Denny Luan

This is awesome! Congrats!

IMO the solution seems like what scientists like Dan Kahan and others are presenting around science deficit model - in science communication, how you present an idea is more important than the content of what you're presenting. Making something seem approachable, or funny, or engaging, or interesting is different than flatly handing over data. Each of those options is a dimension on the transaction that is communicating new science. In a way, it's kind of a defensive complexity against the exploits. Or maybe it's just that scientists today aren't operating on those dimensions enough where exploiting motivated reasoning does: you're more likely to believe the earth is flat if you're watching an engaging youtube personality deliver the pitch. I realize I'm totally blowing up your comment section, so apologies. I'll stop drinking wine now.

Hypothetically, assuming you had comprehensive real-time data of what the collective conscience is in the world a la social networks, it doesn't seem that hard to monitor the available trends and exploit it. You could even automate the content and use machine learning to scale it, given a training data set of a target audience's underlying beliefs and values. E.g., you liked an old 2008 tea party video, a Green Bay Packers facebook group, and live 50 miles outside of a city - throw in some recent behavior, and you're probably a profile for some targeted content: five or six memes related to some political stance. Theoretically, if you could use AI to produce these exploits at scale, then you could probably use AI to detect the patterns too. If maybe you could predict when exploits opportunistically present themselves, then maybe you could counteract it with the opposite noise to drown it out? But taken to the logical extreme, with a known network of content consumers - what is the real defense though? I guess my question is - with the data you hope to produce, what does that lead to in terms of a practical defense against exploiting motivated reasoning. At some point, does it just become a predeterministic thing? E.g. given a population with X education level, it will always result in Y polarization?

Oops - hit enter too early. Is there such a thing as exploiting motivated numeracy, per se, especially with things like identity politics or even the recent cases of targeted ads with political elections? Or is there a framework for measuring what areas of public conscience and understanding are vulnerable - vaccines last month, immigration walls this month, etc.

Hey Matt et al, was wondering if you guys follow current political events and trends and your thoughts on them - e.g. phenomena like Jordan Peterson. I've been thinking about this from a science communication perspective, but haven't quite landed on a guess or theory.

I'm curious about this - what are fisherman doing with sharks that they retain? It seems counter to other consumer focused efforts like phasing out shark fin.

Also, really fantastic visuals of amazing Jamaica landscape followed by landing in cold snow. :)

Congrats!

Those are great photos!