- An essay about how modern manufacturers trigger off evolutionary impulses, from Doritos to AI;
- NYT’s ideas to fix America;
- How Trump confused two different Dana Whites;
- Shostakovich’s 10th.
Understanding modern society through evolution.
NY Times, guest essay by Angela Duckworth, posted 5 Nov 2026, in today’s print paper: These Inventions Were Built to Trick Us
Print title: “Our World Has Become Ultraprocessed.”
Much of this is well-known. The insight here is how AI is just another manifestation of this trend.
It begins with an anecdote about tricking oystercatcher birds into sitting on larger and larger eggs — even fake ones.
It turns out that any animal can be fooled by cues that trigger its evolutionary instincts. But only people use these cues to trick each other. We create artificially enhanced diversions that, like Tinbergen’s fake oystercatcher egg, exploit our reward systems, making us feel good in the moment but leaving us worse off in the future. Is there hope? Only if we understand how radically we have reshaped our habitat and how it manipulates us in turn.
It’s long been understood that the humans developed a craving for substances that were healthy but rare in the ancestral environment, especially anything sweet. Now that humans have learned to manufacture their own food, it can be sold to people to satisfy their innate cravings. Thus obesity. (More prevalent in the South and other rural areas, it seems.)
Consider Doritos. What starts out as raw corn is processed into an irresistible snack by industrial machinery that dries, pulverizes, rehydrates, extrudes and deep-fries it — then adds salt, sugar and artificial flavorings and colorings. Most of us know that food products engineered for immediate pleasure rather than long-term nourishment should be no more than an occasional indulgence. But because instinct tells us that fat, sugar and salt mean escaping starvation and death, ultraprocessed foods now account for the majority of calories in the American diet.
Then social media, cosmetic surgery, online gambling. Cut to the chase: now AI.
And now, A.I. has become the most powerful ultraprocessing technology of all. A.I. deepfakes not only are indistinguishable from real human faces but are also rated as more trustworthy in controlled laboratory studies. A.I.-generated writing can be perceived as “more human” than human writing. And A.I.-generated medical advice has been rated as significantly more empathetic than responses from human physicians.
It’s not just our food, then, that’s ultraprocessed. Altogether, these developments have warped our environment so significantly that we live in what could be called an ultraprocessed world.
Is humanity heading down a rabbit hole? The essay makes some suggestions. Make temptations less convenient, mostly. And recalling Robert Nozick: would we choose to live in a simulation machine that satisfied all our urges, if we could?
Were Nozick alive today, he might change his mind about what most people would choose. Because we don’t have to imagine the experience machine — we’re living in it already. The question, then, is not whether we choose to plug in but rather how intentional we are about unplugging. As a species, Homo sapiens — literally “wise man” — has made some foolish choices, but it’s not too late to reshape our world, individually and collectively, for the better.
I don’t pretend to have any conclusion about this matter, but it’s one that science fiction has been considering…
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Briefly.
NY Times, today: 8 Bold Ideas to Fix America
From different contributors. Build housing. Lower Prices, now. Stop Giving OpenAI and Anthropic a Free Pass. Pass Medicare for All, but for Kids. Expand the Supreme Court. Stop Elon Musk From Making Political Contributions. End the Iran War. Legalize Undocumented Immigrants.
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Widely covered. Trump confused two Dana Whites.
Yahoo News, today: Mistaken identity? Insiders say the wrong Dana White was offered U.S. press secretary job
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Music. No ads. Schostakowitsch: 10. Sinfonie. Lots of close-ups of the musicians.
Shostakovich was post-Mahler, and wrote a couple Mahler-esque symphonies, including this one. Though Shostakovich is much more aggressive in his music. But his symphonic output was all over the map. He endured Soviet condemnation for his 4th, and so wrote a deliberately crowd-pleasing 5th. And then kept going in different directions. To my mind his 8th and 10th are the most interesting.
