We’ve all fallen down an online rabbit hole. You’re scrolling through your news feed and you click on a video that looks mildly interesting… suddenly, it’s two hours later and you’re reading some bizarre conspiracy theory on some topic you had never even thought of before, wondering how on earth you got there.

When I launched the current multi-post series on The Most Important Technical Distinction in the World several weeks ago, I mentioned that I first got the idea for this series when reading of The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher, a disturbing book that examines how such social media platforms as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have be reformulating their algorithms over the past two decades to maximize clicks, often at the expense of the public good.

What’s the difference between Walter Cronkite and Tucker Carlson? I wish I had a funny punchline for that question, but the sad answer is that Tucker would probably trounce Walter in a ratings battle today, despite the fact that Carlson’s former employer, Fox New, once mounted a legal defense maintaining that no reasonable viewer would take Carlson’s reporting seriously.

Last week, I launched a series of posts titled “The Most Important Technical Distinction in the World” by introducing the concepts of positive and negative feedback. I suggested that understanding the distinction between these two types of feedback work is crucial to understanding why so many of our social institutions seem to be on the verge of crisis. In this post, I’ll look more carefully at one of those institutions: modern science…

Not long ago I read The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher. It is the most disturbing book I have read in some time…

The progressive worldview, in the “big picture” sense I understand it, involves equal parts philosophy, science, and political theory. In my four posts on The Progressive Worldview Blog thus far, I’ve mainly talked politics and science, so for this fifth post, let’s go full-on philosophy—although weaving in a bit of science here and there.…

This is a question—a slight rephrasing of Joseph Welch’s famous query to Senator Joseph McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”—that you may have found yourself asking repeatedly over the course of the Trump presidency…

Not long ago, Mike Johnson was elected Speaker of the House, thus prompting everyone to ask, “Who’s Mike Johnson?” He provided the answer, himself, saying that if you want to know where he stands on any given issue…

Have you ever watched a flock of starlings swoop around the sky like a kite, darting first this way then that, the whole flock staying together as a single cohesive mass while it performs these aerial gymnastics? Have you ever…

When I was doing my research for The History of Progress, one the books I read that excited my thinking most was The Conservative Sensibility by George Will. It is not that I agreed with everything Will had to say in…