I just read "whoa" as "who-ah". Might be time to take a break from writing.
Seth Frey
@enfascination.com
Democracy is not a kind of process, it’s a kind of person. It’s a project of human development. Prof in computational commons, collective action, and social emergence. Internet as a governance lab. Science towards nescience enfascination.com/research
This is a wildly prescient story about Chicago's proto-RFK Jr., in charge of public health during the Spanish Flu. He thought beer killed malaria and that bathing could kill you. He had a feud with an actual TB doctor, who insisted bathing is good. He bullied the TB doctor until he killed himself.
It happened with such frog boiling slowness that I’ve missed it for a while, but Politico is now right of The Hill.
Politico@politico.com · 2d agoThis week's Politico Magazine cover story: Data center backlash is now a potent enough force in U.S. politics that it's become a New Luddite movement. And Tennessee Dem Justin Pearson has become the new face of the growing backlash against AI. 🔗 politi.co/4fBahjp Also in this issue 🧵👇
Often you catch students cheating with AI because they post hallucinated URLs. But some you catch because the real URL they provide has "utm_source=chatgpt.com" in the arguments.
🚨🚨🚨 With the confirmation of Clayton, Trump has loyalists in place at the power agencies who will work to enable his election subversion schemes for 2026 and 2028. They're not incompetent, and they're putting loyalists in beneath them. The threat is far greater than in 2020.
I thought this was an Onion headline at first.
NEWSMAX@newsmax.com · last wk.Eye Contact Key to Babies' Language Development
Student just learned the hard way to never plug a full text of an advanced draft into AI for review, because what you get back will be an evil doppleganger of your paper with indistinguishable fake versions of your original real citations.
Why do AI people think that the data center uproars have anything to do with data centers? They're about the Faustian Bargain that the AI industry didn't have to be, and people rightfully have no trust.
True: there's a whole generation that wasn't ready when corpo media figured out how to get in their heads. ht @andrewperpetua.bsky.social
I want to devote myself to building a college that ordinary people use to develop themselves into their own place in the future. You’d think it would be easy to get the resources for that, but it’s a big project just getting on the radar.
When knowing right means doing wrong: Ethics on the frontier of knowledge. I've been sitting on this for years: when do you have to do wrong to be upright? When you're on the edge of knowledge.
When knowing right means doing wrong: Ethics on the frontier of knowledge – enfascination
enfascination.com
Many tech types think democracy is too much work for people to do well. We're busy. So most AI solutions offload the work to agents. But to help communities self-govern, AI should build everyone's capacity to deliberate, participate, and lead in everyday life. When all are experts it's easy work.
Our billionaires are victims of a cruel social experiment in which we make them permanently unrelatable by giving them everything everyone else needs + telling them everything they say is visionary, all to prove that abundance is soul-poison because our humanity is rooted in relying on each other.
A colleague, trained as an orthodox economist, and observing that her behavior was never consistent with predictions of economic rationality, thought for years that something about her was off. It was years before she realized it was the theory that was wrong
"On Seton's 21st birthday his father presented him with an invoice for all of the expenses connected with his childhood and youth, including the fee charged by the doctor who delivered him. ... He paid the bill, but never spoke to his father again." ... on Scouting founder Ernest Thompson Seton
Ernest Thompson Seton - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Nothing like a good abstract: """ ...Archaeological and anthropological evidence suggests that a culture of aggressive egalitarianism may have thwarted the emergence of enduring wealth inequality until the Late Neolithic, ...
If you’re in Cambridge, find out what a historian entomologist and social scientist have in common? Actually we’re not totally sure. But it’s not a joke.
""" Publications like Georgia’s Weekly Examiner argued that if white people had to pay taxes to educate Black people, “the extraction of white wealth for benefit of Black people would never stop.” ... It was, white leaders charged, a diet of “social engineering” indoctrination of children. ...
Some set up casinos on boats to evade gambling prohibitions. Others set up schools on boats to evade literacy prohibitions.
Anti-literacy Laws in the United States Once Prevented Blacks from Getting an Education - TalkAfricana
Anti-literacy Laws in the United States once forbade slaves to learn to read or write and making it a crime for others to teach them.
talkafricana.com
We live in a society with laws, a social order. You can't put upper-case characters or spaces in your public wifi password. Avoid hyphens or underscores, we don't need your handholding. One special character is fine, **at the beginning or end**.
The good news: There’s a DSM for Black communities, tuned specifically to their specific psychiatric needs and context. The bad news: It’s called the BDSM
When some is consistent with rationality but against reason, the choice is easy. This disqualifies most rationalism.
One thing I love about Europe is you can find basically every political position
Birthday stats: * If you have 23 friends, 2 of them probably share a birthday (birthday problem). * If you have 365 friends, you probably celebrate a birthday 248 days of the year (68% rule). * If you have 2364 friends, you probably celebrate one every day of the year (coupon collector's problem).
"The President may err ... Congress may decide amiss ... But if the Supreme Court is ever composed of imprudent or bad men, the Union may be plunged into anarchy or civil war." —Tocqueville
Most pro life youth I’ve heard put it this way: “I think abortion is wrong but i won’t impose that on others”. In other words I think most pro life youth are pro choice.