Wine Video is Here!

Welcome to any new subscribers! In this newsletter I share a few things that I think provide a taste of truth, goodness, or beauty. Sharing something doesn't mean I agree with it, just that I think it's worth some of your attention. I love to learn from quite disparate sources, and I'm sure that will come across in what I share. Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe here.

Finished a marathon over the weekend with a new PR (4:15). The camaraderie and positivity of the race environment is always a highlight. I’m happy to now dial down my mileage a little bit as the Southern heat starts to ramp up.

Returning to the epistemic crisis, this article creates a useful distinction between “echo chambers” and “epistemic bubbles.”

Both are social structures that systematically exclude sources of information. Both exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs. But they work in entirely different ways, and they require very different modes of intervention. An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side.

An ‘epistemic bubble’ is an informational network from which relevant voices have been excluded by omission…An ‘echo chamber’ is a social structure from which other relevant voices have been actively discredited.

In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. The way to break an echo chamber is not to wave “the facts” in the faces of its members. It is to attack the echo chamber at its root and repair that broken trust.

I was reminded during a church Bible study this week how important it is that we continually attempt to hear scripture in a fresh way. Of course, we can never ‘un-know’ what we know and become a truly blank slate. But the point is to avoid the kind of cursory readings that we can do when we assume we already know what we’re reading. Even if you were to spend a lifetime deeply studying the Bible, you’d never exhaust its riches. In a few weeks we’ll be in Holy Week and Easter, hearing passages of scripture that we’ve heard many times before. How might you preserve fresh ears as you hear the account of Christ’s death and resurrection?

Microplastics found in human blood the first time. Truly, a troubling finding, and I have little doubt that future generations will look back at our shortsightedness with regard to plastics in a similar way that my generations looks at widespread smoking in the 20th century.

Enjoy a good glass of wine this week to celebrate the release of my wine video.

God bless,

Ralph

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Ralph Roberts

Wine Video is Here!

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