With repetition, most of us will become inured to all the dirty tricks of Facebook attention-manipulation

In my latest Locus column, “Persuasion, Adaptation, and the Arms Race for Your Attention,” I suggest that we might be too worried about the seemingly unstoppable power of opinion-manipulators and their new social media superweapons.

Not because these techniques don’t work (though when someone who wants to sell you persuasion tools tells you that they’re amazing and unstoppable, some skepticism is warranted), but because a large slice of any population will eventually adapt to any stimulu...