Tag: novel idea
All the Iran Options Have Failed
Just three weeks before Hamas’s gruesome attack on southern Israel, the first anniversary of Iran’s “Women, life, freedom” movement quietly passed on September 16. Even in the heat of events in Israel, the women’s uprising was worth a lament: If the theocracy hadn’t subdued it, Iranians might have toppled the Islamic Republic; and among all the other salutary effects, Hamas’s onslaught against Israel could conceivably have been smaller and less ambitious, or might not have happened at all.
Hamas, an
Why Meta Is Breaking Its Own Walled Garden
More than a decade ago, in a prescient essay for Scientific American, the inventor of the World Wide Web denounced what Facebook and other tech giants were doing to his signature invention. “Why should you care?” Tim Berners-Lee wrote at the time. “Because the Web is yours.” These companies, he warned, were restructuring the web itself, turning an expanse of interconnected websites all built on the same open infrastructure into a series of “fragmented islands” where users were kept
Gödel, Escher, Bach, and AI
By now, you are most likely hyper-aware of the recent stunning progress in artificial intelligence due to the development of large language models such as ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Google’s Bard, and at least somewhat aware of the dangers posed by such systems’ frequent hallucinations and their predictable tone of supreme self-confidence and infallibility.
This tone can unfortunately lead highly intelligent people to believe that such systems, despite their propensity to hallucinate, are on a par, as thinkers, with … Read more
How to Make Diversity Trainings Better
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week I asked, “What do you think of the diversity-training and DEI industries?” Dozens of readers shared their personal experiences, good and bad––so many, in fact, that I’m going to run some additional responses on Wednesday (if you haven’t