Fantastic essay by Sara Walker, an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist, reframing AI into deep historical and evolutionary contexts. Starts by pointing out that "we are embedded in a living world, yet we do not even recognize all the life on our own Earth. For most of human history, we were unaware of the legions of bacteria living and d…

"What does it look like to design a system [the internet] for survivability?" This different question - not design for efficiency, or profitability - led "to different answers, and breakthroughs that made the internet we have today".Rather than protect something, "the r-selected response ... LOCKSS stands for "Lots o…

a recent strand of experimental psychology suggests, our political beliefs may have something to do with ... our propensity to feel physical disgust.... The brains of liberals and conservatives reacted in wildly different ways to repulsive pictures... different brain networks were stimulated... the subjects’ neural responses... could predict with …

Fascinating article in Issue 14 (theme: Evolution): "It is a case of convergent evolution—where different species separately developed similar biological adaptations when faced with the same environmental pressures. Salamanders are Wake’s go-to example when asked a decades-old question in evolutionary biology: If you could replay the “tape of lif…

" In the long term, extorting, selfish strategies did not work as well as more generous strategies. Players who defected instead of cooperating suffered more over time than players who recognized the value of cooperation--though extortion might provide an advantage in a single head-to-head matchup, in the context of a whole population, over time, …