Thursday, June 10, 2021

Retelling stories: From Facts to Fake News: How Information Gets Distorted

 ‘This Should Be the Biggest Scandal in Sports‘ Sports Illustrated


From Facts to Fake News: How Information Gets Distorted

Knowledge@Wharton: “Remember the old childhood game of telephone? One kid whispers a phrase in another kid’s ear, and it gets passed along until the final child in the chain repeats it out loud. Inevitably, the words change along the way, subject to the cognitive interpretation of the listener. Retelling stories may be harmless amusement on the playground, but new research from Wharton sounds the alarm on the grown-up version by revealing how news can become more biased as it is repeated from person to person. As information travels farther away from its original source, retellers tend to select facts, offer their own interpretations, and lean toward the negative, according to the study titled The Dynamics of Distortion: How Successive Summarization Alters the Retelling of News.“This paper started because I was interested initially in understanding how we end up with fake news. But quickly I realized that this project was going to be about something much broader, and I think more interesting, which is how do original news stories become distorted as they’re retold sequentially across people,” Wharton marketing professor Shiri Melumad said in an interview with Wharton Business Daily on SiriusXM. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.)…”



  1. “Lol… the audacity”: when the Society for the Social Studies of Science tried to school MC Hammer — and what can be learned from this episode, from Joshua Earle (Virginia Tech)
  2. “There was no Renaissance. It is an invention by historians, a fiction made in order to tell a story… about the development of philosophy”” — Henrik Lagerlund (Stockholm) makes the case for historiographical nihilism
  3. Is this art? — an Italian artist sells his latest invisible sculpture
  4. “It seems we want to let money in to further research and philosophical excellence and improve and strengthen departments even if it moves a dept in a direction it would not have itself chosen, so long as that path is one of the paths the dept deems a reasonable direction” — David Sobel (Syracuse) on outside funding for academic hires
  5. Kant’s Copernican Revolution — Fiona Hughes (Esssex), Anil Gomes (Oxford), and John Callanan (KCL) talk about Kant on the BBC’s In Our Time
  6. “We need advocates to work out all the options, after all” — Richard Chappell (Miami) on why disagreement between philosophers should not be seen as evidence of philosophy’s failure
  7. “Human beings are who we are: we’re walking disasters, we’re walking wonders at the same time” — Cornel West (Union Theological Seminary) in conversation with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)