The author writes, “You end up in a world where changing your mind becomes impossible because you've built your entire identity around being right”. Yet social-media personalities regularly do a 180° turn on some issue (e.g. pro-Ukraine to anti-Ukraine or vice versa) and still keep their following and ability to monetize it.
Social media is full of parasocial relationships; followers are in love with an influencer’s personality, not their views or factual content. So, the influencer can completely change his mind about stuff, as long as he still has the engaging presentation that people have come to like. Followers are also often in love with the brand relationships that the influencers flog, because people love being told what stuff they should buy.
It's more about being confident and extreme on their stance no matter what it is at that particular moment. People are attracted to personalities that are confident and says they are right all the time. Heck, personalities like that gets all the influence in the workplace too. Imagine John Doe in your office who has a solution for every problem and knows the code base like the back of their hand. You might find that they are not so right all the time (maybe 2 out of 3 times it's pure conjecture) but gosh you will go back to him for solutions the next time you run into a problem.
What I am saying is that we are attracted to the extreme, the flamboyant, the controversial. Maybe it's time we prioritize critical thinking for the future generation no?
I see it as the continued corporatisation of everything. I suspect that you'd be hard press to find anyone who has ever been anywhere above middle-management in a corporate organisation who doesnt see, and chuckles at, the similarities in the worst places they've worked and this:
"Where admitting uncertainty is social suicide. Where every conversation is a performance for your tribe rather than an actual exchange of ideas. You lose the ability to solve problems that don't fit neatly into your ideological framework, which turns out to be most important problems"
Politics is the obvious one to see this effect in action but it's bled into so many facet of society now because society is one giant grey areas but our mediums don't like greys. The medium continues to be the message.
I have been a small content creator for 10 years now. I've been hampered a lot by actively discouraging these types of parasocial relationships - every now and then I'll get a gaggle of followers that spend entirely too much time on my crappy content or my personality/posts and I get extremely weirded out to the point I want to stop doing it entirely. Everyone tells me I'm doing it wrong, but I swear, 10 years ago it wasn't as much of a thing to create a cult around yourself on social media or streaming platforms. Now it's the primary monetization path.
I've even gone so far to say to more than one person, "look, I like and appreciate you really like my content or my personality, but, you don't know me at all, I don't know you, and honestly, we're not friends, no matter how much you want that to be the case. That isn't to say I dislike you, but you need to be more realistic about the content you consume, and if this hurts your feelings a lot, I'm sorry, but this content probably isn't for you."
Then there's the type of content creator that gets a following by being a huge jerk to their fans - I don't like that either. I just tell them to treat it like a TV show. It's not real, the character in the show doesn't know you or like you. Unfortunately for today's youth and media landscape this is an utterly foreign concept.
There are / were a couple of right-wing shillers that were literally paid to promote Russian talking points and they just fit it right into their schtick without blinking.
Nothing on the internet is real. If it wants money or opinion or attention, consider it hostile and try to find the strings (although it's generally not worth the time to try and find the strings, just move on and do something productive instead).
People are also more isolated than ever, positioning them poorly for having robust real relationships. This makes them vulnerable to mistaking "influencers" as their friends.
the words we use matter a lot. the "pro" and "anti" anything is a pretty large reason why all discourse has become so stupid sounding and talking with people about any issue is enraging. nuance is dead. the cultural zeitgeist is being controlled by algorithmic feeds that create neuroticism (i am definitely affected), general anxiety, and anger.
My take on this is that persons are great, everyone should know a few. Groups of people on the other hand are, and always have been, genuinely pretty awful in almost every way. IMHO this is down to some really basic primate stuff that's just inevitable. Social media is a big problem because it makes it easier to create groups, and algorithms are a big problem because they essentially take all of the dynamics that would inevitably lead to conflict anyway, and accelerate them.
Groups, algorithms, and conflict itself are all things that lead to wicked problems. Each one tends to spiral, where the only solution is more of the same, and if you escape one funnel then you fall into an adjacent one. Problem: Some group is against me. Solution: Create a group to bolster my strength. Problem: People are fighting. Solution: Join the fight so the fight will stop sooner. Problem: My code is too complicated to understand. Solution: More code to add logging and telemetry. Problem: Attempting to add telemetry has broken the code. Solution: Time to start a fight
> But exposing yourself to articulate versions of positions you oppose does something valuable: it makes you realize that intelligent people can disagree with you without being monsters or morons.
The idea that being articulate implies intelligence and/or sanity is very common, but really a bit weird. You can find plenty of articulate defences of, say, flat earth theory.
Ezra Klein's book why we're polarized cover this a bit and basically studies show that intelligence level has little to do with what people believe and more so just affects their ability to defend whichever position they already hold.
Indeed, and an articulate, confident defense can also be that much more insidious. I never found it hard to ignore obviously bad-faith talking heads on cable news, but when someone is on a podcast conversation with a host I like, it's much easier to nod along until that moment where they say something demonstrably false and I have to rewind my brain a minute or two to be like... wait a sec, what? How did you get to that position?
Yes, it's easy to cherry-pick an obviously absurd position that could be articulately argued. But the point is that you are definitely wrong about some things and should generally keep an open mind. Even intelligent people are wrong about certain things, and in fact their propensity for rationalization can lead them into some absurd positions. But some of those positions turn out to be right, like the Earth orbiting the Sun, for example.
The grandparent's point is that articulate prose is irrelevant to the strength/correctness of the argument or intelligence of the author.
I would take it a step further and include that it has no bearing on the morality of the author.
The original claim was:
> But exposing yourself to articulate versions of positions you oppose does something valuable: it makes you realize that intelligent people can disagree with you without being monsters or morons.
In truth, it does no such thing. Articulate arguments serve neither as proof the person making it isn't a monster nor that they are particularly intelligent or knowledgeable about that which they argue.
Though, I would also point out that monsters can occasionally be right as well.
That's true, but if you want one, you can find one. If you've conditioned yourself to think that articulate==credible, then sometimes it only takes one.
Yes, and this is not just due to the intelligence of the "believers" but due to the fact that describing 2=2=2 in a self-consistent way only takes understanding it while describing 2=2=3 in a way that appears self-consistent requires a true rhetorical genius.
Yeah, that really stood out to me, I feel certain positions are monstrous no matter how articulately stated. Saying something really mean in a more palatable way doesn't make it (or the speaker) less mean.
This seems like a cognitive bias on the author that they are mistaken for universal truth.
Absolutely agree. Many, many abhorrent ideas and perspectives are accepted very often due to them being deliberately well thought-out and appearing more "academic" sounding to the layperson. There are entire organizations (colloquially, "think-tanks") dedicated to writing pamphlets, books, and memos filled with eloquent in-depth talking points that get distributed to their respective talking heads.
I can't blame many people today for seeing this problem as the foundation of all mainstream media, instead of taking the time to individually investigate each source of information. However it does lead to this "everything is the opposite of what we're told" hysteria the author talks about
Even with the number of articulate examples like this are far out numbered by the number of inarticulate arguments that the rule still has merit. Exceptions do not make the rule bad.
>The idea that being articulate implies intelligence and/or sanity is very common, but really a bit weird. You can find plenty of articulate defences of, say, flat earth theory.
The author has to say this because the consumers of the author's content would stop being right if the author was constantly dropping truth bombs like "being articulate doesn't make you right" they wouldn't get liked, retweeted, shared, and circle jerked about in the comment section on the front page of HN.
Literally every content creating person or company with an established fan base is in this quandary. If Alex Jones said "hey guys the government is right about this one" or Regular Car Reviews said "this Toyota product is not the second coming of christ" they'd hemorrhage viewers and money so they cant say those things no matter how much they personally want to. Someone peddling platitudes to people who fancy themselves intellectuals can't stop any more than a guy who's family business is concrete plants can't just decide one day to do roofing.
Alex Jones literally did this though starting around 2016.
This is a strong argument probably but strangely aimed here. Reading the article, it does seem like you and the author agree about everything in this regard? You are kind of just rearticulating one part of their argument as critique about them. Why?
Or where do we place the reflex here? What triggered: this author is BS, is pseudointellectual, is bad. We jump here from a small note about articulation and intelligence, to what seems like this massive opportunity to attack not only that argument, but the author, the readers, everyone. Why? Does the particular point here feel like a massive structural weakness?
What was the trigger here for you, for lack of better word? Why such a strong feeling?
5. If you don't care about the Bible, I strongly recommend the Tao Te Ching. Probably the most succinct, KISS philosophy and spirituality book ever written in the history of mankind.
To misquote Alan Watts, all other religions are for people that need the Tao explained with too many words.
My favourite version to start with, and even more succinct than the original, is Ron Hogan's https://terebess.hu/english/tao/ron.html then you can move on to fancier translations.
Second this comment. The Tao Te Ching is about as close to a “right answer” in metaphysics as we’re likely to get.
Even after going around the houses for 2500 years, eventually philosophy reached Wittgenstein who had to hold his hands up and say “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” which is pretty well a summary of what Lao Tzu was pointing at.
So you're suggesting an Eastern philosophy and spirituality instead of a Western one. I've listened to both Jordan Peterson and Eckhart Tolle, the difference is quite big but both points of view are interesting.
I would replace your number 5 with "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" or "MacBeth" or "Calvin & Hobbes" or maybe even Natsume's "I am a Cat." Also fun fictional books with impressive protagonists.
Other than that, your first four points are wonderful.
As an atheist, I do find some use for the Jefferson Bible. (US Founding Father) Thomas Jefferson collected all the best parts of the Gospels, dropped the miracles, some of the stranger allegories, but kept all the sermons (the things Jesus was said to have directly taught). It's about 14 "letter" pages, so almost "pamphlet" sized. As far as I'm concerned it finds most of the baby in the bathwater (IMO, so much bathwater), is an easy read, and says some things much more succinctly that I think a lot of Christians might be surprised to find are core teachings of Jesus in the Bible.
I sometimes wonder what the country would be like if every hotel desk was more likely to have a copy of the Jefferson Bible than the Gideon Bible.
Strongly agreed. Reading the actual bible is (mostly) boring as sin. There are a couple of gems in there that you can just take on their own though.
My personal favourite is Ecclesiastes which, apart from a couple of lines of slop added by a later author, has little to do with Abrahamic religion and is more just a little nugget of proto-existentialism.
“Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”
What do people gain from all their labors
at which they toil under the sun?
Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.
Note that "feeds" is a confusing word choice; I immediately thought of something RSS-like which often links to long-form content.
For news, my rule is to check major headlines at most once a day (often less in practice), so I am at least vaguely aware what people are talking about. Doing it this way makes it clear how ... banal? ... most clickbait is. Something local might be useful; if they mention something national it's probably actually semi-important. Though, if you can't change anything about it, is it really?
If reading the Bible, I strongly suggest starting with Matthew 5 and continuing from there, not too fast (maybe one chapter per week, so you can stop and think about it). This gets straight to the mindset, as opposed to the handful of protrusions that make it to the pop-culture version. [I have a lot more I could say about how to read the Bible, but it's no use posting it again unless someone is interested.]
> Read the Bible. Even if you do not believe, Jesus is the most impressive human I've ever learned about.
You might also find it edifying to learn about Socrates. His trial and punishment are as compelling as Jesus' and I his existence is more likely to be an historic fact.
Yes, they are similar and in both cases what we know about them was passed down by their unreliable students with an agenda. I have studied both over the past few years and I find myself disagreeing with Plato's Socrates often whereas I find the Jesus of the Gospels much harder to argue against.
I think that Plato's dialogs are well worth reading too.
Also, just so you know, Jesus is as or more historically "likely to be real" than Socrates (three major works written by two people who knew Him, multitudes more written by those who knew those who knew Him, mentions by multiple historians of the period, a thriving cult in spite of vicious persecutions, etc.). Socrates has three contemporaries (Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes) and then the writings of Plato project him beyond his time and into the philosophical context.
But perhaps you mean "the Jesus of the Gospels" as opposed to "Yeshua ben Yoseph min Natzret" when you said "historic" here (there's good arguments for Jesus-of-the-Gospels being Yeshua ben Yoseph too, but one thing at a time).
> 5. Read the Bible. Even if you do not believe, Jesus is the most impressive human I've ever learned about. When I started reading it I was agnostic.
Yeah, read the whole Bible — the one people swear on in court, the one the preachers hold and up and tell you it is the word of god — and don't cherry-pick. So much misogeny and shit behavior. How about this one:
“David and his men went out and killed two hundred Philistines. He brought their foreskins and presented them as payment in full to become the king's son-in-law. Then Saul gave his daughter Michal to David in marriage.”
Yeah, let's kill those Philistines! Yeah, two hundred human beings! And let's cut off their foreskins because that's not remotely sick and dysfunctional at all and make a gift of them. Seems to be behavior that was rewarded.
I like the Bible too. It is unfortunate but not unexpected that it set off such a firestorm in the replies.
I would even go so far to say that even nonbelievers would find much value in it, just reading at least the top stories and passages the Old and New Testaments. These are foundational cultural texts that bridge centuries of peoples. And if you are a nonbeliever who wants to read beyond the popular well known parts, please do! But read with a mind to connect with others, not divide.
There are other good things to read too. Plato, Shakespeare, the Chinese Classics, Greek Mythology, folktales. Things that people share with those around them as well as their ancestors
I've never seen so many Christmas lights go up this early in my little neck of the wood
They started doing heavy Black Friday sales ads almost immediately after Halloween this year, more so than I remember from even covid (but that's just my memory)
The Christmas radio station started a full 3 weeks early this year. Typically it's after 6pm on Thanksgiving day that they start.
Overall, people are worried right now. Religion slots right in there too.
The Bible is meant to conflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, as the saying goes.
Algorithms that are profit-motivated (trying hard to get you hooked) also reward "engaging" content which means clickbait, ragebait and content that often triggers some emotions and is easy to consume. So not the most balanced content.
Let me insert one more: you have to spend some time with your own thoughts.
Whatever you read, whatever you listen to, if you do not actually stop to consider it, by taking a long walk without headphones or scribbling in a notebook perhaps, you can’t know what you think.
And I suspect this is what’s happening to a lot of people. It’s easy to perform a psychological DDOS on yourself with doomscrolling or YouTube or podcasts or cable news in a way that’s actually really hard to do with a 500 page book.
The Jefferson Bible [1] is excellent in this regard. He removes all miracles and most mentions if the supernatural in a cut & paste job of a King James version of the Bible. The result is portraying Jesus as a person, not divine.
Thomas Jefferson knew Greek and Latin (was a "polymath" of the old Enlightenment era sort) and used somewhat more original sources than King James, translating them himself into English. He probably did cross-check the King James Edition for some of the English wording, or at least couldn't entirely escape its orbit/gravitational pull, but it is mostly true the Jefferson Bible was a fresh early-American translation.
Going well until (5) .. beyond the basic textual questions (old or new Testament? Which translation? Apocrypha or not?), you then have to confront the relationship of the actually existing churches to the text.
> One friend became “convinced” that every major news story was manufactured consent
There is nothing stupid about this and it is a massive problem with Western news. Different anchors across different networks presenting news with the same words as if they were handed off the exact same script to read out, to emphasize the same talking points, etc. They make AI slop look so good. I fully stopped watching US News a few years ago.
Great advice there, and I must especially echo bullet 5 here, read the Bible. One point of disagreement though: I don't believe Jesus left us the option of believeing he was just a good moral teacher. (Liar, Lunatic, Lord)
When I go to the polling place to cast my vote for the candidate of my choice; I am often holding my nose and voting for the one who I think will do the least damage. I often wonder why sane, rational problem solvers are not on the ballot.
Then I realize that our system often rewards the attention seekers rather than pragmatic leaders. Those who quietly get the work done are not invited on talk shows or podcasts. The don't have rallies and make the evening news.
All the oxygen in the room is sucked in by the performance artists, who often say outlandish things but rarely get anything productive done.
This is true outside politics, as well. Or rather, more precisely, any organization has some amount of internal politics, and the larger and more bureaucratic it is, the more politics dominates over utilitarianism. Nation-states and their governments are on the far end of that spectrum, obviously, but it also applies equally to large corporations etc.
And the thing about it is that it doesn't just reward attention seeking. It rewards the entire spectrum of sociopathic behavior - making promises you don't intend to keep, picking associated based on loyalty rather than merit, walking on people's heads if that's what it takes to get higher etc. It's a system that positively selects for sociopathy in elites, whether they are politicians or CEOs.
And thus that is what we get. People like Donald Trump and Elon Musk are extreme examples of what such selection can produce, but I don't think it's a qualitative change compared to the "good old times"; rather, it's the logical end result of the gradual evolution.
The main issue for me is the size of our platforms.
If the owner of a platform tries to enforce a set of virtues, it will always be seen as censorship by a fraction of its users. That fraction will increase as the user base increases, as the alternatives diminish, and as the owners govern with more impunity.
I personally think these loud users are immature, disrespectful, anonymous cowards, but my opinions are irrelevant — the important thing is that large platforms are politically unstable.
The solution to this is to fragment the internet. Unfortunately, this is incompatible with the information economies of scale that underpin the US economy. In my opinion, our insanity is an externality of the information sector, much like obesity for staple goods or carbon dioxide for energy.
I don’t agree with these individualized how-to guides. I can turn my phone off and go outside, but I still have to live in a world informed by social-media sentiment.
"enforce a set of virtues" is a weird way of saying "enforcing basic decency". Let's be clear here, people who are rightfully banned are always going to complain. Our opinions as the majority who DO want decent conversations online are not irrelevant. We should not give those people equal weight to those facing actual censorship. Fragmenting the internet will never get rid of the problem that moderation needs to happen.
To be clear, if I were in charge, there would be significantly more banning and moderation on all platforms. I am arguing moderation is more politically feasible in small communities, not that is any more or less ethical.
What is basic decency? Is it indecent to advocate for atheism or if a women posts a picture of herself not wearing a burka? Many people in certain countries would say so. Personally I think those people are insane, and that maximal freedom of expression is the most important human right, but the fundamental problem is that there is no consensus on what constitutes basic decency.
Facebook has a real name policy and is a prime example of internet-fueled insanity. Why does deanonymization not help Facebook be a more positive place?
A woman wearing anything but a burqa in an extremist Islamic society would be popularly categorized as one of the "people with no shame, and with strong anti-social tendencies". So according to you liberal women in Iran, Pakistan, Sudan etc should not be given a safe space, is it?
Does that also apply to people living under oppressive governments? Anonymity can be a useful tool for sharing information that those in power don't want released, for example whistle blowing.
A better solution to this would be to fragment within social media platforms. Allow users to post any content that's legal within their local jurisdiction. And give other users easy tools to create their own "filter bubbles" so that they don't see content which they personally consider insane or offensive. This would allow the social media platforms to sidestep political debates about censorship.
I have wondered if the long term trajectory of social media is as a locally governed utility, similar to energy or water. I would love a boring page landlocked to my neighborhood. Obviously there would the NextDoor "Karen" issue, that would need to be addressed somehow...
Then you get the other side of this problem, the echo chamber effect. If people self sort they'll eventually end up in social circles that are completely illegible from the realm of physical politics, which leads to a political instability of a different kind.
It's a hard problem. I think multi armed bandit based algorithms can help. Bluesky is a sort of "live" example of self filtering and it ends up creating a lot of fractional purity politics over which filter bubble is the just/moral filter bubble.
We are at this point where we need to “Turn on, tune in, drop out” again. This mass media circus of social media and influencers doesn’t help anyone except their own self centred interests.
Fair to say this is easier in Europe where we don’t have the propaganda firehose but I think it’s time to switch off US friends
There's some truth to this because "Culture is not your friend, man." Ironically though it really needs update, maybe more like turn off, tune out, rise up?
This article is advice for individuals on how to resist the societal incentives to embrace insanity. But what I'm really interested in is advice for how to fix our society so it doesn't incentivize insanity.
How do you help others if you physically restrain yourself from doing so though? I can imagine some help but it severely limits the help you can provide and needed, depending on the situation.
Scepticism taught in schools. Demonstrate manipulation on kids and conclude that even educated, intelligent minds can get entangled when they let their guard down.
> We talk a lot about polarization as if it were a disease that infected society, but we’re missing a key data point: polarization is a growth hack, and it works.
Unfortunately the article does not explain how it works and without a problem definition, you cant reach a solution. IMO it certainly behaves like a disease.
I consider identity politics as one vector how a mind virus can take over the hosts higher order reasoning. There are certainly other vectors (cognitive biases) but IP is definetly the biggest driving factor behind todays polarization. Calling others "liberals" is primarily a signal to label an outgroup.
On what political side do you see more symbols like flags, stickers, memes, etc? Entire news cycle narratives can get deprived of meaning and act as the most recent symbol, individuals can use to signal their group membership. Any counter argument against such a holy cow gets viciously attacked or ignored because to some degree, this counter argument is an actual attack on yourself, your identitiy. Admitting errors is no big deal when nothing is at stake. The opposite example would be a very religious person loosing faith with an adrenaline rush (sweat, shiver, high heart rate, flat respiration), when the body prepares a fight or flight response because a strong, non-ignorable and contradicting thought crossed its mind.
And on what political side do you see more intelligence and broader empathy? More cognitive flexibility?
Around 2000, the internet was considered a new "printing press 2.0" for making information widely accessible. This analogy fits very well, because the first ever western book to be printed was the f'ing bible.
Readit News
Social media is full of parasocial relationships; followers are in love with an influencer’s personality, not their views or factual content. So, the influencer can completely change his mind about stuff, as long as he still has the engaging presentation that people have come to like. Followers are also often in love with the brand relationships that the influencers flog, because people love being told what stuff they should buy.
"Where admitting uncertainty is social suicide. Where every conversation is a performance for your tribe rather than an actual exchange of ideas. You lose the ability to solve problems that don't fit neatly into your ideological framework, which turns out to be most important problems"
Politics is the obvious one to see this effect in action but it's bled into so many facet of society now because society is one giant grey areas but our mediums don't like greys. The medium continues to be the message.
I've even gone so far to say to more than one person, "look, I like and appreciate you really like my content or my personality, but, you don't know me at all, I don't know you, and honestly, we're not friends, no matter how much you want that to be the case. That isn't to say I dislike you, but you need to be more realistic about the content you consume, and if this hurts your feelings a lot, I'm sorry, but this content probably isn't for you."
Then there's the type of content creator that gets a following by being a huge jerk to their fans - I don't like that either. I just tell them to treat it like a TV show. It's not real, the character in the show doesn't know you or like you. Unfortunately for today's youth and media landscape this is an utterly foreign concept.
And they asserted that they were totally right the entire time. That's how. And the sheep kept on following them.
Nothing on the internet is real. If it wants money or opinion or attention, consider it hostile and try to find the strings (although it's generally not worth the time to try and find the strings, just move on and do something productive instead).
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/05/nx-s1-5100829/russia-election...
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Groups, algorithms, and conflict itself are all things that lead to wicked problems. Each one tends to spiral, where the only solution is more of the same, and if you escape one funnel then you fall into an adjacent one. Problem: Some group is against me. Solution: Create a group to bolster my strength. Problem: People are fighting. Solution: Join the fight so the fight will stop sooner. Problem: My code is too complicated to understand. Solution: More code to add logging and telemetry. Problem: Attempting to add telemetry has broken the code. Solution: Time to start a fight
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The idea that being articulate implies intelligence and/or sanity is very common, but really a bit weird. You can find plenty of articulate defences of, say, flat earth theory.
I would take it a step further and include that it has no bearing on the morality of the author.
The original claim was:
> But exposing yourself to articulate versions of positions you oppose does something valuable: it makes you realize that intelligent people can disagree with you without being monsters or morons.
In truth, it does no such thing. Articulate arguments serve neither as proof the person making it isn't a monster nor that they are particularly intelligent or knowledgeable about that which they argue.
Though, I would also point out that monsters can occasionally be right as well.
Plenty of timecube style ones, however.
This seems like a cognitive bias on the author that they are mistaken for universal truth.
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The author has to say this because the consumers of the author's content would stop being right if the author was constantly dropping truth bombs like "being articulate doesn't make you right" they wouldn't get liked, retweeted, shared, and circle jerked about in the comment section on the front page of HN.
Literally every content creating person or company with an established fan base is in this quandary. If Alex Jones said "hey guys the government is right about this one" or Regular Car Reviews said "this Toyota product is not the second coming of christ" they'd hemorrhage viewers and money so they cant say those things no matter how much they personally want to. Someone peddling platitudes to people who fancy themselves intellectuals can't stop any more than a guy who's family business is concrete plants can't just decide one day to do roofing.
This is a strong argument probably but strangely aimed here. Reading the article, it does seem like you and the author agree about everything in this regard? You are kind of just rearticulating one part of their argument as critique about them. Why?
Or where do we place the reflex here? What triggered: this author is BS, is pseudointellectual, is bad. We jump here from a small note about articulation and intelligence, to what seems like this massive opportunity to attack not only that argument, but the author, the readers, everyone. Why? Does the particular point here feel like a massive structural weakness?
What was the trigger here for you, for lack of better word? Why such a strong feeling?
To misquote Alan Watts, all other religions are for people that need the Tao explained with too many words.
My favourite version to start with, and even more succinct than the original, is Ron Hogan's https://terebess.hu/english/tao/ron.html then you can move on to fancier translations.
Even after going around the houses for 2500 years, eventually philosophy reached Wittgenstein who had to hold his hands up and say “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” which is pretty well a summary of what Lao Tzu was pointing at.
https://www.ursulakleguin.com/lao-tzu-the-tao-te-ching
Other than that, your first four points are wonderful.
I sometimes wonder what the country would be like if every hotel desk was more likely to have a copy of the Jefferson Bible than the Gideon Bible.
My personal favourite is Ecclesiastes which, apart from a couple of lines of slop added by a later author, has little to do with Abrahamic religion and is more just a little nugget of proto-existentialism.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ecclesiastes%20...Dead Comment
For news, my rule is to check major headlines at most once a day (often less in practice), so I am at least vaguely aware what people are talking about. Doing it this way makes it clear how ... banal? ... most clickbait is. Something local might be useful; if they mention something national it's probably actually semi-important. Though, if you can't change anything about it, is it really?
If reading the Bible, I strongly suggest starting with Matthew 5 and continuing from there, not too fast (maybe one chapter per week, so you can stop and think about it). This gets straight to the mindset, as opposed to the handful of protrusions that make it to the pop-culture version. [I have a lot more I could say about how to read the Bible, but it's no use posting it again unless someone is interested.]
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%205&ver...
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You might also find it edifying to learn about Socrates. His trial and punishment are as compelling as Jesus' and I his existence is more likely to be an historic fact.
Also, just so you know, Jesus is as or more historically "likely to be real" than Socrates (three major works written by two people who knew Him, multitudes more written by those who knew those who knew Him, mentions by multiple historians of the period, a thriving cult in spite of vicious persecutions, etc.). Socrates has three contemporaries (Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes) and then the writings of Plato project him beyond his time and into the philosophical context.
But perhaps you mean "the Jesus of the Gospels" as opposed to "Yeshua ben Yoseph min Natzret" when you said "historic" here (there's good arguments for Jesus-of-the-Gospels being Yeshua ben Yoseph too, but one thing at a time).
Yeah, read the whole Bible — the one people swear on in court, the one the preachers hold and up and tell you it is the word of god — and don't cherry-pick. So much misogeny and shit behavior. How about this one:
“David and his men went out and killed two hundred Philistines. He brought their foreskins and presented them as payment in full to become the king's son-in-law. Then Saul gave his daughter Michal to David in marriage.”
Yeah, let's kill those Philistines! Yeah, two hundred human beings! And let's cut off their foreskins because that's not remotely sick and dysfunctional at all and make a gift of them. Seems to be behavior that was rewarded.
Word of the Lord is basically sick fucking shit.
I would even go so far to say that even nonbelievers would find much value in it, just reading at least the top stories and passages the Old and New Testaments. These are foundational cultural texts that bridge centuries of peoples. And if you are a nonbeliever who wants to read beyond the popular well known parts, please do! But read with a mind to connect with others, not divide.
There are other good things to read too. Plato, Shakespeare, the Chinese Classics, Greek Mythology, folktales. Things that people share with those around them as well as their ancestors
I've never seen so many Christmas lights go up this early in my little neck of the wood
They started doing heavy Black Friday sales ads almost immediately after Halloween this year, more so than I remember from even covid (but that's just my memory)
The Christmas radio station started a full 3 weeks early this year. Typically it's after 6pm on Thanksgiving day that they start.
Overall, people are worried right now. Religion slots right in there too.
The Bible is meant to conflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, as the saying goes.
In actual tests, non-algorithmic feeds become similarly extremist: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/08/study-social-media-p...
Very different for your psyche in my experience.
Let me leave a comment on hacker news (both news and social media) that I don't consume news or social media.
Whatever you read, whatever you listen to, if you do not actually stop to consider it, by taking a long walk without headphones or scribbling in a notebook perhaps, you can’t know what you think.
And I suspect this is what’s happening to a lot of people. It’s easy to perform a psychological DDOS on yourself with doomscrolling or YouTube or podcasts or cable news in a way that’s actually really hard to do with a 500 page book.
The Jefferson Bible [1] is excellent in this regard. He removes all miracles and most mentions if the supernatural in a cut & paste job of a King James version of the Bible. The result is portraying Jesus as a person, not divine.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Bible
There is nothing stupid about this and it is a massive problem with Western news. Different anchors across different networks presenting news with the same words as if they were handed off the exact same script to read out, to emphasize the same talking points, etc. They make AI slop look so good. I fully stopped watching US News a few years ago.
Then I realize that our system often rewards the attention seekers rather than pragmatic leaders. Those who quietly get the work done are not invited on talk shows or podcasts. The don't have rallies and make the evening news.
All the oxygen in the room is sucked in by the performance artists, who often say outlandish things but rarely get anything productive done.
And the thing about it is that it doesn't just reward attention seeking. It rewards the entire spectrum of sociopathic behavior - making promises you don't intend to keep, picking associated based on loyalty rather than merit, walking on people's heads if that's what it takes to get higher etc. It's a system that positively selects for sociopathy in elites, whether they are politicians or CEOs.
And thus that is what we get. People like Donald Trump and Elon Musk are extreme examples of what such selection can produce, but I don't think it's a qualitative change compared to the "good old times"; rather, it's the logical end result of the gradual evolution.
If the owner of a platform tries to enforce a set of virtues, it will always be seen as censorship by a fraction of its users. That fraction will increase as the user base increases, as the alternatives diminish, and as the owners govern with more impunity.
I personally think these loud users are immature, disrespectful, anonymous cowards, but my opinions are irrelevant — the important thing is that large platforms are politically unstable.
The solution to this is to fragment the internet. Unfortunately, this is incompatible with the information economies of scale that underpin the US economy. In my opinion, our insanity is an externality of the information sector, much like obesity for staple goods or carbon dioxide for energy.
I don’t agree with these individualized how-to guides. I can turn my phone off and go outside, but I still have to live in a world informed by social-media sentiment.
People with no shame, and with strong anti-social tendencies should not be given a safe space.
We should make everyone who disagrees with baxuz where name tags on their chest in the real world too. So we can know who they are.
We can even put the names on a bright yellow six sided star. That way everyone can see them clearly.
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It's a hard problem. I think multi armed bandit based algorithms can help. Bluesky is a sort of "live" example of self filtering and it ends up creating a lot of fractional purity politics over which filter bubble is the just/moral filter bubble.
Like religion
quite ironic, given that we're talking about cognitive dissonance amongst other things
> We talk a lot about polarization as if it were a disease that infected society, but we’re missing a key data point: polarization is a growth hack, and it works.
Unfortunately the article does not explain how it works and without a problem definition, you cant reach a solution. IMO it certainly behaves like a disease.
I consider identity politics as one vector how a mind virus can take over the hosts higher order reasoning. There are certainly other vectors (cognitive biases) but IP is definetly the biggest driving factor behind todays polarization. Calling others "liberals" is primarily a signal to label an outgroup.
On what political side do you see more symbols like flags, stickers, memes, etc? Entire news cycle narratives can get deprived of meaning and act as the most recent symbol, individuals can use to signal their group membership. Any counter argument against such a holy cow gets viciously attacked or ignored because to some degree, this counter argument is an actual attack on yourself, your identitiy. Admitting errors is no big deal when nothing is at stake. The opposite example would be a very religious person loosing faith with an adrenaline rush (sweat, shiver, high heart rate, flat respiration), when the body prepares a fight or flight response because a strong, non-ignorable and contradicting thought crossed its mind.
And on what political side do you see more intelligence and broader empathy? More cognitive flexibility?
Around 2000, the internet was considered a new "printing press 2.0" for making information widely accessible. This analogy fits very well, because the first ever western book to be printed was the f'ing bible.