Brandon Marcus

The core paradox: as soon as something is identified as “good,” it becomes optimizable. As soon as something is optimizable, it is scaled and mass-pro

When we forget that earlier world, we misunderstand our own, and wind up with anti-vaxxers and other conspiracy theorists. When humanity forgets how i

How to retain what we read John Locke kept a commonplace book for decades, hand-copying passages from his reading into a blank book he'd indexed hims

If AI capability depends on the social complexity of human language production—and if AI deployment systematically reduces that complexity through cog

Information and attention: A century in which the key to human history is not how the economy grew, but rather how humans learned to give attention to

Murdoch suggests that the ego makes it difficult to properly attend to one another. We often fail to see others adequately because the ego gets in the

what gives categories their authority—what makes them appear natural to us—is the fact that they are collectively crafted, sustained, and enforced. Th