juliana ong

One recent study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that while men in the workplace may view women’s status gains positively, their power gains are, in contrast, perceived as negative and threatening. So threatening, in fact, that the researcher behind the study, Sonya Mishra, observed that they push men toward more... See more

The authors link this to the so-called Tocqueville paradox, which suggests that social progress can, paradoxically, lead to greater frustration.

I’ve come to believe the greater danger is sometimes tolerable and lukewarm mediocrity. This is because catastrophe forces a change, but mediocrity can keep you still. You don’t quit because things are “fine”, but that haze of “fine” can subtly eat away a decade, or even a whole life.

Whether it’s cutting it, braiding it, straightening it, touching it, or not touching it, hair has long held personal, cultural, and spiritual significance to generations of individuals and the communities they inhabit. If the body keeps the score, hair certainly does some record-keeping of its own.

Sometimes I think of the LLM and RL schools of AGI as two theories of intelligence. Is intelligence about being able to answer any question, or being able to achieve any goal? Now that we’ve conquered the former, attention has turned to the latter mission.

This is why the right gaze, the right conversation, can change you down to the grain. Emotional heat loosens the architecture of the self, and in the presence of someone who sees you vividly, the molten structure reforms around their image of you. What remains afterwards is stronger, different, marked by the shape of their attention. Attention... See more