Damus
Lyn Alden
Recent notes
My June newsletter is out now. It focuses on 3 misconceptions about US public debt and deficits: https://www.lynalden.com/june-2025-newsletter/ https://blossom.primal.net/100827b8002d296a660272e5d4dc743f4cc34f4545bcb0157633786606f76035.png
Apparently JD Vance made a Blue Sky account and got banned/suspended within like 20 minutes.
The combo of 1) people getting sucked into digital echo chambers and 2) people believing hallucinating AI answers without checking, is going to take a lot to change. We are in an environment where if things *look* official enough, we’ll usually just instantly believe them. Since nobody has the time or inclination to check everything. Like, someone can just tweet a picture of me at a conference, and put a quote next to it, and tons of people will take it at face value. People won’t stop and ask “is this actually a quote of hers from this conference?” It could be years ago, out of context, or not said by me at all, but one would never know since it seemed legit enough. The current counter to this is basically to assume most things are potentially wrong in part or in full, unless further verified. But the risk there is people get detached and don’t bother researching things. One thing you can do is go through your follow list and remove people/entities who don’t have a high signal ratio. In other words, keep people you agree or disagree with that are locked in and high signal, but remove those who parrot things they don’t understand or spread misinformation on a regular basis. In an environment of endless quantity, it is more important than ever to elevate quality.