Newsletter week 29: The danger of clickbait and other exaggerations, burgeoning deepfakes, a litany of dangers to the news business, plus three people to follow and three books to read. The Danger of Overpromising The easiest way to get attention for a product is to overpromise. It is also the best way to get customers…
A little knowledge is dangerously misleading. That’s the message of the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which ignorant people think they’re smart. It’s the message of the Gartner Hype Cycle, in which people get overenthusiastic about new technologies. And it’s the reason that analysts, over and over again, get overenthusiastic about whatever’s new. In 1999, the psychologists…
The Fyre Festival was an epic disaster. Organizers hyped the festival, set on an obscure island in the Bahamas, as “the next Coachella”; attendees got stranded with little food and shelter, no entertainment, and no easy way to escape. Who could have known? Anyone who read the pitch deck. It’s filled with un-words that have no…