Joan Westenberg

When exactly were the “certain times” of which these are the un

The Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: 1. Selection Bias 2. Audience Capture 3. The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect 4. Thinking you’re immune to the first three…

The most successful grift of the modern era was convincing the smartest people in the world that 'changing the world' means optimizing the click-through rate on ads for mattresses that ship in a box

Our collective intellectual culture seems to have calcified around a cohort of thinkers who achieved prominence roughly ten+ years ago and have been coasting ever since…

Westenberg.

Comfort Food for the Thinking Class: The Great Intellectual Stagnation

Wander into any bookstore (I dare you.)  The non-fiction table will be all but dominated by the usual suspects: Malcolm Gladwell's latest explora...

Grounded intellectual work, when it happens, if it ever happens again, is uncomfortable. It tells you things you don't want to hear, makes arguments that threaten positions you hold, points out problems you'd rather not see. The public intellectuals of the past, at their best, did this. Our current crop // slop does the opposite.

Westenberg.

Comfort Food for the Thinking Class: The Great Intellectual Stagnation

Wander into any bookstore (I dare you.)  The non-fiction table will be all but dominated by the usual suspects: Malcolm Gladwell's latest explora...

Charles Dickens in 1843: "what if I wrote a story where a man learns not to be a dick" Humanity: "holy shit" Humanity: makes 400 adaptations Humanity: continues being dicks Humanity: "we should adapt this again"

My conscious brain: 'We should learn linear algebra to better understand neural networks.' My revealed preferences: 'We are going to scroll specifically the parts of Wikipedia that list defunct 19th-century breakfast cereals.'

Would you accept "Oopsie!" from your accountant? Your doctor? Why do we accept it from companies holding our data and our money?

Westenberg.

Uh Oh! The Infantilization of Failure

When apps fail, when software breaks, you'll likely encounter a message constructed from a specific vocabulary: "Oops!" "Uh oh!" "Whoops!" Sometim...

Conservative: "Companies say 'Happy Holidays' because they hate Jesus." Economics 101: "Companies say 'Happy Holidays' because they want to sell cheap plastic garbage to 100% of the population instead of 65%." The 'War on Christmas' is just the Free Market you claim to worship working exactly as intended. You are fighting the Invisible Hand. And losing.

The Culture War is a toxoplasma. It bypasses your rational defenses by hacking your tribal loyalty circuits. If you find yourself genuinely furious about a minor controversy involving a sub-group you didn't know existed last week, you aren't "informed." You are being optimized for engagement.