I'm no longer a skeptic, but still I can't resist the old skeptic urge to do a bit of debunking. After all, there are a lot of crackpots out there. There are people, for example, who believe that a superintelligent computer will arise in the next twenty years and then promptly either destroy humanity or cure death and set us free. There are people who believe that one of the best works of English literature is an unfinished Harry Potter fanfic by someone who can barely write a comprehensible English sentence. There are even people who believe the best thing you can do to help the poor and the starving is become a city stockbroker or Silicon Valley entrepreneur! And more often than not, the same people believe all these crazy things!
Effective Altruism Is a Dangerous Cult — Here's Why
Understanding the "Scientology of Silicon Valley." (7,700 words)
The Rise of Silicon Valley’s Techno-Religion (Published 2025)
The Rationalists, a community focused on the risks of artificial intelligence, regularly gather with tech figures and other like-minded people in a complex that covers much of a city block.
AI skeptic Ed Zitron says Industry is scamming us into poverty
Ed Zitron joins The 1600 to bust the myths and fairy tales coming from our AI overlords.
Hyperstition
A hyperstition is a self-fulfilling idea that becomes real through its own existence.[1] The price of Bitcoin,[2] Roko's Basilisk,[3] accelerationism,[4] and the QAnon conspiracy theory[5] have all been described as hyperstitions. Self-fulfilling prophecies are a kind of hyperstition where predictions are made about the future that become true by being known.[6] The concept was coined by Nick Land in 1995 as a portmanteau of hyper- and superstition,[7] during his time at the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit developing the philosophy of accelerationism.[3][8]
More Everything Forever
This "smart and wonderfully readable" (New York Times) exposé shows why Silicon Valley’s heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions—with escaping death...
The Anti-Intellectualism of Silicon Valley Elites
I recently re-read Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, and now every time a reactionary Silicon Valley billionaire opens his mouth, I think about it. So I wrote about it for The Nation. Here's the column: On Instagram, there’s an activist named Brian Patrick (@pano.
"AI" is Automated Inequality
Tech bros still dominate the discussions about so-called "AI" with false claims. Even most "AI"-critical researchers spend much of their time meticulously debunking (always only a subset of) claims, leaving vast areas of the economic consequences of "AI" unexplored. (Even the "AI"-evangelist Economi
Kevin A. Bryan on Twitter / X
I love that this idea has crossed into normie world (please don't look up Sutton's AI Ethics views!). If you want a very short "why does SF believe what it believes", here is the reading list I give students: https://t.co/1vkWtwWwRV pic.twitter.com/zo4YaoNSKf— Kevin A. Bryan (@Afinetheorem) September 23, 2026
The phony comforts of useful idiots
On Casey Newton and the shallowness of anti-skepticism.
Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear
We asked a group of writers to consider the forces that have shaped our lives in 2017. Here, science fiction writer Ted Chiang looks at capitalism, Silicon Valley, and its fear of superintelligent AI.
Against Economics
Mainstream economists nowadays might not be particularly good at predicting financial crashes, facilitating general prosperity, or coming up with models for preventing climate change, but when it comes to establishing themselves in positions of intellectual authority, unaffected by such failings, their success is unparalleled. One would have to look at the history of religions to find anything like it. To this day, economics continues to be taught not as a story of arguments—not, like any other social science, as a welter of often warring theoretical perspectives—but rather as something more like physics, the gradual realization of universal, unimpeachable mathematical truths.
The Techno-Religion at the Center of the A.I. Debate
Are those calling to slow down the development of artificial intelligence in a “doomsday cult,” as some critics say? Our reporter explains.
Dark-Moneyed Denialists Are Running 'Fixing Science' Symposium of Doubt
The “Fixing Science” symposium, which is hosted by the National Association of Scholars and kicks off today in Oakland, California, includes credible speakers who want to improve some areas of science hurt by the use of poor statistical methods or making irreproducible claims. Unfortunately, they are outnumbered by people who have often cast doubt on mainstream climate, environmental, and health sciences. For […]
There's growing experimental evidence¹˒²˒³˒⁴ that LLMs are unusually good at talking people out of entrenched false beliefs and conspiracy theories. ¹ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39264999/ ² pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41179846/ ³ sciety.org/articles/activity/10.21203/rs… ⁴ connecticut.adl.org/resources/report/short-dialog…
Der Fisher
Unpopular opinion: LLMs are generally deradicalizing people whose beliefs are based on pure propaganda. I've been watching this happen slowly with some people I care about. ChatGPT is one of the reasons they finally accept that the NRA, OAN, and NewsMax are lying to them.
I am disappointed by the fact that so many seem tempted to share a "nonrigorous", unserious attempt at quantifying fraud in science because it passes some silly vibe check ("I asked others and they agree"). So in the name of good science, we're ready to produce bad science as a rhetorical tool.
