We’re back from a brief summer hiatus with more tips on fighting misinformation.

Combatting fake news and misinformation is a 2-pronged effort: fact-checking and confronting your own cognitive biases. At a time when facts are scarce and so much is open to interpretation, the truth becomes even more muddied when you allow your biases (conscious or not) to influence what you believe.

In this newsletter, we discuss the foundation of trust. We explore how trust was damaged when technology giants were hauled before Congress to defend their business practices. …

Fighting misrepresentation, exaggerated truths, and outright fake news is no easy task. It has turned wearing masks, reopening schools, eating out, and traveling on planes into fractious questions.

Every day we are forced to independently seek out new facts, determine which experts to trust, assess health risks, make judgment calls, and confront our own biases head-on. Depending on what you read on any given issue, your view may radically differ from your neighbor’s. Furthermore, how our biases seep into our analysis also changes our conclusions.

That’s where being Savvy comes in. We don’t have the answers (no one does) but we can help you navigate the misinformation and confront your own biases more sharply. In this newsletter, we focus on the major stories and how certain cognitive biases hurt our ability to make better decisions. If you think this newsletter will be valuable to a friend, please don’t hesitate to share it. …

Have we hit rock bottom? It has certainly been another trying week for America. In our last newsletter, we talked about COVID-19 ravaging the world and laying bare the hatred and racial tensions amongst us. This week, we have seen global anger erupt over George Floyd’s death inciting protests, cities in flames, curfews, and a breakdown of law and order.

Anyone who believes this is simply the result of Floyd’s death is naive. His death was merely the spark that set the country ablaze. …

In our last newsletter, we asked whether America had hit rock bottom. And somehow we’ve sunk even lower. Based on recent polling, Americans are at an all-time low for happiness and pride.

Even with COVID-19 infections still on the rise, our President is tacitly encouraging us not to wear masks. He also wants to stop testing because it increases the number of recorded cases which in turn may suppress the stock market. On top of that, Trump has stopped funding for NIH research into COVID-19 vaccines. Most shockingly of all, 41% of the US population still supports him.

We are a nation torn apart by a pandemic, racism, and looming economic depression. Fueling each of these crises is misinformation, paranoia, and hatred. It is time to get Savvy. …

COVID-19 has continued to ravage the world, afflicting the elderly, adults, and now children. Sadly, the growing number of infections is not the only consequence of this pandemic. Among the less tangible fallouts are the deepening of hatred and racism, the rise of anxiety, and the birth of conspiracy theories.

People want answers and clarity and, unfortunately, both are hard to come by these days. Contradictory information abounds. Are masks necessary? Is social distancing still required? Can the disease be transmitted through food? Are certain medications safe and effective treatment against the disease? …

What’s clear is that there is a staggering amount of information (and misinformation) swirling around Covid-19. We are all struggling with navigating this new landscape and can probably do with a little help. That is the intent of today’s article.

Here we discuss some of the key questions of the week, explore the cognitive biases impacting how we interpret information, and provide updates on the stories we covered last time.

Repeating Theranos’ mistakes in the COVID-19 Era
Our book unpacks the Theranos fraud through the cognitive biases that blinded its board from seeing the deceit happening before their eyes. Now Tyler Shultz, the Theranos whistleblower and grandson of former Secretary of State George Shultz, explains how fraudulent biotech companies might be deceiving the general public. …

New Zealand’s vote to change its gun laws less than a month after a mass shooting and California Representative Eric Swalwell’s announcement two days ago that he’s running for President on a gun control platform, serve as a reminder of the US gun related tragedies that were briefly in the news less than two months ago. Tragedies that never appear to lead to change because strangely, none of us have savvy enough responses to them. Let’s go back to February to unpack this.

The horrific shooting in Aurora, Illinois took place on February 15th, 2019. A few days later was the Parkland Stoneman Douglas High School tragedy’s one year anniversary too. The President declared a national emergency that week but for a different and arguably fake reason (border control). Fast forward a few days from that moment and our national newspapers had already begun de-prioritizing the Aurora tragedy and the Parkland anniversary to cover other subjects. For example, a story of actor, Jussie Smollett, who manufactured a bullying attack on himself, was given more attention in the news the very day after the Parkland tragedy’s anniversary. There is something very wrong with this picture. …

We have to be better than the ‘fake it till you make’ mindset

The story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos is already Silicon Valley folklore. It is a story of an entrepreneur with impeccable credentials who hoodwinked investors, customers, partners, employees and even her own board on a journey to an $8 billion startup valuation before it all came crashing down.

John Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal reporter who investigated Elizabeth Holmes and exposed the fraud said that she was a “pathological liar.” Few would contest that today. What she did was unequivocally wrong, especially because it put innocent patients’ lives at risk. …