tweets posted by bots created the impression there was a high level of climate change denial... 6.5 million tweets from ... Trump's June 2017 announcement that he was removing the United States from the Paris climate accord... Posts in support of action to protect the environment were far less likely to come from bots... only 5%...the number …

Zettelkasten allowed him to: build a huge web of knowledge, retrieve the right memory when needed, find meaningful connections among topics, and develop his ideas, arguments and discussions efficiently...The first step ... taking literature notes as you read something ... what you don't want to forget ... be brief ... in your own words ...sec…

When you’re pitching a luxury product, one rule of thumb is to surround it with other luxury items. ... “A Gentleman’s Wager,” ... a fun, classy-looking short... none of it has the icky feel of a sales pitch.

misperception of peers’ thoughts and desires... what other voters think and will do... voters commonly refrain from voting for women because they think other voters don’t believe they can win... women were more likely to cite gender as a factor... white men were seen as significantly more electable than white women and women of color... But... in …

the best skill to teach children is reinvention... the author of Sapiens reveals what 2050 has in store for humankind...once technology enables us to engineer bodies, brains and minds... We don’t know what people will do for a living, we don’t know how armies or bureaucracies will function...too many schools focus on cramming information. In the p…

Higher levels of redistribution are favoured when luck is more important in the initial distribution of resources; when social groups are more homogeneous; when the group is at war; and when resources are abundant...Judgements ... carry moderate or high levels of moral conviction... Individuals are only weakly consistent ... political orientation …

many teams ... have become obsessed with ... being agile ... But agile is not a strategy — it is a capability... cannot permanently affect ... competitive position unless there’s a strategy behind it... constant cycles of optimization... offers little more than diminishing returns... not considering the opportunity costs ... A good idea is not the…

Europe has repeatedly failed ... those failures have been the building blocks of Europe’s success. But ... Today’s noise isn’t simply another invitation for Europe to fail upward again. It’s the sound of Europe threatening to fall apart entirely...Postwar Europe is failing today because, for the younger generations, World War II is ancient history…

Great Copy Solves a Problem. Focus on solving customer problems... If you don’t know what your clients worry about, pick up the phone... Your subject line and opening paragraph should tell the full story... newsletter bait to attract your subscribers toward your website ... A good CTA will help transform engaged subscribers into active customers..…

Instead of ... a winner/loser framework, think about your next argument as an opportunity to work toward resolution...change your point of view from I to us. Then, listen carefully... When possible, plan ahead...best persuaders “didn’t rely on the legitimate merits ... the psychological frame ... can carry equal or greater weight... ideas and fine…

a social dynamic in which it becomes more beneficial to hold those views than not. It’s the feedback mechanism by which people are punished for expressing any kind of nuance, doubt or divergence... moral outbidding, unchecked, that corrodes a group from within...the vanity of small differences, and the punishing of people for the most minor transg…

new interactive visualisations to allow stakeholders explore and compare the detailed investment themes ... across the funds, countries and thematic objectives... provide insight starting from the original planned amounts.  The dataset with full details is open and accessible

the most successful ad that I’ve ever posted... a lot of it came from people being confused whether or not it was real...the Bloomberg campaign was offering social media influencers $150 to create content in support of Mr. Bloomberg ...

Our scientists are publishing sophisticated data visualisations for policymakers to use. But are policymakers using them? ... I interview Annie White and Nil Tuzcu of Harvard’s Growth Lab about their use of data visualisations for policymaking... summarise the resulting guidance we’re giving Knowledge4Policy publishers.

Watching Silicon Valley exercise news judgment has been like watching Walter Cronkite try to write code in Python... Four companies have created trustworthiness indicators for news websites: Facebook, Google, Twitter, and NewsGuard. Publishers have no way of learning their secret trust score from the Silicon Valley companies. NewsGuard’s journalis…

Much of modern economic theory is based around a simple idea: Human beings maximize utility... To an economist, utility simply means how much people want something... tend to assume that utility is good... But what if the things people desire don’t bring them happiness?...People seem to reliably seek out a few things that make them unhappy... peop…

Scroll, scroll, scroll... it’s got a name: zombie scrolling syndrome... Consider parasites... some have the power of mind control. Or... zombification... the jewel wasp... grabs a cockroach twice her size... injecting nonlethal venom... dopamine... alters the roach’s behavior... cleaning itself instead of running for its life...zombifying parasite…

A “Behind the Story” explanation box attached to a news story ... most people skip right over it...it didn’t impact their trust ... Banner blindness isn’t just for ads... can be confused with advertising... whether people saw a BtS card or not didn’t significantly change their ratings.

The union faces a double crisis of legitimacy... it is hard to sustain the fiction that ordinary citizens have a meaningful say over what happens in Brussels... If many voters don’t believe that they have much sway over what happens in their national capitals, the feeling of impotence is even more profound when it comes to Brussels.... the EU ... …

Uber gets an $82 billion valuation for a low-margin taxi business it has never made a dime on... WeWork implodes after the slightest scrutiny ... that’s the bullshit economy... fraudulent advertising metrics and fake numbers ... to siphon cash through Facebook and Google’s ... counterfeit goods pass through Amazon... a financial crisis based on bu…

Despite some evidence that many politically minded people live in partisan echo chambers... strong evidence that encountering information across lines of difference (a) happens and (b) is consequential. split-ticket votes mostly likely by folks who spend some time with news media that reports from a different ideological perspective than their own…

is that true?... first thing ... is click the link... most students don’t ... second ... see whether the article actually supports that summary... How? ... zero people are going to [fully read the article] ... too long ... [so] ... the Yeats Effect (“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity”). The reckless p…

we’re headed for a miserable 24 months of purple prose, tediously long sermons and unneeded – and unheeded – speeches and moralising... a ‘Big European Moan’... Let’s capitalise on this rather jolly mood... minimising the institutional hijack and confusion ...European Parliament... traditional organisational blueprint ... plenaries, steering commi…

echo chambers and filter bubbles are slightly different... echo chambers could be a result of filtering or ... other processes, but filter bubbles have to be the result of algorithmic filtering...people main source of news roughly equal ... online and television... TV is more likely... people over 45. People under 45 are more likely to get their n…

‘Conference on the Future of Europe’ will open this spring... will not be enough... also... a real democratic debate on the final text, so that it can be followed up... if there is to be a reform of the Treaties... to be ratified in all Member States...Referenda are ... not suitable for the ratification of a new treaty... not allow a debate on its…

to make participatory democracy a reality, it is essential to avoid only paying lip-service to the idea of participation — and give citizens a real say...European federalists are hoping to gain momentum for treaty change. Many member states are afraid of that very outcome...Citizens’ participation is being tested out far more commonly across Europ…

Europe needs a new mechanism for involving citizens, not another talking shop chaired by the Guy Verhofstadt... By raising expectations it can’t easily deliver on, it risks eroding citizens’ trust...won’t directly prepare treaty change... a preparatory process ... could lead the European council ... to initiate them... this time the conference is …

How the Conference on the future of Europe will look like? ... it's the European Parliament ... to offer 1st blueprint... in essence a Constitutional Convention model PLUS... 'plus' is so tiny that fails to capture ... vivacity of EU civil society ...prepare a set of “concrete recommendations” that may be turned into legislative and…

the lean canvas... single-page template designed to distil the fundamental goals and objectives of a business, and offer a clear route to achieving them... to design a product around perceived market and consumer variables... In about 45 minutes ... journalists learned how to apply this framework to their news organisation’s editorial and business…

often our expectations for fact-checking reflect... the Scooby-Doo model of political accountability... the villain is unmasked ... off to jail... would’ve gotten away with it if it weren’t for “you meddling kids.” ... Once the facts come to light, the consequences follow ... idealized notion ... rooted at least partly in the “folk theory” of demo…