political science
Where is religiosity growing, where is it receding, and what does that tell us?: Sociologists
The data that made nobody happy Pew’s 2015 report projected that by 2050, the global share of religiously unaffiliated people will decline from 16 percent to 13 percent. Not because people are deconverting less, but because secular populations have far fewer children.... How do you avoid violent redistribution of wealth?: The Story
The shaking off of burdens In 594 BCE, Athens was tearing itself apart. Debt had turned free farmers into serfs. The city elected Solon as archon with extraordinary powers and he did something no ruling class has voluntarily repeated at scale since: he canceled the debts.... Could you choose your own legal code?: Crypto-libertarians
The crowd that erupted June 7, 2021. El Salvador’s legislature voted to make Bitcoin legal tender. Bukele announced it at a Bitcoin conference in Miami. A sovereign nation adopted a monetary system no central bank controls. The IMF condemned it within hours.... Is moral progress real?: Power analysts
Six words the celebrations skipped January 31, 1865. The House passed the Thirteenth Amendment. The galleries erupted. One hundred fifty years later, the documentary 13th opened with the amendment’s text and held on six words: "except as a punishment for crime." Convict leasing... Is moral progress real?: The Story
The arc bent, and then it bent back In 1807, the British Parliament passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. William Wilberforce wept in the gallery.... Is there a deep state?: The Story
725 to 1 The federal government employs roughly 2.9 million civilian workers. A new president appoints about 4,000 of them. That is a ratio of 725 to 1.... What are hyperobjects?: Pragmatists
The gap between knowing and acting In 2015, the Paris Agreement set 1.5 degrees. By 2024, pledges put the world on track for 2.5 to 2.9. Everyone knew the gap. The IPCC published the numbers. The numbers did not change behavior.... Is 'Western civilization' a real thing or a brand?: Developmental readers
The wrong unit We have been listening to this debate for years, and the thing nobody says aloud is that "civilization" may be the wrong unit of analysis entirely. The civilizational defenders describe a tradition with identifiable internal logic.... Is 'Western civilization' a real thing or a brand?: The Story
War aims In 1919, Columbia University launched a course called "War Aims." The First World War had just killed twenty million people, and the university needed to explain to returning veterans why it had been worth fighting.... What does governance need to become?: The Story
The civic hacker and the senator Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement occupied the legislature for twenty-three days in 2014. Out of that wreckage, a thirty-five-year-old civic hacker named Audrey Tang built vTaiwan — a platform letting citizens deliberate on national policy through... Open Question March 11: Free Speech, but who draws the lines?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdx9n317Wpw Free speech rules and culture today have a huge impact on the future: Tech companies + algorithms determine who gets heard in 'public'...... Nature article "The political effects of X’s feed algorithm"
TLDR: "Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities," without changing the self-reported identities of these people (eg they didn't think... The Age of Sincere Uncertainty
For much of the twentieth century, public life was animated by confidence. Progress would come. Expertise would guide it. Institutions would stabilize it. Even critics tended to assume that history had a direction. Late in the century, that confidence curdled.... Maybe I'm wrong.
maybe we are all just like dumb cows and need micromanaging by Jews, we need an Israeli majority in the upper and lower chambers of congress, Americans would just Moo and chew cud all the live long day, while Jews make the world better for Jews every second of every day.... No other choice. If it is indeed wrong to say out loud that I do not trust Jews anymore, then that will just have to be something I learn to live with like I do genocide, ethnic cleansing, pedophilia and the deliberate murder of world central kitchen and other aid workers. Israel is a savage and degenerate ally, a child killing lying thieving nation state , a menace to all of humanity and friend to no one...Especially Americans!
To me, there is a difference between stating facts about the State of Israel and generalizations about Jews. I am against Zionism as displayed in the Israeli government, but I am not against Jews.... Left Media Bias bigger than i realized. No matter how you measure (print media, online, page views, paid subscribers, followers, etc) US media leans heavily left, to an extent that surprised me. Most ways I tried back-of-the napkin math have right + right-leaning news sources being below 10%… and even the most generous assessments that include lost of neutral/other outlets still have left + left-leaning above 50% (meaning 5:1 liberal to conservative is the lowest estimate i could find).
Context
The US is pretty evenly split in terms of the two major parties:
> 45% of U.S. adults Republican-ish, 44% Democrat-ish Gallup 2022Some sources
- Allsides Here’s Allsides review
their media bias on Allsides.com here’s the site’s own assessment of its own bias - Googling the top 25 most-subscribed news channels in the United States, and
- Even the more left leaning LLMS can’t help but point out this as a fact of modern media.
Takeaways
First, this gives me empathy for Republicans. Many American conservatives feel like the underdog, regardless of how much power or influence they yield, because in a very real way, they’re not represented in a substantial part of the public narrative making machine—the media—proportionally. The perception of bias is true despite their being popular conservative outlets with sizable audiences, and as a result the left has influence on public opinion.Impact on Public Trust (but also how come Republicans aren’t better at getting media subscribers?)
Second, how come Republicans, who are stereotypically thought of us as having more business acumen or money or something, are getting so handily beaten in the media?
Third, I try not to get involved in politics because I’m scared of loosing connection or turning people off of the value of relatefulness because of my takes, even if they’re nuanced. We’re very good at otherizing people and forgetting to look at nuances. I’m certain I lack nuance. I don’t want a difference of political opinion to get in the way of our connecting. I started writing up this for the TTT email (which I ended up deciding not to send) but I realized others are deeply esconced in politics and way smarter and more educated in the field than I, so I decided to not go there. But here on uptrusting.com I think it’s a cool opporutnity to test; could also be a nice road to empathy, or self-empathy, depending on our identifications.
This is part of what surprised me, the numbers didn't back this up. From my (admittedly very crappy research), Fox was #1 in cable news for the past 24 years with average of ~2 million primetime views, but CNN and MSNBC combined were roughly equal to it (and also 24/7), and that... Have you noticed that when workplace performance dips, people's first reaction is to rush to explain it? What they rarely do is slow down long enough to notice how the work started to feel different first.
And that doesn't show up in dashboards - but it does show up everywhere else.
The teams that recover fastest are the ones that say, 'Something feels off. Let's talk about that.' And that's irrespective of incentives, or even tighter processes.
In my experience, performance doesn't fall off when people stop caring, it falls off when people stop being sure about what caring looks like anymore.
This probably stands out to me because I spend a lot of time inside teams when performance is under pressure.
If you have any perspective on this, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
What I have noticed is this: When productivity dips, politicians want people to work longer. In Germany, the discussion revolves around one hour more per week, one holiday less, or one day of vacation less. What is wrong with this? Most jobs don't profit from more time.... Mechanism Design for Harm Reduction. I’ve just posted a new paper on SSRN:
Mechanism Design for Harm Reduction: Game Theory and Social Choice for Carceral MOUD and Recovery Institutions
👉 Read it here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6173484
The core question: Why do our institutions so often default to punitive, carceral responses to addiction, even when harm reduction and MOUD improve health and reduce mortality?
Using tools from mechanism design and social choice, the paper argues that the “bad” equilibria we see in overdose and addiction policy are not random failures. They emerge from incentive structures that reward visible punishment, central control, and risk‑avoidant bureaucracy over decentralized, evidence‑based care.
A few themes that may interest folks in economics, public policy, and health:
How carceral logics get embedded in funding rules, compliance regimes, and performance metrics.
Why local actors can be systematically steered away from harm reduction, even when they know it works.
What institutional reforms could realign incentives toward treatment, recovery, and community‑based support.
If you work in health policy, criminal justice, behavioral health, or are simply interested in how mechanism design can illuminate real‑world institutional failures, I’d welcome your feedback, questions, and critiques.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6173484Yes, the punitive equilibrium is frustratingly stable because current coalition-formation mechanisms favor status-quo interests over evidence-based welfare maximization, but your hunch about intertwined civic engagement and education equilibria is spot on—both theory and empirics...