Newspapers and television carry tales of lottery wins and fairytale romances, terrorist atrocities or gruesome assaults by strangers.
None of these stories reflect everyday life
All of them are viscerally memorable and seem to take place in our living rooms.
Tag: Tim Harford
Easy triumphs, specially when it’s probably not good for us
It is easy to find a like-minded tribe. It is easy to share, retweet or “like” something we have not even read. It is easy to repeat false claims. It is easy to get angry or personal.
It’s less easy to distinguish truth from lies, to clear time and attention to read something deep, and to reward an important article with something more than a digital thumbs up.
The dangers of dark nudging, December 10, 2017 at 11:43AM
Tobacco industry’s 4 step plan to eliminate inconvenient facts
First, the industry appeared to engage, promising high-quality research into the issue. The public were assured that the best people were on the case.
The second stage was to complicate the question and sow doubt: lung cancer might have any number of causes, after all. And wasn’t lung cancer, not cigarettes, what really mattered?
Stage three was to undermine serious research and expertise. Autopsy reports would be dismissed as anecdotal, epidemiological work as merely statistical, and animal studies as irrelevant.
Finally came normalisation: the industry would point out that the tobacco-cancer story was stale news. Couldn’t journalists find something new and interesting to say?
The Problem With Facts, April 24, 2017, at 10:13 AM
Use my marker 