A system can tell you where a man is. It cannot tell you what his death will mean for a nation. Such systems are trained on behavior, not on meaning — they can track what an adversary does but not what he fears, honors, remembers or would die for.
~ Yonatan Touval via The New York Times
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It was fine to take a devil-may-care attitude toward automated cat-identification. But it wouldn’t be fair, for example, to have a machine evaluate an applicant’s mortgage eligibility in an opaque way. And, if you employed a robot to keep your house clean of dog hair, you wanted to be certain that it would vacuum the couch, not kill the dog.
~ Gideon Lewis-Kraus via The New Yorker
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By pretty much every measure, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has defied the expectations of its early observers. In the years immediately after its founding—as Mormons were being chased across the country by state-sanctioned mobs—skeptics predicted that the movement would collapse before the century was out. Instead, it became one of the fastest-growing religions in the world. The Church now averages nearly 700 converts a day; it has temples in 66 countries and financial reserves rumored to exceed $100 billion.
~ McKay Coppins via The Atlantic
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By reimagining college-admissions criteria, James Conant hoped to spark a social and cultural revolution. The age of the Well-Bred Man was vanishing. The age of the Cognitive Elite was here.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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To meet with the prophet during a plague, certain protocols must be followed. It’s a gray spring morning in Salt Lake City, and downtown Temple Square is deserted, giving the place an eerie, postapocalyptic quality. The doors of the silver-domed tabernacle are locked; the towering neo-Gothic temple is dark. To enter the Church Administration Building, I meet a handler who escorts me through an underground parking garage; past a security checkpoint, where my temperature is taken; up a restricted elevator; and then, finally, into a large, mahogany-walled conference room. After a few minutes, a side door opens and a trim 95-year-old man in a suit greets me with a hygienic elbow bump.
~ McKay Coppins via The Atlantic
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As long as the university is mostly a vehicle for class reproduction, the morality that it produces will be tailored for an audience of fellow college graduates. Is it any wonder that years of liberal theorizing on how to reach non-college-educated voters have failed?
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
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The reason that tech generally — and coders in particular — see L.L.M.s differently than everyone else is that in the creative disciplines, L.L.M.s take away the most soulful human parts of the work and leave the drudgery to you. In coding, L.L.M.s take away the drudgery and leave the human, soulful parts to you.
~ Anil Dash via The New York Times
Upon reflection, it makes sense that the British are reading Breakneck and Abundance. Every problem in the lawyerly society is worse in the UK. I thought that California’s high-speed rail project was an embarrassment; then I learned about the Leeds tram network.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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To cast our recurring panics as technophobic reruns is to misidentify what animates them most: Not fear, but helplessness.
~ John Herrman
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Apocalyptic belief behaves like its own psychological operating system. It’s not just pessimism or generalized anxiety with a religious coat of paint. People who believe humans will cause the end see global threats as more urgent and support far more extreme measures to avert them. Those who think God has circled a date on a divine calendar are much less inclined to risk radical action. Why swing the steering wheel if the crash was scheduled before you were born?
~ John Mac Ghlionn via The Hill
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