Ari Schulman at The New Atlantis:
But then there are the parts of effective altruism that are just … weird.
For many of its adherents, EA is not just an idea but a transformational lifestyle. There is no limit to how much of your time, money, and identity you can give over to it. EA is intertwined with the rationalist movement, so much so that they are virtually synonyms, different faces of the same set of thinkers, ideas, and organizations. There are formalized online communities. There are in-person meetups. For $3,900 a pop, you can attend four-day-long rationality training workshops at the Bay-area Center for Applied Rationality. Or you can just read up on what Eliezer Yudkowsky, whose work helped inspire the seminars, calls “The Way” of rationality: “The Way is a precise Art. Do not walk to the truth, but dance. On each and every step of that dance your foot comes down in exactly the right spot. Each piece of evidence shifts your beliefs by exactly the right amount, neither more nor less.” Yudkowsky, currently enjoying a moment as the world’s leading expert on AI safety research, was once better known for his FanFiction.net magnum opus Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which spans nearly twice the length of Anna Karenina.
more here.
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In 1884, William James began his celebrated essay “The Dilemma of Determinism” by begging his readers’ indulgence: “A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out of the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more than warm up stale arguments which everyone has heard.” James persisted and rendered the subject very juicy, as he always did. But if the topic appeared exhausted to most people then, surely a hundred and forty years later there can’t be anything new to say. Whole new fields of physics, biology, mathematics, and medicine have been invented—surely this ancient philosophical question doesn’t still interest anyone?
I’m an engineer who 
In late 1949, the West Indian intellectual 
The actual exchange between Oppenheimer and Einstein was, as it happened, far less cordial than the film’s version. It ended with an exasperated Einstein telling his assistant, “There goes a Narr [fool],” nodding toward the Institute director.
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So far, we humans have mostly restricted ourselves to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The SETI Institute, a private, nonprofit research organization, has built a variety of instruments designed to detect signs of extraterrestrial life. So have other institutes and universities. This activity is reasonably uncontroversial: If somebody is trying to send us a message, it would likely be beneficial to receive it; we can then figure out how, and whether, to answer.
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In the wake of his huge defeat on June 30, 2024, when 80 percent of voters rejected French “centrist” President Emmanuel Macron, he said he understood the French people’s anger. In the UK, Conservative loser Rishi Sunak said the same about the British people’s anger, as Labor leader Starmer now says as the anger explodes. Of course, such phrases from such politicians usually mean little or nothing and accomplish less. Such leaders and their parties just keep calculating how best to regain power when they lose it. In that, they are like the U.S. Democrats after Biden’s performance in his debate with Trump and like the U.S. Republicans after Trump’s loss in 2020. In both parties, a small group of top leaders and top donors made all the key decisions and then organized the political theater to ratify those decisions. Even surprises like Harris replacing Biden are temporary departures from resuming politics as usual.
Dear Tom,
An analysis of almost 50,000 brain scans