Home / Rant on Congruent World Views (July 2026)

I opened X/Twitter for the first time in a year and the first thing I saw was people blaming the CEO of Coinbase for tanking the price of a memecoin they bought by changing his profile photo. I was so tempted to comment on the absurdity of the situation, but then I remembered that this is why I hate social media and I logged out.

There's a quote about how the test of a good system is whether you could hand it over to your worst enemy to run and still be happy with it. If you like crypto because it's decentralized and permissionless, which means no single person controls it and you have the freedom to do what you want, you should accept the consequences that come from having the freedom to do something as stupid as buying a memecoin and only expecting the price to go up.

Similarly, if you drive a Tesla and you don't like Elon's politics, sell your car and stick it to Tesla. Don't put a sticker on your Tesla that says you hate Elon. All that does is tell the people driving behind you that your dislike of Elon is just barely enough that you're willing to spend 1 minute and $1 buying a sticker, but not nearly extreme enough to go through the modest hassle of changing your car to another electric car that aligns with your politics. The sticker might as well say, "I'm meh about Elon but I love his cars." Or maybe it should even say, "I love virtue signalling so much I bought a sticker."

While we're on the topic of the environment, if you spend 5 minutes digging into what contributes to global warming, you'll learn that flying is far worse than most other things we do. It made me wonder, if you measured the total emissions from the average big gas truck driving never leaves home conservative in Mississippi and compared them to the average Tesla owning globetrotting liberal in California, I'd bet us Californians contribute way more to global warming. Politically, global warming should be more of a rich vs poor issue than a right vs left one.

Clearly I should stay off social media. I was on it for 30 seconds and it made me annoyed enough to write a negative blog post that will offend people on every end of the political and cultural spectrum. Unfortunately, the problem is no longer contained to social media, it's leaking out into the real world in the form of dumb bumper stickers.

Zooming out, as a society I worry we don't have enough free time and energy to develop congruent world views. We're so caught up in the latest thing that we end up with shallow opinions and not enough time or energy to refine them, much less do anything meaningful with them other than post on social media (or write angry blog posts for that matter).

When I was young and social media was new, I thought it would result in more diverse ideas, because it would allow people with niche interests to connect. What I didn't predict was that the business model would push the algorithms toward rage bait and result in more groupthink.

When LLMs first launched I cynically assumed we were all on the path to outsourcing our thinking entirely, exacerbating group think. But after using LLMs for a while, I'm not so sure. I'm not someone who researches new ideas by reading a book cover to cover. Usually, I have a question, spend time finding the answer, then that leads to a new question and I spend time finding another answer somewhere else and so on. For me, "researching" was 80% searching and 20% learning.

But now using LLMs, I spend 0% of my time searching, 20% of my time forming the right questions, and 80% learning, which for me is some combination of comprehending the answer to my question and considering the implications. And interestingly, the fact that I can research faster has led me to look into way more unique and interesting stuff, increasing the time I spend looking into new ideas.

Perhaps the impact of new technologies are destined to be the opposite of whatever we initially assume they will be? Maybe we're really bad at predicting stuff or maybe being scared of some obvious outcome leads us to proactively take action to prevent it, whereas being blind to more nuanced or complex risks leads us to walk right into them.

I still remember when Facebook went public and most people assumed it would connect the world in a positive way but that it was a money-losing business. Now most people think AI will be bad for humanity but assume it will be the most profitable business of all time. I guess we'll find out.