Posts

An Inconsistent Approach to Viewpoint Diversity: If school choice is the answer to fights over curriculum in K-12 schools, it also needs to be the answer at universities. But culture war supporting libertarians don’t tend to apply the argument that consistently.

If You Want to Win Political Arguments, Stop Being an Asshole: Political persuasion versus the urge to political domination.

Why, Despite the Numbers, Bluesky Feels Bigger than Threads: Threads has significantly more active users than Bluesky, but feels a lot smaller. Why?

Silicon Valley’s Very Online Ideologues are in Model Collapse: Like an AI trained on its own output, they’re growing increasingly divorced from reality, and are reinforcing their own worst habits of thought.

Why the Right Lies About Cities: Right-wing narratives falsely depict American cities as failing in order to defend traditional values, while urban residents experience thriving, diverse, and inclusive communities.

Why Tech Bros Overestimate AI's Creative Abilities: Silicon Valley’s overconfidence in the imminent arrival of Artificial General Intelligence stems from a combination of limited understanding of the humanities, an insular culture, and a business model that incentivizes exaggerated claims about AI’s capabilities.

The Challenge of Committing to Liberty—and Meaning It: It is all too easy to abandon liberty when its practice inconveniences us.

Three Kinds of Conservatives: Conservatism encompasses three distinct forms—personal, social, and political—that should not be conflated with being “on the right,” which refers to an ideological perspective on natural human inequalities.

Surround Yourself With Those Who Are Admirable, and Distance Yourself From Those Who Aren’t.: An examination of the place of admirable friendship in an ethical life.

How Social Media Tricks our Brains — and Destroys our Politics: Social media convinces us our small communities are representative of the whole and tells us we’re more right than we really are.

A Twitter Eulogy: This weekend I deleted my Twitter account. Which is a small thing, yes, but it’s 16 years of interactions, and 13,000 followers, and it wasn’t an easy decision. Not the least because, in those 16 years, I made real and important friends through Twitter. The platform meant a lot to me. So as my …

You Haven’t Been Canceled. You’re Just Unlikable.: Social rejection often isn’t about your ideas.

A Crash Course in Cultivating Liberal Virtues: Perfect virtue is impossible, and moral growth is challenging. But we can improve ourselves in practical ways, even if we can’t achieve the ideal.

Social Conservatism is Suffering: We cannot make permanent what is inevitably impermanent, and insisting otherwise brings distress. Better to embrace dynamism and social diversity

Hate Can Be Mainstream: Bigotry is bigotry, even if the bigots are in the majority.

How the Right Distorted Libertarianism: Once rooted in liberalism, libertarianism’s detour through the conservative movement has blunted its radical edge and commitment to principle.

Liberty Upsets Patterns—and Conservatism: Liberty is dynamic. Conservatism is static. They cannot coexist.

The American Right Never Really Loved Freedom: Conservative ideology fundamentally contradicts individual liberty and self-determination.