Overview: Politics

with influencer marketing en vogue and publishers hunting for ways to drive engagement on their properties, the hunt for famous, influential contributors is back on... eg Axios has two people... recruiting, managing subject matter experts to participate in Expert Voices... invite-only contributor network... Find influential people, bring them into…

Major tech corporations have launched AI “ethics” boards that not only lack diversity, but sometimes include powerful people with interests that don’t align with the ethics mission... Partnership on AI... by Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft, does not appear to have black board members or staff ... a board dominated by men.. empty PR sp…

copyright organisations ... succeeded in their lobbying ... establish a narrative that those who criticised the Directive were reeled in by hysterical propaganda or puppets of Google... or against cultural creators... intensity of the lobbying stepped up ... Half of Strasbourg was wearing yellow #yes2copyright sashes ... two years of implementat…

The systems in the brain that light up when we access our beliefs are the same systems that help us understand stories... the same brain systems involved when people think about who they are and about the beliefs that are most important to them... the default mode network, a set of interconnected areas of the brain associated with identity and sel…

The web was designed to bring people together and make knowledge freely available. Everyone has a role to play to ensure the web serves humanity. By committing to the following principles, governments, companies and citizens around the world can help protect the open web as a public good and a basic right for everyone.

Facebook deliberately broke privacy and competition law and should urgently be subject to statutory regulation, according to a devastating parliamentary report...The Cambridge Analytica scandal was facilitated by Facebook’s policies

This working document constitutes a draft of the AI Ethics Guidelines presented by the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI HLEG)... The consultation ended on 1 February 2019 with over 500 comments received. These comments are currently being analysed

three documents from Europe about regulating the net:.... I see danger for the net and its freedoms posed by corporate protectionism and a rising moral panic about technology... Articles 11 & 13: Protectionism gone mad... Article 11 link tax... likely cover many of the snippets shown ... to give you an idea of what they lead to….No exceptions are …

We’ve been taking the wrong approach to communicating about climate change... even climate-denying, anti-scientific, messianic nations like the United States are quietly preparing ... not at how to mitigate climate change, but how to prepare for its inevitability. We’re building walls ... to block tomorrow’s climate refugees... alienation verging …

a recent strand of experimental psychology suggests, our political beliefs may have something to do with ... our propensity to feel physical disgust.... The brains of liberals and conservatives reacted in wildly different ways to repulsive pictures... different brain networks were stimulated... the subjects’ neural responses... could predict with …

In all the urgent debate about regulating, investigating, and even breaking up internet companies, we have lost sight of the problem we are trying to confront: not technology but instead human behaviour on it... in their search for someone to blame, government outsource fault and responsibility, egged on by media (whose schadenfreude constitutes …

“It’s not that pretty” we hear every other day. Possibly. But what’s important: building something beautiful, or something usable?- published on the K4P Publication on Medium

I interviewed three prominent futurists---  about how business leaders can get themselves into a more future-oriented mindset.... they explain how companies and the people running them can learn to predict major shifts ...  in technology, workforce, social trends — and how to adapt accordingly... Read a ton, and consult experts... Futurists use t…

scholars’ assumptions about the value of academic research... has left us ill-equipped to navigate the stormy waters of evidence informed policy and practice. He proposes that instead we extract key insights from policy theories and use them to inform discussions about how to promote evidence use.

Take the Pro-Truth Pledge to encourage politicians – and everyone else – to commit to truth-oriented behaviors and protect facts and civility. ... Pledge-takers are held accountable through crowd-sourcing the truth.. volunteers who evaluate whether public figures violate the pledge by sharing misinformation.... this peer-reviewed article... Publ…

A place where users with radically different political opinions interact productively and politely, where a willingness to participate thoughtfully is the rule rather than the exception, and where people readily admit when their views on a subject have been altered... Reddit’s Change My View forum... promotes respectful conversation between people…

There are many grassroots communities emerging with vital understandings of the importance of continued EU membership... an agile swarm of passionate activist communities can run rings around a top-down Westminster-based operation and engage voters whom politicians cannot reach.... Such is the multifaceted nature of our EU membership that a single…

reddit community called Change My View ... a ready-made natural experiment ... feed it into programs ... to understand the back-and-forth between human beings ... discovered two things: what kind of arguments are most likely to change people’s minds, and what kinds of minds are most likely to be changed. https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/ : po…

naive realism, the tendency to believe that the other side is wrong because they are misinformed, that if they knew what you knew, they would change their minds to match yours... maybe WE are the ones who are wrong. We never go into the debate hoping to be enlightened, only to crush our opponents... When confronted with people who disagree, you te…

The European Citizens’ Consultations (ECCs) are a new experiment in improving the quality of democracy at the EU level by giving European citizens the possibility to express and exchange their opinions about the Union and its future.... This report presents the results of the research and analysis... the member states have stuck to the flexibilit…

This year, we are ... focusing on the strategic impact communities are having and how they are supporting key business goals.... three key findings: Communities are change agents... impact multiple functions, stakeholders, and departments ... agents of change by efficiently dispersing knowledge and information across organizations and their market…

the more fear a 4-year-old showed in a laboratory situation, the more conservative his or her political attitudes were found to be 20 years later... fear center of the brain, the amygdala, is actually larger in conservatives than in liberals.... no one had ever turned conservatives into liberals. Until we did.... Imagining being completely safe…

the psychology of warnings - why some warnings get heard, why many are ignored and the pitfalls of being a prophet.... a vicious cycle ... As the planet warms, the permafrost thaws... dead animals and plants and fungi start to decompose. More decomposition means more carbon released ... means warmer temperatures... even more melting of the permafr…

Celebrating a small milestone for the K4P project on Medium.

Every government has bureaucrats, who are by nature unelected. The EU, with about 33,000 civil servants, is dwarfed by the British ... 400,000. ... many senior ones are appointed rather than elected; yet this, too, is true of all governments.... the 28 commissioners ... are nominated by member countries and approved by the European Parliament, whi…

A workshop proposal for EuroPCom 2018 with @albawhitewolf, Mike Galsworthy (@Scientists4EU) and the original Captain Europe, reposted to Facebook by popular demand.

Latest on the K4P Medium Publication

political scientist Lilliana Mason ... new book, Uncivil Agreement ... we actually agree about most things... “our conflicts are over who we think we are, rather than reasoned differences of opinion... Our opinions can be very fluid... if we wanted to come to a compromise we could, if there were not these pesky identities in the way... we disagree…

the next iteration of technology applied to politics will be a huge leap forward with a greater ability to target people... address each of the 156 million of registered voters on the US with personalized messages.... a falsehood delivered in a personalized way is likely to be more efficient but less visible than a blatant lie put on Twitter; it w…

Technology has altered the foundations of news and media, and as trust in media continues to decline, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and algorithms have come to play a critical role not only as threats to the integrity and quality of media, but also as a source of potential solutions. The core threats to information quality associated …