Cunningham

@cremieuxrecueil “If you meet one asshole, you’ve met one asshole. But if everyone you meet is an asshole, the asshole is you.” I think of this phrase when I hear about people who hate all institutions.

@aginaut @StefanFSchubert @jburnmurdoch But the center is closer to truth most of the time. Also, beyond truth, moderate positions keep society more harmonious.

@StefanFSchubert @jburnmurdoch Moving people toward the centre is not the same as producing better judgment. Sometimes the centre is closer to truth. Sometimes it is just the lowest-conflict answer. That is why “depolarizing” and “epistemically good” should not be treated as identical.

While social media is polarising, evidence suggests AI may nudge people towards the centre. This holds true of all studied models. Grok is more right-leaning than other models, but also has depolarising effects. By @jburnmurdoch.

@RichardHanania American narcissism.

French Laundry chef: “No one asked ME whether they could build apartments near by.” NIMBYs are a case of the banality of evil. If you don’t think these people are the main barrier to Americans living better lives, you don’t understand our current situation.

@mattbencole Who is pushing AI on them?

Btw I'm not saying this to make fun of my students. They're still learning the writing process (and AI is being pushed on them aggressively). But its pathetic that a professional writer would not understand this. And is most certainly being dishonest about her use of AI to boot.

This is literally what my students say when they get busted using AI. “I didn’t use it to write my paper just for brainstorming, outlining, and editing.” Yeah that’s most of what writing is.

@CarlZha Dumb

The US has surpassed China and North Korea in Death rate from malnutrition

@DKThomp That sounds like exactly what our society needs right now.

A good and bad of AI is that it unleashes a centrally pre-trained entity into the wild. The age of social media reflected our polarization, bc people are v different, and v different people locked in a room reliably leads to group polarization (Sunstein et al). AI doesn’t provide a mere room for people with differences to disagree; it provides answers. And answers are de-polarizing. That’s all kind of roughly and vaguely stated, but it’s interesting!

@whyvert It would also help if we all agreed that the Geneva convention rights do not cover insurgents. After all, they are not uniformed.

Western governments should rethink how they approach fighting guerillas. It is too defeatist to say that we can never win irregular wars. But we should not fight them in the same way we have in the past.

Fighting guerillas is very hard (see: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq) because they hide among civilians. Israel has learned this and now orders civilians to evacuate. Anyone left is a target. The lesson: irregular wars can be fought and won. Guerillas are not invincible.

@Noahpinion I am a transplant physician and I straight up do not believe this account.

Dear Lord

@awesomekling @asymmetricinfo I’m ready to talk dinosaurs right now.

Current-gen LLM "memory" systems make every chatbot feel like a distant relative you met once when you were 7, and you see him again 30 years later and he just assumes you want to talk about dinosaurs some more.

This is a clear a sign as any that whichever party can act more normal will win

@MarcACaputo @RadioFreeTom Driscoll the Dunce

When no comment is a comment

@trannyscam28421 @avidseries Well, a fair number of patients die at home while enrolled in hospice. But otherwise, of the hundreds of patients I’ve taken care of, only a handful of times do I learn that they have died unexpectedly at home.

@Arbitrary_user @avidseries Your experience is limited to deaths in facilities. Tens of thousands of people die comfortably in their own homes every day, everywhere. The death described by the OP is a one-in-ten thousand occurrence. Fear of death and dying is making people hysterical.

"Eventually [your health issues] will add up beyond your ability to manage them on your own, and you will be sent off to a nursing home. You will become bedridden, unable to walk or even to turn yourself over. You will become completely dependent on nurse assistants to intermittently shift your position to avoid pressure ulcers. When they inevitably slip up, your skin develops huge incurable sores that can sometimes erode all the way to the bone, and which are perpetually infected with foul-smelling bacteria. Your limbs will become practically vestigial organs, like the appendix, and when your vascular disease gets too bad, one or more will be amputated, sacrifices to save the host. Urinary and fecal continence disappear somewhere in the process, so you’re either connected to catheters or else spend a while every day lying in a puddle of your own wastes until the nurses can help you out. The digestive system isn’t too happy either by this point, so you can either have a tube plugged directly into your stomach or just skip the middleman and have an IV line feeding nutrients into your bloodstream. Somewhere in the process your mind very quietly and without fanfare gives up the ghost. It starts with forgetting a couple of little things, and progresses until you have no idea what’s going on ever... [People] don’t remember their own names, they don’t know where they are or what they’re doing there, and they think it’s the 1930s or the 1950s or don’t even have a concept of years at all... So of course you start screaming and trying to attack people and trying to pull the tubes and IV lines out. Every morning when I come in to work I have to check the nurses’ notes for what happened the previous night, and every morning a couple of my patients have tried to pull all of their tubes and lines out. If it’s especially bad they try to attack the staff, and although the extremely elderly are really bad at attacking people this is nevertheless Unacceptable Behavior and they have to be restrained and tied down to the bed... Every day, your doctors will meet with your family another time, and eventually, as your condition worsens and your family has more time to be hit on the head with a big club marked ‘REALITY’, they will start to relent. Finally, they will allow your doctors to take you off of the machines, and you will be transferred to Palliative Care. And you will die, but not quickly. It takes time for the heart to give up, for the lungs to fill with water and stop breathing, for the toxic wastes to build up. It is generally considered wise for the patient to be on epic doses of morphine throughout the process, both to spare them the inevitable pain as their disease takes their course and to spare their family from having to watch them... A lot of families, faced with the prospect of missing work and school to sit by what’s basically a living corpse day in and day out for weeks just to watch it turn into a non-living corpse, politely decline. I absolutely 100% cannot blame them. This is the way many... die. Old, limbless, bedridden, ulcerated, in a puddle of waste, gasping for breath, loopy on morphine, hopelessly demented, in a sterile hospital room with someone from a volunteer program who just met them sitting by their bed." slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who…

@William_Blake @tylercowen He has no background in science

Jim O'Neill, my former colleague at the Thiel Fellowship, has been nominated to lead the National Science Foundation. I wrote up some ideas on how to reform it for City Journal city-journal.org/article/trump-…

@alfe_joseph @benryanwriter Yes, “just asking questions” does indeed undermine things.

@benryanwriter How? By calling for renewed testing and oversight?

RFK Jr. Is Losing His Grip on the CDC The Trump administration seems to be putting MAHA on notice. Today, Acting CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya said something that no other prominent health leader in the Trump administration has. “I think it is vital that every kid in this country get the measles vaccine. Absolutely vital,” he told CDC staff at a meeting this morning.

@RapidResponseAF @RichardHanania Blocking, and encouraging others to block also

@RichardHanania Rare Trump W

Hegseth’s chief of staff “told Mr. Driscoll that President Trump would not want to stand next to a Black female officer at military events, the officials said.” nytimes.com/2026/03/27/us/…

@arctotherium42 @iowireservice The idiotic non-replies to this are only proving my point.

@arctotherium42 @iowireservice This is whiny. People were always free to take their toxic lowbrow opinions to 4chan and 8chan where they belong.

Master thread on the 2015-2022 closure of the Internet, the process by which every major Internet platform went from broadly open with a few basic guidelines to strict narrative enforcement, often with the collaboration of govts and outsourcing moderation power to NGOs.

@granitarian @arctotherium42 @iowireservice “Nuked forever,” give me break. Then why did I see 8 billion posts questioning the Covid vaccine? I saw them with my own eyes.

@Arbitrary_user @arctotherium42 @iowireservice It didn’t stop at “toxic and lowbrow opinions.” Even on this platform if you questioned the Covid vaccine your account was nuked forever. We are extremely lucky that Elon saved us from that dark time.

@Nidstang__ @arctotherium42 Things are not sanitized now. Antisemitism is everywhere, as just one example.

@arctotherium42 I miss the wild west internet era so much (and the entire 2000s wild west, anything goes, being edgy and offensive is actually a good thing era of society as a whole). I hate the pro-censorship, infantilized, sanitized culture we're currently going through.