#26. Don’t Let It Make Us Hate Each Other
I have a close friend from back in the high school days, and he and I go to lunch once a month. We have a great time talking about this and that, and then, inevitably, we talk politics. He is on the opposite end of the political spectrum, and I am always perplexed: we seem to be talking in a different language, operating from a completely different set of "facts". We have a hard time finding common ground because stuff that he thinks is a given, I think is untested anecdote--and vice versa.
I've been looking into this this week, as the world seems so polarized. It has been a hell of a week.
I got the idea to look into this because I use social media, and social media, because of The Algorithms, knows what I like. But this week, in the wake of political violence, I was very surprised to see that one of my social media platforms (Instagram) was giving me some wildly unhinged stuff. I thought something must be wrong, because shouldn't The Algorithm know what I like? But the thing is: Facebook and Threads know what I like--but I only use Instagram to look at funny videos. Instagram didn't know what my politics were, and it got them very wrong.
And I already knew that Big Algorithm controls what we see and think, to a large degree. I ran a business that was bringing in a couple thousand dollars a month until Google changed their algorithm, and in one fell swoop, I lost 95% of my traffic. Overnight, my site was dead. This kind of algorithmic whim goes beyond Google searches--it's rampant in social media.
It's not like this hasn't been studied extensively. In an article published in Science in 2020, a group of fifteen researchers came to this conclusion:
“In recent years, social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have played an influential role in political discourse, intensifying political sectarianism.”
And in 2021, the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences wrote:
“Although social media is unlikely to be the main driver of polarization, we posit that it is often a key facilitator.”
But if you want something totally wild, let's jump forward to research that came out just last month, which totally strips the algorithm out of the equation. In an August 2025 Cornell study, researchers built a virtual social media site. They populated it with 500 AI users, who were created to reflect the demographics and ideologies of the most recent US census data. There was NO ALGORITHM. Instead, the virtual users' only possible actions were to (1) choose a news article and write a post about it, (2) follow another user, or (3) repost someone else's article.
And? After running this simulation 10,000 times, they found that the very nature of social media itself, sans algorithm, still polarized people.
As reported in Science.org:
But no matter which LLM the researchers used, the platform inevitably developed the negative trifecta of echo chambers, concentrated influence, and extreme voices.
“We were expecting that we would have to work very hard in some way to produce this effect,” Törnberg says. But instead, “We get this toxic network that is forming as a result of these just basic actions of reposting and following.”
All of which leads me to really--really--rethink my own social media use. I've known for ages that I've been in an echo chamber. The fact that ALL OF US are in echo chambers is scary. Especially now, when the political climate is so very divisive.
The social internet wants us to hate each other.
But here's the fact that I found most surprising. A paper from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has this to say:
American voters are less ideologically polarized than they think they are, and that misperception is greatest for the most politically engaged people.
The examples they give of this misperception are things like gun control: the majority of Democrats, but also 40% of Republicans support creating a federal database for gun sales. Almost as many support banning assault-style weapons. You wouldn't know that in the black-and-white perspective we get in the news. There is a lot of agreement--we just don't see it.
But this is the kicker:
However, most partisans hold major misbeliefs about the other party’s preferences that lead them to think there is far less shared policy belief. This perception gap is highest among progressive activists, followed closely by extreme conservatives: in other words, the people who are most involved in civic and political life hold the least accurate views of the other side’s beliefs.
All of this boils down to: The Algorithm inherently (and intentionally, in some cases) makes us more polarized--but the more polarized we are, and the more active we become in politics, the less we understand the views of the other side.
Now, what do we do with this? I don't know. Stop being on social media as much, certainly. Get your news from reliable news sources--not whatever comes across your feed.
I'm as guilty of ALL of this as anyone else. I engage, I doomscroll, I feed The Algorithm. But I'm going to change that.
Don't let it make us hate each other.
Bits and Bobs from the News:
#1. LIFE ON MARS???
Well, maybe--but it's the biggest maybe we've ever had. The Perseverance rover has been looking at a rock that is packed with organic carbon, in a place that we know once was a lake-and-river system, now known as Jezero Crater. Now, I don't know organic chemistry in the least bit, but supposedly some small patches of rock, which range in color from black to dark blue to dark green (and are called "poppy seeds" and also "leopard spots"), which contain the minerals vivianite, an iron phosphate, and greigite, an iron sulfide--are the very kind of place where if we were on earth, there should be a ton of microbes. To be clear, this would be ancient, long-dead Martian life. But, it's the best evidence we've ever had. The next step, unfortunately, is a big one: we have to get that rock to earth to test it. That's... gonna take a while.
#2. Rats are the dolphins of the trash heap!
People have been studying rats in New York City, primarily to figure out how to get rid of the estimated 3,000,000 of them, and they have found that rats communicate with ultrasonic noises that we dumb humans can't hear. What are they talking about? We don't know! Probably something great!
#3. Remember Ötzi, the frozen mummy from the Alps? He had 61 tattoos, and we think we know why!
So Ötzi is a mummified man who live 5000 years ago (between 3350 and 3105 BCE) and he was discovered in the Alps on the Austria-Italy border in 1991. He has a ton of fascinating secrets to reveal about how people back then lived--we have his clothes (a coat, a belt, a pair of leggings, a loincloth, and shoes, all made of leather of different skins), and his artifacts (a scraper, a drill, a flint flake, a bone awl and a dried fungus). But the cool thing is that he has tattoos, and we are just now figuring out what those tattoos represent. First of all, they're not decorative or symbolic. They're mostly just collections of short lines. But he has SIXTY ONE of them. And we have been able to link the fact that his tattoos also happen to be in places where he had injuries or illnesses: we know that he had arthritis in some joints--the joints where the tattoos are--and he even has tattoos on his abdomen, right where he would be feeling the pain of his kidney stones and ringworm! Anyway, other cultures use tattoos for heaÖtzi did, too.
#4. The Oldest Plant in the World is Also, Expectedly, Very Endangered
What would you say if I told you that the oldest plant on earth was not, in fact, Methuselah, the Great Basin bristlecone pine that is 4,857 years old, but actually one that is almost TEN TIMES that: King's Holly in Tasmania, also known as Lomatia tasmanica, had been around for 43,000 years. And this is one plant. It's a plant group, much like Pando (the bunch of aspens in Utah are a group) but they all share a common root system, making up 500-600 shrubs. But the wild thing is that, while King's Holly can continue to spread its root system and put up new shoots, it actually is sterile: it can't make any more baby King's Hollys. And: it's the very last King's Holly in the world. So, let's just hope Tasmania doesn't have wildfires.
A cutting of King’s Holly
Distractions and Diversions
Today's Distractions and Diversions come to you from this week's Emmy awards, which honored three of my absolute favorite shows.
First off, Andor. Andor is a story about revolution and fighting against an oppressive regime, and if you can think of a timelier TV show, I don't know what it is. And it's Star Wars! But, even if you don't like Star Wars, you'll love Andor. It has, I 100% declare, surpassed my love for even Empire Strikes Back: Andor, Season 2, is the best Star Wars there has ever been. In this clip, Luthen Rael, a covert rebel explains what the revolution has cost him. (Andor won the Emmy for Best Writing.)
The next clip comes from Severance, an absolute mind trip of a show which explores the science fiction idea: what if you could sever the You who goes to work from the You who lives your regular life--the two know nothing of what the other does. And it took me a minute to get into it, because I wanted hard science fiction answers, but when I realized that it's a show about satire and philosophy, I fell hard. This scene, which is SUPER WEIRD, is perfectly illustrative of the mad genius of this show. (Two of the actors in this scene won acting awards at the Emmys.)
And the final scene comes from my number one favorite show of the year, The Pitt. It's an ER show (made by many of the original people from the network show ER, including starring Noah Wyle) but the entire season of 15 episodes is a single day in the ER, starting when Dr. Robby (Wyle) comes into work in the morning till when he leaves. It has been praised as the most accurate medical drama ever, but what I love are the characters, the ongoing storytelling, and the hard topics they deal with. This clip is from the first episode, which is a good introduction to the show. (The Pitt won Best Drama and Best Actor at the Emmys)
Don’t let them make us hate each other.
