Slim fit pants are the new dad jeans
Plus: Paying off the BS. Is your AI boyfriend racist? And the impact of the letter O.
STICKY THINGS IX … Material from the content universe that’ll stick with you.
Previously … Why Smarter People Are Woke … The Male Attraction to Adolescence … Wake Me Up in June … Bluffing in Journalism
PAYING FOR BELIEF$: “In an influential paper published in 2015, a team led by the political scientist John Bullock found sizable differences in how Democrats and Republicans thought about politicized topics, like the number of casualties in the Iraq War. Paying respondents to be accurate, which included rewarding “don’t know” responses over wrong ones, cut the differences by 80%. A series of experiments published in 2023 by van der Linden and three colleagues replicated the well-established finding that conservatives deem false headlines to be true more often than liberals—but found that the difference drops by half when people are compensated for accuracy.” — Manvir Singh on how false beliefs are chosen intentionally for partisanship and shown to be eradicated when monetary incentives are introduced. LINK
THE WORK OF ART: “Persistence, endurance — much of the work we love wouldn’t exist if the artist hadn’t been spectacularly tenacious… To look at his own work not defensively but critically; to say, nah, this is crap, but