No new polls were added to the RCP Polling Average yesterday, so the numbers remain the same: Biden leads in the national polls by an average of 6.5%. That lead, if it were to hold up on election day, is probably enough to ensure an electoral college victory.
Pundit-World is mostly talking about the impact that the coming fight over Ruth Bader Ginsburg's replacement will have on the election. Plus there's more chatter about the upcoming debates.
The always interesting Andrew Sullivan has a fascinating piece at his Weekly Dish. Here's a longish excerpt, but do read the whole thing.
For Facebook and Google and Instagram and Twitter, the business goal quickly became maximizing and monetizing human attention via addictive dopamine hits. Attention, they meticulously found, is correlated with emotional intensity, outrage, shock and provocation. Give artificial intelligence this simple knowledge about what distracts and compels humans, let the algorithms do their work, and the profits snowball. The cumulative effect — and it’s always in the same incendiary direction — is mass detachment from reality, and immersion in tribal fever.
With each passing second online, news stories, graphic videos, incendiary quotes, and outrages demonstrate their stunning utility to advertisers as attention seizers, are endlessly tweaked and finessed by AI to be even more effective, and thereby prime our brains for more of the same. They literally restructure our minds. They pickle us in propaganda. They use sophisticated psychological models to trap, beguile, outrage, and prompt us to seek more of the same.
Alternative views, unpleasant facts, discomforting arguments, contextualizing statistics, are, with ever-greater efficiency, filtered out of what our eyes can see and our minds absorb. And what we therefore believe becomes more fixed, axiomatic, self-reinforcing, and self-affirming. We become siloed into two affective tribes, with dehumanization of each other deepening with every news cycle.
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