Groupthink produced a failure of the “wisdom of crowds” and an underestimate of Trump’s chances... political experts aren’t a very diverse group and tend to place a lot of faith in the opinions of other experts and other members of the political establishment. Once a consensus view is established, it tends to reinforce itself ... Social media, esp…

Facebook today cannot exist without AI. Every time you use Facebook or Instagram or Messenger... your experiences are being powered by AI... Eventually, this “classifying” step—known as supervised learning—may become automated, as the company pursues an ML holy grail known as “unsupervised learning,” ... Facebook sees the visual cortex merging wit…

vast universe of self-built social media empires devoted to spreading false, misleading, and polarizing science and health news ... Natural News ... are “[o]pening my eyes to the reality that everything about our culture is corrupted and I can’t trust nothing but what I see and experience.”.. people tend to hold beliefs that align with their cultu…

Bill Gates. At the end of each day, he would look at what he had worked on, and asked himself “what is on this list that somebody else could have done?”... we should be asking the following questions each day: What’s really important here? How am I using my gifts? What is my genius and how I can I bring it forth to impact my family, culture, a…

Material that arouses heated emotions within the viewer spreads faster and wider than well-considered, evidence-based argument.For an elected leader, a u-turn is seen as the ultimate betrayal, but for a scientist, changing views in the face of better evidence is a sign of the highest integrity.... Imagine, if you will, a sort of spellchecker appl…

research the critical trends and market conditions that are of importance to their clients and the company. From that commitment content flows at relatively low cost. It’s easy to write when you have compelling research to share, that has already been paid for by the strategic needs of the company.

If you're wondering where your job sits on the list of "Run for your life, the robots are coming," you have a simple, singular mission. Learn how your job is going to be automated. Learn everything you can about what your job will evolve into and become the very best man-machine partner you can.

"conservatives who received a correction telling them that Iraq did not have [Weapons of Mass Destruction] were more likely to believe that Iraq had WMD." ... fact-checking reinforced the mistaken belief... the "backfire effect."A new paper, however, suggests the "backfire effect" may be a very rare phenomenon.... People are extra happy to adopt a…

Regardless of partisan preference, belief in Trump falsehoods fell after these were corrected ... research found no evidence of a "backfire effect," i.e. an increase in inaccurate beliefs post-correction... [but] Trump supporters were just as likely to vote for their candidate after being exposed to his inaccuracies.... "If the original informat…

Bot Studio... will focus on two main areas: How bots and artificial intelligence can help journalists do their jobs better and how news consumers can use them to access news and information... conference bot, a Twitter bot — @newsnerdbot. We scraped the conference website ... fed that into a database, and then wired that up to a natural-language …

uses machine learning to give readers a stream of 25 stories they might be interested in based on their preferences, but 'always including an element of surprise'... personalisation will be based on the meaning of an article... users' existing history that shows roughly what type of stories they are interested in

every Chinese ... ”Citizen Score” will determine under what conditions they may get loans, jobs, or travel visa to other countries. ... individual monitoring would include people’s Internet surfing and the behavior of their social contacts... algorithms know pretty well what we do, what we think and how we feel—possibly even better than our friend…

Journaling daily is the most potent and powerful keystone habit you can acquire. If done correctly, you will show up better in every area of your life ... We’ve become addicted to input... to reactively being guided by other people’s agendas... wakes up and immediately ... journal for 30 minutes... sleeping, his subconscious mind has been brewing…

The websites Liberal Society and Conservative 101 appear to be total opposites... published stories that were almost exactly the same, save for a few notable word changes... These for-the-cause sites that appeal to hardcore partisans are in fact owned by the same Florida company... all it takes to turn a liberal partisan story into a conservative…

The Information reported that ... artificial intelligence-powered chatbots could successfully complete only 30 percent of requests without human assistance.... a dilemma ... lies in the nature of bots themselves and when they are truly useful... Bots are great for the occasional, simple question: “I know what I want, give me the answer as quickly…

interviews ...suggest that its psychological approach was not actually used by the Trump campaign and, furthermore, the company has never provided evidence that it even works.

the term fake doesn’t begin to describe the complexity of the different types of misinformation (the inadvertent sharing of false information) and disinformation (the deliberate creation and sharing of information known to be false)... once you start breaking these categories down and mapping them against one another you begin to see distinct patt…

An effective communications strategy must be connected to other strategies, usually managed by different departments. Reframing it as central to your organisation’s innovation strategy helps sidestep turf wars. 

according to ... data, many UKIP voters will change their views on immigration if politicians can reassure them by highlighting the impressive rate of assimilation already taking place in British society... all ethnic groups – including the majority – want their community to have a future... It’s rare for stories such as these to shift people’s a…

There are tons of chatbots ... little about how companies really get hands on.,,, my findings here, and here... a deeper explanation about how I exactly face the situation on a regular basis... I separate my process into 4 different steps: the bot scope, the chatbot personality, a prioritized list of must-have features and the chatbot flow.

to put the blame solely on the company is to overlook how people use the site, and how they themselves create a filter bubble effect through their actions.... Just as important as the algorithm is how people use the site and shape it around their own communications... people are actually exposed to a great deal of diversity through Facebook... But…

"Perspective" ... for news websites and blogs to moderate online discussions with the help of artificial intelligence... reports how "toxic" a given comment is. It lets the website publisher, or even readers themselves, choose a "toxicity" threshold for comments that won't be displayed publicly... will start screening for off-topic comments or one…

AllSides.com offers the news you’d expect on any US politics site, except that its lead stories include a choice of articles: one from the left, centre and right... to push the comfortably certain in new directions... When you click on one story you’re offered a range of alternatives... a patented ‘crowd-driven’ political bias rating. Visitors ..…

Why Bots and Chatbots Are Optimal Tools for Politics

There are always “alternative facts.” What matters is how we decide which of those alternative facts are most likely to be true... Conway’s statement based ... on a much older tradition of deciding what is true: the argument from authority.... the culmination of a long retreat from the scientific perspective on truth... pitted against creationist…

If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias... a trait that should have been selected against. ... it must have some adaptive function... related to our “hypersociability.” ... Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned wit…

scientists and their supporters need to paint a positive vision of the future, where science re-affirms its moral authority, articulates how it will help us, and advances a noble cause

More than two dozen governments... have a team of behavioral scientists tasked with ... “nudge” their citizens toward what they deem to be higher levels of well-being... “nudges” are value neutral... both achieve altruistic ends or more malicious ones... our environment (and the government) is always exerting some influence on our behavior, so we’…

become the best at something no one else is attempting... Attracting customers isn’t something you “bolt on” in the end. It’s something you work on at every stage of your business, and your unique selling proposition is the first stage... how do you define yours?... when you try to please everybody, you end up pleasing no one... connect more stro…

a digital community ... a space for anyone interested ... how to make “journalism more responsive to the public’s needs, more representative of the public’s diversity, and more inclusive of the public’s voices.”... Gather... for everyone working in news in some capacity