David Pennington

The happiness that someone like Mark misses is unreal and unhealthy. He needs to learn to want a different type of relative happiness – that is, a state of reasonable contentment, with intermittent joy and pain, which, unlike the myth of a permanent bliss, can potentially be achieved. Switching from one goal to the other will involve a process of... See more

You can do anything!

That’s the mantra, and you hear it everywhere. All the messages circulating in our society seem to converge on that same imperative.

But this soon turns into: You must do everything . The symptoms are everywhere—fitness programs, self-help podcasts, inspirational quotes on social media, vitamins and nutritional supplements,... See more

This idea is nothing new and ever more relevant in our age of digital detoxes and celebrities who are famous for being famous. We know what we want, we have made that choice, and the only chance for improvement is a gritty dedication to your discipline.

The question isn’t whether we can build cool things under authoritarianism. It’s whether those things will still matter in a system that punishes critical, independent thinking.

I’d be even more aware from now on! I’d remember that machine learning has been defined by the people who want me to believe it works the way they say it does. But an algorithm can’t really observe anything. So it can’t really measure my behavior, and so it can’t really discover anything for me, or about me!