Pushing for transparency
We Build On Hope @ PublicSpaces Conference 2026
Keynote by Robin Berjon The current state of tech can feel disheartening. Years of critical analysis and reform efforts have left us with a digital sphere that seems worse than ever. In Europe, our...
Show your work: The new terms for trust in journalism - PressThink
The transparency movement has finally come of age. Power has shifted to the users. Their trust has to be earned in different ways now.
TBM 405: Hope, Context, and Control
This essay is about hope, fear, AI, and the tension between control and collective sensemaking.
Making Sense of Open-Source: Ideals, Reality, and What's on the Horizon - December, 3 2025 | Notion
🗓️ Luma event description
On technological optimism and technological pragmatism
"There are no guarantees that things are going to turn out very well for anyone.”
Strangeness, illegibility, hardness
An update from our Protocol Fiction special interest group
The Hidden Complexity of Wishes — LessWrong
(It has come to my attention that this article is currently being misrepresented as proof that I/MIRI previously advocated that it would be very diff…
Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI
From an award-winning University of Oxford professor comes a brilliant, urgent new look at prophecies--the predictions that determine our lives, from our personal finances and the quality of our healthcare to the news and social media we consume and the produces foisted upon us
Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel’s Secretive ‘Dialog’ Society
More than 200 of the world's elites registered for a retreat whose agenda runs from panels on cult-building and sex to prepping for World War III. An associated app offers matchmaking.
Rabbithole - Thinking with portals
Public Persuasion with Endogenous Fact-Checking
We study public persuasion when a sender communicates with a large audience that can fact-check at heterogeneous costs. The sender commits to a public information policy before the state is realized, but any verifiable claim she makes after observing the state must be truthful (an ex-post implementability constraint). Receivers observe the public message and then decide whether to verify; this selective verification feeds back into the sender's objective and turns the design problem into a constrained version of Bayesian persuasion. Our main result is a reverse comparative static: when fact-checking becomes cheaper in the population, the sender optimally supplies a strictly less informative public signal. Intuitively, cheaper verification makes bold claims invite scrutiny, so the sender coarsens information to dampen the incentive to verify. We also endogenize two ex-post instruments - continuous falsification and fixed-cost repression - and characterize threshold substitutions from persuasion to manipulation and, ultimately, to repression as monitoring improves. The framework provides testable predictions for how transparency, manipulation, and repression co-move with changes in verification technology.
"Fisher/Jameson said "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism". And yet, that act of imagining alternatives is urgent; if AI tells us nothing else, it tells us that capitalism is actively imagining the end of us" x.com/danmcquillan/status/209400707…
