10 Holiday Weekend Reads – The Big Picture

• Can AI debunk people from 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 brief conversation with DebunkBot. (New York Times)

• Renaissance’s declining hedge funds: In total, nearly two-thirds of Renaissance’s foreign assets under management have evaporated over the past five years, falling from $65.1 billion to $23.2 billion today. Renaissance declined to comment. This is not NEW news. Assets in these funds are actually up slightly from their 2023 lows. Most of the exodus occurred in 2020-21 after an unusually shaky performance by Renaissance as Covid-19 rocked markets. RIEF fell 19.9% ​​in 2020, while RIDA lost 31.9%. The performance was so bad that the hedge fund manager sent a rare but not very telling 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 some 4,500 professionals to Huntington Beach. (Investment News)

• Tell good stories. On the value of storytelling as a means of communication (Young Money)

• Apple has a hot new product. It’s a hearing aid. The world’s most valuable company just turned its best-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 across the country by train. (Washington Post)

• Seeing as a network Dark forests, dense networks: We are living through a phase change that is the basis of many problems in our society. It is the fact that our information networks have become much denser. You exist as a node in a network. Other people are other nodes. I am sending you information, edges. You process it, you create your own. Information flows in all directions. There are all kinds of networks. If you imagine us all as nodes and the information we receive from each other through the edges, then the shape of the network defines the type of information that spreads. (Canon with weird loop)

• The Kamala and Tim Show: Does the Democratic ticket’s comedy act sound familiar? Here’s where you might have seen it before. (political) see also What did Biden and Harris achieve? Check out these 10 values. Biden — and, by extension, Harris — has outperformed Trump on several 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 more than $1 million restoring it. Then his dream sank: His ultimate goal was to turn the neglected ship into a museum, but things didn’t quite go according to plan. In October 2023, Willson made the painful decision to sell the ship, which began sinking about seven months later. Now her future looks bleak. “We absolutely loved our time on that ship,” Willson told CNN Travel. “It was (selling) probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. (CNN)

• The most surprising new gun owners are American liberals: After decades of decline, gun ownership is on the rise among Democrats. Fear of murder on the rise or angry MAGA? (Wall Street Journal)