Overview: Politics

if everyone has the same information, the crowd is no smarter than a single individual... a diverse collection of opinions, especially including minority views, is crucial for creating a smart group... we have an innate desire to imitate our peers... it may also be because of a rational, profit-seeking motivation... The more complex the situation…

if you’re having a conversation with your friend, @person@custom.website, and another user from custom.website wants to chime in, they will be invisible.... how does one end up on this blacklist? ... mastodon.social’s community policy:... your social graph is not portable between platforms ... first principle of a workable, future-proof social ne…

Here we propose the following alternative to a democratic vote: select the answer that is more popular than people predict. We show that this principle yields the best answer under reasonable assumptions about voter behaviour, while the standard ‘most popular’ or ‘most confident’ principles fail under exactly those same assumptions. Like tradition…

the international artists and technologists creating our popular ideas of the future do so in contexts shaped by the pursuit of profit or power. If you can render the future in advance, after all, maybe you can also control it.

The objectivity that matters so much in science is not primarily a characteristic of individual scientists but of scientific communities. Scientists rarely refute their own pet hypotheses... Their fellow scientists will be happy to expose these hypotheses to severe testing... Not being afraid of being wrong... is a value we could promote... Intel…

Facebook officially released a tool Monday that lets its users — all desktop and mobile users in the U.S. — easily contact their local officials. It's called "Town Hall," reminiscent of what Facebook likes to see itself as, especially in political discussion. 

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

Why Bots and Chatbots Are Optimal Tools for Politics

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…

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

Zuckerberg uses abstract language in his memo—he wants Facebook to develop “the social infrastructure for community,” he writes—but what he’s really describing is building a media company with classic journalistic goals... “for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”,,,an assumption that news... will con…

our current misinformation problem is only the tip of a massive iceberg — and this looming disaster starts with AI...when we see a picture that seems very unlikely, we naturally assume that it is photoshopped... with AI, we are heading toward a world where this will be the case with every form of media: text, voice, video, etc.

Community engagement is about shifting that perspective. It’s about continuously listening, interacting and serving a community. How did the work contribute to the community reaching its goals? Far too often, journalists are obsessed with telling the story. And the story is good. But the story. isn’t. enough. design thinking ... can help us achi…

Over the past week in our Understanding AI series, we heard from a group of professionals exploring the impacts of AI... Sales coaches are valued, highly experienced, and well-paid. It’s hard to believe that a machine could potentially put them out of work, and yet…look at the data. And Sales’ counterparts over in Marketing are hardly any safer...…

With a few paragraphs buried in... bureaucrat-speak, the GDPR also restricts what the EU calls “automated individual decision-making.” ... what neural networks do... prohibit any automated decision that “significantly affects” EU citizens... provides ... a “right to explanation.” ... the option of reviewing how a particular service made a partic…

Convergence is occurring not just across the technology and future scenario curves, but also the various aspects of social change... the social dimension is impacted or squeezed by the curves, while at the same time, social change has a reciprocal effect

model to assess human beings based on five personality traits, known as the "Big Five." also known as OCEAN... openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism... their needs and fears, and how they are likely to behave. ... the problem with this approach was data collection... Then came the Internet. And Facebook... on the b…

Three articles unpacking the relationship between community, communications, content and EU communications.

While we would like to believe we can persuade people ... with evidence, studies show the other side is likely to become even more deeply entrenched in its view in the face of more information... “politically motivated reasoning,”... people use their minds to protect the groups to which they belong from grappling with uncomfortable truths. The mot…

author of The Content Trap and professor at Harvard Business School, talks about the strategic challenges facing digital businesses, and explains how he and his colleagues wrestled with them when designing HBX, the school’s online learning platform... success for the best companies does not come from making the best content, it comes from recogniz…

the most recommended stories on Medium have either to do with startups, life or productivity. Sometimes, all three topics are squeezed in a single story — How to be super productive in your startup and change your life… If we can undo the follower bias, I think everybody becomes a writer and nobody really becomes a celebrity.

everyone is intransigent now ... Social media acts as a massive collective Sorting Hat, silently assigning most of us to filter bubbles wherein our beliefs and biases are rarely challenged. News (or “news”) sources rise up to cater... slowly, these isolated groups do what isolated groups do... become more extreme. Increasing extremity in one group…

Yet another variation on the Top3ics format: exploring three facets of one topic, highlighting one outstanding resource (plus a few extra links) for each.  Today’s theme... psychology

Many scientists are asking themselves: What can I do?... the answer from ... 314 Action is: Get elected... most scientists view their work as pure and noble, and politics as a dirty game... since Trump’s victory, “many more scientists are realizing why their voices are needed... Scientists bring a unique perspective in how they ... think about …

Marketplace wants to reach a more diverse audience... to raise the economic intelligence of the country... podcast... to approach explainer journalism ... through a group conversation... Our attempt to get the answer is going to be transparent... audience, can you help me with this?

Only 37 percent of eligible Britons voted to leave the European Union. ... Trump triumphed in a low-turnout election.... compulsory voting ... changes who runs for office and the policy proposals they support... it does not pay to energize your base to the exclusion of all other ... elections ... are decided by swing voters and won in the center..…