I hate AI so much.

🆕 You do not have to be someone special to be noble. Nobility can appear in wildly diverse forms—as illustrated in myth, fantasy fiction, and Vajrayana Buddhist practice. You can be noble however is natural for you—not conforming to some socially fixed idea. meaningness.substack.com/p/vajra-prid...

🆕 Nobility in current circumstances depends on an unusual way of perceiving, understanding, and acting. You BECOME the kingdom, and positive visions emerge from your mythic engagement in it. meaningness.substack.com/p/seeing-lik...

࿇ 📺 @petermcewen.bsky.social and I will co-lead a zoom discussion / Q&A on deity yoga, relational yogas, and the nebulosity of identity: Sunday the 20th (weekend after this coming one). Register here! lu.ma/22iop35g (Peter is very scary but fortunately for you I am a girl. Tea will be served!)

🆕🎙️ New podcast with @jimrutt.bsky.social! We discussed All The Things—honor, courage, confidence, dignity, decency, and magnificence for example—and had a lot of fun. www.jimruttshow.com/david-chapman/

I looked into the claim that chess grandmasters burn 6000 calories a day and found it was made up by popular author Robert Sapolsky open.substack.com/pub/strandbe...

If you're among the 17 million Americans likely to lose your health coverage (like me), now is the time to act. - Deal with any existing health issues you've been putting off while you still have coverage. 1/ www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

First time a judge has decided a case based on hallucinated case law in the US that I've encountered. caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ga-cou...

🎙️ w/ David Chapman on rethinking nobility. Character & virtue as “risible” concepts, nobility as intention vs status, the failure of elite universities, Tolkien’s models of nobility, Vajrayana Buddhism’s life-affirming approach, meta-rationality & tech, & more. www.jimruttshow.com/david-chapman/

🆕🎙️ New podcast with Charlie Awbery! An unexpected question, and then we work out an answer together. meaningness.substack.com/p/whats-the-...

🆕 Strategies and tactics for overcoming the typical emotional and relationship difficulties faced by software engineers and other STEM-ish people! meaningness.substack.com/p/leveraging...

Academia will form these little pockets -- people whose theorizing is outrageous & supported by methods outdated since the 90s -- but once it reaches a critical size those people just review each others papers & grants, form societies, hand out awards etc, like a self-contained parallel society.

A few thoughtfully-chosen excerpts from my "How to be a wise optimist..." essay:

🆕 Nobility is the wise and just use of power. Software engineers have recently gained enormous power—and are not always using it wisely or justly. We can do better—and so can you, regardless of occupation or position. meaningness.substack.com/p/software-e...

"Sometimes ritual doesn’t just demand that we hold ourselves in, but instead that we loosen ourselves up."

This essay is about the *teachable* "systematic" part, which is failing in Western Civilization despite being load bearing. If we lack systematically noble/benevolent/good leaders, the future for humans is very dark.

David Chapman @meaningness.bsky.social provides fascinating insights into meaning and purpose and how it intersects with the personal, to social and the political. He's one of our key thinkers for modern times, and the attached essay provides a fine sample! I encourage all to "like and subscribe!"

I enjoyed this insight, by way of @meaningness.bsky.social (meaningness.substack.com/p/to-keep-pr...). It seems obvious in retrospect that the people who rise to leadership in any organization will be those who feel greater duty to the organization than to the purpose of the organization.

🆕 Nobility is the wise and just use of power. What counts as noble? How did nobility become a myth? What have we lost as a consequence? How will we recover it? meaningness.substack.com/p/ofermod

New post: An island of stability in a sea of chaos Zooming in on a patch of white space inside a chaotic image. What's going on in there? https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/05/04/island-of-stability/

🆕 Nobility calls for secular authority to limit the oppressive power of priests and courtiers. When kings fail in that duty, it may fall to churls—or, better, ceorls. I explain the mystery of vice signaling: meaningness.substack.com/p/to-keep-pr...

🆕 📺 Checks and balances between secular and religious power often make for functional societies. That isn't working for us now—maybe for the opposite reason than you'd expect? meaningness.substack.com/p/priests-an...

Most meta-analyses are bad, some are useful

I'll always remember the way he'd respond to someone claiming 'I think in my head'. Jeff would retort: "I think in the bath, in my car & sometimes in my office at BU, but I've never thought in my head".

🆕 📺 New video! Nobility is not moral virtue. They are not in conflict; they may correlate, but they don't always coincide. Nobility is the proper matter of politics. meaningness.substack.com/p/nobility-a...

Infectious diseases & chronic illness are not as distinct as some people suggest. Getting to the bottom of long COVID could help people with persistent illness after other viral & bacterial infections.

Fascinating:

🆕 📺 New video! A visual, kinesthetic, embodied experience 𐡸 A fish-eye lens and a magnifying glass 𐡸 The little clicker wheel 𐡸 Nurturing a plot of woodland 𐡸 Becoming the space, unstuck in time 𐡸 Freed up to play. meaningness.substack.com/p/what-is-st...

🆕 Suffering is never special ࿇ Opening your heart without an anesthetic ࿇ The Buddhist warrior’s path ࿇ Life in a charnel ground ࿇ The point is to cut the enemy: un-seeing ࿇ Gendered Buddhism ࿇ Are you ready to take a vow? meaningness.substack.com/p/living-bea...

This is what it comes down to in terms of how we actually function in society: not “what is a woman?”, but “how do you know I’m a woman?” Nobody has ever asked to inspect my gametes or chromosomes. Presentation is literally all anyone is going on.

(Big part of that is of course that you need to get lots of grant money and collecting expensive data fits right into that 🥲)

Honestly I think this is the most depressing aspect of the current state of science for me. The sheer effort and money that is being wasted on data collection when the study is transparently dead on arrival.>

🆕 📺 Meta-systematicity is an unusual way of being. It is fascinating and important—but no sort of perfection. meaningness.substack.com/p/stage-five...

Ceding techno optimism to the right is a generational scale mistake

Fawn lilies (yellow), fiddleheads (orange), fritillaries (mottled purple-green), fairy slipper orchid (pink)

Wildflower season in the Pacific Northwest Balsamroot (yellow), larkspur and lupine (purple), shootingstar (pink), Indian paintbrush (red) and a view of Mt Hood

🆕📺 Emptiness, form, and the Big Bang 𐡸 How understanding creates students 𐡸 Buddhism outside institutions meaningness.substack.com/p/fivefold-c...

Have you given in yet?

The bipartisan belief that America would be a better place if *other people* worked in a factory. www.ft.com/content/8459...

New essay exploring why experts so strongly disagree about existential risk from ASI, and why focusing on alignment as the primary goal may be a fundamental mistake michaelnotebook.com/xriskbrief/i...

MIT following Harvard's lead here

We (mostly @adammarblestone.bsky.social and Mary with the help of the amazing scientists in our network) made a map of “fundamental development” gaps in science and technology. Go explore gap-map.org.

🆕📺 The pervasive fantasy that the perfect, REAL world is somewhere else, so the fake apparent one is garbage, stifles our lives. So does the alternative misunderstanding, that the actual world is just ordinary. Our world is EXTRAORDINARY! meaningness.substack.com/p/this-is-it

Not a single AI science agent paper I've read so far tackles the issue that actual scientific discovery bears no resemblance to the hypothetico-deductive veneer given by the papers describing results. So asking agents to match the literature and/or solve problems in this way feels very off ...

So much this #MLSky I've seen a string of papers on AI agents for scientific discovery but they bake in antiquated notions of the hypothetico-deductive model of science. Great scientists build up a gut intuition for levels of abstraction that often aren't written down explicitly.

Very important when you consider how AI science agents are going to interpret the literature. There is so much tacit and insider info I have about what is real and what is problematic that is invisible in the scientific record. #MetaScience

🆕📺 Rigpa is Dzogchen’s word roughly equivalent to “enlightenment.” But what is rigpa, actually? And what does it imply for ethics? A seven-minute video conversation, from the monthly Evolving Ground Vajrayana Q&A I host. Next is tomorrow! meaningness.substack.com/p/rigpa-and-...

Oh neat, March 28 is national "Smash Your Amazon Echo Devices With A Hammer" day.

NIST has issued new instructions to scientists that partner with the US Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute (AISI) that eliminate mention of 'AI safety,' 'responsible AI,' and 'AI fairness' in order to reduce 'ideological bias, to enable human flourishing and economic competitiveness.'

🆕 Can one discuss philosophy without *doing* philosophy? Sure! Theologians, psychologists, and sociologists all do that. So do I. Explaining this clarifies what philosophy is, and why. open.substack.com/pub/meaningn...