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‘It takes two fools to make a quarrel,’
‘The world requires at least ten years to understand a new idea,’
“a man’s reach must exceed his grasp”.’
R = Duration × Opportunities × Transmission probability × Susceptibility
For diseases like hiv and malaria they’d found that 20 per cent of cases were responsible for around 80 per cent of transmission.
‘moral luck’: the idea that we tend to view actions with unfortunate consequences as worse than equal actions without any repercussions.[71]
‘We’re social learning specialists,’
However, organisations can’t be too cliquey, otherwise new ideas won’t spread beyond a small group of people.
Your belief after exposure to new information therefore depends on two things: the strength of your initial belief and the strength of the new evidence.[54]
Whereas the backfire effect implies that people ignore opposing arguments and strengthen their existing beliefs, disconfirmation bias simply means they tend to ignore arguments they view as weak.
‘He said to me that it was something that wouldn’t affect him at all but would give great happiness to many people,’ Randall recalled in 2017. ‘That is an argument that I find it difficult to find fault with.’[66]
‘The three things which all but destroyed the army in Crimea were ignorance, incapacity, and useless rules.’[35]
three things are required to stop an epidemic: an evidence base, a method for implementation, and political will.[40]
1996 Dickey Amendment, which stipulates that ‘none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the CDC may be used to advocate or promote gun control.’
In the years following their 1996 clash, Dickey and Mark Rosenberg had become friends, taking time to listen and find common ground on the need for gun research.
in the decade after the packs were introduced, there was about a 40 per cent reduction in deaths from paracetamol overdoses.[49]
‘here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.’
R depends on the four DOTS: duration of infection, opportunities for transmission, transmission probability during each opportunity, and average susceptibility.
Researchers at MIT have found that false news tends to spread further and faster than true news. Maybe this is because high-profile people with lots of followers are more likely to spread falsehoods? The researchers actually found the opposite: it was generally people with fewer followers who spread the false news.
The reason for the high transmission probability? Novelty might have something to do with it: people like to share information that’s new, and false news is generally more novel than true news.[68]
When Alexandre Dumas first wrote The Three Musketeers in serialised form, his publisher paid him by the line. Dumas therefore added the servant character Grimaud, who spoke in short sentences, to stretch out the text (then killed him off when the publisher said that short lines didn’t count).[75]
they found that almost 60 per cent of the links were never clicked on.[77]
‘I know Labour are short of cash but having an invitation to “Date Arab girls” at top of your press release?’ he wrote. Unfortunately for the MP, other users pointed out that the Labour page featured targeted advertising: the offer on display was likely to depend on a user’s specific online activity.[82]
For every Russian post people were exposed to, on average there were almost 90,000 other pieces of content.
information laundering.
Wenlock Jakes,
Peter Medawar once called the flu virus ‘a piece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news’.[42]
haemagglutinin and neuraminidase,
Winter flu epidemics are mostly caused by H1N1 and H3N2.
Similarly, biologists are hoping to develop more effective flu vaccines by targeting the parts of the virus that don’t change.[44]
phylogenetic
The new viruses were closely related to an Ebola virus found in the semen of a local man who’d recovered from the disease back in 2014.
Phylogenetic
