I’m trapped on the upper west side waiting for a bat mitzvah to let out. Whatever it takes to survive...

I‘m guessing that a lot of the internet looks the way it does because it was largely built, especially in the early days, by aphantics. (A lot of the CS guys I knew in college were exactly that type.)

I’m genuinely curious to know whether sites like this one attract a higher proportion of aphantics than exist in the general population. Not because they’re text but because the character limit doesn’t allow much in the way of visual descriptions.

In the Middle Ages, the faculty of the phantasy was believed to be involved in/responsible for both the imagination and dreams—Agamben has a good essay on this—and clearly they were onto something. It’s crazy fascinating.

The only thing I wished she’d talked more about is dreams. I have noticed that when I’m writing fiction, and spending more of my time summoning mental images than usual, I tend to have much more vivid dreams.

MacFarquhar talks about painters and philosophers who are aphantasics—the bit on Derek Parfit, her prior Profilee, is especially interesting. And it’s hard not to suspect that lot of what we think of as avant-garde poetry and fiction was driven by people who were at the very least mild aphantasics.

The subhed isn’t kidding when it says the consequences are profound. You don’t have to ponder it too long to realize that variations in this ability have probably ended marriages and even started wars.

You can imagine universes where such a prospect might be a wonderful thing—fully-automated luxury communism and all that. But in this universe, where people without inherited wealth only get the essentials of life (let alone anything extra) by working, it can only be an unmitigated disaster.

I don’t think it’s going to work, and I hope it doesn’t work. But it can’t be repeated enough that that’s the vision driving this entire multi-trillion-dollar boom: a world where human labor is not just optional but undesirable.

The thing that originally made Silicon Valley companies so wonderful (i.e. so valuable) to their investors was the fact that they could scale revenue massively without massive increases in hiring. The AI boom is an attempt to do that for the rest of the economy.

Yes, I'm lucky in many respects, and yes, that means my experience is far from universal. And of course I might end up eating these words. But even though there's plenty of items I could put on a wishlist for improvement, it's pretty remarkable that the DOE does what it does for so many kids.

Bagel Hole in Park Slope?