How to talk to conspiracy theorists—and still be kind
Experts and r/ChangeMyView subreddit moderators offer 10 tips to debunk conspiracy theories convincingly—and kindly.
More from MIT Technology Review
How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation
The tech giants are paying millions of dollars to the operators of clickbait pages, bankrolling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world.
«Scammers used to make their $$ from naive people. Now they get their payments straight from some of the world's biggest tech companies.»
Meta has built a massive new language AI—and it’s giving it away for free
Facebook’s parent company is inviting researchers to pore over and pick apart the flaws in its version of GPT-3
Saudi Arabia plans to spend $1 billion a year discovering treatments to slow aging
The oil kingdom fears that its population is aging at an accelerated rate and hopes to test drugs to reverse the problem. First up might be the diabetes drug metformin.
Edits to a cholesterol gene could stop the biggest killer on earth
In a first, a patient in New Zealand has undergone gene-editing to lower their cholesterol. It could be the beginning of new era in disease prevention.
Social media is polluting society. Moderation alone won’t fix the problem
Companies already have the systems in place that are needed to evaluate their deeper impacts on the social fabric.
«Facebook’s 2012 “emotional contagion” experiment, which showed that users’ affect (their mood as measured by their behavior on the platform) shifted measurably depending on which version of the product they were exposed to»
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«Although completing a goal may lead to the arrival fallacy, Dr Tal Ben-Shahar maintains that having objectives is essential to personal growth.»
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«A friend once dubbed what happened to me a “sports cry,” and in the years I’ve been using the term since, I’ve found no need to explain it»