They still believed in Progress, of the universal, Habermassian, sort. The West, and the US in particular, was the embodiment of this project. Today, it's dead. Cliché, but Lyotard was correct.

I don't know. A big part of capitalism is faking to be good at whatever trivial task you are doing. In these contexts, AI makes sense. At the end of the day people have to earn a living. In writing and creative jobs, I completely agree with you.

It's strange to think we can understand risk. Probabilities of different outcomes are never known on what matters in life. Different people are...different, we should expect heterogeneity in large samples to be larger than large. Rigorous research is good! We should expect to understand even less.

It really depends on your temperament. He's either seen as problematic and not super exciting or France's greatest living writer. Of course the way he talks about women and immigrants is not beautiful and inspiring and uplifting. But does it have to be?

I wholeheartedly agree with the critique, but I deeply struggle to grasp the 'feel for a sense of shared purpose and meaning' part in this pluralistic & fragmented society; makes me so pessimistic. I'm pragmatic: I agree with union-ing, organizing, demonstrating. But it's hard to be an optimist.

These sorts of big choices we sweep under the rug are the ones that qualitatively impact inferences drawn---introducing bias, reversing signs, and all kinds of stuff. Once you whittle down your model space, as they do in the paper, the flexibility that remains produces coherent insight.

👋 Je vous retourne le bonjour!

Behavioral addictions are likely *not* addictions in the same sense that substance use disorders are. Ideas around dependence, withdrawal, tolerance, and similar physiological processes do not, can not, and should not be uncritically applied to behavioral addictions.