Jerry, this piece does something that most writing about polarization doesn't: it locates the problem at the right level. The media bubble explanation has always felt incomplete, and the Pew data finally puts a number on why. The interpretation gap being larger than the information gap is not a minor finding but rather reframes the whole conversation.
The DEI exchange you walk through is a perfect illustration of what we've been working through together and what strikes me most is that your reader wasn't unintelligent or even wholly uninformed, she had taught the subject (which can be terrifying in a whole other way but not to digress), she had experience. Yet, she still arrived at a definition that the policy itself rules out. That's not ignorance, it's definitely drift, and the question just might be is the drift structural, personal as in self-serving, or something or else.
The magnet word framing is spot on here too b/c once a word starts pulling associations toward itself, the original referent doesn't just get blurred, it gets buried. People aren't arguing about DEI anymore, they're arguing about whatever their version of the word has accumulated over years of exposure. And this is where the work needs to be done b/c you can correct the facts in one conversation and the word shows up un-pinned in the next one. That's the part that makes this so difficult to fix at the individual level, and exactly why the repair has to happen at the organizational and infrastructural level.
That's where I think MRCI does work that nothing else currently does. The scoping review across those eight disciplines is already surfacing something important: the repair strategies that exist are scattered, discipline-specific, and rarely designed for organizations operating under pressure. The framework pulls that together into something that can actually be applied, not just described. The through line from your fitness reports to the dissertation to the book to the review is worth naming clearly, because it shows this isn't a theoretical project. It started in a system that ran your career on words nobody defined, and it hasn't stopped being personal since, and that grounding is what makes the framework credible. It was built at the core of the problem.
Jerry, this piece does something that most writing about polarization doesn't: it locates the problem at the right level. The media bubble explanation has always felt incomplete, and the Pew data finally puts a number on why. The interpretation gap being larger than the information gap is not a minor finding but rather reframes the whole conversation.
The DEI exchange you walk through is a perfect illustration of what we've been working through together and what strikes me most is that your reader wasn't unintelligent or even wholly uninformed, she had taught the subject (which can be terrifying in a whole other way but not to digress), she had experience. Yet, she still arrived at a definition that the policy itself rules out. That's not ignorance, it's definitely drift, and the question just might be is the drift structural, personal as in self-serving, or something or else.
The magnet word framing is spot on here too b/c once a word starts pulling associations toward itself, the original referent doesn't just get blurred, it gets buried. People aren't arguing about DEI anymore, they're arguing about whatever their version of the word has accumulated over years of exposure. And this is where the work needs to be done b/c you can correct the facts in one conversation and the word shows up un-pinned in the next one. That's the part that makes this so difficult to fix at the individual level, and exactly why the repair has to happen at the organizational and infrastructural level.
That's where I think MRCI does work that nothing else currently does. The scoping review across those eight disciplines is already surfacing something important: the repair strategies that exist are scattered, discipline-specific, and rarely designed for organizations operating under pressure. The framework pulls that together into something that can actually be applied, not just described. The through line from your fitness reports to the dissertation to the book to the review is worth naming clearly, because it shows this isn't a theoretical project. It started in a system that ran your career on words nobody defined, and it hasn't stopped being personal since, and that grounding is what makes the framework credible. It was built at the core of the problem.
Great read!
I totally agree. I've experienced this so many times. I'll keep doing this work.