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hose promises have also fueled anxiety over how people will be able to compete for jobs outsourced to eerily refined machines or trust the accuracy of what they see online.

Officials with the San Francisco lab said GPT-4’s “multimodal” training across text and images would allow it to escape the chat box and more fully emulate a world of color and imagery, surpassing ChatGPT in its “advanced reasoning capabilities.”

A person could upload an image and GPT-4 could caption it for them, describing the objects and scene.

AI language models often confidently offer wrong answers because they are designed to spit out cogent phrases, not actual facts. And because they have been trained on internet text and imagery, they have also learned to emulate human biases of race, gender, religion and class.

GPT-4 still makes many of the errors of previous versions, including “hallucinating” nonsense, perpetuating social biases and offering bad advice. It also lacks knowledge of events that happened after about September 2021, when its training data was finalized, and “does not learn from its experience,” limiting people’s ability to teach it new things.

Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI in the hope its technology will become a secret weapon for its workplace software, search engine and other online ambitions. It has marketed the technology as a super-efficient companion that can handle mindless work and free people for creative pursuits, helping one software developer to do the work of an entire team or allowing a mom-and-pop shop to design a professional advertising campaign without outside help.

it could lead to business models and creative ventures no one can predict.

sparked criticism that the companies are rushing to exploit an untested, unregulated and unpredictable technology that could deceive people, undermine artists’ work and lead to real-world harm.

the company held back the feature to better understand potential risks. As one example, she said, the model might be able to look at an image of a big group of people and offer up known information about them, including their identities — a possible facial recognition use case that could be used for mass surveillance.

OpenAI researchers wrote, “As GPT-4 and AI systems like it are adopted more widely,” they “will have even greater potential to reinforce entire ideologies, worldviews, truths and untruths, and to cement them or lock them in.”

“We can agree as a society broadly on some harms that a model should not contribute to,” such as building a nuclear bomb or generating child sexual abuse material, she said. “But many harms are nuanced and primarily affect marginalized groups,” she added, and those harmful biases, especially across other languages, “cannot be a secondary consideration in performance.”

OpenAI said its new model would be able to handle more than 25,000 words of text, a leap forward that could facilitate longer conversations and allow for the searching and analysis of long documents.

OpenAI developers said GPT-4 was more likely to provide factual responses and less likely to refuse harmless requests

Duolingo, the language learning app, has already used GPT-4 to introduce new features, such as an AI conversation partner and a tool that tells users why an answer was incorrect.

The company did not share evaluations around bias that have become increasingly common after pressure from AI ethicists.

GPT-4 will have competition in the growing field of multisensory AI. DeepMind, an AI firm owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, last year released a “generalist” model named Gato that can describe images and play video games. And Google this month released a multimodal system, PaLM-E, that folded AI vision and language expertise into a one-armed robot on wheels: If someone told it to go fetch some chips, for instance, it could comprehend the request, wheel over to a drawer and choose the right bag.

The systems, though — as critics and the AI researchers are quick to point out — are merely repeating patterns and associations found in their training data without a clear understanding of what it’s saying or when it’s wrong.

GPT-4, the fourth “generative pre-trained transformer” since OpenAI’s first release in 2018, relies on a breakthrough neural-network technique in 2017 known as the transformer that rapidly advanced how AI systems can analyze patterns in human speech and imagery.

The systems are “pre-trained” by analyzing trillions of words and images taken from across the internet: news articles, restaurant reviews and message-board arguments; memes, family photos and works of art.

Giant supercomputer clusters of graphics processing chips are mapped out their statistical patterns — learning which words tended to follow each other in phrases, for instance — so that the AI can mimic those patterns, automatically crafting long passages of text or detailed images, one word or pixel at a time.

In 2019, the company refused to publicly release GPT-2, saying it was so good they were concerned about the “malicious applications” of its use, from automated spam avalanches to mass impersonation and disinformation campaigns.

Altman has also marketed OpenAI’s vision with the aura of science fiction come to life. In a blog post last month, he said the company was planning for ways to ensure that “all of humanity” benefits from “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI — an industry term for the still-fantastical idea of an AI superintelligence that is generally as smart as, or smarter than, the humans themselves.

Defining the Anthropocene: nine sites are in the running to be given the ‘golden spike’ designation

Mentioning the Jurassic period, for instance, helps scientists to picture plants and animals that were alive during that time

“The Anthropocene represents an umbrella for all of these different changes that humans have made to the planet,”

Typically, researchers will agree that a specific change in Earth’s geology must be captured in the official timeline. The ICS will then determine which set of rock layers, called strata, best illustrates that change, and it will choose which layer marks its lower boundary

This is called the Global Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), and it is defined by a signal, such as the first appearance of a fossil species, trapped in the rock, mud or other material. One location is chosen to represent the boundary, and researchers mark this site physically with a golden spike, to commemorate it.

“It’s a label,” says Colin Waters, who chairs the AWG and is a geologist at the University of Leicester, UK. “It’s a great way of summarizing a lot of concepts into one word.”

But the Anthropocene has posed problems. Geologists want to capture it in the timeline, but its beginning isn’t obvious in Earth’s strata, and signs of human activity have never before been part of the defining process.

“We had a vague idea about what it might be, [but] we didn’t know what kind of hard evidence would go into it.”

Years of debate among the group’s multidisciplinary members led them to identify a host of signals — radioactive isotopes from nuclear-bomb tests, ash from fossil-fuel combustion, microplastics, pesticides — that would be trapped in the strata of an Anthropocene-defining site. These began to appear in the early 1950s, when a booming human population started consuming materials and creating new ones faster than ever.

Why do some geologists oppose the Anthropocene as a new epoch?“It misrepresents what we do” in the ICS, says Stanley Finney, a stratigrapher at California State University, Long Beach, and secretary-general for the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS). The AWG is working backwards, Finney says: normally, geologists identify strata that should enter the geological timescale before considering a golden spike; in this case, they’re seeking out the lower boundary of an undefined set of geological layers.

Lucy Edwards, a palaeontologist who retired in 2008 from the Florence Bascom Geoscience Center in Reston, Virginia, agrees. For her, the strata that might define the Anthropocene do not yet exist because the proposed epoch is so young. “There is no geologic record of tomorrow,”

Edwards, Finney and other researchers have instead proposed calling the Anthropocene a geological ‘event’, a flexible term that can stretch in time, depending on human impact. “It’s all-encompassing,” Edwards says.

Zalasiewicz disagrees. “The word ‘event’ has been used and stretched to mean all kinds of things,” he says. “So simply calling something an event doesn’t give it any wider meaning.”

Over the years, we have seen huge setbacks to the progress of liberal and democratic institutions, with the rise of fascism and communism in the 1930s, or the military coups and oil crises of the 1960s and ’70s. And yet, liberal democracy has endured and come back repeatedly, because the alternatives are so bad. People across varied cultures do not like living under dictatorship, and they value their individual freedom. No authoritarian government presents a society that is, in the long term, more attractive than liberal democracy, and could therefore be considered the goal or endpoint of historical progress.

The philosopher Hegel coined the phrase the end of history to refer to the liberal state’s rise out of the French Revolution as the goal or direction toward which historical progress was trending. For many decades after that, Marxists would borrow from Hegel and assert that the true end of history would be a communist utopia. When I wrote an article in 1989 and a book in 1992 with this phrase in the title, I noted that the Marxist version was clearly wrong and that there didn’t seem to be a higher alternative to liberal democracy.

setbacks do not mean that the underlying narrative is wrong. None of the proffered alternatives look like they’re doing any better.

Liberal democracy will not make a comeback unless people are willing to struggle on its behalf. The problem is that many who grow up living in peaceful, prosperous liberal democracies begin to take their form of government for granted. Because they have never experienced an actual tyranny, they imagine that the democratically elected governments under which they live are themselves evil dictatorships conniving to take away their rights

Functional Medicine isn't a protected title and a medical qualification isn't a prerequisite to practice. The result is an unregulated and disparate field, with medical doctors, nutritionists, naturopaths and homeopaths among the many practitioners.

Some other chronic illnesses the field claims to treat include heart disease, type 2 diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis, depression, anxiety and arthritis

ll kinds of different reasons, some might have gluten issues, gut issues, others might have a deficiency causing neurological issues, MS is a symptom."

"There are components of Functional Medicine that absolutely lack an evidence base and there are practitioners of what they call Functional Medicine, they charge people for intravenous nutritional injections, they exaggerate claims, and that is professionally inappropriate, unethical and it lacks evidence.

On Dr Mark Hyman's view of MS he says, "there are a lot of terms put together there, all of which individually make a lot of sense, but put together in that way they do not.

"What does FM actually mean? It means nothing. It's a gift-gallop of words thrown together. It's criticised by advocates of evidence-based medicine because it's giving a veneer of scientific legitimacy to ideas that are considered pseudoscientific. For example, it'll take alternative medicine modalities like homeopathy and then call them 'bio-infusions' or something similar, rebranding it as something that works.

"It's a redundant name, real medicine is functional."

Next month the third annual Lifestyle and Functional Medical conference will take place in Salthill, Galway on November 3. Last year's event was attended by more than 500 people and featured a keynote address by honorary consultant cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra, author of bestselling The Pioppi Diet (which was named one of the top five worst celebrity diets to avoid in 2018 by the British Dietetic Foundation).

Dr David Robert Grimes is physicist and visiting fellow of Oxford and QUB. His research into cancer focuses on modelling tumour metabolism and radiation interactions. For Dr Grimes, the lack of definition, or "double-speak" as he puts it, in FM is troubling.

As well as the cost of appointments, FM practitioners commonly charge extra for tests. An omega finger prick test is around €100. A vitamin D test can cost upwards of €60, full thyroid panel more than €150 and a gut function test €400. Prices vary between practitioners.

"If I, as a GP, engaged in some of these behaviours I would be struck off." Specifically? "If I was recommending treatments that lacked an evidence base, or if I was promoting diagnostic tests which are expensive and lack an evidence base.

GPs engage every year in ongoing continuous professional development, I spend my evenings and my weekends outside of working hours attending educational events, small-group learning, large-group learning, engaging in research. This is an accusation that was levelled at the profession 30 years ago and then it was correct, but the profession has caught up…

"Obviously promoting wellness and healthy diet is very welcome but going beyond that and stating that certain aspects of 'functional medicine' can lead to reduced inflammation or prevent cancer, we have to be very careful about those claims.

Often the outcome of such tests are seemingly 'benign' prescriptions of vitamins or cleanses. However, dietitian Orla Walsh stresses that even these can have potentially harmful effects, especially on "vulnerable" patients, if not prescribed judiciously.

FM has five basic principles. 1. We are all genetically and biochemically unique so it treats the individual, not the disease. 2. It's science-based. 3. The body is intelligent and has the capacity for self-regulation. 4. The body has the ability to heal and prevent nearly all the diseases of ageing. 5. Health is not just the absence of disease, but a state of immense vitality.

She began her Functional Medicine career while training as a medical doctor and now travels the world working with high-profile clients. Dr McHale charges €425 for an initial consultation and €175 for follow-up appointments. Straightforward lab tests are €250 to €750, for complex cases testing fees can be up to €2,000.

"The term [Functional Medicine] tends to be bandied around quite a bit. Other things people say, such as 'functional nutritionist', can be misleading as a term. Many people are Functional Medicine practitioners but don't have any real medical background at all... I think regulation is always probably the best way forward."

"There's an awful lot to it in terms of biochemistry and physiology," she says. "You do need to have a very solid and well ingrained bio-chemistry background. A solely clinical background doesn't equip you with the knowledge to read a test.

"Evidence-base is the cornerstone of medicine and that has to be maintained. It becomes problematic in this area because you are looking at personalised medicine and that can be very difficult to evidence-base."

GP Christine Ritter travelled from England to attend the Galway conference last year with a view to integrating Functional Medicine into her practice.

"It was very motivating," she says. "Where it wasn't perhaps as strong was to find the evidence. The Functional Medicine people would say, 'we've done this study and this trial and we've used this supplement that was successful', but they can't show massive research data which might make it difficult to bring it into the mainstream.

"I also know the rigorous standard of trials we have in medicine they're not usually that great either, it's often driven by who's behind the trial and who's paying for it.

"Every approach that empowers patient to work on their destiny [is beneficial], but you'd have to be mindful that you're not missing any serious conditions."

Dr Hyman is working to grow the evidence-base for Functional Medicine worldwide. "The future is looking very bright," he says. "At the Cleveland Centre we're establishing a research base, building educational platforms, fellowships, residency programmes, rotations. We're advancing the field that's spreading across the world. We're seeing in China the development of a programme of Functional Medicine, South Africa, the UK, in London the Cleveland Clinic will hopefully have a Functional Medicine centre."

For Dr Mark Murphy regulation is a moot point as it can only apply once the field meets the standards of evidence-based medicine.

"Despite well intentioned calls for regulation, complementary and alternative medical therapies cannot be regulated," he says. "Only therapies that possess an evidence-base can enter our standard regulatory processes, including the Irish Medical Council, the Health Products Regulatory Authority and Irish advertising standards. In situations where complementary and alternative therapies develop an evidence base, they are no longer 'complementary and alternative', but in effect they become part of mainstream 'Medicine'.

l What are the principles?

"There's a huge variation between therapists, some are brilliant and some are okay, and some are ludicrous snake oil salesmen."

He is so concerned that patients' health and wealth are being put at risk by alternative therapies that earlier this year he joined Fine Gael TD Kate O'Connell and the Irish Cancer Society in introducing draft legislation earlier this year making it illegal to sell unproven treatments to cancer patients. Violators face jail and heavy fines.

Dr Grimes says criticism of variations in the standards of traditional medical research can be fair, however due to the weight of research it is ultimately self-correcting. He adds, "The reality is that good trials are transparent, independent and pre-registered.

"My involvement in shaping the Bill came from seeing first-hand the exploitation of patients and their families. Most patients undergoing treatment will take some alternative modalities in conjunction but a significant portion are talked out of their conventional medicine and seduced by false promises

This is the danger of the American dream when you scale it down from the national to the individual level. You risk devoting your life to wanting something because it’s what you’ve been told you should want. Everybody loves a Cinderella story, but sometimes your dream, in reality, is just a wish somebody else’s heart made.

That has made him the most popular influencer among American Gen-Zers, according to a twice-yearly survey of 14,500 of the country’s teenage boys and girls by Piper Sandler, a finance company that researches consumer data. Teachers have reported boys as young as 11 praising and emulating him.

What happened in 2012, when the oldest Gen-Z babies were in their middle teens? That was the year Facebook acquired Instagram and young people flocked to the latter site. It was also “the beginning of the selfie era.”

Mr. Haidt’s research, confirmed by that of others, shows that depression rates started to rise “all of a sudden” around 2013, “especially for teen girls,” but “it’s only Gen Z, not the older generations.” If you’d stopped collecting data in 2011, he says, you’d see little change from previous years. “By 2015 it’s an epidemic.” (His data are available in an open-source document.)

Mr. Haidt imagines “literally launching our children into outer space” and letting their bodies grow there: “They would come out deformed and broken. Their limbs wouldn’t be right. You can’t physically grow up in outer space. Human bodies can’t do that.” Yet “we basically do that to them socially. We launched them into outer space around the year 2012,” he says, “and then we expect that they will grow up normally without having normal human experiences.”

He calls this phenomenon “compare and despair” and says: “It seems social because you’re communicating with people. But it’s performative. You don’t actually get social relationships. You get weak, fake social links.”

That meant the first social-media generation was one of “weakened kids” who “hadn’t practiced the skills of adulthood in a low-stakes environment” with other children. They were deprived of “the normal toughening, the normal strengthening, the normal anti-fragility.

Now, their childhood “is largely just through the phone. They no longer even hang out together.” Teenagers even drive less than earlier generations did.

Mr. Haidt especially worries about girls. By 2020 more than 25% of female teenagers had “a major depression.” The comparable number for boys was just under 9%.

The comparable numbers for millennials at the same age registered at half the Gen-Z rate: about 13% for girls and 5% for boys. “Kids are on their devices all the time,”

Most girls, by contrast, are drawn to “visual platforms,” Instagram and TikTok in particular. “Those are about display and performance. You post your perfect life, and then you flip through the photos of other girls who have a more perfect life, and you feel depressed.

Mr. Haidt says he has no antipathy toward the young, and he calls millennials “amazing.”

“Social media is incompatible with liberal democracy because it has moved conversation, and interaction, into the center of the Colosseum. We’re not there to talk to each other. We’re there to perform” before spectators who “want blood.”

To illustrate his point about Gen Z, Mr. Haidt challenges people to name young people today who are “really changing the world, who are doing big things that have an impact beyond their closed ecosystem.”

He can think of only two, neither of them American: Greta Thunberg, 19, the Swedish climate militant, and Malala Yousafzai, 25, the Pakistani advocate for female education

I’m predicting that they will be less effective, less impactful, than previous generations.” Why? “You should always keep your eye on whether people are in ‘discover mode’ or ‘defend mode.’ ” In the former mode, you seize opportunities to be creative. In the latter, “you’re not creative, you’re not future-thinking, you’re focused on threats in the present.”

University students who matriculated starting in 2014 or so have arrived on campus in defend mode: “Here they are in the safest, most welcoming, most inclusive, most antiracist places on the planet, but many of them were acting like they were entering some sort of dystopian, threatening, immoral world.”

56% of liberal women 18 to 29 responded affirmatively to the question: Has a doctor or other healthcare provider ever told you that you have a mental health condition? “Some of that,” Mr. Haidt says, “has to be just self-presentational,” meaning imagined.

This new ideology . . . valorizes victimhood. And if your sub-community motivates you to say you have an anxiety disorder, how is this going to affect you for the rest of your life?” He answers his own question: “You’re not going to take chances, you’re going to ask for accommodations, you’re going to play it safe, you’re not going to swing for the fences, you’re not going to start your own company.”

Whereas millennial women are doing well, “Gen-Z women, because they’re so anxious, are going to be less successful than Gen-Z men—and that’s saying a lot, because Gen-Z men are messed up, too.”

The problem, he says, is distinct to the U.S. and other English-speaking developed countries: “You don’t find it as much in Europe, and hardly at all in Asia.” Ideas that are “nurtured around American issues of race and gender spread instantly to the U.K. and Canada. But they don’t necessarily spread to France and Germany, China and Japan.”

something I hear from a lot of managers, that it’s very difficult to supervise their Gen-Z employees, that it’s very difficult to give them feedback.” That makes it hard for them to advance professionally by learning to do their jobs better.

“this could severely damage American capitalism.” When managers are “afraid to speak up honestly because they’ll be shamed on Twitter or Slack, then that organization becomes stupid.” Mr. Haidt says he’s “seen a lot of this, beginning in American universities in 2015. They all got stupid in the same way. They all implemented policies that backfire.”

Mr. Haidt, who describes himself as “a classical liberal like John Stuart Mill,” also laments the impact of social media on political discourse

Social media and selfies hit a generation that had led an overprotected childhood, in which the age at which children were allowed outside on their own by parents had risen from the norm of previous generations, 7 or 8, to between 10 and 12.

Is there a solution? “I’d raise the age of Internet adulthood to 16,” he says—“and enforce it.”

By contrast, “life went onto phone-based apps 10 years ago, and the protections we have for children are zero, absolutely zero.” The damage to Generation Z from social media “so vastly exceeds the damage from Covid that we’re going to have to act.”

Gen Z, he says, “is not in denial. They recognize that this app-based life is really bad for them.” He reports that they wish they had childhoods more like those of their parents, in which they could play outside and have adventur

Before the introduction of Botox and hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in 2002 and 2003, respectively, aesthetic work was serious, expensive. Nose jobs and face lifts required general anesthesia, not insignificant recovery time, and cost thousands of dollars (in 2000, a facelift was $5,416 on average, and a rhinoplasty $4,109, around $9,400 and $7,000 adjusted).

In contrast, the average price of a syringe of hyaluronic acid filler today is $684, while treating, for example, the forehead and eyes with Botox will put you out anywhere from $300 to $600

We copied the beautiful and the rich, not in facsimile, but in homage.

In 2018, use of Botox and fillers was up 18% and 20% from five years prior. Philosophies of prejuvenation have made Botox use jump 22% among 22- to 37-year-olds in half a decade as well. By 2030, global noninvasive aesthetic treatments are predicted to triple.

The trouble is that a status symbol, without status, is common.

Beauty has always been exclusive. When someone strikes you as pretty, it means they are something that everyone else is not.

It’s a zero-sum game, as relative as our morals. Naturally, we hoard of beauty what we can. It’s why we call grooming tips “secrets.”

Largely the secrets started with the wealthy, who possess the requisite money and leisure to spare on their appearances

Botox and filler only accelerated a trend that began in the ’70s and ’80s and is just now reaching its saturation point.

we didn’t have the tools for anything more than emulation. Fake breasts and overdrawn lips only approximated real ones; a birthmark drawn with pencil would always be just that.

Instagram Face, on the other hand, distinguishes itself by its sheer reproducibility. Not only because of those new cosmetic technologies, which can truly reshape features, at reasonable cost and with little risk.

built in to the whole premise of reversible, low-stakes modification is an indefinite flux, and thus a lack of discretion.

Instagram Face has replicated outward, with trendsetters giving up competing with one another in favor of looking eerily alike. And obviously it has replicated down.

Eva looks like Eva. If she has procedures in common with Kim K, you couldn’t tell. “I look at my features and I think long and hard of how I can, without looking different and while keeping as natural as possible, make them look better and more proportional. I’m against everything that is too invasive. My problem with Instagram Face is that if you want to look like someone else, you should be in therapy.”

natural looks have always been, and still are, more valuable than artificial ones. Partly because of our urge to legitimize in any way we can the advantages we have over other people. Hotness is a class struggle.

As more and more women post videos of themselves eating, sleeping, dressing, dancing, and Only-Fanning online, in a logical bid for economic ascendance, the women who haven’t needed to do that gain a new status symbol.

Privacy. A life which is not a ticketed show. An intimacy that does not admit advertisers. A face that does not broadcast its insecurity, or the work undergone to correct it.

Upper class, private women get discrete work done. The differences aren’t in the procedures themselves—they’re the same—but in disposition

Eva, who lives between central London, Geneva, and the south of France, says: “I do stuff, but none of the stuff I do is at all in my head associated with Instagram Face. Essentially you do similar procedures, but the end goal is completely different. Because they are trying to get the result of looking like another human being, and I’m just beautifying myself.”

But the more rapidly it replicates, and the clearer our manuals for quick imitation become, the closer we get to singularity—that moment Kim Kardashian fears unlike any other: the moment when it becomes unclear whether we’re copying her, or whether she is copying us.

what he restores is complicated and yet not complicated at all. It’s herself, the fingerprint of her features. Her aura, her presence and genealogy, her authenticity in space and time.

Dr. Taktouk’s approach is “not so formulaic.” He aims to give his patients the “better versions of themselves.” “It’s not about trying to be anyone else,” he says, “or creating a conveyor belt of patients. It’s about working with your best features, enhancing them, but still looking like you.”

“Vulgar” says that in pursuing indistinguishability, women have been duped into another punishing divide. “Vulgar” says that the subtlety of his work is what signals its special class—and that the women who’ve obtained Instagram Face for mobility’s sake have unwittingly shut themselves out of it.

While younger women are dissolving their gratuitous work, the 64-year-old Madonna appeared at the Grammy Awards in early February, looking so tragically unlike herself that the internet launched an immediate postmortem.

The folly of Instagram Face is that in pursuing a bionic ideal, it turns cosmetic technology away from not just the reality of class and power, but also the great, poignant, painful human project of trying to reverse time. It misses the point of what we find beautiful: that which is ephemeral, and can’t be reproduced

Age is just one of the hierarchies Instagram Face can’t topple, in the history of women striving versus the women already arrived. What exactly have they arrived at?

Youth, temporarily. Wealth. Emotional security. Privacy. Personal choices, like cosmetic decisions, which are not so public, and do not have to be defended as empowered, in the defeatist humiliation of our times

Maybe they’ve arrived at love, which for women has never been separate from the things I’ve already mentioned.

I can’t help but recall the time I was chatting with a plastic surgeon. I began to point to my features, my flaws. I asked her, “What would you do to me, if I were your patient?” I had many ideas. She gazed at me, and then noticed my ring. “Nothing,” she said. “You’re already married.”

In every group chat, no matter the size, participants fall into informal roles. There is usually a leader—a person whose posting frequency drives the group or sets the agenda. Often, there are lurkers who rarely chime in

Larger group chats are not immune to the more toxic dynamics of social media, where competition for attention and herd behavior cause infighting, splintering, and back-channeling.

It’s enough to make one think, as the writer Max Read argued, that “venture-capitalist group chats are a threat to the global economy.” Now you might also say they are a threat to national security.

thanks to the private nature of the group chats, this information largely stayed out of the public eye. As Bloomberg reported, “By the time most people figured out that a bank run was a possibility … it was already well underway.”

The investor panic that led to the swift collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March was effectively caused by runaway group-chat dynamics. “It wasn’t phone calls; it wasn’t social media,” a start-up founder told Bloomberg in March. “It was private chat rooms and message groups.

Unlike traditional social media or even forums and message boards, group chats are nearly impossible to monitor.

as our digital social lives start to splinter off from feeds and large audiences and into siloed areas, a different kind of unpredictability and chaos awaits. Where social networks create a context collapse—a process by which information meant for one group moves into unfamiliar networks and is interpreted by outsiders—group chats seem to be context amplifiers

group chats provide strong relationship dynamics, and create in-jokes and lore. For decades, researchers have warned of the polarizing effects of echo chambers across social networks; group chats realize this dynamic fully.

Weird things happen in echo chambers. Constant reinforcement of beliefs or ideas might lead to group polarization or radicalization. It may trigger irrational herd behavior such as, say, attempting to purchase a copy of the Constitution through a decentralized autonomous organization

Obsession with in-group dynamics might cause people to lose touch with the reality outside the walls of a particular community; the private-seeming nature of a closed group might also lull participants into a false sense of security, as it did with Teixiera.

the age of the group chat appears to be at least as unpredictable, swapping a very public form of volatility for a more siloed, incalculable version

Social-media platforms are “preying on your insecurities; they’re preying on your temptations,” Jenn explained to me in an interview that shifted our parasocial connection, at least for an hour, to a mere relationship. “And, you know, I do play a role in this.” Jenn makes money through aspirational advertising, after all—a familiar part of any influencer’s job.

She’s pro–parasocial relationships, she explains to the camera, but only if we remain aware that we’re in one. “This relationship does not replace existing friendships, existing relationships,” she emphasizes. “This is all supplementary. Like, it should be in addition to your life, not a replacement.” I sat there watching her talk about parasocial relationships while absorbing the irony of being in one with her.

The open acknowledgment of social media’s inner workings, with content creators exposing the foundations of their content within the content itself, is what Alice Marwick, an associate communications professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, described to me as “meta-content.”

Meta-content can be overt, such as the vlogger Casey Neistat wondering, in a vlog, if vlogging your life prevents you from being fully present in it;

But meta-content can also be subtle: a vlogger walking across the frame before running back to get the camera. Or influencers vlogging themselves editing the very video you’re watching, in a moment of space-time distortion.

Viewers don’t seem to care. We keep watching, fully accepting the performance. Perhaps that’s because the rise of meta-content promises a way to grasp authenticity by acknowledging artifice; especially in a moment when artifice is easier to create than ever before, audiences want to know what’s “real” and what isn’

“The idea of a space where you can trust no sources, there’s no place to sort of land, everything is put into question, is a very unsettling, unsatisfying way to live.

So we continue to search for, as Murray observes, the “agreed-upon things, our basic understandings of what’s real, what’s true.” But when the content we watch becomes self-aware and even self-critical, it raises the question of whether we can truly escape the machinations of social media. Maybe when we stare directly into the abyss, we begin to enjoy its company.

“The difference between BeReal and the social-media giants isn’t the former’s relationship to truth but the size and scale of its deceptions.” BeReal users still angle their camera and wait to take their daily photo at an aesthetic time of day. The snapshots merely remind us how impossible it is to stop performing online.

Jenn’s concern over the future of the internet stems, in part, from motherhood. She recently had a son, Lennon (whose first birthday party I watched on YouTube), and worries about the digital world he’s going to inherit.

Back in the age of MySpace, she had her own internet friends and would sneak out to parking lots at 1 a.m. to meet them in real life: “I think this was when technology was really used as a tool to connect us.” Now, she explained, it’s beginning to ensnare us. Posting content online is no longer a means to an end so much as the end itself.

We used to view influencers’ lives as aspirational, a reality that we could reach toward. Now both sides acknowledge that they’re part of a perfect product that the viewer understands is unattainable and the influencer acknowledges is not fully real.

“I forgot to say this to her in the interview, but I truly think that my videos are less about me and more of a reflection of where you are currently … You are kind of reflecting on your own life and seeing what resonates [with] you, and you’re discarding what doesn’t. And I think that’s what’s beautiful about it.”

meta-content is fundamentally a compromise. Recognizing the delusion of the internet doesn’t alter our course within it so much as remind us how trapped we truly are—and how we wouldn’t have it any other way.

a 2022 Reuters investigation found that some American clinics were quite aggressive with treatment: None of the 18 U.S. clinics that Reuters looked at performed long assessments on their patients, and some prescribed puberty blockers on the first visit.

As Cass writes in her report, “The toxicity of the debate is exceptional.” She continues, “There are few other areas of health care where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behavior.”

The report’s greatest strength is its epistemic humility. Cass is continually asking, “What do we really know?” She is carefully examining the various studies — which are high quality, which are not. She is down in the academic weeds.

he notes that the quality of the research in this field is poor. The current treatments are “built on shaky foundations,” she writes in The BMJ. Practitioners have raced ahead with therapies when we don’t know what the effects will be. As Cass tells The BMJ, “I can’t think of another area of pediatric care where we give young people a potentially irreversible treatment and have no idea what happens to them in adulthood.”

She writes in her report, “The option to provide masculinizing/feminizing hormones from age 16 is available, but the review would recommend extreme caution.

her core conclusion is this: “For most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.” She realizes that this conclusion will not please many of the young people she has come to know, but this is where the evidence has taken her.

In 1877 a British philosopher and mathematician named William Kingdon Clifford published an essay called “The Ethics of Belief.” In it he argued that if a shipowner ignored evidence that his craft had problems and sent the ship to sea having convinced himself it was safe, then of course we would blame him if the ship went down and all aboard were lost. To have a belief is to bear responsibility, and one thus has a moral responsibility to dig arduously into the evidence, avoid ideological thinking and take into account self-serving biases.

“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,” Clifford wrote

A belief, he continued, is a public possession. If too many people believe things without evidence, “the danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.”

Since the Trump years, this habit of not consulting the evidence has become the underlying crisis in so many realms. People segregate into intellectually cohesive teams, which are always dumber than intellectually diverse teams. Issues are settled by intimidation, not evidence

Our natural human tendency is to be too confident in our knowledge, too quick to ignore contrary evidence. But these days it has become acceptable to luxuriate in those epistemic shortcomings, not to struggle against them. See, for example, the modern Republican Party.

Writing, especially the kind of writing that I do, brings together narrative, science, sometimes history, and an appreciation for the person who might be at the center of the narrative.

The greatest influence on me was Oliver Sacks, because he could capture people as people, and he always integrated serious science into his pieces.

The two subjects that were most prominent for him, as I once wrote for you, were identity and adaptation: Who is this person, despite their illness? How does that illness interface with their behavior and their decisions, how do people perceive them from the outside, and how do they try to find meaning and adapt to what looks like a disability, but sometimes—not always, but sometimes—gives them hidden strength?

I’ve gone from witnessing the depths of disability and death, like with AIDS: I saw some of the first people with AIDS in California, in 1982 or so. The average lifespan was six months. They were mostly young gay men, and it was devastating, the infections they got, the cancers they got. Now, with all the new drugs that have been developed, someone who gets HIV is projected to have a normal lifespan. From six months to fifty years: it’s miraculous

that’s part of what keeps you going: the belief that things can advance in a meaningful way.

Are there any major or interesting medical stories that the public doesn’t know enough about? 

The idea of genetic treatments. Often when people hear the words “genetics” or “DNA” or “RNA,” they shut down. The challenge is how to make it accessible.

There’s a wonderful line in the Talmud that says, “Whoever saves a single life saves the whole world.” There might be only a few hundred people in the whole country who have a particular genetic disorder. I

The students who’d been told they were almost always right were, on average, no more discerning than those who had been told they were mostly wrong.

In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. The students were told that the real point of the experiment was to gauge their responses to thinking they were right or wrong.

Once again, midway through the study, the students were informed that they’d been misled, and that the information they’d received was entirely fictitious. The students were then asked to describe their own beliefs

The students who’d received the first packet thought that he would avoid it. The students in the second group thought he’d embrace it.

One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group

Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain

Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves

Consider what’s become known as “confirmation bias,” the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them

Of the many forms of faulty thinking that have been identified, confirmation bias is among the best catalogued; it’s the subject of entire textbooks’ worth of experiments

Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,” the researchers noted. In this case, the failure was “particularly impressive,”

reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context

The particle that carries his name is perhaps the single most stunning example of how seemingly abstract mathematical ideas can make predictions which turn out to have huge physical consequences.”

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel, said at the time the standard model of physics which underpins the scientific understanding of the universe “rests on the existence of a special kind of particle: the Higgs particle. This particle originates from an invisible field that fills up all space.“Even when the universe seems empty this field is there. Without it, we would not exist, because it is from contact with the field that particles acquire mass. The theory proposed by Englert and Higgs describes this process.”