June 2026
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The Fear Trap: Why Scaring People Won't Save the World
emotional short-form content about existential risk tends to produce engagement and avoidance rather than durable belief revision — the research on fear appeals and catastrophe communication is not encouraging for the plzdontkillus theory of change
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The Concern Performance Trap
the plzdontkillus creator selection process has a built-in tension — the traits that make someone willing to genuinely believe AI risk arguments and the traits that make someone go viral select for different people, and the ones who survive the filter may be best at performing concern rather than transmitting it
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The Credibility Debt of AI Predictions
AI risk communication anchored to specific near-term AGI timelines is carrying credibility debt — the history of AI timeline predictions is poor and a miss will damage the entire epistemic project
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The 1% Trap: Who Wins When We Treat Risk as Certainty?
asymmetric risk arguments that escape specialized communities tend to get weaponized by whoever has the most power — the 1 percent doctrine shows what happens when low-probability high-consequence framing goes mainstream
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When Everyone Knows the Bomb, But No One Acts
nuclear weapons achieved genuine cultural saturation for decades and the policy outcomes were still messy — what does the precedent tell us about the theory that more cultural salience leads to better collective decisions on catastrophic risk
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The Wrong Lever: Why the AI Safety Movement Is Talking to the Wrong Audience
the decision-makers who control the AI race are not TikTok audiences — the plzdontkillus theory of change may be optimizing for the wrong lever
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The Meme That Eats the Argument
the AI risk arguments are especially sensitive to distortion — a viral meme version may do more long-run damage to the argument than reaching a smaller but higher-fidelity audience
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The Experiment That Wasn't Run
no one has seriously tried making rigorous AI risk content go viral and concluded it can't work — the simplification tradeoff is being made too early
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The Hidden Cost of Taking This Seriously
Making sense of AI risk is deliberately hard and why the people who feel it most might be the worst (and best) at explaining it
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The Builders Are Racing Blind
Most AI experts have never heard of instrumental convergence — the core reason advanced AI is expected to be dangerous by default even if it has no hatred for humanity
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The Quietest Coverage Gap: How SNAP and Medicaid Data Could Finally Fill WIC
why better coordination between snap wic and medicaid could reach more young children
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The Domino Effect: How SNAP Cuts Are Quietly Undermining Universal School Meals
how changes to snap are rippling into school meals access for millions of kids
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The Missing Clinical Layer: How Food is Medicine Completes SNAP and WIC
how medicaid food is medicine programs complement snap and wic for better health outcomes
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The Smarter Safety Net: How to Evolve SNAP Without Losing What Works
evolving SNAP and U.S. food security policy toward a more robust architecture
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BlackRock: Conspiracy vs. Reality
BlackRock conspiracism is mostly financially illiterate — it confuses asset management with corporate ownership — but the rise of passive investing and ESG proxy voting raise legitimate questions about concentrated voting power and fiduciary accountability
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The Real BlackRock Problem
BlackRock conspiracism is mostly financially illiterate — it confuses asset management with corporate ownership — but the rise of passive investing and ESG proxy voting raise legitimate questions about concentrated voting power and fiduciary accountability
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The Rent-Seeking Tax: Making Extraction Cost More Than Creation
rent-seeking as the underlying motivation behind much of the world's evil — how extracting unearned wealth instead of creating value drives corruption, inequality, and institutional decay
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The Rent-Seeking Tax: Making Extraction Visible
rent-seeking as the underlying motivation behind much of the world's evil — how extracting unearned wealth instead of creating value drives corruption, inequality, and institutional decay
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The Extraction Economy: Why Rent-Seeking is the Real Villain
rent-seeking as the underlying motivation behind much of the world's evil — how extracting unearned wealth instead of creating value drives corruption, inequality, and institutional decay
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The Venice Code: Can a 1,000-Year-Old Republic Fix Our State?
what aspects of the statecraft of the venetian republic might be repurposed in times of rearchitecting our state
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Who Controls Your Next Meal?
the relationship between the state and food security