#publicdiscourse — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #publicdiscourse, aggregated by home.social.
-
I wrote last week into my "Cruella De CyberSIN" piece that #tech has a lineage problem and is, in effect, a first-order shouting match.
Elon and Sam just publicly proved me right at an altitude that induces vertigo in me.
This is what happens when first-order thinkers build billion dollar companies. That's really all I have to say.
https://systemic.engineering/cruella
#Cybernetics #FirstOrderShoutingMatch #ElonMusk #SamAltman #XTwitter #CruellaDeCyberSIN #CantMakeThisShitUp #WhatElseIsThereToSay #AI #GenerativeAI #PublicDiscourse #SystemicEngineering
-
I wrote last week into my "Cruella De CyberSIN" piece that #tech has a lineage problem and is, in effect, a first-order shouting match.
Elon and Sam just publicly proved me right at an altitude that induces vertigo in me.
This is what happens when first-order thinkers build billion dollar companies. That's really all I have to say.
https://systemic.engineering/cruella
#Cybernetics #FirstOrderShoutingMatch #ElonMusk #SamAltman #XTwitter #CruellaDeCyberSIN #CantMakeThisShitUp #WhatElseIsThereToSay #AI #GenerativeAI #PublicDiscourse #SystemicEngineering
-
I wrote last week into my "Cruella De CyberSIN" piece that #tech has a lineage problem and is, in effect, a first-order shouting match.
Elon and Sam just publicly proved me right at an altitude that induces vertigo in me.
This is what happens when first-order thinkers build billion dollar companies. That's really all I have to say.
https://systemic.engineering/cruella
#Cybernetics #FirstOrderShoutingMatch #ElonMusk #SamAltman #XTwitter #CruellaDeCyberSIN #CantMakeThisShitUp #WhatElseIsThereToSay #AI #GenerativeAI #PublicDiscourse #SystemicEngineering
-
I wrote last week into my "Cruella De CyberSIN" piece that #tech has a lineage problem and is, in effect, a first-order shouting match.
Elon and Sam just publicly proved me right at an altitude that induces vertigo in me.
This is what happens when first-order thinkers build billion dollar companies. That's really all I have to say.
https://systemic.engineering/cruella
#Cybernetics #FirstOrderShoutingMatch #ElonMusk #SamAltman #XTwitter #CruellaDeCyberSIN #CantMakeThisShitUp #WhatElseIsThereToSay #AI #GenerativeAI #PublicDiscourse #SystemicEngineering
-
DATE: July 7, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Viral heatmap gets it wrong: Liberals don’t prioritize strangers over family
URL: https://www.psypost.org/viral-heatmap-gets-it-wrong-liberals-dont-prioritize-strangers-over-family/
A new psychological study published in Political Psychology suggests that people on the political left do not value distant strangers more than their own friends and family. Instead, the research indicates that liberals simply extend their moral concern further outward while still prioritizing those closest to them. These findings help explain how different ideological groups balance local loyalties with global compassion.
Human beings naturally display ingroup bias, which is the tendency to favor family, friends, and familiar community members over outsiders. Social identity theory proposes that people derive a strong sense of self-worth from their group memberships, fostering deep loyalty toward insiders. Evolutionary biology models suggest that this trait helped early humans survive in small, tightly knit groups by ensuring mutual protection and resource sharing.
Over time, human societies have grown more interconnected, prompting discussions about how people expand their moral circle. The moral circle is a concept describing the psychological boundary of who or what a person considers worthy of ethical care. In 2019, a paper titled “Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle” by Adam Waytz and colleagues explored this concept.
In one phase of their 2019 research, the authors asked participants to allocate moral concern across concentric circles ranging from immediate family to all things in existence. The study produced data that eventually became a viral visual on social media. Memes featuring two heatmap charts, one labeled “conservatives” and the other “liberals,” began appearing in political discussions online.
Right-wing commentators and even the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under the Trump administration have used the heatmap to imply that liberals care more about strangers and animals than about their immediate family.
Kyle Fiore Law, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Utah and director of the Morality, Altruism, and Prosociality Lab, noticed this narrative taking shape. “A specific claim had been circulating in public discourse, that people on the political left have come to value distant others more than their own family, neighbors, and community, effectively reversing the usual ordering of moral concern,” Law said.
“That ‘inversion’ framing showed up in political rhetoric and in a widely shared social media chart. It’s an empirically testable descriptive claim, so we wanted to test it directly.”
The previous research methods had some structural limitations regarding how people could express their priorities. “The most cited prior work here shows that liberals tend to draw a broader moral circle than conservatives, but those tasks were built in a way that assumes concern expands outward step by step, which made them poorly suited to detect whether concern for distant others actually trades off against concern for close others,” Law explained. “We used a measure that lets people structure their own moral circles independently, so that tradeoff could show up if it existed.”
The research team, led by Law and Stylianos Syropoulos of Arizona State University, conducted three separate analyses. In the first phase, known as Study 1a, they examined a nationally representative sample of 1,000 adult participants in the United States. The participants completed a short version of the Moral Expansiveness Scale, alongside a measure of their political ideology ranging from very liberal to very conservative.
This scale measures how much moral concern a person attributes to various entities, allowing participants to structure their own moral circles independently. Participants rated targets like genetic relatives, individuals of different religions, plants, animals, and villains. They assigned each target a score from zero to three, where zero meant the entity fell outside their moral boundary and three placed it in their inner circle.
The findings from Study 1a provided evidence that concern for distant entities does not reduce concern for close ones. Rating human outgroups highly on the moral scale actually correlated positively with caring for genetic relatives. Across almost all political affiliations, participants consistently granted the highest level of moral concern to their own inner circle. Surprisingly, very conservative participants showed a slightly smaller gap between family and outgroups, primarily because they reported slightly lower concern for genetic relatives compared to other political groups.
“In the nationally representative sample, the most conservative participants were the one group that didn’t show a clear gap between concern for ingroups and outgroups, and that came from somewhat lower concern for close others rather than heightened concern for outgroups,” Law told PsyPost. However, he noted that the “pattern did not hold in our preregistered replication, so I’d read it as a lead for future work rather than a firm result.”
For Study 1b, the scientists analyzed combined data from four previous online samples, totaling 3,201 adult participants from the United States. This phase utilized a longer version of the same moral scale. The list featured a wider variety of targets, including romantic partners, friends, opposing political members, coral reefs, and artificial intelligence constructs like supercomputers.
The results from Study 1b supported the first study. Both liberals and conservatives overwhelmingly prioritized their family and friends over outgroups, nature, and artificial intelligence. Liberals did exhibit a larger overall moral circle, but this expansion was driven by increased concern for marginalized humans and the environment. It did not stem from a lack of concern for their close social ties. Interestingly, conservatives in this sample showed slightly higher moral concern for artificial intelligence than liberals did.
To confirm these patterns under different conditions, the authors conducted a new, preregistered experiment called Study 2. They recruited 899 adults from an online platform, intentionally gathering roughly equal numbers of liberals, moderates, and conservatives. This study measured moral concern in two distinct ways to capture different psychological realities.
First, participants completed the unconstrained rating scale using updated categories. These categories included future generations alongside close others, human outgroups, animals, plants, technological agents, and criminals. In this unconstrained format, the findings replicated the earlier results. Every ideological group placed their close relationships at the absolute top of their moral hierarchy.
Second, the scientists introduced a fixed-resource allocation task. Participants received 100 moral concern points to distribute across the different entity categories. This setup mimics real-world scenarios where time, money, and attention are strictly limited resources that must be divided.
When resources were constrained to 100 points, tradeoffs naturally emerged. Giving points to distant targets mathematically required taking points away from close ones. Under these strict limits, liberals distributed more points to plants and future generations than conservatives did, which resulted in them allocating slightly fewer points to their close family and friends.
But even with this resource limitation in place, the inner circle remained the dominant priority across the entire political spectrum. The data suggests that liberals and conservatives largely agree on who matters most in a general sense. They simply differ on exactly how much of a limited resource should be shared with the broader world when sacrifices are necessary.
“Across a nationally representative sample, four large online samples, and a preregistered replication, people across the whole political spectrum placed their closest relationships at the top of their moral concern,” Law explained. “We found no evidence of an inverted hierarchy on the left. What differed by ideology was how far concern reached outward. Liberals, on average, extended more concern to distant targets like human outgroups, animals, and future generations, which is why their overall moral circles look larger, and that did not come with reduced concern for close others. When we forced people to divide a fixed pool of concern, tradeoffs did appear, but ingroups still came first for everyone. The more accurate summary is broader scope sitting alongside strong concern for those close to home.”
“The ingroup-first pattern was large and highly consistent, with very sizable effect sizes in the online samples. That’s the robust headline. The ideological differences in concern for distant targets were real but modest, often on the order of one to three percent of the variance. I’d encourage readers to hold both facts together. Prioritizing close others is close to universal and strongly expressed, and the liberal-conservative gap is a smaller difference layered on top of that shared pattern.”
While the findings challenge the idea of a liberal moral inversion, the researchers are careful to bound their conclusions. “The most important thing to flag is that this is descriptive work,” Law noted. “We’re not making any claim about whether prioritizing close or distant others is the morally right thing to do. That’s a question for ethics and for society, and it sits outside our data.”
The research does have limitations, particularly regarding its reliance on self-reported attitudes rather than physical behaviors. Rating how much you care about an entity on a survey might not perfectly reflect how you would spend your actual money or time. The fixed-resource point task helps bridge this gap, but it still functions as a hypothetical scenario rather than an incentivized behavioral measure.
Looking ahead, the authors plan to expand their methodology to better capture physical behaviors rather than self-reported attitudes. “We’d like to test whether these patterns hold when allocations carry real costs, using incentivized behavioral tasks rather than self-report,” Law explained. “Longitudinal designs would help us understand how moral concern and political identity shape each other over time.”
The research team also hopes to explore the nuances of political affiliation beyond a simple spectrum. “We’re also interested in more specific political identities that a single left-right item can miss, and in running a large nationally representative study with the full measure,” Law said.
“The idea I’d most like readers to walk away with is that debates about ‘moral inversion’ tend to blur two separate questions, how widely someone extends moral regard, and whether extending concern widely necessarily means smaller concern for those who are close,” Law concluded. “Our data seem to show that circles can be wide and also strong at the center at the same time. Keeping those two questions apart makes a lot of the disagreement clearer.”
The study, “Ideological differences in moral concern reflect circle expansion, not inversion,” was authored by Kyle Fiore Law, Seoyeon Bae, Liane Young, and Stylianos Syropoulos.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/viral-heatmap-gets-it-wrong-liberals-dont-prioritize-strangers-over-family/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #MoralCircle #LiberalConservative #IngroupBias #MoralExpansion #PoliticalPsychology #Empathy #GlobalCompassion #MoralTradeoffs #LiberalVsConservative #PublicDiscourse
-
DATE: July 7, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Viral heatmap gets it wrong: Liberals don’t prioritize strangers over family
URL: https://www.psypost.org/viral-heatmap-gets-it-wrong-liberals-dont-prioritize-strangers-over-family/
A new psychological study published in Political Psychology suggests that people on the political left do not value distant strangers more than their own friends and family. Instead, the research indicates that liberals simply extend their moral concern further outward while still prioritizing those closest to them. These findings help explain how different ideological groups balance local loyalties with global compassion.
Human beings naturally display ingroup bias, which is the tendency to favor family, friends, and familiar community members over outsiders. Social identity theory proposes that people derive a strong sense of self-worth from their group memberships, fostering deep loyalty toward insiders. Evolutionary biology models suggest that this trait helped early humans survive in small, tightly knit groups by ensuring mutual protection and resource sharing.
Over time, human societies have grown more interconnected, prompting discussions about how people expand their moral circle. The moral circle is a concept describing the psychological boundary of who or what a person considers worthy of ethical care. In 2019, a paper titled “Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle” by Adam Waytz and colleagues explored this concept.
In one phase of their 2019 research, the authors asked participants to allocate moral concern across concentric circles ranging from immediate family to all things in existence. The study produced data that eventually became a viral visual on social media. Memes featuring two heatmap charts, one labeled “conservatives” and the other “liberals,” began appearing in political discussions online.
Right-wing commentators and even the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under the Trump administration have used the heatmap to imply that liberals care more about strangers and animals than about their immediate family.
Kyle Fiore Law, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Utah and director of the Morality, Altruism, and Prosociality Lab, noticed this narrative taking shape. “A specific claim had been circulating in public discourse, that people on the political left have come to value distant others more than their own family, neighbors, and community, effectively reversing the usual ordering of moral concern,” Law said.
“That ‘inversion’ framing showed up in political rhetoric and in a widely shared social media chart. It’s an empirically testable descriptive claim, so we wanted to test it directly.”
The previous research methods had some structural limitations regarding how people could express their priorities. “The most cited prior work here shows that liberals tend to draw a broader moral circle than conservatives, but those tasks were built in a way that assumes concern expands outward step by step, which made them poorly suited to detect whether concern for distant others actually trades off against concern for close others,” Law explained. “We used a measure that lets people structure their own moral circles independently, so that tradeoff could show up if it existed.”
The research team, led by Law and Stylianos Syropoulos of Arizona State University, conducted three separate analyses. In the first phase, known as Study 1a, they examined a nationally representative sample of 1,000 adult participants in the United States. The participants completed a short version of the Moral Expansiveness Scale, alongside a measure of their political ideology ranging from very liberal to very conservative.
This scale measures how much moral concern a person attributes to various entities, allowing participants to structure their own moral circles independently. Participants rated targets like genetic relatives, individuals of different religions, plants, animals, and villains. They assigned each target a score from zero to three, where zero meant the entity fell outside their moral boundary and three placed it in their inner circle.
The findings from Study 1a provided evidence that concern for distant entities does not reduce concern for close ones. Rating human outgroups highly on the moral scale actually correlated positively with caring for genetic relatives. Across almost all political affiliations, participants consistently granted the highest level of moral concern to their own inner circle. Surprisingly, very conservative participants showed a slightly smaller gap between family and outgroups, primarily because they reported slightly lower concern for genetic relatives compared to other political groups.
“In the nationally representative sample, the most conservative participants were the one group that didn’t show a clear gap between concern for ingroups and outgroups, and that came from somewhat lower concern for close others rather than heightened concern for outgroups,” Law told PsyPost. However, he noted that the “pattern did not hold in our preregistered replication, so I’d read it as a lead for future work rather than a firm result.”
For Study 1b, the scientists analyzed combined data from four previous online samples, totaling 3,201 adult participants from the United States. This phase utilized a longer version of the same moral scale. The list featured a wider variety of targets, including romantic partners, friends, opposing political members, coral reefs, and artificial intelligence constructs like supercomputers.
The results from Study 1b supported the first study. Both liberals and conservatives overwhelmingly prioritized their family and friends over outgroups, nature, and artificial intelligence. Liberals did exhibit a larger overall moral circle, but this expansion was driven by increased concern for marginalized humans and the environment. It did not stem from a lack of concern for their close social ties. Interestingly, conservatives in this sample showed slightly higher moral concern for artificial intelligence than liberals did.
To confirm these patterns under different conditions, the authors conducted a new, preregistered experiment called Study 2. They recruited 899 adults from an online platform, intentionally gathering roughly equal numbers of liberals, moderates, and conservatives. This study measured moral concern in two distinct ways to capture different psychological realities.
First, participants completed the unconstrained rating scale using updated categories. These categories included future generations alongside close others, human outgroups, animals, plants, technological agents, and criminals. In this unconstrained format, the findings replicated the earlier results. Every ideological group placed their close relationships at the absolute top of their moral hierarchy.
Second, the scientists introduced a fixed-resource allocation task. Participants received 100 moral concern points to distribute across the different entity categories. This setup mimics real-world scenarios where time, money, and attention are strictly limited resources that must be divided.
When resources were constrained to 100 points, tradeoffs naturally emerged. Giving points to distant targets mathematically required taking points away from close ones. Under these strict limits, liberals distributed more points to plants and future generations than conservatives did, which resulted in them allocating slightly fewer points to their close family and friends.
But even with this resource limitation in place, the inner circle remained the dominant priority across the entire political spectrum. The data suggests that liberals and conservatives largely agree on who matters most in a general sense. They simply differ on exactly how much of a limited resource should be shared with the broader world when sacrifices are necessary.
“Across a nationally representative sample, four large online samples, and a preregistered replication, people across the whole political spectrum placed their closest relationships at the top of their moral concern,” Law explained. “We found no evidence of an inverted hierarchy on the left. What differed by ideology was how far concern reached outward. Liberals, on average, extended more concern to distant targets like human outgroups, animals, and future generations, which is why their overall moral circles look larger, and that did not come with reduced concern for close others. When we forced people to divide a fixed pool of concern, tradeoffs did appear, but ingroups still came first for everyone. The more accurate summary is broader scope sitting alongside strong concern for those close to home.”
“The ingroup-first pattern was large and highly consistent, with very sizable effect sizes in the online samples. That’s the robust headline. The ideological differences in concern for distant targets were real but modest, often on the order of one to three percent of the variance. I’d encourage readers to hold both facts together. Prioritizing close others is close to universal and strongly expressed, and the liberal-conservative gap is a smaller difference layered on top of that shared pattern.”
While the findings challenge the idea of a liberal moral inversion, the researchers are careful to bound their conclusions. “The most important thing to flag is that this is descriptive work,” Law noted. “We’re not making any claim about whether prioritizing close or distant others is the morally right thing to do. That’s a question for ethics and for society, and it sits outside our data.”
The research does have limitations, particularly regarding its reliance on self-reported attitudes rather than physical behaviors. Rating how much you care about an entity on a survey might not perfectly reflect how you would spend your actual money or time. The fixed-resource point task helps bridge this gap, but it still functions as a hypothetical scenario rather than an incentivized behavioral measure.
Looking ahead, the authors plan to expand their methodology to better capture physical behaviors rather than self-reported attitudes. “We’d like to test whether these patterns hold when allocations carry real costs, using incentivized behavioral tasks rather than self-report,” Law explained. “Longitudinal designs would help us understand how moral concern and political identity shape each other over time.”
The research team also hopes to explore the nuances of political affiliation beyond a simple spectrum. “We’re also interested in more specific political identities that a single left-right item can miss, and in running a large nationally representative study with the full measure,” Law said.
“The idea I’d most like readers to walk away with is that debates about ‘moral inversion’ tend to blur two separate questions, how widely someone extends moral regard, and whether extending concern widely necessarily means smaller concern for those who are close,” Law concluded. “Our data seem to show that circles can be wide and also strong at the center at the same time. Keeping those two questions apart makes a lot of the disagreement clearer.”
The study, “Ideological differences in moral concern reflect circle expansion, not inversion,” was authored by Kyle Fiore Law, Seoyeon Bae, Liane Young, and Stylianos Syropoulos.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/viral-heatmap-gets-it-wrong-liberals-dont-prioritize-strangers-over-family/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #MoralCircle #LiberalConservative #IngroupBias #MoralExpansion #PoliticalPsychology #Empathy #GlobalCompassion #MoralTradeoffs #LiberalVsConservative #PublicDiscourse
-
https://www.europesays.com/britain/63644/ Could Nigel Farage’s Substack restore intellectual debate in Britain? #Britain #HenryNowak #JurgenHabermas #NigelFarage #PublicDiscourse #Substack #TwoTierPolicing
-
Could Nigel Farage’s Substack restore intellectual debate in Britain?
Jürgen Habermas, the titanic German intellectual who died earlier this year, extolled the “public sphere” and lamented its…
#EuropeSays #Britain #Europe #EU #henrynowak #jurgenhabermas #NigelFarage #publicdiscourse #Substack #two-tierpolicing
https://www.europesays.com/britain/63644/ -
Could Nigel Farage’s Substack restore intellectual debate in Britain?
Jürgen Habermas, the titanic German intellectual who died earlier this year, extolled the “public sphere” and lamented its…
#EuropeSays #Britain #Europe #EU #henrynowak #jurgenhabermas #NigelFarage #publicdiscourse #Substack #two-tierpolicing
https://www.europesays.com/britain/63527/ -
https://www.europesays.com/britain/63527/ Could Nigel Farage’s Substack restore intellectual debate in Britain? #Britain #HenryNowak #JurgenHabermas #NigelFarage #PublicDiscourse #Substack #TwoTierPolicing
-
Climate change is a consequence.
Where you look at a problem conditions where you look for a solution.Read @thierryaaron.bsky.social:
https://sklonger.app/profile/thierryaaron.bsky.social/post/3mhrzbuhf3s2p#advocacy #influence #framing #strategy #publicDiscourse #climate #adaptation #mitigation #rootCause
-
Climate change is a consequence.
Where you look at a problem conditions where you look for a solution.Read @thierryaaron.bsky.social:
https://sklonger.app/profile/thierryaaron.bsky.social/post/3mhrzbuhf3s2p#advocacy #influence #framing #strategy #publicDiscourse #climate #adaptation #mitigation #rootCause
-
The Illusion of Engagement: Why Social Media Rewards Ignorance Over Thought
By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News
Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — June 3, 2026The Myth of the Thinking Crowd
Social media platforms promote a comforting illusion: that ideas rise or fall based on merit, that good arguments eventually find their audience, and that collective intelligence emerges from enough voices speaking at once. In practice, the opposite is more often true.
What rises is not insight, but familiarity. What spreads is not thought, but reassurance. Platforms optimized for engagement are structurally hostile to work that requires attention, humility, or reconsideration. This is not a failure of individual users so much as a failure of the system that selects which behaviors are rewarded.
Status Before Substance
On most social platforms, content is evaluated before it is read. Signals such as follower count, tone, identity, and alignment with group expectations determine whether an idea is granted consideration at all. Substance is secondary.
This produces a closed loop. Those already recognized are amplified. Those outside the circle are dismissed without engagement. The act of not reading becomes a performance of belonging.
Claims that a book, article, or argument is “bad” without having been read are not intellectual judgments. They are status declarations.
The Performance of Intelligence
Social media rewards the appearance of intelligence rather than its practice. Quick takes outperform careful reasoning. Moral certainty outperforms curiosity. Dismissal is cheaper than engagement and therefore more common.
This environment trains users to react, not to think. Reading deeply carries social risk: one might encounter complexity, ambiguity, or ideas that resist easy alignment. It is safer to signal agreement with what is already popular.
Over time, this dynamic produces a culture that confuses confidence with competence.
AI as a Convenient Scapegoat
Recent hostility toward the use of artificial intelligence in writing follows this pattern. AI has become a shorthand accusation, a way to disqualify work without engaging it. The claim is rarely that the argument is wrong, only that its origin is suspect.
This tactic avoids the discomfort of evaluation. It replaces critique with insinuation. Whether the work predates AI, incorporates it transparently, or uses it as a tool rather than a substitute is irrelevant. The label serves its purpose: dismissal without reading.
Engagement Metrics as Anti-Intellectual Filters
Platforms measure success through likes, reposts, and replies. These metrics favor content that confirms existing beliefs and punishes work that challenges them. As a result, the system filters out complexity long before readers encounter it.
Low engagement is then treated as evidence of low quality, rather than as a predictable outcome of structural bias. Serious work is declared irrelevant because it does not perform well in a space designed to marginalize it.
This logic mistakes popularity for validity.
Why This Is Not an Audience Problem
It is tempting to blame users for this environment. That temptation should be resisted. Most people behave rationally within the incentives presented to them. When platforms reward speed, certainty, and conformity, those traits will dominate.
The problem is not that people are incapable of thought. It is that the system actively discourages it.
Expecting serious engagement from a platform optimized against it is a category error.
The Cost of Confusing Noise for Judgment
When dismissal replaces critique and status replaces reading, the collective capacity for judgment erodes. Institutions, ideas, and policies are evaluated based on vibes rather than evidence. This has consequences beyond social media.
A culture that trains itself to ignore complexity will struggle to govern complexity.
Why Walking Away Is Rational
Disengaging from these systems is not surrender. It is alignment. Serious work does not require constant affirmation. It requires preservation, clarity, and time.
Archives outlast feeds. Records outlast reactions. Thought outlasts applause.
The purpose of writing is not to win attention contests in environments designed to flatten meaning. It is to establish a record that can be encountered by those willing to read.
From Alamo to Anarchy argues that saving U.S. democracy requires breaking Texas into five states. In a sharp Zoomer voice, Dorah Zurino traces Texas from slave republic to today’s “lab of extremes” (Rangers, Jim Crow, ERCOT, SB8) and maps a constitutional, step-by-step plan to un-monopolize power and let real communities govern.
https://books2read.com/u/mdBD9RAPA References
Carr, N. (2010). The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains. W. W. Norton & Company.
Lanier, J. (2018). Ten arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now. Henry Holt and Company.
Vaidhyanathan, S. (2018). Antisocial media: How Facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy. Oxford University Press.
#digitalPlatforms #engagementMetrics #institutionalLiteracy #intellectualCulture #misinformation #publicDiscourse #SocialMedia -
The Illusion of Engagement: Why Social Media Rewards Ignorance Over Thought
By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News
Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — June 3, 2026The Myth of the Thinking Crowd
Social media platforms promote a comforting illusion: that ideas rise or fall based on merit, that good arguments eventually find their audience, and that collective intelligence emerges from enough voices speaking at once. In practice, the opposite is more often true.
What rises is not insight, but familiarity. What spreads is not thought, but reassurance. Platforms optimized for engagement are structurally hostile to work that requires attention, humility, or reconsideration. This is not a failure of individual users so much as a failure of the system that selects which behaviors are rewarded.
Status Before Substance
On most social platforms, content is evaluated before it is read. Signals such as follower count, tone, identity, and alignment with group expectations determine whether an idea is granted consideration at all. Substance is secondary.
This produces a closed loop. Those already recognized are amplified. Those outside the circle are dismissed without engagement. The act of not reading becomes a performance of belonging.
Claims that a book, article, or argument is “bad” without having been read are not intellectual judgments. They are status declarations.
The Performance of Intelligence
Social media rewards the appearance of intelligence rather than its practice. Quick takes outperform careful reasoning. Moral certainty outperforms curiosity. Dismissal is cheaper than engagement and therefore more common.
This environment trains users to react, not to think. Reading deeply carries social risk: one might encounter complexity, ambiguity, or ideas that resist easy alignment. It is safer to signal agreement with what is already popular.
Over time, this dynamic produces a culture that confuses confidence with competence.
AI as a Convenient Scapegoat
Recent hostility toward the use of artificial intelligence in writing follows this pattern. AI has become a shorthand accusation, a way to disqualify work without engaging it. The claim is rarely that the argument is wrong, only that its origin is suspect.
This tactic avoids the discomfort of evaluation. It replaces critique with insinuation. Whether the work predates AI, incorporates it transparently, or uses it as a tool rather than a substitute is irrelevant. The label serves its purpose: dismissal without reading.
Engagement Metrics as Anti-Intellectual Filters
Platforms measure success through likes, reposts, and replies. These metrics favor content that confirms existing beliefs and punishes work that challenges them. As a result, the system filters out complexity long before readers encounter it.
Low engagement is then treated as evidence of low quality, rather than as a predictable outcome of structural bias. Serious work is declared irrelevant because it does not perform well in a space designed to marginalize it.
This logic mistakes popularity for validity.
Why This Is Not an Audience Problem
It is tempting to blame users for this environment. That temptation should be resisted. Most people behave rationally within the incentives presented to them. When platforms reward speed, certainty, and conformity, those traits will dominate.
The problem is not that people are incapable of thought. It is that the system actively discourages it.
Expecting serious engagement from a platform optimized against it is a category error.
The Cost of Confusing Noise for Judgment
When dismissal replaces critique and status replaces reading, the collective capacity for judgment erodes. Institutions, ideas, and policies are evaluated based on vibes rather than evidence. This has consequences beyond social media.
A culture that trains itself to ignore complexity will struggle to govern complexity.
Why Walking Away Is Rational
Disengaging from these systems is not surrender. It is alignment. Serious work does not require constant affirmation. It requires preservation, clarity, and time.
Archives outlast feeds. Records outlast reactions. Thought outlasts applause.
The purpose of writing is not to win attention contests in environments designed to flatten meaning. It is to establish a record that can be encountered by those willing to read.
From Alamo to Anarchy argues that saving U.S. democracy requires breaking Texas into five states. In a sharp Zoomer voice, Dorah Zurino traces Texas from slave republic to today’s “lab of extremes” (Rangers, Jim Crow, ERCOT, SB8) and maps a constitutional, step-by-step plan to un-monopolize power and let real communities govern.
https://books2read.com/u/mdBD9RAPA References
Carr, N. (2010). The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains. W. W. Norton & Company.
Lanier, J. (2018). Ten arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now. Henry Holt and Company.
Vaidhyanathan, S. (2018). Antisocial media: How Facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy. Oxford University Press.
#digitalPlatforms #engagementMetrics #institutionalLiteracy #intellectualCulture #misinformation #publicDiscourse #SocialMedia -
“ #Publicdiscourse about #taxes and #inequality is, even more than discussion of other #economic topics, infested with #zombies — #ideas that should be dead, having been proved wrong again and again, but that keep shambling along, eating people’s brains.” open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...
Bezos, Backlash and Zombies -
America's Philosophical Void: A Costly Misconception
Why Americans treat philosophy like faith, not thinking. This hurts education and public debate. Learn the real cost.
#PhilosophyVsFaith, #CriticalThinking, #AmericanEducation, #PublicDiscourse, #IntellectualGrowth
https://newsletter.tf/america-philosophy-faith-not-thinking-debate/
-
Many Americans think philosophy is about faith, not thinking. This is different from how other countries see it, leading to weaker public arguments.
#PhilosophyVsFaith, #CriticalThinking, #AmericanEducation, #PublicDiscourse, #IntellectualGrowth
https://newsletter.tf/america-philosophy-faith-not-thinking-debate/ -
We can’t know if Donald Trump has dementia. Even if he did, it wouldn’t excuse his actions
#Politics #Health #Ethics #Media #Journalism #Psychology #Trump #Dementia #MentalHealth #Accountability #Misinformation #PublicDiscourse #Stigma #Leadership
https://the-14.com/we-cant-know-if-donald-trump-has-dementia-even-if-he-did-it-wouldnt-excuse-his-actions/ -
We can’t know if Donald Trump has dementia. Even if he did, it wouldn’t excuse his actions
#Politics #Health #Ethics #Media #Journalism #Psychology #Trump #Dementia #MentalHealth #Accountability #Misinformation #PublicDiscourse #Stigma #Leadership
https://the-14.com/we-cant-know-if-donald-trump-has-dementia-even-if-he-did-it-wouldnt-excuse-his-actions/ -
This story is spreading because it touches on deeper questions about identity and societal change.
#Europe #Politics #Society #GlobalDebate #CulturalIssues #PublicDiscourse -
This story is spreading because it touches on deeper questions about identity and societal change.
#Europe #Politics #Society #GlobalDebate #CulturalIssues #PublicDiscourse -
Participation, dignity, care, transparency, inclusion, voice — the language is everywhere. But what happens when the words remain, while the structures meant to carry them grow thinner, vaguer, or harder to answer for?
#Coherence #Leadership #Democracy #PublicLife #PublicDiscourse #Accountability #Meaning #CivicCulture #InstitutionalTrust #PoliticalCulture #SocialChange #SystemsThinking #Ethics #CivicLeadership
-
Participation, dignity, care, transparency, inclusion, voice — the language is everywhere. But what happens when the words remain, while the structures meant to carry them grow thinner, vaguer, or harder to answer for?
#Coherence #Leadership #Democracy #PublicLife #PublicDiscourse #Accountability #Meaning #CivicCulture #InstitutionalTrust #PoliticalCulture #SocialChange #SystemsThinking #Ethics #CivicLeadership
-
There’s a shift happening in plain sight.
It’s not that responsible and reckless ways of speaking coexist. They always have.
It’s that both now carry equal weight, even when the stakes are real lives and real futures.
#Democracy
#GlobalPolitics
#Leadership
#Geopolitics
#Sensemaking
#PublicDiscourse
#SystemsThinking
#PoliticalAnalysis
#Ethics -
There’s a shift happening in plain sight.
It’s not that responsible and reckless ways of speaking coexist. They always have.
It’s that both now carry equal weight, even when the stakes are real lives and real futures.
#Democracy
#GlobalPolitics
#Leadership
#Geopolitics
#Sensemaking
#PublicDiscourse
#SystemsThinking
#PoliticalAnalysis
#Ethics -
A capacity for rational dialogue?
“Democracy depends on the belief of the people that there is some scope left for collectively shaping a challenging future.” Jürgen Habermas
"His abiding concern was the state of democracy and the fear of backsliding into the exclusionary and violent social order..." >>
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/14/books/jurgen-habermas-dead.html
#PublicSphere #PublicDiscourse #communication #dialogue #nationalism #violence #democracy #CriticalTheory -
A capacity for rational dialogue?
“Democracy depends on the belief of the people that there is some scope left for collectively shaping a challenging future.” Jürgen Habermas
"His abiding concern was the state of democracy and the fear of backsliding into the exclusionary and violent social order..." >>
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/14/books/jurgen-habermas-dead.html
#PublicSphere #PublicDiscourse #communication #dialogue #nationalism #violence #democracy #CriticalTheory -
ICYMI: Santo & Schwartz – “Psychology of Stupid” Analyses with Author (Compilation) https://mauineutralzone.com/video/santo-schwartz-psychology-of-stupid-analyses-with-author-compilation/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #Psychology #CognitiveBias #CriticalThinking #MediaInfluence #PublicDiscourse
-
ICYMI: Santo & Schwartz – “Psychology of Stupid” Analyses with Author (Compilation) https://mauineutralzone.com/video/santo-schwartz-psychology-of-stupid-analyses-with-author-compilation/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #Psychology #CognitiveBias #CriticalThinking #MediaInfluence #PublicDiscourse
-
AI Tools Used in Epstein File Investigations and Public Discourse
AI helps search millions of Epstein files and creates viral videos. See how AI affects public talk and what it means for you.
#EpsteinFiles, #AITools, #ViralContent, #DataAnalysis, #PublicDiscourse
https://newsletter.tf/ai-tools-search-epstein-files-viral-videos/
-
AI is used to search over 1.4 million Epstein files and also to make viral videos. This is a big change in how we get information.
#EpsteinFiles, #AITools, #ViralContent, #DataAnalysis, #PublicDiscourse
https://newsletter.tf/ai-tools-search-epstein-files-viral-videos/
-
Santo & Schwartz – “Psychology of Stupid” Analyses with Author (Compilation) https://mauineutralzone.com/video/santo-schwartz-psychology-of-stupid-analyses-with-author-compilation/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #Psychology #CognitiveBias #CriticalThinking #PublicDiscourse #MediaInfluence
-
Public Discourse
I thought about why accepting blog comments via email does not work for me.
