Skip. Except the links. “Among the lucky, you are the chosen one”

The post below is anti-important. I'm serious.

• Instead, here's something about tofu
• Here's a very difficult quiz about energy generation
• Here's an analysis of the shingles vaccine / dementia claim  😞
• Here's a cool 10-year-old music video from The Chemical Brothers
  
  
• And here's The Honest Trailer for Project Hail Mary  😂
  
  
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Computer issues used to be [!] the one sure way to set me off. When Anne’s pals Shelley and Katherine met me during 1992’s Time the First, I was, as mentioned, totally blissed out. [That is: not my previously normal self.] They asked Anne, “Does Matt ever get upset about anything?” Anne replied: “Well, he does yell at his computer.”

Guilty!

I just spent 90 minutes [trying to do something that should be simple]. In my long long long “chat” with non-AI support, I deleted all my obscenity and all-caps before sending them. And I didn't scream out, “Motherfucker!” like I wanted to.

Yay me? 

I would love to get to the point where I didn't let these things bother me. And when it is something that I have control over (e.g., when my harddrive was dying last year) I'm pretty good. But when it is a stupid error and I've tried everything to troubleshoot (including extended chat with LLMs to see if I was missing anything) ... well, I wasn't so chill. (Me to tech support: “Please don't tell me the obvious. Please.”)

Not this time

(By the way, usually when something technical doesn't work, we say, “The fingers you are using are too fat.”)

But most of the time these days, I am pretty much blissed out. (I did recover from this support situation as soon as it was over. Yay me?) Every day, I realize how unbelievably fortunate I've been. I actively try to not feel guilty about how lucky I am compared to every other sentient creature who has ever existed. 

Very early in our lifetime together, Anne got a fortune that said, “Among the lucky, you are the chosen one.” Yes, that sums up my life since October 1992, even with all of karma's efforts in the other direction. 

In the comic here, replace “greatness” with “great fortunate”:

TY for reading.

Relationships: Just Do It (Plus: The things we choose)

One thing we hammered into EK: Don’t ever think you can change someone, or even hope they will change. 

This might be the most useful relationship advice in Losing My Religions. (Then again, maybe not! “Don’t do natural childbirth” is far more important but relevant to many fewer people.) 

In song version:

You can't change somebody

With your love, no matter  

How right you are.

Practical take-away: If there is something you want done - dishes put in the sink, things organized a specific way, driver’s seat adjusted, clothes kept a certain way - just do it yourself. 

Sitting around stewing that your partner won’t do something you want is just creating unhappiness. You didn’t get with this person because they are a programmable robot (see below). Expectations and resentment poison a relationship; it is far better to think “This bothers me more than it bothers you, so I’ll either do it myself or decide it’s not worth caring about.”

Or: “If adopting this approach makes you feel taken advantage of, it is time to re-evaluate your relationship.”

And I know the below is repetitive, but my gawd, SMBC is just tooooo gooooood!

Silly Song & Suicide

For people who know the excellent Nirvana song "Smells Like Teen Spirit," this Weird Al version is just too funny.  

"Humans!" <eyeroll>

Almost forty years ago, I wrote an editorial saying that one way (some) non-human animals have it better than us was that we (generally) don't let our cats and dogs suffer horribly at the end of their lives. 

Losing covers it succinctly:

Opposition to physician-assisted suicide is immoral.

Why oh why do we think we can tell anyone that they can’t end their life in as painless a way possible? Who do we think we are? We let “any butt-reaming asshole” bring any number of new lives into existence, regardless of circumstance, regardless of how much the child will suffer. Yet we deny those same people the right to end their own life? Crazy....

This recent Freakonomics episode on the topic is pretty good. Anne and I note that the failed priest's "other side" anti-medical-aid-in-dying argument is: "It is wrong to want to end your life because you don't want to lose control. [Because I decree it!] Therefore, I should control your life."

He also goes on and on about "free will," all while insisting that people shouldn't be allowed to make choices about their lives!

(Ad hominin but still: he took a vow before God to serve God. Then met a woman and said, "Just kidding!" And now he wants to dictate how others can live, insisting, "I will be vindicated." 

He's not saying that his arguments will prove superior, or that society will do more than pay lip service to "human dignity." No - he insists that he, personally, will be vindicated.

God save us from moral fanatics.)

Hank Green on 250 Years

“You do alright for cats, but not for chickens...”

From here (also check out here for more good news):

“Would the average American in 1776 think we had done a good job?” 

I’m worried that they wouldn’t, but not for the reasons you might think. I’m worried that they would look at things that I see as miraculous, like the increase in rights for women and non-white people and people who are not upper class, and they would see that as some kind of failure of the social order. 

I hope some of them would look at our society and see the progress, but I think most of them would not. 

Though, honestly, I guess I wouldn’t be sad to discover that the founders of this country didn’t really live up to their own ideals, because I already knew that. Perhaps this should make me happy… that we have been able to make so much progress inside the frames those people built that we have moved far beyond their sensibilities. 

I hope I would be similarly unnerved by the next 250 years of progress. 

Some Holiday Weekend Reading

1. If AI Is Sentient Then So Is ‘Age of Empires II’

"The point of the paper is to formally show that we anthropomorphize too readily."

That sentence says it all. No notes.

2. Using AI to help physicians diagnose rare genetic diseases affecting children

My medical history is a string of non-diagnoses, wrong diagnoses, and other near-fatal botches - and I'm a straight, white, male college grad who has always had health insurance. Medical errors are one of the leading causes of death (although maybe not as bad as headlines indicate). Bring on our robot doctors! 

(Interesting: General-purpose large language models outperform specialized clinical AI tools. Again: LLMs get things wrong / hallucinate.* But again: it isn't like doctors always get it right. More importantly, very few people in the U.S. have easy access to full medical care. "Always ask: What is the alternative?")

3. From Tobias, The Vegan Strategist, who is far better than I am at not descending into "Angry old man yells at cloud": A small, unforgiving club won't get us there.

(Be warned: In the next week or two, there will be a yelling at cloud post.)

4. An inconvenient truth: CO2 is greening the Earth. 

Why can't we set a realistic "social cost of carbon"? Because it isn't clear that there is a net social cost of carbon! That "CO2 is greening the Earth" link is fuller exploration of this point from Carbon Cult Cruelty:

Over a decade ago, I came across a sentence buried in a New Scientist article noting that increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased crop yields. Asking ChatGPT today to summarize the research on crop yields and increased carbon dioxide concentrations produced this table:

📊 Summary of Average Yield Increases Under Elevated CO₂ (~550 ppm)

Wheat 10–15% 

Rice 10–15%

Soybeans 15–20% 

Maize 0–5%

Now, a serious question for you:

Did you know that our most important crops were more productive because of increased carbon dioxide concentrations?

Another serious question:

Why do you think that fact isn’t known? 

5. And finally: Recycling is stupid and "the most ardent vegan activists are almost certainly doing more harm to their cause than good."  

For those who don't know, that quoted line about the most ardent vegan activists accurately sums up the "half failed" portion of Losing My Religions' subtitle. And it is the topic of my upcoming "yelling at clouds" post (uh-oh!).  

* From here (plenty more fun stuff at the link):

A new study claims that an eight-minute conversation with ChatGPT can reduce belief in conspiracy theories by about 20%, and that these effects last at least two months. ... I bet most 9/11 truthers have never spoken to a skeptic who both took them seriously and who knew a lot about 9/11. ...

37% of Americans—a plurality—believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years. 40% don’t understand how a control group works. 26% think that the sun goes around the Earth. For these people, talking to a chatbot is likely to leave them with a more accurate view of reality.

250th Birthday

Like democracy and capitalism, the United States is the worst,* except compared to any alternative.** 

You don't have to like Bill Maher to benefit from the facts he lays out here. That's just some of what it was like in the U.S. fifty years ago. And that doesn't get into what it was like to be non-white or LGBTQ.

Or you can just skim this list from my life. 

Dying younger is not "The good old days."
See the rest of the charts here.

We don't have to lie*** about the past or the present to make the future better. Lying (and self-pity) distorts our thinking, actually making it more difficult to improve the lives of those acutely suffering right now. 

(And it isn't just the past that sucks; Abi Olvera: "I Was a Diplomat Where Being Gay Was a Crime.")

***Obviously, most people on the Left don't think they're lying - they are sure they are the only ones “seeing things clearly.” We all do!

**This isn't really accurate. If I were to be born at random, I would not choose the United States. But if I could be guaranteed to be born to parents in the top half of a county's income distribution, I would choose the U.S.

*From, of course, Losing My Religions:

F the Founding Fathers.

I understand wanting to feel special about your country. In the Bicentennial year of 1976, I celebrated as much as anyone.

But I have an excuse: I was eight.

We’re adults, not children. We must stop worshiping the “Founding Fathers.” What they and their contemporaries “intended” is simply irrelevant to the 21st Century.

More than that: Their intentions were actively immoral. They intended for people to be enslaved. They intended all the native people to be pushed aside. (At best.) They intended for women to be de facto property with zero voice in government. (“It’s 1800. Ladies: Tell your husbands Vote for Burr!”) They intended a shitty form of government that protected only white land-owning and slave-owning men. ...

Food Tips, July 2026

Some practical advice:

1. We used to use Tofuky Chik'n all the time, but it hasn't been available in Tucson for years. (I still eat metric tons of Tofurky Deli Slices.) We currently use soy curls (picture of the bulk bag above; voice recognition helpfully sometimes translates as "soy girls"  😆 ). We have a dealer who sometimes gets us similar but super-cheap soy chunks from Mexico. 

But in the past year, having been veg for a combined 70+ years, Anne and I have been eating lots more tofu than ever before - specifically, Trader Joe's high-protein tofu. We freeze and thaw it, then put it in a tofu press. We'll use that in pretty much anything (except this, from 2014 - that uses soy girls). The tofu goes into everything from curry to "hash" -- normal potato, sweet potato, carrots, peas, and anything else we want to throw in (e.g., crushed tomatoes), spiced with whatever we're in the mood for....

2. It is incredible what spices and sauces are available! Berbere for an Ethiopian kick (in the winter, we'll make berbere lentils in the InstaPot - there are many recipes online; I don't even try injera); chipotle for that earthy Mexican; many curry pastes and powders. Trader Joe's has a wide variety to try (not just in meals, but sprinkled on bread or popcorn).

3. Prepared foods are quite excellent these days, speaking as someone who grew up on Salisbury "steak" TV dinners.  This red bean curry is one of our favs. Since Japan, we've also been eating a lot more ramen (generally ordered from here - you can just search on "vegan ramen;" yes, the "Hello Kitty" chicken noodle soup is vegan). We add in soy girls, peas, dried edamame, and extra siracha.  

4. We (especially Anne) eat quite a bit of Silk Soy Milk Yogurt. For some odd reason, ordering this directly from Amazon has been much cheaper than getting it directly at Whole Foods, even with delivery! 

I eat sauerkraut most days. We grow broccoli sprouts (2 minute video), too, based on our pal Ken's suggestion. We do this so much we buy 4.5 pounds of seeds at a time. We don't do any of the fancy stuff in other videos / guides - that linked short is all we do. We don't believe all the "fights / prevents cancer" claims about the sprouts, etc., but we like them well enough. They are cheap, it is easy to have them fresh (we have several containers going in sequence), and they basically taste like nothing (esp compared to kale, broccoli florets, etc.). 

5. Anne makes me overnight oats with nuts, dried fruit, protein powder, and soy milk. I add Trader Joe's frozen Wild Boreal Blueberries (the best tasting, IMO). 

6. Since I've not mentioned Trader Joe's, our friend Kari hipped us to their Thai Wheat Noodles. As per a meal she once made us, we just toss them in with sautéed tofu, veggies, ginger and garlic (TJ's has frozen garlic and ginger in little red containers) and then a teriyaki peanut sauce that Anne whips up (generally part of a bottle of store-bought teriyaki, TJ's peanut butter, and siracha). No need boil water, etc.

Your Life Is Cosmically Important

Off topic, but jeebus....

 
The latest hotness in EA-type discourse is along the lines of, “AI could lock in factory farming such that it spreads throughout the entire universe, enslaving quadzillions of future chickens, fishes, and pigs!”

Yeah! You have finally discovered The One Truth, the way your Big Brain can impact the future of the entire universe!

I don’t mean to mock.* We all want our lives to have meaning. This is, I think, especially true of highly-educated people who don’t have an invisible sky daddy to serve. Audience capture, where we have to continually post clever and provocative and validating takes to get likes, makes it worse.

While getting views and hearts and shares are metrics we can optimize for, they aren't meaning. 

Your life is not meaningful in proportion to your popularity on Twitter or Substack. 

Your life is meaningful in proportion to how many actual individual’s lives are actually made better by your actual efforts. 

And sadly, there are currently loads of actual individuals desperately in need of your help.

An easy test: If an argument takes attention and resources away from helping actual, real-world individuals, click away as fast as you can.
 

*OK, that is obviously a lie. Another failure of my “Only Kindness” mantra. Sorry.

10/10 Podcast: The Case for Sunshine

The Case for Sunshine 

Too much good / interesting / useful stuff to excerpt. The book.

Solutions vs Screaming

Preface: It was 2003 - over 20 years ago! - when there was a horrible heat wave across Europe. "The death toll has been estimated at more than 70,000." 

What has been done since then? Has Europe built loads of climate-friendly nuclear power and installed AC everywhere to prevent this from happening again?

Nope - just the opposite. 

For more, please see How Europe Became the World Champion of Heat Deaths 
and Europe's Deadly Aversion to Air Conditioning
😢

But also, as Hannah Ritchie has noted, cold kills far more people than heat, even in Europe. (Note the correction to the famous but hugely dishonest chart in that Europe link.*)

Carbon doesn't matter. Suffering matters.

Development is the most important things we could do to reduce human suffering.

</preface>

Via this One Step donor, here is a detailed post on how we could actually make things better re: climate stability. Read that, and you'll know more about the climate than 99.9% of the screamers. (I'm not exaggerating.) 

BTW, adaptation and mitigation are not new ideas. 

When I was in grad school at the University of Illinois as a DOE Global Change Fellow, I worked on carbon sequestration via forestry. This was in 1992-93. Next, at Carnegie Mellon, I worked on the role of particulates in climate change, including how to use them to increase albedo (cool the surface ala the "natural" Mount Pinatubo. 

When EK was an undergrad at Pomona, they wrote a big paper about carbon sequestration via ocean seeding and enhanced weathering of olivine. This was 2012.

There is so much we could do to make things better, but many (most?) on the Left would rather scream than help. 

* OK, I won't make you click through. Here's the famous chart of European deaths of cold vs heat - note the scale:

Here's what it looks like using the same scale:

Honest questions: How can we make things better when we insist on lying to promote our dogma? 

A Vegan Awakening

A Matthew founds a vegan organization. He pours his heart and soul into it, spending years and years building and promoting the idea, but only sees:

Same for everywhere else, including the UK.
The only decline came from the Great Financial Crisis.

 
In the face of the undeniable evidence, he shifts tactics. 

💗

Thought Experiments Are Harmful

Passionflower, SDBG

• Would you pull the trolley lever to kill one person and save five?
• Would you torture one person to save a trillion from stubbing their toes?
• Would you donate to prevent an unnecessary death today, or use that money have a one-in-a-trillion chance at creating a quadzillion happy robots over the next billion years?

While people have spent countless hours debating these and similar questions, people are suffering and dying from poverty and preventable diseases. 

While we one up each other with our expected value, individuals are being tortured - individuals we could help. 

Every hour we spend in mental masturbation is an hour we aren't reducing intense suffering. 

Suffering isn't hypothetical. It isn't an argument or a game or a debate.

Counterpoint:

If we just accept some standard philosophy or dogma, like utilitarianism or Veganism, we also do real harm. 

I did that for decades.

Recently, I saw this error in an article arguing against welfare reforms - specifically, slow-growing chickens. The author noted "The [slow-growing] birds experience fewer hours of excruciating, disabling, and hurtful pain than conventional broilers." But he [obv] goes on to note that more slow-growing birds would be needed to produce the same amount of chicken meat as today's torturously-fast-growing birds. 

This is another example of the fatal flaw of utilitarianism. Suffering does not sum. 

It doesn't matter if our mental sum of suffering across individuals is greater.

Reducing an individual's extreme suffering is what matters. 

However, it took writing of Losing My Religions - specifically the chapter "Biting the Philosophical Bullet" - for me to realize this. 

Sorry.

We live in a time of miracles

Steak & fries at Kindred, San Diego. Been about 40 years since I've had anything like this. Scary. (And we ate there on a credit card credit. Score!)

Works in Progress: "What’s new in biology: June 2026."

Derek Thompson podcast version. 

Incredible. And that's just one month of news! 

Three Quick Graphs

I saw a post recently replying to the fact that, on average, young people are richer than any previous generation at their age. And yet they are the unhappiest cohort ever. 

This person said it isn't vibes; young people are unhappy because housing in desirable areas is expensive. 

So that's now the standard: If there is something desirable you can't have right now, you should be miserable. 

• Don't buy the narrative. 
• Don't take anecdotes as data. 
• Don't give in to Doom. 
• Don't share or like negative posts.

Rather than resent others, we should appreciate what we have.

"In 1979, 24% of American households were lower middle class while 30% were poor or near poor. Those numbers have dropped to 16% and 19%, respectively while the upper middle class has seen its numbers swell from 10% in 1979 to 31% in the latest reading."

Outside the vibes / social media, there has never been a better time to be the average (or a random) US citizen (human, obviously). 

The reality of the job market.

Please Save Your Brain

Bonsai, Japanese Friendship Garden, San Diego.

Preface: Yes, you are very, very smart. 

 

But companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, TikTok, Netflix, OpenAI, etc. spend literally hundreds of billions of dollars every year and employ hundreds of thousands of the smartest people in the world to acquire, predict, rank, monetize, and retain human attention.  

 

It is simply irrational to count on your willpower to counter all that. 

As you know, I post a lot about why so many people are so unhappy (example). But what, exactly, to do about it? The tl;dr:

Don't let an algorithm determine what you see.

Don't have a "feed"* (think about it).
Don't scroll through Facebook or YouTube or Twitter or Reddit or Google News or even Substack.

Be entirely intentional about what receives your attention. 

If you are going to consume online content: 

Subscribe to people and outlets who produce interesting and useful content.

Go directly to their blog or Substack or Bluesky (etc.) page, rather than counting on coming across them amidst a sea of clickbait.

If you come across a post that makes you think, "YES," click away quickly. 
If you come across a post that makes you think in terms of "smart, moral us" vs "stupid and evil them," click away quickly.

For more, please check out this by Charles Duhigg.
And Noah Smith: Are you finally ready to admit it's the phones?

*Or very carefully and ruthlessly curate your feed so it is only planes, cat videos, and whiskey reviews.