psychology

AMA with Tim Urban.  

Wednesday, 3/4 at 2:00 PM CT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJqtVCgxXTE 

Post questions you're curious about here, and continuously during the conversation. One orienting big question: How do you keep thinking clearly when everything around you rewards thinking tribally — and can technology actually help, or does it only make it worse?

Tim Urban is the writer behind Wait But Why, one of the most popular blogs on the internet, known for making complex topics (AI, procrastination, the Fermi Paradox, the future of humanity) accessible and deeply engaging. His book "What's Our Problem?" examines how the decline in collective thinking quality threatens democratic society. He's currently deep in a new long-form writing project exploring the full arc of everything.

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 2022

Some 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.

Neither King Nor Mob. INTRODUCTION 
Neither King Nor Mob
I first encountered American politics as an argument, not a spectacle.
At fifteen, I read The Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist responses. I didn’t know then that I was being inducted into the oldest debate in the republic: whether liberty dies from chaos or from control. Hamilton feared disorder. Brutus feared tyranny. Both feared human nature. Both were right.
What struck me even then was not how different they were, but how similar. Each side believed the other would destroy the nation. Each side spoke in moral urgency. Each side thought compromise was dangerous. Two hundred and fifty years later, we use better microphones, but we say the same things.
My parents were Democrats who became Reagan voters after Jimmy Carter. My mother listened to Rush Limbaugh in the kitchen. I later became a libertarian, joined the Free State Project, and eventually drifted into what I now call the “leave me alone” branch of political thought. I voted for Republicans, Libertarians, and once, reluctantly, for Donald Trump—whom I disliked even as I marked the ballot.
That list of votes is not a contradiction. It is a record of a citizen trying to preserve a principle while the language of politics kept changing around him.
This book is not an argument for a party. It is an argument for a way of thinking that once defined American political life and now seems almost extinct: the belief that law should be neutral, power should be limited, speech should be free, and citizens should be treated as adults rather than moral projects.
The Permanent Emergency
Every generation believes it is living through the most dangerous moment in history. This is not arrogance; it is biology. Fear sharpens memory. Crisis simplifies stories. When politics becomes a permanent emergency, nuance becomes treason and doubt becomes cowardice.
Today, we are told that everything is existential: elections, words, borders, opinions, even jokes. The left warns of fascism. The right warns of invasion. Both claim moral necessity. Both demand loyalty. Both insist that the rules must bend for the sake of survival.
This is not new. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. Woodrow Wilson jailed dissenters. Franklin Roosevelt interned citizens. George W. Bush built a surveillance state. Barack Obama expanded it. Donald Trump personalized power. Joe Biden moralized bureaucracy.
Different faces. Same logic: the crisis justifies the exception.
The founders anticipated this. James Madison warned that faction would be the greatest threat to liberty—not foreign enemies, but domestic certainty. A faction, he wrote, is any group “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion…adverse to the rights of other citizens.”
In other words, when politics becomes about moral identity instead of shared rules, liberty becomes collateral damage.
Immigration as a Moral Battlefield
Few issues reveal this transformation more clearly than immigration.
Once, it was a policy debate: how many, how fast, under what rules. Now it is a moral theater. One side speaks only of compassion. The other speaks only of threat. The human being disappears into the symbol.
In this new language, even legal categories become taboo. The phrase “criminal alien” is treated as a slur rather than a legal description. Enforcement becomes cruelty. Mercy becomes lawlessness. Every position is interpreted as hatred or betrayal.
Yet some of the most uncomfortable voices in this debate come not from native-born Americans, but from Black immigrants who followed the rules, waited years, and sacrificed to enter legally. They do not oppose immigration. They oppose erasing the meaning of legality. They ask a simple question: What was the point of doing it right?
That question cannot be answered with slogans. It requires a political philosophy capable of holding two truths at once: human dignity and rule of law. We once had such a language. We lost it.
Outrage as Industry
Modern politics does not merely exploit fear. It depends on it.
Rush Limbaugh pioneered the monetization of outrage. Cable news refined it. Social media perfected it. Algorithms learned that anger travels farther than reason and loyalty lasts longer than curiosity. Today, political conflict is not a failure of the system; it is the system.
Both parties need enemies. Both need emergencies. Both need moral absolutes. A calm citizen is a bad customer.
This is why moderation feels invisible. The middle has no merchandise. There is no market for “I’m uncertain.” There is no applause for “both sides might be wrong.” Tribalism pays better than thinking.
What emerges is a politics that looks religious: saints and sinners, heresy and orthodoxy, excommunication and conversion narratives. We no longer argue to persuade. We argue to signal belonging.
The Orphaned Philosophy
Classical liberalism—once the dominant American instinct—has become politically homeless.
It believed:
The law should be impersonal.
Power should be restrained.
Speech should be free.
Citizens should be responsible.
The state should be limited.
Differences should be tolerated.
This philosophy is now attacked from both directions. The right distrusts liberty when it threatens order. The left distrusts liberty when it threatens justice. Both distrust neutrality. Both believe power must be wielded for moral ends.
The “leave me alone” citizen is therefore suspect to all tribes. He is accused of indifference when he is actually defending boundaries: between state and citizen, between law and emotion, between disagreement and evil.
How to Stay Sane Without a Tribe
This book is not a manifesto. It is a diagnosis and a survival guide.
It explores:
Why “leave me alone” keeps resurfacing in history.
How immigration became a moral war instead of a policy question.
Why outrage now fuels both parties.
How a citizen can remain humane, rational, and free in a culture that rewards hysteria.
It does not pretend neutrality is easy. It is not. Independence is lonely. Skepticism is tiring. But it is the only posture that preserves both liberty and decency.
To reject the mob is not to reject morality. It is to insist that morality must be lived by individuals, not enforced by crusades.
Neither King Nor Mob
The American experiment was never about perfection. It was about restraint: restraining rulers, restraining majorities, restraining certainty itself.
We are now tempted by two ancient solutions:
The strongman who promises order.
The crowd who promises righteousness.
Both destroy liberty in different ways.
This book argues for a third path: the old one. The path of law over passion, humility over certainty, and liberty over fear. Not because it is fashionable, but because it is necessary.
I do not trust mobs.
I do not trust kings.
I trust rules, neighbors, and the quiet dignity of being left alone.
That faith is not radical. It is American.

UpTrust

DownTrust

What a Clock Actually Measures: Why physics never proved time exists. We are told that clocks measure time.

We repeat it casually, as if it were discovered rather than assumed.

But pause long enough — and the statement begins to thin.

A clock ticks.

Metal shifts.

Crystals vibrate.

Atoms oscillate with disciplined regularity.

Each tick is a physical transition.

Nothing more.

A clock does not detect a flowing substance. It does not register a hidden dimension streaming past it. It does not dip its hands into an invisible river.

It changes.

And we compare that change to other changes.

When you say, “an hour has passed,” what has occurred?

A process has repeated a specific number of times relative to another process.

Your heart beat.

The sun shifted across the sky.

Neurons fired and reorganized.

The clock did not measure time.

It provided a stable rhythm against which change could be counted.

That is all.

The mind, however, does something subtler.

It stores states.

It arranges them in sequence.

It feels difference stretching between memory and anticipation — and names that stretch “passage.”

But feeling passage is not detecting a dimension.

It is experiencing ordered contrast.

Physics has never isolated time as an entity.

No instrument has captured it apart from motion. No equation requires a flowing essence — only parameters relating states to states.

Even relativity, often invoked as proof of time’s complexity, quietly unsettles the intuition of flow.

If time were a universal current, how could it dilate?

How could two observers disagree about duration?

How could simultaneity fracture depending on motion?

What bends is not a river.

What shifts is the rate of change under constraint.

The clock on a satellite oscillates differently from the clock on Earth because gravity alters structure — not because “time itself” has thickened or thinned.

We call this time dilation.

But nothing has been stretched except relational geometry.

Notice the pattern.

At every level, we find transitions.

States differentiating.

Structures constraining.

Nowhere do we find “time” as a substance moving things forward.

And yet we cling to the metaphor of flow.

Because without it, something destabilizes.

If time does not pass, what becomes of becoming?

If nothing moves forward, what becomes of the self that feels it is traveling?

Perhaps reality is not advancing.

Perhaps it is differentiating.

Not a river, but a structure within which relations unfold according to constraint.

A clock ticks.

But nothing is passing through it.

It is simply holding pattern against pattern.

The tick is not the sound of time escaping.

It is the sound of stability repeating.

The deeper question is no longer “What time is it?”

The deeper question is:

What must reality be for difference to appear ordered without a flowing dimension beneath it?

Order does not require a current.

It requires constraint sufficient for states to cohere.

What we call time may be nothing more than the coordinate language we use to index structural change — a narrative convenience laid across relation.

And if that is true —

Then the universe is not moving forward.

It is holding itself in structured tension.

And the ticking we hear is not the erosion of existence.

It is the persistence of form.

Part of an unfolding inquiry into stochastic temporality and the structural ground of reality.

Does Pursuing Our Passions Mean We Are in Crisis? It seems in life whenever we decide to actively pursue our dreams or child-like passions, we are labeled as having a crisis.

A mid-life crisis, an existential crisis, a post divorce crisis, postpartum crisis.

Why is this? Is it because going for what we love threatens other people?

Or is it because it takes a crisis to wake us up to how we are living in complacency. From there, we can begin to move forward and live authentically?

I would love to know your thoughts as I ponder a newsletter post on this topic.

The Born Again Gospel .  The Born Again Gospel

You are a created being, made in the image of a Holy God but, no one on Earth can be Holy so, God sent His Only Begotten Son Jesus, to take the punishment for our sins by dying on a cross. He was placed in a tomb and on the third day His God and Father raised Him from the dead and exalted Him to the Throne of Heaven. God has made this Jesus, whom they crucified, both Lord and Christ. And, Jesus: The Son of Man, will return to take us to be with Him forever and ever. Amen. 

Romans 10:8-13

...“The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart,” that is, the word of faith we are proclaiming: that if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” And, believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with your heart you believe and are justified And, with your mouth you confess and are saved.

It is just as the Scripture says: “Anyone who believes in Him will never be put to shame.” For there is no difference between a Jew or a gentile, for the same Lord is Lord of all, and gives richly to all who "call" on Him, for, “Everyone who "calls" on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

John 3:3

 Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you! No one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.”

Becoming Born Again is 'known' by The Initial Evidence of The Holy Spirit. 

1st Corinthians 12:3

 Therefore, I inform you that no one who is speaking by the Spirit of God says, “Jesus be cursed,” and no one can say, “Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit.

1st Corinthians 14:1 

Earnestly pursue "love", (Galatian 5:22,23 The Fruit of the Holy Spirit is Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control.) and earnestly desire spiritual gifts, (1st Corinthians 12-14) and especially that you might prophesy.

Luke 11:13 Therefore if you, being evil, know to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father who is in Heaven give the Holy Spirit, to those who 'ask' Him."

Here is an example prayer.

Almighty God and Father, I believe You raised your Son Jesus from the dead. Please forgive me of all my sins and fill me with Your Holy Spirit so I can bear good fruit and do Your will, in the name of Jesus my Lord and Christ. Amen. Thank you Father God, Thank you Lord Jesus. Halleluyah!

Matthew 6:8-15 

Nevertheless, the firm foundation of God stands, having this seal, "The Lord knows those who are His," and, "Everyone who names the name of the Lord is to abstain from wickedness." 2nd Timothy 2:19

My name is Arnold J. Bur and I am an Elohimist.

Politics self-assessment quiz from an integral perspective. I’m obsessively working on a course I’ve been trying to build for 4 years and have recently made big breakthroughs with. I’ve just completed the first draft of questions in the topic of politics.

Ideally, the way this would be scored is that people could rank all of the statements that are true for them, put as many responses as they want in a no way bucket, and put as many responses as they want in a I don’t get it bucket. I haven’t found a quiz builder tool that will let me build it that way yet, so in the meantime I’m using one that lets me randomize the order the responses are shown in and lets them rank the answers.

Here’s the first draft of the prompts, would love any and all feedback, support, and nit-picking!

What are your opinions and feelings about politics?

 M I personally don’t care, that’s just not where my focus is in my life.

 R I’ll stand firm until I die to defend my country.

 A I worry that things could be heading in the wrong direction.

 O The people with the best strategies will always win.

 G The efforts of good intentions are persistently threatened by corruption and greed.

 T The current political landscape shows me a mirror of my inner world, and the most impactful solutions start by looking within.

What are your priorities in how you interact with politics?

 M I’m not going to do anything that might make my people reject me.

  R As long as I can live my life the way I want to, we’re good, but as soon as someone tries to get in the way I’m going to fight for my rights.

 A I perform my civic duty, like voting, writing to my senator and staying aware of local politics, because that’s what a conscientious citizen does to maintain what matters.

 O I leverage connections and resources to move the cogs of the political machine in directions that support my endeavors.

 G I volunteer for causes that work to fix systemic flaws and care for those in need.

 T I trust the overarching trend that life has always had toward greater good, and I take action when needed.

What do you want or expect from politicians?

 M As long as me and my family’s lives stay the same, whatever they do is ok by me.

 R Take charge, get shit done, and don’t get in the way of what I want.

 A Protect our valued traditions and morals.

 O Make everything as functional as possible without getting in the way of progress.

 G Undo antiquated laws that systematically oppress and harm people, and create safety nets to ensure everyone’s basic needs will always be met.

 T Stay aware of societal patterns, and look for solutions that balance holding firm limits with honoring the current views of all who live here.

What are the keystones of our political culture?

 M I’m not really sure.

 R Honoring our forefathers who fought for our independence.

 A Maintaining law and order.

 O The system of checks and balances makes sure history doesn’t get in the way of innovation.

 G Legislation that protects people and the environment.

 T Public and private entities interacting to create policies that accurately represent the beliefs of the people.

When you talk about politics, where do you tend to come from?

 UL My feelings- what makes me feel safe and protected, and what makes me feel threatened.

 LL The people I love- what matters to them and will help them feel safe and protected.

 UR Data- polls, statistics, and effectiveness.

 LR Systemic impacts- how voting functions, ways laws are implemented, etc.

When you take in information about politics, what do you want most?

 UL Personalization- ask me questions and find out what matters to me.

 LL Connection- let’s listen to each other and see what we discover.

 UR Facts- I want to study what’s happening and why it’s happening.

 LR Structures- I want to explore the methods and protocols at work.

Engage or Enrage. It is likely that we have family members or friends that we differ with greatly when it comes to politics, healthcare, etc.  I am no different.  When the inevitable hot topic arises, do you recommend flight or fight, engage or enrage?  How do you respond when this occurs?

Engage or Enrage. It is likely that we have family members or friends that we differ with greatly when it comes to politics, healthcare, etc.  I am no different.  When the inevitable hot topic arises, do you recommend flight or fight, engage or enrage?  How do you respond when this occurs?

Engage or Enrage. It is likely that we have family members or friends that we differ with greatly when it comes to politics, healthcare, etc.  I am no different.  When the inevitable hot topic arises, do you recommend flight or fight, engage or enrage?  How do you respond when this occurs?

Engage or Enrage. It is likely that we have family members or friends that we differ with greatly when it comes to politics, healthcare, etc.  I am no different.  When the inevitable hot topic arises, do you recommend flight or fight, engage or enrage?  How do you respond when this occurs?

Does Pursuing Our Passions Mean We Are in Crisis? It seems in life whenever we decide to actively pursue our dreams or child-like passions, we are labeled as having a crisis.

A mid-life crisis, an existential crisis, a post divorce crisis, postpartum crisis.

Why is this? Is it because going for what we love threatens other people?

Or is it because it takes a crisis to wake us up to how we are living in complacency. From there, we can begin to move forward and live authentically?

I would love to know your thoughts as I ponder a newsletter post on this topic.

Does Pursuing Our Passions Mean We Are in Crisis? It seems in life whenever we decide to actively pursue our dreams or child-like passions, we are labeled as having a crisis.

A mid-life crisis, an existential crisis, a post divorce crisis, postpartum crisis.

Why is this? Is it because going for what we love threatens other people?

Or is it because it takes a crisis to wake us up to how we are living in complacency. From there, we can begin to move forward and live authentically?

I would love to know your thoughts as I ponder a newsletter post on this topic.

Deep take/ Hot take- Hating and complaining is healthy for authenticity and intimacy. In the new age era, there is so much emphasis on positivity and light. I sense a superficial texture at times, where it's challenging for me to feel the depths of the person before me. I noticed a pattern, that when I opened the doorway to begin complaining and hating things playfully yet honestly, gushing renewed life force showered the conversation.

followed by much laughter and beauty.

yes, some people need to learn how to use words in ways other than complaining and hating....

and some, need that permission slip to be a wild animal in their expression so their soul doesn't suffocate in an in an invisible box of superficial superior spirituality #deeptakes, #hottakes

Topic of the day.. A  massive lesson i learned is that I can't expect people to match the effort I put in. I always thought if I tried harder and was honest and transparent that people would give the same back to me, but that's not true. 

I had to learn that not everyone is willing or capable of putting the same effort for me. But that's not the same as tolerating it, either. I can accept it without having to tolerate it.

Engage or Enrage. It is likely that we have family members or friends that we differ with greatly when it comes to politics, healthcare, etc.  I am no different.  When the inevitable hot topic arises, do you recommend flight or fight, engage or enrage?  How do you respond when this occurs?