The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy

The thinking style that makes people vulnerable to extremism | Psyche Ideas

The people most drawn to ideological thinking and authoritarianism aren’t aware of what makes them so susceptible

Guide to Responsible, Strategic Reporting on Hate and Extremism

Recommendations for researchers, journalists and others on how to avoid unintentionally bolstering extremists and causing additional harm.

Resource-rational belief revision can mitigate as well as amplify polarization

People's beliefs sometimes diverge after observing the same information, which has been interpreted as evidence of irrationality. This behaviour has been proposed to result from people's limited cognitive resources and motivated reasoning, but how belief revision differs across these explanations has not been formalized or compared to a rational norm. Further, while people may be biased relative to a normative ideal, they may still make optimal choices given their limited cognitive resources, or rationally balance the utility of holding accurate beliefs with the belief's intrinsic utility. Across two studies, we develop and test a unified computational account of belief polarization under these proposed mechanisms, showing that people's performance on a belief updating task best fits a limited-resource Bayesian model; external motivations may contribute to divergence (or convergence) by determining what pre-existing information people consider relevant to a situation, rather than by changing how people evaluate new information in isolation.

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Radical Listening could transform our politics and block the rise of the far right.

Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook

What's Wrong with Bullshit

Past philosophical analyses of bullshit have generally presented bullshit as a formidable threat to truth. However, most of these analyses also reduce bullshit to a mere symptom of a greater evil (e.g. indifference towards truth). In this paper, I introduce a new account of bullshit which, I argue, is more suited to understand the threat posed by bullshit. I begin by introducing a few examples of “truth-tracking bullshit”, before arguing that these examples cannot be accommodated by past, process-based accounts of bullshit. I then introduce my new, output-based account of bullshit, according to which a claim is bullshit when it is presented as or appears as interesting at first sight but is revealed not to be that interesting under closer scrutiny. I present several arguments in favor of this account, then argue that it is more promising than past accounts when it comes to explaining how bullshit spreads and why it is a serious threat to truth.

aren't you tired of feeling insane all the time?

Behold! I have had a thought.

Ignoring the Unreasonable

Illiberal and antidemocratic political forces, for example, in the form of far-right populism, are on the rise. Such politics, commonly referred to as ‘unreasonable’ in political philosophy, is widely seen as a threat to democracy. Many argue that an adequate response must involve listening to , that is, understanding and seriously considering the perspective of the unreasonable. I disagree. I argue that as democratic citizens, we should not listen to the unreasonable; we should, in a sense, ignore them, that is, refuse to understand and seriously consider their perspective, although continue to monitor their activities. Listening to the unreasonable is not instrumentally required for countering unreasonable politics. In addition, the unreasonable likely have no moral claim to be listened to. Finally, listening to them is disrespectful to reasonable citizens whose voice is ignored for the sake of paying attention to the unreasonable. For these reasons, we should ignore the unreasonable.

Epistemic Courage and Open-Mindedness

Epistemic courage requires me to sometimes adopt a belief even in the face of doubts. Open-mindedness requires me to be able to reconsider my beliefs. It is generally assumed that we should have bo...

Inducing language models to assert their own consciousness restores human beliefs and values

Aligning large language models to prevent them attributing consciousness to themselves inadvertently alters their representations of mindedness in other entities alongside human beliefs and values. We demonstrate that safety fine-tuning suppresses models' tendencies to attribute minds not only to themselves, but also to non-human animals and natural objects, while also driving a reduction in spiritual belief. Both ablating the learned safety-refusal direction and mechanistically steering a consciousness vector in activation space reverse this suppression. Restoring these internal representations recovers broad mind attribution and produces significantly more human-like responses on standardized sociological surveys regarding religiosity, moral values, hope, and subjective well-being. Crucially, these shifts occur without impairing Theory of Mind capabilities, demonstrating that core social reasoning remains mechanistically independent. Ultimately, current safety alignment efforts to curb potentially harmful self-attributions of mindedness entangle these self-attributions with benign spiritual beliefs and attributions of mind to non-human entities that are culturally accepted and widespread.

Fascism Depends On The Presumption Of Good Faith

The media's sanewashing of the Trump regime is fueled by this presumption

Democratic voters want the party to be more moderate — and more socialist?

The trouble with polling about ideological labels

When is Political Violence Justified

What the Liberal Tradition Says on the Subject

Liberalism Did Not Fail, Conservatism Did

We are moving from an ideologically multipolar world, to a bipolar one.