(Brain Ticklers, Ed. 54) — Yesterday rode a horse. Today rides a Large Language Model.
Inspiresting links for July 2025. ChatGPT says: If Monty Python edited Foreign Affairs and Wired, it might read something like this.
History (or its first draft)
Great story about Disney's attempts to create a "safe social space" online as early as in the 90s. I loved the tenets like "No kid will be harassed, even if they don’t know they are being harassed"
An interesting review of the book "Raiders, Rulers, Traders" - about how horse changed the course of history in most parts of Asia - well into the Middle Ages, not just the Aryan migration stuff.
A fascinating exploration of how modern architecture came to be so joyless - Blame it on ideological struggles with socialism wanting to do away with anything bourgeois. Wow.
“We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” I am afraid this is going to be the theme I repeatedly hear from across the world for the rest of my life. The dreams of globalization and universal culture are all gone.
Nice exploration of the tensions in the world: The New Vertigo Years — Over a century ago, the world felt anxious and unsettled much like today
Inside India’s scramble for AI independence. Structural challenges and the nation’s many languages have made it tough to develop foundational AI models. But the government is keen not to be left behind. (I am just mildly worried that "some experts argue that the government’s action, or reaction (to DeepSeek), is performative" might be right). On Sarvam AI, mentioned there: What happens when you force an AI to take positions on genuinely controversial topics? A trial on Sarvam AI finds it genuinely liberal, though trained in India and supported by GOI. (Ha). "For sovereign AI models, political positioning isn't just technical - it's about whether AI systems reflect the values and interests of the populations they serve."
Related: National productivity growth is a matter of few firms taking bold strategic action, rather than millions of firms raising efficiency. (McKinsey stuff, but still OK, read it).
Society
"Elite overproduction" isn't about humanities alone — It has afflicted the STEM sectors as well, thanks to what else but Generative AI. Among recent graduates, Computer Engineering has 7.5% unemployment rate, Computer Science has 6.1%, Philosophy has 3.2%, and Art History of 3%.
Call center workers are tired of being mistaken for AI. Well, I have a theory on this: Just like how writers who use "em dash" are suspected of using Gen AI by people used to seeing bad writing, people who are used to hearing non-native speakers attend to customer care are suspecting native English speakers to GenAI.
Related: This is affecting scientific literature also — The AI tools tend to use certain words — like “delves,” “crucial,” “potential,” “significant” and “important” — far more often than human authors do. So, scientists will start using these fewer times to avoid giving the impression they used AI. (There are 454 such words identified there, in case you are curious)
More Related: Now comes false-positives with AI. As Chinese universities crack down on AI use, some students report false positives, leading some to “dumb down” their writing to pass the checks (sad). As always, an industry of work-around tools is emerging.
AI is rapidly changing how fragrance is created — Is it innovation or erasure?
We may soon get to a stage when we declare parts of meetings should be "off AI" so there is some privacy (and humanity) left.
[Podcast] Generational differences at workplace are vastly exaggerated. (I agree).
Inverted commas are falling out of fashion. But why? (Not because AIs don’t use it).
Interesting-Perspectives
Writing will become a choice, like walking is. (Due to what else but GenAI).
Last responsible moment (LRM): A strategy of not making a premature decision, but instead delaying commitment and keeping important and irreversible decisions open until the cost of not making a decision becomes greater than the cost of making a decision. (This is exactly what I needed — to justify and explain my daily dilly-dallies). I used to call it “strategic indecision”, but this sounds cooler.
The next time you tear up at a movie or see someone crying over bad news, take a moment to appreciate the cognitive complexity behind those tears. They reflect the outcome of evolutionarily ancient evaluative and emotional systems that guide our behavior adaptively. (Wow, complex lives we lead). Unrelated, but this also reminded me of an old Atlantic article on Octopus.
Let's all live (and send out newsletters) as if we matter. While this talks about Western philosophy with Epicurus and Kant, a quick Claude check reveals that even Advaita and Samkhya philosophy might actually be alluding to something similar.
Science & Technology
What happens when AI remembers everything? Forgetting is a feature of human memory. “Infinite memory” runs against the very grain of what it means to be human. Cognitive science and evolutionary biology tell us that forgetting isn’t a design flaw, but a survival advantage.
Scary story of how Syria's regime was brought down. (Why scary? It's all good when this happens to a regime you don't like and until it reaches you). Smartphone espionage doesn’t need costly zero-day exploits or advanced spyware. Off-the-shelf tools like Android SpyMax, paired with smart phishing and social engineering, can produce high-impact results.
A company has fused human brain cells on a silicon chip to process information via sub-millisecond electrical feedback loops. Amazing!
Doctors, you are safe! A paper by researchers at the University of Oxford found this: While LLMs could correctly identify relevant conditions 94.9% of the time when directly presented with test scenarios, human participants (i.e., patients) using LLMs to diagnose the same scenarios identified the correct conditions less than 34.5% of the time. I know it is a complex statement. So, just understand this: Doctors + LLMs are the best. Not separately.
What do you even teach in Computer Science curriculum anymore? I already find a lot of things I learned 20+ years back (digital electronics, assembly languages, and function pointers in C) as pretty much not critical for someone developing software now. But with coding agents, I too genuinely wonder what universities should teach.
Perso Dev
The best Reference Works for every subject. (One for the bookmarks, even if it is only for post-retirement). PS: Which, if AGI happens, could be in the next few years.
[Podcast] More than the content itself, I became a fan of Scottish accent (or should I say singing?). Philosophy for Life: Ancient versions of psychotherapy, parallels between Stoicism and Buddhism, practical vs. analytical styles of philosophy, CBT’s origins in Stoicism, the difficulty of self-criticism, techniques for reframing upsetting experiences.
Avoiding “true goal fallacy”: the unchecked yet embodied assumption that there is a “correct goal” in the world, a true essence in need of discovery and revealing. Fallacy, indeed.
Ambition requires you to sacrifice the things that matter most in life - people, love, peace - to achieve something that matters in the eyes of capitalism, so that at the very end of that achievement you can circle back to: people, love and peace. Exhausted and burned out. (All good, but the author says she developed "audacity" - I wonder if that will take you somewhere else than ambition, though!
Some tactical tips on writing emails. The right words can make you seem warmer, more authoritative, and more effective. But the wrong words can unintentionally make you sound negative, passive, or confrontational. (Unfortunately, I am guilty of using Unfortunately and However many times. However, I may change after reading this)
Reaping the emotional benefits of cold water - I continue to think this is a fad, but should say this article made me slightly move towards "maybe I should try it some day" mentality. (Update: I tried it for 2 days, and the stopwatch said I could stand in cold water for exactly 0.92 seconds, ha! I am sure it is unrelated, but my brain says I developed a headache due to that).
Parenting
A super-long note on the missing pieces of "nature" influencing a child's life. With nurture relegated to being more or less irrelevant (ha), what are those "unpredictable" attributes that truly matter? Goes deep into areas like assortative mating, population stratification, and genetic nurture! Click only if you are inclined for long-reads. Related podcast: What if siblings actually matter more than parents in terms of the role they play in our accomplishments?
Continue that debate: [Podcast] Nature Vs Nurture, with Paul Bloom. How much of our success or failure is written in our genes? How much is under our control? Is it nature or nurture, or is that dichotomy too simplistic?
An interesting deep-dive into a new age school in Austin called "Alpha School". You will see a lot of the nurture-nature debate in this too, but focuses on why/how Alpha school works.
Very Related: Another article about schools which argues that while schools may seem inefficient, they represent the best compromise we've found. For the massive challenge of universal education, the primary obstacle isn't designing better curricula but motivating diverse learners to engage with learning.
[Podcast] When you mess up, a sincere apology can make all the difference. But making things right takes more than a simple “I’m sorry.” - This includes lessons for children too.
[Podcast] Reimagining Boyhood: What it's like being a mother raising boys in modern society, the role of "masculinity influencers”, and what healthy masculinity looks like.
PSA: With the "OS 26" releases, Apple expands family tools with smarter child account setup, age-based app filters, more.
In an AI world, share this to prove you're human—or heart it to fake some feelings! No love? Fine, my robot therapist gets it.