June 3, 2016

Here is a really superb paper on the 50 cent party, the Chinese Communist Party’s army of loyalist Internet trolls. The researchers scraped literally millions of below-the-line comments and Weibo posts, hired Chinese students to identify the 50-centers in random samples and classify the posts by subject, checked that the students, who worked independently, agreed…

Read More This is what the mandate of heaven looks like

It’s pretty depressing that British politicians are shallow enough all to glom onto the same risible fad at the same time: It’s a thing. It’s definitely a thing. Someone is telling them to stand like this. pic.twitter.com/RcvelFujVa — SimonNRicketts (@SimonNRicketts) June 2, 2016 It’s even more depressing that the risible fad in question is also…

Read More This one weird trick will completely fail to replicate the previous experimenter’s results