Chuck Todd. Courtesy of William B. Plowman/NBC.

Dear Commons Community,

Chuck Todd, the former “Meet the Press” moderator, is leaving NBC News, he told colleagues in a memo issued yesterday, a move he’s making in order to pursue ventures outside the NBCUniversal empire.  As reported by Variety:

Todd had in recent weeks been meeting with other news outlets and potential employers, according to people familiar with the matter. His current contract with NBC News had been expected to lapse at some point after the 2024 election.

“There’s never a perfect time to leave a place that’s been a professional home for so long, but I’m pretty excited about a few new projects that are on the cusp of going from ‘pie in the sky’ to ‘near reality,’ Todd told NBC News staffers in the memo.  “So I’m grateful for the chance to get a jump start on my next chapter during this important moment.”

He said his “Chuck Toddcast” podcast would be “coming with me,” and urged colleagues to “stay tuned for an announcement about its new home soon.” Todd plans “to continue to share my reporting and unique perspective of covering politics with data and history as important baselines in understanding where we were, where we are and where we’re going.”

“We’re grateful for Chuck’s many contributions to our political coverage during his nearly two-decade career at NBC News and for his deep commitment to Meet the Press and its enduring legacy,” NBC News said in a statement. “We wish him all the best in his next endeavors.”

Many personnel at traditional TV outlets have explored opportunities with digital or new-tech outlets in recent months, a nod to the more difficult economics of national newsgathering in the current climate. Jim Acosta, the CNN anchor, announced earlier this week that he was leaving the Warner Bros. Discovery-backed network to launch his own Substack. Don Lemon and Megyn Kelly are among the ranks of well-known TV anchors who have moved on to digital media.

When he moderated “Meet The Press,” Todd demonstrated an entrepreneurial streak, bringing the long-running Sunday program into podcasting and even launching a film festival.

“Everyone is trying to figure out how to get in front of millennials. I think the millennial generation learns as much visually as they do the old-fashioned way, by the book,” Todd told Variety in 2017. “We are no longer in the business of telling people how they should consume information. Our job is to provide depth and information in any way they want to consume it.”

He told staffers he expected to continue to try to build new media businesses. “The media has a lot of work to do to win back the trust of viewers/listeners/readers and I’m convinced the best place to start is from the bottom up.  At my core, I’m an entrepreneur — I spent my first 15 years professionally working for the company that started the political newsletter craze that dominates today.  And this is a ripe moment,” he said, adding: “The only way to fix this information eco system is to stop whining about the various ways the social media companies are manipulating things and instead roll up our collective sleeves and start with local.  National media can’t win trust back without having a robust partner locally and trying to game algorithms is no way to inform and report.  People are craving community and that’s something national media or the major social media companies can’t do as well as local media.”

Todd joined NBC News in 2007 as a political director, after having spent 15 years working at National Journal and leading the “The Hotline,” an early digital newsletter focused on inside-the-Beltway maneuvers. In 2008, he was named chief White House correspondent. In 2014, he was elevated to top duties at “Meet The Press,” succeeding David Gregory. He expanded the program by doing a regular daytime hour on MSNBC called “MTP Daily,” a program that was eventually moved over to the live-streaming service NBC News Now.”

I always thought of Todd as a fine newsman.  We wish him luck in his new ventures.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

John Horgan, who is the author of Mind-Body Problems and My Quantum Experiment, had an article in Scientific American in 2022 and republished earlier this week sub-titled “A radical quantum hypothesis casts doubt on objective reality.”  It reviews individual perceptions and whether reality is strictly  in the eye of the beholder.  This is an old issue that has been debated ever since Max Planck and Niels Bohr first posited quantum mechanics which challenged traditional deterministic, empirical theories in the early 1900s. Horgan refers to QBism (Quantum Bayesianism Probability Theory) which Horgan defines as:

“A newish interpretation of quantum mechanics called QBism (pronounced “Cubism,” like the art movement) makes subjective experience the bedrock of knowledge and reality itself. David Mermin, a prominent theorist, says QBism can dispel the “confusion at the foundations of quantum mechanics.” You just have to accept that all knowledge begins with “individual personal experience.”

According to QBism, each of us constructs a set of beliefs about the world, based on our interactions with it. We constantly, implicitly, update our beliefs when we interact with relatives who refuse to get vaccinated or sensors tracking the swerve of an electron. The big reality in which we all live emerges from the collisions of all our subjective mini-realities.”

QBism is similar to multiple realities and  has been a bedrock for qualitative researchers for decades. I have been lecturing on this since the 1980s in my education research methods courses. In sum, this new interpretation of QBism seems like old wine in a new bottle.

Below is an excerpt from the Horgan article.

Tony

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“As philosopher Michael Strevens points out in The Knowledge Machine, science resolves disputes by means of repeated observations and experiments. Strevens calls scientists’ commitment to empirical data the “iron rule of explanation.” Ideally, the iron rule produces durable, objectively true accounts of the world.

But subjectivity is hard to expunge even in physics, the foundation on which science rests. Quantum mechanics, a mathematical model of matter at very small scales, is science’s most rigorously tested theory. Countless experiments have confirmed it, as do computer chips, lasers and other technologies that exploit quantum effects.

Unfortunately, quantum mechanics defies common sense. For more than a century, physicists have tried to interpret the theory, to turn it into a coherent story, in vain. “Every competent physicist can ‘do’ quantum mechanics,” a leading textbook says, “but the stories we tell ourselves about what we are doing are as various as the tales of Scheherazade, and almost as implausible.”

Many physicists ignore the puzzles posed by quantum mechanics. They take a practical, utilitarian attitude toward the theory, summed up by the admonition, “Shut up and calculate!” That is, forget about those quantum paradoxes and keep working on that quantum computer, which might make you rich!

Others keep probing the theory. In 1961 a prominent theorist, Eugene Wigner, proposed a thought experiment similar to the conundrum of Schrödinger’s cat. Instead of the fabled cat in a box, imagine that a friend of Wigner is inside a laboratory monitoring a radioactive specimen. When the specimen decays, a detector flashes.

Now imagine that Wigner is outside the lab. If Wigner’s friend sees the detector flash, he knows that the specimen has decayed. But to Wigner, standing outside the lab, the specimen, his friend and the entire lab hover in a blur of possible states. Wigner and his friend seem to occupy two distinct realities.

In 2020, physicists performed a version of Wigner’s thought experiment and concluded that his intuitions were correct. In a story for Science headlined “Quantum paradox points to shaky foundations of reality,” physics reporter George Musser says the experiment calls objectivity into question. “It could mean there is no such thing as an absolute fact,” Musser writes, “one that is as true for me as it is for you.”

A newish interpretation of quantum mechanics called QBism (pronounced “Cubism,” like the art movement) makes subjective experience the bedrock of knowledge and reality itself. David Mermin, a prominent theorist, says QBism can dispel the “confusion at the foundations of quantum mechanics.” You just have to accept that all knowledge begins with “individual personal experience.”

According to QBism, each of us constructs a set of beliefs about the world, based on our interactions with it. We constantly, implicitly, update our beliefs when we interact with relatives who refuse to get vaccinated or sensors tracking the swerve of an electron. The big reality in which we all live emerges from the collisions of all our subjective mini-realities.

QBists hedge their mind-centrism, if only so they don’t come across as loons or mystics. They accept that matter exists as well as mind, and they reject solipsism, which holds that no sentient being can really be sure that any other being is sentient. But QBism’s core message, science writer Amanda Gefter says, is that the idea of “a single objective reality is an illusion.” A dream, you might say.

Proponents bicker over definitions, and physicists and philosophers fond of objectivity reject QBism entirely. All this squabbling, ironically, seems to confirm QBism’s premise that there is no absolute objectivity; there are only subjective, first-person viewpoints.”

John Horgan, who has written for Scientific American since 1986, comments on science on his free online journal Cross-Check. He has also posted his books Mind-Body Problems and My Quantum Experiment online. Horgan teaches at Stevens Institute of Technology.