Partner @praxislabs // Author, The Life We’re Looking For (2022) | The Tech-Wise Family | Strong & Weak | Playing God | Culture Making // Twitter minimalist
Dec 21, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Why not just use quote marks and citations? How hard is that?
Actually pretty hard, for perhaps non-obvious reasons.
You are working on a fairly conventional section of a high-profile work—a dissertation, say, or a research paper. You need to get through some tedious but crucial points, or you are completing your acknowledgments (a notoriously cliché-bound task).
Dec 13, 2022 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
I've spent a fair amount of time the last few years talking with parents, teachers, etc., about technology. While I always insist that the issue starts and ends with "us," not "kids these days," people always want to talk about kids.
And the one opinion I've securely formed, regarding kids specifically, is this: There is nothing more seductive, and more sad, than "winning at high school."
Dec 1, 2022 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
I’ve been playing with OpenAI for a couple weeks and with ChatGPT for (an embarrassing amount of) the past 24 hours, and I think it’s pretty clear—pending how these technologies get commercialized—that the era of homework, up through at least the second year of college, is over.
This is my Loeb edition of Pindar's odes. Greek on the left—for an undergrad classics major, pretty difficult Greek. English on the right. Awesome, right?
Feb 2, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I am increasingly drawn to the Null Hypothesis — the evidence that no large-scale programmatic social intervention has significant beneficial effects.
What does work? From a policy perspective, unconditional cash transfers are probably the single best thing that states can do.
But you and I don't have to act like states (though we have a responsibility as citizens to shape the choices government actors).
We can build family, households, community rooted in something bigger than the self, right where we are. There is robust evidence that this matters.
Dec 9, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Real world: "AI" (i.e., ML) defeats the most skilled human beings at chess and Go.
Web3 world: "play to earn" "nations" like Axie Infinity pit humans against one another in gameplay that is far simpler than chess or Go.
This cannot be sustainable or good for actual persons.
I'm trying to give "creator economies" and other beneficial implementations of blockchain the benefit of the doubt, but the most celebrated examples so far still look like Ponzi schemes to me.
Dec 9, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
“What’s it like to be the target of so much hate? It’s freeing.” This is excellent in so many respects. abigailshrier.substack.com/p/what-i-told-…
Two caveats: first, I suspect I disagree with Abigail Shrier on some points, including the deep question of exactly what freedom is and entails.
May 11, 2021 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
I follow, you presumably won't be surprised to learn, a very wide range of well-informed public health folks. They vary, however, in how "insider" they are institutionally.
And I can't help but notice that though I consider all of them super smart, as a rule the more "insider," the slower they've been to definitively say what accumulating evidence clearly shows is true (e.g., most egregiously, risks of outdoor transmission).
Apr 16, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Okay, I have thought about this a bit more and would revise it slightly. (If journalism is the rough draft of history, Twitter is presumably Anne Lamott's, ahem, "crappy" rough draft.)
I regret the false precision of "50%." (The other numbers have more actual warrant in public-health practice.) Instead I should have said, "roughly half."
I also think "planning for" implies this is the only scenario worth engaging. That's not quite right. So—
Feb 25, 2019 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Thinking about that horrifying Verge piece (which is just the latest reporting on a phenomenon that's been going on, largely offshore, for the last decade or so), and its connection to the authority / vulnerability dynamic I wrote about in Strong & Weak:
There's a Law of Conservation of Vulnerability in every human system. Someone is going to bear the risk. For you to live in Withdrawal (no authority or risk), someone else has to exercise Control (authority without risk), AT THE COST of someone Suffering (risk without authority).
Mar 23, 2018 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
If you're someone growing in celebrity, your first priority should be to build systems of unimpeachable independence and credibility that can hold you accountable. The problem is that almost no one who tastes celebrity makes this a priority.
And when credible allegations of misconduct come — as has happened in two cases in my circles this week — you are stuck. Even credible allegations can be false. But if you haven't built a system others can trust to fairly assess those allegations, how can we believe your denials?
