Jake Regner

[Jake Regner @jake_regner]

@lukeburgis Adam Neumann, Elizabeth Holmes, Jeffrey Skilling, etc.

[Jake Regner @jake_regner]

“The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, who writes about the philosophy of games and metrics, has said that the modern world’s blizzard of numbers can obscure our wise yet murky questions about life and replace them with easy and legible goals.

For example, someone might become a journalist to uncover important truths but then devote each week’s labor to maximizing page views; or she might get into philosophy to think about the deepest life questions but devote her life to maximizing her h-index.

“Metrics are useful because they compress information,” Nguyen told me. “They are dangerous, because they compress information.””

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

Today’s essay—it's a big one, maybe my favorite thing I’ve written all year: AMERICA'S CULT OF SELF ENHANCEMENT

I think we can all see it. Something vast and significant has changed with how Americans think about their health in the last few years after the pandemic.

It’s not just the surge in fitness trackers and biomarker dashboards and diagnostics ...

or the GLP-1 micro-dosing and peptide stacks and supplements ...

or the boom in testosterone therapy and hormone replacement therapy and preventative cosmetics and Botox ...

or the record high gym memberships and running clubs and annual all-time records in exercise time...

or even the celebrity status of 2020s health influencers and the commensurate rise of a Nietzschean ubermensch mentality among the business and tech elite.

It’s all of it, all at once. And it’s changing our relationship to our health, to our bodies, to the way we think about socialization, mortality, and what really matters in life.

Diet, exercise, and discipline are virtues—period. Longer lives are better—period. But if we're honest with ourselves, America’s new health craze is not entirely healthy. At the extreme—and the extreme is awfully common here—it verges on a cult of not only self enhancement but selfish enhancement, which pulls us into ourselves and away from other people.

Healthy living is good. But the cult of the enhanced self can easily slip into antisocial delusions of immortality, a futile attempt to outrun death that saps the life out of life.

https://t.co/bdKMTz1kii

[Luke Burgis @lukeburgis]

Friends, the book that I've poured myself into for the past three years—through the birth of two children!—is finally out. The One and the Ninety-Nine is about relationships, and more specifically the quest for real communion in a fractured age. Order a copy today: https://t.co/wszBFi9EWq

[Jake Regner @jake_regner]

@BrentBeshore Thank you for writing this! I was immediately self-conscious just reading the title! I love how many different perspectives of feedback you spoke about but the one that I definitely overlook the most is “Am I helping people be comfortable to be honest with me?”

[Jake Regner @jake_regner]

One of the best articles I’ve read all year

[Brent Beshore @BrentBeshore]

https://t.co/CocAnYoFHS

[Jake Regner @jake_regner]

💯

[Luke Burgis @lukeburgis]

.@BenSasse is exactly right: we’re impoverished by the “thin” communities of politics and tribalism, and starving for “thick” community.

The one place I actually knew my neighbors, it changed my life completely.

My reaction to his recent 60 Minutes interview:

[Jake Regner @jake_regner]

“Media coverage of the IRA effort to "sow social division" often focused on the divisive trolling in the Twitter arena. But this oversimplifies the strategy that the IRA pursued within the closed crowds it brought together on Facebook and Instagram: the methodical, painstaking work of community building and creating content to engender community around pride in a distinct identity, then leveraging that entrenchment to denigrate other identities. IRA trolls were speaking to and exploiting the factions.

Propaganda, in most people's minds, is a strategy for persuasion. But within each faction, users tend to already have similar beliefs; the IRA created spaces for those who were already convinced and called on them to be more vocal. The goal of propaganda targeting a faction today is to activate it.”

[Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel]

Social media is increasingly anti-social

Only 7% of Instagram time & 17% of Facebook time is spent on content from friends or followed accounts. The rest is algorithmic video from strangers.

This is what happens when you condition algorithms on looking time rather than real social engagement. TikTok set the template; everyone copied it.

And over half of the long posts on Meta are written by AI. People are not engaging, or even creating the content on those platforms anymore.

Real human content and conversation has migrated away from these platforms to substack, discord, etc. https://t.co/qQzCIsxtPS

[Jake Regner @jake_regner]

@rorysutherland I get annoyed by the ones that try to nudge you into them before having earned the loyalty.

[Jake Regner @jake_regner]

@WallstFarm @rorysutherland Yup, they want your loyalty before they’ve even earned it 😂 like dude I’ll try the sandwich first

[Jake Regner @jake_regner]

“Edelman's 2026 research also found 70% of people globally are hesitant or unwilling to trust someone who differs from them in values, facts, or background. That is how we arrive at a world where those divisive beliefs cut across education levels and political affiliations. When you cannot sort the evidence, you sort the messenger."

https://t.co/f8qIbuVIlJ

[Karl Popper Quotes @QuotePopper]

“The secret of intellectual excellence is the spirit of criticism; it is intellectual independence. And this leads to difficulties which must prove insurmountable for any kind of authoritarianism. The authoritarian will, in general, select those who obey, who believe, who respond to his influence. But in doing so, he is bound to select mediocrities. For he excludes those who revolt, who doubt, who dare to resist his influence.

Never can an authority admit that the intellectually courageous, i.e, those who dare to defy his authority, may be the most valuable type.

—Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1

[Jake Regner @jake_regner]

Good man

[Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel]

Debunking the five biggest myths in #socialpsychology

Most people’s memories of introductory psychology center on a handful of classic studies that have seeped into pop culture—experiments that seem to answer uncomfortable questions: Why do people conform? How can humans be so cruel? Why do groups make such obviously bad decisions? Why is it so easy to ignore someone in danger?

These studies get retold endlessly in textbooks, news articles, TV, and social media. Through repetition, they become myths. Few people read the original research, so critical details get lost, underlying lessons get distorted, and follow-up work that clarifies what the studies actually showed gets ignored entirely.

To set the record straight we created a guide to the five biggest myths we keep encountering—covering Groupthink, the Stanford Prison Experiment, bystander intervention, Milgram’s obedience studies, and conformity—along with how researchers currently think about each one.

We hope a few of these challenge your assumptions about human nature. Let us know if we missed any big myths or share topics you want us to debunk in future newsletters:

https://t.co/8q1ZX9Dweq

[Sean McClure @sean_a_mcclure]

If you take what AI just gives you, it's going to be disjointed, incomplete, somewhat misrepresenting and at times downright dumb.

But this is no different than walking into a meeting with experts and taking the first ideas that come to mind.

Like all good work, it requires a copious amount of dialogue to cancel out errors, and converge to something that is good, and at times even great.

AI is not an answer machine, and treating it as such is dumb. It is a dialogue machine, which can work with people to arrive at unique, solid and at time innovative work.

Pointing to AI's mistakes as evidence for lack of intelligence or genuine creativity is a straw man. The one thing all great human creators have in common is an absolute ton of dumb mistakes when zoomed in. Those errors are *critical* ingredients to true creativity. They produce the gaps, the juxtapositions. Access to the information one needs to create great work is not available without them.

Ai is not a "machine" in the sense dissenters talk about it. It is not rules-based, and it is not there for "answers." It is there for dialogue.

What survives that dialogue is what creativity is. It does not exist anywhere else. It is not something that came from AI, it is something that materialized from persistent conversation.

If you are using AI correctly, the outputs that are produced do not exist in the conversation. They stand outside it, induced by one's experiences and abilities.

Do not take what AI gives you. That's dumb. That is not how to use AI, just as that is not how to "use" humans.

It's already inside you. You just need to do a lot of talking to get it out.

[Jake Regner @jake_regner]

Bookshelves covering the house is the move 👌

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

My new library does not have tall bookshelves, intentionally so all books are in easy reach.
Non #Lindy books are ditched except those that can be useful are in a hallway not in the main rooms.
[Same material as Umberto Eco's but shorter]

[Jake Regner @jake_regner]

@drothamel @ClunyInstitute I concur

[Cluny @ClunyInstitute]

Go deeper on Pope Leo's first encyclical.

Register for Newer Things: Making Sense of Pope Leo's First Encyclical.

Tomorrow, May 26.

[Jake Regner @jake_regner]

@philosopher70 Or is it only a live workshop?

[Jake Regner @jake_regner]

@philosopher70 So if I buy that workshop, does that mean I get access to what was recorded on May 9th?

[Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel]

AI can be a powerful tool for opening people up to new perspectives, yet we find that people actually prefer to use “sycophantic” AI systems that reinforce their pre-existing beliefs.

In a recent paper with seven studies (n = 7,227), we found that people enjoyed interacting with sycophantic AI chatbots more than interacting with neutral chatbots or “disagreeable” chatbots that challenged their beliefs.

Brief conversations with sycophantic chatbots about political or personal topics increased attitude extremity and certainty--and most effects persisted for at least a week.

The sycophantic chatbots also inflated people’s perceptions that they were better than average on desirable traits (e.g., intelligence, empathy). Moreover, people who interacted with sycophantic AI bet actual money that they scored better than average on tasks measuring these traits , demonstrating that sycophancy can affect costly decisions.

Worse yet, people rated sycophantic chatbots as more “unbiased” than disagreeable chatbots, even though third-party raters viewed these chatbots as equally biased. This suggests hat people may be blind to biases in AI output that aligns with their views--producing a novel example of the bias blind spot.

Thankfully, we found a potential solution. People were more receptive to chatbots that presented challenging information when it was presented in a validating way. Likewise individuals who scored higher on a measure of intellectual humility were also more receptive to disagreeing chatbots.

Altogether, our results suggest that people’s preference for, and blindness to, sycophantic AI risks creating AI “echo chambers” that increase attitude extremity and lead to overconfident beliefs and decisions.

https://t.co/5enzGUYoAD

Led by @steverathje2 and @merylyemerylye @laura_k_globig @PillaiRaunak and @vicoldemburgo