Roger von Oech

Paul Ehrlich has passed away, and I wanted to see whether he was as bad as his quotes and short clips suggest. Surely, there might be some nuance or careful thought in his worldview. Nobody is that purely evil. So I picked up The Population Bomb and started reading. It turns out, he's even worse than you think! I’m putting together a thread below. Quotes taken out of context don't get at the degree to which he is consistently evil and misanthropic. He had an entire system that he pursued in which human life was constantly denigrated and devalued, with an eye toward elimination. You’re left wondering what you’re even reducing human population for, since every form of life seems to be not worth living. Some people are racist and just hate poor and brown people. Some hate the rich. Paul Ehrlich doesn't discriminate. He wants you not to exist if he can get away with it. But if he can't stop you from living, he wants you to have a much worse quality of life. Ehrlich has a plan for both advanced and poor countries. He has blueprints for entire regions of the globe. Humans do not have agency in Ehrlich’s world. They’re simple consumers of resources, with no ability to create, better their circumstances, or exert individual agency to make the world a better place, except to the extent that they ensure fellow humans no longer exist. You might find all of this depressing. But I’ve found reading Ehrlich invigorating. It is a reminder of how much evil there is in the world. Recall that Ehrlich was not some guy in his room putting out diatribes. He was a professor at Stanford, a highly decorated scientist, and one of the most prominent public intellectuals of his generation. While reading Ehrlich today, know that he has intellectual descendants in the form of degrowthers and other environmental extremists, along with anti-capitalists who don’t understand the basis of prosperity and prioritize redistributing wealth over all else.

🚨BREAKING: MIT hooked people up to brain scanners while they used ChatGPT. What they found should concern every single person reading this. ChatGPT users showed 55% weaker brain connectivity than people who didn't use it. Not after years. After just four months. Here's how they tested it. 54 people were split into three groups: one used ChatGPT to write essays, one used Google, and one used nothing but their own brain. They wore EEG monitors that tracked their brain activity in real time across four sessions over four months. The brain-only group built the strongest, most widespread neural networks. Google users were in the middle. ChatGPT users had the weakest brains in the room. Every time. Then the memory test hit. Participants were asked to recall what they'd just written minutes earlier. 83% of ChatGPT users couldn't quote a single line from their own essay. They wrote it. They couldn't remember it. The words passed through them like they were never there. It gets worse. In the final session, ChatGPT users were told to write without AI. Their brains were measurably weaker than people who never used AI at all. 78% still couldn't recall their own writing. The damage didn't go away when the tool was removed. Meanwhile, brain-only users who tried ChatGPT for the first time? Their brains lit up. They wrote better prompts. They retained more. Their brains were already strong enough to use AI as a tool instead of a crutch. The researchers also found that every ChatGPT essay on the same topic looked almost identical. More facts, more dates, more names. But less original thinking. Everyone using ChatGPT produced the same generic output while believing it was their own. MIT gave this a name: cognitive debt. Like financial debt, you borrow convenience now and pay with your thinking ability later. Except there's no way to pay it back. The question isn't whether ChatGPT is useful. It's whether the price is your ability to think without it.

Raheem's in the building 🫡

I’ve been tear-gassed 3 times in my life in 1970 and 1972 (college). All three times at events that started as “peaceful” anti-Vietnam War rallies, and then escalated into rock throwing mayhem. I learned my lesson then to be very wary when large crowds gather (no matter what the cause).