Top Highlights

• Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, has done research suggesting that identity is a stronger cause of political polarization than ideology, but the two are hard to tease apart, even in principle.19 Distinguishing whether identity drives ideology or ideology drives identity is a chicken-and-egg problem. The larger po...
• orders require constitutions: formal, political ones, or informal, culturally embodied ones—but, in either case, systems of rules which channel human energies in pro-social directions. All three of the great liberal social systems—economic, political, epistemic—are traceable to breakthroughs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. All
• Truth-friendly digital architectures are possible and indeed are already emerging, as digital platforms begin to take on institutional responsibilities to truth.
• doings, and the essential enablers, connectors, and transmitters are institutions. Institutions propagate and enforce norms and rules, evaluate and certify credentials, set agendas and direct resources, enforce accountability, and train future generations to do all of those other things, and more. That is why, today, the institutions and norms of l...
• obvious. Modern liberalism—what the philosopher Karl Popper and subsequently others have called the open society—is defined by three social systems: economic, political, and epistemic. They handle social decisionmaking about resources, power, and truth. The epistemic system is often analogized to the economic system, through the metaphor of the mar...