Ruby-Maude Rioux

Put simply, the masses hate experts. If forced to choose between the advice of the learned and the vague impressions of other people just like themselves , the masses invariably turn to the latter. The upper elites still try to pronounce judgments and lead, but fewer and fewer of those down below pay attention.

Both artists’ ability to trick the human cognition, and observers’ ability to successfully fall into the illusion is immensely fascinating to me.

“In the past, jobs were about muscles. Now they’re about brains, but in the future, they’ll be about the heart.”

Fake is our leading candidate for word of the century. It captures almost everything relevant now in a single syllable.

Women also have on average a 41% lower grip strength than men, and this is not a sex difference that changes with age: the typical seventy-year-old man has a stronger handgrip than the average twenty-five-year-old woman. It’s also not a sex difference that can be significantly trained away: a study which compared ‘highly trained female athletes’ to... See more

The media ecosystem is in crisis because social media has a mental illness and traditional media has a physical illness. Today’s dominant social media platforms might make us angry and dumb, but they have functioning business models and, with the exception of X, financial stability. Today’s largest traditional media companies have the opposite prob... See more

In anthropology, when there’s no empirical connection between acts and their desired outcomes, “We call this stuff ‘magic,’”