Holmes was suprisingly nihilistic, and I feel his formation of the search and competition for truth held now idealized beliefs of human behavior.

He accepted that people woudl be driven by their passions and biases, including things like a desire to create cohesion. That this was also something traded as a value and motivating force.

Unless you know someone else is going to be doing this, or you know this doesnt interest you - then see how far this makes sense to you.

I did my soul searching the day Trump won. I had a 0% chance for that occurence, and my prediction was wrong.

I relooked at everything I believed, because I had made a high confidence prediction on how the world worked, and I had made the wrong call. If this was a massive stock play, I would have been broke.

My revised position made me stop asking why Harris lost, but instead focused on how Trump ran in 2016 in the first place.

I felt it forced me to take my thinking seriously, and my assumptions seriously. Perhaps it matters and will help you too.

One of my other conclusions is that, with gen AI, the old assumptions of truth are gone.

Instead we're at the dawn of something like the fiat money revolution, in analogy terms. Like the value of a idea isnt about how its based on fact, but on the relation between the person sharing it, and the person paying attention to it.

Im hoping someone makes a blog post about this.

Also - this used to be hacker news. As in who gives a shit about what is, its about what needs to change.

Think of it this way - this is just a puzzle that needs to be cracked. Take it as a job application problem, and see how it can be dissected over the weekend.

Come up with some theories, then go see if you can disprove them.

Fixing anything, comes from defining the right problem anyway.

American right-wing propaganda personalities and media outlets drive the negative sentiment to a large degree. They radicalize their audiences against traditional media institutions, and they do it very, very well. Sometimes there are kernels of truth to their criticisms. Mostly they are wildly exaggerated, or even totally fabricated. It sucks we can't have nice things, but it is what it is. Free speech is free speech.

But it won't really get better unless all that propaganda is successfully countered, even if you magically figured out how to build a perfect mainstream media.

Where things get really dangerous is when demagogues come along and join in, like Trump.

On the list of things to look for to tell if you're dealing with a rising authoritarian movement, near the top are sustained attacks on the press. Enemy of the people, Trump calls them. Zuckerberg gets threatened with life in prison. He encourages supporters to menace and attack reporters at rallies. The list goes on.

These all become the pretext for drastic anti-constitutional attacks on the free press, and we're seeing that take shape already in Trump 2.0.