Persuasion, Adaptation, and the Arms Race for Your Attention

For my latest podcast, I read my January 2018 Locus column, Persuasion, Adaptation, and the Arms Race for Your Attention.

The essay proposes that we are 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...