Hahahahaha why the hell did I become a political scientist

I wrote about how DOGE was destroying our capacity to prevent harms. Efficiency isn’t always the best metric for government responsibility. Prevention is immeasurable until it’s needed and then you’ll be really glad you had it. This is bad and blaming DOGE is correct. Totally. ⬇️

This is unhinged, psychotic commentary. This mindset makes Americans (and the world) less safe. It is antithetical to freedom and the intrinsic human rights that everyone on earth should enjoy.

Ronny Chieng had one message for Harvard grads during his commencement speech: destroy AI. "Look, a lot of other respected graduation speakers in colleges around America are talking about you guys needing to master AI for the future. I'm here to tell you the mission of your generation is to destroy AI... "And I know, I know there's someone sitting out here right now who’s just like, 'Well, you know, what about the use of AI to pioneer breakthroughs in medicine and physics?' Well, first of all, shut up, nerd. I'm not talking about that. Obviously, if you're using it for that purpose, you're not the problem. "I'm talking about the accumulation of cognitive debt due to excessive use of large language models according to a study by MIT published in 2025. That's right, MIT. MIT did that study. I guess you guys were too busy giving each other A's. Feel free to boo MIT, by the way, and AI, and yourselves, I guess. "Look, this is actually good news, okay? This is why you guys shouldn't be scared of AI, because I think AI is just going to end up making mediocre people dumber. Have you heard how dumb people brag about how they use AI? They're always like, 'Hey, did you know that AI can now read my email, summarize it, and drop a response?' Yeah, you know who else can do that? Me. I can do that. You can't do that? How useless are you? You need artificial intelligence just to match me? I'm a dumb*ss who couldn't get into Harvard. "From what I can see, getting an actual advantage from AI in the future will require a minimum escape velocity of intelligence that I'm assuming you guys from Harvard have. Everyone else who can't match that is just going to get dumber, and that's when you run up the score on them, assuming we still have a functioning society, of course. "But to run up the score, you’re going to have to master your craft. And AI can be the fuel, but fuel is useless if you can't kindle the fire. For example, I recently used AI to use regression analysis to prove that a certain race of people are mathematically terrible at sports. I won't say which race, but thank you for not inviting Hasan Minhaj to Harvard. My point is, learning the fundamentals still matter. If I didn't know what a regression analysis was, and if I wasn't fundamentally racist, would I have been able to do any of that? No. "Untalented people love bragging about using AI to help them draft their speeches and their scripts and their podcasts and their promo videos for UFC fights at the White House, which to be fair, even if they had filmed that for real, it would still have looked like AI. But what they're missing is this: the creating is the fun part. The best part of comedy writing is figuring out the puzzle pieces of a joke and getting the self-regard from having accomplished a difficult thing. Why would I want AI to take that away from me? "You know what problem I want AI to solve? I want the problem of AI making everything look like sh*t. I want AI to solve that problem. How about that? "Or how about, can AI take away the part of comedy writing where my TV pilot gets passed on and when I ask if I can pitch it to someone else, the network says, 'We don't want it, but we also don't want anyone else to have it. We just want you to be sad.' Can AI solve that? "I recently tried to introduce my friend to Buddhism through a book called Buddhism Made Simple. It was literally a book about Buddhism made simple. And instead of reading it, he used AI to summarize it in 10 seconds. Believe it or not, he didn't reach enlightenment. It turns out speed running Buddhism is completely missing the point. "And I know this platitude is almost worthy of AI, but the reason shortcuts to skip to the end aren't always good is because the journey isn't just how we acquire skills. The journey is the point of all this. It is! It turns out maybe the real Harvard was the friends we made along the way. "Look, I know this won't apply to everyone's industry, but I'm just saying whatever your chosen profession is, please don't let AI rob you of the fun part of it. "I think your generation's upcoming battle won't be humans against AI. That's at least two months away. It's going to be people with substance versus people with shallow knowledge. It’s going to be mastery versus faking it. It's going to be people with good taste versus tacky. I trust you will put in the work necessary to be on the right side of those battles."

Comedian Ronny Chieng says "f*ck AI" during Harvard graduate speech "AI is just gonna end up making mediocre people dumber”

🔥 @ronnychieng at Harvard: “F*ck A.I. — the mission of your generation is to destroy it… shortcuts to skip to the end aren’t always good. The journey is the point of all this.”

The Pope's humanist manifesto does something really interesting; not only does he call for new regulations and guardrails, but he also calls out what he describes as the "anti-human vision" pervasive in the tech world. Human limitations, he argues, are not bugs in our code to be fixed or optimized. They're at the core of love, wonder, community, the shared vulnerability of being human. charlottealter.substack.com/…

In the era of #ArtificialIntelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human. We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace. #MagnificaHumanitas vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/e…

Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing an essay, writing a eulogy, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing for 5,000 years.

Unironically one of the best things this administration has done. Welles Crowther is an American hero.

A community college professor named Marty Lobdell taught the same study skills lecture for 30 years. The video quietly became one of the most watched educational recordings online, with over 10 million views. He spent his career watching students fail not because they were lazy, but because no one had taught them how their brain actually works when learning something difficult. The lecture, “Study Less Study Smart,” contains a powerful framework. Your brain cannot sustain focus the way most people believe. Studies show the average learner hits a wall between 25 and 30 minutes. After that, efficiency collapses. You’re still sitting there, but almost nothing is being absorbed. Lobdell told the story of a student who planned to study 6 hours a night, 5 nights a week. Thirty hours total. She failed every class. She was not lacking effort. She was confusing time near books with actual learning. The fix is simple: when focus drops, stop, take a 5 minute rewarding break, then return. That reset makes a massive difference. He also destroyed the myth of highlighting and re reading. Recognition is not the same as recall. To prove it, he read 13 random letters. Almost no one remembered them. Then he turned them into “Happy Thursday.” The entire room recalled them instantly. The brain stores meaning, not repetition. This is why elaborative encoding works so well. Finally, he shared the most important principle: 80 percent of study time should be active recitation. Close the book and explain the material in your own words. Teach it to someone else or an empty chair. Retrieval is where real learning happens. His closing line stuck with me: If this information does not change your behaviour, you have not actually learned it. The best students do not study more hours. They stop confusing the feeling of studying with the reality of learning.

There is no way this can be legal or enforceable. Extreme dictator stuff.

Genuinely if you can’t understand basic issues of conflicts of interest (and propriety in public office), don’t be there.

Beautiful essay on adult friendship

Everything Republicans have done shows why the VRA was necessary. The Confederate states only respect rights when forced to by the Feds.

Samuel Alito Quoted Fake Data in His Ruling Gutting Voting Rights Act trib.al/9bj8Zm6

Kaine: "The U.S. Supreme Court eviscerates the Voting Rights Act in a lawsuit brought by a January 6 extremist and Southern states race to craft backroom deals disenfranchising minority voters and candidates. Meanwhile Virginia voters choose to stand up against national disenfranchisement only to see their votes cast into the trash by a 4-3 ruling."

If the counterterrorism strategy were submitted as an academic journal article, it would have received a "rejection," not even a "revise & resubmit." It contains no data, no empirical evidence, there's no clear methodology, lacks rigor, it's highly partisan & mostly incoherent.