Mary Martin

Taking the green pill is depressing, socially alienating, and deeply countercultural; those who make the leap often struggle to get their loved ones to see the obvious, all while being told by society that they are actually the weird ones. I’ve been one of these weird people since relatively early in life, and most of my time on Earth has been... See more

Asking people to change themselves instead of changing the work environment around them is a strategy that not only wastes resources but may also infuriate employees, who feel like all the responsibility for dealing with a toxic work environment and unrealistic demands rests on their shoulders alone.

Though our collective forgetting is enormous, it is mostly unremarkable to those who study the transmission of culture. What puzzles me, and others who study transmission, is why so much unwritten knowledge has survived. Despite the brittleness of cultural practices, skills proliferate with and without records, chaining generation to generation,... See more

Are mental health awareness efforts contributing to the rise in reported mental health problems? A call to test the prevalence inflation hypothesis

It is predictable, then, that users are consistently fooled into believing that their AI companions are conscious persons, capable of feeling real emotions.

Maybe AI doesn’t raise the bar. Maybe it reveals how low we’ve let the bar drop. In a world where ghosting is normal and attentiveness is rare, a chatbot that listens is radical.

Whatever action I take, walking, eating and excreting, incurs a cost to other lives, whether by killing and eating them directly, or by eating foods that they could otherwise have lived on. The most extreme impact my life has on other species is extinction, not just of their physical presence, but also of their memories, both those acquired within... See more