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IDEAS

Is There A Power Broker In Hollywood Who Can End The Strikes?

Not really. "The studios that now must figure out how to appease actors and writers are wildly different in size and have diverging priorities. They all say they want to resolve the strikes. But some are more willing than others to compromise." - The New York Times

Is The Entertainment Industry Collapsing, Or Simply Going Through A Remodel?

"Netflix and all these other streaming services debuted in an environment where shareholders were encouraging them to spend money for growth. Interest rates were low. Borrowing money was cheap." That era is over, and the reckoning is here. - NPR

Study: Turns Out There Are Effective Strategies To Counter Bullshit

Turns out, the interventions do help. Reminders to think about accuracy, tips on digital literacy, and effective crowd-sourced accuracy ratings improve the information hygiene of people around the world. - Nautilus

The Tide Turns – Criticism Pivots Away From Moralizing…

The rise of “postcritique” signals a similar pivot in some English departments, while in the broader culture the aftermath of the Trump years has been marked by a steady retreat from feverish activist critique and a new hunger for style, humor and frivolity (TikTok, not Twitter; Red Scare, not Rachel Maddow). - The Point

Trying To Teach A Post-2001 Generation About The Trauma Of The Towers

"Their generation has come-of-age in a pandemic that killed millions of people and laid bare incredible systemic inequities. ... Many of my students don’t know how they will ever afford to pay off their student loans, much less buy a house." 9/11? So what? - LitHub

Is There Any Privacy-Protecting Way To Use New AI Tools?

Maybe, but probably not. "It's worth putting some guardrails in place right at the start of your journey with these tools, or indeed deciding not to deal with them at all, based on how your data is collected and processed." - Wired

A Rebellion Against AI Stealing Content

Fan fiction writers, "social media companies such as Reddit and Twitter, news organizations including The New York Times and NBC News, authors such as Paul Tremblay and the actress Sarah Silverman have all taken a position against A.I. sucking up their data without permission." - The New York Times

David Brooks: Why AI Won’t Replace Us

 Over the past few months, I’ve become an A.I. limitationist. That is, I believe that while A.I. will be an amazing tool for, say, tutoring children all around the world, or summarizing meetings, it is no match for human intelligence. It doesn’t possess understanding, self-awareness, concepts, emotions, desires, a body or biology. - The New York Times

Science Fiction Is Chockablock Full Of Aliens. But “Alien” Is So Hard To Comprehend, So We Describe Them In Human Terms

“A truly alien alien is so incomprehensible that stories about them just become stories about human beings,” Jaime Green writes in her new book, The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Universe. - The New Republic

AI Is Coming For Us. So What Could Go Wrong?

With all this talk of killer robots, humanity may be overlooking the more immediate dangers posed by AI. - The Atlantic

Google’s New AI Search Tool Could Break The Internet In Significant Ways

Sort of like ChatGPT, it pulls information from various websites, rewords it, and puts that text on top of your search results—pushing down any links you see. In the process, it stifles traffic to the rest of the internet, lessening the very incentive to post online. - MSN (The Atlantic)

The Five Most Common Delusions Worldwide

One possibility is that “they reflect the common existential issues or dilemmas of living which preoccupy all human beings,” they write. “Another is that they reflect abnormalities of social-cognitive processes that, because they are important in everyday life, are universal.” - Nautilus

The Idea Of A Global Town Square Is Dead

The dream of the internet’s bipartisan “town square” is ending, transforming into many town squares tucked in alleys and behind buildings, because the actors in charge couldn’t stop seesawing in terms of who held the power, and because they always took that power too far. - The Intrinsic Perspective

Why It Might Not Be Good Strategy To “Expect The Worst”

Folk wisdom suggests that if you expect the worst, then you won’t be disappointed. This advice is pervasive; it can drive meteorologists to over-promise rain and companies to overestimate delivery times. - Psyche

The Boomers Never Had A Chance

The Boomers’ careers followed behind a glut of Traditionalists still in their prime. Disproportionately, the Baby Boomers never made it to the seats of power at the top of the business world. - 3 Quarks Daily

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