I really like this interpretation:
"before decoherence takes place, all the #quantum possibilities are in some sense present. But #decoherence and quantum #Darwinism select only one of them as an element of our observable reality, without any need to assign all the others a classical reality in some other world. The other states exist in an abstract space of possibilities, but they stay there, never getting the chance to grow via entanglement into observable realities."

https://www.quantamagazine.org/are-the-mysteries-of-quantum-mechanics-beginning-to-dissolve-20260213/

Her groundbreaking theory on the origin of life was rejected 15 times. Then biology proved her right.

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/lynn-margulis-symbiosis

• Though too many clearly still suffer too much, a large proportion of people live free from fear of starvation or lack of shelter
• The US has deindustralized, meaning hard physical labor is not the reality for a lot of people. For a lot of people labor is emotional or symbolic (“knowledge work”)
• In other words, for lots of people the economic promise has been fulfilled

• It is not coincidental that “Gas Town”’s announcement post mentioned Towers of Hanoi, an undergraduate CS student homework problem that for most students requires thinking hard. It’s designed to encourage a kind of “eureka” moment where recursion as a computer programming technique becomes more clear. GT claims to fulfill the promise of not having to think hard like this anymore: the LLMs will do that thinking for you
• It is not coincidental that Gas Town is described as being very expensive. Economic power in the form of asset accumulation is what earns you freedom in this way of conceiving things. If you want the freedom from having to think hard, you’d better accumulate assets
• Since the promise is greater collective freedom, endeavoring to accumulate assets is, in this view, a collective good
• This differs from effective altruism and other “do good by doing well” conceptions. Rather, the very mechanism of economics produces collective wealth, so the story goes, which means the more active one is as an economic agent, the more collective good one produces (“wealth” and “good” being conflated)
• Accumulation of assets is the scorecard, so to speak, of such enhanced economic activity, and the individual reward can then be freedom from having to think hard

• Lotka’s maximum power principle (supposedly) dictates that those entities that transform the most power into useful organization are most fit from an evolutionary standpoint
• Ernst Juenger’s notion of “total mobilization” brings this principle to politics/political economy/geopolitics: those nations that “totally” mobilize their national resources are the ones that will dominate geopolitically
• See, for instance, the RAND Corporation’s Commission on the National Defense Strategy: “The Commission finds that the U.S. military lacks both the capabilities and the capacity required to be confident it can deter and prevail in combat. It needs to do a better job of incorporating new technology at scale; field more and higher-capability platforms, software, and munitions; and deploy innovative operational concepts to employ them together better.” (emphasis mine). In summary: the US is about to be outcompeted (lacks fitness); in response, it should go big (“at scale”, “more”) in an organized way (“deploy innovative operational concepts”, “employ them together better”)
• The rhetoric around LLM-based AI includes similar language, exemplified in the GT post: burn through as much infrastructural resources as possible to produce organized outputs “at scale”, while avoiding having human beings think too hard to produce those outputs, an indication that the power was burned to produce useful organization
• LLM-based AI plays a prominent role in US federal government strategy, particularly military strategy, with language about dominance serving to justify its use
• It is not coincidental that Gas Town uses many orders of magnitude more resources to solve the Towers of Hanoi problem (“Burn All The Gas” Town). This rhetoric dovetails perfectly with the “total mobilization” concept

There's... A LOT going on in this article 🤯

"I believe neo-#Hasidism is in some ways the only future for #Judaism, because it takes the whole discussion of #religion to an interior place. To the heart."

Mainstream Judaism, he says, faced three major crises in the 19th and 20th centuries: #Darwinism, which made people feel they should no longer believe in the act of Creation; #biblical criticism, which led to the understanding that the #Torah was written by several people over time, so that it could no longer be termed divine; and "No. 3, a little crisis called the #Shoah."

In short, "the pillars of Judaism have collapsed."

https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2026-01-10/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/swinging-parties-and-ayahuasca-u-s-hasidic-rebels-are-redefining-jewish-orthodoxy/0000019b-a763-dd39-a7ff-ef7b42ea0000

"Google AI Overviews put people at risk of harm with misleading health advice"

#Darwinism

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/02/google-ai-overviews-risk-harm-misleading-health-information

A special issue (free download) on the Sociobiology Debate at 50.

This largely focuses on Wilson, an entomologist who was no expert on primates, hominins, human evolution at all. It isn't taking much note of all the female primatologists who grabbed hold of 'selfish-gene' theory to start seeing female strategies. Donna Haraway didn't miss it!

#gender #Darwinism #femalestrategies

https://online.ucpress.edu/hsns/issue/55/1