This criticism of “learning things they won’t use in real life” has always been frustrating to me, so I appreciate this response.

This Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic from yesterday spoke to me at a deep level:

My first thoughts went to generative AI, an area in which I feel like a fetishization of optimization is crowding out really important questions of what is good. As I put it in a university survey earlier today, there are undeniable benefits to the use of AI tools, but there are important questions as to who benefits. If my department started to use generative AI as a note-taking tool in faculty meetings (the specific focus of this survey), we would probably benefit from it!

This is a fascinating book written by two authors who began the project wanting to write about how cool it would be to settle space… but after consulting all the evidence, concluded that it might not be a great idea.

It’s kind of a downer book in a way—I’ve always been excited about space, and it’s a bummer to think of it as an awful place where we might not have a future. I’m glad for the chance to re-evaluate my thinking, though!

Mormon theology doesn’t really do incarnation. Latter-day Saints believe in an embodied God and that (nearly) all humans will be resurrected to perfect bodies after this life and inevitable death. Latter-day Saints are also not Trinitarian and see Jesus and God the Father as more distinct than most Christian traditions do. Between those two beliefs, Jesus’s taking on a mortal body is not really a big deal—it’s kind of par for the course for any human, whether or not they are the Savior of the world. Perhaps because of that contrast, incarnation has been one of the most interesting things for me to think about as I’ve evolved my own theology with my transition out of institutional Mormonism over the past few years. What does it mean for a God that transcends fleshy, imperfect existence to take on mortal form and live among us? I’ve really enjoyed exploring the implications of that reframing (even though, when pressed, I’d probably describe my understanding of God is largely non-theistic and my Christology as pretty low).

I’ve wanted to read this book for a while, but Doctorow has really sold me on it.