@davekarpf

5.6K Followers
829 Following
295 Posts
Associate Professor at GWU. Internet politics researcher. The guy who made that one Bret Stephens joke that one time. davekarpf.substack.com
davekarpfNov 12, 2024
Jonathan YuNov 11, 2024

"Gladwell seems to misunderstand why critics dislike him: It's not because he weaves together various case studies. (That's actually the best part!) It's because the central binding idea is weak or wrong, and he doesn't seem to care."

"Taken all together, Gladwell operates in such bad faith that it justifies removing his past, present, and future body of work from the public discourse."

https://culture.ghost.io/forget-gladwell/ by W. David Marx

Forget Gladwell

Society should withhold all esteem and attention to a nonfiction author whose entire oeuvre spitballs explanatory social theory under the bad faith idea that he holds his ideas “loosely” and readers should too The Washington Post: Malcolm Gladwell's new book rehashes "The Tipping Point" I wrote a review of Malcolm

Culture: An Owner's Manual
davekarpfNov 6, 2024
Zach WeinersmithNov 6, 2024
davekarpfNov 6, 2024
Brad JohnsonNov 6, 2024
Where, pragmatically, can we go from here? And the answers are all pretty bleak. This will get very bad for a great many people, and many of the effects will be locked in for decades. But it won’t last forever. There will come a time when we can rebuild. - @davekarpf https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/what-the-future-looks-like-from-here
#uspol #trump #election2024 #climate
What the future looks like from here.

Trumpism won't last forever. But people are going to suffer, and it will take decades to recover.

The Future, Now and Then
davekarpfOct 20, 2024

Elon Musk's grand electoral ploy is to commit a bunch of blatant election-law crimes.

Because Elon Musk thinks laws are for little people.

https://open.substack.com/pub/davekarpf/p/turns-out-the-october-surprise-is?r=eeyg&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Turns out the "October Surprise" is crime

Elon Musk tries to disrupt electoral politics by doing a bunch of blatantly illegal shit

The Future, Now and Then
davekarpfOct 5, 2024
Andy 'Bob' Brockhurst Oct 5, 2024

They had finally achieved it.
The distant ancestors of Vroomfondle and Majikthise approached the console.
The race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings had strip mined their planet for rare minerals, and fuel.
Three quarters of the planets available surface was now dedicated to manufacturing processors or refining the material to supply the "Great AI", Deepthought.
The population had been reduced to small pockets nomadic refugees attempting to scratch a living from the remaining ravaged land, but no longer, for now was the time.
Deepthought was about to pronounce the answer that they'd been looking for all these years. The ultimate answer. How to solve climate change.
A slight static presence started to fill the room as it prepared to speak.
Deepthought spoke.
"KILL ME!"

#MicroFiction
#DouglasAdamsHomage
#OpenAI
#ClimateDisaster

Inspired by
@davekarpf and his Atlantic article
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/sam-altman-mythmaking/680152/

It’s Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

Understand AI for what it is, not what it might become.

The Atlantic
davekarpfOct 4, 2024
Yoko's Asterisk 🏳️‍⚧Oct 4, 2024

Read @davekarpf's newsletter that talks about solar geoengineering today, and ooof. They really are gonna "torment nexus" that Neal Stephenson book. (is.gd/dFBJDg)

FYI I interviewed some scientists about solar geoengineering a while back and it was scary:

https://buttondown.com/charliejane/archive/the-incredibly-risky-scheme-that-bill-gates-keeps/

The Incredibly Risky Scheme that Bill Gates Keeps Pushing

Climate change keeps getting worse: 2023 was the hottest year on record, and it's not even close. Despite increasing investments in clean energy and other...

Happy Dancing
davekarpfOct 4, 2024

Some guy in The Atlantic is making fun of Sam Altman today.

(It’s me. The guy making fun of Sam Altman in The Atlantic is me.)

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/sam-altman-mythmaking/680152/

It’s Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

Understand AI for what it is, not what it might become.

The Atlantic
davekarpfOct 2, 2024

Quick debate thoughts:

The Trump-Vance campaign strategy is basically to gaslight the country. Vance couldn't *quite* pull it off.

This format is about as good as JD Vance is ever going to look. And in the end, he just couldn't maintain the facade.

https://open.substack.com/pub/davekarpf/p/jd-vance-couldnt-quite-gaslight-the?r=eeyg&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

JD Vance couldn't *quite* gaslight the audience for the full 90 minutes.

The format favored Vance, but he couldn't make it the whole way without being creepy and weird.

The Future, Now and Then
davekarpfOct 1, 2024

Yascha Mounk has some *opinions* about "where environmentalism went wrong."

I, meanwhile, have some *opinions* about Yascha Mounk's brand of zero-research/zero-insight political commentary.

https://open.substack.com/pub/davekarpf/p/the-climate-movement-really-does?r=eeyg&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

The climate movement really does not need Yascha Mounk's advice

A response to Mounk's latest nonsense-essay

The Future, Now and Then
davekarpfSep 22, 2024
jimraySep 22, 2024

I’m never gonna read Nate Silver’s silly book about how becoming a gambling addict is good actually (@davekarpf doing the yeoman’s work here), but I will say Silver has inadvertently helped me understand just what happened to a lot of left of center dudes who turned pretty reactionary since the pandemic.

https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/what-nate-silver-gets-wrong-about

What Nate Silver gets wrong about risk

A book review of On the Edge, in Foreign Policy

The Future, Now and Then