The Myth of the Secret Genius - The Garden of Forking Paths – “From Elon Musk to Elizabeth Holmes and Donald Trump, many very rich people are effective at convincing us of a myth: they’re secretly a genius, and you’re just too dumb to understand. Are they right?…Elon Musk is part of a small class of extremely rich people who are rich partly because they’re effective at making others think they’re Secret Geniuses…
If someone is a billionaire, they must be a genius. But there are serious reasons to doubt that claim. Wealth is not normally distributed, like height. While there’s never going to be someone who is even 3x shorter or 3x taller than you, Elon Musk is about three million times richer than the average American. That means that the super-rich are extreme outliers, and that creates some major statistical irregularities that are not tied to talent…”
House Republicans warming to Church-style committee to probe FBI from top to bottom Just The News
Elon Musk, Fox News, and Free Speech Absolutism
Teri Kanefield – “Free Speech Absolutism” – Elon Musk abolished Twitter’s moderation policies and allowed “America’s most prominent Nazi,” Andrew Anglin back onto Twitter along with Donald Trump. He declared himself a “free speech absolutist”and said all voices should be heard. Then, on Thursday, he went on a binge and suspended the Twitter accounts of a number of well-known journalists. He offered a flimsy pretext, claiming that the journalists had told people his family’s location. It was a lie. In fact, they were criticizing him and he didn’t like it. Because Musk claims to be a free speech absolutist and has been criticizing the previous owners of Twitter for banning people and content, people pointed out his hypocrisy—but what he did was worse than that. Max Fisher, an international reporter and columnist for The New York Times, said this about Musk and friends:
“People need to understand how mainstream it has become in some tech vulture capitalist circles to argue that journalism itself is dangerous as an idea and should be abolished and that it will be up to the tech world to carry this out.” “It comes out of a [Silicon] Valley utopianism that has said since the 90s that all legacy institutions are ultimately barriers to progress, but that the enlightened minds of the tech world, guided by the pure science of engineering, will one day liberate us by smashing the old ways.” “The idea of rejecting institutions to build a purer society on the internet, in vogue in tech in the 90s, by the 2010s had become a mandate to abolish and remake those institutions in big tech’s image.”
Kennedy, I., Wack, M., Beers, A., Schafer, J. S., Garcia-Camargo, I., Spiro, E. S., & Starbird, K. (2022). Repeat Spreaders and Election Delegitimization: A Comprehensive Dataset of Misinformation Tweets from the 2020 U.S. Election. Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, 2. https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2022.013 (Original work published June 13, 2022)
“This paper introduces and presents a first analysis of a uniquely curated dataset of misinformation, disinformation, and rumors spreading on Twitter about the 2020 U.S. election. Previous research on misinformation—an umbrella term for false and misleading content—has largely focused either on broad categories, using a finite set of keywords to cover a complex topic, or on a few, focused case studies, with increased precision but limited scope.
Our approach, by comparison, leverages real-time reports collected from September through November 2020 to develop a comprehensive dataset of tweets connected to 456 distinct misinformation stories from the 2020 U.S. election (our ElectionMisinfo2020 dataset), 307 of which sowed doubt in the legitimacy of the election. By relying on real-time incidents and streaming data, we generate a curated dataset that not only provides more granularity than a large collection based on a finite number of search terms, but also an improved opportunity for generalization compared to a small set of case studies. Though the emphasis is on misleading content, not all of the tweets linked to a misinformation story are false: some are questions, opinions, corrections, or factual content that nonetheless contributes to misperceptions. Along with a detailed description of the data, this paper provides an analysis of a critical subset of election-delegitimizing misinformation in terms of size, content, temporal diffusion, and partisanship. We label key ideological clusters of accounts within interaction networks, describe common misinformation narratives, and identify those accounts which repeatedly spread misinformation.
We document the asymmetry of misinformation spread: accounts associated with support for President Biden shared stories in ElectionMisinfo2020 far less than accounts supporting his opponent. That asymmetry remained among the accounts who were repeatedly influential in the spread of misleading content that sowed doubt in the election: all but two of the top 100 ‘repeat spreader’ accounts were supporters of then-President Trump. These findings support the implementation and enforcement of ‘strike rules’ on social media platforms, directly addressing the outsized role of repeat spreaders.”
For the rich and famous, private jets are no longer private enough LA Times
Elites Are Clueless, and so on In These Times
