Debbie Foster

Personalized AI will need to store details of past conversations, so that it can write our likes and dislikes to memory, and choose appropriate words and actions even if weeks or months have since gone by. Unfortunately, however, LLMs are deep neural networks, which learn in minuscule increments from millions of repeated data samples. They don't

The Aztec method for developing good habits—what we would call virtues—relies on progressive exposure paired with reflection. Great courage is built through small, everyday acts, just as prudence, temperance, and other virtues are.

being an adult was all about not pointing out the obvious in situations where the obvious was too painful to take in.

I count myself among a growing number of scientists who believe that the construction of self identity is not much better than the Lo-fi representations of other people we hold in our heads.

In 2023, researchers at the Kellogg School of Management found that the way algorithms filter content has fundamentally changed how we engage in social learning. We've always acquired new behaviors by mimicking the actions of others, but algorithms bring us content representing the most extreme behaviors of others. Again, this leads to us thinking

[Samuel] Delany prefers the term "given world" to "real world," since in his view it better explains the construction and fictionalization of reality: this is just the world we have been given to believe in as real.

Even with the clocks, the subway seems to hover outside of time, a "heterotopia," or a space that exists beyond the reach of normal human systems and social mores. Foucault saw heterotopias everywhere: graveyards, hospitals, boats. In heterotopias, certain inviolable binaries "that our institutions and practices have not yet dared to break down"

But more advanced meditatio involved linking memories together and in the process “remembering”

Eroticism is one of the few forms of play permitted to adults. It occurs in a world parallel to the habitual one; it frees us to adopt new personas; it has a tendency to generate enduring communities whose members are "apart together" even when its excesses have come to an end; and, finally, it is dispensable and therefore indispensable.