What are we seeing?
Plus: Building churches upside-down and humanity's last exam. (#515)
This is David, your human beacon in a sea of content, and you're reading the Weekly Filet, the newsletter for curious minds who love when something makes them go «Huh, I never thought of it this way!». As every Friday, I'm trying to help you make sense of what’s happening, and imagine what could be. Thanks for following along.
1. Don't Believe Him
An essay on Trump that had me thinking this week, as it offers a perspective that contrasts with pretty much everything else I'm gathering these days. The key argument: What we see is a «projection of strength [that] obscures the reality of weakness». A mirage of power that only works as long as enough people believe it. The argument makes sense when I listen to it, it really does. And yet: It does not (yet) compute.
Ezra Klein
2. This Is So Much Worse Than Last Time
A matter-of-factly description of all the craziness that we witnessed in the first two weeks of the new administration. Even if this were weakness masquerading as strength, the damage being done is astounding. Then again, calling it «a distributed denial of service attack on people who believe in reality» echoes the argument from Klein's essay above.
Alex Shephard
3. How Upside-Down Models Revolutionized Architecture
How creating a model upside-down made the impossible possible with St. Paul's Cathedral in London, and paved a new path for imagining complex structures.
4. The New Zuck
This one-hour episode is the best reconstruction I've encountered of how Mark Zuckerberg became Maga Zuckerberg.
Pocket Casts
5. Humanity’s Last Exam
This is a fascinating challenge: To test when – if ever, but yes, more likely: when – artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, scientists are designing a super-hard exam, called Humanity's Last Exam. 3000 multiple-choice and short answer questions, with areas ranging from hummingbird anatomy to rocket engineering.
Kevin RooseReporting from San Francisco
