Can We Be Hacked?

[T]he problem is the hijacking of the human mind: systems that are better and better at steering what people are paying attention to, and better and better at steering what people do with their time than ever before. These are things like “Snapchat streaks,” which is hooking kids to send messages back and forth with …

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Thinking Collectively

TL;DR How We Think One of the most important ways in which our brains encode information in the form of grown relationships between neurons is so-called "Hebbian" associative learning, commonly represented in the catch-phrase "neurons that fire together, wire together."  More specifically, in an interaction between two neurons, if the downstream or "post-synaptic" neuron is …

Ideological Capture

For the uninitiated I’m going to review some background that I believe is generally accepted among experts before I get to the real point, so if you prefer to jump to where I actually tell you what I think it all means, click here.  And if you think this post is worth thinking about, don't forget …

Vox Overstates its Own Reporting

You keep using that word, but I'm not sure you know what it means.... Vox dot com has this article they seem to be recycling once a week or more lately, in which it claims in its headline and tagline that after Australia banned and confiscated certain weapons in 1996, homicides "plummeted."  It was a …

Teen Vogue Writes a Tendentious Article

Turning Critics into Racists My attention was directed to this article published by Teen Vogue, which purports to show that “White male” terrorists are more dangerous than other terrorists. Alas, like most of its kind, this article is riddled with illogic and misleading accounting.  I agree, of course, that we ought to be concerned about …