Writer-editor. Co-author of “Are We Ready for Mars?” tinyurl.com/yr8wb36x. Previously @nautilusmag. Here to take everything seriously 100% of the time.

Berkeley, CA
No one: My 2yo on a walk: “I was born” Me: “You were born. You exist now.” 2yo: “It’s amazing!”
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Brian Gallagher retweeted
We deleted an opinion video about the use of foreign languages in election night speeches. The post contained a factual error and its tone fell short of what we believe advances healthy public discourse. The rigorous editorial process that produces the work that appears on our website and in our newsletters must apply to everything we post on social media. We’ll be updating how we do things to achieve just that. We regret the error.
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Figures that a man who trusted Sam Altman would fall for a Chinese spy.
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Replying to @timnitGebru
I donated about $45k last year, mostly to malaria net distributions and seasonal malaria chemoprevention. If this is not improving the lives of the affected people, I will obviously donate somewhere different this year. What's your recommendation.
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Brian Gallagher retweeted
Snapchat settled, rather than going to trial and letting a jury and the world see its internal communications. But so many damning quotations have already come out. We collected them at After Babel last year; see for yourself: afterbabel.com/p/industrial-…
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Brian Gallagher retweeted
I study AI consciousness and personhood for a living, and people have been telling me to watch this episode for years. I finally watched it for the first time last week, and the writing and acting blew me away. It could be released today, and it would still be ahead of its time.
Replying to @mattyglesias
Also a guy with correct takes about AI consciousness.
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Just wanted to share something I found amusing this morning. Don’t know why I laughed when I peeked inside this box of books on the sidewalk. But I just knew that I spotted a gem because there’s something about the brazen improbability of having all those food items on a visit to the Statue of Liberty. The chiding subtitle made me giggle as well.
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Brian Gallagher retweeted
Just learned that Patrick Stewart has passed away. Such a sad loss. Here he is in one of the best things ever put on television, the Star Trek episode “The Measure of a Man.” I show it to my students in Philosophy and Science Fiction every year.
Patrick Stewart has sadly passed away at the age of 86.
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Fox: Why are you here this morning? Trump rally attendee: Well, in the late 70s, I was a little too young to go to South America for the Jonestown Massacre. But this is as close as I'll ever get, so that's why I'm here. There's nothing like seeing a cult right up front.
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Yesterday, Putin revealed that Russian authorities are "in close touch" with Elon Musk about the technology Ukraine needs to defend itself. Our new report @TheAtlantic investigates how @elonmusk went from supporting Ukraine to coordinating with Moscow. theatlantic.com/national-sec…
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NBA Players all “injured” before GTA 6 drops
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I have a bias here because I've worked with Jon and was an editor on his book, but have to say this coming from Taylor seems pretty unfair. And the "discredited himself" phrasing is kinda curious, given revelations about Meta's scheme to demean Haidt's academic reputation.
Haidt is not an academic, he's a political actor making millions pushing a political agenda. He discredited himself by relentlessly lying abt an entire academic field that overwhelmingly refutes his false claims. It's good Meta is putting resources into getting the truth out
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“The farts were working.” 😂
Nathan Fielder spent over a decade preparing for the Holmes doc, including that time he rigged a blood test with a fart machine to show that people had more fun (eg. higher dopamine levels) when hanging around him.
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Ashlee Vance wrote a topnotch biography of Musk years before the Isaacson one and is a model of patience and good-humored civility here, responding to one of the most frequent and silly accusations against Musk: that he isn’t an exceptional engineer
Replying to @alexgibneyfilm
Oh, why not. Haven't had a chance to watch the movie yet but have heard you on a couple of podcasts and find this line of criticism the most confusing. It's not difficult to find employees across the companies who will talk at length about him making engineering decisions. I've seen this happen at Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink firsthand. Mostly, though, I tend to think of the companies as being built by the thousands of employees and as group engineering exercises. There are tons of choices that have to be made and things that have to be fixed and resources marshalled. The top end of these tasks has quite often fallen to Musk. People had pretty much given up on electric cars until Tesla came along. You will argue that Martin and Marc had the idea for Tesla, which is fine. But it would not be a going concern without the engineering fixes that took place to finally get the Roadster over the line and then the tons of choices that turned the Model S into a very surprising success. This totally revitalized the electric car industry and made it a thing again. It changed the automotive industry worldwide. Many people made many engineering choices along the way. Musk included. There are just too many stories and anecdotes to deny this. SpaceX is perhaps the most dramatic example. People had tried and failed to build a commercial rocket company before. They have tried and failed since. Blue Origin and SpaceX started almost the same year, but only one of the two companies has changed the dynamics of the worldwide aerospace industry and our access to space. Many people deserve credit for this, but it's hard to argue that Musk was not the driving force behind a great deal of what SpaceX has achieved. SpaceX had far less resources than Blue Origin. The engineering accomplishments of SpaceX are pretty nuts. The US aerospace industry would be in terrible shape without them. We'd be unable to put humans in space, behind China on all fronts and very, very slow to do launches. Space is one of the last manufacturing and engineering strongholds for the US. Is this entirely because of Musk? Certainly not. Did he push the company forward on engineering? Certainly yes. Neuralink has a great, great deal still to prove. But it took products that were trapped in acamedia and advanced them dramatically. I would argue that this does not happen without the engineering pattern matching Musk has done across these other two industries. He pushed changes on semiconductor, materials, robotics and implant design. It's important to ask all these other questions about his empire and power and his evolution over time. And you're a tremendous filmmaker. This will no doubt come off as cheerleading. All I can say is that Elon and I have had a very tumultous relationship, and he's been plenty unkind to me at times. I don't really have a need to speak up here. Me writing this comes more from a place of confusion than anything else. The products are all very real, and there's a common denominator across them. It's difficult for me to see them as lucky accidents, particularly when rivals trying to do similar things have struggled so badly. All of these things are so difficult to build. Like verging on impossible. Why do you fixate on the engineering thing when there are so many other more real avenues to explore?
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Someone should really check in on the UK to see if it’s OK
JUST IN: UK police arrest 15 y/o boy, seize his devices, & collect his DNA after he posted photo of a local politician edited to look like a rabbit.
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Our modern day Socrates
“I always feel that everyone knows more than I do. So it’s very easy for me to ask people questions.” ––Nathan Fielder
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Brian Gallagher retweeted
In ‘Middlemarch’, Tom McCarthy argues, George Eliot uses her ‘study of provincial life’ as a Trojan Horse to smuggle the continental philosophy of Spinoza and Hegel into the vicarages of middle England. youtube.com/watch?v=XD_Cww5Q… #Middelmarch #Spinoza #Hegel #literature #philosophy
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Brian Gallagher retweeted
The plan: Instead of giving Knicks employees championship rings, use them as a lure to see who needs mandatory cybersecurity training
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Hume was well aware of the “my side” bias
Insightful passage from Hume. One reconstruction: Why assume the worst about people when designing political institutions, given that most people are pretty decent? Because everyday decency is partly rooted in reputational concerns, and the tribal or factional nature of politics inverts these incentives: people win approval from their own side for advancing its interests, not for impartial benevolence, which leads them to act in ways that are biased and immoral.
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