In A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going, Michael Muthukrishna contends that the core issue affecting Western societies is increasing energy…
The Wellcome Trust has recently (yesterday) released the 2018 Global Monitor, a 140,000 people survey on how ‘people around the world think and feel about science and major…
You have probably heard the adagio that “man bites dog”, and not “dog bites man”, makes for a good piece of news: unusual, exceptional, events are better stories…
I have been involved, over the weekend, in a small twitter debate on the old question of whether anthropology should use qualitative or quantitative methodologies. The debate was…
Online misinformation, fake news, false news, hoaxes, you name it, has been blamed for almost everything bad happening in the last years, from the success of Trump to…
There is a joke among pilots—of course, I never heard any pilot actually saying the joke, but I found it online in plenty of commentaries about automation—according to…
Next month, I will give two talks – or two versions of the same talk – on “Cognitive attraction and online misinformation”. One will be in Den Bosch…
The phenomenon of online diffusion of misattributed quotes is so widespread that got its own dedicated meme. You may have seen a picture of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th…
Apparently, June is the month I write a blog post about the “Journal of Cultural Evolution” (or whatever will be its name) project, so I will keep the tradition…
Last week – April 25 – Facebook posted the 2018 first-quarter data on revenues and users (here the original post from Facebook.) The perhaps unexpected take-home message is…