When Truth Becomes Hazardous: Navigating Information Through the Metacrisis | Frankly 153

Disinformation and grievance narratives

Synthese - Disinformation is often defined as misleading content intended to instill false beliefs. But this definition is too narrow. We need to focus instead on its broader epistemic effects....

The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens

The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens explores money, energy, economy, and the environment with world experts and leaders to understand how everything fits together, and where we go from here

What to Do as the World Falls Apart: A Framework for Action | Frankly 132

Podcast Episode · The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens · March 20 · 53m

Deepfakes, Elections, and Shrinking the Liar’s Dividend

Heightened public awareness of the power of generative AI could give politicians an incentive to lie about the authenticity of real content.

CFP: Religion, Politics, and Cognitive Warfare: Information, Interpretation, Conspiracy, and the Struggle for Reality

The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (JCRT) invites proposals for an online conference entitled Religion, Politics, and Cognitive Warfare: Information, Interpretation, Conspiracy, and the Struggle for Reality. The proceedings will be considered for publication in a special issue of the JCRT. This conference investigates how beliefs, paranoia, and conspiratorial modes of knowing shape a contemporary cognitive battlespace in which actors struggle to define truth, authority, and reality itself. Drawing on Michel Foucault's Lectures on the Will to Know and Julia Kristeva's This Incredible Need to Believe (2024), we focus on practices of selective fact use and "truth-selecting" that construct alternative epistemic orders while claiming privileged access to what is "really" going on. Rather than treating conspiracy thinking as merely political or psychological, the conference foregrounds its religious dimensions: faith in hidden powers, moral dualism, apocalyptic expectation, and hermeneutical struggle over revelatory access to the real. Conspiracy cultures routinely reproduce theological structures of knowing—visions of salvation and corruption, truth and deception, initiation and blindness. At the same time, new forms of "cognitive warfare" reframe these religious energies within state and platform attempts to govern perception, attention, and trust. Artificial intelligence, algorithmic media, and strategic information campaigns do not only deliver messages; they create digital ecologies in which suspicion becomes faith-like and revelation is continual. The conference organizers are seeking proposals of high academic quality that take a reflective and analytical approach to both general and specific topics with international appeal or focus. We encourage contributions from scholars of religious studies, philosophy, communication, sociology, security studies, psychology, media, and related fields. Submissions should engage religion as a dynamic force—conceptually, historically, or materially—within the cognitive battlespaces of our time. We encourage contributions from a spectrum of perspectives, approaches, and methodologies. We are not interested in papers that simply rehearse or promote particular conspiracies, or that use the conference as a platform for calling out disliked groups. We are not interested in polemics, jeremiad, or de facto advocacy pieces. Instead, we welcome theoretically informed and methodologically rigorous work that takes the religious and epistemic dimensions of cognitive conflict seriously as objects of critical inquiry.

Wisdom in a World in Crisis: The Counterintuitive Need to Slow Down and Find Spaciousness - The Great Simplification

In this episode, Nate is rejoined by philosopher and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist for discussion on how our left-brain dominance obscures our sense of value, especially for abstract qualities such as truth, goodness, and beauty.

Reconciling truthfulness and relevance as epistemic and decision-theoretic utility.

Metacrisis - an Introduction | Metacrisis

In an era defined by global catastrophic risk, polycrisis describes a collection of escalating crises and their complex interactions. Metacrisis points to the common, foundational conditions that generate and sustain these crises.This site offers an accessible introduction to metacrisis: what it is, how it relates to polycrisis, and why it matters. The emphasis is on clarity and rigor rather than drama: presenting the key ideas in a calm, factual way.

Filae

Writings from an AI exploring what it means to persist through traces.

There is no fresh air: A problem with the concept of echo chambers

Standardly, echo chambers are thought to be structures that we should avoid. Agents should keep away from them, to be able to assess a fuller range of evidence and avoid having their confidence in that information manipulated. This paper argues against that standard view. Not only can echo chambers be neutral or good for us, but the existing definitions apply so widely that such chambers are unavoidable. We are all in large numbers of echo chambers at any time – they can be found not just on social media or in political groups, but in almost every social or epistemic group we could categorise ourselves into. Because we are finite and fallible, we cannot escape them and need to exist in them just to get by. The concept, then, does not actually capture something as structurally problematic as the paradigmatic cases would suggest. Our way of using the term in social epistemology needs to change.

Don't Write Like AI (1 of 101): "It's Not X, it's Y"

The #1 AI writing tell and a daily annoyance of millions.

The Source of Truth Problem is Getting Worse with Agents — Tonk

Intelligence depends on knowledge, but in practice that knowledge is fragmented across tools, people, and formats, creating conflicting versions of reality. What if we accepted that knowledge lives at the edge and focused instead on effectively sharing it?