bad motives
Thursday 1 January 2026“A Big Misunderstanding”, David Pinsof link
- “What if the primary cause of humanity’s problems is not bad beliefs, but bad motives?”
While reflecting on these questions, you may reach an unpleasant conclusion: there’s nothing you can do. The world doesn’t want to be saved.
Sure, you can tell the politicians they’re “biased,” but at the end of the day, a politician’s job is to win the support of biased voters. Sure, you can tell the voters they’re “biased,” but at the end of the day, the voters have basically no incentive to be unbiased, and strong incentive to parrot their tribe’s propaganda. Sure, you can tell the press about these terrible misunderstandings, but the press will only write about them if it increases their market share of the attention economy. Sure, you can tell the consumers to stop paying attention to attention-grabbing bullshit, but therein lies the problem: they won’t pay attention to you.
Low-Trust Society
Monday 29 December 2025Kyle Saunders “The United States Has Become a Low-Trust Society — and That Changes Everything” link
Nederland gaat ook die kant op...
In high-trust environments, institutional breakdowns are treated as problems to be fixed. In low-trust environments, they are treated as proof that the system is fundamentally corrupt. The same event produces radically different reactions depending on the baseline level of legitimacy.
This is why fraud scandals, administrative failures, or enforcement lapses now carry outsized symbolic weight. They are no longer isolated incidents; they become narrative accelerants.
Recent high-profile welfare fraud cases illustrate this dynamic. While such cases are not representative of broader communities or programs, they nonetheless erode confidence precisely because trust is already thin. In a low-trust society, oversight failures are interpreted as intent, not error. The damage is social as much as fiscal.
Public health provides an even clearer example. Vaccine hesitancy during COVID was not simply about misinformation. It was about credibility deficits that predated the pandemic. Once trust was gone, expertise alone could not compensate.