Gary King: Slowing The Flow of Misinformation

I read different books for work and leisure of course. For leisure, I like to read books in scientific fields where I don’t do research. For both purposes, I prefer books that are at least intended to be true. When reading for work, I spend most of my time figuring out what to skip and so, for leisure, I choose books that are fun to read cover to cover. For leisure, I’m now reading The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds by Christopher E. Mason.

Professionally, my purpose is the creation, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge.

I wouldn’t. In areas where we make progress, more recent books are usually much better, easier to understand, and more impactful than earlier ones. I’d show them how to find one of these.

One of the best jobs I ever had was as a magician, which I did to earn enough money to pay for college. But one summer I decided I should see how the real world works and so I took what turned out to be my worst job, at Alexander Department Stores. My assigned task was to mark up the price of T-620B toasters, so they could mark them down to their ordinary price during the holidays and claim they were having a sale.

My graduate students and I are running a series of experiments that we think will show how to slow the flow of misinformation on social media without intervention by governments or social media companies; I can’t wait to find out whether it works!

I wrote two books for this purpose: Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research with my coauthors Bob Keohane, and Sid Verba, and Unifying Political Methodology: The Likelihood Theory of Inference. The latter is the core of the first course in the methodology sequence in the Harvard Government Department, which I teach. Most of the materials for this course, including all the lectures, are freely available online at j.mp/G2001; you can also find almost all my articles, some of my books, and lots of other related materials online at GaryKing.org.

I only read books once. Sometimes I go back to the notes I’ve made.

In addition to books about science in fields other than my own, I occasionally read science fiction. Good science fiction is also typically great science; the reverse can seem the case too.

With over 55 prizes and awards to your name, is there one that stands out from the rest?

Thanks, it is always great to have recognition from your peers. I’m grateful for every one of these, but I especially enjoy when people write to say they read a book or article of mine, or saw my talk, and decided right then to change career plans or field of inquiry.

I’d love to read another book by my friend, and author of Stumbling on Happiness, Dan Gilbert. Can you help me convince him to write it?

Humanity needs a book that teaches everyone the universally applicable advice (if not the meaning of life!): it’s not about you. Usually, it is about the person you are trying to convince, the social group, the organization, or the society. Similarly, if you are writing nonfiction, no one cares who you are or what you “think,” “feel,” or “believe,” only what you can demonstrate.

Humanity would also do well with a book that shows how to design a political system popularly regarded as fully democratic (and so channels all conflict through the political system rather than violence) but manages to avoid politicization of the rules of the game. The annoying thing about current politics is that readers of my last sentence will think I’m mainly talking about those on the other side, but really, if you think that, it isn’t about you.

No idea! But as a kid, I quite liked The Royal Road to Card Magic by Jean Hugard and Frederick Braué, and would still recommend it.

I’ve written about 8 books but I have started every one by trying to write an article. Sometimes the shortest article you can write is a few hundred pages and so a book pops out. The “article” I’m working on now most likely to spawn a book is about the definition and future of science; I think most miss that science is, in human history, a novel social organization, not a checklist of methodological rules that books and articles must follow.

I’d like to know more about “origin of life” studies (would you like to read a book that shows how to make life in a test tube?) and quantum biology.

It would be amusing if I called my autobiography It’s Not About You, but I hope I will always prefer to work on and write about the next discovery rather than spend that much time looking backwards.