Public expertise on the pandemic from officials (e.g., WHO’s Maria Van Kerkhove) and official bodies (e.g., WHO, CDC, FDA) has pretty much sucked. Most people agree with this statement.
Most also agree: These officials and official bodies must do better!
What if “doing better” isn’t possible for official expertise?…
TL;dr
The economist and ethicist Itai Sher took issue last week on Twitter with philosopher Jason Stanley’s assertion (on Twitter) that “Fascism is always popular.” Sher asked (on Twitter) for evidence justifying the claim; Stanley replied (on Twitter) “it’s the main point of my entire body of work on the topic.”…
On the week his Substack newsletter turned one year old, journalist Matt Yglesias devoted a column to summarize the “really important” issues — those he thinks “genuinely matter globally over the long term…what might look most consequential from 2021 [from the perspective of people in 2100].”…
Every public expert faces the same question: What am I going to talk with non-experts about?
The wrong answer is “What I’m an expert in” — at least, as expressed by the list of the topics in which you are indeed an expert.…
A think tank here in DC sends out an “rapid reaction” email featuring its experts’ take on various events in the news.
The key word: “various.” One alert might cover the coup in Sudan, another China’s hypersonic missile test, a third the latest federal elections in Germany.…
Everyone is piling on Facebook over the recent revelations that it has research showing Instagram is widely harmful to teenage girls.
Except the research doesn’t show that.
Psychology professor Laurence Steinberg wrote about the holes in the research at length in a recent opinion essay published in The New York Times, “Does Instagram Harm Girls?…
It’s a researcher’s nightmare: You give a talk about a problem, and it’s a great talk — except for one thing: Your audience of important decision-makers, who started texting and scrolling through their email about five minutes into your talk, doesn’t just want to hear so much about problems.…
You’re author on a new paper just published. Congratulations! Of course you tweet about it, to make sure everybody reads it.
Too bad no one will click on the link to actually read your paper, according to a new study shared by Wharton’s Ethan Mollick (which I got the gist of from his tweet with screenshot of the paper’s abstract, so didn’t click through to read).…
Isn’t it time we all knew what we’re talking about when we talk with each other?
The marketer Seth Godin argues yes: Social media gives each of us so much potential public impact that we all now share the responsibility of being informed.…
Malcolm Gladwell doesn’t find the late Norm Macdonald’s comedy very funny. (Neither do I.) Comedians, on the other hand, often think Macdonald was not just hilarious but peerlessly so. What do the comedy experts see in Macdonald’s comedy that we don’t?…