Danny Crichton

By now, everyone is familiar with the story of Brian Williams, the NBC News anchor who is taking some time off after coming under fire (not literally, apparently) for inaccuracies in a story about being shot down over Iraq. A second round of stories this weekend noted that Hillary Clinton, among other notables, has also been caught making similar comments over the years.

One direction for the analysis of this situation has been to take a critical look at the production of U.S. media these days. David Pakman's post about abundance versus scarcity has been getting a lot of attention. His argument is familiar, "Brands built in the age of scarcity take significant risks when they use celebrities (or any one individual) to act as a proxy for their products." This is in contrast to online media, where "brands are built by the stories brands tell and the content they share." Facebook doesn't have an anchor problem.

But that media criticism doesn't explain why so many notable people have made up stories involving the military.

I want to take a different view of the situation by looking at the trust that Americans have in their leading institutions. For many years, Gallup has run polls asking about "confidence in institutions". These surveys are interesting because they can show the American public's changing relationship with various parts of our society.

In their current chart, Gallup lists 16 different institutions. By far the most trusted institution in the United States is the military, with 74% of respondents indicating that they trust the armed forces a great deal or quite a lot. The bottom two institutions are Congress (with ~6%) and television news (with 18%).

Hillary Clinton was a member of the US Senate when she made

I read Ian Bogost's essay in the Atlantic called "The Cathedral of Computation" a week ago, but it still annoys me. Bogost argues that our obsession with algorithms everywhere in the labor economy undermines the very human aspects of labor that we should not be ignoring.

His argument is that behind every algorithm is a human organization doing the actual work required to make a product or service function. "... just as the machine metaphor gives us a distorted view of automated manufacture as prime mover, so the algorithmic metaphor gives us a distorted, theological view of computational action."

Take Netflix, for example. Bogost writes that, "Netflix trains people to watch films, and those viewers laboriously tag the films with lots of metadata, including ratings of factors like sexually suggestive content or plot closure. [...] Yes, there’s a computer program matching viewing habits to a database of film properties. But the overall work of the Netflix recommendation system is distributed amongst so many different systems, actors, and processes that only a zealot would call the end result an algorithm."

Bogost's central point is that we are using algorithms as a sort of theology, much as science has been used as a theology the last few decades. It allows us to abbreviate our thinking and avoid the sometimes harsh behind-the-scenes processes that consumers would rather avoid when thinking about who makes their products or what allows their services to be successful.

Bogost has a point, but I don't think algorithms undermine our discussions of the modern labor force, nor do algorithms devalue human work.

I use the algorithm economy as a short hand to describe a very specific set of changes to the economy, most notably the rise of network-mediated marketplaces like Uber and Airbnb. Neither

Have you seen the ratings for cable news channels these days? They aren't looking good, and are almost pathetic next to the ratings the channels received even just a few years ago.

Take a look at the ratings for just one day, Monday January 19. In daytime ratings, Fox led other networks by a healthy margin with an average viewership of 1,231,000 compared to CNN's 442,000, MSNBC's 320,000 and CNBC's 205,000. Ratings are higher for primetime, with Fox almost doubling its viewership to 2.1 million, and CNN getting 536,000, MSNBC 688,000 and CNBC 451,000. These ratings are fairly typical for the respective channels.

Take a moment to think about this. These supposedly "highly-influential" channels are barely squeaking out a handful of million viewers for Fox, and don't even top one million viewers for the other cable news channels. O'Reilly Factor still leads all cable shows with more than three million viewers in its first slot, with another million during its late night rerun, but other shows are much more variable in performance.

To make even a stronger point here, cable news rarely draws in middle-of-the-road viewers who are trying to decide what side of the aisle to vote on. Fox and MSNBC in particular are partisan channels that provide red meat (or maybe vegan burgers in the case of MSNBC?) to their viewers. That means that not only are these channels barely able to eke out a small viewership, but they are doing so mostly to partisan diehards.

And yet, the public, comedians, and particularly politicians continue to portray these stations as deeply influential. Nowhere was that point more obvious than over Fox's mistake over the "Muslim no-go" spaces in France and England that the station ended

Fact checking is a popular sport, both in traditional print newspapers and online. Rather than reading news or opinion, we get something far more pleasing – seeing a politician brought down by a statement that was later proven by a group of writers to be false. Democracy is in action, and we can all feel smug knowing that the most powerful in our society have to be as responsive to the truth as we are.

Or do they? While fact checking is a crucial part of journalism, it should not be narrowed to merely fact checking what people say. That's why this trend of fact-checking websites is starting to alarm me. Neiman Lab quotes researchers at Duke saying that the number of fact check websites has grown even more in the last few months – up to about 89 total, and 64 consistently active (check my facts!)

There is satisfaction in tearing apart a politician's speech and finding gaping holes in it, but we have to be cautious at just how responsive investigative journalism is. Fact checking is a relatively cheap check on power –- it by and large doesn't require interviews, in-depth field work, or long-term commitment of resources. In some cases, a simple Google search is all that is required as proof that a particular statement is off-balance.

Unfortunately, fact checking is also only responsive to the discussions of politicians and business executives, and doesn't go beyond their statements. Like the old Drunkard's Search problem ("why are you searching for your keys at the lamppost?", "because that is where the light is"), fact checking speeches transfers all the power to speakers who can then control what gets debated and what does not. If you don't want anyone to investigate school finances, for instance, simply don't mention

January is that time after application season is over, and friends and acquaintances start doing a double-take on their life decisions. "Should I actually be going to business school?" (maybe). "Should I actually go to law school?" (Hell no!) But the question that seems to elicit the most conflicted feelings is always graduate school, and particularly PhD programs.

It goes without saying that PhD degrees have been under fire, from a whole host of sources. And yet, I am in one, quite happy, and couldn't imagine doing almost any other degree. Considering this is my first year, and most students and my advisor have strongly said this is the worst year by far (due to all the course requirements), I take this as a good sign. Here are some thoughts for those who are thinking through their path.

If you don't understand the job market for PhDs, you are (truly) an idiot

That's blunt, but really, there is no excuse in 2014 not to fully understand the job market for PhD holders. If you want to work at a research university, you will work anywhere in the country in which a job is being offered, since there may only be three jobs in your entire field in a given year. You will not necessarily live near a major global city, and indeed, you may live in a terrible suburb in the middle of nowhere. That's how it is.

If you are looking to get married and need to get two jobs in one location, good luck. If you aren't prepared for the massive work it takes in a job search to secure one of these jobs (which easily takes the bulk of the last year of a PhD, and possibly additional years beyond that), then what

Gail Collins poses a question today to her readers: should a president have a college degree? That immediate question is somewhat interesting (I would say yes, if only because entry-level secretaries in offices are required to have a bachelor's degree these days), but there are others with more intellectual excitement.

Two deeper questions are: to what extent do credentials and qualifications help a president in decision-making and how closely should analysts of politics pay attention to the backgrounds of their subjects?

I was reading my undergraduate advisor's critique of Graham Allison's Essence of Decision in International Security [1] yesterday, and he repeatedly references the value of historical biography in analyzing foreign policy decisions. In contrast with Allison, who argues that the process of policymaking is the fundamental framework for understanding decisions, this paper argued that we should instead not lose sight of the people within the room and their similar backgrounds.

Perhaps no quote sums up the piece better than this one from the paper's final paragraph: "Resisting the narrowness of Essence, scholars should think deeply and critically about the underlying values framework of major policy, and perhaps even about the class background or social origins of major policymakers." Such a point is heretical to international relations scholars, who believe that countries are black boxes. It's one of the many reasons I have a sociological bent to my research.

Academics too often are willing to cede that historical contingency for theories that offer more "science" at the expense of real explanatory power. The background of the president doesn't just matter -- it matters a lot! The fact that Obama was trained as a lawyer shows through in much of his decision-making, and is in contrast to Romney's mode of operation while governor of Massachusetts. It's not

With the announcement that Paul Ryan will not be entering the 2016 presidential race, we are starting to see the formation of the short list of presidential candidates. And what a list it is! Right now, the Democrats have Hillary Clinton and possibly Elizabeth Warren, if left-wing cheerleaders can somehow convince her to leave her Senate cocoon.

And on the right, the candidates are beginning to narrow to Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, and now Mitt Romney, with maybe some others throwing in their hats.

What is striking is just how familiar these names are. Bush and Clinton certainly need no introductions of their political family connections. Romney, who has now run for president twice -- once as his party's candidate -- is also the son of a former governor. And of course, Rand Paul is the son of erstwhile libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul.

That leaves Rubio as the sole candidate running outside of a political dynasty.

Political dynasties aren't uncommon in America. We have already had John and John Quincy Adams, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, as well as George H. W. and George W. Bush. But it is far less common to see the vast majority of candidates in the primaries come from such backgrounds.

What is happening in American politics today is a pattern that has already befallen professions as diverse as professional soldiers and medical doctors. One element is competition. As these areas of work increasingly see new entrants, advantages that accrue to those with parents in these disciplines tend to become decisive later on. Children with parents who are doctors can be better prepared for life in a hospital simply by listening to the vocabulary and procedures that their parents are talking about.

Similarly to competitiveness, the increasing search costs for work means that

I lost a good friend in San Francisco today to depression. He had been battling his illness valiantly for years since I knew him in high school. He was brilliant, hilariously funny, and someone who I always looked forward to having dinner with. He had so much potential to offer the world with his intellect, and we are all worse off without his presence.

As many of you know, I think mental health remains one of the most under-examined areas for research, creativity, and innovation that we have today. Depression is one of the leading causes of death in this country, and yet, we still treat it much the way we have for decades: with drugs whose effects we barely understand. Irving Kirsch, one of the leading experts in the field at Stanford, said last year, "One hundred years from now, people will look back at the age of giving SSRIs and they will have a reputation that's akin to bloodletting."

There has to be a better way.

There have been a handful of startups like Teletherapy and 7 Cups of Tea that have started to address this area. But so much more can be done. I hate it when entrepreneurs ask me how they can make a difference in a reasonable period of time for a lot of people, and then begin to focus on things like aging. This area is so under-explored, we don't even know if there are ways of dramatically improving the lives of millions of people with just some lines of code.

My friend was an engineer, and I can't think of a better way to remember his legacy than to take his problem-solving ethos and apply it to one of the most important health problems today. Rest in peace.