To the author: I love this idea, but your blog has two problems that made it less enjoyable for me to read. The first is the pull quotes. I find them confusing and unnecessary, especially when they repeat sentences in the preceding paragraph. The second is that I got stuck on the moving graphs while scrolling on my phone. I suggest making them smaller with a different background color or simply make them static images.

AI chat bots in the future may be a part of ritual mind cleansing.

There's no claim to expertise or empirical support. There isn't even a claim that it applies an existing framework. Why would you think it was anything other than opinion?

I get tired endless unnecessary invocations of "I could be wrong" and "this is just my opinion" as if every author needs to actively steer readers away from the mistake of assuming the author's omniscience and infallibility.

I'm wary of making an "arguments are soldiers" assumption where facts are mostly useful for making arguments, in an attempt to change people's minds.

We should be curious about what's going on in the world regardless of what ideologies we might find appealing. Knowing what's going on in the world is an end in itself. An article with some interesting evidence in it is useful even if you disagree with the main argument.

Facts may not change minds, but we should still support people who do the reporting that brings us the facts.

my understanding (which is definitely not exhaustive!) is that the case between Galileo and the church was way more nuanced than is popularly retold, and had nothing whatsoever to do with Biblical literalism like the passage in Joshua about making the sun stand still.

Paul Feyerabend has a book called Against Method in which he essentially argues that it was the Catholic Church who was following the classical "scientific method" of weighing evidence between theories, and Galileo's hypothesis was rationally judged to be inferior to the existing models. Very fun read.