> The ideal of college as a place of intellectual growth, where students engage with deep, profound ideas, was gone long before ChatGPT. The combination of high costs and a winner-takes-all economy had already made it feel transactional, a means to an end. (In a recent survey, Deloitte found that just over half of college graduates believe their education was worth the tens of thousands of dollars it costs a year, compared with 76 percent of trade-school graduates.) In a way, the speed and ease with which AI proved itself able to do college-level work simply exposed the rot at the core. “How can we expect them to grasp what education means when we, as educators, haven’t begun to undo the years of cognitive and spiritual damage inflicted by a society that treats schooling as a means to a high-paying job, maybe some social status, but nothing more?” Jollimore wrote in a recent essay. “Or, worse, to see it as bearing no value at all, as if it were a kind of confidence trick, an elaborate sham?” > “Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought,” wrote Duke professor Orin Starn in a recent column titled “My Losing Battle Against AI Cheating,” citing a quote often attributed to W. H. Auden. But it’s not just writing that develops critical thinking. “Learning math is working on your ability to systematically go through a process to solve a problem. Even if you’re not going to use algebra or trigonometry or calculus in your career, you’re going to use those skills to keep track of what’s up and what’s down when things don’t make sense,” said Michael Johnson, an associate provost at Texas A&M University. Adolescents benefit from structured adversity, whether it’s algebra or chores. They build self-esteem and work ethic. It’s why the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued for the importance of children learning to do hard things, something that technology is making infinitely easier to avoid. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has tended to brush off concerns about AI use in academia as shortsighted, describing ChatGPT as merely “a calculator for words” and saying the definition of cheating needs to evolve. “Writing a paper the old-fashioned way is not going to be the thing,” Altman, a Stanford dropout, said last year. But speaking before the Senate’s oversight committee on technology in 2023, he confessed his own reservations: “I worry that as the models get better and better, the users can have sort of less and less of their own discriminating process.”

Societies, communities, neighborhoods can’t operate if people live in fear of each other. There will always be some people that try to take advantage of the good will of others. So how do you live with a default trust of other people while protecting yourself from those who would capitalize on that trust? You must commit to that trust and rely on support networks to catch you when that trust is violated, to live out the belief in a trust-first world.

The movement’s nationalistic character and penchant for mindless destruction are also typical. Those who boast few achievements of their own will often lay claim to those of the nation, instead. “When we renounce the self and become part of a compact whole, we not only renounce personal advantage but are also rid of personal responsibility,” Hoffer observed. “When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom – freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse.” A society so thoroughly steeped in the work ethic and committed to the pursuit of individual achievement cannot but fail to prepare its members for any other kinds of lives. Yet solutions to the problem of leisure exist throughout our own wisdom tradition, which stresses the value of friendship (Epicurus), contemplation (Aristotle), and “other-regarding” public service (Cicero). These basic human goods have been severely eroded, producing an age of loneliness, inattention, and ginned-up tribalism; but each could be reclaimed with sufficient free time and a proper command over it. While there will always be demagogues, conspiracists, and cult leaders, they would have no purchase over a people who can find fulfilment in themselves. Only through deep, sustained habituation does one begin to distinguish between art and entertainment, lower and higher pleasures, titillation and the sublime. - ironically they kinda talked about this on the The Yard episode with Northernlion, the idea of like, if you never put in the work to enjoy the process of a hobby/interest then you'll just only ever want slop (similar thesis to the brad troemel "healing report")

I don't leave any tabs open when I stop using my computer. A closed tab is a good tab. Not closing a tab is like breathing in without breathing out.

Local norms matter too much for global governance of the social internet to make sense; the flattening of global diversity to fit the norms and interests of any given American techno-culture—corporate or otherwise—is both a baldly colonial aspiration and one we should scorn for the same reason that we leave the idea of effective, monolithic, planetary-scale government—benevolent or otherwise—to underbaked science fiction. Home rule and genuine resilience both require the existence of many places, many of them at least partially interconnected. Decades down the road, I think the notion that a pack of mostly-American mega-corporations could ever have stood in for the complexities of governing a new layer of global public life, with all the opportunities and dangers it brings, will be obviously laughable. I think it already is.