The Wikipedia Bot wars

There have been a few media stories about editing bots battling it out on Wikipedia and so I wondered what the alpha source for this was. It turns out that it all stems from a paper published within the Open Access Journal Plus One. Even good bots fight: The case of Wikipedia First the Basics … Read more

Why do political and religious discussions become heated?

Dialog on most topics tends to not result in heated verbal exchanges, but move on to either strongly embraced politics or religion ideas and you may find that verbal a whiplash is soon being deployed. What is going on here, why is it like this? What is even more fascinating is that even when faced with mountains of … Read more

Is a Fake News Vaccine really possible?

The BBC reports on a recently published study as follows … A University of Cambridge study devised psychological tools to target fact distortion. Researchers suggest “pre-emptively exposing” readers to a small “dose” of the misinformation can help organisations cancel out bogus claims. Stories on the US election and Syria are among those to have caused … Read more

Why are some inclined to embrace Bullshit as truth?

We live in a world that is awash with rather a lot of pseudoscientific claims that are pure grade one gold plated Bullshit, and so it is worth thinking about why some are very susceptible to such influences and others demonstrate a robust immunity to it all. A fascinating paper that yields some insights has been published within the journal Judgment … Read more