How to cope in the Age of Slop by @gurwinder.bsky.social 🙏 www.gurwinder.blog/p/26-useful-...

A thread of useful concepts to equip you for 2026:

“Social media made y’all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it.” —Mike Tyson

This will keep you stuck in the past, preventing you from healing. Even worse, your memories of your lost loved one will be polluted and overwritten by your memories of their AI-generated ghost, until you’ve forgotten the person you lost, and instead grieve only their caricature.

The best motivation hack is to switch to a job you enjoy.

15 years ago, ~30% of relationship advice on Reddit advocated for breakups. Now ~50% does. Perhaps a side-effect of giving everyone the power to mute, block, and cancel anyone who causes them slight discomfort is that people never learn how to resolve their differences.

This graph goes viral every few months because it tells a compelling story, but, like most graphs that tell a compelling story, it’s grossly misleading. The demographics of people in prisons are not the same as those once in asylums; the former are much younger and more male.

In one specific way, Grok might be the most honest and transparent AI project out there nymag.com/intelligence...

In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write to a famous author & ask for advice. KURT VONNEGUT - born 103yrs ago today - was the only one to respond. His reply was a doozy.

The way to use chatbots is not to ask them what’s true but to tell them what you think is true and then ask them for feedback. This lets you learn without eroding your ability to think for yourself.

If you really want to understand a topic, don’t read about it, write about it.

All the horrid people celebrating Watson’s death because he “stole” Franklin’s research are wrong and should read this. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

If you want Google search results to be free of AI overviews, recommendations, image previews, and other enshittified content, use this: udm14.com

Our suspicions of others stem from our knowledge of ourselves.

The big tech companies are reversing the intellectual and political gains of the Enlightenment and returning us to a New Dark Ages of ignorance, rage and superstition - it's the most important story of our time jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-o...

Lessons learned are quickly forgotten unless they were learned in terror, or sorrow, or shame. Wisdom can always be rented for free, but it must be purchased with pain.

If you find yourself losing patience with someone, remember that they are an ape adrift in an alien world, born into a struggle they did not choose, taunted by impulses they cannot control, searching for answers they will not find, and condemned to a fate they do not deserve.

“Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.” ―Oscar Ameringer

Which skills will stay relevant in the AI age? Skills of discernment, of sorting wheat from chaff. How do you develop these skills? Don't let the AI do the work for you before you've learned how to do it yourself. Great piece by @naomialderman.bsky.social naomialderman.substack.com/p/preparing-...

Automation will make self-reliance more important, not less. When everything can be outsourced except your agency and judgment, success will hinge on taking charge of your life and making good decisions.

One reason negativity dominates the news is that bad things tend to happen suddenly while good things tend to happen gradually so are rarely newsworthy on any particular day.

MEGATHREAD: In 40 skeets I’ll explain 40 useful concepts for understanding the world. Reading time: ~7 minutes Value: potentially a lifetime. Thread:

“The Instagram generation experiences the present moment as an anticipated memory.” —Kahneman

An easy way to be less miserable is to switch from being anti-things-you-hate to pro-things-you-like.

MEGATHREAD: In 40 skeets I’ll explain 40 useful concepts for understanding the world. Reading time: ~7 minutes Value: potentially a lifetime. Thread:

Posting is correlated with affective polarization: 😡 The most partisan users — those who love their party and despise the other — are more likely to post about politics 🥊 The result? A loud angry minority dominates online politics, which itself can drive polarization (see doi.org/10.1073/pnas...)

The most important skill is learning, because when you can do that you can do anything else. Learn how to learn.

To turn ChatGPT from a babbling sycophant into a no-nonsense mentor, personalize it with these instructions.

The rise of social media as the primary mode of interaction has caused us to overvalue opinions as a gauge of character. We are now defined more by what we say than what we actually do, and words, unlike deeds, are cheap and easy to counterfeit.

When you procrastinate you pass the buck to your future self. The problem is, your future self tends to act a lot like you.

A chief cause of delusion is the need for certainty. Just as the thirst for water may drive a desert wanderer to chase mirages, so the thirst for answers makes us rush into poorly justified beliefs. To avoid being duped, become comfortable with uncertainty.

New study of 10,000 twins finds the rise in autism diagnoses is not matched by a rise in autism symptoms. As I’ve long said, autism rates are increasing not because of vaccines or Tylenol, but because of an ever widening definition of autism. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Banning smartphone use during class led to a marked increase in students’ test scores the following year, according to new data from Florida. This is such an easy intervention, with no downside and huge potential upside, that it’s ridiculous it’s not more widespread. www.nber.org/system/files...

People often talk of tackling the “root causes of poverty”, but poverty doesn’t have a root cause; it is the natural state of existence. The real question is, what causes prosperity?

If you consume similar content to everyone else, you'll produce similar content to everyone else.

A simple way to steel-man an opposing view is to imagine you yourself posted it, got ratioed for it, and must now defend it to save face. You’ll be amazed at how suddenly the view makes sense.

Idly following your curiosity in a world designed to take advantage of it will keep you from finding the things you truly love. Schopenhauer, 1851:

If you're outsourcing all your writing to chatbots, you're also outsourcing all your thinking.

The real danger of AI-generated illusions flooding the world is not that people will come to believe falsehoods—most of what we believe is already false—it’s that we’ll cease to believe anything at all. A society can survive without truth, but not without trust.

Aliens are on their way to our planet, and will likely arrive in just a couple of decades. They have unfathomable intentions, and the power to wipe us all out. The only reason we're not panicking is that the aliens are not coming from space; they’re being built by our own hands.

Interesting paradox: Most people think the world is not getting better, but that their own life will get better. This doublethink is likely adaptive; negativity bias toward our environment keeps us vigilant while optimism bias toward our situation keeps us going.

Elite universities have long existed for smart kids to turn merit into money, and for rich kids to turn money into the illusion of merit. But with AI, the poor won’t be contained by gatekeepers, and the pretentious won’t be contained by disguises.

There is no actual movement in a video clip; your brain interpolates it. There are no actual spaces between spoken words; your brain inserts them. Human perception is like autocomplete, fleshing out the unknown with the expected.

Your brain thinks all info is good info, so scrolling feels like it’s making you smarter, more current, more connected. But trivial info doesn’t expand the mind—it dilutes it—dispersing the focus that’d actually make you smarter.

I favor the view that who we really are changes over time based on our actions (speech & writing are actions)––a view supported by neuroscience, since our actions over time continually reshape our neural pathways. Our conduct on social media contributes to shaping who we are. Who do you want to be?

Social media makes 99% of people behave worse than they would face-to-face. The question is, does social media turn people into someone they’re not, or does it simply reveal them for who they really are? Is there even such a thing as who we really are?

“One way to measure the quality of a book: the number of thoughts you’ve never had before.” —David Perell

For eons, it was better to mistake mist for monsters than monsters for mist. False negatives were fatal, false positives merely embarrassing. Thus the paranoid inherited the earth, and we inherited their paranoia, so that the trait that once saved us from wolves now curses us to see them in the sky.

The more that people waste their lives with scrolling, video games, and porn, the crueler they become, for when they can’t take pride in their accomplishments, they’ll instead take pride in your failures.

Perfect.