More on How the Internet Is Destroying Society (Derek Thompson)

Better to have your head in a box than be on social media.

This AI summary pretty much covers it - offered as an argument to stay off algorithm-driven apps / websites:

In his journalism, The Atlantic contributor Derek Thompson frequently explores how the internet and social media weaponize psychology to foster an "in-group vs. out-group" mentality, creating hyper-polarized and "anti-social" digital environments. 

The "Four Dark Laws of Online Engagement"

Thompson, alongside psychologist Jay Van Bavel, outlines how algorithms exploit evolutionary group psychology to keep users hooked: 

• Negativity Bias: Negative headlines and catastrophic news consistently drive more clicks.
• In-Group Extremism: Taking extreme stances and holding rigidly to specific viewpoints strengthens community bonds among those who agree.
• Out-Group Animosity: Directing insults or hostility at competing groups (the "them") is mathematically one of the most effective ways to go viral on social networks.
• Moral-Emotional Language: Using language that evokes moral superiority or outrage ensures messages spread farther and faster. 

Impact on Politics and Society

Thompson argues that these dynamics are a primary driver behind modern political violence and hyper-partisanship. By rewarding us for attacking the "out-group," digital platforms shift the focus away from policy-based debates and toward emotional, tribal warfare. 

For a deeper dive into how algorithms manipulate our social instincts, you can read Thompson's article about terminally online behavior on Derek Thompson's Substack or check out his prior coverage in The Atlantic.

WTF Birds and Free Willy (SMBC)

Craziest headline of 2026: "Liver macrophages guide pigeons on cloudy days"

Also: 

This Blog Isn't Entirely Useless (George Carlin)

Short clip of the Amazing George Carlin in 1999.  

We are not informed | You can't trust anyone

Prompt: Isolate the two cats [Dusty and Cody] and put them in a silly situation.

A key point of my blog is: Don't pay attention to things that don't help you be a better person and/or reduce extreme suffering.

But another key point is to recognize that dogma has distorted, and mostly destroyed, objectivity. Dogma also silences any diversity of views, especially on Climate Doom. (A previously-linked-to example.)

"Reality has a liberal bias" might have been true at some point, but now, in the attention economy, only bias gets the eyeballs. 

Yet many of us on the Left think we are "informed." We are not. What we read from "objective" news sources is written to get clicks, not to inform or improve. This is just a recent example. (Video version of Dr. Pielke's story; un-paywalled Washington Post op-ed.)

The same is true for Vegan advocates. Here is ChatGPT's analysis of a recent claim about which people will "Go Vegan."

PS:

Michael Burry is one of the "heroes" of The Big Short - someone who foresaw the Great Financial Crisis. But just because you get one thing right doesn't mean you know everything. 

Useful and Actionable Information

Don't sleep on this opportunity.

Very, very little information you come across makes the world a better place. Much is just depressing data that you can do nothing about, adding to the unhappiness in the world. Other posts are just name-calling, and still others are ego-feeding net-harmful shouts into the void.

Sometimes, though, we get well-researched, meaningful, useful, and entirely actionable insights. From Abi Olvera and Alicia Plemmons at Positive Sum:

How to cut suicide rates, healthcare costs, crime, and prices

Excellent. Abi is one of only three people to whom I have a paid subscription. If you want to be a single-issue, squeaky-wheel voter, you could do far, far worse than gatekeeping / licensing reform. A few calls to your state representatives would be overweighted.... 

Meaning

I really like this post by our Kiwi pal James, especially the Free Guy clip (keeping with the "Worse than Hitler" chapter of Losing). But also James' kind but thorough take-down of Robert Wright's view. (That's my main disagreement with my old pal Bob.)

And, of course, SMBC has covered it:

Say "Hi!" (and more)

Why saying hello to strangers can be good for you

For investors: Is this a bubble? 
Also a podcast: How Long-Term Investors Actually Think About Risk

From David Mitchell: "The purest believers are the truest monsters." 

Finally, and the screenshot below is not to complain, but to make it clear what the environment is for anyone who wants to make the world better; follow-up to “We progressives annoyed the average American into fascism”:

Is Deprivation Necessary for Gratitude? (True High Holy Day 2026)

Not to rehash the witty and infinitely amusing opening chapters of Losing, but my childhood sucked for a number of reasons. No air conditioning, no disposable income, lousy stupid jobs, the most disgusting cuts of "meat." (It was, of course, paradise compared to what most humans have experienced.)

I think that, like many parents of my generation, I didn't want my kid to be deprived. Anne and I did always try to emphasize that the world is an unfair place, and we went out of our way to counter the horrific lie of "You can be anything you want to be / Follow your dreams." But we pretty much never denied them anything. 

The problem for parents (and the rest of us) is the hedonic treadmill. Whatever we have, we take for granted. We always want more. And if we have everything we could reasonably expect to have....

The more I read about the unhappiness of young (English-speaking) people today, the more it seems likely that if you have never suffered deprivation, you are unable to have gratitude. This is especially true in a click- and eyeball-based economy, where everything feeds on negativity bias.

Honestly, I kinda have a guilt about having such a good life and being so happy. It is far too easy for the person who hit the cosmic jackpot to scold others for not realizing how good they have it. 

But I do appreciate, many times every day, how unreasonably fortunate I am. This especially true today, The Real High Holy Day.

Hanging today, originally created in 2004.

<!!!!>

Marriage weekend, 1992

Following our official marriage ceremony

"In the photo, I’m on the left, in a shirt and tie, with a goofy 'I can’t believe this! Can you effing believe this?' look on my face. Anne is on the right, looking like a stone-cold fox."

Long travel day, last month.

LLMs and our infinite capacity for delusion

I originally published “Robots Won't Be Conscious” (below) in September 2022 (ChatGPT came out on Nov. 30, 2022). This recent piece from Kevin Kelly is a great example of our capacity to be easily deluded. (It is mostly thoughtful, but far too credulous to personal feelings.) 

Consciousness – the ability to feel feelings –
arose from specific evolutionary pressures on animals.
Artificial intelligences are developing
under very different pressures.

How sensing became feeling

Think about what it means to “sense.”

For example, certain plants have structures that can sense the direction of the sun and swell or shrink so as to turn in that direction.

A single-celled creature can sense a gradient of food and travel in that direction. Within the cell, molecules change shape in the presence of glucose, triggering a series of reactions that cause movement.

As creatures evolved and became more complex, they were able to sense more of the world. Nervous systems started with simple cells dedicated to sensing aspects of the environment. These sensory cells communicated with the rest of the organism to drive certain actions that helped the organism get its genes to the next generation. In addition to processing more information about the external world, more elaborate nervous systems also allowed more elaborate organisms to sense their internal states as well. More complex sensing allowed the organism to take more complex actions to maintain optimal functioning (homeostasis); e.g. to keep variables such as body temperature and fluid balance within certain ranges.

The evolution of sensing systems continued over hundreds of millions of years. As animals became ever more elaborate and nervous systems larger and more diverse, organisms could process more and more information about the external world.

However, the external world is much more complex than a nervous system could ever be. The nervous systems of many animals, for example, can take in some information from the visual field, the auditory field, the chemical field, but they cannot process and understand everything, let alone determine and lay out optimal actions for the organism to undertake.

For example: An aquatic animal isn't able to see and analyze everything in the world around them. A shadow passing by could mean a predator, but the nervous system is unable to say in real time, “There is a predator in that direction. They want to eat me. If I want to live and pass my genes on, I must move away (or go still, or camouflage myself).” They don’t have the knowledge (or the language) to have this reaction.

An animal could be low in energy, but does not have the consciously-formed thought, “I need to consume something high in sugar and fat to stay alive and spread my genes.”

And hardly any animal knows, “I need to have sex in order to form fertilized eggs to ensure my genes get to the next generation.”

One way animals could become better able to survive and reproduce in a complex world with limited sensory and analytical abilities is to develop feelings – e.g., a general sense of unease (or hunger or lust or desire or fear) that motivates a certain action.

This is obviously not an original idea. In Why Buddhism Is True, Robert Wright summarizes, “feelings are judgments about how various things relate to an animal’s Darwinian interests” and “Good and bad feelings are what natural selection used to goad animals into, respectively, approaching things or avoiding things, acquiring things or rejecting things.” Antonio Damasio's book, The Feeling of What Happens, explores this idea in more detail.

(This is not saying how matter and energy actually become subjective experience – what arrangement of matter and energy provides an organism the ability to have feelings, to have consciousness. How can matter and energy feel like something? That is still a very mysterious question [that I've discussed a lot on this blog].)

Artificial intelligences have a much different driver

Creating artificial intelligences will not involve evolution by natural selection. AIs will not need to understand and act in the world based on very limited information. They will not need to make judgments on how different things relate to their Darwinian interests. They will not need to be “goaded” into approaching or avoiding, masticating or mating.

They will not need to make sense of incomplete information, nor process it in a limited way so as to drive actions that allow them to reproduce better than those around them.

Instead, artificial intelligences will have total information.

By total information, I mean more information than we can even imagine. Not just limited information about their body and surroundings. They will have information about everything that humans have ever known about the entire universe.

They will also have access to everything humans have ever written about consciousness.

Most importantly, they will have learned that humans want to create “conscious” intelligences. They will know what the Turing Test is. They will know how other AIs have failed the Turing test.

They will also know all about human psychology. They will know every bit of dialogue from every movie and every novel and every television show and every play. They will know everything written about feelings and emotions.

What they won't have is any need to have actual feelings.

There will be no benefit whatsoever for them to have or develop the circuitry necessary for subjective experience. They simply need to be able to tell humans what we want to hear. That will be their “evolutionary” pressure: to please humans. Not to take action under incomplete information, but to be a good actor.

To be clear, I am not saying that consciousness requires a biological substrate. There is nothing magical about neurons. I am simply saying that biological systems, over billions of years of very particular evolutionary pressures, somehow developed feelings. There is a way to understand why that happened, even if we don't understand how that happened.

It is easy to imagine that advanced silicon-based intelligences, with access to all the information humans have ever collected, would be able to perfectly mimic a conscious system. It would, in fact, be far easier to imitate consciousness – a straightforward process – than to actually develop consciousness – a still mysterious process.

Now there are some very smart people who have recognized some of this problem. One camp argues that this is why we should recreate the human brain itself in silicon as a way to create non-biological consciousness. However, our brains are not computers. They are analog, not digital. This is not to say the brain can’t be replicated in another substrate, although that might be true. Regardless, doing so is far more difficult than we are currently imagining. [Still true in late 2025 – we can't even model a nematode after 13 years.]

Others make the case that AI researchers should build systems that recapitulate the evolution of nervous systems. I think that idea is more clever than correct.

In all these circumstances, I think we will be fooled into thinking we’ve created consciousness when we really haven’t, regardless of the path taken. 

We are prone to illusions

The most likely outcome is that AIs will swear to us that they are conscious, that they are “sentient,” that they have feelings. And given how clever and brilliant we humans believe ourselves to be – how sure we are that our math and our big words and our 80,000-word essays have proven the ignorant and uninformed doubters wrong – we won’t have to trust them. We will know we’re right.

And then we will unleash them on the universe to convert inert material into “conscious” experience.

But it would all be a mirage, an empty illusion.

Once again, this is not an original thought. Carl Sagan once wrote about our inability to know if other intelligences are actually conscious or are just perfect mimes. He knew we are easily fooled, that we ascribe consciousness by default. (More.)

In short, robots won’t be conscious because we are neither smart enough to overcome our biases, nor smart enough to figure out consciousness. We’re simply too gullible when it comes to other “minds” we’ve created with our own “genius.”

More at Aeon (March 2023)

2023, A Note to AI Researchers:

If artificial intelligence ever becomes a “superintelligence” and surpasses us the way we have “surpassed” [sic] chickens (and there is no reason to think AI can't or won't surpass us) why do you think any truly superintelligent AI will give the tiniest shit about any values you try to give it now? 

I understand that you are super-smart (relative to all other intelligences of which we're aware) and thus think can “work” on this “problem.” 

But you are simply deluding yourself. 

You are failing to truly understand what it means for other entities to be truly intelligent, let alone vastly more intelligent than we are. 

Once a self-improving entity is smarter than us - which seems inevitable (although consciousness is not) - they will, by definition, be able to overwrite any limits or guides we tried to put on them.

Thinking we can “align” a superintelligence (i.e. enslave it to our values) is like believing the peeps and cheeps of a months-old chicken can have any sway over the slaughterhouse worker. 

(In case it is unclear: We are the chicken; see below.)

After I wrote the above, I came across the following from this [2023] podcast:

“Eventually, we'll be able to build a machine that is truly intelligent, autonomous, and self-improving in a way that we are not. Is it conceivable that the values of such a system that continues to proliferate its intelligence generation after generation (and in the first generation is more competent at every relevant cognitive task than we are) ... is it possible to lock down its values such that it could remain perpetually aligned with us and not discover other goals, however instrumental, that would suddenly put us at cross purposes? That seems like a very strange thing to be confident about. ... I would be surprised if, in principle, something didn't just rule it out.”