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.