Aside
A lot of people are fleeing from Twitter/X looking for the next place where ‘everybody is.’ But consider that the scale required for a place where everybody is might be the whole problem. Or at least attract the worst of social network health.
Last night at a middle school band concert, the director announced a student would play “a little ditty” but all the kids heard “play a little Diddy” and they all went nuts.
Brooding: Should Our Children Have a Political Party?
Most of us have loved ones whose beliefs don’t perfectly align with ours, and kids need help making sense of that beyond a binary of right and wrong. Our biases are often simultaneously irrational and grounded in experience. Understanding this is not moral relativism, it’s social intelligence. Belonging to a group feels good, but teaching your kids how to identify group dynamics can feel good too.This was from before the election, but will continue to be relevant.
Accountability sinks | A Working Library
Once you start looking for accountability sinks, you see them all over the place. When your health insurance declines a procedure; when the airline cancels your flight; when a government agency declares that you are ineligible for a benefit; when an investor tells all their companies to shovel so-called AI into their apps. Everywhere, broken links between the people who face the consequences of the decision and the people making the decisions.
I’m thinking about how accountability sinks might operate in my context, the local church. Sometimes you get opposing sinks: the pastor concludes the church doesn’t move forward because of the stubbornness of the laity; the laity conclude the pastor is to blame; everyone escapes accountability as the community degrades. The consequences, though, are much harder to discern in this case.
“merlin mann” apple site:music.apple.com at DuckDuckGo
Merlin doesn’t share his profile on Apple Music but you can find his public playlists with this search.
Finished reading: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan 📚
Finished reading: Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker 📚
Finished reading: Low Anthropology by David Zahl 📚
Finished reading: Free of Charge by Miroslav Volf 📚
Finished reading: America’s Theologian by Robert W. Jenson 📚
Finished reading: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders 📚
Finished reading: The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne 📚
Finished reading: The Humans by Matt Haig 📚
Finished reading: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin 📚
Finished reading: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It’s a big book with diverse parts so I have big and diverse feelings about it. 📚
Finished reading: Saving Time by Jenny Odell 📚
Perhaps [‘the history of anarchism, almost alone among modern social movements, is one of unrelieved failure.’]; but its failures are different and less shameful than the failures of Marxism. There are many ways for a social movement to fail, and I prefer those that don’t result in the murder of tens of millions of human beings.
Maybe a good question for leaders of any social movement: how will you fail? Failure is guaranteed but not all failure is equal.
A great test for Large Language Model AI’s would be to remove some artist’s specific work and see if it could be anticipated based on the remaining work. I don’t think the nature of super large datasets would ever allow this, though.
Finished reading: Across the Everglades by Hugh Laussat Willoughby 📚
Finished reading: I Heard the Owl Call My Name by Margaret Craven 📚