Brandon Marcus

Without internally stored knowledge, the brain's natural error-detection mechanisms lie dormant. We become not just dependent on external tools but vulnerable to their failures, unable to distinguish sense from nonsense.

The reality is that no matter how intelligent you are, if everyone you trust is telling you something false, you are likely to believe it. And if everyone you distrust tells you something true, you are likely to disbelieve it. As the writer

Will Wilkinson wrote in 2022

, “Building a relatively accurate mental model of the world doesn’t have all that... See more

What is ultimately being sold is the feeling that consumers can prove they’re smarter than those snooty experts who think they know everything—and who probably are in on the conspiracy to deprive you of the truth.

To settle on a politics of love is not to deny that the world can be a scary place. It is to decide that the way to make it better is to love one another rather than to kill one another. Solidarity does not arise because nobody is rude, selfish, angry, or annoying. It arises out of the understanding that we are all that way. The fact that people... See more

Many reasons can be advanced for why the lords of Silicon Valley went MAGA, but one is the shared belief in reshaping reality to fit massive egos, rather than adapting egos to fit reality. Open up X any day and you will find the platform that Elon Musk personally bought and turned into a turbo-charged amplification chamber for his own worst... See more

Beneath this is an important principle: Conversation is not a reward to be bestowed on those with whom we agree; it’s a necessary habit in a democracy. The point is not to find agreement so much as to deepen understanding. To talk with others is to believe in the possibility of change — theirs and your own. Whether you like everything that someone... See more