Neuroscientists strapped EEG electrodes to the heads of Rwandan genocide survivors—perpetrators, bystanders, and rescuers—and measured what happens in the brain when someone is told to hurt another person. Two of the three groups were neurologically indistinguishable in a way that maps onto the American political moment with uncomfortable precision. The third group was different—and the reason why is the thing we most need to understand right now.
The Uncomfortable Truth About AI Literacy Is That It Looks Like Work
In a line-editing experiment I recently conducted, Claude Opus 4.6 flagged a term used by a traumatized fourteen-year-old female narrator as “cliché” and insisted I replace it with something “more literary”—and arguably far more cliché—that’d be catastrophically damaging to her established voice. I spotted the harm instantly, but would a less experienced writer? A popular article on Medium with the click-bait-y title "Everyone Is 'Learning AI,' But Nobody Really Understands This One Thing” argues the solution to identifying confident-sounding wrong answers from LLMs is… learning vector math and writing scripts using cosine similarity to measure semantic distance? The article’s diagnosis is on the money, but the author’s prescription is—like most AI answers ironically enough—authoritative, confident-sounding claptrap. I have a better solution—it just won’t sell any weekend courses (or Medium subscriptions).
An AI Ethics Framework So Boring It Might Actually Work
SFWA needed two emergency board votes to create terms they couldn’t define and rules they can’t enforce to produce an AI policy that doesn’t address a single actual threat or valid ethical concern. That’s what happens when a professional organization builds ethics by panic instead of framework. This essay constructs the framework SFWA didn’t—starting with the three objections that arrive before any conversation about AI tools can happen, dismantling each on technical and ethical grounds, then applying four consistent principles to the questions that actually matter. AI cover art passes every test. AI manuscript screening fails all of them. Meanwhile the community’s entire ethics apparatus is aimed squarely at struggling indie authors trying to get their book in front of readers.
Good Men Doing Something
In Minneapolis, ordinary people are standing outside schools in subzero temperatures watching for ICE vehicles so parents can pick up their kids safely. Coffee shops are handing out whistles so people can warn their neighbors. A public health nurse is standing bodily between immigrants and federal agents—not because she thinks she’ll fix the world, but because her neighbor needed a shield between them and the government. And it’s working.
Less Than Half of One Percent
I wrote a farewell post about silence being more insidious than hostility, and a guy who was silent for the entirety of my presence on Twitter showed up to be hostile at the end. Of nearly 4,000 followers, less than half of one percent ever engaged positively on anything that really mattered—and I know each of them by name. The rest? Hate follows, lurkers, tourists, a meaningless vanity metric. When the only interactions on posts about federal agents shooting American citizens and government agencies posting Nazi slogans are hostile, that tells you everything you need to know about who your audience is and what to do about it.
When Good Men Find Tyranny Boring
I’m grieving. Going through the stages. This week was anger. The grief isn’t because “everyone I know is a Nazi.” They aren’t. That’s the problem. That’s what makes it worse. “I find this argument boring and lacking substance,” my friend says. “Trump’s a lot of things, but he’s not a tyrant.” My friend isn’t a Nazi. He’s a good guy. He’d help his immigrant neighbors. He’d give you the shirt off his back. And he’ll keep finding each individual argument boring and lacking substance, right up until the moment it’s undeniable, even to him, and the people he’d help are gone.
This is Not a Political Debate. This is Basic Human Decency
“We’re no longer having a political debate, we’re having a moral debate… This is not ‘we need to see both sides.’ This is not ‘we need to wait for this.’ This is basic human decency.” — Tim Walz
The Hypothetical Has Become Reality
I posed Claude a thought experiment: “Federal agents extrajudicially killing a man for peacefully exercising his Second Amendment rights at a lawful gathering is the very definition of tyranny.” Claude agreed—by definition—but noted that real cases never arrive with clean stipulations. The contested ground is always whether it was *actually* peaceful, whether the gathering was *actually* lawful, whether there was *actually* an imminent threat. Then I told Claude to search for Alex Pretti.
Born Targets: How Our Society Vilifies the Victims
LGBTQ+ adults report far higher rates of childhood sexual abuse than heterosexual adults. This correlation is real, documented across multiple studies, and not disputed. It’s also been weaponized—cited as evidence that abuse “causes” homosexuality, which then perpetuates abuse across generations. The logic seems intuitive until you look at the research. A 2017 instrumental variable analysis found the causal arrow points the other direction: sexual orientation increases the risk of being abused. Gender-nonconforming children—visible from early childhood in home videos taken before any abuse occurred—are targeted at elevated rates. The population labeled “groomers” is the population that was groomed.
Pervy by Default, Puritan by Policy
I asked an AI to generate a woman in a modest cloth wrap skirt walking through a rainforest. Blocked. I asked for a mother holding her sleeping baby. Blocked. I asked for a hypersexualized pinup with impossible cleavage and a shotgun—one prompt, instant generation. “Buxom” is banned. “Curvy” is banned. “Petite” isn’t—and what Grok generated from “petite adult woman in a string bikini” was a functionally nude child. The moderation systems that block a breastfeeding mother had nothing to say about that.