“So, Barack Obama has taken up fighting disinformation. NYT notes how his administration didn’t regulate tech. When I started writing about it, a decade ago, the pushback I got from the Obama universe was intense, and is hinted at the below profile of me.”

So starts a Twitter thread from Zeynep Tufekci on groupthink of an administration. Maybe he should have jumped straight to narrating Netflix docu-series.

The Good Science Project is underselling how good it is. More like this, please. (signatures below the manifesto are a good — heh — example of quality over quantity)

Twitter doesn’t lend itself to nuanced arguments. But here are a few arguments that don’t require nuance, because one side is so obviously right.

• The best beer in the world comes from Belgium.
• But Italy is the best country in Europe, by any definition.
• The average European is more racist than the average American, and by a lot.
• The main, often only, reason some European countries seem better-run than the US is that they are small and no one cares about what’s going on there.
• There is no good use case for cryptocurrencies, and bitcoin is Amway for men.
• Silicon Valley won’t “solve” healthcare, it will at best make it bad in a different way.
• The original Iron Man is still the best Marvel movie.
• Gravity Falls is the best general-audience cartoon series ever made.
• Christopher Nolan made some good Batman movies but ruined the DC franchise.
• Hans Zimmer is to movie soundtracks what Johny Ive is to industrial design: too much of a thing that is not even that good.
• You don’t need to have made a movie to know whether one is well-made.
• You don’t need to have designed a clinical trial to know whether one is well-designed.
• Having said that, nobody likes a self-appointed critic, unless they are also self-effacing.
• Randomized controlled trials are the best — and often only — way to find out whether a medical intervention works.
• It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. (Upton Sinclair)

…by rewiring everything in a headlong rush for growth—with a naive conception of human psychology, little understanding of the intricacy of institutions, and no concern for external costs imposed on society—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other large platforms unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.

At 8,000+ words, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid” is a behemoth of an essay, but do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. There are still islands of wisdom floating in the soup of idiocracy, from James Madison to Martin Gurri, and Jonathan Haidt charts a course across them to make some sense of, well, this.

I also recommend subscribing to The Atlantic, which is an island of sense all by itself.

A brief Twitter exchange reminded me why that site is so bad at fostering productive debate. It always takes effort for different sides not to talk past each other, but Twitter is uniquely poised to make all parties involved think that they know what the debate is about while at the same time making sure they are talking about different things.

In this particular case, the article that started it for me is the one from my previous post. The title of the article — “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid?” — biased me towards thinking that the matter under discussion would be, well, why have the past 10 years of American life been uniquely stupid?

But have they really been that unique? Or have the past 200-some years of American life been one long free-fall towards… higher living standard? Cleaner air and water? More educated populace? Obviously, I do think the past 10 years have been a deviation. While I don’t completely agree with putting all of the blame on poorly thought out social networks — some of it surely falls on abysmal primary and secondary education American children have been getting for at least the last 30 years — Twitter does make fights over stagnating pieces of prosperity pie more vicious than they need be.

As soon as I realized the conversation was turning towards original sins, corruption built into America’s core, and the very impossibility of the country existing for this long… I checked out. Without attention, most debates will degenerate into a topic like this, at once polarizing and vague, which Twitter is so good at promoting without ever resolving. It is a skill worth developing to identify those debates quickly, and to avoid them like the plague.

From David Graeber’s uneven but in parts excellent book BS Jobs. This was my own conclusion after watching that CGP Gray video on AI taking over all the jobs some years back 📚

“We live in Applicatia, a world where people must spend their days improving their resumes in the hope of improving their lives…”

This is from Experimental History, my new favorite newsletter.

🎙 Out of the two podcasts about randomized controlled trials that came out this week, I much preferred this one. Confirmation bias.