Shoot for the moon? Or don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good? Our new paper, "Optimal ambition in business, politics, and life," led by @appliedkath, formalizes how to think about this tension. tl;dr: optimal ambition is above average but finite. We mathematically prove this in a search model; we show how optimal ambition is affected by statistical properties of available rewards and by upward social comparison; and we discuss how to apply these concepts in various domains including entrepreneurship, economic policy, political campaigns, online dating and college admissions. HT to @AdamMGrant, whose fascinating work on procrastination was one of the cases that got us thinking about this. Links to paper and @guardian coverage below. 🧵

New on Guided Civic Revival:

New paper: "U.S. television news coverage of climate change policy is aggregately balanced but polarized", led by @appliedkath, with @JeremiahOsGo, @maxboykoff, and Joshua Garland. Link below. Key findings: - News segments on climate policy *aggregately* represent positive and negative views of climate policy in roughly similar proportions as public opinion. - *However*, individual outlets pretty much give either all positive (e.g. @CNN) or all negative (@FoxNews) coverage. See the figure below. - As a result, *individuals* often get very unbalanced coverage (mostly positive or mostly negative). We analyzed this by comparing outlets' coverage to survey data on individuals' media diets. See the figure in the next post. - Most news segments covering climate change did not cover policy at all. There are a couple of different ways to interpret that (and there is a diversity of views on our author team about which interpretation holds most weight). One interpretation is that many news segments are sticking to the facts and letting their audiences decide what to make of them. For example, we don't know whether coverage of other issues like crime or poverty mentions policy more (or less) frequently than climate coverage. Another interpretation is that audiences are being given lots of information about the problem of climate change, and relatively little information about what to do about it. My big takeaway overall is that news outlets are creating echo chambers for their audiences, and, as a result, Americans with different media diets are inhabiting different realities. This is likely magnifying polarization of the climate change issue. Might be of interest to @jayvanbavel @michaelvandenb6 @Revkin @Jee_vuh @katemyoder @bradplumer @dwallacewells, among others.