I got the following email today, sent from myself exactly 12 years ago. A University of Michigan alum was looking for people to join his new startup. I was a little bit tempted by it, but instead just forwarded it to my future self in anticipation of the "prototype" he was pitching... »
"Men are from Mars, women are from Venus," proclaimed John Gray in his influential, yet controversial, 1992 book of the same title, which highlights differences between the sexes. This summer Irmak Sirer, Jake Hofman and I explored an online version of this issue, examining the extent to which the... »
UPDATE: A revised version of this article now appears at blog.beeminder.com/akrasia. Preface: I love dog food, metaphorically speaking, of course. This article is about forcing oneself to do what one wants to do and I, among other things, want a new Messy Matters article to go out no less often than the... »
When the avant-garde jazz group The Bad Plus first covered Nirvana’s "Smells Like Teen Spirit” almost ten years ago, they inspired heated controversy for their supposedly non-traditional approach to jazz. But when John Coltrane first recorded his now classic 1960 performance of the show tune “My... »
(Cross posted at Decision Science News.) Do you know what the #$*! your social media strategy is? Perhaps it's "to facilitate audience conversations and drive engagement with social currency"? Or maybe "to amplify word of mouth by motivating influencers"? Well, given all the lies and damned lies being told about social, fellow... »
