Below you’ll find a quote from The Eric Topol X-account, which he has taken from a recent nature article on AI in medicine (paywalled):

GPT-5 represents a meaningful advance: fewer hallucinations, better reasoning benchmarks, and stronger rule-following in its best variant. However, it remains a probabilistic text generator, not a reasoning engine. Whether next-token prediction can support robust, generalizable reasoning is still debated. Until that question is resolved, the most insidious risk may be the hardest to detect: the illusion of understanding. In medicine and public health, in which decisions carry life-or-death stakes, that illusion can be as dangerous as outright error.

A reasonable (sic) argument I guess. I wonder though: Isn’t [human] understanding (i.e. reasoning, generalizable or not) also based on next token prediction ? The difference being that our tokens aren’t necessarily limited to text. The illusion may be that human reasoning is something magical.

What is outright dangerous is bad performing systems of next token predictions. In my experience, those systems can be both human and artificial.

From: Beyond Redemption

When belief defines reality, those with the strongest convictions—the crazy, the obsessive, the delusional—have the power to shape the world.

Originally a fantasy quote, but horrifyingly accurate in the real world too.

I wanted to read Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” mostly as an introduction to modern conservative philosophy. It’s also a really good book though, Ayn Rand writes beautiful prose.

Ayn Rand’s thinking seems to have a major influence on the political development in parts of the world right now. Not really the “facts are facts” part of her Objectivism-philosophy (support for scientific thinking is at an all time low after all), but rather the mindset where individualism is far superior to collectivism. Unfortunately, the black and white perspective of this narrative seems to attract a lot of followers.

How abolishing collaboration and altruism can possibly be good for anyone is beyond me, but reading texts like these at least help me understand.

The court room speech delivered by the main character, the architect Howard Roark, serves as a representative summary for this thinking. The whole speech can be found here, or if you prefer a movie version, you can watch it here. Below is in my view, the quintessential part where Roark is summarizing his views:

I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.

I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.

We should all work towards becoming as strong and independent as possible – it’s tempting to say “duh”.

Not even the strongest of us can be strong all the time, however. At some point, we all need help and support from our fellows.

Most importantly, collaboration and collectivism create wonderful things, a lot of them more wonderful than any man can create alone. Also “duh”, but has to be said anyway it seems.

From the book “Borne” by Jeff VanderMeer:

Made me think twice.

From “The Running Grave” by Robert Galbraith:

“How does Dennis know how to fake levitation?” asked Robin, diverted.
“Mate of his, when he was young, used to do stuff like that to impress girls” said Pat laconically. ” Some girls are really silly, let’s face it. When does anyone need a man who can rise two inches into the air?”

Which is true for so many other silly real world flexes some people do

“A Stranger in the Village” by James Baldwin. An essay that makes you realize how racism plays out basically the same way today as it did in 1953.

Quote:

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them

Stranger in the Village, which can be read outside of pay walls here.

In keeping with the history of European white supremacy of my people, I am permitting myself to arrogantly add a final last sentence to end this truly eye-opening essay:

“In fact, the world was never white in the first place”

Which, coincidentally, when you say it out loud, sounds almost like “Morning quote” – a quote to start a new day.

Mourning is about dwelling with a loss

And so coming to appreciate what it means,

How the world has changed,

And how we must ourselves change and renew our relationships

If we are to move forward from here.

I took this quote from Donna J. Haraways book “Staying with the trouble” although I believe she may be quoting someone else, possibly Thom Van Dooren. I changed the sentence structure.

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words….The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.

Oscar Wilde, Irish playwright, poet, and novelist, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890

From Watchmen (introduction to chapter VII / ending of chapter VI):

Is it possible, I wonder, to study a bird so closely, to observe and catalogue its perculiarities in such minute detail, that it becomes invisible? Is it possible that while fastidiously calibrating the span of its wings or the length of its tarsus, we somehow lose sight of its poetry? That in our pedestrian descriptions of a marbled or vermiculated plummage we forfeit a glimpse of living canvases, cascades of carefully toned browns and golds that would shame Kandinsky, misty explosions of color to rival Monet? I believe that we do. I believe that in approaching our subject with the sensibilities of statisticians and dissectionists, we distance ourselves increasingly from the marvelous and spell-binding planet of imagination whose gravity drew us to our studies in the first place.

This is not to say that we should cease to establish facts and to verify our information, but merely to suggest that unless those facts can be imbued with the flash of poetic insight then they remain dull gems; semi-precious stones scarcely worth the collecting.”

1. From this post on Gene Expression (found via this excellent post):

the study of human genetic variation is in its infancy, and once it hits adolescence it’s going to start becoming a real pain in the ass.

2. From a comment on this post on Anna’s Bones:

My argument, however, was very simple: If you don’t believe in evolution, don’t get the flu shot. It’s hypocritical.

3. From this post on Blind Scientist on scientists as communicators:

We are horrible communicators, most of our websites are dreadful and do no contain any useful information and when we are confronted with a dumb Playboy bombshell we lose the argument. We lose because usually the argument is so ludicrous that we have no patience to explain. We lose because we are unable to communicate in lay terms. We lose because we’re not entertainers or crowd manipulators. We lose because we make our arguments difficult to understand. We lose because we get angry.

4. From “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” by J.K. Rowling:

After all, to the well organized mind, death is but the next great adventure. – Professor Dumbledore on p. 215, line 31

5. …………and…..:

…the trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things which are worst for them. – Professor Dumbledore on wanting Money and life extension, p. 215, line 35.