The Guardian: More than half the world’s food production will be at risk of failure within the next 25 years as a rapidly accelerating water crisis grips the planet, unless urgent action is taken to conserve water resources and end the destruction of the ecosystems on which our fresh water depends, experts have warned in… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: October 2024
How rational inference about authority debunking can curtail, sustain, or spread belief polarization
Setayesh Radkani, Marika Landau-Wells, Rebecca Saxe. How rational inference about authority debunking can curtail, sustain, or spread belief polarization. PNAS Nexus, 2024; 3 (10) DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae393 In polarized societies, divided subgroups of people have different perspectives on a range of topics. Aiming to reduce polarization, authorities may use debunking to lend support to one perspective… Continue Reading
Why Microsoft Excel won’t die
The Economist: Excel has featured in plenty of workplace blunders — though its defenders will be quick to blame human error. The financial world is littered with tales of costly spreadsheet errors. Excel has also been blamed for botching gene names in over a third of genomics papers (because it labelled them as dates); underreporting… Continue Reading
The Individualization of Responsibility – Masterclass in Deception
The Climate Historian: “…In the mid-20th century, as evidence mounted linking smoking to lung cancer, the tobacco industry didn’t just fight back—they mastered the art of deflection. Instead of outright denying the dangers, they funded research to stir doubt, muddying the scientific waters.In the 1950s, the Tobacco Institute launched its “health reassurance” campaigns. These campaigns… Continue Reading
WildChat: 1M ChatGPT Interaction Logs in the Wild
WildChat: 1M ChatGPT Interaction Logs in the Wild: “Chatbots such as GPT-4 and ChatGPT are now serving millions of users. Despite their widespread use, there remains a lack of public datasets showcasing how these tools are used by a population of users in practice. To bridge this gap, we offered free access to ChatGPT for… Continue Reading
You should be using an RSS reader
Pluralistic: “…RSS (one of those ancient internet acronyms with multiple definitions, including, but not limited to, “Really Simple Syndication”) is an invisible, automatic way for internet-connected systems to public “feeds.” For example, rather than reloading the Wired homepage every day and trying to figure out which stories are new (their layout makes this very hard… Continue Reading
FTC Final “Click-to-Cancel” Rule Making It Easier to End Recurring Subscriptions, Memberships
“The Federal Trade Commission today announced a final “click-to-cancel” rule that will require sellers to make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up. Most of the final rule’s provisions will go into effect 180 days after it is published in the Federal Register. “Too often, businesses make… Continue Reading
The illusion of information adequacy
Gehlbach H, Robinson CD, Fletcher A (2024) The illusion of information adequacy. PLoS ONE 19(10): e0310216. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0310216: “How individuals navigate perspectives and attitudes that diverge from their own affects an array of interpersonal outcomes from the health of marriages to the unfolding of international conflicts. The finesse with which people negotiate these differing perceptions depends… Continue Reading
Hearing Things is a new home for independent music journalism.
Hearing Things: “The music industry is once again at a crossroads. Streaming was supposed to democratize music, making it more equitable for all. That didn’t happen. Now the most famous artists are dominating the industry like never before, while everyone else is scrounging for pennies. What’s left of music media is chasing those same huge… Continue Reading
Voting early or by mail is getting more popular. See the data by state.
Washington Post unpaywalled: “Election Day in many states now stretches over multiple days or weeks. Across America, jurisdictions have adopted an array of policies that allows for ballots to be cast by mail, in person at early voting sites or that maintain a preference for voting in person on Election Day. The result: a voting… Continue Reading
Free site uses AI to help you fight health insurance claim denials
BGR: “Fight Health Insurance (FHI) is the name of an AI website with only one purpose: to help you appeal health insurance claim denials. “Make your health insurance company cry too,” is the site’s clever motto. FHI is the result of an engineer who worked at IBM, Apple, and Google before landing at Netflix. Over… Continue Reading
How social media distorts perceptions of norms
Claire E. Robertson, Kareena S. del Rosario, Jay J. Van Bavel, Inside the funhouse mirror factory: How social media distorts perceptions of norms, Current Opinion in Psychology, Volume 60, 2024, 101918, ISSN 2352-250X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2024.101918. “The current paper explains how modern technology interacts with human psychology to create a funhouse mirror version of social norms. We… Continue Reading
