With the advent of social media and the internet the entire landscape of speech has changed. For as long as the concept of freedom of speech it has always been assumed that more speech was better, but what if we have finally reached the point where there can be too much speech, that in fact the quantity of speech is now such that it acts as a form of censorship?

This week I had the flu, so I decided to take the low energy approach of covering three topics briefly, rather than one in depth. I start off talking about the new LDS First Presidency, than move to the recent excitement about Steven Pinker, and finally provide on update on the progress of the Pervnado.

What all of these topics have in common is that we don't appear to be reaching any kind of equilibrium point. Both sides appear to just be getting angrier, and the question, as always is how is it going to end?

I spend this episode commenting on Scott Alexander’s epic Meditations on Moloch post. In particular I look at the way his conception of Moloch interacts with religion and Fermi’s paradox.

My annual prediction episode, of course since I have a set of permanent predictions, mostly I'm looking at whether 2017 brought any of them any closer to completion. There was some progress with AI, and with nuclear war getting more likely, but nothing earth-shattering. 

On top of the raw predictions I explain why the future is dominated by Black swans and being antifragile is the only way to deal with unexpected and impactful events because the future is not going to go the way we think it will.