LSE Blogs

Mis/dis-information is not only located to the fringe/tail-end. See for example:

1. The reporting of the Hillsborough disaster by The Sun, The Times, The Spectator, and others [1].

2. How Martin Bashir secured an interview with Princess Diana for the BBC by making up information. [2]

3. How the BBC included climate skeptic when debating climate change. [3]

Then there is reporting of technical or scientific discoveries that are slanted by only taking a single source for information, not to mention the consistency of reporting on subjects where a company or other organization has made a PR statement.

There is little investigative journalism and fact checking by major news outlets, just reporting from a single source. This is in part because news can move quickly given 24 hour news, the internet, and social media. It is also in part that paying people to take time to do research for little gain as advertisement and engagement drives profits for news outlets. It is also in part people's inherent biases slanting articles or news reports.

Taking time to read each article (instead of just the headlines), and to follow up on sources (which are lacking in most/all media publications -- unless it is someone saying something on Twitter), so it is difficult to verify everything that is being reported on.

Some discussions are also complicated. Take for example the Y2K problem. A lot of people put in a lot of effort to make sure that it didn't happen (specifically, they were able…

I read this article the other day, "There are four schools of thought on reforming peer review" [1] about how there's four schools of thought about how to reform publishing and peer review. Each of them independently are fairly well received and makes sense in itself, at least among my academic circles. However, there are tensions between them, so it's hard to come up with a solution that's universally satisfying to even the majority of stakeholders.

This article about ArXiv is clearly in the "Democracy and Transparency school" as categorized article, but it doesn't yet address the other three camps. The arxiv article proposes machine-readable semantics, easier sharing and discoverability, papers + supplementary materials + reviews all open; this floods the world with even more publications with varying quality, so it's even harder to identify good quality work; and when things can be more easily aggregated by machines and measured with the alternative metrics proposed, it often leads to a more powerful winner-takes-all system that can be gamed (there's now a subtle game of increasing citations that appear on Google Scholar); finally, with an increase in submissions and materials that go along with submissions, it puts an even greater strain on the review system. These problems are not unsolvable, but almost every idea I've seen proposed so far has only been in a single camp, and there's side effects that harm the goals of the other three camps. So I'd love to see more…

>> On the other hand, I found reading it as a child in the 80s a great disappointment. At the time I was learning about chaos theory and the butterfly effect. It was painfully obvious to me that the Seldon theory of psychohistory was impossibly simplistic. Human society and culture is just too unstable and susceptible to disruption for long term predictions of the kind the plot relies on to be viable.

I would disagree on that one. Of course, it would be impossible to predict particular events - like Harry Seldon does in the book - but I find it completely possible to foresee general trend in the future. For example, Immanuel Kant predicted the rise of an European Union back in the 18th century [0]. For example, I'd take the prediction that at some point in the future, technology will be so advanced to make travelling across the Earth or remote working completely seamless and costless, so people will have the ability to access to the same kind of jobs or activities wherever they are based, resulting in an homogenisation of the whole planet. You could argue that this trend started already when travelling in plane and internet were made affordable to most.

But yeah, the potentiality of prediction in the book are completely exaggerated, with Seldon being able to time the major events. On the other hand, it my be realistic if he can set up a secret group of telepathic people to influence the future and prevent anything to disturb his visions.

[0]…

Many people would be open to the idea that working from home (WFH) decreases productivity if there was solid evidence and a general consensus, rather than mere speculation and differing reports from various companies.

From our daily experiences in the tech industry, most people would likely observe that WFH has not led to a decrease in productivity. Instead, factors such as low morale have had a much more significant impact. Issues like layoffs, employee turnover, wages not keeping pace with living costs, mismanagement, a global pandemic, economic uncertainty, lack of prospects for homeownership and family-building, and generally declining life satisfaction weigh more heavily on work engagement than the WFH arrangement.

In fact, remote work is often viewed as a perk and is optional—many companies that offer WFH still maintain offices that employees can choose to work from, but few opt to do so. This means that the perk is desired and has a positive effect on morale.

In terms of direct counters to the notion that WFH inherently reduces productivity, consider the following sources:

- https://www.apollotechnical.com/working-from-home-productivity-statistics/

- https://timeular.com/blog/remote-working-affects-productivity/

- https://www.business.com/employees/remote-work-productivity/

- https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/intentional-insights/202210/the-truth-about-work-from-home-productivity

-…

> As for crypto, I recommend people read about Bitcoin being used for the purposes of sending remittances to start.

I followed your recommendation and this is what I found: bitcoin might, in theory, work for the purpose of sending remittances, but in practice it doesn't.

So, returning to the original question, can cryptocurrencies offer an innovative solution for migrant remittances to developing countries? Yes and no. In theory, cryptocurrencies can really provide an effective and economical channel for money transfers to help alleviate poverty through remittances. However, there are two principle problems. Firstly, coins such as Bitcoin remain too volatile, in fact ten times more volatile than major currencies (Baur & Dimpfl 2021). This means that if migrants were to use such channel they would be exposing themselves to extreme risks. But, more importantly users of bitcoin may find themselves victims of speculative attacks, as the cryptocurrencies’ value remains completely speculatively constructed. Secondly, as with international bank transfers, cryptocurrencies need a bank account to buy and sell it. As explained above, having a bank account is not a given and represents a high barrier to entry for many of the poorest migrants.

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/humanrights/2021/04/29/cryptocurrencies-an-innovative-solution-to-migrant-remittances/

Why blanket punish and make every single development on the waterfront more expensive because of a single Warriors arena project that was eventually moved to Mission Bay?

All of these little costs, process hurdles add up and make housing more expensive. The broad point is that these citizen anti-growth initiatives, which might have a single poorly-designed and consulted project in mind, end up having very long-term and consequential impacts on housing prices across the board.

This 2014 study examined 7,300 land parcels in the Bay Area and found that if you increase the number of independent reviews for a construction project by one standard deviation, average land prices increase by about eight percent.

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2014/07/01/regulatory-constraints-on-supply-are-a-key-factor-in-san-franciscos-affordable-housing-crisis/

I agree and am concerned about how the point of the economic cycle we're in affects the profile, goals and objectives of people we attract to Silicon Valley. You tend to get more true believers at the low points in the cycle versus the gold-rush folk we're seeing now.

What do you think is the best way of dealing with this? We can either build a lot more housing or drive away jobs and companies if we think they're too greed or speculation-driven.