Wharton’s Ethan Mollick is one of my favorite Twitter follows, and I’m hardly alone — Mollick summarizes tons of interesting papers that I would have otherwise missed. Like these two:
For Mollick, the upshot of these papers is clear: We hate hard thinking/being alone with our selves so much that we would rather act sadistically or hurt ourselves than do it
and that is a bad thing, obviously leading to idiocracy.…
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.…
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.…
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.…
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?