This article presents a fairness principle for evaluating decision-making based on predictions: a decision rule is unfair when the individuals directly impacted by the decisions who are equal with respect to the features that justify inequalities in outcomes do not have the same statistical prospects of being benefited or harmed by them, irrespective of their socially salient morally arbitrary traits. The principle can be used to evaluate prediction-based decision-making from the point of view of a wide range of antecedently specified substantive views about justice in outcome distributions.

Interventions in environmental conservation are intended to make things better, not worse. Yet unintended and unanticipated consequences plague environmental conservation; key is how uncertainty plays out. Insights from the intellectual humility literature offer constructive strategies for coming to terms with uncertainty. Strategies such as self-distancing and self-assessment of causal complexity can be incorporated into conservation decision-making processes. Including reflection on what we know and do not know in the decision-making process potentially reduces unintended and unanticipated consequences of environmental conservation and management decisions. An important caution is not to have intellectual humility legitimate failing to act in the face of uncertainty.

The article describes measures developed to counter the spread of coronavirus infection in the Republic of Kazakhstan. The first cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Kazakhstan were detected on March 13, 2020, among people who arrived from Germany. After declaring the state of emergency in the country, the Ministry of Healthcare of the Republic of Kazakhstan began to formulate and implement a comprehensive package of measures aimed at slowing down and stopping the transmission of infection, preventing outbreaks, ensuring optimal care for all patients, especially the seriously ill, minimizing the negative impact of the pandemic on health systems, social services, and economic activities. Developed set of restrictive measures was approved by the Country Office of Word Health Organization (WHO) in Kazakhstan, being later adapted by the European Union (EU) countries and applied in Kyrgyzstan. In addition, article identifies Kazakhstan’s experience in creating epidemiological surveillance systems, studying virus mutations, and the clinical aspects of dealing with it to combat the infection. It also indicates the impact of the epidemic on health-care workers and the development of measures to protect them, strengthening infection prevention, and control in medical organizations.

Civic education is essential to the health of any democracy. When COVID-19 emerged in the spring of 2020, almost all civic education efforts went online. This increased interest in the effectiveness of online civic education. Does it lead to similar outcomes as in-person education? I used student evaluations from a youth civic engagement conference co-run by Latinx and Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) non-profit organizations to compare learning outcomes on multiple dimensions of civic education, from an in-person conference in 2019 and an online conference in 2020. I find that although students improved over the course of both conferences, the 2019 in-person conference yielded slightly greater improvement in civic knowledge confidence than the online conference. Other dimensions—verifiable knowledge, self-efficacy, and community consciousness—increased after participation in the conference in both years; however, the increases were similar between the online and in-person formats.

In this commentary we reflect on Shaalan, Eid, and Tourky's (2022) article in which they investigated the Chinese concept and practice of guanxi in the Middle East,1 a region in which wasta represents the common way of informal networking.2 While we encourage and welcome research into informal networks, we have serious concerns about the conceptual and methodological approaches taken by Shaalan et al. (2022) in investigating informal networks in the Middle East and explain herein why we do not believe guanxi should have been used in place of wasta.