Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate who upended economics, dies at 90
Chlorpyrifos: pesticide tied to brain damage in children
Population based case-control study found that, “Prenatal or infant exposure to a priori selected pesticides—including glyphosate, chlorpyrifos, diazinon, and permethrin—were associated with increased odds of developing autism spectrum disorder.”
Better Living Through Chemistry™
A Zen Buddhist priest voices the deep matters he usually ponders in silence
To be able to die at peace, a philosopher needs to die to his attachments to the world. This, for Montaigne, is “true solitude,” where one’s thoughts and emotions are reined in and brought under control. “To prepare oneself for death is to prepare oneself for freedom. The one who has learned to die has unlearned to be a slave.”
To die to the world is far from straightforward. “People do not recognize the natural sickness of their mind,” says Montaigne, which does nothing but “ferret about in search of something, ceaselessly twisting, elaborating, and entangling itself in its own activity like a silkworm, until it suffocates there like ‘a mouse in pitch.’ ” We rush around in a compulsive flight from death. “Every moment,” he remarks, “it seems I am fleeing from myself.” No matter how many laws or precepts we use to fence the mind in, we still find it “garrulous and dissolute, escaping all constraints.” This flight is chaotic and aimless. There is “no madness or lunacy that cannot be produced in this turmoil. When the soul has no definite goal, it gets lost.”
Henry Kissinger, Who Shaped U.S. Cold War History, Dies at 100
Exclusive: OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster, sources say
Researchers consider math to be a frontier of generative AI development. Currently, generative AI is good at writing and language translation by statistically predicting the next word, and answers to the same question can vary widely. But conquering the ability to do math — where there is only one right answer — implies AI would have greater reasoning capabilities resembling human intelligence. This could be applied to novel scientific research, for instance, AI researchers believe.
Unlike a calculator that can solve a limited number of operations, AGI can generalize, learn and comprehend.
I really, really, really hope my fears about AI are unfounded.
But we will build it. Humans never don’t build something because it might be dangerous. Nuclear weapons, gain-of function viral research… AI isn’t any different.
But how can we stop it from happening? We can’t prohibit everyone everywhere from building it. It’s inevitable.
I’m a doomer. I’ve long believed that humans will fuck up what we already have because we can’t learn to be content with it. We will do anything other than the hard work of learning to be content with life, to accept that misery and death are parts of it.
That’s all this is, right? Our abiding fear of death being made manifest?
Ironic, then, if it’s our inability to reconcile with death that causes our extinction.
What we’ve learned about the robot apocalypse from the OpenAI debacle
The argument is not that AI will become conscious or that it will decide it hates humanity. Instead, it is that AI will become extraordinarily competent, but that when you give it a task, it will fulfill exactly that task. Just as when we tell schools that they will be judged on the number of children who get a certain grade and teachers start teaching to the test, the AI will optimize the metric we tell it to optimize. If we are dealing with something vastly more powerful than human minds, the argument goes, that could have very bad consequences.
When we know that our time in this body and in this life is finite—when we fully embrace finitude—we don’t waste time. When the scarcity of our time comes into the forefront of our consciousness, we tend not to do the unskillful actions that cause harm. When we “greet and hold death as an advisor on our shoulder all the time,” as Carlos Castaneda said, the way we live our life changes.
We live with more freedom, peace, ease, love, and care because we know there is nothing to hang on to. We are a traveler on this earth. This body is not mine. It’s for rent. This life is for rent.
When we realize this, we live differently, we live more freely. We let go of our clinging, our sense of attachment to me, me, me, mine, mine, mine. It shifts our perspective. We can live with more freedom, generosity, kindness, and forgiveness. There is nothing to take with us. There’s nothing to hang on to. So this practice is liberating, just as the Buddha says, and it has the deathless as its fruit.
Apple continues to use our own mortality as marketing
On Tuesday, Apple revealed yet another reason why we might want to have our Apple devices with us at all times: Roadside Assistance. The service, which is compatible with the iPhone 14 and later, lets you contact AAA via satellite in case your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere.
In the West, I use location sharing via satellite connectivity on my iPhone 14 constantly, but visiting family in the Midwest I don’t (and can’t) use it at all. It’s a testament to cell carriers that they’ve blanketed much of the eastern half of the United States with cellular connectivity.
Yesterday was the military funeral for my neighbor that died in February. His ashes were interred at a state veteran’s cemetery of a neighboring (red) state, as all the veteran cemeteries in ours are located on the far more liberal side of the state, which he hated.
I’ve been told this should bring some closure — I heard it repeated it all weekend — but I don’t feel any. I had ‘closure’ many months ago, and while it was nice to meet some of his family, this weekend only served to remind me how hollow so much of this feels.
The veteran’s cemetery abuts a subdivision several miles from the city center, the green manicured grass pushing into the sagebrush desert that surrounds it. I presume a veteran’s cemetery is designed to inspire, I don’t know, reverence? But who comes to a place like this and feels anything but horror at the ticky-tacky of it all? Is this what patriotism is now? A few acres beside Shady Acres?
Once, I had an idea of cemeteries as hallowed ground, as spaces that were meant to persist into the future, to demonstrate to future generations the respect and reverence we felt for those in the ground, veterans or not. Yet the more I see, the more I realize the cemeteries of our time are just suburbs of the dead, mere cul-de-sacs of headstones. I rarely see anyone visiting cemeteries, no families picnicking as was once customary and common. Built on the edge of town (on land given as a tax write-off) and accessible only by car, they’re bereft of anything remotely natural. The grass endlessly mowed and sprayed with chemicals, the ground as embalmed as the bodies beneath.
It’s bullshit.
Nearly every principle, every belief, every assumption that undergirds that cemetery is fake. Patriotism, afterlife, “respect for the dead”… it’s all bullshit. Our culture doesn’t respect the dead, we want them out of the way. We don’t create lasting monuments to their sacrifices, we put them at the edge of town so we won’t be bothered. These are not monuments to the dead, but shrines to convenience and willful ignorance.
Headed Into the Abyss by Brian T. Watson 📚
I just finished, laying here in my bed, the dogs and cat asleep beside me. Crickets chirp out my window. In the distance a train’s whistle breaks and rolls over the valley.
More than anything, I prize seeing things clearly. Nothing fills me with that particular and precious joie de vivre — that electric sizzle — quite like close proximity to the truth. But most people don’t like the truth. We’ll do anything to avoid it, if we know it at all. So it’s a rare thrill to read something so transgressive in its honesty, so clear-eyed.
Credit to Brian T. Watson for his courage to accept the inevitable, and then to write it. May his acceptance be an inspiration.
Astrud Gilberto: The Girl from Ipanema singer dies at 83
Getz/Gilberto remains one of the most sublime albums ever recorded.
50% of AI researchers think there’s a 10% or greater chance that AI will cause the extinction of the human race.
Microsoft Now Claims GPT–4 Shows ‘Sparks’ of General Intelligence.
A few weeks ago, my only friend in this town died. Fifty-one years my senior, he was my neighbor across the street.
Four years ago, when we first met, I was wary. He would come to my fence as I was gardening, talking about immigrants coming over the southern border or something else he had seen on Fox News — but as our relationship matured and I learned to steer the conversation away from political issues (or, if I’m honest, indulge him a bit), we struck up a friendship.
Last summer, when his Android phone quit working, he walked over to my fence and asked me about “those iPhones you keep telling me about.” We bought a used SE on eBay. Within a few months, he had upgraded to a brand new iPhone, an Apple TV, an Apple Watch. He took to technology — well-designed, thoughtful technology — in a way I had never seen in someone his age. He loved learning about the capabilities of this incredible tool that fit in his pocket.
Long before he moved to this small town, he was a globe-trotter. He was born in Brooklyn in the 30s, became an Airborne Ranger in the Korean War, and went on to work at IBM, American Satellite, and other long-diminished-yet-bedrock tech companies. He told stories of setting up satellite uplinks in Alaska, of living in Rome, of business meetings with executives all over the world. He moved often — Missouri, Virginia, California, Italy, Minnesota — before settling in this small town in 2002. The tumult of 9/11 on the east coast caused him to re-assess where he wanted to be, and for some reason, he chose this tiny town.
Seventeen years later, I would move here, into a 130-year-old home across the street from his. We got to know each other over the next four years. I painted his garage as he told stories. I would help him with his new iPhone, or try my best to help him with his old Android. I mowed his lawn, shoveled his snow. Initially, he asked how much my services would cost, and when I told him to knock it off — he was a neighbor, after all — he took to me. I don’t think he was accustomed to people being decent without a price of some kind. It wasn’t long after his new phone that he’d start calling 2–3 times a day, asking about this or that, how to use the Find My app to share his location with his niece, or just to ask where I was hiking that day. Once, I FaceTimed him from the top of a mountain not far from our houses and he was amazed. Just that morning, I had been in his living room helping him with something or other, and now I was on a mountaintop? And we were videochatting? He relished those moments.
On a very snowy night a few weeks ago, I walked across the street to shovel his back porch. He heard the shovel on cement and cracked the back door. His voice sounding weak, he asked me to come inside. “I’ve got a question for you.” I walked in a few minutes later to him sitting on his couch. His hair was disheveled, his voice thin. He was clearly not feeling well. He had been vomiting for nearly 24 hours and asked if these were symptoms of covid. “I don’t think so,” I replied, “but I have some tests across the street.” I walked across the street, grabbed some covid tests and Thera-Flu, and walked back to his place. He didn’t want to take a test yet, so I put them on the counter. I asked if he wanted anything, if I could take him to the hospital, told him that I was worried about dehydration. He insisted on staying put, but if in the morning he wasn’t feeling better, he’d let me drive him to the hospital.
“Call me if you need anything. I mean that. Anything.” I told him as I got ready to leave.
“Thanks, buddy,” he said. He thanked me that way often, but this time his voice sounded different. Resigned. I heard both gratitude and finality. I walked across the street and messaged a friend of mine, telling her I was unsure he would survive the night.
I was right.
He died later that evening. At some point late at night, he got up to use the bathroom. He had a heart attack and fell back onto the floor of his bedroom. We found him there in the morning.