Kickoff For July 28, 2025
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With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
What good is writing anyway? — Wherein a group of academics working in several fields ponder the titular question and try to reconcile the concept of good writing with the growing use of AI chatbots to generate words.
From the article:
[W]hen we outsource the task of finding words to express things, we lose all the kinds of mental activation that come from those searches. Words and ideas are laden with associations, reminders, emotional charges — a whole forest of connections to our past and future tasks, ideas, and relationships.
Seven Days At The Bin Store — Wherein Jen Kinney spends a week popping into such a store in her Philadelphia neighbourhood and discovers a lot about the people who run it and shop at there, about the divided attitudes towards bin stores, and what they say about consumer culture.
From the article:
There are times when the bin store does feel like an art installation, a message, or a warning. Wander through it for a few days and you will start to feel like you are in a room in a haunted house, one where the corporeal forms of the world economy’s least-wanted products are trapped, unable to move on.
How Much Energy Does It Take To Think? — Wherein we learn about what's required (metabolically) to keep those brains going, and the major role our brains play in keeping us alive and kicking.
From the article:
[O]ver the past few decades, they have clarified what the brain is doing in the background. “Around the mid-’90s we started to realize as a discipline [that] actually there is a whole heap of stuff happening when someone is lying there at rest and they’re not explicitly engaged in a task,” she said. “We used to think about ongoing resting activity that is not related to the task at hand as noise, but now we know that there is a lot of signal in that noise.”
Even EV owners believe misinformation about cars, study finds — Wherein we learn a bit about how and why false information and outright lies spread and become entrenched in peoples' brains, this time through the filter if misinformation about electric vehicles.
From the article:
The report said that suspicions could arise if there were perceived motives for government or industry to exaggerate the benefits of a technology and disguise its dangers.
Is the AI Bubble About to Burst? — Wherein Aaron Benanav argues that AI isn't the force for good that various tech bros proclaim it to be, and that the promises of AI radically increasing productivity are (at best) hollow.
From the article:
[I]f generative AI were transformative, we would already be seeing the world economy growing faster. Instead, there is little evidence of any such acceleration.
Fake news and real cannibalism: a cautionary tale from the Dutch Golden Age — Wherein we learn that the idea of fake news isn't a modern one, and get a glimpse at what can happen if a mass of people not only believe that news but also act on it.
From the article:
They say history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. As ever, the need to separate fact from fiction remains an urgent task.