Algorithms now curate what billions of people hear, read, and see — and most of us treat this as a neutral convenience. But the 11th-century Persian polymath Al-Biruni noticed something about information gatekeeping long before the internet: every system of transmission distorts what it transmits, and the distortion tends to serve whoever controls the transmission. He documented this while translating Sanskrit texts into Arabic, watching how each cultural intermediary quietly reshaped the ideas. What he couldn't have anticipated is a gatekeeper with no cultural agenda at all — only an optimization target. Engagement maximization isn't bias toward any worldview; it's bias toward whatever provokes the strongest reaction, which turns out to hollow out the very concepts — beauty, the sacred, moral seriousness — that give sustained meaning. The insight is less about filter bubbles and more about what happens to a civilization's interior life when its most intimate experiences are quietly sorted by a function that has never had one.

What is one thing you have changed your mind about in the last year — and can you trace exactly where the information that shifted you actually came from?

Drawing from Islamic Philosophy of Science and Cross-Cultural Translation — Al-Biruni (Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni)