that the COVID-19 vaccine makes you infertile should not be allowed to spread widely under the guise of being news.
As people become more polarized on both sides of the aisle, politicians are incentivized to take increasingly extreme positions. In the past, if you didn’t like the way a government agency was operating, you’d run on a platform of fixing it. Today, we’re seeing more people get elected on the promise of abandoning institutions and norms outright.
When your government leaders are the ones telling you not to trust government, who are you supposed to believe? This creates a compounding effect where people lose confidence in government, elect politicians who share their distrust, and then become even more disillusioned as their leaders tell them how bad the institutions they now run are.


Reasons for optimism in 2022
My work has always been driven by a simple idea: The world can get better. A big setback like the pandemic makes it harder to believe that progress is possible. I’m still optimistic, though, about our ability to build a world where everyone has the chance to live a healthy and productive life.
But that ability is dependent on whether we can stop the next pandemic. We can’t afford to repeat the suffering of the last two years. The world had a chance to invest in the tools and systems that could’ve prevented the COVID-19 pandemic, and we didn’t take it. Now is the time to learn from our mistakes and take steps to prevent this terrible experience from ever happening again.
The good news is that the world no longer needs to be persuaded that stopping a pandemic is important. I’m hopeful that we’ll see broad support for pandemic preparedness efforts, and I plan on spending a lot of time advocating for them. This is the biggest and most important thing I’m going to work on in 2022. I’m currently writing a book that will come out some time next year, which lays out my plan for making sure that COVID-19 is the last pandemic.


Session I:

1. 2021 was an incredibly hard year for many people.
Do you share the same feeling in Taiwan? What was your biggest concern and challenge last year?

2. Are you optimistic about 2022?
Do you believe your work/health/interpersonal relations/leisure will be getting better this year?

3. In Gates’ recently published end-of-year blog post, he shows optimism about the rise of the metaverse. What do you think the role of augmented reality is in future work, shopping, and lifestyle?

4. Bill Gates is optimistic and hopeful that the end of Covid pandemic is finally in sight, possibly within this year. When Omicron runs rampant all over the world now, what do you think about Gate’s prediction?

Session II:

5. a. What makes a good character?
There are many good traits like Integrity, honesty, loyalty, self-sacrifice, accountability, self-control and many others. Are these traits equally important when building trust?
b. How much do you trust other people? How do you know if someone is trustworthy? Have you had the experience of trusting the wrong person?

6. Declining trust makes it harder to tackle big challenges.
a. Do you think the declining trust in governments is a global phenomenon?
b. What causes the shrinking trust in governments?
c. Why is declining trust Bill Gates most worried about heading into 2022? (In your opinion, how to restore people’s trust in governments?)

7. Do you think people in Taiwan trust their government?
Do you believe our government is performing effectively in pandemic control, vaccination and subsidy policies? What makes you think so?


******************************************************************************************************
Agenda:
6:45 ~ 7:00pm Greetings & Free Talk / Ordering Beverage or Meal / Getting Newcomer’s Information
7:00 ~ 7:10pm Opening Remarks / Newcomer’s Self-introduction / Grouping
(Session I)
7:10 ~ 7:50pm Discussion Session (40 mins)
7:50 ~ 8:10pm Summarization (20 mins)
8:10 ~ 8:15pm Regrouping / Instruction Giving / Taking a 10 Minutes Break (Intermission)
(Session II)
8:15 ~ 8:55pm Discussion Session (40 mins)
9:00 ~ 9:20pm Summarization (20 mins)
9:20 ~ 9:30pm Concluding Remarks / Announcements

Meeting Date: As shown on the Subject Line
Meeting Time: 7:00pm – 9:30pm
Meeting Venue: 丹堤咖啡 Dante Coffee (Minimum Order $80)
Address: 台北市濟南路三段25號[MAP]-捷運忠孝新生站3號出口步行3分鐘

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[Iris Wu]

I do share some thoughts and concerns of Bill Gates’ views about 2022.
In general, I think the pandemic will either end or become a new normal in 2022, and the technology advancements will only stay and continue, but my list of concerns may be a bit longer.

First, the inflation rose after pandemic and may linger around longer and broader than we expected.
Secondly, the divide, in financial aspect or political partitions, gets wider and deeper.

Distrust of governments, the most concerned issue by Bill Gates, for me, isn’t anything new or worse. I think the phenomenon has been around in human history for a long time, but now we just have the tools to surface it up easier and get to form all different kinds of “echo chambers” more convenient than any time in the history. Gates said he does not have solutions for this and will continue searching for answers. I am not optimistic in this regard. Two-party or even multi-party political systems are facing a lot of challenges. Autocratic system is surely not the answer, but the mentality that two-party democratic system is “the lesser of two evils” has been around for several hundred years, but it is still not optimized.

[Iris Wu]

When human beings are not satisfied with our physical reality, can virtual reality or augmented reality help? The metaverse is sort of promising. It is currently focusing on gaming, but can it become part of our work and social environments? What are the pros and cons of the meta universe?
In the past few years, we were promised by tech pioneers on Big Data, AI, blockchain technology, drones, autonomous vehicles, and now, metaverse. All in all, how would these innovations stay to change our lives? I don’t know, but I am more optimistic and open-minded about technology advancements than political and social progress.

[Shirley Hsu]

Thank you, Iris!
In my opinion, the pandemic has become the new normal, and social media further enabled the "echo chamber" effect. Inflation also concerns me a bit. The world’s top 10 richest people have almost doubled their wealth during the epidemic while most people suffer from inflation.
Advances in the metaverse are gradually changing our lives. How to react with a cautious attitude and with an open mind, is also an issue worth paying attention to.

[Iris Wu]

In the meeting, people were asking if the metaverse needs the VR glasses. Here is a paragraph briefly explaining the current development of the two major players, Meta(FB) and Microsoft:

“However, much of Meta’s vision is speculative and would rely on technologies and server capacity that doesn’t currently exist. It also assumes the wide-spread adoption of hardware such as VR headsets and digital glasses.

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), meanwhile, is focused on adapting technologies it currently has for the metaverse. They have a service called Mesh, a mixed reality platform, that allows users to access augmented reality environments via their smartphone or laptop without having to buy a virtual reality headset. Microsoft also plans to integrate Microsoft Teams into the metaverse, creating a more immersive experience for remote workers and virtual meetings.“

— quoted from https://www.google.com/amp/s/seekingalp ... -metaverse

[Shirley Hsu]

Attendees(15):

Alice, Carmelo, Chris, Iris, Jerry, Jessica, Jeff, Miller, Morris, Rock, Ryan, Sherry, Steve, Wenhan, Shirley(host)

Session 1 speaker:
Rock, Wenhan, Miller, Jessica

Session 2 speaker:
Morris, Steve, Carmelo

Thank you for joining.