Please, citizens of Twitter, stop rewarding hand-wavy blowhards who write 37-part threads that Explain Everything. Yes, they hate who you hate and they replace uncertainty with certainty. Yes, they make you feel good.

But they're making you dumber. They're making us all dumber.

In Future Babble, I tried to explain 1) that the record of overconfident blowhards in understanding the world and predicting the future is dismal and 2) why we keep going back to those sorts of people despite 1. I wrote it a decade ago, before social media. 2/

Social media didn't alter the dynamics I discussed. It accelerated them, by an order of magnitude. Snake oil salesmen who once had to travel town to town now can reach the world without leaving home. So their ranks have proliferated. Production and sales have exploded. 3/

Then came the perfect storm: President Chaos plus global pandemic. Uncertainty exploded. 4/

Uncertainty is the key. We have a profound psychological need for a sense of control. At the core of control is knowing what's happening and what is coming. Looking around and having no clue what the f*** is happening, or will happen, is terrifying. 5/

I mean that literally. Smart torturers cultivate uncertainty, knowing it can be more agonizing than physical pain. Quoting (from memory) a CIA interrogation manual: "The anticipation of the blow can be more damaging than the blow itself." There's heaps of research on this. 6/

The creepiest: Researchers monitored the physiological signs of fear in volunteers who received electric shocks. One group was told you will get 20 strong shocks. The other was told you will get 17 mild shocks, interspersed randomly with three strong. Guess who suffered more? 7/

Today, every single one of us is like one of those test subjects bracing for the next shock. Will it be mild or strong? We are desperate to know. So desperate that even being told "it will be strong" is experienced as psychological relief. Because "at least we know." 8/

So who do we want to hear from now? The genuine expert who emphasizes the gaps in our knowledge and gives an even-handed assessment of all the evidence? Hell, no! We want to hear from the blowhard who tells us a simple, clear, and above all confident story. 9/

The blowhards deliver what we psychologically crave, so we gulp that snake oil down.

But it's poisonous. We think it makes us see more clearly but what we see are delusions. That's dangerous at the best of times. But in these times? We can't keep suckering ourselves. 10/