One reason that people perceive LLMs as conscious is that the total phenomenological structure of a functioning LLM includes many conscious subparts acting with intentionality—the humans responsible for the countless judgment calls in fine-tuning and training.

Tfw you’ve obtained the “Ham”

Went back to the history of the Sicilian Mafia to illustrate something obvious but worth stating explicitly: The Trump administration behaves like an organized crime syndicate running a protection racket, not a representative government www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

we talk too much about the male loneliness crisis and not enough about the male suckerfication crisis maxread.substack.com/p/prediction...

Words to live by tbh

The more democratic elements of the American constitutional and economic order are actually throwing up road blocks to Trumpism. Protests and boycotts and low level courts and juries and cetera. Elite actors on the other hand are all too frequently caving. Fascinating study in who actually cares!

The core skill of successful punditry is identifying a viewpoint that powerful and influential people already subscribe to, and then providing an endless, and endlessly flexible, stream of rationalizations of why that viewpoint is correct, regardless of real-world outcomes.

Take this quiz to die instantly www.americansurveycenter.org/quiz/

The actual regime that these people are hankering after is Dubai: a small elite of citizens, most immigrants to be transient, insecure and all immigrants to be second-class. In reality they would hate the world they would create and would find ever-more ridiculous scapegoats for their failure.

on the one hand recognition only matters from someone who might decline to give it. on the other, them declining to give it is an outcome you want to avoid. so you generate these simulacra of genuine human connection, the *appearance* of the possibility of rejection with the reality of its absence

When you are pure of heart no amount of earnestness is Cringe. When you are a malevolent little freak no amount of sarcasm is enough to make you cool

New article out from me, in which I consider: what if I'm wrong about everything re: what's important for a flourishing democracy? I use a recent book attacking institutions & advocating disintermediated localism to explore the limits of my view. Get it free here: academic.oup.com/psq/advance-...

peter thiel (clutching chrome plated human skull) tell me oracle... does the world end in fire, or ice? the passionate flames of the activist thunberg, or the frozen doom yudkowski demands? chatGPT: ✨ What a great question, Peter! ✨ Let's break that tough Q down 🕺, in your favorite epic style:

*Lil Jon Voice* States' Rights to What

Everything the government does is for online clout because *that is the only thing that's actually real for them*

It's the golden rule of grievance politics: you will never be happy. You are a permanent captive to the infinity goalpost.

Gonna be thinking about this lede for a minute.

𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐝𝐨𝐧’𝐭 #𝐛𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐝𝐞𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 #𝐚𝐮𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐬? They face huge risks, especially during economic crises, when dictators choose to financially extort or #purge their business allies. And yet, despite their power to disrupt, business elites rarely switch sides. My research shows why.

“Authoritarianism is wrong, murder is evil, corruption is awful, the law must be followed, America should not be brought to its knees for Trump’s benefit” - simple principles that somehow we struggle to rally around, because of our paralyzing fear that some silent majority will not approve of them

Yeah, this is just common sense. Cruelty is corrosive. Everyone who deals with people knows this. Once cruelty enters into your tree of options, it stays there. It's always there, waiting for a point where you stop granting sufficient moral consideration to deploy it.

Great job telling on yourself for raising a goddamn adult baby

heggseth's weird podcast rant (delivered to 800 generals and admirals for some reason) is just another sign of how this is a tv presidency. they don't really know how to do policy. their instinct is theater. encounter a problem? put on a spectacle

We need a bigger tent, that’s why we must betray and expel the following types of people:

New article ⬇️⬇️⬇️ Forner, L., Lutz, S., Zheng, X., & Stein, J. P. (2025). The Dark Side of Fandom: Exploring the Association between Parasocial Relationships with Celebrities and Aggression. Media Psychology, 1–25. #FanStudies doi.org/10.1080/1521...

when an SEC game cuts to shots of the crowd:

More than anything, they want to be patted on the head and told they're a good boy by the liberal elites

I love this person.

Grape Nuts (holding me back): Whoa whoa whoa, hey man, just let it go! This asshole isn't worth it!

Chotiner's secret weapon is he has values while interviewing people who have none.

volunteering to run a program or help out a community org in your neighborhood or town is the best way to meet interesting people as an adult and have interesting conversations. it's annoying to read someone say this, but unfortunately it's true. also it's free. why not give it a shot

I'll say this again: In my opinion, when companies and institutions cave to Trump despite the law being on their side, they are not misunderstanding the law; they are making an educated guess that the United States is heading in a direction where, in practice, the law won't matter.

Always a good day to remember this @nytimes.com

dating apps and profiles are an attempt to make the processes of romance 'legible', and to some extent can be perceived as a 'high modernist' simplification of courtship send tweet

Contra many, I don't think anonymity is a problem. The lack of stable relationships and the kinds of emotional cues we're evolutionaryily equipped to handle is a big problem for modern, drive by dunk style feeds.

As grim as this story may be, there's still much to be inspired by. Look no further than this attorney for the children, who rushed to the airport to stop the planes. She stood near the tarmac, warning any officials she saw that they’d be complicit in violating a court order if the planes took off.

OK, a🧵: Our new paper studies workers' political consciousness in times of class demobilization. We show there's more to workers' politics than right-wing resentment. Listening to workers, we reconstruct their moral critiques of money, power & recognition. Link journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

the "tax the billionaires" political refrain is Good Actually in part because it is a call for the people at the top to actually be constrained by rules informed by the public interest, a virtue that fingerwagging correctives about how much revenue such taxes would *really* generate doesn't address

It’s odd because we seem to have a press wide obsession with right wing philosophers while any hint of critical thinking outside of the right is treated as obviously ridiculous.

the state of political discourse in this country is essentially just jfk’s campaign video about abe from clone high, but instead of 30 seconds it’s been about 25 years

True freedom is freedom from domination, and is thus fundamentally incompatible with those that want to dominate the lives of their neighbors and countrymen

The charge of hypocrisy only works if the people you're charging with it believe in the ideal of human equality, the rule of law, human rights, etc. Denying someone else a right you yourself have is only hypocrisy if one believes that the person you're doing this to is equally human.

fascism is the ideology for insecure losers who know they do not provide any value in a functioning society and instead of learning any tangible skills they would rather lash out with violence

Sometimes you're looking through old sci fi novel covers, and you have to share one.

Philosophy is structurally unable to acknowledge that "I dunno, man, maybe?" is objectively speaking the correct answer to most of our questions.

It’s so embarrassing when ppl say HP was important to their childhood so they can’t let it go. Did it open a love of books & you went on to devour millions more books? Or is it just that you took one step into total brand capture before your brain was fully formed & even now you wish to remain