Welcome back, Shit Givers.

I intended to revisit another old essay this week but had to get this one out of my system. It’s a big one. Please send me your feedback!

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TOGETHER WITH INTERNATIONAL INTRIGUE

A Proven System: Reading International Intrigue every morning.

You don’t have time to read all the news around the world. There’s so much released daily. You can’t keep up, but International Intrigue can.

After scouring over 600 sources, their team of former diplomats gives you a free daily brief in <5min.

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What We Can Do

⚡️ Addiction is brutal. Help yourself or a loved one or someone you’ve never met with Shatterproof.

⚡️ I’m so excited to share that my favorite event on Earth, “LA Loves Alex’s Lemonade Stand” is finally back. Support pediatric cancer research and buy yourself some tickets to eat food from some of the greatest chefs on the planet.

⚡️ It’s a pretty pretty pretty good moment to read Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence and The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values.

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What Do You Want?

In screenwriting, there is a well-honed idea that main characters should want one thing, but need something different, something that is often opposed to or even opposite their most public desires.

They are blind to what they need the most, and often purposefully so, having shoved those feelings down juuuuust about as far as they can go. Trust me when I say: having a long hard look at yourself isn’t easy, or comfortable.

So we empathize with these characters because, I mean, who amongst us, right?

It’s an imperfect character development mechanism, of course. The best characters aren’t that simple, and none of us are, either.

That said, history is littered with memorable characters who reluctantly go through transformations, who finally walk away from what they want and go through hell to get what they needed all along, letting us experience what it’s like to have that long hard look without actually having to, you know, do it.

Web search was intended to give us what we need, but over time the utility has been hijacked to give us what we want.

We need a real answer, but at this point search most often gives us what we want — self-affirmation — and if it’s delivered by a paid advertisement that looks just like a real answer, that’s even better.

That process, over and over, billions of times a day, leads to disinformation. Sometimes disinformation hurts one person, as we’ll see below, but at scale disinformation inevitably hurts many, many people.

Imagining that search could ever give us entirely objective answers, all of the time, ignores the web’s original sin — the web is only what we put into it, and we are fundamentally flawed.

The internet is so fundamentally broken that we desperately want the next thing — AI chatbots — to be everything, all at once.

But that’s even more dangerous because instead of your question returning a list of links ranked by Google, most of which are now paid ads, or a newsfeed of extreme views from friends and family on Facebook, a chatbot is an extremely convincing version of both.

It’s incredibly confident, and often very wrong. But we can’t tell the difference, and I’m not sure we want to.

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