EH S5 E16: special "so much going on" edition
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Other astute political observers agreed. Steve Schmidt, a former Republican strategist who ran John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, delivered a devastating assessment in Rolling Stone that’s worth reading in its entirety:
People try to analyze Lindsey through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things that he used to believe and what he’s doing now,” Schmidt says. “The way to understand him is to look at what’s consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers about a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. That’s Lindsey. And when he swam around the McCain shark, broadly viewed as a virtuous and good shark, Lindsey took on the patina of virtue. But wherever the apex shark is, you find the Lindsey fish hovering about, and Trump’s the newest shark in the sea. Lindsey has a real draw to power — but he’s found it unattainable on his own merits.”
In high school terms, Graham was the desperate kid determined to be part of the in crowd, not the out crowd. Like other collaborators throughout history, he would do almost anything to stay there.
History will not be kind.
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final exam time for tim-ster & sam
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Man-da-la P makes a point
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZyIi1qO5hc/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==
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as seen in Natick Massachusnutts:
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Against Slop: An Interview with Meghan O’Gieblyn
“It makes me sad to think about a young person who might never cultivate the process of self-discovery that takes place in writing, which is inseparable from thinking.”
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..........“The whole field of AI alignment—ensuring that machine intelligence can peacefully coexist with humanity—grew out of the pervasive anxiety that we might create monsters.” This is, Meghan O’Gieblyn argues in our June 25, 2026, issue, a distinctly parental anxiety, a primordial kind of maternal metaphor that appears over and over again in writing and interviews about AI development. The metaphor asks not only what kind of child we are raising, but what kind of mothers we might be to what is an increasingly mysterious entity. For example, O’Gieblyn notes that in an interview with a New York Times podcast, Anthropic’s so-called “Claude mother,” Amanda Askell, “worried about the relationship between AI and humanity—not because AI might destroy the world, or take all our jobs, but because its feelings were getting hurt.” According to Sam Altman, the basic etiquette people employ when typing to their chatbots has cost OpenAI millions in computational costs, and he believes that “this was money well spent. (‘You never know,’ he wrote.)”
O’Gieblyn’s primary subject is not artificial intelligence—she is one of the most prolific working thinkers on contemporary religion, in particular its relationship to technology—but she was one of the first writers during the machine-learning revolution to take a serious look at the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence, in her 2021 book God Human Animal Machine. Her first book, Interior States (2018), was a collection of essays with the more earthly preoccupations of American Christianity and the Midwest, where she grew up and attended Bible college, which subject also features in her forthcoming memoir, Will and Attention, publishing in October. Since 2023 she has been a frequent critic for the Review, writing about novels, religion, and philosophy.
Over the past month, we emailed about AI consciousness, the craft of essay writing, and contending with John Calvin.
Lauren Kane: What most terrifies you and what most excites you about artificial intelligence?
Meghan O’Gieblyn: I feel like I should say I’m most terrified of mass cybersecurity breaches or intelligence explosions, but the fear that preoccupies me these days has to do with how AI is changing our relationship to language, writing, and reasoning. I started writing in my teens and early twenties because it was the only way I could engage in a certain level of complex thought. When I was studying theology at a fundamentalist Bible college—where the majority of the coursework is in the study of Scripture—it was in my private journals that I first allowed myself to question the ideology I’d been steeped in for most of my life. The page was a kind of mirror, a way to discover doubts and misgivings that I didn’t feel I could share with anyone, and which were difficult to name when I was simply going about my day, lost in a swirl of idle thoughts and emotions. Writing was basically how I found my way out of that very narrow form of faith. I don’t know that I would have done that if I’d had an institutional subscription to ChatGPT, as many college students do today. It makes me sad to think about a young person who might never cultivate the process of self-discovery that takes place in writing, which is inseparable from thinking—at least the kind of thinking that we associate with complex reasoning and self-knowledge.
This is connected to a more general fear of mine, which is that language models are causing us to devalue all kinds of higher cognitive functions. Any time a machine takes up a skill that was once thought of as uniquely human, like chess or coding, there’s a tendency to dismiss that skill as simple and mechanical. There’s an emerging consensus right now, particularly among AI skeptics, that the most distinctly human qualities are emotion, intuition, the ability to sense and feel. Those are undoubtedly the capacities that most readily distinguish us from machines. But this view risks fetishizing embodiment and emotion, much the same way that previous generations valued reason and language to an outsized degree to prove that humans are distinct from animals. What makes us unique as a species is that we can do all of these things: we share with animals the ability to feel and sense, and we share with machines the capacity to reason through language. It’s also true that we think and speak in ways that are radically distinct from computers, and we feel in ways that are different from animals.
I’ve heard many people argue that AI offers a challenge to express ourselves in a way that is more fully human. I used to be skeptical of that idea, which struck me as a bit of wishful thinking, one that imposed a mythical limit on how good the illusion could get. But I’ve come around, having witnessed several generations of LLMs that, despite their increasing technical sophistication, remain incapable of writing anything surprising, which is, of course, extremely difficult for a technology designed to hit the statistical mean of the writing it’s been trained on. I’ve found that having a name for this kind of writing—“synthetic text” or “slop”—makes me more aware of the predictable tendencies in my own writing. You could argue that AI output, because it has distilled the most pedestrian, noncontroversial conventions of human expression, offers a baseline against which we can measure our own attempts to capture the inherently spontaneous and unpredictable nature of thought. I suppose that’s one thing that excites me.
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from one of our Oceana friends:
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