I just finished Tom Nichols’ book “The Death of Expertise”. I feel like Nichols is one of those old-school conservatives (he clearly despises the Trumpist version of conservatism) who is worth listening to. Despite many rough spots in the book in which he comes across as curmudgeonly and condescending, the book’s central message is solid, in my opinion.

And that message is: experts know more about their topic of expertise than the vast majority of people, therefore you should give their opinion on that topic more authority than the layperson’s. This assertion is plainly true, but is perceived as deeply insulting by most USians today;“my ignorance is as good as your knowledge” may well be the tenet many people today cling on to.

Nichols wrote this book in 2017 and eerily predicted what would happen if we continued in this trajectory: a takeover by politicians who coddle and promote the ignorance of the uninformed masses at the expense of the prestige of expertise.

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• #opinion
• #books

Every time I see a Ghibli AI picture, my heart dies a little. Every time an image is made, we are all impoverished a tiny bit. A small shred of respect is lost for an old man and his crew toiling months at a time on seconds of animation, to tell stories of beauty, empathy, and humanity, a man who loathed AI from its earliest days as an affront to life itself.

Every time a cartoon facsimile is generated and used for a lark, a token bit of our common heritage is stolen, ground up, repackaged, and regurgitated like so much chewing gum, boiling gallons of water and spewing carbon to entertain someone for a moment with images as vapid and forgettable as the next.

Every time I see one of those images, I scroll past and shake my head a little.

• #opinion
• #AI

Everyone needs a safe space. Conservatives have turned the phrase into a derogatory term (as they tend to do with all manner of empathy-based language), but I think a safe space is a requirement for human growth.

Learning, self-expression, and study can only happen when there is sufficient safe space for someone to drop their guard and focus their intellect on a problem. Flow state cannot occur when you’re constantly looking over your shoulder, watching your language, or censoring your output.

I found that my pace of learning new skills has slowed in the past decade. I’m sure some of it is due to age, but I bet a lot of it is due to the erosion of psychological safety at large, and a (well-founded) suspicion that some portion of those I meet are actually OK if I or my loved ones were to suffer, and they are ever more bold about it.

Without a safe space, there is no trust, no play, no creativity, no growth. It’s imperative that we curate and defend our safe spaces.

PS: I know I’m conflating psychological safety with safe spaces, but to me they are the same thing; the differences lie in whether you’re invoking safe spaces as a slur, i.e. to refer to a space where no one can be criticized, which is really a straw man argument.

• #opinion

Do your best to resist cynicism, because cynicism destroys nuance, and almost everything valuable in life exists inside nuance.

Resist saying cynical things like “who cares about privacy; your data is already out there”, “who cares about stopping climate change; it’s already too late”, “who cares about voting; we don’t have a democracy any more”, and any number of similarly simplistic, thought-destroying nonsense.

Cynicism is faux-intellectualism. It’s attempting to impress people with rational-sounding generalizations that lead to absurd, defeatist behavior. It’s a claim of “being real” while being too lazy to think through the problem. It’s feeling superior by kicking a table on which someone else is doing their homework.

Nuance exists even during a crisis—it’s arguably even more important then. Things can always get worse, and things can always get better. Working to make things better is worth doing. Feeling smug and telling people to give up is not; it’s the asshole’s easy way out.

• #opinion

As we wrap up Biden’s tenure, I can’t help but be utterly disappointed that he had powerful tools at his disposal, and used almost none of it to prevent the ascent of Fascism.

He allowed the Supreme Court to remain full of Fascist agents, even after they decided that a president was immune from prosecution, a patently absurd idea.

He did effectively nothing as Netanyahu destroyed Gaza and its residents.

He did not put pressure on Jack Smith to quickly bring charges against Trump despite a four year window, essentially running out the clock and allowing an insurrectionist to get on the ballot.

He did absolutely nothing that matters to help Harris win the election.

Could Biden have pulled any of this off given the divided Congress? Maybe not, but he could have tried. And he certainly could have used his bully pulpit to drive national conversation and build grassroot support.

Instead, we got an Absent President, who silently made life great for shareholders.

Was Biden a bad president? In any other era, no. He was an exemplary administrator. He got the economy restarted after Trump Episode One put it in the shitter. He appointed Lina Khan to the FTC, a great fighter for the interests of the people against corporate hegemony. He likely did a thousand good works we didn’t even hear about, keeping this nation rolling, and mostly doing right by us. And of course, compared to his predecessor, he’s an absolute saint and superstar.

But as a president installed in the aftermath of a failed insurrection, during a global resurgence of Fascism, overseeing a nation awash in a storm of disinformation financed by our enemies, with the people crying out for justice and accountability, he was an abject failure. Fascist agents made steady progress while he worked his desk job. He did the opposite of rising to the occasion: he pretended it didn’t happen.

• #opinion
• #politics