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Javier E

AI Is Running Circles Around Robotics - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...673608

AI physical capabilities

shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • Large language models are drafting screenplays and writing code and cracking jokes. Image generators, such as Midjourney and DALL-E 2, are winning art prizes and democratizing interior design and producing dangerously convincing fabrications. They feel like magic. Meanwhile, the world’s most advanced robots are still struggling to open different kinds of doors
  • the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker offered a pithier formulation: “The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research,” he wrote, “is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard.” This lesson is now known as “Moravec’s paradox.”
  • The paradox has grown only more apparent in the past few years: AI research races forward; robotics research stumbles. In part that’s because the two disciplines are not equally resourced. Fewer people work on robotics than on AI.
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  • In theory, a robot could be trained on data drawn from computer-simulated movements, but there, too, you must make trade-offs
  • Jang compared computation to a tidal wave lifting technologies up with it: AI is surfing atop the crest; robotics is still standing at the water’s edge.
  • But the biggest obstacle for roboticists—the factor at the core of Moravec’s paradox—is that the physical world is extremely complicated, far more so than languag
  • Whatever its causes, the lag in robotics could become a problem for AI. The two are deeply intertwined
  • Some researchers are skeptical that a model trained on language alone, or even language and images, could ever achieve humanlike intelligence. “There’s too much that’s left implicit in language,” Ernest Davis, a computer scientist at NYU, told me. “There’s too much basic understanding of the world that is not specified.” The solution, he thinks, is having AI interact directly with the world via robotic bodies. But unless robotics makes some serious progress, that is unlikely to be possible anytime soon.
  • For years already, engineers have used AI to help build robots. In a more extreme, far-off vision, super-intelligent AIs could simply design their own robotic body. But for now, Finn told me, embodied AI is still a ways off. No android assassins. No humanoid helpers.
  • Set in the context of our current technological abilities, HAL’s murderous exchange with Dave from 2001: A Space Odyssey would read very differently. The machine does not refuse to help its human master. It simply isn’t capable of doing so.“Open the pod bay doors, HAL.”“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Javier E

The Liberal Maverick Fighting Race-Based Affirmative Action - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...enberg-affirmative-action.html

maverick liberal race class admissions

shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • The paper inspired him to write his influential 1996 book, “The Remedy,” which developed his theory that affirmative action had set back race relations by becoming a source of racial antagonism.
  • “If you want working-class white people to vote their race, there’s probably no better way to do it than to give explicitly racial preferences in deciding who gets ahead in life,” he said. “If you want working-class whites to vote their class, you would try to remind them that they have a lot in common with working-class Black and Hispanic people.”
  • Today, as in the mid-1990s, polls show that a majority of people oppose race-conscious college admissions, even as they support racial diversity. Public opinion may not always be right, Mr. Kahlenberg said, but surely it should be considered when developing public policy.
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  • If Mr. Kahlenberg had his way, college admissions would be upended.
  • His basic recipe: Get rid of preferences for alumni children, as well as children of faculty, staff and big donors. Say goodbye to recruited athletes in boutique sports like fencing. Increase community college transfers. Give a break to students who have excelled in struggling schools, who have grown up in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, in families with low income, or better yet, low net worth. Pump up financial aid. Look for applicants in towns that do not normally send students to highly selective colleges.
  • elite colleges have become fortresses for the rich, he said. Harvard had “23 times as many rich kids as poor kids,” Mr. Kahlenberg testified in 2018 at the federal court trial in the Harvard case, referring to a 2017 paper by Raj Chetty, then a Stanford economist, and colleagues.
  • his 2012 study that found seven of 10 leading universities were able to return to previous levels of diversity through race-neutral means.
  • In 2020, Berkeley boasted that it had admitted its most diverse class in 30 years, with offers to African American and Latino students rising to the highest numbers since at least the late-1980s, without sacrificing academic standards.
  • In a simulation of the class of 2019, he found that the share of Black students at Harvard would drop to 10 percent from 14 percent, but the share of white students would also drop, to 33 percent from percent from 40 percent, mainly because of the elimination of legacy and other preferences. The share of Hispanic students would rise to 19 percent from 14 percent and the Asian American share would rise to 31 percent from 24 percent.
  • The share of “advantaged” students (parents with a bachelor’s degree, family income over $80,000, living in a neighborhood not burdened by concentrated poverty) would make up about half of the class, from 82 percent. SAT scores would drop to the 98th percentile from the 99th.
  • In the affirmative action trial, Harvard said that Mr. Kahlenberg’s model would produce too little diversity, and water down academic quality. Its actual class of 2026 is 15.2 percent African American, 12.6 percent Hispanic and 27.9 percent Asian American.
  • Edward Blum, the conservative activist behind the lawsuits against Harvard and U.N.C., said Mr. Kahlenberg came to his attention when “The Remedy” was published. The focus on class seemed like a powerful bridge between the left and the right, Mr. Blum said
  • Dr. Laycock, of the University of Virginia, expects that once the Supreme Court rules, conservative groups that are now promoting race-neutral alternatives will claim they are racial proxies and turn against them. “Everybody knows that’s why it’s being used,” he said. (Mr. Blum said his group will not, though other conservative groups could do so.)
  • There is no “We Believe” sign in the yard. But on the living room wall, a sign says, “Live simply, dream big, be grateful, give love, laugh lots.”
  • In that spirit, his stubborn campaign might be traced to being the son of a pastor whose family could afford to make him a Harvard graduate, twice over. “I do have some measure of class guilt,” he said. “I wish people who are far richer than I am had more class guilt.”
Javier E

There's a New Menace Stalking Suburbia. Meet the McBasement. - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...eet-the-mcbasement-11665497875

rich house construction size excess culture

shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • One solution? Go low. “The possibilities are endless,” says Stephen Cheney, owner of Cheney Custom Homes, who is currently constructing a roughly 16,000-square-foot home and guest home with a 5,600-square-foot “bunker” below for a bowling alley, 3-D golf simulator, and spa..origami-wrapper *{margin:0;padding:0;border:0}.origami-top-border{border-top:1px solid #dadada;padding-top:10px}.origami-headline{font-family:Retina,'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-weight:500;color:#333;font-size:18px;line-height:20px;margin-bottom:8px}.origami-image-wrapper{display:flex;margin-bottom:10px;gap:10px}.origami-image-wrapper:last-of-type{margin-bottom:8px}.origami-image{flex:1 1}.origami-image img{max-width:100%;width:100%;height:100%;display:block;max-inline-size:100%}.origami-image figcaption{display:none}.origami-caption{display:block;font-family:Retina,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;font-weight:300;color:#555;line-height:18.6667px;margin-bottom:4px}.origami-credit{display:block;font-family:Retina,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;font-weight:300;color:#555;line-height:20px;text-transform:uppercase}@media (min-width:640px){#origami-dac13529-1203-4200-8bb3-a2147cdf655f .origami-hide-on-desktop{display:none}}@media (max-width:639px){#origami-dac13529-1203-4200-8bb3-a2147cdf655f .origami-hide-on-mobile{display:none}}
  • Basements can dwarf homes above. Designer Andrew Kotchen, a principal at Workshop/APD, is working on a 5,000-square-foot Nantucket abode that will have a 10,000-square-foot basement with a basketball court, garage, bedrooms and a wellness space.
  • For the 10,000-square-foot grotto, workers are using the same waterproofing technique as Boston’s Big Dig highway project, Mr. Kotchen says. An emergency pump system and thick concrete slab underneath will prevent the foundation from floating up should water levels rise, he says.
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  • In Aspen, a 5,000-square-foot basement at the confluence of two rivers required “dewatering,” says Ryan Walterscheid, a partner at architecture firm Forum Phi. Workers drilled wells around the site and pumped out almost a billion gallons of water before pouring the foundation. (The water was poured back into the river.)
  • r David Taban, who is trying to build a 23,144-square-foot house, of which 9,829 would be a basement. (He wants to dig down to appease neighbors who worried his home would hurt their views.) But getting a basement of that size required removing 5,346 cubic yards of dirt, which one city planner said would amount to 594 truckloads.
  • Spec developers know the more livable space, the bigger the price tag, says Brett Loehmann, a project manager at McClean Design. “If you don’t have great amenities, you’re not going to be the coolest person on the block.”
Javier E

Order and Calm Eased Evacuation from Burning Japan Airlines Jet - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...japan-airlines-fire.html

discipline order panic airplane fire japan culture history

shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • While a number of factors aided what many have called a miracle at Haneda Airport — a well trained crew of 12; a veteran pilot with 12,000 hours of flight experience; advanced aircraft design and materials — the relative absence of panic onboard during the emergency procedure perhaps helped the most.
  • “Even though I heard screams, mostly people were calm and didn’t stand up from their seats but kept sitting and waiting,” said Aruto Iwama, a passenger who gave a video interview to the newspaper The Guardian. “That’s why I think we were able to escape smoothly.”
  • Experts said that while crews are trained — and passenger jets are tested — for cabin evacuations within 90 seconds in an emergency landing, technical specifications on the 2-year-old Airbus A350-900 most likely gave those on the flight a bit more time to escape.
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  • Firewalls around the engines, nitrogen pumps in fuel tanks that help prevent immediate burning, and fire-resistant materials on seats and flooring most likely helped to keep the rising flames at bay, said Sonya A. Brown, a senior lecturer in aerospace design at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
  • “Really, the Japan Airlines crew in this case performed extremely well,” Dr. Brown said. The fact that passengers did not stop to retrieve carry-on luggage or otherwise slow down the exit was “really critical,” she added.
  • Tadayuki Tsutsumi, an official at Japan Airlines, said the most important component of crew performance during an emergency was “panic control” and determining which exit doors were safe to use.
  • Former flight attendants described the rigorous training and drills that crew members undergo to prepare for emergencies. “When training for evacuation procedures, we repeatedly used smoke/fire simulation to make sure we could be mentally ready when situations like those occurred in reality,” Yoko Chang, a former cabin attendant and an instructor of aspiring crew members, wrote in an Instagram message.
  • Ms. Chang, who did not work for JAL, added that airlines require cabin crew members to pass evacuation exams every six months.
Javier E

There has never been more music made - but most artists go hungry - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...st-artists-go-hungry-nx7c2vg8m

music industry costs success

shared by Javier E on 06 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • “Fifteen years ago,” says Will Burgess, of Practise Music, a management company, “if you wanted to record a song you needed two days in a studio, at £400 a day, plus a sound engineer at £100 a day. That’s the cost of a laptop, on which you can make unlimited amounts of music today.”
  • These days you don’t need to be able to play a musical instrument to be a musician and you don’t need a studio. All you need is a computer. “I’ve created songs that have gone to No 1 in my daughter’s bedroom downstairs,” says Crispin Hunt, former lead singer of the Longpigs and now a songwriter who has worked with Lana Del Rey, Rod Stewart and Ellie Goulding.
  • You can sketch out a musical idea on a laptop, you can add instrumentation, you can record your own vocals. If you want to collaborate with others around the world, no problem: when Luke Sital-Singh, a singer-songwriter who works in London, needs drums, he asks a friend with a studio in Lewes to send the files to his computer. He’s working with a guitarist in Santa Fe, to whom he sends a rough version of the song; his collaborator sends him back a guitar track.
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  • Special effects software can give your music all sorts of subtle vibes. For $299, for instance, you can make your song sound as though it was recorded in Sound City Studios in Los Angeles, on the $20,000 vintage microphones with the $100,000 mixing console that recorded Fleetwood Mac and Nirvana. For $259 you can simulate the Beatles’ Abbey Road Studios
  • In the past, when you assembled all the tracks for a song, it would have to be mixed and mastered in a studio by a sound engineer adjusting the levels. Now an app will do it for you.
  • Now, all you need to do is get the files uploaded to streaming services. If you are signed with a label, they will do that for you, but you don’t need a record deal to do that. There are companies such as DistroKid that act as postmen: for £17.99 a year, you can ensure that the song you created in your bedroom is available on multiple streaming platforms.
  • Some artists thrive on social media. It suits lively, quirky performers like Ryder, and artists who want to experiment with different genres. Mxmtoon, a 23-year-old American YouTuber, singer-songwriter and ukulele player, is also a streamer on Twitch, a platform on which people watch others playing online games, has published graphic novels and made a podcast. Maia — the artist’s name — describes mxmtoon as “a multi-hyphenated project”.
  • More traditional musicians struggle with some aspects of tech. “We get together,” says Sital-Singh of his contemporaries in the business, “and have a little moan about how everyone’s telling us to do TikTok and we can’t bring ourselves to dance and we feel old and decrepit.”
  • Even digital natives struggle sometimes: “I already have nostalgia for a simpler past, even though I’m 23,” says Maia. “It’s exciting but it does put so much pressure on a normal individual to be an entrepreneur to advertise their own personal brand.”
  • Journalists, regrettably, no longer have the power they once did. What matters these days is social media. The A&R (artists and repertoire) people at record companies who would once have hung out in basement clubs scouting for new talent now sit in meetings examining the data on artists’ social media performance.
  • Now that the whole world’s music is available all over the world at the click of a play button, there’s a greater diversity among top-selling artists.
  • People making videos of themselves performing or dancing to the song on TikTok helped propel it to the stratosphere. It has been streamed a billion times. Sethi now plays to packed venues in America and Europe; last year, he performed at Coachella, America’s Glastonbury. “Without digital technology I would be a south Asian indy musician, working on the fringes of Bollywood,” he says from his home in New York.
  • For musicians, it’s more ambiguous. Because the costs of making music are lower, anybody with ambition can have a go. Many more people, as a result, are getting into the music business. According to PPL, the organisation which distributes money to music performers and rights-holders, the number of registered artists has risen from 61,310, when the industry was at its nadir, to 165,039 last year.
  • That makes the business fiercely competitive. As Will Page, former chief economist at Spotify and author of Tarzan Economics, points out, around 100,000 tracks are being uploaded on to Spotify every day: that’s more than were released in an entire calendar year in the 1980s
  • That has cemented the power of the record companies. When the digital revolution started, it was widely expected that record labels would cease to exist, and be replaced by a model in which everybody promoted and distributed their own music. That’s not what has happened: because it’s so difficult to get noticed, embryonic stars need record labels to promote them.
  • A label invests in the production of the music, the styling of the band, video content, interviews, touring and the crucial business of getting a song on a streaming service’s playlist that suggests the song to listeners to suit their tastes. Artists that are signed with major labels get paid more, per stream, than those that aren’t.
  • Three quarters of streamed tracks have one of the major record labels behind them. And even though streaming is booming, it doesn’t contribute much to the incomes of the vast majority of artists.
  • Most artists stay hungry. A single stream will earn a musician anywhere between 0.1p and 2.4p. Crispin Hunt reckons that on average a million streams for a song — a wild ambition for most musicians — will, if you have to pay a cut to a record company, probably make you £1,000
  • If you’ve then got to pay your manager 20 per cent, and divide the rest between the four band members, “it barely pays for a Sainsbury’s shop. That’s why music is dominated by middle-class people called Crispin whose parents can afford to buy them an electric guitar and a laptop.”
  • For Christie Gardner, half of Lilo, a two-woman band, it helps planning gigs. “You can see where your listeners are and you can tell what they’re listening to. We make decisions about shows on that basis.” But for most bands, the economics of live performance are pretty grim.
  • Deathcrash’s manager Joe Taylor says that the band has been offered the opportunity of a European tour supporting a much bigger act. It would be good for their career but not their bank balance. The fees per show would be €200; once the costs of a sound engineer, a tour van, a driver, fuel, hotels and a carnet for importing musical instruments into the EU had been factored in, they would lose £15,000.
  • music has always been an uneconomic business, which people subsidise through other activities. The fiddler in the village pub probably worked in the fields in the daytime and played for money and fun in the evenings and at the weekend, rather as Ryder ran a juice bar and sang at weddings. These days, there is also the wafer-thin chance that they might end up being one of the 1,200 artists who make more than $1 million a year on Spotify
  • There are some signs that in the new musical economy, the balance of power between artists and the big record companies may have tipped slightly in the artists’ favour
  • the share of streaming revenues going to artists increased from 19.7 per cent to 23.3 per cent between 2012 and 2021 and that going to songwriters has risen from 8 per cent in 2008 to 15 per cent in 2021. “Outcomes for consumers, artists and songwriters,” it concludes, “are getting better.”
  • Most of the extra revenues generated by streaming are going to the top earners. But the stars are not the only ones benefiting. Between 2017 and 2022, the number of artists earning over $1 million on Spotify more than doubled, but so did the number earning over $10,000
  • more than two fifths of artists who release their own music aren’t expecting to make a full-time career. They’re in it for fun, for the love of it, or to be able to show their mum that they have released a song on Spotify.
  • It seems likely that the more music is being created, the greater the chance that wonderful tunes are being written, but it’s not necessarily the case. The best stuff might get buried under a mound of mediocrity.
Javier E

Opinion | This Is Why MAGA Loves JD Vance - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-vice-presidential-debate.html

maga vance politics US

shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 24 - No Cached
  • In choosing Vance and discarding Pence, Trump traded actual decency for a man who can simulate decency, and that’s exactly what Vance did on Tuesday night.
  • With those words and in that moment, Vance told MAGA: Don’t be fooled by my civility; when real power is on the line, I’m with Trump. He’s said so before. Just last month, he told the All-In podcast that he “would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of an election that we had.”
  • There was nothing peaceful about the transfer of power from Trump to Joe Biden. Even the relative calm of Inauguration Day (which Trump skipped) was guaranteed only by a troop deployment that made any substantial disruption impossible.
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  • But he couldn’t keep it together for the entire evening. At the very end, the mask slipped. When pressed to say whether Trump lost in 2020, Vance said, “Obviously, Donald Trump and I think that there were problems in 2020,” and he had the gall to say, “It’s really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on Jan. 20, as we have done for 250 years in this country.”
  • No one should underestimate the importance of that moment. Earlier in the debate, Vance explicitly backed away from his previous anti-abortion positions. If abortion is no longer sacred for Republicans, we know who is: Trump. Vance will compromise on abortion, but he won’t waver from the Big Lie.
  • Even so, vice-presidential debates can still be instructive. And on Tuesday night, voters learned exactly why MAGA loves Vance so much. He’s a talented communicator. He has a compelling life story. He can make the ideological and policy case for Republican populism better than any other politician in America. And he’s no Mike Pence: He would wreck the Republic for Donald Trump.
Javier E

Opinion | That Voice on the Phone May Just Be A.I. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ai-voice-telemarketers.html

AI chatbot applications loneliness effects scenarios conversation culture crisis

shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 24 - No Cached
  • What I’ve learned is that interacting with A.I. voice agents will change how we interact with one another: who we trust, what we expect and what we need in our communications. A.I. voice agents are already infiltrating our world: calling us as telemarketers, taking our orders at fast-food drive-throughs, listening to our problems as A.I. therapists or — and this one really hits home, given my occupation — being employed as A.I. podcast hosts.
  • Voice agents have also been touted as a solution to the loneliness epidemic. But when I called a friend of mine and unleashed the A.I. version of me, he later offered the most succinct description of what the whole experience felt like: “It’s so lonely,” he lamented. That sense of loneliness — the base reality that, fundamentally, you are only talking to yourself — may be the most lasting result of all these A.I. conversations.
  • A.I. agents are already triggering an avalanche of synthetic conversation, as they are deployed as tireless, unflagging talkers, capable of endless invented chatter. As they improve, it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish these A.I. voice agents from humans and, even when you can identify them, you will still be forced to talk to them.
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  • the more simulated human conversation I heard, the more it left me craving the real thing: in-person connections with the people I care about, with all the quirks of a meandering human discussion
  • the upside may be that it forces us to appreciate the subtleties of personal interactions that many of us have come to devalue.
  • I witnessed A.I. voice agents strike up conversations with one another, which raised a Zen-like question: If one A.I. voice agent tries to scam another, is anyone’s time being wasted?
  • As I provided my A.I. voice agent with more information about me and my life, it evolved into a more credible impersonator of me. Armed with my biography, it attended work meetings on my behalf (off-camera, of course), conducted interviews in my place and even attempted to negotiate business deals. My clone was better at arranging meetings than closing deals, though it handled an important legal conversation with aplomb.
  • Along the way, I discovered its singular talent: a knack for endless untruthful riffing that no human can match.
  • I’m talking about a bottomless capacity for mundane small talk, combined with the imperative to make things up just to keep the conversation going.
  • Even when my voice agent did a good job masquerading as me, I found that for the people on the other end of the line, having out-loud conversations with A.I. clones upended their sense of reality.
  • Companies are poised to unleash these A.I. voice agents into our world. We humans need to decide how we will adjust to a world flooded with near-human voices
  • we could try and reject this technology, carving out no-clone spaces and refusing to patronize the companies that offer a pseudo-human experience instead of a real one.
  • If there’s one thing we don’t need, it’s more loneliness, which seems to be the one thing these A.I. voices reliably supply. Their arrival offers a chance to rethink how we use our own voices and to seek out more of the human interactions that they can never replace.
Javier E

Everyone Online Sounds Like an Absolute Fucking Poseur Lately - 0 views

freddiedeboer.substack.com/...online-sounds-like-an-absolute

poseur millennial insecurity discourse culture history

shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 24 - No Cached
  • part of the basic confusion of that little cultural moment was to suppose that snark (reflexive, dismissive negativity) and smarm (treacly positivity in which power might hide) were antonyms. But Millennial snot demonstrates that they were always kissing cousins, easily integrated, two complementary spices begging to be added to the same chowder.
  • Millennial snot is smarmy in that it depends on the speaker’s certainty that they are the good, righteous being in every exchange, and it is snarky in that it operates under a logic of being limitlessly disaffected, an asserted perpetual superiority that’s always believed to be apparent to everyone. It’s a simulation of being witty and cutting the way people are in movies, impressed with the self and literally nothing else, like asking ChatGPT to make you into the cool kid at the back of the class that you’ve always longed to be. Millennial snot so easily integrates two supposedly opposed approaches to communicative integrity because it’s the vocabulary of people who have no particular interest in integrity. They simply want to feel powerful, if however briefly, if only in insincere and meaningless online exchanges.
  • The purveyors of Millennial snot attempt to fool themselves and the world about their level of self-belief with two primary tools: one, through embracing the preening sanctimony of contemporary left politics, acting as though they simply are the campaigns against racism or injustice or need, themselves, expressed of course in an obfuscatory academic vocabulary; two, through the language of droll disdain that has become the default idiom of the 21st century as insecurity has become the universal marinade of American elite life.
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  • the fusion of modern progressivism’s self-celebratory nature, the discourse norms of our most overeducated age cohort, and the reflexive retreat into triviality as a self-defense strategy
  • It’s the idiom of a failed generation, the unconvincing puffery of millions of unhappy front-of-class kids who have spent their adulthoods expecting the pure beauty of their creative souls to someday be rewarded with fame and riches, somehow, just like Orson Welles giving Kermit and the rest of the Muppets the standard rich and famous contract. It floats the ineradicable belief that success is just around the corner, exactly the way it seemed to be when they wore jumpsuits to warehouse parties in 2005.
  • I am obsessed with the way that such a vast portion of those who regularly communicate online do so in styles of language that are utterly artificial, borrowed from “marginalized groups,” when the people doing the borrowing are so often the very people who are endlessly sensitive to cultural borrowing
  • I don’t think much of the concept of cultural appropriation. In fact I’ve always seen it as the worst kind of academic-political overreach, the product of people looking for new vectors of offense when the whole huge world of material bigotry and inequality is already orbiting all around u
  • All culture is appropriated. There is quite literally nothing that exists in culture that is not the product of some amount of borrowing, and influence always extends in both directions
  • It all comes down to the same two culprits, which are not at all restricted only to Millennials but which are particularly acute for my generational cohort: fear of aging and the elevation of insecurity to a virtue.
  • As for the second, well, it’s the enforcement of insecurity, the way cultural elites have created an expectation that all decent people should perform a total lack of self-confidence and perpetual anxiety for others, so that no one feels judged for their own lack of self-esteem.
  • It’s related, oddly, to my constant, fruitless complaints about modern mental health culture. As we’ve seen in that domain, there appears to be no way to end the stigma regarding something without ending up actively celebrating that something.
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