TOK Friends

Essay generation is neither theoretical nor futuristic at this point. In May, a student in New Zealand confessed to using AI to write their papers, justifying it as a tool like Grammarly or spell-check: ​​“I have the knowledge, I have the lived experience, I’m a good student, I go to all the tutorials and I go to all the lectures and I read everything we have to read but I kind of felt I was being penalised because I don’t write eloquently and I didn’t feel that was right,” they told a student paper in Christchurch. They don’t feel like they’re cheating, because the student guidelines at their university state only that you’re not allowed to get somebody else to do your work for you. GPT-3 isn’t “somebody else”—it’s a program.

The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up

“You can no longer give take-home exams/homework … Even on specific questions that involve combining knowledge across domains, the OpenAI chat is frankly better than the average MBA at this point. It is frankly amazing.”

, the Twitter Files do what technology critics have long done: point out a mostly intractable problem that is at the heart of our societal decision to outsource broad swaths of our political discourse and news consumption to corporate platforms whose infrastructure and design were made for viral advertising.

The trolling is paramount. When former Facebook CSO and Stanford Internet Observatory leader Alex Stamos asked whether Musk would consider implementing his detailed plan for “a trustworthy, neutral platform for political conversations around the world,” Musk responded, “You operate a propaganda platform.” Musk doesn’t appear to want to substantively engage on policy issues: He wants to be aggrieved.

it’s possible that a shred of good could come from this ordeal. Musk says Twitter is working on a feature that will allow users to see if they’ve been de-amplified, and appeal. If it comes to pass, perhaps such an initiative could give users a better understanding of their place in the moderation process. Great!

If the nearly two dozen voting members of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), a committee of scientists formed by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), agree on a site, the decision could usher in the end of the roughly 12,000-year-old Holocene epoch. And it would officially acknowledge that humans have had a profound influence on Earth.

Scientists coined the term Anthropocene in 2000, and researchers from several fields now use it informally to refer to the current geological time interval, in which human activity is driving Earth’s conditions and processes.

Formalizing the Anthropocene would unite efforts to study people’s influence on Earth’s systems, in fields including climatology and geology, researchers say. Transitioning to a new epoch might also coax policymakers to take into account the impact of humans on the environment during decision-making.

When we are herding, neuroimaging experiments show increased activation in the amygdala area of the brain, where fear and other negative emotions are processed. While you may feel vulnerable and exposed on your own, being part of the herd gives you a distinct sense of protection. You know in your guts that, in the midst of others, the risk of being hit by a car is lower because it is somehow distributed among the group’s members

The more of them, the lower the risk. There is safety in numbers. And so much more than mere safety.

Herding also comes with an intoxicating sense of power: as members of a crowd, we feel much stronger and braver than we are in fact.

It’s useful to keep in mind that Twitter is an amplification machine. It is built to allow people, with astonishingly little effort, to reach many other people. (This is why brands like it.)

There are a million other ways to express yourself online: This has nothing to do with free speech, and Twitter is not obligated to protect your First Amendment rights.

When Elon Musk and his fans talk about free speech on Twitter, they’re actually talking about loud speech. Who is allowed to use this technology to make their message very loud, to the exclusion of other messages?

Over the past year, though, it has become evident that there are key weaknesses at the core of these strong states.

The weaknesses are of two sorts. First, the concentration of power in the hands of a single leader at the top all but guarantees low-quality decision making, and over time will produce truly catastrophic consequences

Second, the absence of public discussion and debate in “strong” states, and of any mechanism of accountability, means that the leader’s support is shallow, and can erode at a moment’s notice.

I’ve done my best to pull out the recurring themes I’ve observed from these 100 conversations.

I have come to believe that there are six forces that help form friendships and maintain them through the years: accumulation, attention, intention, ritual, imagination, and grace.

The simplest and most obvious force that forms and sustains friendships is time spent together. One study estimates that it takes spending 40 to 60 hours together within the first six weeks of meeting to turn an acquaintance into a casual friend, and about 80 to 100 hours to become more than that.

Slow transit constipation (STC) is a common disease characterized by markedly delayed colonic transit time as a result of colonic motility dysfunction. It is well established that STC is mostly caused by disorders of relevant nerves, especially the enteric nervous system (ENS).

After 5 weeks of treatment, CES could enhance the colonic electromyogram (EMG) signal to promote colonic motility, thereby improving the colonic content emptying of STC beagles. HE staining and transmission electron microscopy confirmed that CES could regenerate ganglia and synaptic vesicles in the myenteric plexus.

Taken together, pulse train CES could induce the regeneration of myenteric plexus neurons, thereby promoting the colonic motility in STC beagles.

Some might see the entrenchment of child-centeredness in children’s literature as reinforcing what some social critics consider a rising tide of narcissism in young people today. But to be fair: Such criticisms of youth transcend the ages.

What is certainly true now is the primacy of “mirrors and windows,” a philosophy that strives to show children characters who reflect how they look back to them, as well as those from different backgrounds, mostly with an eye to diversity.

This is a noble goal, but those mirrors and windows should apply to adults as well. Adults are, after all, central figures in children’s lives — their parents and caregivers, their teachers, their role models

Satya Doyle Byock, a 39-year-old therapist, noticed a shift in tone over the past few years in the young people who streamed into her office: frenetic, frazzled clients in their late teens, 20s and 30s. They were unnerved and unmoored, constantly feeling like something was wrong with them.

“Crippling anxiety, depression, anguish, and disorientation are effectively the norm,”

her new book, “Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood.” The book uses anecdotes from Ms. Byock’s practice to outline obstacles faced by today’s young adults — roughly between the ages of 16 and 36 — and how to deal with them.

In politics, “the American dream” has long been used aspirationally, to evoke family and home. But as my colleague Jazmine Ulloa detailed earlier this year, the phrase has also lately been used ominously, especially by conservative politicians, to describe a certain way of life in danger of being stolen by outsiders.

The typical counterargument, both in politics and pop culture, has been that immigrants pursuing their ambitions help to strengthen all of America

recent stories have complicated this idea by questioning whether the dream itself — or, at least, defining that dream in mostly material terms — can be toxic.

Functional Medicine is the alternative medicine Bill Clinton credits with giving him his life back after his 2004 quadruple heart by-pass surgery. Its ideology is embraced by Oprah and regularly features on Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop.

Developed in 1990 by Dr Jeffrey Bland, who in 1991 set up the Institute of Functional Medicine with his wife Susan, today the field is spearheaded by US best-selling author Dr Mark Hyman, adviser to the Clintons and co-director of the controversial Cleveland Clinic for Functional Medicine.

"Functional Medicine is not about a test or a supplement or a particular protocol," he adds. "It's really a new paradigm of disease and how it arises and how to restore health. Within it there are many approaches that are effective, it's not exclusive, it doesn't exclude traditional medications, it includes all modalities depending on what's right for that patient."

‘We are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves,’ wrote Friedrich Nietzsche at the beginning of On the Genealogy of Morals (1887

This seeking after ourselves, however, is not something that is lacking in Buddhist and Confucian traditions – especially not in the case of Korean philosophy. Self-cultivation, central to the tradition, underscores that the onus is on the individual to develop oneself, without recourse to the divine or the supernatural

Korean philosophy is practical, while remaining agnostic to a large degree: recognising the spirit realm but highlighting that we ourselves take charge of our lives by taking charge of our minds

In a sense Santos is a sad, farcical version of where Donald Trump has taken the Republican Party — into the land of unreality, the continent of lies.

Trump’s takeover of the G.O.P. was not primarily an ideological takeover, it was a psychological and moral one.

he did introduce, on a much larger scale, the same pathetic note into our national psychology.