culture

Online political debate mainly involves cherry-picking the most outlandish members of the enemy side and presenting them as indicative in order to make the entire side look crazy.

The culture war is essentially just each side sneering at the other side's lunatics.

Part of the problem with the Lean Startup mindset is that it sees life and work as an optimization problem. The point is to help people live a good life, not just an efficient life. The goal is human flourishing, not convenience. The goal is a good future, not just a technically advanced future.

The merging of personalisation and generation represents the ultimate optimisation for media production. Everybody satisfied, all of the time.

But such a simplistic optimisation overlooks the broader implications – those that differentiate entertainment from culture. They inspire a cascade of questions, such as how is human culture changed if we

... See more

In some ways, book reviewers, critics, book club hosts, readers, and even the writers themselves, are engaged in a long war against the idea of fiction itself, involving the reverse-engineering and geolocation of various hurts and harms in the psychology of the writer. We are, at least in America, a nation trained in the arts of literary analysis,... See more

In-spire: breathing in, breathing out, huffing from the sense that there is more to life than materialism (nihilistic metaphysics), utilitarianism (nihilistic ethics), and small-talk (nihilistic speech).

“There’s no way to make these systems without human labor at the level of informing the ground truth of the data — reinforcement learning with human feedback, which again is just kind of tech-washing precarious human labor. It’s thousands and thousands of workers paid very little, though en masse it’s very expensive, and there’s no other way to... See more