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2025-07-31

Slop as a way of life

Slop as a Way of Life - by Drew Austin - Kneeling Bus #slop #ai #enshittification

Yesterday morning, I walked past the small grocery store on my block and heard REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” emanating from inside. I’d usually ignore that kind of thing but here it suddenly struck me as absurd—it was 9:30 am on a weekday and there was absolutely no reason for that song to be coming out of an empty grocery store. Not even annoying or dissonant, it was just the least appropriate accompaniment for the moment, in its own subtle way. And of course there was no reason for it—no person had chosen the song and the process that led to it playing then had no audience in mind.

…

The popularity of “slop” as a concept points to something significant about how we experience digital culture in 2025, just as “algorithms” did last decade. In each case, the term’s usage gets less precise as it’s overloaded with everything we hate about the internet. And while the word itself becomes less meaningful, it reveals more about how we feel. It’s tempting to define slop as Potter Stewart did pornography (“I know it when I see it”) but that would just further obfuscate an already murky concept. Today, “slop” implies AI more than anything else, and primarily refers to the AI-generated content that is flooding the internet. The subtext is that slop is being dumped on us against our will—that it’s something that happens to us—but that lets us off the hook far too easily. Most of the slop we see is still made and distributed by real people, often with no AI assistance. If AI is able to suddenly pump slop into our environment it’s only because we already turned on the faucets ourselves. Just think about all the garbage content that people you actually know send you via text, or the DMs that feel like they’re from bots but are actually from real people driven by platform incentives (Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc). The arrival of AI slop is simply the culmination of a long process of cultural slopification, and one of AI’s unexpected functions has been to launder the human slop so we can pretend we didn’t create it.

I call the REM song I heard slop because it’s a good example of this process: The automation of personal music listening, a process accelerated by Spotify but long underway in places like the supermarket aisles, is ultimately a process of “learning to care less about details and perceive distinct things as interchangeable,” as I wrote last year. In slop utopia, there is no right or wrong place or time for anything to happen, because context has been eliminated. The end result of this process, as Liz Pelly has described, is an opportunity for AI content creation, which barely registers because the human-made content with which it coexists has already become fungible. The appearance of AI slop is not something new, just a sign that an ongoing slopification process has been completed.

The Living Fossils Compendium

The Fossil Record So Far - by The Living Fossils #evo-psych #psychology #mentalhealth #evolution

The Living Fossils blog is one of the most high-value blogs I have discovered in the last year or so. They just posted a recap of their posts under the most common thematic categories. This is a great set of links!

2025-07-30

Hope admist the climate crisis

Less rain, more wheat: How Australian farmers defied climate doom #farming #climate

A great Reuters investigation on how Australian farmers overcame climate change to get record wheat harvests. Normally climate news is always doom and gloom, with this being a rare exception.

2025-07-29

Monk Mode

The growing allure of running away to a monastery | Dazed #wellness #spirituality

As a growing number of young people embark on spiritual journeys, including those attending church and turning to prayer, the idea of ‘disappearing into the woods’ is becoming more compelling. “Given the political climate, technology and expenses, it’s a very romanticised ideal that I think people are drawn to,” says MC. Where once crunchy yoga and meditation retreats may have appeased the crowds, some people are turning their attention to traditional religions like catholicism. Across social media, people are using the term #MonkMode with wellness connotations similar to a 75-day challenge, promoting disappearing as a new way to “level up” and come back as a “completely unrecognisable version of yourself”. Somewhat ironically, instead of focusing on the faith, there’s a certain level of wellness culture embedded in the discussion. There are “monk schedules” for building your work routine and #MonkMode inspo pics for bare-bones living.

2025-07-28

People who dislike agentic AI coding

HN: on Claude Code is a Slot Machine

Spotted an interesting comment on HN.

I've been noticing the pattern among the kind of people who like/dislike AI/agentic coding:

  1. people who haven't programmed in a while for whatever reason (became executives, took a break from the industry, etc)

  2. people who started programming in the last 15 or so years, which also corresponds with the time when programming became a desirable career for money/lifestyle/prestige (chosen out of not knowing what they want, rather than knowing)

  3. people who never cared for programming itself, more into product-building

To make the distinction clear, here are example groups unlikely to like AI dev:

  1. people who programmed for ~25 years (to this day)

  2. people who genuinely enjoy the process of programming (regardless of when they started)

I'm not sure if I'm correct in this observation, and I'm not impugning anyone in the first groups.

2025-07-27

Why are we all so weird about cheating?

Why are we all so weird about cheating? | Dazed #relationships #cheating #infidelity

Writer Amanda Montei highlighted the nonsensical ways we attempt to punish and scold those who have cheated in her essay on the film Babygirl for her Substack newsletter, Mad Woman. She mentions that when Romy (Nicole Kidman) reveals her affair with Samuel (Harris Dickinson) to her husband, played by Antonio Banderas, he yells at her and asserts that she has jeopardised their children and kicks her out. Montei simply asks, “How exactly has she hurt her children?” By having the kind of sex she actually wants to have? By acting and living for herself and not her children or husband? These are very different situations, obviously, and I am not here to cast moral judgement on these behaviours. But why should someone be stripped of everything for behaving the “wrong” way?

Overtourism in Japan

Overtourism in Japan, and How it Hurts Small Businesses — Ridgeline issue 210 #japan #tourism

A great city is typified by character and the character of great cities is often built on the bedrock of small businesses. Conversely: Chain shops smooth over the character of cities into anodyne nothingness. Think about a city you love — it’s likely because of walkability, greenery, great architecture, and fun local shops and restaurants. Only psychopaths love Manhattan because of Duane Reade. If you’ve ever wondered why overtourism can be a kind of death for parts of a city (the parts that involve: living there, commuting there, creating a life there) it’s because it paradoxically disincentivizes building small businesses.1 Nobody opens a tiny restaurant or café to be popular on a grand, viral scale. Nor do they open them to become rich.2

So why do people open small shops? For any number of reasons, but my favorite is: They have a strong opinion about how some aspect of a business should be run, and they want to double down on it. For example, forty years ago Terui-san, the owner of jazz kissa Kaiunbashi-no-Johnny’s up in Morioka, was like: Hmm, nobody is spinning wa-jyazu (Japanese jazz),3 so I’m only going to rock it. That led to a bunch of cool knock-on connections, not the least of which was a lifelong friendship with the incredible Akiyoshi Toshiko. That singular thing can drive an initial impulse, but small business purpose quickly shifts into: Being a community hub for a core group of regulars. That — community — is probably the biggest asset of small business ownership. And the quickest way to kill community (perhaps the most valuable gift for running a small business) is to go viral in a damaging way.

At risk of oversimplifying: Most “problems” in the world today boil down to scale and abstraction. As scale increases, individuals become more abstract, and humanity and empathy are lost. This happens acutely when the algorithm decides to laser-beam a small shop with a hundred-million views. If you cast a net to that many people, a vast chunk of them will not engage in good faith, let alone take a second to consider the feelings of residents or owners or why the place was built to begin with. Hence: The crush, the selfish crush.

Overtourism brings with it a corollary effect, what I call the “Disneyland flipflop.”8 This happens when visitors fail to see (willfully or not) the place they’re visiting as an actual city with humans living and working and building lives there, but rather as a place flipflopped through the lens of social media into a Disneyland, one to be pillaged commercially, assumed to reset each night for their pleasure, welcoming their transient deluge with open arms. This is most readily evident in, say, the Mario Kart scourge of Tokyo — perhaps one of the most breathtakingly universally-hated tourist activities. I dare you to find a resident who supports these idiots disrupting traffic as the megalopolis attempts to function around them.9

This overtourism is happening mostly because of algorithms collimating the attention of the masses towards very specific activities / places. There’s also a slightly nutty narcissism / selfish component to it, too — fueling that impulse to, at all costs, “get” a photo at a specific spot to share on a specific social media service. (See: Fushimi Inari.) If the algorithm is the gas, cheapness is the spark. Because, damn, is it cheap to travel these days. Combined with the fact that there have never been more “middle class” people in the world, and you get overtourism. In a way, overtourism complications and disruptions are what happens when “humanity wins” and more people have more time and money to go “do things.”

Because! Here’s the heartening bit: More people than ever are traveling, and while, sure, the majority of those travelers are just following trends and lists, there is another group, a small cohort of self-aware travelers who are genuinely, deeply curious about the places they’re visiting, who desire to engage directly without being disruptive, who want to engage fully and “authentically” (that is: visiting people and places that haven’t twisted themselves for the sake of transient visitors (i.e., no renaming things “samurai spice”)). And that “small cohort” (let’s say 15% of global travelers) is larger than the total number of travelers the world saw twenty years ago. Omotesando? Gion? They’re lost, like villages washed away by a tsunami. Much like I don’t understand the heart of a wave, I do not understand the hearts of those who come to Japan to buy a Rimowa suitcase. (Quite frankly, it really freaks me out!) And it is not our job to understand.

…

These kinds of folks buoy the chest, elevate the soul (like witnessing a person stand on an escalator and just stare into the distance, refusing the Siren call of their smartphone). I don’t know if there’s some Platonic or deontic mode of travel, but in my opinion, the most rewarding point of travelling is: to sit with, and spend time with The Other (even if the place / people aren’t all that different). To go off the beaten track a bit, just a bit, to challenge yourself, to find a nook of quietude, and to try to take home some goodness (a feeling, a moment) you might observe off in the wilds of Iwate or Aomori. That little bundle of goodness, filtered through your own cultural ideals — that’s good globalism at work. With an ultimate goal of doing all this without imposing on or overloading the locals. To being an additive part of the economy (financially and culturally), to commingling with regulars without displacing them.

algorithmic performativity

algorithmic performativity - by Adam Aleksic #social-media #algorithms

Chat, we all act differently when we’re being watched. There’s a pressure to avoid embarrassment, to present “authentically,” to put others at ease.

Sociologist Erving Goffman calls this performance—the idea that all public interactions are a kind of theatrical act. You’ll put on a different performance for your college friends and your grandmother; TV broadcasters will put on a different performance when on air and behind the scenes.

In the same way, social media algorithms are uniquely changing how we present ourselves online, since they come with a completely new type of spectator: the algorithm itself.

how social media subjugates us

how social media subjugates us - by Adam Aleksic #social-media #dominance

Throughout this parasocial interaction, we’ve both adopted social roles that come with an imbued set of norms and behaviors. You, the viewer, are in an assigned role of docility. I, the influencer, am in an assigned role of dominance. With each repetition of this dance, we internalize our roles a little bit more. Even though I started out as some random guy yapping on the internet, my role over time is mutually legitimized and I begin to take on greater credibility in your mind.

To be clear, I as an influencer also submit myself to the platform, much like a supplicant to a ruler. I need to replicate “viral-looking” mannerisms and expressions; I need to perform for the algorithm by submitting to its constraints. My studio lighting and “influencer accent” are forms of aesthetic labor validating the platform’s priorities. Then you perceive my message on the toilet and do the same, and we both give more power to the technology mediating our interaction.

what i'm looking for in my marriage

What I'm looking for in my marriage - by Sasha Chapin #marriage #relationships

The complications of measuring things

The Luxury of Fudged Numbers - by Josh Zlatkus #numbers #money #measurement

The drawback to money as a concrete and concentrated form of value is that it crowds out other valuations. At many a cocktail party, wealth is the lowest common denominator of worth. Another downside is that many people are tempted to pursue money well beyond what would represent the best use of their time. Golden handcuffs have imprisoned many in the most productive years of their lives.

Now here’s the thing: even after reading this, you’ll be tempted to filter by height. Why? Because height is a preference, after all, and when accurate information is available, why not use it? The problem is that when something is easy to measure, it tends to crowd out better—but fuzzier—metrics. For example, is weight the best proxy for health? Absolutely not. But it’s easier to capture than VO₂ max. Similarly, is bench press the best determinant of overall strength? No, but it’s more concrete than core strength. So we run with it.

One overlooked consequence of numbers is that they enable the quantification of things that were never meant to be that precise. Without numbers, you can’t specify height. You can’t reduce a person’s value to how much money they make. You can’t compare thoughts, jokes, or creative projects by how much attention they receive. Essentially, much of the harm this essay talks about loses its razor-sharp edge.

Many small-scale societies developed additional ways to blunt the edge of social competition. In Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots, James Suzman describes how the Ju/’hoansi assign credit not to the person who shoots the animal, but to the maker of the arrow that brings it down. The purpose of this and related practices is to “cool young men’s hearts”—to temper pride and prevent vanity.

Other examples include the many games of chance that foraging peoples play—often for hours on end. As Sahlins said of the Hazda: “[The] men seem much more concerned with games of chance than with chances of game.” By minimizing the role of skill, these games ensure that every dog has its day. I find something very wise in these old and various ways of softening a loser’s pain, given that most of the time, most people are losing.

Modern metrics give unnatural precision to inherently fuzzy social dynamics. When social life remains loose and informal, and advantages remain imprecise, emotions soften. But the more we quantify, the sharper the comparisons become—and the more those comparisons hurt.

Gaza

Chartbook 400: Murder not crisis - Why Israel's starvation of Gaza is exceptional in a global context. #gaza #palestine #israel #genocide

For many months, it has been beyond reasonable doubt that the Israeli government, the Israeli military, sections of Israeli politics and society as well as their aiders and abetters abroad, have been deliberately starving the population of Gaza with a view to forcing the population either to flee or to face intensifying misery and ultimately an agonizing death. There is clear evidence of deliberate intent going back to 2023. This clearly warrants charges of genocide.

Those who style themselves “defenders of Israel” will be quick to insist that, in fact, there is a feeding operation in Gaza. But, as the famine historian and aid expert Alex de Waal demonstrates in powerful piece in the Guardian, “Israel’s food points are not just death traps – they’re an alibi … The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation system is like standing at the edge of a big pond and feeding the (starving) fish by throwing breadcrumbs. Who gets to eat its rations?” Air drops of food, are simply more of the same.

Ethnic cleansing by means of starvation is the actual policy.

Death by starvation in Gaza is not the collateral, unintended consequence of an obscure, anonymous, amorphous crisis. It is the results of deliberate policy on the part of the Israeli government, bent on using the resources of a highly sophisticated state to render Palestinian life in Gaza impossible.

GenZ

Why everyone hates Gen Z workers - by Ellen Scott #genz #workplace

far back as the fourth century BC there’s evidence of Aristotle criticising the generation below him for the way they approach hard graft: “They are high-minded, for they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of necessity”. In the first century BC, “the beardless youth” are described as not knowing how to manage their money. There’s no hard evidence of younger-generation-bashing in the years of children working in factories, but I’d confidently bet it happened, especially when young people dared to ask for better working conditions. In 1894, the Rooks County Record in Stockton, Kansas, published a reader’s letter that accused ‘nobody wants to work these hard times’.

In 1990, Gen X were referred to as the slacker generation, with Time magazine stating that workers born between 1965 and 1980 “would rather hike in the Himalayas than climb a corporate ladder” and have attention spans “as short as one zap of a TV dial”. In 2017, it was millennials who were called “spoilt, full of themselves [and] averse to hard work”. Now it’s Gen Z’s turn in the firing line.

But why does this happen? Why do we keep viewing the generation below us as bad at work? Why did everyone hate Gen X, then millennials, and why do we now hate Gen Z?

Why does everyone hate Gen Z workers? Because we’ve all been told to. Because an ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality, with Gen Z workers as ‘them’ is far better for bosses than one in which it’s all workers versus those at the top. It’s better that we keep squabbling at each other like crabs in a big bucket, rather than us pausing and questioning the very structure of the bucket, or deciding to group together and attack the crab fisherman. And if that squabbling can be monetised, even greater news!

I urge you, the next time you’re lured in by Gen Z sniping, pause and consider what’s going on behind the take you’re being served up by your algorithm. Are Gen Z workers really lazy, entitled, or rude? Or is your own outrage being manufactured and weaponised against you? Who’s benefitting when we see work/life boundaries and those who ask for them negatively? And who’s losing out? Spoiler: It’s not just Gen Z.

Ageing accelerates at 50

Ageing accelerates around age 50 ― some organs faster than others #ageing

It is a warning that middle-aged people have long offered the young: ageing is not a smooth process. Now, an exhaustive analysis of how proteins change over time in different organs backs up that idea, finding that people experience an inflection point at around 50 years old, after which ageing seems to accelerate.

2025-07-23

When curiosity doesn’t fit the world we’ve built

When curiosity doesn’t fit the world we’ve built #adhd #curiosity

However, three interconnected forces might be conspiring to push hypercuriosity toward its maladaptive expressions:

1) Social media is designed to trigger but never satisfy our information-seeking drives. Algorithms exploit our curiosity gaps (the space between what we know and want to know) and deliver just enough novelty to keep us scrolling. For hypercurious minds, this creates an endless loop of stimulation.

2) Nonlinear exploration is discouraged in educational institutions. Traditional education rewards sustained attention to predetermined tasks. The result is that many hypercurious kids feel miserable suppressing their natural curiosity rather than learn how to leverage it.

3) Most modern workplaces measure value based on efficient output. In high productivity + low creativity work environments, hypercurious employees might burn out and/or leave to become self-employed (which might be why there is an association between ADHD and entrepreneurship).

So how do we fix this? I believe solving this requires three fundamental shifts:

1. Rewilding education. We need to redesign learning environments to support hypercuriosity. This means welcoming neurodivergent thinking, embracing experimental learning, and encouraging nonlinear paths.

2. Reclaiming attention. The attention economy hijacks hypercuriosity. We must treat attention as a precious resource worth protecting both individually and culturally by resisting algorithmic distraction and setting boundaries around our focus.

3. Reimagining technology. Digital tools should support hypercuriosity, not exploit it. We need interfaces (including AI) that help us ask better questions, discover new information, connect ideas, and integrate knowledge.

2025-07-16

Google Finds a Crack in Amazon’s Cloud Dominance

Google Finds a Crack in Amazon’s Cloud Dominance — The Information #gcp #google #aws #amazon #ai #startups

AWS generates more than twice as much revenue as Google Cloud and has long dominated the market for selling cloud services to startups. But the Dia episode and other examples show how Google has become competitive in attracting AI startups to its cloud, thanks to Gemini and other capabilities AWS doesn’t have.

AWS’ struggle to develop a strong AI model of its own has fueled a perception that it is trailing Google in developing cutting-edge AI.

That’s a big turnaround after Google’s earlier struggles with previous versions of Gemini and startups’ widespread complaints about the difficulty of setting up Google Cloud accounts for AI computing.

Google Cloud has even landed business from two high-profile AI startups its own AI teams compete with: Safe Superintelligence Inc., led by former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever; and Thinking Machines Lab, helmed by former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati. (AWS may have wanted Murati’s business, too: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy met with her in San Francisco earlier this year.)

Google Cloud also recently won business from an even fiercer rival, OpenAI, which has been a major customer of Microsoft cloud servers but has been branching out to other providers.

Aruna Roy on Jane Austen

Social activist Aruna Roy on Jane Austen’s enduring appeal  - The Hindu

As we mark the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth, I am reminded of British-American poet W.H. Auden’s remark about her in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’.

…It makes me most uncomfortable to see

An English spinster of the middle-class

Describe the amorous effects of ‘brass’,

Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety

The economic basis of society…

Raising Children

Learning to Parent in Community – SAPIENS #parenting #caregiving #culture #anthropology

Bebuna, a woman in her 60s, sits in front of her hut breastfeeding her granddaughter. I had never seen an older woman nursing and—even as an evolutionary anthropologist—didn’t realize it was biologically possible.

“Are you producing milk?” I asked.

Bebuna squeezed her breast, and white droplets appeared.

It turns out that lactating people can produce milk indefinitely, as long as they continue breastfeeding baby after baby. Bebuna has been doing just that for decades, as a midwife and caregiver to many children in her community.

Bebuna is a member of the BaYaka, a collective name for several forest-living forager groups west of the Congo River. [1] Her community lives in the northern Republic of Congo and speaks the Mbendjele language. In 2013, I began visiting Mbendjele BaYaka camps to research how people learn from others in a hunter-gatherer society.

There are countless ways to raise children, shaped by cultural traditions or, in more individualistic societies, by personal choices among various parenting philosophies. All approaches bring benefits and challenges. But community-oriented cultures like the BaYaka get at least one thing right: Parenting should not be learned in isolation or all at once—it is a lifelong process embedded in daily life long before one has a child and long after.

Unlike me, the BaYaka learn to parent before they become parents.

Among both babies under 1.5 years and children aged 1.5–4, around 40 percent of their close care, including holding and physical contact, was provided by “allomothers”—caregivers other than the biological mother. On average, each child had 14 people within arm’s reach throughout the day.

Mothers responded to just under half of all crying bouts. Allomothers soothed the rest—over 40 percent on their own, the remainder alongside the mother. Soothing often meant drumming on the child’s back or yodeling to gently calm the child.

And who were these allomothers? Mostly, other children. These young helpers were more involved, collectively, than fathers or grandmothers.

Parenting is never perfect. Cultures raise children differently, shaping adults valued by their own standards. But, based on my experiences, one truth emerges: Learning to care for others should start long before having a baby.

Two years into parenthood, I have more questions than answers. Growing up in Turkey, studying across Europe and Canada, and working in the U.K., I had never held a newborn until I had Eren. I spent my childhood and early adulthood learning subjects like math, physics, and literature—what my societies valued most. My first months of motherhood were emotionally overwhelming because of the steep learning curve I had to scale.

I wish, like the BaYaka, my parenting lessons had followed a gentler slope, stretched across my lifespan. The same could be said about other essential life skills like growing food, caring for our elders, and dealing with death.

For those of us living in individualistic societies, what happened that people stopped caring to learn life’s basics? Take a note from the BaYaka and other community-oriented cultures: Bring these lessons back into learning journeys.

What’s Happening to Reading?

What’s Happening to Reading? | The New Yorker #reading #ai

What will happen to reading culture as reading becomes automated? Suppose we’re headed toward a future in which text is seen as fluid, fungible, refractable, abstractable. In this future, people will often read by asking for a text to be made shorter and more to-the-point, or to be changed into something different, like a podcast or multi-text report. It will be easy to get the gist of a piece of writing, to feel as if you know it, and so any decision to encounter the text itself will involve a positive acceptance of work. Some writers will respond by trying to beguile human readers through force of personality; others will simply assume that they’re “writing for the A.I.s.” Perhaps new stylistic approaches will aim to repel automated reading, establishing zones of reading for humans only. The people who actually read “originals” will be rare, and they’ll have insights others lack, and enjoy experiences others forgo—but the era in which being “well-read” is a proxy for being educated or intelligent will largely be over. It will be difficult to separate the deep readers from the superficial ones; perhaps, if A.I.-assisted reading proves useful enough, those terms won’t necessarily apply. Text may get treated like a transitional medium, a temporary resting place for ideas. A piece of writing, which today is often seen as an end point, a culmination, a finished unit of effort, may, for better and worse, be experienced as a stepping stone to something else.

2025-07-15

Coffee and aging

Coffee May Promote Longer, Healthier Living - Bloomberg #caffeine #anti-aging

If you're like me, you climb out of bed each morning feeling like a zombie -- until you slug back that first cup of coffee.

Turns out that morning jolt may benefit more than just energy levels. It could help slow down the aging process of the body's cells, potentially helping to fend off ailments including cancer and neurodegeneration.

Caffeine flips a biological switch in our bodies called AMPK, which monitors our cells' energy levels and, when they're low, tells them to slow down their growth processes and instead focus on repairing damage, according to a paper recently published in the journal Microbial Cell.

In doing so, caffeine inhibits the cellular growth regulator TOR, explains Babis Rallis, the paper’s senior author and a reader in genetics, genomics and fundamental cell biology at Queen Mary University of London. TOR is highly active when we're embryos and fast-growing kids, helping us develop into adults. Once we're older, it will contribute to our body’s ability to, say, renew skin, grow hair and heal wounds.

TOR, however, is "pro-aging." When it's too active, it's implicated in problems including metabolic disorders, neurodegeneration, inflammation and cancer, according to Rallis. 

By studying caffeine's effect on cell growth, Rallis is hoping to get a better handle on some of the factors that promote longevity, a field known as biogerontology. That could inform future research into how we can trigger these virtuous cellular effects through diet, lifestyle and new medicines to achieve healthy aging, he said in an interview.

"We're not saying that you have to take hundreds of pills, like we have seen in the news by certain billionaires," he said. "We mostly try to uncover biological mechanisms and understand how you can then change your habits."

2025-07-13

What I could have learnt from René Girard #mimetic #culture

René Girard might have found metaphorical use for this. The French theorist’s great idea was that religion and culture grow out of what he called mimetic rivalry. Human beings, uniquely, choose the objects of their desire largely on the basis of what other people desire. “There is nothing, or next to nothing, in human behaviour that is not learned, and all learning is based on imitation,” he writes. But while mimesis helps us learn, it also leads to escalating competition, and ultimately violence. Religion evolved as a means for containing rivalry by projecting communal violence on to an arbitrarily chosen sacrificial victim, the scapegoat.

As always happens when an intellectual becomes popular, distortions have followed. The main problem, though, is not misinterpretation. It’s omission. What is often left out of discussions of Girard is the most challenging part of his theory, about how we break the cycle. Here he turns to one of the firmest messages of the gospels: the injunction to love our enemies. Girard knew, as we all know, that renunciation and mercy are almost impossibly hard, and quite alien to human culture. Yet he argues that it is the moments when the mimetic crisis has reached a hysterical crescendo, when “the vanity and stupidity of violence have never been more obvious”, that it is possible to see our enemies in a new way. Might we not be living in such a moment right now?

Extraction vs Creation

From Dollar Dominance to the Slop Machine - by kyla scanlon #economics

The US has become an extraction economy.

  • We extract value from our existing position through dollar dominance, military supremacy, and technological leadership and now are choosing to tear down the foundations that created that position in the first place.
  • We extract attention through spectacle without creating the trust that makes spectacle meaningful.
  • We extract wealth from our own institutions without replenishing the capacity that generated that wealth.
  • The UFC image captures this well - it takes the symbolic power of American institutions and converts it into entertainment value, with no consideration for what that conversion costs us in terms of credibility or coherence.

China, meanwhile, has become a creation economy1.

  • They're building electrical generation capacity, training engineers, developing industrial policy that spans decades.
  • They're creating an “electrostate” with an economy driven by the technologies that will determine 21st-century competitive advantage.

Immigration Policy of the Danish left

Denmark’s left defied the consensus on migration. Has it worked? #denmark #immigration

These are uncomfortable facts, so much so that to point them out is to invite the disgust of European polite society. Whether in France, Germany, Italy or Sweden, parties of the hard right have surged as they—and often only they, alas—persuaded voters that they grasped the costs of mass migration. But the National Rally of Marine Le Pen in France and Giorgia Meloni’s post-fascist Brothers of Italy have an unexpected ally: Denmark’s Social Democrats, led by the prime minister, Mette Frederiksen. The very same party that helped shape the Scandinavian kingdom’s cradle-to-grave welfare system has for the past decade copy-pasted the ideas of populists at the other end of the political spectrum. Denmark is a generally well-run place, its social and economic policies often held up for other Europeans to emulate. Will harsh migration rhetoric be the next “Danish model” to go continental?

The Danish left’s case for toughness is that migration’s costs fall overwhelmingly on the poor. Yes, having Turks, Poles or Syrians settle outside Copenhagen is great for the well-off, who need nannies and plumbers, and for businesses seeking cheap labour. But what about lower-class Danes in distant suburbs whose children must study alongside new arrivals who don’t speak the language, or whose cultures’ religious and gender norms seem backward in Denmark? Adding too many newcomers, the argument goes—especially those with “different values”, code for Muslims—challenges the cohesion that underpins the welfare state.

The upshot of the left’s hardline turn on migration has been to neutralise the hard right. Once all but extinct, it is still only fifth in the polls these days, far from its scores in the rest of Europe. For good reason, some might argue: why should voters plump for xenophobes when centrists will deliver much the same policies without the stigma? Either way, that has allowed Ms Frederiksen to deliver lots of progressive policies, such as earlier retirement for blue-collar workers, as well as unflinching support for Ukraine. The 47-year-old is one of few social-democratic leaders left in office in Europe, and is expected to continue past elections next year.

2025-07-12

AI Therapy

AI therapy bots fuel delusions and give dangerous advice, Stanford study finds - Ars Technica #ai #therapy

Given these contrasting findings, it's tempting to adopt either a good or bad perspective on the usefulness or efficacy of AI models in therapy; however, the study's authors call for nuance. Co-author Nick Haber, an assistant professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Education, emphasized caution about making blanket assumptions. "This isn't simply 'LLMs for therapy is bad,' but it's asking us to think critically about the role of LLMs in therapy," Haber told the Stanford Report, which publicizes the university's research. "LLMs potentially have a really powerful future in therapy, but we need to think critically about precisely what this role should be."

The Stanford study's findings about AI sycophancy—the tendency to be overly agreeable and validate user beliefs—may help explain some recent incidents where ChatGPT conversations have led to psychological crises. As Ars Technica reported in April, ChatGPT users often complain about the AI model's relentlessly positive tone and tendency to validate everything they say. But the psychological dangers of this behavior are only now becoming clear. The New York Times, Futurism, and 404 Media reported cases of users developing delusions after ChatGPT validated conspiracy theories, including one man who was told he should increase his ketamine intake to "escape" a simulation.

In another case reported by the NYT, a man with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia became convinced that an AI entity named "Juliet" had been killed by OpenAI. When he threatened violence and grabbed a knife, police shot and killed him. Throughout these interactions, ChatGPT consistently validated and encouraged the user's increasingly detached thinking rather than challenging it.

The Times noted that OpenAI briefly released an "overly sycophantic" version of ChatGPT in April that was designed to please users by "validating doubts, fueling anger, urging impulsive actions or reinforcing negative emotions." Although the company said it rolled back that particular update in April, reports of similar incidents have continued to occur.

Stablecoins and 100% reserve requirements

What does one hundred percent reserves for stablecoins mean? - Marginal REVOLUTION #crypto #stablecoin #reserves

The statute’s policy goal is to keep a payment‑stablecoin issuer from morphing into a fractional‑reserve bank or a trading house while still giving it enough freedom to:

  • hold the specified reserve assets and manage their maturities;
  • use overnight Treasuries repo markets for cash management (explicitly allowed);
  • provide custody of customers’ coins or private keys.

Everything else—consumer lending, merchant acquiring, market‑making, proprietary trading, staking, you name it—would require prior approval and would be subject to additional capital/liquidity rules.

Why Your Brain Gets High on Uncertainty #neuroscience #brain #uncertainity

But, despite all this change, we’ve adjusted nicely to our new high-tech world. Why? Because we thrive on a challenge. We thrive on the uncertainty that comes with learning new things.

But why would our brains evolve to thrive on uncertainty? Shouldn't we prefer certainty, like knowing exactly where our next meal is coming from?

As I mentioned earlier, uncertainty was critical for our survival. Think about our ancestors who conquered new lands. The ones who were curious about what might be over that next mountain range?

So what can we do with this knowledge? Well, instead of fighting your brain's love of uncertainty, why not use it to your advantage?

  • Want to learn something new? Frame it as a mystery to be solved.
  • Need to exercise more? Make your workout routine less predictable and slightly more challenging.
  • Trying to stay motivated at work? Gamify projects with elements of discovery and reward.

Like anything pleasurable, too much of a good thing can ruin it. Like too much candy for a nickel. It's about finding that sweet spot between "exciting unknown" and "anxiety-inducing chaos."

Meditation and Boredom

Find meditation really boring? You’re not the only one | Psyche Ideas #meditation #boring

In fact, what my colleagues and I call ‘spiritual boredom’ has a long tradition. Christian history contains numerous depictions of boredom: paintings of yawning congregants, people sleeping during sermons, and so on. In the Middle Ages, this phenomenon was recognised as a spiritual malaise called acedia (from Latin), characterised by listlessness and melancholy. Christians referred to it as the ‘demon of noontide’ – a concept described by St Thomas Aquinas as the ‘sorrow of the world’ and the ‘enemy of spiritual joy’.

Beyond these examples from Christian history, reports of boredom can be found in almost every spiritual practice. For instance, in Buddhist contexts, there are accounts of boredom during Asanha Bucha Day sermons. Similarly, some reports relating to mindfulness meditation describe experiences of ‘void’ – an emotional state combining boredom and psychological entropy.

Having said all that, I don’t believe boredom is just an obstacle – it could also be informative. From an evolutionary perspective, boredom exists to signal misalignment. It’s your brain’s way of saying: ‘This doesn’t suit you – change something.’ If you ever find yourself bored while meditating, praying or listening to a sermon, it might be helpful to ask yourself: ‘Am I over- or underchallenged?’ and ‘Does this practice (still) hold personal meaning for me?’

Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY

Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale | Hacker News #postgres #pubsub #queues

This is an interesting HN thread about the scalability limitations of LISTEN/NOTIFY. The blog post is worth reading. What caught my attention was this thread which had some interesting discussion

This is roughly the “transactional outbox” pattern—and an elegant use of it, since the only service invoked during the “publish” RPC is also the database, reducing distributed reliability concerns.

…of course, you need dedup/support for duplicate messages on the notify stream if you do this, but that’s table stakes in a lot of messaging scenarios anyway.

Yeah, but pub/sub systems already need to be robust to missed messages. And, sending the notify after the transaction succeeds usually accomplishes everything you really care about (no false positives).

Boosterism

Boosterism - by Rob Kurzban - Living Fossils #evo-psych #heirarchy #power

Boosting seems to have to do with cases in which an individual2 does something—I’m going to call it the Thing, with a capital letter—that that individual is either not allowed to do, by convention or rule, or is stereotypically not good at—according to the current cultural norms, or both.

…

Boosterism seems to be the feeling you get when someone does someThing stunning and brave that fits the scheme above.

Why?

Scholars such as Chris Boehm—see, for instance, his book Hierarchy in the Forest—have suggested that humans have a propensity to try to flatten hierarchies. As we have seen in posts about power, when there is one individual—or a group of a few individuals—who everyone else always backs, these few powerful people can do practically whatever they want, advancing their (fitness) interests at the expense of others’. Boehm suggests that humans naturally want to limit the power of the powerful. Certainly there is cross-cultural evidence of this preference, especially in the so-called collectivist cultures associated with Asia.

This resonates with boosterism, if imperfectly. The story about the marathon can be seen as part of eroding the power of men in society, reducing the extent to which it is an identity-focused regime, as I’ve called it. Generally, boosterism feels anti-hierarchy. So maybe boosterism is a leveling system, designed to support underdogs to prevent domination by the few, or the one. It’s probably often fitness-good to support the erosion of power of people or groups who can impose their will on you. Leveling is good for those who aren’t part of the elite.

As some researchers put it, “[a]lthough people prefer to associate with winners, there is also a strong desire to support the lovable loser or underdog.” It feels good to stand up and say, yes, I too support people doing that Thing.

But if everyone else has the same belief, well, that’s neither particularly stunning nor especially brave. When the battle is long over, and the moral arc has fully arced, boosterism changes. It still feels good—but it’s no longer subversive. It’s orthodoxy in the costume of rebellion. And like all such performances, it risks slipping into the theater of the absurd: applause lines for acts no longer forbidden, cheers for victories already won.

2025-07-11

Why I don't want a boyfriend

Why I don't want a boyfriend - by Sky Fusco - Unsupervised #boyfriend #relationships

I’ve been dating men for twenty years. I’ve merged lives with brooding musicians, flamboyant jocks, hard-working farmers, single dads, tortured professors, treehouse builders, and award-winning chefs. I tried to love these men for who they were, and not for what they did, but it was impossible. Their actions towards love were clouded by ego, coercion, control, dominance, manipulation, self-loathing, reactivity, weaponized incompetence, and cowardice. With one exception, I don’t remember any of them taking the time to sit still, self-reflect, or even jot some thoughts down in a journal.

Currently, I see multiple generations of men who haven’t done any inner work, and generations of women who have done all of it. Men can barely look at themselves, and women are taught to look too much. This disparity is sad for everyone involved, but because of it, I rarely feel the benefits of the “love” men try to offer me, especially when compared to the nourishment and deep intimacy provided by my friendships with everyone else.

It turns out that love starts with the self, and it requires courage, attention, and devotion. Deeply loving someone, and being loved by them in return, requires radically loving ourselves. In my experience, most men don’t even like themselves. It’s no wonder I don’t really feel their love.

Ok this made me chuckle

An exception to my boredom is when I’m romancing academics—men who read profusely and have knowledge to share—or men who are phenomenally skilled and obsessed with their work. I learn so much from them, but both of these archetypes ultimately make difficult partners, namely because they’re workaholics. They are, however, good temporary lovers, and can turn into the best peers.

These days, I cherish my friendships with men who aren’t trying to court or possess me—mentors, dads, friendly neighbors, helpers, or the partners of my friends. They almost see me; there’s no fantasy for them to project onto me, blocking their view. And if there is, I don’t have to know about it.

2025-07-10S

Rigidity in Islamic Societies

State Power & Punishment - by Alice Evans #islam #religion #power

Nobel laureates Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have a brilliant new paper, published in the Journal of Economic Literature, proposing a dynamic interaction between culture and institutions. They suggest that a society’s values legitimise particular economic and political institutions, which then shape emergent configurations of culture. In their theory, each cultural set has a set of ‘attributes’ (which can be abstract or specific). These sets can be ‘free-standing’ or ‘entangled’

Contrasting cultural evolution across world regions, they suggest that Islam has some ‘highly specified’ attributes, which are also ‘entangled’. Sharia reigns supreme, since it is the word of God, revealed by Mohammad. Given this fundamental set of attributes, reinterpretation or critique becomes illegitimate. Instead, Muslims usually gravitate to scriptural literalism, and the religion thus becomes relatively ‘hard-wired’, less open to contestation or institutional reform. Rulers then cement their authority by invoking and entrenching Islamic values.

Alice Evans critically engages with Acemoglu and Robinson’s theory on the dynamic interaction between culture and institutions, focusing on Islamic societies. She argues that state power, prestige, and punishment are key engines sustaining cultural norms, especially through religiously sanctioned enforcement mechanisms like the office of hisba.

Key Takeaways

• Islamic cultural rigidity is not "hard-wired" but enforced through state power and punishment. • The office of hisba historically policed morality, legitimizing rulers and controlling social behavior. • Power, prestige, and punishment together shape cultural evolution and institutional legitimacy.

“Positive” Masculinity

The problem with ‘positive masculinity’ | Dazed #masculinity #gender #patriarchy

Masculinity is always in crisis, and the crisis is always new. In 1100, chronicler Oderic Vitalis railed against pointy shoes, for initiating young men into lives of effeminacy and sexual deviance. In the 1930s, George Orwell blamed the suburbs and middle-class morality. Today, it’s violent misogynist Andrew Tate and his legion of off-brand masculinity influencers.

TIL about the term "toxic masculinity"

‘Toxic masculinity’ was not a concept born of feminism. The phrase was coined, at least in print, by Shepherd Bliss, a member of the mythopoetic men’s movement – a mostly 1980s and 90s phenomenon that tried to explain why men felt like shit.

Can we really solve patriarchal violence with good patriarchs, who deserve their authority and always get things right? Envisioning a way out of oppressive masculinity is obviously better than defending it, but the positive masculinity movement hasn’t done much envisioning. ‘Healthy masculinity’ means both everything and nothing at the same time. Plus, some of its advocates are startlingly conservative: a recent BetterHelp ad features a man with a soothing voice being asked what ‘healthy masculinity looks like in 2025’, and telling the listener “maybe the tropes of provide and protect still hold,” clarifying that “maybe it’s less about muscles right now and maybe it’s about protecting your partner’s spirit or protecting their emotional safety.” Some are pushing back against traditional gender roles in more meaningful ways, but the language of ‘healthy masculinity’ leaves their endgame a great big mystery box. Do they want the borders of masculinity to be less policed, or do they just want to slightly expand the territory of what is acceptable for men? And where, if at all, do women fit into this?

Notes from an experienced software dev

All high value work is deep work, and all motivation is based on belief. #software #programming

Advice about software engineering that is worth repeating in full

Senior SWE, 12 YoE. The discourse around software development is incredibly chaotic and anxiety-inducing. I deal with the same emotions as everyone, but I manage to keep going despite having worked in a very poorly run company for a long time on a severely neglected product amidst product cancellation, brand cancellation, mass layoffs (one of which affected me), mismanagement, offshoring, you name it. I have managed to stay actively learning new tech, engaged on challenging problems, and having positive interactions with my coworkers consistently, even when one or more parties are being difficult to work with (which we all can be guilty of, myself included).

Here, I am to about share what keeps me grounded within all the noise.

This post itself is not a statement of fact, but a belief. But it keeps me going through all the noise and bullshit.

Also, a caveat: The claims I am making aren't the only claims to be made, and there are other important things to know. For example: It is true that all high value work is deep work, but it's not true that all deep work is high value work. A rectangle isn't necessarily a square.

All high value work is deep work, and all motivation is based on belief.

High value work is differentiated work. It's your moat. Not everyone has the grit, the attitude, the determination, and the ability to focus on challenging problems involving abstract concepts, especially when there is no immediate gratification, and when there is significant adversity in the environment. This is true of the population at large. But even within engineering/development, there are levels to this. Most people refuse to read. Most people refuse to do research. Most people panic when they see big log messages or stack traces. Most people give up when their code won't compile after googling for 20 minutes, if they even try googling at all. If you're the opposite of that kind of person, you will always be valuable in development.

All motivation is based on belief. Use this fact to be a leader, and use this fact to motivate yourself. All hard workers work hard because they believe they will benefit from it.

For some people, it is enough benefit to simply get in a flow state and enjoy solving a problem. But there is something deeper. Ask yourself what it is for you. Some examples:

  • ego boost (I am so smart wow)

  • prestige/praise (he/she is so smart wow)

  • distraction/addictive pattern (my marriage/family/health/social life sucks so bad, I need to forget for a while)

  • raw gratitude (or is it cope energy?) (I am grateful I get this fat paycheck to sit inside in comfortable temperatures and ergonomics, safely on a computer with no risk of injury or death, no one berating me constantly, no dealing with unreasonable patrons/patients/customers/schoolkids etc, just to solve challenging problems and be in a flow state, and if I could earn this money in a band or as a gamer I would but I can't so I'm just grateful for this opportunity so I can focus on myself and my family and my hobbies outside of work and build a nest egg for my family)

  • social (I love the people I work with, I genuinely have fun at the office with these cool people and I would still hang out with these people even if I weren't being paid)

Find out what motivates you, understand it, contextualize it, and ACCEPT it. Once you do that, you can have the space to figure out the same for others and help them along. I recommend taking the gratitude route. Gratitude can apply pretty broadly. It is actually a major life lesson in happiness.

Also, yes, corporate America is toxic. But you choose to work there. Every day you choose to work there, you should 100% double down on acceptance, or 100% double down on trying to find another job. Anything in between is total misery. Don't live life in resistance to what is. Accept what you can't control and work hard on what you can control. Either go to a startup and accept the risks, become politically active and solve the problem that way, or accept that you want the money badly enough and that the greedy, lying toxic charlatans running corporate America are the ones most able to give you the fat paycheck you signed up for.

Find what it is that motivates you in this field, and use that motivation to power some deep work so that you have some staying power in this field. It all starts in your own mind.

I know this devolved into a ramble. Just my two cents, hope it helps.

2025-07-08

The Perils of ‘The Perils of Design Thinking’

The Perils of ‘Design Thinking’ - The Atlantic #design #politics #culture

The concept of design, as the French philosopher Bruno Latour observed in a 2008 lecture, has had an “extraordinary career.” No longer is design about making objects more beautiful and useful; instead, he suggested, “design is one of the terms that has replaced the word ‘revolution’!” That might be the problem. “Our contemporary idea of design,” Gram writes, is often used to convince ourselves “that positive social change could be achieved without politics and government action; that problem solving could be both generative and profitable.” But most ambitious changes on the societal level require political consensus, and what’s profitable for some may not be beneficial for all. Design may be a distraction from the real work.

In Praise of “Normal” Engineers

In Praise of “Normal” Engineers – charity.wtf #engineering #normal #productivity

I really liked the part How do you turn normal engineers into 10x engineering teams?

  1. Shrink the interval between when you write the code and when the code goes live.
  2. Make it easy and fast to roll back or recover from mistakes.
  3. Make it easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing.
  4. Invest in instrumentation and observability.
  5. Devote engineering cycles to internal tooling and enablement.
  6. Build an inclusive culture.
  7. Diverse teams are resilient teams.
  8. Assemble engineering teams from a range of levels.

Decentering work

Is it finally time to decentre work?  | Dazed #work #hustle #capitalism

“The journey of emerging into adult responsible contexts [the working world] involves at some point the need to do some sort of deprogramming and unlearning as the fantasy of your working life becomes deconstructed by reality,” 25-year-old Olivia tells Dazed. Olivia graduated with her MA in 2023 and started working at her university shortly after, but she recently quit her job. Her last job made her acutely conscious of the structural violence of late-stage capitalism, and shaped her plans for the type of job she’d like to do next. “[It is important to look at] how you are being valued at a place where you swap your time, skills, mind and body for money,” she says. “And I use those words with a lot of intention.”

Framing work in the way that Olivia has is beneficial to understanding the oppressive nature of work under late-stage capitalism because you are exchanging your limited time on earth and your health, which can be seriously jeopardised by doing a desk job, for money. And this is, of course, not by choice. Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek argue in their book After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time, that “we are coerced into work on pain of homelessness, starvation and destitution.” In other words, we work because we have no other choice. This isn’t to say that work isn’t fulfilling and deeply enjoyable for some. It can provide a sense of purpose and optimism, especially when you’re doing something you love and feel passionate about. But the amount of time we’re expected to expend on our jobs (and lack of choice) can significantly sour that devotion.

I would argue that young graduates’ dissatisfaction with work is potentially connected to the fact that their priorities differ from those of past generations. As older people were marrying young and able to buy their homes and have children on their salaries, they were able to acquire symbols of the “good life”, as theorist Sara Ahmed describes it, even if it didn’t really make them happy. Gen Z (and millennials) struggle to receive the economic benefits that previous generations achieved through work, which potentially makes them less resilient to its brutality. It’s also important to note that the markers of the “good life” have changed in the social media age, where we are confronted 24/7 by influencers who are always on holiday, live in big homes and wear enviable clothing. They could not afford their lifestyle through a traditional nine-to-five job, and it makes one question the point of having one when you could just become a content creator.

As we’ve already established, under capitalism, everyone needs to work; and detailing the ways work under this system is coercive and detrimental to one’s health doesn’t change that fact, if anything, it’s just depressing. The intention of this article is not to depress anyone, but rather to prompt an examination of our feelings about work, as it often defines so much of our self-worth, creating fears about how others see and value us. You are not a failure if you can not find work in our incredibly fucked-up job market. You are more than the work you do and what you produce, and the same energy that goes into your working life should be expended on your personal life. Of course, our personal lives do not provide us with income, but they do equally (if not more so) provide us with the tools we need to stay alive: our friends, family and our communities (if we invest in them).

2025-07-06

AI, ML and Deep Learning

PyTorch in One Hour: From Tensors to Training Neural Networks on Multiple GPUs #ai #ml #deeplearning #tensors

I was working my way through this article when I came across a nice, simple definition of the different categories - AI, ML and Deep Learning

AI is fundamentally about creating computer systems capable of performing tasks that usually require human intelligence. These tasks include understanding natural language, recognizing patterns, and making decisions. (Despite significant progress, AI is still far from achieving this level of general intelligence.)

Machine learning represents a subfield of AI (as illustrated in Figure 2) that focuses on developing and improving learning algorithms. The key idea behind machine learning is to enable computers to learn from data and make predictions or decisions without being explicitly programmed to perform the task. This involves developing algorithms that can identify patterns and learn from historical data and improve their performance over time with more data and feedback.

Machine learning has been integral in the evolution of AI, powering many of the advancements we see today, including LLMs. Machine learning is also behind technologies like recommendation systems used by online retailers and streaming services, email spam filtering, voice recognition in virtual assistants, and even self-driving cars. The introduction and advancement of machine learning have significantly enhanced AI’s capabilities, enabling it to move beyond strict rule-based systems and adapt to new inputs or changing environments.

Deep learning is a subcategory of machine learning that focuses on the training and application of deep neural networks. These deep neural networks were originally inspired by how the human brain works, particularly the interconnection between many neurons. The “deep” in deep learning refers to the multiple hidden layers of artificial neurons or nodes that allow them to model complex, nonlinear relationships in the data.

Unlike traditional machine learning techniques that excel at simple pattern recognition, deep learning is particularly good at handling unstructured data like images, audio, or text, so deep learning is particularly well suited for LLMs.

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Oliver Burkeman on Insecure Overachievers

The Imperfectionist: Acting because you don't have to

The spiritual teacher Michael Singer says somewhere that the basic stance most of us take toward the world is that we try to use life to make ourselves feel OK. And this is certainly true of the type psychologists label ‘insecure overachievers’, who often accomplish plenty of impressive things, but who do so, deep down, because we don’t believe we’d have earned the right to feel good about ourselves, or to relax into life, if we didn’t.

It’s a soul-crushing way to live, not least because it turns each success into a new source of oppression, since now that’s the minimum standard you feel obliged to meet next time…

Most productivity advice, I think, caters to people mired in this mindset. It promises ways to help you take so much action, so efficiently, that you might one day get to feel good about yourself at last. Which isn’t going to work – because the real problem isn’t that you haven’t yet done enough things, or got good enough at doing them. The real problem is the fact that for whatever combination of reasons in your childhood, culture or genes, your sense of self-worth and psychological safety got tethered to your productivity or accomplishments in the first place.

This is a really good take on ambition, and continuing to be ambitious without being constantly in insecure-overachiever mode

One of the most important consequences of all this, for me, has been the realisation that when you begin to outgrow action-from-insecurity, you don’t have to give up on being ambitious. On the contrary: you get to be much more effectively and enjoyably ambitious, if that’s the way you’re inclined.

I’ve long been allergic to the notion, prevalent in self-help circles, that if you truly managed to liberate yourself from your issues, you’d ideally spend your days just sort of passively floating around, smiling at everyone, maybe attending the occasional yoga retreat, but not much more. “The more I heal, the less ambitious I become” is a phrase I’ve encountered multiple times online in recent months. And yes, sure, if your ambition was only ever a function of anxiety, becoming less ambitious would be an excellent development. Then again, the desire to create remarkable outcomes in your creative work, relationships or community – or even just in your bank balance – might just be an authentic part of who you are, once the clouds of insecurity begin to clear.

So you don’t need to choose between peace of mind and the thrill of pursuing ambitious goals. You just need to understand those goals less as vehicles to get you to a future place of sanity and good feeling, and more as things that unfold from an existing place of sanity and good feeling. (Besides, I’ve got to believe that ambition pursued in this spirit is far likelier to make a positive difference in the world.)

How do we boost birthrates

How do we Boost Birth Rates? - by Alice Evans #fertility #demography #children

Six factors need to be addressed

  1. Women procreate if they expect rewards such as personal fulfillment or social approval.
  2. People are more likely to have kids if it’s fun relative to other alternatives.
  3. Economic and housing incentives from governments must outcompete other alluring alternatives.
  4. Community plays a role by creating social expectations and shared activities among families.
  5. Films and cultural portrayals could make parenting seem more desirable.
  6. The rise of singles and solitude makes it harder to raise children alone and affects dating prospects.