Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items tagged rumors

Rss Feed Group items tagged

knudsenlu

Huge MIT Study of 'Fake News': Falsehoods Win on Twitter - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it,” Jonathan Swift once wrote.It was hyperbole three centuries ago. But it is a factual description of social media, according to an ambitious and first-of-its-kind study published Thursday in Science.
  • By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.
  • “It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information,” said Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at MIT who has studied fake news since 2013 and who led this study. “And that is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature.”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • A false story is much more likely to go viral than a real story, the authors find. A false story reaches 1,500 people six times quicker, on average, than a true story does.
  • “In short, I don’t think there’s any reason to doubt the study’s results,” said Rebekah Tromble, a professor of political science at Leiden University in the Netherlands, in an email.
  • It’s a question that can have life-or-death consequences.“[Fake news] has become a white-hot political and, really, cultural topic, but the trigger for us was personal events that hit Boston five years ago,” said Deb Roy, a media scientist at MIT and one of the authors of the new study.
  • Ultimately, they found about 126,000 tweets, which, together, had been retweeted more than 4.5 million times. Some linked to “fake” stories hosted on other websites. Some started rumors themselves, either in the text of a tweet or in an attached image. (The team used a special program that could search for words contained within static tweet images.) And some contained true information or linked to it elsewhere.
  • Tweet A and Tweet B both have the same size audience, but Tweet B has more “depth,” to use Vosoughi’s term. It chained together retweets, going viral in a way that Tweet A never did. “It could reach 1,000 retweets, but it has a very different shape,” he said.Here’s the thing: Fake news dominates according to both metrics. It consistently reaches a larger audience, and it tunnels much deeper into social networks than real news does. The authors found that accurate news wasn’t able to chain together more than 10 retweets. Fake news could put together a retweet chain 19 links long—and do it 10 times as fast as accurate news put together its measly 10 retweets.
  • What does this look like in real life? Take two examples from the last presidential election. In August 2015, a rumor circulated on social media that Donald Trump had let a sick child use his plane to get urgent medical care. Snopes confirmed almost all of the tale as true. But according to the team’s estimates, only about 1,300 people shared or retweeted the story.
  • Why does falsehood do so well? The MIT team settled on two hypotheses.First, fake news seems to be more “novel” than real news. Falsehoods are often notably different from the all the tweets that have appeared in a user’s timeline 60 days prior to their retweeting them, the team found.Second, fake news evokes much more emotion than the average tweet. The researchers created a database of the words that Twitter users used to reply to the 126,000 contested tweets, then analyzed it with a state-of-the-art sentiment-analysis tool. Fake tweets tended to elicit words associated with surprise and disgust, while accurate tweets summoned words associated with sadness and trust, they found.
  • It suggests—to me, at least, a Twitter user since 2007, and someone who got his start in journalism because of the social network—that social-media platforms do not encourage the kind of behavior that anchors a democratic government. On platforms where every user is at once a reader, a writer, and a publisher, falsehoods are too seductive not to succeed: The thrill of novelty is too alluring, the titillation of disgust too difficult to transcend. After a long and aggravating day, even the most staid user might find themselves lunging for the politically advantageous rumor. Amid an anxious election season, even the most public-minded user might subvert their higher interest to win an argument.
peterconnelly

Debunking 3 Viral Rumors About the Texas Shooting - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Here are three of the most prominent rumors that have spread on online platforms such as Twitter, Gab, 4chan and Reddit.
  • Among their unfounded claims were that the shooting had been orchestrated to draw local law enforcement away from the border, allowing criminals and drugs to cross into the United States, and that gun-control advocates had organized the tragedy to stoke public outrage.
  • he conspiracy theorist and broadcaster Alex Jones of Infowars has lied for years that the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was staged by the federal government, with people pretending to be survivors and victims’ parents. Last year, Mr. Jones lost four defamation lawsuits filed by victims’ families, many of whom have been harassed by his believers.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Hours after the attack, a post on the fringe online message board 4chan circulated claiming that the gunman was transgender.
  • where people falsely claimed that the shooting was a result of hormone therapy undertaken by the gunman.
  • “There is an overwhelming number of individuals who are posting images of this person, who was the shooter, and information about the nature of them being transgender,”
  • On Tuesday, a transgender artist said on Reddit that people online “just took my photos and used it to spread misinformation.”
  • False claims that the gunman was born outside the United States began to circulate within hours of the shooting. Spread largely on white nationalist Telegram channels and Gab accounts, the claims alleged that he was an undocumented immigrant in the United States, even after authorities including Roland Gutierrez, a Texas state senator, confirmed that the gunman was born in North Dakota.
  • “Did he cross the border illegally?” Code of Vets, a veterans organization, posted on Twitter. “Our nation has a serious national security crisis evolving.”
Javier E

Bile, venom and lies: How I was trolled on the Internet - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Thomas Jefferson often argued that an educated public was crucial for the survival of self-government
  • We now live in an age in which that education takes place mostly through relatively new platforms. Social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. — are the main mechanisms by which people receive and share facts, ideas and opinions. But what if they encourage misinformation, rumors and lies?
  • In a comprehensive new study of Facebook that analyzed posts made between 2010 and 2014, a group of scholars found that people mainly shared information that confirmed their prejudices, paying little attention to facts and veracity. (Hat tip to Cass Sunstein, the leading expert on this topic.) The result, the report says, is the “proliferation of biased narratives fomented by unsubstantiated rumors, mistrust and paranoia.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The authors specifically studied trolling — the creation of highly provocative, often false information, with the hope of spreading it widely. The report says that “many mechanisms cause false information to gain acceptance, which in turn generate false beliefs that, once adopted by an individual, are highly resistant to correction.”
  • in recent weeks I was the target of a trolling campaign and saw exactly how it works. It started when an obscure website published a post titled “CNN host Fareed Zakaria calls for jihad rape of white women.” The story claimed that in my “private blog” I had urged the use of American women as “sex slaves” to depopulate the white race. The post further claimed that on my Twitter account, I had written the following line: “Every death of a white person brings tears of joy to my eyes.”
  • Disgusting. So much so that the item would collapse from its own weightlessness, right? Wrong. Here is what happened next: Hundreds of people began linking to it, tweeting and retweeting it, and adding their comments, which are too vulgar or racist to repeat. A few ultra-right-wing websites reprinted the story as fact. With each new cycle, the levels of hysteria rose, and people started demanding that I be fired, deported or killed. For a few days, the digital intimidation veered out into the real world. Some people called my house late one night and woke up and threatened my daughters, who are 7 and 12.
  • The people spreading this story were not interested in the facts; they were interested in feeding prejudice. The original story was cleverly written to provide conspiracy theorists with enough ammunition to ignore evidence. It claimed that I had taken down the post after a few hours when I realized it “receive[d] negative attention.” So, when the occasional debunker would point out that there was no evidence of the post anywhere, it made little difference. When confronted with evidence that the story was utterly false, it only convinced many that there was a conspiracy and coverup.
  • conversations on Facebook are somewhat more civil, because people generally have to reveal their identities. But on Twitter and in other places — the online comments section of The Post, for example — people can be anonymous or have pseudonyms. And that is where bile and venom flow freely.
  • an experiment performed by two psychologists in 1970. They divided students into two groups based on their answers to a questionnaire: high prejudice and low prejudice. Each group was told to discuss controversial issues such as school busing and integrated housing. Then the questions were asked again. “The surveys revealed a striking pattern,” Kolbert noted. “Simply by talking to one another, the bigoted students had become more bigoted and the tolerant more tolerant.”
  • This “group polarization” is now taking place at hyper speed, around the world. It is how radicalization happens and extremism spreads.
douglasn89

Russia mystery threatens to consume Washington - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

  • Washington has become a hall of mirrors, where it's impossible to distinguish between rumor and fact as conspiracy theories and partisan paroxysms rage -- all arising from an alleged Russian spy plot to sway last year's election that is now clouding the new administration.
  • Often, President Trump himself reignites the drama — apparently to his detriment — as with his sensational claim Saturday that his predecessor Barack Obama tapped his phones.
  • The White House spokesman Sean Spicer insists that there is "no there, there" in the Russia intrigue.But the conduct of the President himself often undercuts that message. Some observers have noted that while there may be nothing nefarious going on, the President often acts in a way that suggests there is.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The credibility of the President's statements on the issue is also eroding."Russia is a ruse, I have nothing to do with Russia. To the best of my knowledge, no person that I deal with does," Trump said during his news conference on February 16.But since then, details have emerged of repeated meetings between Trump aides and Russian officials, casting doubt on the president's words.
  • A second reason why questions about Russia will linger is because what some observers see as Trump's odd fixation with Moscow raises constant questions about his motives.
  • The President's unique personality also appears at times to be exacerbating the sense of crisis being fostered in Washington.In theory, he could flush away questions about whether undeclared links with Russia are influencing his attitude to Moscow by releasing his tax returns.His refusal to do so gives oxygen to claims that he has some secret business or creditor relationships with Russia that compromise him.
  • Democrats have a clear political incentive to prolong a situation which is helping to unify them, to slow Trump's agenda by bogging the White House down with investigations and to present the President in a scary light.
  •  
    Washington has become a hall of mirrors, where it's impossible to distinguish between rumor and fact as conspiracy theories and partisan paroxysms rage -- all arising from an alleged Russian spy plot to sway last year's election that is now clouding the new administration.
johnsonel7

Chief Justice John Roberts warns about dangers of fake news - POLITICO - 0 views

  • Chief Justice John Roberts — who’s on the verge of an extraordinarily high-profile balancing act presiding over the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump — issued a warning on Tuesday about the dangers of misinformation in the internet era.
  • “In our age, when social media can instantly spread rumor and false information on a grand scale, the public’s need to understand our government, and the protections it provides, is ever more vital,” Roberts declared
  • “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said in a statement. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • He pointed to a 1788 attack on founder John Jay, who was struck in the head with a rock while trying to quell a lawless mob whipped up by talk that medical students were robbing graves to experiment on corpses. The episode appears to have limited Jay’s contributions to the Federalist Papers, leaving most of those writings to be prepared by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, Roberts observed. “It is sadly ironic that John Jay’s efforts to educate his fellow citizens about the Framers’ plan of government fell victim to a rock thrown by a rioter motivated by a rumor,”
nataliedepaulo1

Trump and the Truth: The Viral Candidate - The New Yorker - 0 views

  • Some rumors seem to emerge from nowhere; others are invented for a discernable reason.
  • Perhaps Trump made a sustained bid for the Presidency in 2016 because he sensed that the end of the age of mass media had created a historic opportunity.
  • But cable news was already big business in 1999, when Trump considered a third-party run. Twitter and Facebook did not exist in 1999. In 2011, their power was ascendant. Now Facebook is, by many measures, the biggest media company in the world. Did Trump play the media, using provocation to gain more attention than anyone thought possible? We are all the media now. He played all of us.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • And there is no reason to think that he will be the last viral candidate.
johnsonma23

Social media stirs fear at Salesianum - 1 views

  • A verbal comment made by a Salesianum School student was fanned across social media stirring enough concern that some parents pulled their children out of classes Monday, and left the student explaining what he meant to legal authorities
  • "My understanding is that he did give sort of a time-frame," she said. "You never know."
  • he removed her son because she felt there were too many distractions.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "I just felt for his own mental stability, at least whatever goes on at school, that he's at home safe."
kushnerha

Our Natural History, Endangered - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Worse, this rumored dustiness reinforces the widespread notion that natural history museums are about the past — just a place to display bugs and brontosaurs. Visitors may go there to be entertained, or even awe-struck, but they are often completely unaware that curators behind the scenes are conducting research into climate change, species extinction and other pressing concerns of our day. That lack of awareness is one reason these museums are now routinely being pushed to the brink. Even the National Science Foundation, long a stalwart of federal support for these museums, announced this month that it was suspending funding for natural history collections as it conducts a yearlong budget review.
  • It gets worse: A new Republican governor last year shut down the renowned Illinois State Museum, ostensibly to save the state $4.8 million a year. The museum pointed out that this would actually cost $33 million a year in lost tourism revenue and an untold amount in grants. But the closing went through, endangering a trove of 10 million artifacts, from mastodon bones to Native American tools, collected over 138 years, and now just languishing in the shuttered building. Eric Grimm, the museum’s director of science, characterized it as an act of “political corruption and malevolent anti-intellectualism.”
  • Other museums have survived by shifting their focus from research to something like entertainment.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The pandering can be insidious, too. The Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, which treats visitors to a virtual ride down a hydraulic fracturing well, recently made headlines for avoiding explicit references to climate change. Other museums omit scientific information on evolution. “We don’t need people to come in here and reject us,”
  • Even the best natural history museums have been obliged to reduce their scientific staff in the face of government cutbacks and the decline in donations following the 2008 economic crash. They still have their collections, and their public still comes through the door. But they no longer employ enough scientists to interpret those collections adequately for visitors or the world at large. Hence the journal Nature last year characterized natural history collections as “the endangered dead.”
  • these collections are less about the past than about our world and how it is changing. Sediment cores like the ones at the Illinois State Museum, for instance, may not sound terribly important, but the pollen in them reveals how past climates changed, what species lived and died as a result, and thus how our own future may be rapidly unfolding.
  • Natural history museums are so focused on the future that they have for centuries routinely preserved such specimens to answer questions they didn’t yet know how to ask, requiring methodologies that had not yet been invented, to make discoveries that would have been, for the original collectors, inconceivable.
  • THE people who first put gigantic mammoth and mastodon specimens in museums, for instance, did so mainly out of dumb wonderment. But those specimens soon led to the stunning 18th-century recognition that parts of God’s creation could become extinct. The heretical idea of extinction then became an essential preamble to Darwin, whose understanding of evolution by natural selection depended in turn on the detailed study of barnacle specimens collected and preserved over long periods and for no particular reason. Today, those same specimens continue to answer new questions with the help of genome sequencing, CT scans, stable isotope analysis and other technologies.
  • These museums also play a critical role in protecting what’s left of the natural world, in part because they often combine biological and botanical knowledge with broad anthropological experience.
  • “You have no nationality. You are scientists. You speak for nature.” Just since 1999, according to the Field Museum, inventories by its curators and their collaborators have been a key factor in the protection of 26.6 million acres of wilderness, mainly in the headwaters of the Amazon.
  • It may be optimistic to say that natural history museums have saved the world. It may even be too late for that. But they provide one other critical service that can save us, and our sense of wonder: Almost everybody in this country — even children in Denver who have never been to the Rocky Mountains, or people in San Francisco who have never walked on a Pacific Ocean beach — goes to a natural history museum at some point in his life, and these visits influence us in deep and unpredictable ways.
  • we dimly begin to understand the passage of time and cultures, and how our own species fits amid millions of others. We start to understand the strangeness and splendor of the only planet where we will ever have the great pleasure of living.
Javier E

Feeling Sad Makes Us More Creative | Wired Science | Wired.com - 0 views

  • For thousands of years, people have speculated that there’s some correlation between sadness and creativity, so that people who are a little bit miserable (think Van Gogh, or Dylan in 1965, or Virginia Woolf) are also the most innovative.
  • People who received negative feedback created better collages, at least when compared to those who received positive feedback or no feedback at all. Furthermore, those with low baselines of DHEAS proved particularly vulnerable to the external effects of frowns, so that they proved to be the most creative of all.
  • It turns out that states of sadness make us more attentive and detail oriented, more focused
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • angst and sadness promote “information-processing strategies best suited to dealing with more-demanding situations.” This helps explain why test subjects who are melancholy — Forgas induces the mood with a short film about death and cancer — are better at judging the accuracy of rumors and recalling past events; they’re also much less likely to stereotype strangers and make fewer arithmetic mistakes.
  • shoppers in the “low mood” condition remembered nearly four times as many of the trinkets. The wet weather made them sad, and their sadness made them more aware and attentive.
  • There are two important lessons of this research. The first is that our fleeting feelings can change the way we think. While sadness makes us more focused and diligent — the spotlight of attention is sharpened — happiness seems to have the opposite effect, so that good moods make us 20 percent more likely to have a moment of insight. The second takeaway is that many of our creative challenges involve tasks that require diligence, persistence and focus. It’s not easy making a collage or writing a poem or solving a hard technical problem, which is why sometimes being a little miserable can improve our creative performance.
  • Why is mental illness so closely associated with creativity? Andreasen argues that depression is intertwined with a “cognitive style” that makes people more likely to produce successful works of art. In the creative process, Andreasen says, “one of the most important qualities is persistence.”
  • While Andreasen acknowledges the burden of mental illness — she quotes Robert Lowell on depression not being a “gift of the Muse” and describes his reliance on lithium to escape the pain — she argues that many forms of creativity benefit from the relentless focus it makes possible. “Unfortunately, this type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering,” she says. “If you’re at the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.”
Javier E

95,000 Words, Many of Them Ominous, From Donald Trump's Tongue - The New York Times - 2 views

  • The New York Times analyzed every public utterance by Mr. Trump over the past week from rallies, speeches, interviews and news conferences to explore the leading candidate’s hold on the Republican electorate for the past five months.
  • The transcriptions yielded 95,000 words and several powerful patterns
  • The most striking hallmark was Mr. Trump’s constant repetition of divisive phrases, harsh words and violent imagery that American presidents rarely use
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • He has a particular habit of saying “you” and “we” as he inveighs against a dangerous “them” or unnamed other — usually outsiders like illegal immigrants (“they’re pouring in”), Syrian migrants (“young, strong men”) and Mexicans, but also leaders of both political parties.
  • Mr. Trump appears unrivaled in his ability to forge bonds with a sizable segment of Americans over anxieties about a changing nation, economic insecurities, ferocious enemies and emboldened minorities (like the first black president, whose heritage and intelligence he has all but encouraged supporters to malign).
  • “ ‘We vs. them’ creates a threatening dynamic, where ‘they’ are evil or crazy or ignorant and ‘we’ need a candidate who sees the threat and can alleviate it,”
  • “He appeals to the masses and makes them feel powerful again: ‘We’ need to build a wall on the Mexican border — not ‘I,’ but ‘we.’ ”
  • And as much as he likes the word “attack,” the Times analysis shows, he often uses it to portray himself as the victim of cable news channels and newspapers that, he says, do not show the size of his crowds.
  • The specter of violence looms over much of his speech, which is infused with words like kill, destroy and fight.
  • “Such statements and accusations make him seem like a guy who can and will cut through all the b.s. and do what in your heart you know is right — and necessary,
  • And Mr. Trump uses rhetoric to erode people’s trust in facts, numbers, nuance, government and the news media, according to specialists in political rhetoric.
  • “Nobody knows,” he likes to declare, where illegal immigrants are coming from or the rate of increase of health care premiums under the Affordable Care Act, even though government agencies collect and publish this information.
  • He insists that Mr. Obama wants to accept 250,000 Syrian migrants, even though no such plan exists, and repeats discredited rumors that thousands of Muslims were cheering in New Jersey during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
  • In another pattern, Mr. Trump tends to attack a person rather than an idea or a situation, like calling political opponents “stupid” (at least 30 times), “horrible” (14 times), “weak” (13 times) and other names, and criticizing foreign leaders, journalists and so-called anchor babies
  • This pattern of elevating emotional appeals over rational ones is a rhetorical style that historians, psychologists and political scientists placed in the tradition of political figures like Goldwater, George Wallace, Joseph McCarthy, Huey Long and Pat Buchanan,
  • “His entire campaign is run like a demagogue’s — his language of division, his cult of personality, his manner of categorizing and maligning people with a broad brush,”
  • “If you’re an illegal immigrant, you’re a loser. If you’re captured in war, like John McCain, you’re a loser. If you have a disability, you’re a loser. It’s rhetoric like Wallace’s — it’s not a kind or generous rhetoric.”
  • “And then there are the winners, most especially himself, with his repeated references to his wealth and success and intelligence,”
  • Historically, demagogues have flourished when they tapped into the grievances of citizens and then identified and maligned outside foes, as McCarthy did with attacking Communists, Wallace with pro-integration northerners and Mr. Buchanan with cultural liberals
  • Mr. Trump, by contrast, is an energetic and charismatic speaker who can be entertaining and ingratiating with his audiences. There is a looseness to his language that sounds almost like water-cooler talk or neighborly banter, regardless of what it is about.
  • he presents himself as someone who is always right in his opinions — even prophetic, a visionary
  • It is the sort of trust-me-and-only-me rhetoric that, according to historians, demagogues have used to insist that they have unique qualities that can lead the country through turmoil
Javier E

Opinion | What Do We Actually Know About the Economy? (Wonkish) - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Among economists more generally, a lot of the criticism seems to amount to the view that macroeconomics is bunk, and that we should stick to microeconomics, which is the real, solid stuff. As I’ll explain in a moment, that’s all wrong
  • in an important sense the past decade has been a huge validation for textbook macroeconomics; meanwhile, the exaltation of micro as the only “real” economics both gives microeconomics too much credit and is largely responsible for the ways macroeconomic theory has gone wrong.
  • Finally, many outsiders and some insiders have concluded from the crisis that economic theory in general is bunk, that we should take guidance from people immersed in the real world – say, business leaders — and/or concentrate on empirical results and skip the models
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • And while empirical evidence is important and we need more of it, the data almost never speak for themselves – a point amply illustrated by recent monetary events.
  • chwinger, as I remember the story, was never seen to use a Feynman diagram. But he had a locked room in his house, and the rumor was that that room was where he kept the Feynman diagrams he used in secret.
  • What’s the equivalent of Feynman diagrams? Something like IS-LM, which is the simplest model you can write down of how interest rates and output are jointly determined, and is how most practicing macroeconomists actually think about short-run economic fluctuations. It’s also how they talk about macroeconomics to each other. But it’s not what they put in their papers, because the journals demand that your model have “microfoundations.”
  • The Bernanke Fed massively expanded the monetary base, by a factor of almost five. There were dire warnings that this would cause inflation and “debase the dollar.” But prices went nowhere, and not much happened to broader monetary aggregates (a result that, weirdly, some economists seemed to find deeply puzzling even though it was exactly what should have been expected.)
  • What about fiscal policy? Traditional macro said that at the zero lower bound there would be no crowding out – that deficits wouldn’t drive up interest rates, and that fiscal multipliers would be larger than under normal conditions. The first of these predictions was obviously borne out, as rates stayed low even when deficits were very large. The second prediction is a bit harder to test, for reasons I’ll get into when I talk about the limits of empiricism. But the evidence does indeed suggest large positive multipliers.
  • The overall story, then, is one of overwhelming predictive success. Basic, old-fashioned macroeconomics didn’t fail in the crisis – it worked extremely well
  • In fact, it’s hard to think of any other example of economic models working this well – making predictions that most non-economists (and some economists) refused to believe, indeed found implausible, but which came true. Where, for example, can you find any comparable successes in microeconomics?
  • Meanwhile, the demand that macro become ever more rigorous in the narrow, misguided sense that it look like micro led to useful approaches being locked up in Schwinger’s back room, and in all too many cases forgotten. When the crisis struck, it was amazing how many successful academics turned out not to know things every economist would have known in 1970, and indeed resurrected 1930-vintage fallacies in the belief that they were profound insights.
  • mainly I think it reflected the general unwillingness of human beings (a category that includes many though not necessarily all economists) to believe that so many people can be so wrong about something so big.
  • . To normal human beings the study of international trade and that of international macroeconomics might sound like pretty much the same thing. In reality, however, the two fields used very different models, had very different intellectual cultures, and tended to look down on each other. Trade people tended to consider international macro people semi-charlatans, doing ad hoc stuff devoid of rigor. International macro people considered trade people boring, obsessed with proving theorems and offering little of real-world use.
  • does microeconomics really deserve its reputation of moral and intellectual superiority? No
  • Even before the rise of behavioral economics, any halfway self-aware economist realized that utility maximization – indeed, the very concept of utility — wasn’t a fact about the world; it was more of a thought experiment, whose conclusions should always have been stated in the subjunctive.
  • Kahneman and Tversky and Thaler and so on deserved all the honors they received for helping to document the specific ways in which utility maximization falls short, but even before their work we should never have expected perfect maximization to be a good description of reality.
  • True, a model doesn’t have to be perfect to provide hugely important insights. But here’s my question: where are the examples of microeconomic theory providing strong, counterintuitive, successful predictions on the same order as the success of IS-LM macroeconomics after 2008? Maybe there are some, but I can’t come up with any.
  • The point is not that micro theory is useless and we should stop doing it. But it doesn’t deserve to be seen as superior to macro modeling.
  • And the effort to make macro more and more like micro – to ground everything in rational behavior – has to be seen now as destructive. True, that effort did lead to some strong predictions: e.g., only unanticipated money should affect real output, transitory income changes shouldn’t affect consumer spending, government spending should crowd out private demand, etc. But all of those predictions have turned out to be wrong.
  • But, you say, we didn’t see the Great Recession coming. Well, what do you mean “we,” white man? OK, what’s true is that few economists realized that there was a huge housing bubble
  • But data never speak for themselves, for a couple of reasons. One, which is familiar, is that economists don’t get to do many experiments, and natural experiments are rare
  • The other problem is that even when we do get something like natural experiments, they often took place under economic regimes that aren’t relevant to current problems.
  • Both of these problems were extremely relevant in the years following the 2008 crisis.
  • you might be tempted to conclude that the empirical evidence is that monetary expansion is inflationary, indeed roughly one-for-one.
  • But the question, as the Fed embarked on quantitative easing, was what effect this would have on an economy at the zero lower bound. And while there were many historical examples of big monetary expansion, examples at the ZLB were much rarer – in fact, basically two: the U.S. in the 1930s and Japan in the early 2000
  • These examples told a very different story: that expansion would not, in fact, be inflationary, that it would work out the way it did.
  • The point is that empirical evidence can only do certain things. It can certainly prove that your theory is wrong! And it can also make a theory much more persuasive in those cases where the theory makes surprising predictions, which the data bear out. But the data can never absolve you from the necessity of having theories.
  • Over this past decade, I’ve watched a number of economists try to argue from authority: I am a famous professor, therefore you should believe what I say. This never ends well. I’ve also seen a lot of nihilism: economists don’t know anything, and we should tear the field down and start over.
  • Obviously I differ with both views. Economists haven’t earned the right to be snooty and superior, especially if their reputation comes from the ability to do hard math: hard math has been remarkably little help lately, if ever.
  • On the other hand, economists do turn out to know quite a lot: they do have some extremely useful models, usually pretty simple ones, that have stood up well in the face of evidence and events. And they definitely shouldn’t defer to important and/or rich people on polic
  • : compare Janet Yellen’s macroeconomic track record with that of the multiple billionaires who warned that Bernanke would debase the dollar. Or take my favorite Business Week headline from 2010: “Krugman or [John] Paulson: Who You Gonna Bet On?” Um.The important thing is to be aware of what we do know, and why.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
Javier E

Bile, venom and lies: How I was trolled on the Internet - The Washington Post - 1 views

  • In a comprehensive new study of Facebook that analyzed posts made between 2010 and 2014, a group of scholars found that people mainly shared information that confirmed their prejudices, paying little attention to facts and veracity. (Hat tip to Cass Sunstein, the leading expert on this topic.) The result, the report says, is the “proliferation of biased narratives fomented by unsubstantiated rumors, mistrust and paranoia.”
  • The authors specifically studied trolling — the creation of highly provocative, often false information, with the hope of spreading it widely. The report says that “many mechanisms cause false information to gain acceptance, which in turn generate false beliefs that, once adopted by an individual, are highly resistant to correction.”
  • in recent weeks I was the target of a trolling campaign and saw exactly how it works. It started when an obscure website published a post titled “CNN host Fareed Zakaria calls for jihad rape of white women.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Here is what happened next: Hundreds of people began linking to it, tweeting and retweeting it, and adding their comments, which are too vulgar or racist to repeat. A few ultra-right-wing websites reprinted the story as fact. With each new cycle, the levels of hysteria rose, and people started demanding that I be fired, deported or killed. For a few days, the digital intimidation veered out into the real world. Some people called my house late one night and woke up and threatened my daughters, who are 7 and 12.
  • The people spreading this story were not interested in the facts; they were interested in feeding prejudice. The original story was cleverly written to provide conspiracy theorists with enough ammunition to ignore evidence. It claimed that I had taken down the post after a few hours when I realized it “receive[d] negative attention.”
  • an experiment performed by two psychologists in 1970. They divided students into two groups based on their answers to a questionnaire: high prejudice and low prejudice. Each group was told to discuss controversial issues such as school busing and integrated housing. Then the questions were asked again. “The surveys revealed a striking pattern,” Kolbert noted. “Simply by talking to one another, the bigoted students had become more bigoted and the tolerant more tolerant.” This “group polarization” is now taking place at hyper speed, around the world. It is how radicalization happens and extremism spreads.
Javier E

How to avoid covid-19 hoax stories? - The Washington Post - 1 views

  • How good are people at sifting out fake news?
  • we’ve been investigating whether ordinary individuals who encounter news when it first appears online — before fact-checkers like Snopes and PolitiFacts have an opportunity to issue reports about an article’s veracity — are able to identify whether articles contain true or false information.
  • Unfortunately, it seems quite difficult for people to identify false or misleading news, and the limited number of coronavirus news stories in our collection are no exception
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Over a 13-week period, our study allowed us to capture people’s assessments of fresh news articles in real time. Each day of the study, we relied on a fixed, pre-registered process to select five popular articles published within the previous 24 hours
  • The five articles were balanced between conservative, liberal and non-partisan sources, as well as from mainstream news websites and from websites known to produce fake news. In total, we sent 150 total articles to 90 survey respondents each
  • We also sent these articles separately to six independent fact checkers, and treated their most common response — true, false/misleading, or cannot determine — for each article as the “correct’’ answer for that article.
  • When shown an article that was rated “true” by the professional fact checkers, respondents correctly identified the article as true 62 percent of the time. When the source of the true news story was a mainstream news source, respondents correctly identified the article as true 73 percent of the time.
  • However, for each article the professional fact checkers rated “false/misleading,” the study participants were as likely to say it was true as they were to say it was false or misleading. And roughly one-third of the time they told us they were unable to determine the veracity of the article. In other words, people on the whole were unable to correctly classify false or misleading news.
  • four of the articles in our study that fact checkers rated as false or misleading were related to the coronavirus.
  • All four articles promoted the unfounded rumor that the virus was intentionally developed in a laboratory. Although accidental releases of pathogens from labs have previously caused significant morbidity and mortality, in the current pandemic multiple pieces of evidence suggest this virus is of natural origin. There’s little evidence that the virus was manufactured or altered.
  • Only 30 percent of participants correctly classified them as false or misleading.
  • respondents seemed to have more trouble deciding what to think about false covid-19 stories, leading to a higher proportion of “could not determine” responses than we saw for the stories on other topics our professional fact checkers rated as “false/misleading.” This finding suggests that it may be particularly difficult to identify misinformation in newly emerging topics
  • Study participants with higher levels of education did better on identifying both fake news overall and coronavirus-related fake news — but were far from being able to correctly weed out misinformation all of the time
  • In fact, no group, regardless of education level, was able to correctly identify the stories that the professional fact checkers had labeled as false or misleading more than 40 percent of the time.
  • Taken together, our findings suggest that there is widespread potential for vulnerability to misinformation when it first appears online. This is especially worrying during the current pandemic
  • In the current environment, misinformation has the potential to undermine social distancing efforts, to lead people to hoard supplies, or to promote the adoption of potentially dangerous fake cures.
  • our findings suggest that non-trivial numbers of people will believe false information to be true when they first encounter it. And it suggests that efforts to remove coronavirus-related misinformation will need to be swift — and implemented early in an article’s life-cycle — to stop the spread of something else that’s dangerous: misinformation.
Javier E

How Joe Biden's Digital Team Tamed the MAGA Internet - The New York Times - 1 views

  • it’s worth looking under the hood of the Biden digital strategy to see what future campaigns might learn from it.
  • while the internet alone didn’t get Mr. Biden elected, a few key decisions helped his chances.
  • 1. Lean On Influencers and Validators
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • In the early days of his campaign, Mr. Biden’s team envisioned setting up its own digital media empire. It posted videos to his official YouTube channel, conducted virtual forums and even set up a podcast hosted by Mr. Biden, “Here’s the Deal.”
  • those efforts were marred by technical glitches and lukewarm receptions, and they never came close to rivaling the reach of Mr. Trump’s social media machine.
  • So the campaign pivoted to a different strategy, which involved expanding Mr. Biden’s reach by working with social media influencers and “validators,
  • Perhaps the campaign’s most unlikely validator was Fox News. Headlines from the outlet that reflected well on Mr. Biden were relatively rare, but the campaign’s tests showed that they were more persuasive to on-the-fence voters than headlines from other outlets
  • “When people saw a Fox News headline endorsing Joe Biden, it made them stop scrolling and think.”
  • 2. Tune Out Twitter, and Focus on ‘Facebook Moms’
  • “The whole Biden campaign ethos was ‘Twitter isn’t real life,’” Mr. Flaherty said. “There are risks of running a campaign that is too hyper-aware of your own ideological corner.”
  • As it focused on Facebook, the Biden campaign paid extra attention to “Facebook moms” — women who spend a lot of time sharing cute and uplifting content
  • “Our goal was really to meet people where they were,”
  • 3. Build a Facebook Brain Trust
  • the “Rebel Alliance,” a jokey nod to Mr. Parscale’s “Death Star,” and it eventually grew to include the proprietors of pages like Occupy Democrats, Call to Activism, The Other 98 Percent and Being Liberal.
  • On the messaging app Signal, the page owners formed a group text that became a kind of rapid-response brain trust for the campaign.
  • “I had the freedom to go for the jugular,” said Rafael Rivero, a co-founder of Occupy Democrats and Ridin’ With Biden, another big pro-Biden Facebook page.
  • “It was sort of a big, distributed message test,” Mr. Flaherty said of the Rebel Alliance. “If it was popping through Occupy or any of our other partners, we knew there was heat there.”
  • These left-wing pages gave the campaign a bigger Facebook audience than it could have reached on its own. But they also allowed Mr. Biden to keep most of his messaging positive, while still tapping into the anger and outrage many Democratic voters felt.
  • 4. Promote ‘Small-Batch Creators,’ Not Just Slick Commercials
  • the Biden campaign found that traditional political ads — professionally produced, slick-looking 30-second spots — were far less effective than impromptu, behind-the-scenes footage and ads that featured regular voters talking directly into their smartphones or webcams about why they were voting for Mr. Biden.
  • “The things that were realer, more grainy and cheaper to produce were more credible.”
  • In addition to hiring traditional Democratic ad firms, the campaign also teamed up with what it called “small-batch creators” — lesser-known producers and digital creators, some of whom had little experience making political ads
  • 5. Fight Misinformation, but Pick Your Battles
  • The campaign formed an in-house effort to combat these rumors, known as the “Malarkey Factory.” But it picked its battles carefully, using data from voter testing to guide its responses.
  • “The Hunter Biden conversation was many times larger than the Hillary Clinton email conversation, but it really didn’t stick, because people think Joe Biden’s a good guy,”
  • the campaign’s focus on empathy had informed how it treated misinformation: not as a cynical Trump ploy that was swallowed by credulous dupes, but as something that required listening to voters to understand their concerns and worries before fighting back
  • Ultimately, he said, the campaign’s entire digital strategy — the Malarkey Factory, the TikTok creators and Facebook moms, the Fortnite signs and small-batch creators — was about trying to reach a kinder, gentler version of the internet that it still believed existed.
  • “We made a decision early that we were going to be authentically Joe Biden online, even when people were saying that was a trap.”
knudsenlu

You Are Already Living Inside a Computer - The Atlantic - 1 views

  • Nobody really needs smartphone-operated bike locks or propane tanks. And they certainly don’t need gadgets that are less trustworthy than the “dumb” ones they replace, a sin many smart devices commit. But people do seem to want them—and in increasing numbers.
  • Why? One answer is that consumers buy what is on offer, and manufacturers are eager to turn their dumb devices smart. Doing so allows them more revenue, more control, and more opportunity for planned obsolescence. It also creates a secondary market for data collected by means of these devices. Roomba, for example, hopes to deduce floor plans from the movement of its robotic home vacuums so that it can sell them as business intelligence.
  • And the more people love using computers for everything, the more life feels incomplete unless it takes place inside them.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Computers already are predominant, human life already takes place mostly within them, and people are satisfied with the results.
  • These devices pose numerous problems. Cost is one. Like a cheap propane gauge, a traditional bike lock is a commodity. It can be had for $10 to $15, a tenth of the price of Nokē’s connected version. Security and privacy are others. The CIA was rumored to have a back door into Samsung TVs for spying. Disturbed people have been caught speaking to children over hacked baby monitors. A botnet commandeered thousands of poorly secured internet-of-things devices to launch a massive distributed denial-of-service attack against the domain-name syste
  • Reliability plagues internet-connected gadgets, too. When the network is down, or the app’s service isn’t reachable, or some other software behavior gets in the way, the products often cease to function properly—or at all.
  • Turing guessed that machines would become most compelling when they became convincing companions, which is essentially what today’s smartphones (and smart toasters) do.
  • But Turing never claimed that machines could think, let alone that they might equal the human mind. Rather, he surmised that machines might be able to exhibit convincing behavior.
  • People choose computers as intermediaries for the sensual delight of using computers
  • Why would anyone ever choose a solution that doesn’t involve computers, when computers are available? Propane tanks and bike locks are still edge cases, but ordinary digital services work similarly: The services people seek out are the ones that allow them to use computers to do things—from finding information to hailing a cab to ordering takeout. This is a feat of aesthetics as much as it is one of business. People choose computers as intermediaries for the sensual delight of using computers, not just as practical, efficient means for solving problems.
  • Doorbells and cars and taxis hardly vanish in the process. Instead, they just get moved inside of computers.
  • “Being a computer” means something different today than in 1950, when Turing proposed the imitation game. Contra the technical prerequisites of artificial intelligence, acting like a computer often involves little more than moving bits of data around, or acting as a controller or actuator. Grill as computer, bike lock as computer, television as computer. An intermediary
  • Or consider doorbells once more. Forget Ring, the doorbell has already retired in favor of the computer. When my kids’ friends visit, they just text a request to come open the door. The doorbell has become computerized without even being connected to an app or to the internet. Call it “disruption” if you must, but doorbells and cars and taxis hardly vanish in the process. Instead, they just get moved inside of computers, where they can produce new affections.
  • The present status of intelligent machines is more powerful than any future robot apocalypse.
  • ne such affection is the pleasure of connectivity. You don’t want to be offline. Why would you want your toaster or doorbell to suffer the same fate? Today, computational absorption is an ideal. The ultimate dream is to be online all the time, or at least connected to a computational machine of some kind.
  • This is not where anyone thought computing would end up. Early dystopic scenarios cautioned that the computer could become a bureaucrat or a fascist, reducing human behavior to the predetermined capacities of a dumb machine. Or else, that obsessive computer use would be deadening, sucking humans into narcotic detachment.Those fears persist to some extent, partly because they have been somewhat realized. But they have also been inverted. Being away from them now feels deadening, rather than being attached to them without end. And thus, the actions computers take become self-referential: to turn more and more things into computers to prolong that connection.
  • But the real present status of intelligent machines is both humdrum and more powerful than any future robot apocalypse. Turing is often called the father of AI, but he only implied that machines might become compelling enough to inspire interaction. That hardly counts as intelligence, artificial or real. It’s also far easier to achieve. Computers already have persuaded people to move their lives inside of them. The machines didn’t need to make people immortal, or promise to serve their every whim, or to threaten to destroy them absent assent. They just needed to become a sufficient part of everything human beings do such that they can’t—or won’t—imagine doing those things without them.
  • . The real threat of computers isn’t that they might overtake and destroy humanity with their future power and intelligence. It’s that they might remain just as ordinary and impotent as they are today, and yet overtake us anyway.
knudsenlu

How World War II Spurred a Veteran's Ambition - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • My first 18 months of military service were uninspiring. Donning the uniform did not fill me with pride, nor did the experience alter my perspective on life. What basic training had taught me was that the best way to get by was to stay out of sight.
  • Accordingly, my detachment expanded its mission: all males—soldiers and others of military serviceable age, no matter where encountered or whether in uniform—were to be taken prisoner unless they had persuasive evidence of either having been exempted or discharged from military service. Anyone without such proof was considered a potential guerilla. A sweep of the countryside would yield scores of German “civilians,” among them soldiers who had simply shed their uniform or party activists suspected of organizing a resistance usually with cover stories that I had to break. Not only did I become very adept at this task, but it also gave me some great insights into postwar German mentalities—insights that would later inspire me to revisit my views on higher education.
  • Wilke and his family had emigrated from Germany in the early 1920s, and he still spoke German with a genuine Saxon dialect.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • As soon as I was released from the hospital, I worked my way step-by-step from France back to Berlin, the capital of the four occupying powers. After some stumbling blocks and a job I despised, I found a position as a research analyst in the intelligence branch of the military government’s information-control division.
  • This job turned out to be extremely challenging, but that also made it a real blessing. I wrote drafts on a wide range of political topics, including the identification of potential political leaders not yet recognized, a catalog of the rumors circulating among the population, incidents indicative of how people felt about American troops, and the dominant mood among German youth. We gleaned information from reports compiled by field representatives stationed in roughly a dozen communities throughout the American occupation zone, supplemented with details from German newspapers—and, in my case, with insights based on contacts and conversation I had whenever I passed myself off as a German civilian.
  • That is how my war and post-war service induced me, in the fall of 1947, after an interlude of more than five years, to enroll in the University of Chicago as a freshman. I stayed for six years, left with a Ph.D., and ever since enjoyed a long academic career as a sociologist, first specializing in the military and then studying propaganda and the effect of television on politics.
  • World War II spurred my ambition by teaching me how to navigate the army. Those lessons led me to confront the society I had once known so well, and to study politics and people living in a time of upheaval.
katherineharron

How to be a human lie detector of fake news - CNN - 0 views

  • Fake news existed long before the internet. In an essay on political lying in the early 18th century, the writer Jonathan Swift noted that "Falsehood flies and the truth comes limping after it." You have to hire a train to pull the truth, explained English pastor Charles Spurgeon in the 19th century, while a lie is "light as a feather ... a breath will carry it."
  • MIT researchers recently studied more than 10 years' worth of data on the most shared stories on Facebook. Their study covered conspiracy theories about the Boston bombings, misleading reports on natural disasters, unfounded business rumors and incorrect scientific claims. There is an inundation of false medical advice online, for example, that encourages people to avoid life-saving treatments such as vaccines and promotes unproven therapies. (Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop is just one example.)
  • The psychological research does, however, offer us a silver lining to this storm cloud, with various experiments demonstrating that people can learn to be better lie detectors with a little training in critical thinking.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • If you would like to improve your own lie detection, a good first step is to learn the common logical fallacies -- red herrings, appeals to ignorance, straw men and "ad populum" appeals to the bandwagon -- that purveyors of misinformation may use to create the illusion of truth.
  • These efforts are often called "inoculations," since they use a real-life example in one domain to teach people about the strategies used to spread lies and therefore equipping people to spot them more easily. Educating people about the tobacco industry's attempts to question the medical consensus on smoking, for example, led people to be more skeptical of articles denying climate change, according to one study.
  • Another project aimed to inoculate students at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, involved a course on misinformation throughout history. The class was taught about everything from the myth that aliens somehow built the Egyptian pyramids to the theories that NASA's moon landings were faked. Along the way, the students had to identify the erroneous logic that helped create the arguments, and the motivations that may lead some people to spread those ideas.
  • You could also try basic strategies such as cross-checking different outlets and finding the original source of a claim. You might also look at independent fact-checking websites used in the MIT study such as Snopes, PolitiFact and TruthOrFiction.com.
  • The psychological literature offers us one good strategy against bias, called the "consider the opposite" method. This involves asking yourself whether you would have been so credulous of a claim if its opinions had differed from your own. And if not, what kind of additional scrutiny might you have applied? This should help you to identify the weaknesses in your own thinking.
  • Falsehoods may fly, but with this lie detection kit, you can better ensure your actions and beliefs remain grounded in the truth.
tongoscar

In Hong Kong, the coronavirus outbreak is deepening the political divide from the 2019 ... - 0 views

shared by tongoscar on 19 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Rumors had spread that toilet paper supply would be cut off due to new border closures with mainland China, implemented in an effort to contain the novel coronavirus outbreak.
  • The government's reassurances and calls for order went unheeded as millions of residents, gripped by fear and suspicion, descended on stores citywide to panic buy.The novel coronavirus, which originated in Wuhan, China, was first detected in Hong Kong on January 22. Since then, there have been 62 confirmed cases and two deaths in the city.
  • The numbers are far lower than in mainland China, where at least 1,868 people have died so far -- but Hong Kong carries the memories of the deadly Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003, and people aren't taking any chances.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • By the time she withdrew the bill -- that would have allowed criminal suspects to be extradited across the border to mainland China -- protesters' demands had expanded to include action on deeper social grievances.
  • In January, many Hong Kongers across various sectors, including elected lawmakers, called to shut Hong Kong's borders with mainland China to contain the virus. But these demands also reintroduced familiar strands of localism, an ideology focused on preserving Hong Kong's autonomy.
  • This is why closing the Chinese borders is a politically significant and symbolic act -- and perhaps why Lam resisted doing so for weeks.
  • The 2019 protest movement may appear to have fizzled out -- but it educated an entire city and generation of youth on organized resistance. Now, this spirit of political action has been redirected toward the outbreak, as people protest for a stronger government response.More than 7,000 health care workers participated in a week-long union strike in early February to demand closed borders; that's nearly 10% of all medical staff of Hong Kong's Hospital Authority.The labor union that organized the strike was one of several born from the 2019 unrest, founded during the tail end of the protests.
  • Hong Kong's schools are shut until at least mid-March, and many businesses have closed or have instructed employees to work from home.With cases of community transmission confirmed, many people are staying at home for weeks at a time to avoid infection, only venturing out for groceries or quick strolls.
  • Fear and anger are palpable in the city, especially earlier this week with the disappearance of two people who violated quarantine after returning from mainland China. They were found after being added to a police wanted list.
Javier E

This Time-Management Trick Changed My Whole Relationship With Time - The New York Times - 0 views

  • A couple of years ago I was told a rumor about a notable artist who would break up everything she did, from making films in the day to running her studio in the afternoon to reading books in the evening, into intervals of 25 minutes, with five-minute breaks in between — 25 minutes on, five minutes off, over and over again.
  • the Pomodoro technique. Invented by Francesco Cirillo, a student at Rome’s Luiss Business School in the late 1980s, it’s a time-management method that takes its name from the tomato-shaped kitchen timer he used to regulate its core process, breaking the day into brief intervals
  • A pomodoro, once started, must not be interrupted, otherwise it has to be abandoned
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • there is relief: You are not allowed to extend a pomodoro, either. After a set of four 25-minute intervals are completed, you’re supposed to take a longer break of 15 to 30 minutes before continuing.
  • It tells us when to start, and also when to stop; and now, more than ever, we have to be told when to stop.
  • An unquestioned assumption in our culture holds that the more hours spent on work — whether a passion project or office drudgery — the better we’ll perform and the more successful and happier we’ll be. What if none of that’s true?
  • Leisure time has also taken on a timeless, hypnotic quality lately. Everything our culture produces feels at once never-ending and meaningless — or perhaps meaningless because it’s never-ending.
  • An everlasting present expands around us in all directions, and it’s easy to get lost in there — all the more reason to set some boundaries.
  • Now that my breaks are short and fleeting, I think more carefully about what I’d like to do with them, and I’ve found it’s quite different from the unimaginative temptations I would otherwise default to
  • Instead I’ll make a sandwich, do a quick French lesson, reply to a few texts, have a shower, go to the laundromat; and such humdrum activities, now that they’re restricted, have become sources of great pleasure.
  • I’ve found that tackling a range of tasks in short bursts keeps things interesting and provides a more rounded life.
  • Variety is the sugar that helps the medicine go down; not the mirage of variety conjured by infinite scrolling content, by nearly a hundred different flavors of Oreos, but the genuine variety of pursuing different sorts of interests every day.
  • time-management techniques are for me a way of better understanding which things matter and which don’t.
  • time management makes time uncanny by revealing how it speeds up and slows down throughout the day, and how many different ways 25 minutes can feel;
  • it’s not an exaggeration to say that, by changing my relationship with and appreciation of time, the technique has brought me to some profound existential questions about whether I’m wasting my life — my fragile, fleeting life — on activities I neither care about nor enjoy
  • It has forced me to think about what I’d most like to be doing every day instead. It has made me see time afresh — as something we really don’t have enough of, as something precious precisely because it’s ephemeral.
Javier E

New research explores how conservative media misinformation may have intensified corona... - 0 views

  • In recent weeks, three studies have focused on conservative media’s role in fostering confusion about the seriousness of the coronavirus. Taken together, they paint a picture of a media ecosystem that amplifies misinformation, entertains conspiracy theories and discourages audiences from taking concrete steps to protect themselves and others.
  • The end result, according to one of the studies, is that infection and mortality rates are higher in places where one pundit who initially downplayed the severity of the pandemic — Fox News’ Sean Hannity — reaches the largest audiences.
  • “We are receiving an incredible number of studies and solid data showing that consuming far-right media and social media content was strongly associated with low concern about the virus at the onset of the pandemic,”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Administering a nationally representative phone survey with 1,008 respondents, they found that people who got most of their information from mainstream print and broadcast outlets tended to have an accurate assessment of the severity of the pandemic and their risks of infection.
  • But those who relied on conservative sources, such as Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, were more likely to believe in conspiracy theories or unfounded rumors, such as the belief that taking vitamin C could prevent infection, that the Chinese government had created the virus, and that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was exaggerating the pandemic’s threat “to damage the Trump presidency.”
  • “The effect that we measure could be driven by the long-term message of Fox News, which is that the mainstream media often report ‘fake news’ and have a political agenda,” Simonov said. “This could result in lowering trust in institutions and experts, including health experts in the case of the pandemic.”
  • Our results indicate that a one standard deviation increase in relative viewership of Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight is associated with approximately 32 percent more COVID-19 cases on March 14 and approximately 23 percent more COVID-19 deaths on March 28,
  • “If the results hold, the research demonstrates the influence that broadcast media can have on behavior,”
1 - 20 of 24 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page