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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It is a cliché that we live in an information age. And it is true that much of what we interact with today comes in the form of information. But an unfortunate side effect of the information idiom is the idea that everything is a form of speech and therefore exempt from regulation.
~ Tim Wu via The New York Times
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I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid
conforming to my own tastes.
~ Marcel Duchamp
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There is something deeper about the damage done by the government, too. The Anthropic-DoW skirmish is the first major public debate that is truly about where the proper locus of control over frontier AI should be. Our public institutions behaved erratically, maliciously, and without strategic clarity. Our political leaders conveyed little understanding of their own actions, to say nothing of the technology and its stakes. They got off on an extraordinarily bad footing, and it is hard to imagine them ever recovering, because they do not seem to care about improvement.
~ Dean Ball via Hyperdimensional
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By 11th grade, the high-IQ students and their parents have spent so many years immersed in the college-admissions game that they, like 18th-century aristocrats evaluating which family has the most noble line, are able to make all sorts of fine distinctions about which universities have the most prestige: Princeton is better than Cornell; Williams is better than Colby.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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Dario Amodei, who has a mop of curly hair and perennially askew glasses, gives the impression of a restless savant who has been patiently coached to restrain his spasmodic energy. He was later joined at OpenAI by his younger sister, Daniela, a humanities type partial to Joan Didion.
~ Gideon Lewis-Kraus via The New Yorker
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All true opinions are living, and show their life by being capable of nourishment; therefore of change. But their change is that of a tree — not of a cloud.
~ John Ruskin
The moral confusion on too many campuses after the October 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis fits a familiar pattern. The acceptability of the speech depends on the speaker. Individuals from oppressed groups are given leeway to target oppressor groups through disruptions and threats. This victimology allows Palestinians and their supporters (the oppressed) to target, intimidate, and harass Jews (the oppressors).
~ Ben Sasse via The Atlantic
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