Failure to Learn

Posted on Sunday 25 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Steven Strogatz on the AI crisis in mathematics; is it OK to be given the answers, without figuring them out for ourselves?
  • How religious zealots mock scientific understanding, since scientific conclusions can change;
  • Briefly: another comment about Rubio’s defense of Western civilization; how David French thinks there is no bottom to MAGA; Heather Cox Richardson recounts how the Republican victories in 1920 led to the 1929 Crash; and Nicholas Kristoff on the pillars of our nation — education, immigration, and legal and social norms — that are on the current ballot.
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Humanity only advances by learning from the lessons of the past. No one person can learn everything about modern civilization by themselves, from scratch. But are we now stuck in a cycle of repeated failures, unable to learn? (Or refusal to learn?) (Or failure to launch?)

Is it about the journey, or the destination?

The Atlantic, Steven Strogatz, today: A Mathematician Reads the AI Future, subtitled “My field is as much an expression of the human spirit as music and literature. Is it for the machines now?”

Strogatz is a mathematician and author. I have his book about calculus.
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Passing Through World Fantasy Con 2026

Posted on Saturday 24 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

I didn’t attend the World Science Fiction Convention a few months ago, in Anaheim, but I had thought to attend its fantasy counterpart this month since it’s being held in downtown Oakland, just a few miles from me. I wouldn’t need to rent a hotel room; I could drive back and forth each day (even though many of the events at such gatherings occur in the evening, often until late hours, not to mention ordinary gatherings at the bar). But then I waited too long to buy a membership, and found them no longer for sale as of earlier this week, and found daily passes (which Worldcons used to offer) unavailable. Still, inquiries led me to acquire a “Locus staff” badge, and I used it to attend the convention yesterday, Friday, from 10am to 4pm or so. (Not that there were any careful observers keeping non-members out of event rooms.)

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Evolutionary Tradeoffs, and Nonintelligent Design

Posted on Thursday 22 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How the evolution of the human brain made us vulnerable to Alzheimer’s;
  • Kibble: Hegseth’s staff broke Eisenhower’s globe; a MAGA host who thinks witchcraft is real; most evangelicals do not consider empathy a core moral value; false Christian Nationalist history from Rob McCoy.
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Today’s thought piece.

Keep in mind that evolution doesn’t “care” about anything; organisms that survive natural selection (or environmental filtering, another term someone used) do so by reproducing, and once they’ve done that, it doesn’t matter what happens in their “old age.”

The Atlantic, Adina Wise, 18 Oct 2026: The Evolution of the Human Brain Set It Up for Failure, subtitled “The genetic changes that made the human brain may have made us uniquely vulnerable to Alzheimer’s.”

Apes don’t develop Alzheimer’s—at least, not like we do. Although we share a hefty amount of our DNA with our closest primate relatives, humans are uniquely at risk of developing the disease that can erode our sense of who we are.

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Posted in Conservative Resistance, Evolution | Comments Off on Evolutionary Tradeoffs, and Nonintelligent Design

What Would Be the Cure for Being Human?

Posted on Wednesday 21 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Jim Palmer’s six existential realities that humans try to escape…;
  • Short items: Fox News provides the conservative need for the panic of the day, or month; even National Review calls out Trump as shameless; Pete Buttigieg on how Republicans take credit for Democratic projects; and how Christian Nationalists are plain about their intentions to “seize power.”
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I briefly noted this piece back on 9/24. Let’s spend a little more time with it today. What does he mean by “trying to escape”? This goes to the core of his metaphysics, which I still haven’t exactly figured out.

Jim Palmer, Deconstructionology, 23 Sep 2026: There Is No Cure for Being Human, subtitled “The Six Existential Realities We Spend Our Lives Trying to Escape”

It’s 37 screens long, on my big laptop. Just write a book and be done with it! Let’s see if we can find his six.

Here’s part of his preface:

As Existential Health becomes established as a field of health, there is necessary work to be done defining its concepts, developing its theoretical foundations, examining its applications, and subjecting its claims to serious scrutiny. I have published an academic paper Continue reading →

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The Biggest Inflection Points

Posted on Tuesday 20 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Big picture: What we know about how life arose: a good summary by NYT’s science writers;
  • Relatively trivial items: Vance lies about gas prices; men in groups; Edsall on Trump’s real agenda; Krugman on how Trump actually hates America and what it stands for; Reich criticizing the NYT for its false equivalencies; and Heather Cox Richardson on charges from a decade ago that Trump is Putin’s puppet.
  • Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde.
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Decent summary. Not sure of the occasion.

NY Times, William J. Broad, Kenneth Chang and Carl Zimmer, yesterday 19 Oct: How Did Life Arise? [gift link]

Subtitled: “Where did it start? How did it grow complex? Why did it get big? Three moments in Earth’s early history when evolution suddenly, inexplicably turned up the dial.”

Apparently this is part of a NYT series called “Unknowns” — “A special project exploring unanswered scientific questions — the big mysteries about ourselves, our origins, our world and our universe.” — that also included that item about whether babies are conscious a couple weeks ago.

I’ll quote the intro:
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Posted in Conservative Resistance, Evolution, Music, Politics | Comments Off on The Biggest Inflection Points

Speculations on a New World Order

Posted on Monday 19 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Speculation on a new world order;
  • Tom Nichols on how Trump has abandoned the Western order;
  • Reconsidering what business schools promote;
  • Fareed Zakaria’s essay;
  • How Fox News peddles “fear porn”;
  • How the Trump administration is discouraging even legal immigration.
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What might this new order be?

NY Times, opinion by Serge Schmemann, yesterday 18 Oct 2026: The Old World Order Is Over. This Is What Could Come Next.

Opening:

By now it is clear to most of America and much of the world that America and what it stands for have changed. The dominant face of that change is President Trump and his determined and deliberate efforts to accumulate greater powers than the Constitution apportioned to the president, to create a cult of personality based on grievance and vengeance and to challenge every aspect of the postwar global order, demeaning allies and courting autocrats.

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Posted in conservatives, History, progress, Social Progress | Comments Off on Speculations on a New World Order

Placeholder

Posted on Sunday 18 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

This post from Oct 18 was a placeholder containing content originally compiled from Oct 4 to Oct 6. To represent them fairly, I’ve created separate posts for those three days, and set the publish dates accordingly.

 

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If Humanity Doesn’t Have a Grasp on Reality, Does It Matter?

Posted on Saturday 17 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Wondering if it matters that humanity doesn’t have a grasp on reality, via recent politics about James Talarico.
  • And today: posted page Notes on Meaning, (and Wisdom and Purpose and Progress), part of my grand plan to identify broad philosophical themes and how they relate to science fiction;
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A thought piece for today.

Slate, Molly Olmstead, 16 Oct 2026: A Hoax About James Talarico Went Viral and Then Fell Apart. What Happens Next Will Tell Us a Lot About Politics in 2026., subtitled “Texas just set up a natural experiment on the power of conspiracy theories—and whether it matters if they’re debunked.”

Title on homepage: “Texas Just Accidentally Set Up a Great Experiment About Whether Facts Matter at All in 2026”

If humans cannot engage in reality, what hope is there for our race?

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Posted in Human Nature, Philosophy, Politics | Comments Off on If Humanity Doesn’t Have a Grasp on Reality, Does It Matter?

Along the Spectra

Posted on Friday 16 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • In the context of the Tom Cruise film Digger, thoughts about the difficulties of thinking about climate change;
  • Neil deGrasse Tyson wonders if humans are intelligent enough to understand everything;
  • Fareed Zakaria on why Marco Rubio thinks the West is great because of pre-Enlightenment values;
  • A similar piece by Ishaan Tharoor;
  • And how a Kansas GOP candidate seems to literally believe in witches;
  • The running theme: the limitations of human cognition, perhaps one spectrum among several others.

Site is back up after a couple weeks repairs from hacker attacks. Here are some items from today and yesterday. Over the next few days I’ll post items I’ve collected over the past two weeks.

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From a review of Digger, the Tom Cruise climate change movie that I haven’t seen, some perspective on how difficult it is for many people to grasp the scope of the problem. This goes to themes I’ve been calling scale-blindness, and the difficulty of long-term thinking.

NY Times, opinion by Jayson Greene, 14 Oct 2026 (but in today’s print paper): Tom Cruise’s Big Flop Is a Secret Masterpiece

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Something New and More Modern

Posted on Thursday 15 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Key points of a Democratic Project 2029;
  • Brief items: Kimberly Guilfoyle is out because she embarrassed Trump; Trump claims he doesn’t call people names (followed by a long list of names he’s called people); Trump keeps claiming that schools kidnap kids and force them to transition; Florida’s new science standards downplay evolution and climate change (of course).
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The Democrats have a Project 2029.

Vox, Zack Beauchamp, today 15 Oct: The radical Democratic plan to change the government for good, subtitled “The party is finally mounting an aggressive response to Trump’s slash-and-burn second term. Could their ideas for a rebooted, reimagined Washington actually work?”

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