3 stars
They Missed Their Cruise Ship. That Was Only The Beginning. | New York
Nine stranded passengers made a mad dash across Africa to meet back up with their boat.
On Priesthoods | Astral Codex Ten
Some recent political discussion has focused on “the institutions” or “the priesthoods”. I’m part of one of these (the medical establishment), so here’s an inside look on what these are and what they do. […]
From this formulation, it becomes clear that such a priesthood is only useful insofar as it has some kind of barrier between itself and the general public.
The priesthoods don’t exactly hate the public. But they hate the idea of letting the public’s ideas mix with their own. It’s not just that they discount the public’s ideas insofar as the public is less sophisticated than themselves. Their whole identity comes from their separation from the public. Ideas that seem too similar to the public’s get actively penalized, the same way it would be hard to convince Democrats to accept a plan that Donald Trump proposed first, even if it otherwise fit with Democratic ideals.
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When a Deadly Winter Storm Trapped a Luxury Passenger Train Near the Donner Pass for Three Days | Smithsonian Magazine
Snowdrifts stranded the vehicle in the Sierra Nevada in January 1952, imprisoning 226 people traveling from Chicago to California
Observations from India | The Scholar’s Stage
In November 2024, I traveled to India as part of a delegation hosted by the India Foundation. The foundation is a part of the new nationalist establishment steering Indian society. As they see things, India’s relationship with America has been mediated by hostile parties for too long. On the Indian side you have Congress-sympathizing functionaries; on the American side, a set of intellectuals and diplomats who can neither speak for nor to the American right. Direct links between Indian and American nationalists are needed.
So I was invited to India.
The ‘Beautiful Confusion’ of the First Billion Years Comes Into View | Quanta Magazine
After the first morning of the conference, I found Hainline in the courtyard. The new discoveries I had been hearing about seemed revolutionary, perhaps even paradigm-shifting. I wanted to check my reaction with one of the people doing the actual work. Were these results as extraordinary as I, a reporter, thought they were?
“We are knocking on the door of history,” Hainline assured me. “Astronomers need to be better about celebrating discoveries.”
In Santa Barbara, they did. Over star-studded slide decks and rounds of Pacifico beer, 100 or so astrophysicists exulted in the new findings about the universe’s first billion years, an epoch that JWST is revealing in exquisite detail for the first time. They shared surprising observations of “little red dots,” which abound in JWST data and whose nature remains elusive, as well as images of other early galaxies that look extremely blue. They marveled at odd galactic shapes, including bright objects that resolve into tight clusters, like bunches of grapes, and others resembling bananas. People argued over the enormous black holes spotted at those early times and the circumstances of their formation.
Women and Children First | Fairer Disputations
In this seemingly trivial piece of advice lies great wisdom for feminists. I make no secret of the fact that I oppose the kind of feminism that seeks to erase the differences between men and women in the hope of erasing the status gap. I reject the kind of feminism that insists on 50/50 representation in boardrooms while forgetting about 50/50 representation in waste disposal, since the goal is not “equality” per se, but rather masculine status.
I oppose that project not only because it’s hopeless, but also because it doubles down on the disdain directed towards femininity and so ends up causing material harm to other women. An unfortunate feature of the influx of women into elite professions over the last half century is that the women who tend to get to the top of the ladder are the women most likely to deprioritize motherhood relative to career. These powerful women can often be more contemptuous of the feminine role than are their male colleagues, and it is partly due to their influence that, as Caplan writes, “schools and media aggressively encourage girls to pursue career success.” This rejection of motherhood is evident in policymaking. For instance, in the UK, families with stay-at-home mothers are penalized by our tax system, sometimes paying twice as much tax as families in which both parents earn the same, all in the name of “equality.”
My proposal, instead, is that feminists should play a different status game entirely by pugnaciously asserting the status of motherhood—a status no man can ever achieve, whether he be a CEO, an astronaut, or the President of the United States.
Reflections | Sam Altman
We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes.
We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.
This sounds like science fiction right now, and somewhat crazy to even talk about it. That’s alright—we’ve been there before and we’re OK with being there again. We’re pretty confident that in the next few years, everyone will see what we see, and that the need to act with great care, while still maximizing broad benefit and empowerment, is so important. Given the possibilities of our work, OpenAI cannot be a normal company.
Trudeau was a poor steward of Canada's economy | Noahpinion
No one knows what ails Canada, but Trudeau didn't try very hard to fix it.
How The World’s Rarest Pasta Came Back From Near Extinction | Still Standing | Business Insider [YouTube]
Su filindeu, or "threads of God," is the rarest pasta in the world. For a century, it was made by a single family in the Sardinian city of Nuoro for religious celebrations. Today, there are fewer than 10 people there who know the secret to making the pasta as thin as a strand of hair. Secrecy nearly led to the dish’s disappearance, but now, the pasta is finding new customers abroad. We went to Italy to see how the process of making su filindeu is Still Standing.
An earful of gill: USC Stem Cell study points to the evolutionary origin of the mammalian outer ear | Keck School of Medicine USC
The outer ear is unique to mammals, but its evolutionary origin has remained a mystery. According to a new study published in Nature from the USC Stem Cell lab of Gage Crump, this intricate coil of cartilage has a surprisingly ancient origin in the gills of fishes and marine invertebrates.
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Kohei Ohmori’s Hyperrealistic Pencil Drawings | Kottke
Wow, check out these amazing hyperrealistic pencil drawings by Kohei Ohmori. The detail is next-level.
