Society

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.

Open any consumer electronics catalog from around the 1980s to the early 2000s and you are overwhelmed by a smörgåsbord of devices, covering any audio-visual and similar entertainment and hobby nee…

Age verification isn't just for adult websites.

Three years in, one of AI’s enduring impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.

When you factor in all the data points, we have an anxious workforce, a business sector seeking opportunity in inflation, and an avalanche of bad policy bearing down on everyone.

Roger Alford, former number two at the Justice Department Antitrust Division, speaks out. Here’s what was important in what he said.

A repost of one of my favorite essays that I've written.

On Power, Radical Education and Automation.

You can still vote. It just might not mean much.

How free time gets conscripted into the service of work