You might have heard of the term the Great Equalizer. Wikipedia has the following page for disambiguation:

• the philosophy of Horace Mann, which promoted education as the great equalizer that allowed anyone to improve their life in spite of wealth, status, and privilege

• the Slider (pitch) in baseball, a pitch that is said to neutralize the best hitters

• the Colt Single Action Army handgun, whose firepower was said to equalize the odds between the weak and the strong

• the rule of law, which subjects all people to the same set of rules that are ideally impartial and fair

• Time, which applies to all in equal amounts

• Death, the end of life for all living things, regardless of distinction

Those answers are possibly correct. My friends in physics tell me that time actually works differently in different contexts, which is why your head is mildly older than your feet. If you are curious why, it has to do with gravity and general relativity. But, I think there is another great equalizer, and a tragic one at that.

The toaster. We all know how much variation goes into bagels. They are round and delightful. Few foods are as delicious as a good, fresh bagel. But Houston, you ask, what is the problem? Well, it’s simple, and don’t call me surely.

The key about the toaster is that it uses all existing bagels as an input and outputs a nearly identical bagel. This compression is particularly potent when a bagel is over 24 hours old (i.e. no longer fresh). I find this disturbing. People devote inordinate amounts of time to baking and acquiring the perfect bagel. It seems inappropriate to me that this effort can be swiftly dismissed with a $10 heating appliance (a toaster).

The natural question that arises is whether one should care about this injustice – and it is a grave injustice – or whether we should just accept as inevitable that effort in the realm of bagels will continue to go unrewarded. I was charged $25 for a bagel in Manhattan the other day, including $14 for the lox. I was aghast.

But that complaint of mine was not even a strawman; rather, it was a stray thought, something is currently gnawing at me (just as I gnawed at that pricey, pricey bagel) at 2:36am.

In truth, the toaster is a great equalizer. Regarding schooling as the great equalizer, we accept the premise that all students are created equal. Therefore, schooling is correcting for something that ought to have already existed. Bagels are decidedly not created equal. So, rather than realizing justice via the process of toasting, you are inverting it by flattening the good and the bad into one warm torus.

The lesson today is that just because something produces equality, and just because that equality may actually elevate all prior objects to a state higher than they were previously (pareto efficient, if you will), that action is not necessarily just. Often, it can be the opposite. But is the just the same as the good? Is justice always the same as morality? That’s a discussion for a later post.

Now, we are going to talk about another great equalizer that has taken western society by storm. A human equivalent of the toaster… yep… the GLP-1.

The analogy to the toaster is clear as day. Some people have metabolisms like furnaces; others store every calorie as though preparing for a winter that never comes. Some carry a genetic predisposition toward adiposity; others simply have a long and intimate relationship with pasta.

The variation in human bodies — across genetics, circumstance, willpower, access to quality food — is staggering and beyond that of normal animals. Think about the most obese cat you have ever seen, and I bet that chungus did not need a wheelchair to move around.

Enter the GLP-1. Six months later: convergence (if you have money). The drug does not care what produced your weight. It applies heat uniformly, and out comes a more standardized product.

Now, the champions of GLP-1s will tell you this is unambiguously good, and frankly they have a point. Obesity is a disease, not a moral failing, and millions of people have struggled for decades not because of laziness but because of biology.

For such folks, the GLP-1 is not a toaster but a correction of a rigged lottery. It is justice incarnate. All humans, after all, are created equal. But I keep returning to the bagel.

The best bagel in New York, hand-rolled and kettle-boiled, subjected to the toaster, becomes the same as the one that arrived by truck from a factory in New Jersey. The toaster does not reward the craft. It simply applies heat, and everything comes out warm and roughly equivalent. Justice has been swerved.

It is unclear whether anything is lost in a process where life is compressed yet overall elevated.

I do know that Jimmy Carter once said that “We are, of course, a nation of differences. Those differences don’t make us weak. They’re the source of our strength.” Try to tell that to the toaster.

A friend told me that the ultimate equalizer is AI. Separately, I was speaking to a very socialist English PhD, who is about 40 and has spent his life weaving through prestigious institutions. He was upset that AI could derive things from texts that he could not. He hated AI, and he loved equality, and I think that he resented that AI eliminated the difference between him and someone less educated.

Has the PhD guy been robbed of something? Did everyone else gain something they did not deserve? Is the former equivalent to the latter? (It likely is if we apply a mercantilist worldview).

If you can toast a bagel into perfection, medicate someone into a normal BMI, or AI someone into a PhD, has anything been lost along the way? Perhaps some mangled notion of justice lies moribund, a little down the road. Perhaps something else entirely has been shed in the process. Or perhaps life is just better with adjustments.

I grew up playing Clash of Clans (CoC). I never had an X-box or a playstation like the other twerps, so I was relegated to my iPad air, from which I wreaked havoc.

I recently redownloaded the app. It changes over time, you see. I guess it’s similar to how one might revisit the social media page of a long-lost friend or, god forbid, a former lover.

But CoC was nonetheless a big part of my teenage life, and the only way to check in with the game is to redownload it.

Returning to CoC, I entered a lopsided world: everyone had so much money. (Relatedly, I moved to Manhattan last week and observed the very same phenomenon.)

The reason for the ballooning of CoC net worth is simple. In video games, in order to simulate suspense (and/or to milk the teenage players of their incipient fortunes), the designers of the games must decide on certain bottlenecks or areas of scarcity. So it should be difficult to obtain a given resource, or a certain process must take time, or there must be a skill you have to unlock or whatever. By overcoming these bottlenecks or overcoming scarcity, you advance through the game. It is sort of like the real world.

Without bottlenecks/scarcity, a game would not be challenging or fun. Clash Royale, for example, forces you to ascend through leagues, which helps you unlock cards, and after a long, long time, you would theoretically beat the game by unlocking and upgrading everything to its maximum level. In New Super Mario Bros, it’s a similar idea, where you have to beat a whole bunch of bosses and levels before you obliterate Bowser, who, by the way, is apparently a dragon-turtle.

And so it goes. The only obvious exceptions to my rule are the Ketchapp-style-games, which are designed to be more of a battle than a war. More of a comic than a tome. The other exceptions are multi-player games like NBA 2K, where you can play against friends instead of a computer.

Clash of Clans operates as follows. You train an army, deploy it to ransack another person’s home, utilize the resources to upgrade your home, and this vicious cycle never ends unless you delete the game or die.

Training an army used to take time and elixir (a resource, alongside gold, gems, and dark elixir). At some point between when I last downloaded the app and now, the genius creators decided to scrap that bottleneck. Now, you can train your army for free and in zero time. Is that realistic? No. Even the most fearsome Steppe warlords had to go yodeling through the plains in order to assemble an army to sack Baghdad.

So now CoC has created for themselves two problems. Problem A: there’s nothing to do with elixir. Apparently, unlike oil, there are infinite quantities of this purple sap under the CoC earth, and we just pump it up incessantly and needlessly. Problem B: alongside over-elixirification of the game (since its chief usage of training armies was scrapped), there are far too many resources across the board.

In CoC, you store resources in storage containers. Almost all containers I encounter are full. I realized this was because the main way you accumulate resources is through conquest, and the game had removed both bottlenecks (elixir and time) that used to regulate the frequency of attack. The other way to accumulate resources was through pumps, so there was no way someone could fall into a solow-swan poverty trap.

Now that the game had followed the Clash Royale model by bulldozing its attack-related bottlenecks, the only remaining bottleneck was upgrade times, which grows to something like 3 days by the time you hit townhall level 10. Needless to say, I was uninterested.

But I am interested in economics. As I scoured through villages, it occurred to me that the price of goods had remained the same, even as the volume of resources with which to purchase the goods had grown. Yep, it dawned on me that my favorite childhood game had been hit with a nasty bout of inflation. The game had become severely over-saturated with resources, and the gravy train showed no sign of slowing down. People had cash flowing out of their pockets and nothing on which to spend it. Again, sort of like Manhattan.

In the Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, we witness how a talented man can accomplish great things if only he puts his mind to it. Even though I have long since recused myself from being the best Clash of Clans player in the western hemisphere, I realized that this wrong must be righted. I could bring balance to the force.

My plan went as follows: I would fill my storages up with gold/elixir. I would then go around attacking the richest players I could find and acquire their resources. Crucially, upon my own storages hitting max capacity, my gains from conquest vanished into thin air.

I was like Robin Hood, except the poor never saw a penny. Rather, I sought to salvage a virtual world that has been stolen from the newest generation of clashers.

By implementing this strategy, I would reduce the resource supply, ideally to a point of scarcity. I could restore the game of my youth to its former glory. Obviously, the best solution would be the reinstatement of costs (both time and elixir) to train armies, but to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And in this case, my only hammer was an orange “attack” button.

After some basic calculations, I realized I was trying to construct the Hoover Dam with toothpicks. Or bailing out the Titanic with a teaspoon.

It dawned on me that I had chosen to embark on quite an idiotic crusade. The growing resource misallocation within a game I once played has no real impact on my life. And spending my most valuable resource – time – endeavoring to reintroduce scarcity into Clash of Clans has led to nothing good, including this article.

A Jewish precept, derived from Leviticus 24:17, teaches that to save a life is to save an entire world. I doubt God had virtual worlds in mind.

But according to the NOAA: “The Great Lakes are considered to be non-tidal.” Still, according to BlogTO: “Lake Ontario doesn’t have tides but it also sort of does depending on who you ask.” According to me, no one cares about this pondering, but the little curiosity that remained was quenched by the NOAA’s useful tidbit that “Water levels in the Great Lakes change primarily because of meteorological effects.”

If you’re curious like I used to be, the NOAA’s explanation goes something like this.

True tides—changes in water level caused by the gravitational forces of the sun and moon—do occur in a semi-diurnal (twice daily) pattern on the Great Lakes. Studies indicate that the Great Lakes spring tide, the largest tides caused by the combined forces of the sun and moon, is less than five centimeters in height. These minor variations are masked by the greater fluctuations in lake levels produced by wind and barometric pressure changes.

Consequently, the Great Lakes are considered to be non-tidal.

There are two things you should notice. First, the NOAA’s explanation did not go “something” like that; rather, I directly lifted that paragraph from their website. Second, the NOAA clearly tries to use the No True Scotsman fallacy on tides themselves. No True Tide, they seem to argue, can be “masked” by meteorological effects. The tide, in its natural state, must be so crushingly powerful that its effects can overcome all other forces acting upon it. So theoretically, if there’s a cruise ship or a gigantic duck or something else that temporarily (or forever, if the duck has an anchoring mechanism and permanently bopped up and down) obscures the tide, then the ocean itself would no longer be tidal. This cannot be.

I would argue that a body of water should be considered tidal if the gravitational forces of the sun and the moon exercise any influence on them whatsoever. Let’s lower the bar for tides and raise the bar for our schoolchildren.

But none of this is actually the point of this article. What I really wanted to discuss was the strategic differences in the deployment of animal weapons in WWII between America and other countries, namely the Soviet Union and Britain.

That was actually the sudden thought that occurred to me once I forgot about the tide business. And guess what— the NOAA is unable to answer it. But I looked deeper and began to develop a thesis.

So WWII is what most people call a total war. A total war is basically the military embodiment of “by any means necessary.” All elements of society become involved. What confuses me is that in this world brimming with asymmetric conflict, usually one side is constrained by a whole slew of things, while the other side (typically the weaker one) is effectively fighting a total war. This is often because losing the war could mean the dissolution of the weaker entity, while in the stronger entity it would engender an “aw, shucks” sort of feeling.

So total war, just like love, can cause people to do the craziest things. But sometimes those crazy things can systematically vary, and that’s where things get interesting.

Here’s the kicker (i.e. the thesis): Non-American animal projects confronted pressing tactical challenges where the animals were perceived as the optimal solution; American initiatives sought to reimagine the potentials of warfare itself.

Let’s examine a few cases. In 1941, the Soviets had a problem. They were getting creamed by the Nazis. A big problem were the German tiger tanks and the overall lack of Soviet organization. The maximum penetration of the Germans was 1200 miles— that’s the equivalent of the width of three Germanies, which should set off just about anyone’s alarm bells.

So, the Soviets did what any normal person would do: they strapped dogs with dynamite and set them loose on the battlefield. There were two versions of this plan. Ideally, the dog would advance to the German lines, drop a load (of explosives) near a tank and safely scurry back to their Soviet comrades. The alternative plan was similar, except there was no release mechanism for the explosives— and the dog would explode with the load.

Tank Man vibes

In a cruel twist of fate, the Soviets opted to weaponize German shepherds against German soldiers. The Bible commands us to “not cook a kid in its mother’s milk.” This strategy appears to violate the spirit of the law, not that those dog-murdering commies cared.

Worse still, the Soviets, evidently caught up in the fog of war, made the classic mistake of confusing gas and diesel. A friend of mine did this to his parent’s car once… not good. Imagine you have a dog, a beautiful dog, and are trying to convince him to run toward the Nazis and basically suicide-bomb a tiger tank or two into oblivion. When training these canine kamikazes, you’d want to match the training to the actual battlefield as closely as possible. You’d want to avoid training the anti-tank dogs to think the enemy tanks smelled like diesel, when in actuality it was the friendly tanks that smelled like diesel and the enemy tanks that smelled like gasoline. Anyway, that’s pretty much what happened, and it’s hard to know the ultimate success of the anti-tank dogs.

Now you, reader, know something about Soviet anti-tank dogs. I came across this video that argues that everything you (now) know about them is wrong. You’ll have to judge for yourself.

If you want to drive a coal-fired steam locomotive, you are going to need a fireman. The fireman shovels coal into the firebox throughout the journey. The firebox incinerates the coal, which heats water in a boiler, which produces steam, which drives the pistons, which turn the wheels.

The British knew that the Germans used coal-fired steam locomotives. Pretty much everyone did. The British suspected that if the Germans found a dead rat aboard one of their coal-fired steam locomotives, they’d chuck it into the firebox. This was common practice. So the British decided to fill a bunch of dead rats with explosives and leave them on German trains. Ideally, the exploding rat would be disposed of in the firebox, which would result in a massive explosion, some amount of death, and a substantial disruption to supply lines.

Via the Keister method

This was a project of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). The Germans immediately discovered their shenanigans, intercepting the rats hidden within a coal shipment. This caused the Germans to enter a “rat-scare,” prompting exhaustive coal inspections. The discovered rat bombs were paraded around German military academies like Japanese submarine HA. 19 that was captured at Pearl Harbor. This wave of murophobia led the SOE to conclude that the rat program had an “extraordinary moral effect” on the Germans. The SOE deemed the operation a victory because “the trouble caused to the [Germans] was a much greater success to us than if the rats had actually been used.”

The Brits were unable to directly attack the Germans on mainland Europe, so they resorted to rat-based sabotage. They also considered transing Hitler. The Soviets were unable to counter the Tiger Tanks, so they resorted to anti-tank dogs. Both these innovations sprung from necessity. There was a problem that had to be solved, and the animals happened to be the best tool in the repertoire. Perhaps creative, these uses of animal weapons could not reasonably be construed as imaginative.

The American way was revolutionary. It viewed the animal not as something to fill a tactical gap but as a means to fundamentally transform the paradigm of warfare.

A main problem with the American projects, for our purposes, is that they require some amount of background information.

Ed Salinger operated a Tokyo-based import-export firm. At some point in 1943, he might have yelled “eureka!” because he had just cooked up the most legendary idea of all time. From his time in Japan, Ed knew a thing or two about kitsune– supernatural foxes that he believed most Japanese people believed in. These mythical fox spirits were associated with doom in Shinto mythology. But how might one exploit the kitsune for a military edge?

Ed approached the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, precursor to the CIA) with an offer they should have refused: given that the Japanese were “subject to superstitions, beliefs in evil spirits, and unnatural manifestations which can be provoked and stimulated,” work with me to build “a peculiarly potent manifestation of the Fox legend.” This was to be known as Operation Fantasia.

Ed’s initial proposal involved deploying glowing fox-shaped balloons equipped with eerie whistles and synthetic odors to evoke spectral apparitions. When these methods proved impractical, the OSS shifted to live foxes coated with phosphorescent materials.

Painted foxes released in Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Park caused widespread panic among civilians. According to a National Park Police report, “Horrified citizens, shocked by the sudden sight of the leaping ghost-like animals, fled from the dark recesses of the park with the ‘screaming jeemies.’” A critical trial in the Chesapeake Bay confirmed that foxes jettisoned from a ship would then swim to the mainland but revealed a flaw: seawater washed away the glowy paint, and the foxes licked off the rest. One step forward, two steps back.

Ed was not one to back away from a challenge. He explained his new design: “We have made a stuffed fox with a human skull affixed to his head, equipped with a simple mechanical device for raising and lowering the jaw so as to simulate the opening and closing of the mouth of the skull. This stuffed figure will be painted to give the same luminous effect as in the case of the live foxes.” Unfortunately, the world was not ready for Ed’s foxes; Pandora’s box remained shut.

Just like MLK, Lytle S. Adams had a dream. Lytle’s dream, though, was to deploy the bat as a weapon of mass destruction. Enraged by the attack on Pearl Harbor, he framed his vision with religious zeal, claiming bats were “placed there by God to await this hour to play their part in the scheme of free human existence.” Lytle envisioned the Bat Bomb as delivering a “shock to the morale of the Japanese people as no amount of [ordinary] bombing could accomplish.”

He also did air mail

Harvard bat expert Donald Griffin remarked that failing to explore the bat bomb would constitute “suicidal folly.” President Roosevelt himself gave Lytle a nod of approval: “this man is not a nut.”

The bat bomb was intended to harness the natural roosting behavior of Mexican free-tailed bats to ignite fires across Japan’s wooden cities. Lytle enlisted a crack squadron of bat haters that included a former gangster, a mammalogist, and Louis Fieser, who invented napalm. Millions of dollars were poured into this bat-shaped sinkhole.

The plan was to forcibly hibernate the bats, strap them with napalm, and drop thousands of them over a city from a plane. Then, the bats would become hyperactive in midair and fly in a panic to the nearest dark roosting spot– theoretically within a paper Japanese house. The napalm would ignite, burning down the house, potentially the neighborhood, and definitely the bat. The scattering of the bats combined with the effect of napalm on paper houses was predicted to devastate Japanese cities.

Despite a few botched test runs (including accidentally setting a US military base aflame due to a mistimed de-hibernation), the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) endorsed the weapon as “effective.” The hardest part was determining the goldilocks zone: thaw the bats too early, and they spread too far from the drop point; thaw them too late, and they go splat. The program was cancelled in mid-1944 due to the Manhattan Project. The world never got to see the bat bomb come into fruition, and the bats lived to fight another day.

The third American weapon is actually the most normal. B. F. Skinner saw the pigeon and asked “what if this thing can guide a missile?” One pigeon fared poorly. But what one pigeon does badly, three can do well. At this point, the USA did not have any self-guided missiles. Skinner writes this about pigeons: “They are cheaper and more compact and, in particular, especially good at responding to patterns.” The pattern response is key. Also the compactness, because he was about to shove them into a missile.

At the core of the project was the use of pigeons as guidance mechanisms, transforming their natural behaviors into a technological asset. Using operant conditioning, Skinner trained pigeons to guide a moving projectile toward a target by pecking at specific points, noting that “the pigeon learned to reach any target within reach.”

You shove the pigeons in the holes.

The system evolved into a complex missile nose cone outfitted with “three translucent plates,” each linked to a pigeon trained to peck at a projected target image. The pigeons’ actions adjusted the missile’s trajectory in real time: they’d peck at a dot on the horizon, representing the target. To enhance reliability, Skinner implemented a redundancy system of three pigeons, deemed a “multiple bird unit,” with the majority vote determining the missile’s course.

A combination of anti-animal bias and the Manhattan project spelled the doom of this quixotic initiative. During a pivotal demonstration, the pigeons performed flawlessly, but as Skinner recounted, “the spectacle of a living pigeon carrying out its assignment… simply reminded the committee of how utterly fantastic our proposal was.”

As we can see, the British and the Soviets used animals to fill a tactical gap. The Americans were clearly more imaginative than practical. Dropping thousands to suicide bats from the sky? Animating a glowing fox? Shoving three pigeons inside of a missile? These were transformational technologies, reaching beyond the scope of available weapons.

I mean, just compare the rat bomb and the bat bomb. Imagine the blue sky above Tokyo as blotted out by a swarm of American bats descending from heaven, each strapped with a napalm jacket. And then imagine a dead rat with an explosive inside.

Or compare Operation Fantasia to the anti-tank dogs. One attempted to train a dog to run with a bomb toward a tank. The other tried to reanimate a glowing fox and swap its head with a mechanical skull. These maniacs were operating on different planes of existence.

So what can we learn from this? Honestly, it’s hard to say. The Americans took more risks in the animal weaponry realm during WWII. That much is clear. It’s likely because they had more resources and more breathing room. This allowed them to experiment. None of the American projects were deployed on the battlefield, though, and it’s possible that they were a waste of resources.

The only initiative that could reasonably be construed as a success was the rat bomb. This was the most practical one and the most boring. Certainly the least imaginative. Does this mean we should avoid risk? That we should only lean into risk when we have the resources to do so? That we should not try to weaponize animals in increasingly inventive ways? Unsure. The most concrete thing is that you should not take irresponsible risks, but understanding risk is probably one of the most important things in the world, so this is certainly easier said than done.

And there’s an interesting takeaway that has nothing to do with animals at all. The pigeon committee watched Skinner’s birds guide a missile with solid accuracy and still pulled the plug, because the sight of the pigeons jammed into a warhead struck them as absurd.

This is a permanent feature of frontier research: the people best equipped to evaluate an idea are usually too busy doing the work to sit on the committee. So the decision can fall to someone who knows enough to approve a budget but not enough to accurately assess the value of what’s actually in front of them. The rat bomb succeeded partly because it was legible. The bat bomb, the pigeon, and the glowing fox were all too strange to escape the laboratory. This friction persists today in scientific grants, VC funding, and much more.

There is not really a solution for this. The best (vague) idea I’ve come across to ameliorate this mismatch is called “embedded autonomy.” Basically, you have a highly dynamic and connected government bureaucracy that is resistant to corruption and extremely capable. Theoretically, they can bridge the gap between government and industry. Again, easier said than done.

But then again, maybe the higher-ups were correct that releasing a mechanized glowing fox onto the shores of Japan would be less effective than two nukes.

Also, this might be survivorship bias. It’s possible that the Italians were training a fleet of hippos to swim across the Atlantic and gobble up American children and crops until the Yankees surrendered. I guess we’ll never know.

Bibliography / Further Reading

Couffer, J. (2008). Bat Bomb: World War II’s Other Secret Weapon. University of Texas Press.

Lisle, J. (2023). The Dirty Tricks Department: Stanley Lovell, the OSS, and the Masterminds of World War II Secret Warfare. St. Martin’s Press.

Skinner, B. F. (1960). Pigeons in a Pelican. American Psychologist.

Aneculaesei, C. (2022, September 12). The Soviet Anti-Tank Dog. History of Yesterday. https://historyofyesterday.com/the-soviet-anti-tank-dog/

Glantz, D. M., & Orenstein, H. S. (Eds.). (1999). The Battle for Kursk 1943: The Soviet General Staff Study. Frank Cass.

Navarro, H. (2022, December 19). The Russian Anti-Tank Dogs of World War II. Factschology. https://factschology.com/factschology-articles-podcast/russian-anti-tank-dogs-world-war-ii

Medvedev, G. (n.d.). From the History of Military Dog Breeding. https://www.dog-shkola.ru/voen_dog.htm (Translated from Russian)

Anti-Tank Dog. (n.d.). https://army.armor.photos/engenear/sobaka-mina.shtml (Translated from Russian)

BBC History. (2014). SOE: Exploding Rats. https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/soe_gallery_05.shtml

Military History. (2012). Back to the Drawing Board—Exploding Rats! https://www.military-history.org/back-to-the-drawing-board/back-to-the-drawing-board-exploding-rats.htm

The Guardian. (1999, October 27). How Exploding Rats Went Down a Bomb. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/oct/27/richardnortontaylor

With the internet came a wave of influencers, thinkers (and grandparents on WhatsApp) that could share their ideas more broadly. This reduced the influence of the established sources and allowed for more dissent and contrarianism. Undoubtedly the impact of the internet in how information is shared and verified has been huge, though it’d be hard to find consensus as to whether this impact has been net positive or negative. It increased the ability of whistleblowers and marginalized people to share their challenges, though some say it’s led to polarization, mental health issues and the spread of misinformation.

However, this trend, of increasing ease of communication, may finally be saturating as the most powerful people in the world can (and sometimes do) communicate with billions of people from atop their toilet seat. We have, of course, benefited immensely from the ease at which ideas could be communicated. This ease has enabled closer interpersonal relationships, easier access to information and lots of scientific progress. Though, as we will undoubtedly discover, easy communication combined with a massive increase of content will have idiosyncratic effects.

Thus far, every technological advance has been constrained by a tight bottleneck in that for any message to be communicated and spread, it required significant labour and human capital to craft said message. What that means is that the very act of reading something necessitated that significant time went into creating it, and that necessity acts as a filter preventing the most unhinged or useless sentences from being written to begin with. Newspapers may not have been elixirs of truth; however, you knew that if you were reading something that someone, somewhere thought it worthwhile to write it, and had the ability, funding and backing required to disseminate it to you. This filter has been collapsing for years, as we’ve made it easier to share ideas, even without the “proper” credentials. Today, this trend is accelerating dramatically as the cost of creating content collapses to near zero.

LLMs can generate text, audio, and video with increasing quality. Risks of technological addiction aside, this glut of content has massive implications as to the spread of disinformation and will change how people decide what to believe. Not only does the vast amount of generated content make it more difficult to know what is true, it also makes it considerably easier to dismiss quality content as fake. Already we’re overwhelmed by the vastness of information to be consumed online. People grapple with the difficulty of discerning what can be trusted when so much conflicting information is out there. This is Brandolini’s law on steroids. Most people will always resort to their pre-existing beliefs and tribal affiliations, even when they try to expand their horizons, though we need good methods for when we are, in fact, optimizing for truth. What happens when the amount of content multiplies by 10, 10², 10³, 10^x? And what happens when this content is designed to trigger our emotions, beliefs, or trigger certain actions in the real world?

Deepfakes, when they proliferate, by default lead to a low trust world with conflicting information emerging from different sources and no obvious way for people to determine what is actually true. Mitigating this risk is tough. Any centralized efforts to determine truth will be faulty and is unlikely to be fully embraced. Technological solutions, like watermarking technology or AI detectors are undermined by open-source AI, and the fact that many are unable or unwilling to determine whether a piece of media was fabricated. Note that Apple has thus far declined to use the standards set by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) allowing us to determine the source and edits on images based on cryptographic metadata.

Prediction markets, which merit an article of their own, are one method of aggregating accurate information. Robin Hanson has written extensively about their potential to revolutionize how we decide what is true, though his vision has yet to be implemented successfully. He has proposed Futarchy, a form of governance in which democratically elected officials set goals and prediction markets are used to determine the best way to achieve them. Conditional markets, such as “If policy X occurs, will outcome Y follow?” provide incentive to calibrate correctly, and even if X never occurs, money can simply be returned to holders. A fascinating idea, this remains a fantasy as current prediction markets have seen little real world utility and can only be applied to events with clear yes/no resolution criteria. Though with prediction markets rising to prominence time will tell how powerful they become, for good or for bad.

Often when arguing with friends, or when people need a quick reality check, they’ll resort to asking an LLM. It doesn’t matter if they’re always correct, it still provides legitimacy to your opinion and can serve as a check on your intuition. This is like the role Wikipedia has traditionally served. As LLMs become more grounded in truth (better models paired with better scaffolding) people will naturally begin to trust them more just as they did with Wikipedia, though with the added benefits that AI is not as rigid and can answer any question you have. This approach is not without risk, as providers playing with the training data or system prompt can render wildly different responses, and LLMs will continue to hallucinate and misinterpret user questions for years to come, providing false reassurance. Though as models improve and trust in them grows, they will inevitably become an increasingly used tool to figure stuff out.

Another solution, that has seen success in the real world, is the Community Notes feature. Recently added to Twitter (now known as X), it uses an open-source algorithm that allows users to create a note providing context or a fact check to a given Tweet. It uses a bridging-based ranking system to ensure there is consensus. If a note is ranked highly by other users that tend to disagree with each other, it’ll be more likely to be accepted and prominently featured below the tweet, which serves to provide useful context or limit the spread of disinformation. In my experience, it’s highly effective, and does not limit free speech, without relying on centralized fact-checkers that are not always broadly trusted.

Now that technology has reduced the cost of creating content to near-zero, scarcity has moved beyond finding information into determining what is worth our attention and what is true. We need to determine the best methods for sifting for truth and how we can have institutions that encourage truth to become consensus. Only time will tell what this looks like.

In summary:

• Over time technology has made it easier to communicate, today it’s making it easier to generate messages too.

• While ease of communication is incredibly useful, the overwhelming volume of information, accelerated by LLMs and hard to filter effectively, makes it hard to know what’s true.

• It’s unlikely traditional media will regain its former glory, though other decentralized forms of verification such as prediction markets, LLMs, and community notes will likely become larger features of our epistemic arena, at least for those seeking truth.