The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• Can AI Talk People Out of Conspiracy Theories? When presented by a chatbot, believers were more open to the facts. (IEEE Spectrum) see also This Chatbot Pulls People Away From Conspiracy Theories: In a new study, many people doubted or abandoned false beliefs after a short conversation with the DebunkBot. (New York Times)
• Renaissance’s shrinking hedge funds: All told, nearly two-thirds of Renaissance’s external assets under management have evaporated over the past five years, falling from $65.1bn to $23.2bn today. Renaissance declined to comment. This is not NEW news. The assets of these funds are actually up a little from the lows of 2023. Most of the exodus happened in 2020-21, after an unusually shocking performance by Renaissance when Covid-19 rattled markets. RIEF declined 19.9 per cent in 2020, while RIDA lost 31.9 per cent. The performance was so bad that the hedge fund manager sent a rare but not very elucidating letter to investors trying to explain the reversal as just one of those things that happens. (Financial Times)
• ‘We let advisors create their own adventure’: Future Proof CEO Matt Middleton reflects on the event’s rapid growth as it prepares to welcome around 4,500 professionals to Huntington Beach. (Investment News)
• Tell Good Stories. On the value of storytelling as a medium of communication (Young Money)
• Apple Has a Hot New Product. It’s a Hearing Aid. The world’s most valuable company just turned its top-selling headphones into low-cost hearing aids—and it’s quietly a huge moment (Wall Street Journal)
• Seeing America by train: What it’s really like to travel cross-country by rail. (Washington Post)
• Seeing Like A Network Dark Forests, Dense Networks: We’re living through a phase change that is at the root of a lot of our societal problems. It’s the fact that our information networks have become much more dense. You exist as a node in a network. Other people are other nodes. They send you information, the edges. You process it, you create your own. Information flows in all directions. There are all sorts of networks. If you imagine all of us as nodes and the information we receive from each other via edges, then the shape of the network defines the type of information that spreads. (Strange Loop Canon)
• The Kamala and Tim Show: Does the Democratic ticket’s buddy-comedy act feel familiar? Here’s where you might have seen it before. (Politico) see also What Have Biden and Harris Accomplished? Look at These 10 Metrics. Biden — and by extension, Harris — has outperformed Trump on a number of fronts, such as job creation, health care and crime. But not all. (Bloomberg)
• He bought a cruise ship on Craigslist for $1 in 2008 and spent over $1 million restoring it. Then his dream sank: His ultimate goal was to transform the neglected ship into a museum, but things didn’t quite go to plan. In October 2023, Willson made the painful decision to sell the vessel, which began sinking around seven months later. Now its future looks bleak. “We absolutely loved our time with that ship,” Willson tells CNN Travel. “It (selling) was probably the hardest thing I’ve done in my life. (CNN)
• The Most Surprising New Gun Owners Are U.S. Liberals: After decades of decline, gun ownership is rising among Democrats. Fear of rising crime, or angry MAGA? (Wall Street Journal)
