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dblums · 8 months
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The same year, three young behavioral-science professors—Joe Simmons, Leif Nelson, and Uri Simonsohn—published an actual parody: in a paper called “False-Positive Psychology,” they “proved” that listening to the Beatles song “When I’m Sixty-Four” rendered study participants literally a year and a half younger. “It was hard to think of something that was so crazy that no one would believe it, because compared to what was actually being published in our journals nothing was that crazy,” Nelson, who teaches at U.C. Berkeley, said. Researchers could measure dozens of variables and perform reams of analyses, then publish only the correlations that happened to appear “significant.” If you tortured the data long enough, as one grim joke went, it would confess to anything. They called such techniques “p-hacking.” As they later put it, “Everyone knew it was wrong, but they thought it was wrong the way it’s wrong to jaywalk.” In fact, they wrote, “it was wrong the way it’s wrong to rob a bank.”
They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie?
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dblums · 8 months
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n instant airport-book classic, and augured an extraordinarily successful career for Ariely as an enigmatic swami of the but-actually circuit.
They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie?
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dblums · 8 months
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They’ll never do away with them completely, but at the new Times, the lede-alls are increasingly out of fashion. The emphasis now is on the “Live Desk,” which puts out those short-burst news briefings that are thrown together into incoherent, rolling bulletins during particularly newsy moments. The cascading information keeps readers glued to the app, refreshing for more, but many reporters regard it as unrewarding work. Die-hard Times readers can recall trenchant ledes they’ve loved or stories that touched their hearts. No one is ever going to say, Remember that great live briefing …
Masthead Gladiators at the New York Times
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dblums · 8 months
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As many have noted, draft horses were permanently put out of work by the automobile. If Hondas are to horses as GPT-10 is to us, a whole host of long-standing assumptions may collapse.
Does Sam Altman Know What He’s Creating?
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dblums · 1 year
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One possible conclusion from these findings is “that the advantage that someone had from tenure in terms of their performance has now diminished because a youngster with ChatGPT can perform as well as somebody who’s had a few years’ experience,” s
Bringing A.I. Tools to the Workplace Requires a Delicate Balance
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dblums · 1 year
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IDEO has also been building new design capabilities within its own team, hiring writers and filmmakers to tell stories for their clients, which Brown has come to see as “the key activity, not a key activity” for influencing change in societal systems. “If you had asked me 10 to 15 years ago,” he says, “I would never have guessed that we would have as many folks who come from a storytelling background within a design firm as we do today.”
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
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dblums · 2 years
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The hashing function gives clear step-by-step instructions for how to shuffle the bits together, but they don’t work in reverse.6 It’s like stirring cream into coffee: easy to do, hard to undo.
The Only Crypto Story You Need, by Matt Levine
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dblums · 2 years
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Instead of lining up at 4:30 p.m. on a Monday, the one day Dame takes walk-in diners, a devoted diner could pay $1,000 dollars, which buys them the ability, with at least 24 hours notice, to book a table once a week through the end of 2022. (20 such tokens have been created; 11 have been sold so far.)
The Era of the Paywalled Restaurants Is Upon Us
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dblums · 2 years
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He takes issue with knocking OXO for valuing function over beauty. “When I started in design school, everyone wanted to make things that would end up in design stores, or the Museum of Modern Art. I’d much rather design a product that millions of people buy and appreciate than make a product that nobody can afford, and half the people can’t understand it because it’s got some artistic vision in it.”
The Brand That Conquered America’s Kitchens Won a Legion of Obsessive Fans. Can They All Be Wrong?
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dblums · 2 years
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I asked how many products missed deadlines because OXO engineers were still tinkering with details they wanted to make better. “Honestly,” he said with a grin, “most of them.”
The Brand That Conquered America’s Kitchens Won a Legion of Obsessive Fans. Can They All Be Wrong?
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dblums · 2 years
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We didn’t have a protocol for maintaining consensus – meaning agreeing on what’s in the database – that would allow anyone to join the protocol (as well as anyone to leave). It is difficult to overstate how big an innovation this is. We went from not being able to do something at all to having a first working version. Again to be clear, I am not saying this will solve all problems. Of course it won’t. And it will even create new problems of its own. Still, permissionless data was a crucial missing piece – its absence resulted in a vast power concentration. As such Web3 can, if properly developed and with the right kind of regulation, provide a meaningful shift in power back to individuals and communities.
Web3/Crypto: Why Bother?
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dblums · 2 years
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A blockchain is a worse database. It is slower, requires way more storage and compute, doesn’t have customer support, etc. And yet it has one dimension along which it is radically different. No single entity or small group of entities controls it – something people try to convey, albeit poorly, by saying it is “decentralized.”
Web3/Crypto: Why Bother?
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dblums · 2 years
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Even for the true believers, the obliteration of Terra and Luna was a powerful reminder that investing in most cryptocurrencies is the financial equivalent of Wile E. Coyote running on air—it works great until people decide to look down. And once they do, it’s a really long way to fall.
How Crypto Disappeared Into Thin Air
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dblums · 2 years
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When crypto’s value is the product of investors’ collective will, then it’s essential to try to keep that will intact.
How Crypto Disappeared Into Thin Air
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dblums · 2 years
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If the collective group of people on the internet believes something has value, it has value. We are in a world where belief equals value.”
How Crypto Disappeared Into Thin Air
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dblums · 2 years
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The interests of arbitrage publishers are to have sites load fast to stay on Google’s good side. Premium publishers, on the other hand, are trying to serve so many masters that they have inferior product experiences.
Arbitrage media - by Brian Morrissey - The Rebooting
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dblums · 2 years
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But by turning features into “user stories” on a whiteboard, Agile has the potential to create what Yvonne Lam calls a “chain of deniability”: an assembly line in which no one, at any point, takes full responsibility for what the team has created.
Agile and the Long Crisis of Software
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