Scott Adams: Russia Hacked our Election! (So what?) From 2017 onward, the democratic process in any country is open to “voting” by the entire world. The foreign “votes” will come in the form of social media influence on the local voters (more)

David Schmaltz connects the Pseudo-Science of Nutritionism (referring to Michael Pollan's new book) to Management Science and its pernicious BigWorld effects. parts 2 3 4 . (more)

She Warned of ‘Peer-to-Peer Misinformation.’ Congress Listened. Renee DiResta watched on her laptop screen as lawyers representing Facebook, Google and Twitter spoke at congressional hearings that focused on the role social media played in a Russian disinformation campaign ahead of the 2016 election. (Presidential Candidates 2016) (more)

Scientism is the view that science and the scientific method are the best or only objective means by which people should determine normative and epistemological values.[1][2] While the term was originally defined to mean "methods and attitudes typical of or attributed to the natural scientist", some religious scholars (and subsequently many others) also adopted it as a pejorative with the meaning "an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities)".[3] The term scientism is often used critically, implying an unwarranted application of science in situations considered not amenable to application of the scientific method or similar scientific standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism I use it more in reference to cargo-culting of bad scientific method....

The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), formerly known as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), is a program within the transnational American non-profit educational organization Center for Inquiry (CFI), which seeks to "promote scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims."[1] Paul Kurtz proposed the establishment of CSICOP in 1976 as an independent non-profit organization (before merging with CFI as one of its programs in 2015[2]), to counter what he regarded as an uncritical acceptance of, and support for, paranormal claims by both the media and society in general.[3] Its philosophical position is one of scientific skepticism. CSI's fellows have included notable scientists, Nobel laureates, philosophers, psychologists, educators and authors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_Skeptical_Inquiry (more)

Timothy Allen Caulfield (born 1963) is a Canadian professor of law at the University of Alberta,[1] the research director of its Health Law Institute,[2][3] and current Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy.[4][5][6] He specializes in legal, policy and ethical issues in medical research and its commercialization. In addition to professional publications, he is the author of several books aimed at the general reader, the host of a television documentary series debunking pseudoscientific (pseudoscience) myths and is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Caulfield

Mike Caulfield: Misinformation Is a Norovirus and the Web Is a Cruise Ship (more)

Chris Dixon: The Crypto Price-Innovation Cycle. People who’ve been in crypto for a long time view the space as evolving in cycles, alternating between periods of high activity and “crypto winters.” There have been three cycles so far. The first peaked in 2011, the second in 2013, and the third in 2017 (more)

Gloria Origgi: Say goodbye to the information age: it’s all about reputation now. There is an underappreciated paradox of knowledge that plays a pivotal role in our advanced hyper-connected liberal democracies: the greater the amount of information that circulates, the more we rely on so-called reputational devices to evaluate it. (more)

Craig Silverman: How Facebook Groups Are Being Exploited To Spread Misinformation, Plan Harassment, And Radicalize People. One week after the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, those searching on Facebook for information about the upcoming March for Our Lives were likely to be shown an active group with more than 50,000 members. Called “March for Our Lives 2018 Official,” it appeared to be one of the best places to get details about the event and connect with others interested in gun control. But those who joined the group soon found themselves puzzled. The admins often posted pro-gun information and unrelated memes and mocked those who posted about gun control. (more)

Targeted Advertising Is Ruining the Internet and Breaking the World. Contextual advertising had supported the print and broadcast media for decades, so this was the logical next step. What could possibly go wrong? (more)

Threatcast 2020: Our New Brainstorming Game To Explore Disinformation In The 2020 Election. As you may recall, a few years back, I helped design and run a large group election simulation game called “Machine Learning President.” The game explored what odd or surprising coalitions might form around a 2020 election, as well as the impact of both money and technology on the races. (more)

Crafting projects, Islam, and Russian propaganda – Data for Democracy. We spent last Friday night combing through Jonathan Albright’s dataset of posts from five Russian-linked Facebook pages, trying to track down related Instagram accounts. (more)

How Misinfodemics Spread Disease. They called it the Great Stink. In the summer of 1858, London was hit with a heat wave of noxious consequence...Their belief, the miasma theory of disease transmission, had some truth to it—it just wasn’t precise. (Ghost Map) (more)

How Russia ‘Pushed Our Buttons’ With Fake Online Ads. Many Americans this week got their first looks at fake Facebook ads placed by Russian propagandists during the 2016 election campaign to sow discord in the US. The ads, made public during congressional hearings with social-media executives, targeted Americans on both sides of divisive issues such as Islam, gun rights, and the Black Lives Matter movement. (more)

Product Management/Customer Discovery coach https://www.producttalk.org/ https://twitter.com/ttorres (more)

cf Exponential Growth, NonLinear, Phase Change, Power Law (more)

"The idea was great, it was just executed wrong." tweets cf Execution, Accountability

product management guru with newsletter/community - 7yrs at AirBnb, 9yrs at WebMetrics; https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ (more)

Chaos Magick had its inception in the late 1970s when Pete Carroll began to meld together elements of Golden Dawn ceremonial magick, Thelema, Taoism and Tibetan Buddhism in his articles for the magickal journal, The New Equinox. The inspiration for this synthesis was the work of the obscure, early twentieth-century artist and sorcerer Austin Osman Spare. Spare had developed what he called the technique of SentientLetters. Pete Carroll reformed the technique, and the sentient letters were recast as 'sigils'; they became the basis of a system which aimed to generate results through the application of undogmatic magickal technique. http://www.barbelith.com/cgi-bin/articles/00000004.shtml (more)