🔦 food for thought

At present, we seem to be suffering from a widespread failure of literary imagination. We have become worse at imagining the experiences of other people, less inclined to credit these experiences as being as valid and real as our own. Why is this? In part, I think, because of the methods by, and pace at which, we acquire our stories. After all, eve... See more

@dwarkesh_sp I think this comes down to a version of agency. An LLM doesn't sit around and "ponders" things. Would Newton have made his discoveries if his only mode of interaction was reacting to questions from the people around him?

That’s because first computer culture, then our broader culture, has been colonized by people for whom the only truth is the power of the computer. For them there is no mystery that can’t be solved with computers, eventually. There is nothing to say except that everything will someday be quantifiable and calculable, and that the best course of acti... See more

If a society is a person, politics is like the person “thinking out loud” its problems.

We’ve come through 75 years where having neighbors was essentially optional: if you had a credit card, you could get everything you needed to survive dropped off at your front door. But the next 75 years aren’t going to be like that; we’re going to need to return to the basic human experience of relying on the people around you. We’re going to need... See more

“Practice” made its way into our language by way of the Greek word praktikē , meaning “active,” and the Old French pratique , which actually means “experience.”

Process, on the other hand, originates in Latin as procedere and in French as proces , which mean something more akin to “a methodical series of steps.” Those steps lead toward something, as... See more