The Pentagon has ordered a review of US psyops on social media theverge.com/2022/9/19/2336…

Chatting w/a friend last night, we agreed that one of the biggest scams of the contemporary era is convincing millions of people that they have the exact same mental health struggles (anxiety/depression) for wholly personal, and not systemic/structural, reasons. Good one. 10/10

I asked an AI to write a Bible song about ducks and I'm laughing so hard now I can't breathe

I’m sorry, I simply cannot be cynical about a technology that can accomplish this.

Social media CAUSES mental illness, especially heavy use, especially in girls. I lay out the longitudinal and experimental evidence for causality in my latest post at the After Babel Substack: jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media…

Sydney doesn’t like cheaters

The Clif Bar website I helped design/build in 2007 vs the Clif Bar website now in 2023. Hard not to feel like we've lost something as the web 'matured'.

What distinguishes this moment in media is that for the past 20 years the assumption was that we were in a transition from print to online media and now it's clear that online media is dying and we don't seem to be transitioning into anything. Just less. washingtonpost.com/media/2023/06/…

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I am often surprised by polling but this one scares the shit out of me. 1 out of 5 people 18-29 believe the holocaust is a myth. How did it get to be this way?

Thanks to POLITICO and Marc Novicoff for an interview that let me go deep into the evidence for causation, and into why TikTok may be the worst consumer product ever invented, given its negative utility for users (who are in a trap)... politico.com/news/magazine/…

Stunning new findings on device use by young children: 40% of two-year-olds now have their own tablet. From Common Sense Media. We have to roll back the phone-based childhood now. An iPad is not a babysitter, it is an experience blocker. commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/…

This is the main problem with the post-truth online information ecosystem in a nutshell. A MAGA user claimed last night that Democratic politicians "Blinken, Rice Nuland and Vindman" had a conference call with Zelensky on his flight to Washington and advised him to "stand

Put another way: founders are becoming so evolutionarily fit to capital markets that they effectively cosplay the most visible outputs of ideal startups rather than the inputs Simulacra of companies. Fitting of late stage capitalism, where culture is simulacra all the way down

I really try to lean against my "the kids aren't alright" instincts, but the combination of a freefall collapse in conscientiousness *and* the belief that financial success requires a salary deep inside the top 1% of the income distribution might not make a good mix.

I’ve joined First Round to partner with founders at the earliest stages 🚀 There’s no better feeling than building something people love, and there’s no better team to back those who do – Liz Wessel, Brett Berson, and the entire First Round crew truly puts founders first and

No matter what kind of company they’re building, every founder starts with some version of the same question: imagine if this could be different? This year on In Depth, we spoke with dozens of founders about the journey of finding product-market fit — turning their “imagine if”

At hypergrowth companies like Vercel, Harvey, and Cognition, executives face a brutal challenge: keeping pace with a company that might grow 5-10x in a year. That means hiring aggressively without lowering the bar, figuring out how to mature the org without slowing down,