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Asymptoting towards zero…
Nearly ten years ago Hal Varian wrote a paper called Markets for Information Goods. It’s none too elegantly expressed, but it has what you might call “profound” implications: I would like to coin a “Malthus’s law” of information. Recall that Malthus noted that number of stomaches grew geometrically but the amount of food grew linearly.…
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Public information – it’s not rocket science
One of my favourite pub-bore topics is the importance of public information. And I like collecting examples. Here is one from Richard Feynman’s conclusion to the report on the disaster which destroyed the space shuttle Challenger in 1986: If a reasonable launch schedule is to be maintained, engineering often cannot be done fast enough to…
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Why informing the public doesn’t always work…
In case you missed this little gem from the Washington Post: Long-term memories matter most in public health campaigns or political ones, and they are the most susceptible to the bias of thinking that well-recalled false information is true. The experiments do not show that denials are completely useless; if that were true, everyone would…
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Stockwell 2: Policing public information
The IPCC‘s Stockwell 2 report is undoubtedly the best account of the management confusion surrounding the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes. Well, it’s the only one. There is a key problem. The central claim in all police communications was that de Menezes was challenged, refused to comply and was then shot. This, Stockwell 2…