Links from Summer 2022
Wisdom of the Crowd is when you ask a crowd to estimate something and the average turns out pretty accurate. Strangely, this also works with only one person, when you ask her the same question several times – this has been called dialectical bootstrapping. A new study found that you can make it more accurate by putting yourself in the shoes of someone you often disagree with. This sounds obvious, but how often do you actually do it?
Nutshell by Nicky Case: a tool to make websites so the reader can click words to expand the text up to the desired level of detail. Someone please start a scientific journal based on this.
You heard about Alzheimer researchers copypasting western blots? Zigerell found a paper where the authors hid inconvenient parts of a survey under white rectangles in the pdf. You can still see the hidden content by selecting the text.1
Also on preserving democracy: evidence from China that censorship normalizes censorship leading to further censorship. The legend of Murder-Gandhi was true!
The Early History of Average Values and Implications for Education.
(Ancient Greece fact of the day: some early attempts at estimating averages were Pappus of Alexandria calculating mean beauty, and Aristotle calculating mean virtue.)The emergence of agriculture came with new genetic variants that protect against alcoholism. I enjoy the fact that our ancestors got wasted so hard that they evolved.
Sentences out of context
“The Holy See was very displeased at the settlement, with Pope Innocent X calling it null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time" (here)
“(Click to add sheeps, obviously)” (here)
“Meameamealokkapoowa oompa. Not to be confused with meameamealokkabipowwa oompa.” (here)
“Probably half of the air fleet in the world today is more than 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in some of the avionics.” (here)
Wholesale Wikipedias
Oil futures drunk-trading incident
Hurt the feelings of the Chinese people
Zigerell has some kind of supernatural talent for finding this stuff, I don’t know how he does it. But he always scrutinizes papers from the same tribe. Beware selective exposure to information.