It’s a great mercy that pregnant women receive ultrasounds instead of MRI scans.

Conservatives prioritize security over truth. Libertarians prioritize freedom over truth. Progressives prioritize social justice over truth. All forget that one cannot have security, freedom, or justice without prioritizing truth.

China will win video AI because of lax copyright laws. The US will win text AI because of lax censorship laws.

Artistry requires not just creativity but also good taste, and AI can only grant the former. The coming age, then, will be an era of infinite creativity and infinitesimal taste, which will be won by those who can discern as well as design, and curate as well as create.

Automate only the skills you’re willing to lose.

The news exists not to inform us but to enthrall us. Like a strobe light, it dazzles us with over-illuminated moments, blinding us to all the others, until we view life as a flicker of disjointed snapshots, and can only dream what lies between.

The increasing recategorization of ordinary sadness as a form of sickness to be medically treated is like trying to stop people from burning by silencing their smoke alarms. Or, as Theodore Dalrymple put it in Our Culture, What's Left of It:

We basically choose our leaders via rap battle, then wonder why they’re better at performance than governance.

“You pity the moth confusing a lamp for the moon, yet here you are confusing a screen for the world.” — Jay Alto

I gave up editing Wikipedia articles when I realized most of my fellow editors were either political activists or PR firms. The problem with an encyclopedia anyone can edit is that the people most motivated to edit will naturally be those with an agenda.

Consuming only content that reinforces your views is intellectual incest, producing beliefs that are increasingly frail and deformed.

An easy timesaving tip is to skip the first 10% of any YouTube video. You’ll lose absolutely nothing.

Critical thinking is when you’re as sceptical of your own thoughts as of others’ speech.

By default, the algorithm doesn't give us what we want; it trains us to want what it can give. The best way for it to predict your preferences is to decide them. And the best way for you to resist is to decide them for yourself.

Curiosity compounds.

“People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

In just a few decades, everyone who ever judged you will be dead. Remember this whenever you feel anxious about what people think of you.

Nicholas Winton helped 669 Jewish children escape the Nazis. His efforts went unrecognized for 50 years. Then in 1988, while sitting as a member of a TV audience, he suddenly found himself surrounded by the kids he’d rescued, now adults. I like to remember this every Jan 27th.

The most important quality for a smart person is courage because without it their intellect will be leveraged to rationalize their fears and concoct the most convincing excuses not to act.

People have so many epiphanies in the shower because it’s one of the few places without phones or other distractions. Imagine how many life-changing realizations you’d have if you were undistracted for more than 15 minutes a day…

“The Germans, perhaps, at first ill-treated the Jews because they hated them: afterwards they hated them much more because they had ill-treated them.” — C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952)

Tech platforms love culture war because it automates demographic segmentation. When they know what you stand for, they know how to get your attention.

The “it’s not intelligent, it’s just predicting the next token” argument ignores that predicting things *is* intelligence. IQ tests involve finding the next item in a sequence. Predicting the future is in fact the surest sign of IQ, because unlike others, it can't be bullshitted.

Most people don’t benefit much from chatbots because what people lack is not good answers so much as good questions. It’s no longer enough to curate your feed; you must now also curate your curiosity.

When you view the world through an ideology, you seek information not to better understand the world, but to better justify what you already believe. The way to see the world objectively is to view it without expectation; to see without looking for something.

The “Great Feminization” theory which has recently become popular on the Right is nothing new; here’s a conservative caricature from Henry James’ 1886 novel, The Bostonians, sounding like he’s been red-pilled by the manosphere.

Just as being good at running is disadvantageous if you run the wrong way, so being smart is a handicap if you’re irrational.

“Nothing gives you a clearer look into someone than how they misinterpret things; every misinterpretation is a confession.” —Dylan O’Sullivan

Many online express disagreement not because they actually disagree but because disagreeing is how they exercise (and signal) their individuality. It’s why many people instinctively nitpick or play devil’s advocate even when they agree; common ground can feel claustrophobic.

People sound like chatbots not just because they’re using chatbots, but also because they’re subconsciously adopting the linguistic mannerisms of chatbots. We're now witnessing humans being trained on LLMs, becoming ever more average & predictable. The autocompletion of the soul.

Resist the urge to engage with content that enrages you, or the algorithm will show you more of it.

A thread of useful concepts to equip you for 2026:

"Life is 10% what you make it, and 90% how you take it." —Irving Berlin

3. Reality Apathy: When the deluge of conflicting info makes the effort of finding truth costlier than the value of knowing it, people give up trying to be right and instead choose whatever bullshit stinks least. Slop doesn't just threaten the truth, but the very worth of truth.

Worth reading now

1. 1% rule: In online communities, around 1% of users produce almost all of the content. As such, what you see online is not representative of humanity, but merely of a loud, obsessive (and often narcissistic) minority. Social media is literally a freakshow.

How to cope in the Age of Slop by @gurwinder.bsky.social 🙏 www.gurwinder.blog/p/26-useful-...

A thread of useful concepts to equip you for 2026:

“Social media made y’all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it.” —Mike Tyson

This will keep you stuck in the past, preventing you from healing. Even worse, your memories of your lost loved one will be polluted and overwritten by your memories of their AI-generated ghost, until you’ve forgotten the person you lost, and instead grieve only their caricature.

The best motivation hack is to switch to a job you enjoy.

15 years ago, ~30% of relationship advice on Reddit advocated for breakups. Now ~50% does. Perhaps a side-effect of giving everyone the power to mute, block, and cancel anyone who causes them slight discomfort is that people never learn how to resolve their differences.

This graph goes viral every few months because it tells a compelling story, but, like most graphs that tell a compelling story, it’s grossly misleading. The demographics of people in prisons are not the same as those once in asylums; the former are much younger and more male.

In one specific way, Grok might be the most honest and transparent AI project out there nymag.com/intelligence...

In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write to a famous author & ask for advice. KURT VONNEGUT - born 103yrs ago today - was the only one to respond. His reply was a doozy.

The way to use chatbots is not to ask them what’s true but to tell them what you think is true and then ask them for feedback. This lets you learn without eroding your ability to think for yourself.

If you really want to understand a topic, don’t read about it, write about it.

All the horrid people celebrating Watson’s death because he “stole” Franklin’s research are wrong and should read this. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

If you want Google search results to be free of AI overviews, recommendations, image previews, and other enshittified content, use this: udm14.com

Our suspicions of others stem from our knowledge of ourselves.