Note: If you came here from Twitter, I use “kittens” as my code for climate science to thwart Twitter’s shadowban on my tweets.
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You probably know that actor Leonardo DiCaprio is a climate activist, and he is trying to persuade the world that climate change is both real and serious. Someone asked me on Twitter what it would take for DiCaprio (for example) to persuade a person like me.
I’ll take a swing at that.
I’m testing a WhenHub visualization that is optimized for comics. Here are some of my Robots Read News comics that I thought worked best. For optimal viewing, click the icon in the lower right of the Whencast to view as a full page.
Obviously I could have pasted the comics directly to the blog page. But WhenHub adds a number of features that I don’t get on the blog. For example, as a reader you could use our cloning feature, edit out the comics you don’t like, and share as your own WhenCast on Facebook or anywhere else.
Think of a Whencast as a way of offering digital “shelf space” on a blog or media site. That shelf space can be managed by any trusted content provider. Any changes at the source will flow automatically to every page that has the embedded WhenCast.
How cool is that?
0 CommentsSnapchat is tanking. As I predicted here.
0 CommentsTrue story from five minutes ago.
Someone tweeted me an article showing photos of droughts and other natural disasters with the caption “Photos don’t lie.” I tweeted in response to the article, “On what planet do photos not lie?”
Sixty seconds later I see this photoshopped photo in my feed.
(I knew right away that it was fake because I don’t own a suit.)
0 CommentsHow was it meeting our wonderful President, @ScottAdamsSays ? pic.twitter.com/GwKi1zAzPa
— Jack Helsinger (@jackway2fast) March 16, 2017
After the hilarious Rachel Maddow face-plant on live television, with her scoop on President Trump’s 2005 taxes – all two pages of it – the big question in the news today is about who leaked it.
The worst punditry you will see on this question is coming from the people who say Trump couldn’t have leaked it himself because he wouldn’t leak it to a guy who has been his critic for many years.
What????
0 Comments[Update: fixed bad email address in step 3.]
Most of the remaining problems in the world are information problems in disguise. For example, our politicians in the United States are trying to figure out how to provide health insurance to low-income people without breaking the budget.
It looks impossible, at least with our political system as it stands.
So I thought I would help.
In my opinion, the only hope for affordable health care in the long run comes from startups that will dramatically lower the cost of medical services. There are many such healthcare startups in the pipeline, and some could make a big difference to society. As a public service, I’ll collect a list of them in this blog post so investors can see their options for helping the country lower the cost of medical care.
I started the list with one start-up (Sandstone) that I happen to know because I invested in it. Any healthcare startup that lowers the cost of medical treatment is welcome to add their information to the list. To add your company, do this…
1. Go to whenhub.com and create a schedule with one entry for your company, using as your event date the year you went live with a commercial product, or the year you plan to do so.
2. You can include any kind of documents, links, photos, or video to your one event. But please include at least a paragraph saying how your startup lowers healthcare costs.
3. Share your schedule, with its one event, to this address: healthcarestartups@whenhub.com. I’ll check it for completeness and add it to the list.
By the way, WhenHub – a start-up I co-founded – wasn’t designed for this sort of task, but I couldn’t think of an easier way to do it. I’ll use our new streaming feature to create one schedule (really just a list of start-ups) from the shared events. You’ll see the Whencast below grow as I add entries.
The nature of Whencasts is that you can share them on social media and embed them on blog pages. So if this list is useful, feel free to share it. Whencasts stay live and updated no matter where they travel.
I’m also imagining some sort of “digital doctor” healthcare insurance that is super-cheap and relies largely on startups that are not yet part of mainstream medicine. This low-cost insurance plan might be better (but slightly riskier) than traditional medical treatment. For example, if the low-cost insurance people get first access to IBM’s Watson for diagnosing problems, they are probably getting better treatment recommendations than the patients going to human doctors.
I can also imagine this low-cost health insurance plan asking patients to voluntarily give up more health-related privacy than normal, and perhaps agree to some sort of health tracking technology. The data from this group would help improve healthcare technology and treatment for all.
We probably can’t tax-and-spend our way to universal healthcare. The numbers just don’t work. But startups could get us more options for serving low-income folks if we decide to make that a priority.
Update 2: Here’s a great article by Benjamin Joffe explaining the medical tech device revolution ahead of us. This is one of the most underreported stories on the planet.
0 CommentsHere’s a link to a smart person who does a better job than I did at explaining the problems with climate models.
I mentioned on social media a few times that I am using public persuasion to split the climate science debate into two parts. One part is the basic science, which appears credible. The other part is the climate models that are less credible. Watch for the climate science debate to start making that distinction more often. Historically, both sides have tended to conflate the credibility of all of the parts. That never made sense.
0 CommentsAfter 18 months of reading my blog posts about President Trump’s talents for persuasion, you might wonder how persuasive I am on my own. If you have already read my book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, check out this article in Business Insider to see an example of my influence. The author who talks about my ideas – exactly the way I talk about them – is named Adam Alter.
(What were the odds of that???)
0 CommentsRecently, one of my millions of critics left a message on social media about my writings on the topic of climate science. I pasted the critic’s comment below, as well as a response from a third party who explains to her that she is watching the wrong movie.
I present the exchange here as an example of how two people can look at the same screen and see completely different movies.
0 CommentsIn a word, yes, assuming they had lots of help from the CIA to deliver their persuasion.
I would not have said this was possible five years ago. But in 2017, cognitive scientists know how to reprogram a human brain fairly effectively. They have weaponized what hypnotists have been doing for decades.
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