Unsolicited advice
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Unsolicited advice

No one wants unsolicited advice. Here’s what that means. No matter how brilliant you are and how perfectly suited your knowledge is to someone’s situation, your unsolicited advice will not help them. They will not listen. And they will resent you. What that looks like About weight loss. This is solicited advice: Your friend or…

Everybody is under the influence of disinformation bots (except you and me)
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Everybody is under the influence of disinformation bots (except you and me)

I strongly recommend that you take a look at Eric Schwartzman’s new article in Fast Company, “Bot farms invade social media to hijack popular sentiment.” Schwartzman’s deeply researched piece explains how malign actors are using banks of actual mobile phones, spoofed to appear as actual independent people, to manipulate sentiment about everything from actions in…

Arguably essential; publishing shrivels; AI-powered fraud: Newsletter 2 October 2024
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Arguably essential; publishing shrivels; AI-powered fraud: Newsletter 2 October 2024

Newsletter 64. Why progress requires embracing people’s right to be wrong. Plus the decline in publishing workers, Gucci vs. Lord & Taylor, three people to follow and three books to read. The freedom to be wrong We’ve gotten to a point where we rip people apart for being wrong, when we should be celebrating them….

Nate Silver demonstrates how not to do book promotion
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Nate Silver demonstrates how not to do book promotion

Election forecaster and statistics pundit Nate Silver has a new book out. It’s called On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything and it’s billed as an investigation of “the River,” the “community of like-minded people whose mastery of risk allows them to shape–and dominate–so much of modern life.” Like any author, Silver and his…

Truth and research; biased bestsellers; cocaine sharks: Newsletter 24 July 2024
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Truth and research; biased bestsellers; cocaine sharks: Newsletter 24 July 2024

Newsletter 54: Honesty is impossible but essential, why the Times bestseller list favors liberals, free books for 2 million kids, plus three people to follow, three books to read, and a sneak preview of our author ROI research. On telling the truth We all are certain we are honest people. We all hold truth as…