1) how to craft your Zettelkasten of atomic notes, 2) actually master books and write essays — I see many people taking notes in an ineffective way. If you collect information by highlighting and importing, copying interesting source material into your graph, putting [[]] around concepts, and tagging each page and block, this article is for you. (If this doesn’t mean a lot to you, check out…

Cunning marketers can predict and manipulate our behaviour. Facebook knows your soul. Google is hacking your brain. — I’ve noticed many people being scared of digital manipulation, Cambridge Analytica style, where companies track your digital footprints to show you microtargeted content that penetrates your brain and manipulates your mind. …

Algorithms and the new (dis)information landscape: disaster afoot or unjustified epistemic panic? — Part I. “The world that we have to deal with is out of reach, out of sight, out of mind. It has to be explored, reported, and imagined. …

Why enforced intellectual conformism hurts truth-finding — I. One thing Covid-19 taught me is that humans have a norm of liberally tolerating contrarians when the stakes are low and it would take decades to be proven right, but shunning contrarians when stakes are high and events are moving fast. Seeing as how they ended up in a global…

Talking morals and not consequences is deceptive: we have similar values. So: how much do we really want people to participate in politics? — I. Law professor Ilya Somin, author of Democracy and Political Ignorance, says, “The sheer depth of most individual voters’ ignorance is shocking to many observers not familiar with the research.” Political theorist Jeffrey Friedman adds, “The public is far more ignorant than academic and journalistic observers of the public realize.”

Privilege, standpoint epistemology and lived experiences: why one may claim a statement is knowledge only if it can be debunked in… — Last week, I said that one of the things this blog is about is how societies come to some kind of public understanding of truth. That’s rather vague, so consider this post an example. As WaitButWhy’s Tim Urban nicely illustrated last Thursday, you have a lot in common with every…

Introducing the renewed blog — Not long ago, punishing wrong believers along with wrong beliefs was the specialty of the right wing. That was what McCarthyism was all about. Today, the left wing has joined in. Thus we see Bari Weiss leaving the New York Times with an eloquent resignation letter condemning how everyone not…

Why you don’t need to worry about lying politicians, fake news, and filter bubbles — A lot has been said recently about ‘post-truth’. If you’re at all interested in understanding our culture, the term seems to show up everywhere. The usual narrative runs like so: Each of us lives in our own bubble. Increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting…

Understanding the constitution of knowledge (and the new attacks on it) — Why do you believe what you believe? Over the last months, I’ve become fascinated by (a) how each of us comes to accept something as true and (b) how societies come to some kind of public understanding about truth. Playing around at the intersection of these questions has been immensely…