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Education Reading Vietnam War Watergate

The Man Nobody Knew

The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby is a 2011 documentary by his son Carl exploring his life and career at the CIA.

The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby is a 2011 American documentary film exploring the life and career of former CIA director William Egan Colby

What is rather revealing are not insights from his wife Barbara. Rather, interviews with America’s most powerful voices from that era is a “Who’s Who” of America’s entire war in Southeast Asia is key.

Willam left law school to fight in World War II and joined the OSS (CIA) taking a leading role in Norway receiving a Silver Star. William first moved his family to Rome in order to thwart the rise of Italian communism. The CIA’s early role in Vietnam led by William is presented front and center, revealing a deeper understanding of America’s early entry into the French war.

William’s move to Vietnam in 1959 occurred less than five years after Dien Bien Phu. He brought his family to Saigon from Rome. In fact, the Colby children attended a special school for American families in Vietnam with their oldest daughter attending with the niece of Ngo Dinh Diem. Very interesting backstory to Barbara’s life in Italy. Yet, after settling into Saigon, she noted “It’s strange to think the threat from North Vietnam wasn’t easily seen.”

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Education Reading

Latest Read: Sway

Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias by Pragya Agarwal. Pragya is a behavior and data scientist and currently a visiting professor of Social Inequities and Injustice at Loughborough University. Pragya holds a PhD from the University of Nottingham.

Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias by Pragya Agarwal

She has been a visiting professor at University College London (UK), University of Melbourne, University of Temuco (Chile), University of California Santa Barbara, and Johns Hopkins University. She is the founder of a research think-tank The 50 Percent Project investigating women’s status and rights around the world. Pragya has launched podcasts Wish We Knew What to Say and Outside The Boxes on PodBean. In addition, Pragya has just published Wish We Knew What to Say (April ’22) and previously published (M)otherhood, the choices of being a woman.

Sway is providing an in-depth look at the very difficult topic of unconscious bias. Pragya is attempting to document not only how we identify unconscious bias, but how one may begin to unravel this specifically across our society.

What should immediately confront all readers is this is similar to slaying a three-headed (neuro, cognitive and behavioral) science dragon. In reading this book I found that multiple touch points certainly align along Daniel Kahneman’s excellent work in Thinking, Fast and Slow. Actually, this also compliments Bias Interrupted by Joan C. Williams and Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez.

Waterstones | Sway by Pragya Agarwal
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Education Reading

Latest Read: Man’s Search for Meaning

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankle, M.D., Ph.D. Originally published in 1946, this certainly chronicles Viktor’s truly horrific experiences as an Auschwitz concentration camp prisoner.

Man's Search for Meaning

So, The US Library of Congress lists this book as one of the ten most influence in the country. In addition, after surviving he developed a psychotherapeutic method of finding meaning in all forms of existence and finding a reason to continue living. Viktor’s experiences at Auschwitz are certainly deeply moving.

After less than one year of marriage, he and his family in 1942 arrived at Theresienstadt concentration camp. Yet, his father soon died of starvation and pneumonia. Two years later he and his family were at Auschwitz. Viktor’s mother and brother also were quickly led to the gas chambers. His wife later died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

To his credit, his focus is not on the horror of Auschwitz as Viktor acknowledges others have addressed, but how as the title suggests, you can find meaning in life under the most horrific conditions. In fact, his writing includes how guards and even prisoners (temporally elevated into supervisor roles) inhumanly treated their prisoners. Likewise, he became the founder of logotherapy, a form of Existential Analysis, the “Third Viennese School” of psychotherapy.

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Education Innovation Reading

Latest Read: Contagious

Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger. I was really looking forward to Contagious as my followup to his excellent book The Catalyst. Jonah is a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger

However, I found this does not hold the same spark. Actually, Contagious is really about common sense that most already understand. Many suggest a Malcolm Gladwell book which can share these ideas in his more impactful style. Perhaps they are correct.

But the world is much different for college students still facing COVID in 2022. For example, the quick use of Discord by college classes.

Here is a sample of how attempting to create an idea that will certainly catch on with college students meets hacking in 2022. In skipping the well established LMS for the cool features that appeals to students, it is only then that FERPA data has leaked across Discord servers. In addition, those same servers are running malware including drive by attacks on browsers. The malware is proving to also steal student’s data including their personal identifiable data and in many cases digital money used across Discord.

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Education Innovation Reading

Latest Read: Conformity

Conformity: The Power of Social Influences by Cass Sunstein. He is currently a professor at Harvard and was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School for 27 years. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School.

Conformity: The Power of Social Influences by Cass R. Sunstein

From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and after that, he served on the President’s Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board.

In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway. Furthermore in 2020, the World Health Organization appointed him as Chair of its technical advisory group on Behavioral Insights and Sciences for Health.

In fact, his previous books Nudge and Noise are all best sellers and provide wonderful insights to human behavior. The focus of this book is addressing decisions influenced by social pressure.

Similarly, this can be for the better (logic, facts, and even experiments) or worse. So, it is very easy today to witness irrational social media posts influencing decisions.

Conformity has two faces

Cass begins by sharing a baseline that conformity is be positive or negative. As we know, conformity is a basic requirement and is proving to be necessary today. However, the focus is to understand the larger circumstances and become aware of the effects of conformity upon your decision making process. In addition, there is a real drive to understand the full impact of social media placing new pressures upon individuals to make decisions:

On social media, that happens all the time. The result can be to lead people to errors and even to illness and death. “Fake news” can spread like wildfire; informational cascades are the culprits. In 2017 and 2018, that was a particular concern for Facebook, whose platform has often been used as a basis for the rapid transmission of falsehoods.
pgs. 104-105.

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