Cultural Observations

Each generation has different things that force the generation to grow up. Maybe for our grandparents it was World War II. You know? For us…[we] have to put away childish things and discipline ourself about how much time do I spend being passively entertained?

The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours. A recent article in The Times found that on average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens.

Standing in front of all my stuff, it hit me that all of it used to be money, and all of that used to be time. I was standing in front of the metabolic waste of my existence, materialized.

Twenty-five years ago Allan Bloom proclaimed a heresy: The supposed idealism of the 1960s was in fact a veneer hiding a new barbarism. He saw that our elite liberal culture has a very definite vision, however much it talks about diversity, multiculturalism, and the like: the relativism of moral truth. This anti-dogmatic dogma, he thought, is... See more

Dismantling current gen ed requirement to align with a new upstream mission will be hard. First, state boards must put a sunset date on all gen ed credit requirements that measure AI-replicable outcomes, replacing them with requirements focused on knowledge production and validation. Second, accrediting bodies must revise their standards to... See more

Physics may try its damnedest to instill in us existential dread at an incomprehensible universe, but biology will always be the most offensive science. For physics merely deals with the nature of reality, whereas biology contends with our own nature, and so it repeatedly runs up against wishful thinking about who we are. Biology forms the... See more