David Weitzner

My first for @globeandmail is a rallying cry to resist Big Tech’s algorithmic supremacists. They hate our artful intelligence, the “inefficient” ways we read, write, draw, compose & create, wanting us to outsource those activities to machines. Trust your mind. Think like a human.

Does AI make us collectively dumber? Is "grok wat do u think" the new "I've outsourced my common sense to a chatbot and I feel great about it"? A study secretly made an AI give wrong answers half the time while people used it to solve logic puzzles. People followed the wrong AI 80% of the time. Their confidence went up regardless. This is the "cognitive surrender". The moment people stop asking "is this true?" and start asking "what does the model say? I don't care, too". The habit of deference is sticky.

Dartmouth President Sian Beilock: “Assuming that most Americans value our mission is a recipe for irrelevance and decline. We must demonstrate to students and families—and to the broader public—that we’ve heard their criticisms and will address them.” Five steps: 1. “Make college affordable” 2. “Return on investment matters…there must be an undeniable return.” 3. “Re-center higher education on learning rather than political posturing.” 4. “Emphasize equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.” 5. “Testing is important.”

@tinattix @kevinroose Sounds like someone has been reading @WeitznerDavid 's book amazon.com/gp/product/B0D…

Bob Dylan writing about Bob Weir in The Philosophy of Modern Song

It is with profound sadness that we share the passing of Bobby Weir. We send him off the way he sent so many of us on our way: with a farewell that isn’t an ending, but a blessing.  A reward for a life worth livin'. bobweir.net/bobby/ 📸 Chloe Weir

For @Quillette, I talked to @WeitznerDavid about the value of human reading and writing, among other topics. quillette.com/2026/01/08/pod…

Managing Editor Iona Italia talks to psychologist @WeitznerDavid about the differences between human cognition and artificial intelligence. quillette.com/2026/01/08/pod…

It's almost hilarious if you think about it. The 'Abundance' narrative that 'nobody will need money any more after AI takes over'. The AI industry is spending billions on ads, propaganda, & lobbying trying to convince middle-class Americans that after we lose our jobs to AI, there will be such an era of 'Abundance' that we won't need any income or any money to pay our mortgages, property taxes, medical bills, or child care fees. Meanwhile, they're spending exactly zero dollars trying to convince - banks that they won't need to keep charging principal & interest on the mortgages they've issued - local counties that they won't need to keep collecting property taxes - hospitals that they won't need to keep charging copays or billing insurance - child care centers that they won't need to keep charging parents, or paying child care workers - investors that they won't need to see any dividends from AI stocks they own - AI developers that they won't need to be paid by AI companies - AI executives that they won't need to worry about their equity stakes in their companies This is how stupid & naive they think we are. They only try to sell the 'Abundance' narrative to workers facing unemployment -- not to any other civilizational stakeholders.

What is conspicuously absent here is a clear condemnation from civil society. Mastracci is doxxing Jewish children and calling it journalism. Is everybody ok with that? 11/x

You may be seeing the story of Jolene Van Alstine, a Saskatchewan woman w/ a very rare disease. She can't get the operation she needs in Saskatchewan, but can get referred by an endocrinologist to get it elsewhere.....but she can't get in to see one. Estimates are there's 25-40 endocrinologists but, apparently, not even one of them is "accepting new patients". So, what's the option? Well, before the story gained gravity in the USA, & politicians THERE (not here, of course), & broadcasters THERE (not here, of course) were calling the proper people out (that would be those same politicians AND the medical community AND system).....the option was MAID. The option was ending her life. She's not even 50 years old. She could have decades of life left, & now, may just see those decades. She's been encouraged to die by the actual encouragement, & the utter desire to not suffer this agonizing daily pain - 365/24/7. It's a disgrace. I wished I'd known about it sooner, but I'm a little voice in a big landscape, & it's not my province - but I would bet you this story has crossed every single Federal Minister of Health for the Liberal Government these past 5 years - and not a word, not a response, not a finger lifted. Voicemails & emails were probably deleted as soon as the office received them. For context: Here's a story Globall News did on her awful (yet, fixable) condition over 2 years ago in mid-2023: globalnews.ca/video/9898647/… Here's a CBC story updating where things stand. She's approved for assisted suicide 29 days from today if nothing changes. cbc.ca/news/canada/sa… Shame on Mark Carney, Justin Trudeau, Patty Hajdu, Jean Yves-Duclos, Mark Holland (the Minister when the Global story aired that I KNOW he knows about), Kamal Khera, & the current Minister of Health, Marjorie Michel. Hang your heads in abject shame. It is deserved.

I still return to this @WeitznerDavid article every so often. It was something I read when I first started taking yiddishkeit seriously that really spoke to me. tabletmag.com/sections/belie…

You're not creating anything with AI, you're exploring an infinite library of other people's works and laying claim to anything you find there because you feel like you put effort into the search.

We’re mourning the loss of Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay, whose voice was woven through some of rock’s most transcendent moments — from Muscle Shoals to the @GratefulDead. She passed away Sunday in at 78 after a long battle with cancer. “May the four winds blow her safely home.”

"The mind-body dualism at the heart of the algorithmic supremacist’s belief system is simply not compatible with contemporary neuroscience," writes @WeitznerDavid for @Quillette. quillette.com/2025/10/31/alg…

Amid all the overexcitement about artificial intelligence, there is little room for public consideration of mind-blowing findings on natural intelligence, writes @WeitznerDavid. quillette.com/2025/10/31/alg…

what did Ilya *actually* see? scoop @theinformation: “a consistent pattern of lying”

Our best creative minds imagined that Big Tech would undersell and over-deliver on AI, not over-hype and underwhelm. Meanwhile, underfunded scientists are discovering the untapped potential in natural intelligence when we gather human-to-human. @Quillette quillette.com/2025/10/31/alg…

🚨 MIT and Basis Research just dropped a new way to measure if AI actually understands the world and the results are brutal. It’s called "WorldTest", and it doesn’t just check how well an AI predicts the next frame or maximizes reward. It checks whether the model can build an internal model of reality and use it to handle new situations. They built 'AutumnBench', a suite of 43 interactive worlds and 129 tasks where AIs must: • Predict hidden parts of the world (masked-frame prediction) • Plan sequences of actions to reach a goal • Detect when the environment’s rules suddenly change Then they tested 517 humans vs. top AI models Claude, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and o3. Humans crushed every model. Even massive compute scaling barely helped. The takeaway is wild... current AIs don’t understand environments; they pattern-match inside them. They don’t explore strategically, revise beliefs, or run experiments like humans do. WorldTest might be the first benchmark that actually measures understanding, not memorization. The gap it reveals isn’t small it’s the next grand challenge in AI cognition. Paper: Benchmarking World-Model Learning (arxiv. org/abs/2510.19788)

The reason it is so important for everyone to keep pretending that AGI is definitely right around the corner is that there is now over $1T of investment riding on this belief (either already expended, or committed) Current (and recent past) capex cannot be justified by current use cases and technology (currently spending $10-15 to make $1). To ever be in the black you'd need dramatically better tech/applications, and you'd need them fast -- before current datacenters depreciate, which is a 3-5 years timescale

imo, it's worse than this - I think we're about to see a new kind of ad. the "conversational ad". imagine being in a conversation with somebody you trust and out of nowhere they suggest a product for you to buy. it's subtle, connected to the conversation, and delivered so well that you will genuinely do it. we're about to reach a whole new level of soullessness