Hello, and welcome to Polite Disputes.
It has become a common refrain in our time to lament the rise of what we call 'misinformation.' The popular narrative, the one you’ll see on cable news and in mainstream editorials, often paints a simple picture: a gullible, unsuspecting public being manipulated by a handful of malicious actors armed with sophisticated algorithms.
But that’s not quite right. It's too absolute, too simple. It casts ‘us’ as passive victims and ‘them’ as cartoon villains. The truth is far more complex, and far more participatory — there is no ‘them’ at all. It’s all us.
The problem isn't just the supply of bad information, or the bland corporate rationalization for it — you know, the endless quest for "creating shareholder value."
The real, uncomfortable truth is that the system works because of the demand for it. A demand that is baked directly into our human code, a demand that the modern internet has learned to exploit with terrifying efficiency, while public education — our only compulsory training school to learn how much work it’s taken to even get this far as a species — is laughably far behind.
To understand this, we have to be honest with ourselves. And I am, always, conscious that I am one of the humans. We are, by and large, drawn to the shallow end of the pool. Our attention is not naturally captured by nuance, by complexity, by spreadsheets detailing municipal budgets. It is captured by stories of intense emotion, by gossip and scandal, by fashion, by relationships.
To put it poetically, this stuff is delicious. We crave it. A well-reasoned policy analysis simply can’t compete with a story about a celebrity’s messy divorce. This isn't a ‘modern moral failure’; it’s an ancient attentional reality. For our ancestors on the savannah, paying keen attention to social dynamics — who was allied with whom, who was a reliable partner, who was a threat — was a matter of life and death. Gossip wasn't entertainment; it was survival data.
Our brains are still running on that ancient software. And the modern internet is the first technology in history to build a global machine that runs on it.
So, we have this innate craving for simple, dramatic, social information. That’s the demand side. Now, let’s look at the supply side.
If you are a writer, a creator, a media company, an influencer — you learn the rules of this new game very quickly. You get more clicks, more engagement, if your headline is an accusation. You get more views if your sentences are short and your conclusions are absolute. You get more shares if your content is dramatic and visual... think fire, crime, violence, and of course, that ever-present, delicious gossip.
More clicks mean more ad revenue. More ad revenue creates that holy grail of modern capitalism: "shareholder value," which really means individual greed, but dispersed so no one person has to feel bad.
What we have unintentionally built is a perfect, closed loop. The economic incentives are now perfectly aligned to exploit our most basic, ancient impulses. It is the most effective, and most profitable, feedback system ever created.
The mechanism at play was described with chilling accuracy decades before the first tweet was ever sent.
The name you need to know is B.F. Skinner, and his ideas have revolutionized marketing.
Burrhus Frederic Skinner was one of the most influential — and controversial — psychologists of the 20th century. He was the father of what's called Radical Behaviorism. Skinner argued that free will was an illusion. He believed that all human action is the result of conditioning.
His most famous concept is operant conditioning. The idea is simple: if a behavior is followed by a pleasant consequence — a reward, or what he called 'positive reinforcement' — the subject is more likely to repeat that behavior. If it’s followed by an unpleasant consequence, or 'aversive stimuli', they're less likely to do it again.
Skinner proved this with his invention, the "operant conditioning chamber," better known today as the Skinner box. A rat in a box learns that pressing a lever gives it a food pellet. Soon, it's pressing the lever constantly. It has been conditioned.
Now, think about your phone.
You post a photo. You get a notification. That little red dot, that ping — it’s a pellet of social validation. A 'Like'. A 'Share'. A 'Retweet'. Each one is a positive reinforcement. You feel good. So you post again. You check again. You scroll, looking for the next pellet. The system learns what kind of content gets you the most pellets, so it shows you more of that. It shows you things that make you feel righteous, or angry, or vindicated, because strong emotions are the most powerful reinforcers of all.
Simultaneously, the system learns what you don't like. It learns which ideas and which people cause you to feel uncertain, insecure, or challenged. These are the aversive stimuli. The algorithm, in its quest to maximize your engagement, carefully hides them from you, building a comfortable, personalized reality bubble around you. It can be difficult, even, to deliberately search for an opposing point of view, because this self-learning, self-reinforcing machine script has learned a truth about us — opposing points of view are aversive, and we don’t (not really) actually want to see them.
The result of this vast, distributed Skinner box is that our natural human tendency to seek out confirmation of what we already believe — what psychologists call confirmation bias — has been put on performance-enhancing drugs. We are all being systematically conditioned to reject threatening ideas, because it is profoundly unnatural to lean into discomfort.
The machine feeds us what we want — simple, emotionally validating stories that confirm our identity — and we happily consume it because it protects us from the unpleasantness of cognitive dissonance. The supplier and the consumer, locked in a feedback loop of shallow engagement.
But this begs a deeper question. Why were we so vulnerable to this conditioning in the first place? Why, at this moment in history, did this machine find our minds to be such fertile ground?
The technology, the Skinner box, is the how. But it’s not the why.
The "why" is philosophical. The conditioning works so well because our dominant cultural philosophy for the last 70 years has been telling us that this is the correct way to live. We’ve been marinating in a worldview that primes us for this kind of manipulation.
As I argued in my first post, I blame a distorted version of humanism. Specifically, the modern obsession with the authentic self.
This is the idea that deep inside each of us is a core, true self. A self that is pure, innate, and has an inherent knowledge of what is right and wrong for us. The highest moral calling, in this worldview, is to "find yourself," "speak your truth," and live "authentically." Your feelings are not just fleeting emotions; they are dispatches from this true self. They are your ultimate guide.
This idea feels so natural to us now, so obviously true, that it's hard to imagine it's not a timeless human wisdom. But it's not. And this is worth another aside.
The modern cult of authenticity has a history. You can trace its roots back to thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century, who argued against the prevailing Christian idea of original sin. Rousseau believed that humans are born naturally good and that it is society, with its rules and institutions, that corrupts us. The goal, then, is to get back to this natural, pure state.
This idea exploded during the Romantic movement of the 19th century, which celebrated intense emotion, individualism, and intuition over the cold, hard logic of the Enlightenment. It was a rebellion against reason in favor of feeling.
But its final form was forged in the post-war boom of the 20th century, particularly in the soil of American individualism and the counter-culture of the 1960s. Psychologists like Abraham Maslow gave us the "hierarchy of needs," with "self-actualization" at the very peak. The goal of life became the full realization of one's personal potential and unique identity.
Don’t get me wrong. Maslow’s hierarchy is brilliant and widely applicable. But we confuse self-actualization with self-authority. It’s like when people say, ‘parents know best.’ This is an aphorism that just doesn’t hold up when the only base requirement to be a parent is a certain stage of physical maturity.
Self-actualization, I believe, is the ability to change one’s views with the understanding that one’s ‘self’ as it were, is not in our control. We are what we do, not what we claim about ourselves.
But by the time we get to our modern era of self-help, Instagram influencers, and corporate HR seminars (used with the utmost cynicism, of course), this idea has become an unquestioned dogma: "Bring your whole self to work." "You are enough." "Your feelings are valid."
Now, let's be clear. In many ways, this was a healthy correction to centuries of rigid, oppressive social structures that compelled conformity. But a good idea taken to its extreme becomes a bad one.
And here is the collision.
You have this powerful new technology of operant conditioning — social media — that is designed to give you pellets of validation and protect you from aversive stimuli.
And we have a culture that has taught us, for decades, that your feelings are your ultimate source of truth and that your core identity must be protected and affirmed at all costs.
What happens when these two forces meet?
The result is our modern culture, at least in the West. If my feelings are my guide to truth, then any idea that makes me feel bad or insecure must be false. It's not just an idea I disagree with; it's a form of violence. An attack on my "authentic self." It is an aversive stimulus of the highest order.
The algorithm learns this. It sees that you recoil from certain arguments. It sees that you flourish when you are surrounded by those who echo your "truth." And so it builds your bubble. It doesn't do this out of malice — it is, like our modern LLMs, an automatic process. It does it because its only command is to keep you pressing the lever.
The problem is deeper than just bad media. It's a collision between a powerful conditioning technology and a vulnerable, self-centered philosophy. One that has crippled our ability to do the one thing essential for a functioning society: grapple with ideas we do not like. The result is the breakdown of a shared reality.
So, if we're biologically wired for this, and culturally reinforcing it, what hope is there? How do we possibly break the loop?
If we genuinely want to change our information landscape, we can't just blame the algorithms or the corporations. And we can't simply wait for our human nature to change. It won't.
We have to build a new practice. We need a method. A kind of cognitive resistance training. A way to go to the gym for our minds. This is the entire purpose of this project, what I call the practice of Polite Disputes.
This isn't just about being nice. Politeness, in this context, is a strategic tool. It’s the prerequisite for doing something deeply unnatural: intentionally exposing ourselves to aversive stimuli for the sake of learning.
So how do we do it? It starts with a few key steps.
First: Acknowledge the Wiring. This is the most crucial step. You have to be able to observe your own mind in action. When you read an article or hear an argument that makes your blood boil, you have to develop the ability to pause and say, "Ah. There it is. That is my defensiveness kicking in. My instinct is to identify this idea as a threat to my identity." You have to see the bars of your own Skinner box. Naming the feeling detaches you from it. It gives you a moment of space between stimulus and response.
Second: Define Your Terms. The language of emotion and identity is vague and slippery. The language of logic is precise. The fastest way to short-circuit an emotional spiral is to demand precision. When a conversation gets heated around a word like "justice," or "freedom," or "harm," stop. Ask the question: "What, precisely, do we mean when we use that word?" Forcing a conversation away from vague feelings and toward concrete definitions is effective methodology, even against our own biases — always the hardest to see.
And Third: Separate Your Identity from Your Ideas. This is the direct antidote to the cult of authenticity. You must practice the art of holding an idea as an object separate from yourself. An idea is a tool, a proposition to be tested. It is not you. The phrase you have to internalize is, "I am not my opinion." If someone attacks your idea, they are not attacking you. They are stress-testing a tool you are currently holding. This allows you to discard bad ideas without feeling like you are annihilating a piece of yourself.
And once again, this isn't just a nice theory. This practice of detaching from one's automatic thoughts has a firm grounding in proven therapeutic techniques. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, is one of the most successful therapeutic models in the world. And its entire foundation is helping people identify, question, and reframe their own distorted or unhelpful thought patterns. The Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome taught the very same thing: we cannot control what happens in the world, but we can control our judgments about what happens. That space between event and judgment is where our freedom lies.
This is not easy. It is a discipline. It requires effort and a willingness to feel uncomfortable. But it is the only way to reclaim our focus, our agency, and our ability to build a shared understanding of the world. It’s how we break the loop. It’s how we learn to stop pressing the lever and, instead, start thinking again.
The goal is not to win an argument. The goal is to have a better one. To leave a conversation with more questions than you started with. To seek out the strongest possible version of an argument you disagree with, not for the purpose of defeating it, but for the purpose of understanding it.
That is the practice. That is the dispute. And that is why it must be polite.
Thank you for joining me for this discussion. If this practice sounds interesting to you, if you're tired of the noise and long for a better conversation, please subscribe, and join me next time for another Polite Dispute.
