An Open Letter to Scott Alexander
The dangers of AI are real, but doomerism may be counterproductive.
Steven Pinker
· 8 min read
Science / Tech
A collection of 386 posts
AI Doom Is Not Cybersecurity
An OpenAI agent’s breach of a Medicare portal shows that the real danger from AI is a mundane one—and the labs’ fixation on a coming machine god is making it worse.
Zack Korman
· 6 min read
Banning the Horseless Carriage
Bernie Sanders wants to outlaw artificial superintelligence. The risks he points to are real—but the answer to a powerful new technology is regulation, not prohibition, and China has no intention of pausing.
John Aziz
· 10 min read
Myths and Illusions of the Digital Age
The digital revolution is not remaking the world as the industrial one did.
Shalom Lappin
· 13 min read
Citizen Sane
The mainstreaming of therapy culture may be driving us all out of our minds.
Steve Salerno
· 18 min read
The Autism Epidemic That Wasn’t
The Trump administration’s scientific illiteracy about rates of autism is going to have catastrophic results.
Geoffrey C. Kabat
· 6 min read
Net Zero Won't Fix Climate Change. Technology Will
Treat a warming planet as an engineering problem rather than a moral failing, and it starts to look solvable.
John Aziz
· 9 min read
AI and the Bioweapon Threat
The knowledge and infrastructure needed to engineer a pandemic pathogen, once confined to a handful of elite military and civilian research institutions, are quietly becoming more accessible.
Henry I. Miller
· 7 min read
Sex Differences Above the Neck
The evidence for innate sex differences has been accumulating for decades. Steve Stewart-Williams's new book is a welcome inventory.
Jerry A. Coyne
· 16 min read
The Long Road to Medical ‘Miracles’
How decades of invisible science produced two cancer breakthroughs.
Henry I. Miller
· 9 min read
The Mask That Made Me
Thirty years as a high-functioning neurodivergent project manager.
Jason Sylvester
· 7 min read
Agency and Adaptation
Humans have not merely been shaped by evolution—we have shaped it too, through the environments we chose to inhabit and the lives we chose to lead.
Tristan S. Rapp
· 8 min read
Selective Pressure, Selective Silence
David Reich and the politics of recent human evolution.
Jon Entine, Patrick Whittle
· 14 min read
Richard Dawkins and the Claude Delusion
What is consciousness for?
Sean Welsh
· 10 min read
Why AI Is Not About to Go Feral
Worries about AI doom rarely take Darwinian evolution seriously. A new paper argues we should—but we are still further from that scenario than its authors suggest.
Maarten Boudry
· 13 min read