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?…
My wife and I just got back from 10 days in the Basque Country of Spain — the first international trip we’ve taken since the pandemic began. We had a great time and tested negative for COVID (at least, before encountering the flight attendant who coughed for nine hours on our return leg).…
You can’t say you weren’t warned.
Here are some excerpts from a recent Digiday interview with an anonymous young journalist now working at a tech company, headlined “’Not on me to save the media industry’: Confessions of an early-career journalist leaving the industry”:
…I saw your recent announcement that you were leaving your job at a legacy news publication?
Why do some scientists commit scientific fraud?
If you’re a scientist, “How would I know?” is probably your smartest answer here. But your real answer is probably something like “ambition,” “ego,” and/or “they’re not good enough scientists.”
Here’s what interests me: All of the above answers (including “How would I know?”)…
Economist Brad DeLong calls his Substack a “weblog-like newsletter.” On it, he publishes early drafts of forthcoming columns he wants to publish on Project Syndicate. The drafts are a premium for his Substack subscribers — but he’s also soliciting feedback and challenges to improve the draft before he finalizes it.…
I don’t say this bluntly often enough:
Public expertise isn’t “an expert who’s also good with the media.” Or “is good at giving talks.” Or “is good at Twitter.”
It’s not an aggregation of performance skills. Those skills are of course very useful if you’re trying to communicate with non-specialists.…