This is floated into my view from alt-right Facebook earlier today: It’s a set of tables from an unknown source showing that there were appx. 15 million Jews in the world in 1933 and 15 million in the world in 1948, the implication being that the Holocaust never happened. Now, if you’re like me, your Continue reading

My solution to the post-truth crisis is to develop a culture of collaborative explanation and exploration via development and use of new and different tools. My belief is that humans have a couple modes of working with truth. Some are adversarial and propagative, and some are exploratory and collaborative. The adversarial mode is killing us. Continue reading

From a great New Yorker article that ran last month: In a study conducted in 2012, they asked people for their stance on questions like: Should there be a single-payer health care system? Or merit-based pay for teachers? Participants were asked to rate their positions depending on how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the Continue reading

I’ve talked about how you have three basic moves in web investigations: Check for previous work Go upstream Read laterally These can be used on simple claims (“Bernie Sanders shouted ‘Death to America’ at a Communist rally”) to get an answer quickly. But the real reason I like this set of moves is that they Continue reading

Tim Harford, whose work I have followed since I first got into media and statistical literacy a decade ago, has one of the best pieces yet on our post-truth moment. As we’ve often done in these pages, he traces the roots of our current crisis not to the 2016 election but to the realization in the Continue reading

I’m a huge fan of peer-to-peer sharing systems. The whole idea of federated content takes much of its inspiration from platforms like BitTorrent, and I’ve repeatedly argued here that the future belongs to platforms that look more like IPFS than Dropbox. (In fact, if you read this blog, this was probably where you first heard Continue reading

I missed this when Jim put it up, but Martha Burtis’s keynote abstract is up for the Domains conference: Four years into Domain of One’s Own, I wonder if we are at an inflection point, and, if so, what we will do to respond to this moment. At its onset, Domains offered us paths into Continue reading

I’ve put my tweets on a rolling auto-delete, which probably means I’ll be doing ocassional shorter pieces in this space in addition to longer pieces. For posterity, or something. Anyway, a thought for the day. As we think about the firehose of the Stream — that never-ending reverse-chronological scroll of events that has become the Continue reading

I’ve been investigating Google snippets lately, based on some work that other people have done. These are the “cards” that pop up on top sometimes, giving the user what appears to be the “one true answer”. What’s shocking to me is not that Google malfunctions in producing these, but how often it malfunctions, and how Continue reading

There’s lots of primary causes of the recent assault on truth that are non-technological. In fact, most causes have very little to do with technology. I’d point people to the excellent book The Merchants of Doubt which details the well-funded and and well-planned corporate assault on science that began as early as the 1950s around the issue Continue reading