Could we make 2024 the year of intellectual honesty, integrity and anti-sophistry?

I just apologized to a couple of colleagues. It wasn’t about anything huge, but I felt the need to say sorry. I tried very hard to apologize properly. Being clear what I was apologizing for. Explaining why I made the mistake I did, without in any way excusing myself or pretending it wasn’t my fault. Conversely, a while ago, I took a colleague to task. I had been making the point that a group of us discussing an issue relating to China were almost all non-Chinese, and we had to recognize that we might have unhelpful biases. I did this a couple of times. The colleague then sent me an amazingly rude email, which included the line “…I am over your repeated petty, woke, self-serving, condescending, virtue signaling…narrative”. I decided to escalate the issue because they were attacking me and my motives, rather than discussing issues. (Playing the person, not the ball.) That colleague ultimately apologized to me, but gave one of those insincere apologies that basically put the responsibility for my being offended on me. It was of the form of ‘I did not personally attack you. I apologize if you feel attacked.’ I felt that this was plainly inaccurate, super dishonest and low integrity, given the words that they had used. I think people do this kind of thing to each other all the time these days. Not just with apologies. But with all kinds of explanations, requests and other communications. I am not hot on all kinds of detail, and I kind of like people who are naughty in all sorts of ways, but I think intellectual dishonesty, lack of integrity, and sneakiness are one of the leading factors in what is causing the world to be a bit broken and chaotic at the moment. I associate a lot of these behaviours with the term sophistry. Sophism has much more honourable roots, coming from the Greek word for wisdom, and was originally about expertise in disciplines like philosophy and rhetoric. Some sophists became ‘arguers for a price’, and nowadays, sophistry typically means those being tricky using clever arguments that are often false. In each of our own small ways, let’s try to improve the world in 2024 by being anti-sophists. Not always trying to win arguments at all costs. Being willing to let our egos take a hit every now and then. Valuing intellectual honesty and integrity more than winning at all costs. #unthink #unask #unlearn