Tara McMullin

I didn’t know that all the therapy and journaling and meditation and “work on myself” I did would eventually start to pay off, and that after a lifetime of worrying that people might not like me, I would learn to love and trust myself enough that it would finally stop mattering so much what strangers thought and I could FREAKING RELAX.

10

I didn’t... See more

Generative models should not be invested with the capability to arbitrate reality, and any discussion that forwards that idea shifts more power to the companies that amass the data and build the models. The only knowledge that models produce is about the composition of their training data and the methods they use to process and organize it. Those... See more

And I realised that if you ever hear someone explaining things in terms of a long list of caveats, the odds are good that you’re looking at tacit knowledge in action.

I think of a comparably personal comment I once heard my colleague Judith Shapiro, former provost of Bryn Mawr and then president of Barnard, make to a group of young people about what they should expect from college: “You want the inside of your head to be an interesting place to spend the rest of your life.”

When we place our faith in hard work, we’re wishing for the creation of character; but we’re also hoping, or expecting, that the labour market will allocate incomes fairly and rationally. And there’s the rub, they do go together. Character can be created on the job only when we can see that there’s an intelligible, justifiable relation between past... See more

Even when we allow for all the investors who need to be paid back, and all the expenses that need be deducted, there is always going to be some amount of money reasonably available in the “WORKER COMPENSATION” column. Why is it such a chore to agree on what that amount is?

The most intractable problem is that the management of your company does not... See more

Willfulness can create all sorts of personal suffering because, at the end of the day, we don’t have control over all sorts of things, and certainly not over other people. Some walls are meant to be broken down or scaled, but others are clear signals to attempt a different tact.

What sorts of signals are we ignoring when we hit those concrete... See more