Society

No.369 — African time concepts and futures thinking ⊗ ChatGPT’s memory dossier ⊗ Resilient food systems ⊗ Artificial light has essentially lengthened birds’ day

How community-first thinking can help newsrooms survive AI

How Many in the Foreign Policy Establishment Fooled Themselves About Trump

Alberta populism has deep origins in a group of people who have long harboured a libertarian utopia for Alberta. Danielle Smith is the most recent manifestation of this wave of thought. The Jacobin…

Today Dave Snowden has published a significant post outlining his team’s work and thinking about safety: “we must stop trying to write better rules and start building better processes for rapid dec…

Want rule of law? That’s premium.

They hoped to make tomorrow’s medicines. Then came Trump.

Wherever there is autonomy, trust must follow. If we raise children to go off on their own, they need to be autonomous and we need to trust them. (Parenting is a school for learning how to trust.) If we make … Continue reading →

From Patriots to Authoritarians in One Generation

Somebody is throwing things out of a window at the White House. That’s what the post said. Sure enough there was also a video of the very thing described. That is the opening line to a Frank O’Hara poem I’m certain of it someone else said and

How do people or companies with vested interests spread ignorance and obfuscate knowledge? Georgina Kenyon finds there is a term which defines this phenomenon.

How do I find a drug dealer who will sell me these dank Canadian vaccine doses? Without needing to risk crossing a border myself. Will I need to use cryptocurrency for this, since buying illegal drugs is still the only use case for Dunning-Krugerrands? (Oh, that and paying ransoms.) News releases from both Pfizer and Moderna say the new mRNA shots will target the LP.8.1 variant, a descendant ...

In their bestseller AI Snake Oil, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor open their chapter on "How Predictive AI Goes Wrong" with a story from Mount St. Mary's University: how, in 2015, the school had conducted a survey of freshmen to identify ones who were struggling – an attempt, it said, to

No one likes to be wrong. But perhaps what bothers people even more than making a mistake is being made a fool, being tricked or duped. It's no surprise then that many folks bristle at the assertion that "AI" is a con. They stamp their feet and insist that no,

Recently Beth, an online anarchist friend, commented that “people’s models for genocide are wrong.” Genocide “rarely looks like the Holocaust,” involving the killing of “thousands and millions in camps.” It’s more likely to result from “ordinary prisons and deportations run so badly people start dying. It is an extension, not a break with everyday abuses.”...

Trading Democracy for the death of DEI

Like fungi, we will decompose the rot around us to create something new. On mycelium, permacomputing, and the fractals of a greater pattern.

In Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, Alec MacGillis notes that the city at the center of a circle containing the largest population within a one-day drive is Dayton, Ohio. You c…

Intelligence Can't Compete with Tribal Loyalty

What Matt Zwolinski Gets Wrong About Left-Libertarianism Over at The Bleeding Heart Libertarian,1 Matt Zwolinski has a recent post about what we left libertarians get right and get wrong. According to Matt, we left libertarians are correct in going after traditional right libertarians for being vulgar libertarians. Further, he argues that we left libertarians are correct...

America is not a good place to be an early adult.

Readers react to a column by David Brooks analyzing the gloominess trend in the United States.