Americans in 2005: “If people just knew what I know, they would agree with me. Ergo, I must dedicate myself to prostylitizing my Truths.”

Americans in 2025: “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Stop trying to put information into my brain! I can’t take anymore!”

Sure. But those are the ones I’m most inclined to pay for.

Not much is cheaper than free

Cooking is cost negative relative to eating out. You just need a decent kitchen and plenty of free time

D&D costs $90 for the hard cover core book set and $0 for the pirated pdfs.

Biking can have a high upfront cost, but I’ve been using the same bike for 20 years with tune-ups and replacements running in the low three figures over that time.

I’m a big fan of podcasts, particularly ones that cover old movies. Criterion collection films are everywhere, they’re dirt cheap, and they’re classics for a reason.

Truthiness!

It feels right, because I find young wealthy parents to be annoying.

Why are people not trusting experts?

People are trusting “experts”. That’s how they’re getting the information necessary to distrust other experts.

Dr Oz has “Doctor” right in his name! If he goes on Oprah - the show that brings on a parade of ahem “experts” to explain the world to a population of shut-in housewives - and warns that vaccinations are why your kids aren’t Ivy League Material, people listen.

It’s because they believe their ignorant opinion is just as valid as a researched conclusion.

Their opinions don’t just emerge Ex Nihilo. And they aren’t breaking arbitrarily for or against certain topics. They’re polarized around a set of reactionary beliefs because they’re trained into it by reactionary media, reactionary politicians, and reactionary local institutions.

This is a moronic take.

It’s just a capital gains tax

Anti-intellectualism isn’t real. Same for misinformation.

There’s a kernel of truth to this. People aren’t “anti-intellectual” in the broad sense, they’re biased to a certain worldview or partisan to an ideological lens. You can get liberals and conservatives to agree on quite a bit if you just channel the message through a trustworthy proxy. You can get them to split by making them watch Crossfire for an hour a day.

Vaccination is a great example of this in action. Big church groups that value being able to meet in public do a 180 on the jab when they see the impact a disease has on its congregation. Meanwhile, woo-woo liberals living in heavily insulated suburban communities can get very cavalier about vaccination when they hear an Oprah spokesperson claim it impacts their childrens’ academic performance.

I remember when COVID first hit and we got an earful about needing to conserve medical masks. “Don’t bother wearing them, just socially distance, they don’t really help” was a thing we initially got from liberals. Conservatives were masked up and liberals weren’t. And then the zietgeist flipped and it was liberals clutching them while conservatives were tearing at the gazy discount paper covers screaming “I can’t breath! I can’t breath!”

What we like to call “anti-intellectualism” is, at its heart, a trust issue. Which professionals do you consider credible? Which personal experiences inform your worldview? What do you value - personal safety? financial success? self-expression? religious dogma?

If you’re living in a country that functionally eliminated measles 30 years ago, you can get pretty fair on herd immunity and never have to see your beliefs challenged. Then, when your bubble is breached by the outside world, all those warnings about Diseased Immigrants ruining your pocket paradise are reinforced by the same crop of reactionary news shows and fascist politicians who raised you.

The paid subscribers subsidize the unpaid ones.

Even for paying customers, inference alone costs OpenAI several times more than revenue.

My man out here asking for $500B $1T $2T to build Datacenter God and people just keep giving him blank checks because he made a series of bad Vines.

The important thing isn’t that your kids don’t see porn, it’s that they feel the requisite amount of shame and never talk to you about their sexuality.

Also, it’s one more thing we can criminalize in a surveillance state. So now we can more easily extort horny people with fines and prison if we feel the need

UwU

If they bring up their cultural religion, values, politics, philosophy, or social dynamics, suddenly things can become an area of controversy and even ethical debate

Italians will go three rounds in the ring over which neighborhood has the best ice cream shop. I wouldn’t even say its uncontroversial. But these also tend to be attributes that vary heavily even at relatively short distances in older communities. A certain meal prepared a certain way or a dance/music style that originated in your neighborhood becomes a unique touchstone to your community.

I might note that this is something “Planned Communities” tend to lose out on. Everyone gets a Chilis. Everyone gets a radio station franchise that plays the same six songs on a loop. Everyone gets an AMC that shows the same ten movies as everywhere else. Everyone gets a Catholic Church and a Methodist Church book-ending the local elementary school.

Then you leave your provincial cookie-cutter suburb and visit London, a city where the dialect of the language changes by intersection. Or you do a road trip in Italy and find out how every tiny township has this one kind of dish they’re all really proud of. Or you just drop into inner city Houston and get an earful of Chop’n’Screw music played by guys with spinners on the wheels of their lowered Cadalliacs. Then you find some weird old bookshop in Montrose that sells pagan bumper stickers.

OP is British

Adios, sucker.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_long_spoons

Heard St. Peter is checking all social media history back five years before they let you into Heaven.

All Hail