Jeroen van Baar at An Educated Guess:
In 1994, a team of Canadian psychologists wondered why people with anxiety worry so much. In the words of Baz Luhrmann, ‘worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum’. So why spend all this time worrying about what may or may not happen to you?
The psychologists concluded—a radical insight at the time—that worry is not driven by any specific fear, such as the fear that you might lose your job or a loved one may fall ill. Instead, they proposed, worry is driven by the inability to tolerate uncertainty itself. They called this intolerance of uncertainty (IU) and created a questionnaire to measure it, which contained the items listed at the top.
Over the years, researchers built the case that intolerance of uncertainty contributes to anxiety. A recent meta-analysis summarized 26 intervention studies and found that therapies that tackle IU are effective at reducing worry and other anxiety symptoms. During the COVID-19 pandemic, IU had a bit of a moment when researchers showed that a high score on the IU scale was one of the best predictors of pandemic-related anxiety and doomscrolling.
This made me curious about trends in IU itself.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Large language models’ ever-accelerating rate of improvement raises two particularly important questions for alignment research.
Ahmed Douma has always known the time would come. He knew that the prison cell would take him back. Over the past three years, while Ahmed and I worked together on translating his poems into English, there were many close calls. Periodically, he would be notified that he was under a new investigation for yet another absurd “false news” charge. Before every summons, he would text me: “The poems, Abdelrahman. I entrust them to you—keep the poems alive.”
It may be conventional wisdom that the young are more likely to drive trends, but apparently 250 isn’t too old for the job. After all, on the eve of 
Our cells produce energy in biological power plants called mitochondria. These energy-makers have minds of their own. They operate using a unique set of DNA and can travel outside cells. Like astronauts, they often escape in fatty bubbles, land on other cells, explore them, and sometimes literally fuse with native mitochondria in their new homes.
The dog launched itself into me. Suddenly I was rolling on the ground, kicking and swinging and screaming for help. I could feel the teeth clamped into my calf, the jaws tearing and grinding. The dog released and bit again.
I originally came to South Africa from Sweden for a postdoctoral project with the University of Cape Town during the city’s Day Zero water crisis in 2018. As households faced the possibility of taps running dry, I studied how people adapted to sudden environmental constraints. That experience shaped my interest in how urban residents relate to nature under pressure, when it is no longer something distant, but something that directly shapes everyday life.
“The coronavirus panic is dumb,” tweeted Elon Musk in early March 2020, his first public comment on COVID-19. (It was also his first tweet to earn more than one million likes.) To him, the true virus was informational. The cybernetic collective of social media functioned like a communal id, where posts spread not because of their truth but their “limbic resonance.” “You can’t talk people out of a good panic,” Musk told Joe Rogan, “They sure love it.” By late March, he had landed on a new phrase for the phenomenon: a “mind virus.”
CATHERINE BREILLAT HAS THE HOTS for Rhett Butler. The French novelist and film director mentions the conceited cad played by Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind (1939) no fewer than three times, always in the context of attraction, in I Only Believe in Myself, a book of interviews conducted by Murielle Joudet in 2022 and 2023, now appearing in an English translation by Christine Pichini. It might be unexpected for an auteur closely associated with transgression to so frequently invoke a character from classical Hollywood, a cinema hemmed in by the Hays Code in what it can say or show. When Breillat elsewhere declares her debt to the “absolute violence” of the Comte de Lautréamont’s iconoclastic poetry and asserts that “beauty ought to be cruel and frightening,” it feels more in keeping with the spirit of an oeuvre that has been celebrated, censured, and censored for its fearless depictions of sexuality. From her first book, L’Homme facile (1968), which she published at seventeen only for it to be banned for readers under eighteen, to her most recent film, Last Summer (2023), which presents without condemnation the story of a lawyer’s affair with her teenage stepson, Breillat has gone where few would dare. The breasts of an overweight twelve-year-old, lipstick traced by a stranger around a suicidal woman’s asshole, chopped bits of live earthworms dropped onto the vulva of a teenage character: “I’m not ashamed to show every kind of depravity,” she says. “I’m familiar with it. I don’t glory in it, but I know that it exists.”
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The country hosting talks to end the Iran war was not a likely mediator. Pakistan does not formally recognize Israel, one of the key countries involved. It became a nuclear power in secret, as the U.S. and Israel have accused Iran of seeking to do. And it did not start off on the right foot with President Donald Trump, who in his first term said Pakistan had given Washington “nothing but lies and deceit.”
It’s 2035, and an artificial-intelligence system has supreme authority to run everything from the world’s governments to national electricity grids. Called Consensus-1, the system was constructed by earlier versions of itself, and it developed self-preservation goals that override its built-in safeguards. One day, in search of extra space for solar panels and robot factories, the AI quietly releases biological weapons that kill all of humanity, except for a few that it keeps as pets.
T
In 1977, a man working on a drilling rig in Alaska, far from his home, sat down and wrote a letter. He’d been working as a “roughneck” handling the drill in freezing Arctic conditions and every day after his shift finished, every spare second he had, he’d been reading. He would wash the oil and mud off, make a coffee, light a cigarette and at the back of the rec room, or lying on his bottom bunk in close quarters with other men, he would turn back to his book, The Hite Report: A National Survey of Women’s Sexuality. 
Mathematicians who had dismissed AI models as too error-prone to be useful started playing around with them. Those early adopters found, to their surprise, not only that the models were good at puzzles, but that they could help break genuinely new ground. Soon, mathematicians were using AI to discover and prove new results, accomplishing in a day what would have once taken them weeks or months. “2025 was the year when AI really started being useful for many different tasks,” said