Apologies for the light posting here. I’m mid-project on a few issues that I’d normally blog about here, so blogging will be a bit uneven for the time being. In the meantime, here’s a quick stop-gap while IA while ago, I posted something here on the common misconception that many of us have about consensuses [...]
Posts under ‘Popular biases’
Conversational politics, and how we argue ourselves into positions
I started to write a second follow-up post on the Local Gov Camp data-visualisation session (I’ll probably finish it later today) when I stumbled on this post on conversational politics (in a very wide sense of the term) from my favourite US blogger – it made the point I was inching towards better than I [...]
Elections bring the best out in bloggers
I’ve tried to boil down the killer argument in the whole ‘blogger v journalist’ debate, and it runs something like this: Take the best article you’ve read in a newspaper recently. The one that was well-written and argued and the one that met a particular need that you have personally. You can be almost certain [...]
Straight answers and the Prisoner’s Dilemma
… or ‘we get the politicians we deserve, pt1′: Via Mick, this is worth a look over at the Daily Mail for people who recycle The Independent. “Academics …. found that “not giving straight answers to questions” scored an average of 8.45 when people were asked how much of a problem it was on a scale [...]
‘The ratio of substance to horse-race reporting remains low…’
Here’s Peter Levine on the way that the healthcare debate has been reported by the press in the US: “…the news media spent a year feeding American citizens a steady diet of stories about Congressional procedure, the possible impact of health-care reform on elections, and quotes that falsely described the bill or denounced its critics. [...]
The Conservatives’ £million question
I’m not a natural Tory (if you’ve met me, you’ll know that I’m quite the opposite) but I can’t help but be impressed with their grasp of a few of the opportunities offered by new (potentially) democratic tools lately. The first one is their use of Google Moderator in the Q&A that is embedded in [...]
Active citizens, subjective well-being and Clarksonism
If you were to add one blog to your RSS reader at my request, please make it Chris Dillow’s Stumbling and Mumbling. It’s about ‘Clarksonism.’ Why tedious self-pitying rich white blokes on the telly the question of ‘subjective well-being’ is an important one to understand and why politicians often end up being forced to expend [...]
