Another World is Probable

Fear is an interesting emotion. In our society, we treat it like a plague – something to cure, attack, avoid. We say, “Screw fear,” or, “Don’t let fear get in the way.” Oftentimes our message about fear is simpler: “Don’t be scared,” as if telling someone to stop being scared could stop them. More in this week's post.

I keep thinking about the Sirens from Homer’s The Odyssey. Hollywood and fantasy books paint the Sirens as beautiful monsters who lure men to their deaths with pretty faces and melodious songs. But in the original Greek, the Sirens are grotesque bird-women with human heads. And rather than singing like Ariel from The Little Mermaid, the Sirens sang about knowledge.

I notice in myself and others the desire for certainty, resolution, simplicity. This means this, and that means that. We like binaries: heroes and villains. Black and white. I don’t know about you, but I’ve literally never encountered anything in real life without complication and nuance. More in this week's post.

As a journalist, and maybe because of my psychological makeup, I care a lot about the truth. It irks me when people repeat false information, or they declare something as fact without citing any evidence. I also notice when an issue stirs passion in people, or presses their buttons, they’re more apt to gloss over the truth because it doesn’t fit with what they want to be true. More in this week's post.

I’ve seen a few posts on social media about planting trees because it helps future generations, and it got me thinking about how there are other examples of that too, particularly in social justice movements. What follows is a post from December 2017 about the #metoo movement. While the struggle continues, we aren’t in the pre-2017 world because the legal and structural architecture of the workplace has fundamentally changed. The movement successfully passed systemic protections that cannot be easily undone. And essentially it asks, what if we are the ones making things better for future generations?

I don’t work in AI, so I haven’t felt qualified to weigh in on Evan Hubinger’s post on X about the risks of AI. As a refresher, he’s a top safety researcher at Anthropic, and he said AI is advancing so quickly he believes there is a greater than 10% chance it "could kill all humans" within the next decade.Again, I don’t work in AI, but I have opinions too, and they’re based on research, observation, and lived experience.

I’m not a true crime or horror kind of gal. I don’t enjoyblood or guts or gore. I don’t derive pleasure from other people’s suffering so it was curious to me why a new friend sent me a podcast about the wreck of the Grafton. The Grafton was a ship that crashed onto one of the islands near New Zealand in 1864 resulting in four men becoming stranded.