The name “Wick’s Eternal” is a tribute to Keanu’s iconic role as John Wick, a character who is well-known for his fierce love and protection of his dog, Daisy. This bond, as seen in the movie series, mirrors Keanu’s own relationship with animals. By naming his sanctuary project after this character, Keanu is reinforcing the message that animals are worth fighting for and that their safety and well-being are non-negotiable.
The project aims to offer animals a sanctuary where they are treated with respect and given a chance to heal from past traumas. The sanctuaries will be more than just shelters – they will be homes, providing comfort and safety for animals that have often been victims of neglect or cruelty.
The Sanctuaries: A Safe Haven for Animals
Keanu’s sanctuaries will be located in both urban and rural areas across the U.S. Each facility will be designed to cater to the needs of abandoned, elderly, and sick animals, offering a space where they can feel secure and loved. The design of each sanctuary reflects Keanu’s dedication to providing a high-quality environment for the animals. The sanctuaries will feature:
Veterinary Services – Each sanctuary will have a state-of-the-art veterinary clinic offering medical care to the animals. These clinics will focus on treating common and chronic illnesses, providing necessary surgeries, and offering routine check-ups. Specialized care will be available for elderly animals, ensuring they receive the attention they need.
Hydrotherapy Pools – Many of the animals in need of a safe haven have physical ailments such as joint issues or arthritis. To help them regain mobility and improve their quality of life, hydrotherapy pools will be available. These pools offer a low-impact way for the animals to exercise and recover from injuries or age-related issues.
Trauma Recovery Areas – For animals who have experienced abuse, neglect, or trauma, the sanctuaries will feature designated quiet spaces where they can recover in peace. These areas will be designed to reduce stress, allowing the animals to heal both physically and emotionally in a safe, tranquil environment.
Spacious Outdoor Areas – Each sanctuary will feature expansive outdoor spaces where animals can roam freely, play, and socialize with other animals. These areas will be fenced in, allowing dogs and cats to exercise and enjoy the natural environment. These spaces are crucial for the animals’ well-being, offering them freedom and the ability to engage in natural behaviors.
Adoption Services – While these sanctuaries are a permanent home for some animals, others will eventually be adopted out to loving families. Keanu’s initiative is designed to ensure that no animal stays without a family for long. The adoption process will be thorough, ensuring that animals are placed with families who truly care about their well-being.
No Adoption Fees – Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Keanu’s project is that there will be no adoption fees for any animals. All services, from medical care to adoption, will be provided free of charge, ensuring that no financial barrier prevents an animal from finding a home.
For starters, using the phrase "pursuit of happiness" was the big mistake Jefferson made. Happiness had a different meaning at that time, I cannot blame him. I wish he used a word like Gratitude.
For all its prowess and simplicity the English language has its limitations - subtle richness innate to older languages.
The geniuses here want to consolidate whatever good micro words English has into one bucket called Happiness.
Members of our broader research group are working extensively in the field. This especially involves the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, the major project to learn what is going on in the most vulnerable part of the most vulnerable ice sheet in the Antarctic, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which includes the Thwaites Glacier. After seasons lost to Covid, a major expedition will be traversing down Thwaites, using radars, seismic sensors and more to characterize the ice and its bed.
Other groups are working farther downstream, extending work that has been done on the ice shelf and in the ocean beyond. Thwaites is vast, larger than the state of Florida. It is some 80 miles across, making it arguably the widest glacier on Earth. Since the 1990s, scientists have reported on the increased velocity of its movement and the doubling of its contribution to sea-level rise. Its collapse would trigger meters of sea-level rise in the decades and centuries to come, hence its popular nickname in the media, Doomsday Glacier.
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What are the challenges in predicting how much warming will ultimately cause the Thwaites Glacier to break apart?
Some of this is really difficult, especially where fractures are involved. Think about ceramic coffee cups dropped on hard floors. Sometimes the coffee cup just bounces, or the rim chips, or the handle breaks off, but sometimes the whole thing shatters. Scientists can accurately predict the average behavior of a lot of coffee cups dropped on a lot of floors, if you tell us the height of the drop, the type of floor, the type of cup and a few other things. But predicting the exact behavior of the next cup dropped is really difficult, in part because the behavior depends on whether there are small cracks buried deep in the material of the cup, among others. Predicting exactly how much warming is needed to break parts of Thwaites will be harder than predicting coffee cups.
Sounds like there’s still a lot of uncertainty here. How should policymakers cope with that?
First of all, the uncertainties are not our friend. There is basically no way that sea-level rise can be notably smaller than expected. When we make the climate warmer, the ocean warms up. That makes the water expand, which raises sea level. That’s relatively easy.
The glaciers in the mountains are doing what we projected decades ago: They really are melting. That takes water that was ice out of the mountains and puts it into the ocean, and that raises sea level. Those are fairly easy predictions. There are not large uncertainties in those. The uncertainties are: Will the ice shelves break off, will the flow of the big ice sheets change a lot, with the potential to drive these very large, rapid sea-level rises. So the uncertainties are on the bad side.
In other areas of our lives, we tend to invest a lot to avoid the possibility of a catastrophe, even if we are not sure it is going to happen. The example I like to use is highway safety. We have highway engineers, we have crumple zones in the car, we have airbags and antilock brakes and seatbelts and we have police out there trying to stop drunken drivers. We are not very likely to get killed by a drunken driver, but the catastrophe would be so bad if it happened that we invest a lot in heading that off.
What would make sense may be to think about sea-level rise and our response to it with the same sort of lens: There are things we can do to better understand why it happens and what the causes are. Next steps might be communities taking steps that reflect scientific findings, which of course have economic as well as social benefits.
The pain and suffering of billions of unborn kids who will be losers of the birth lottery will be massive and immense in a scale that humanity has never seen.
Without coming up with a way to control this stupidest idea of automatic inheritance, lot of problems in the world cannot be fixed. In other words, this is one of the very few fundamental problems in the world.
Just because A fucked B and C was born hence C gets everything A & B worked hard for in their entire life while C did zilch in life is wrong. This will be one of the the primary root causes that capitalism is failing and might cause democracy to decline in future,
To state the obvious:
We need to segregate the process of defining and understanding a problem vs finding a solution. I am defining a problem here. I have no idea how to solve this problem. I think most of humanity will agree this is a problem. But disagreements come when you start confusing solutions with the process of defining the problem.
Identifying this as a problem doesn't define me nor anyone as a communist or socialist. Fuck communism and socialism; its is proven over and over again as bad ideology not even close to a solution for any problem in the world.
This is the time most people should start understanding this problem and agree that we have to find solutions to this issue.
Solutions might not come for years or decades.
Implementing the solution after #4 might take years or decades.
So good luck sapiens. Max and I will not be alive to see what unveils.
I have seen a few academic papers but not even is writing or talking about this a fundamental problem. I have been screaming about this for over two decades now. The birth-lottery a.k.a inheritance is the cancer which has potential to destroy democracy. Beware.
Baby boomers and older Americans have spent decades amassing one of the largest concentrations of private wealth in history. Now, that wealth is starting to be passed down to the next generation—and it’s having a ripple effect across the high-end property market.
Over the next decade, roughly 1.2 million individuals with net worths of $5 million or more are projected to pass down more than $38 trillion globally, according to a new report from brokerage Coldwell Banker Global Luxury reviewed exclusively by The Wall Street Journal.
Real estate is poised to play a significant role in the great wealth transfer. Gen Xers and Millennials are set to inherit $4.6 trillion in global real estate over the next 10 years, according to the report, which incorporated data from research firms Altrata and Cerulli Associates. Nearly $2.4 trillion of that property is located in the U.S.
Real-estate brokers, attorneys and family offices say they are already seeing profound changes in who buys luxury homes and how purchases are structured. High-net-worth families are bringing children into conversations about inheritance earlier and making high-stakes real-estate decisions sooner.
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In Manhattan, for instance, family money is accounting for an increasing share of major transactions.
“The price points have just gone wild,” said Ian Slater, a Compass agent who works with ultrawealthy families in New York. “I used to commonly see people buy $3 million to $5 million apartments for their 25- to 30-year-old kids. Now I see people buying $15 to $30 million apartments for their kids.”
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Americans with a net worth of more than $5 million are expected to pass down about $17.3 trillion over the next decade. Centimillionaires—those worth more than $100 million—hold roughly 43% of that wealth, according to the Coldwell Banker report.
With so much at stake, many families are preparing their children by starting conversations early.
When Bobby Castro, 58, began planning how his money would one day pass to his children, he said he was driven primarily by fear that the fortune he and his wife built would be squandered.
“I read there’s over a 70% chance Gen Two—meaning my children—will wind up blowing all the hard work that the creators of Gen One, my wife and I, did,” he said. “And that is a scary stat.”
As a result, he and his wife, Sofia Castro, 54, who live in a sprawling waterfront home with a private dock in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., began building what they call their “100-year legacy plan.” Bobby made his money by founding and later selling a financial-technology company called Bankers Healthcare Group and using the proceeds to amass a real-estate portfolio along the way. The family is now worth about $500 million, he said.
[---]
In cases where multiple siblings inherit one property, things can get complicated, particularly if a plan isn’t put in place before a parent’s death, Cole said.
“Kids have kids, spouses get involved and complexity becomes more of an issue,” he said. “One wants to keep it because there is sentimental value, one wants to sell it because they want the capital out. There’s a lot to untangle.”
Just a brilliant synthesis of knowledge. Just brilliant!
It never crossed my mind to think of knowledge along the same terms as life - struggling to evolve, and adapt.
Very few can preserve and move knowledge through time while billions don't bother.
But similar to life, knowledge probably also has a minimum external threshold needed to continue forward (life and knowledge doesn't have any self-imposed or innate plateau but a minimum external threshold to survive another moment in time). I hope we have almost infinite time to reach that minimum threshold.
Read this small piece packed with knowledge... well I should say wisdom:
All this grows from a tiny seed long ago swimming in a vast ocean: the sensation of pain. From “Ouch!” to “Eureka!”. We go to universities because our distant ancestors felt pricks and pangs: one sort of knowledge led to the other after a brief period of time (by cosmic standards). A super-scientist might have seen it coming (“It won’t be long before they have advanced degrees and diplomas”). The point I want to stress is that this is a natural evolutionary process, governed by the usual laws of evolution–cumulative, progressive, opportunistic, gradual.
As species evolve from other species by small alterations, so it is with the evolution of knowledge; there is no simultaneous independent creation of all the species of knowledge. Knowledge-how, acquaintance knowledge, propositional knowledge, the a priori and the a posteriori, knowledge of fact and knowledge of value, science and common sense—all this stems from the same distant root (though no doubt supplemented). It was pain that got the ball rolling, and maybe nothing else would have (pain really marks a watershed in the evolution of life on Earth). Knowledge of language came very late in the game and is not be regarded as fundamental. Epistemology is much broader than language. Knowledge has all the variety and complexity we expect from life forms with a long evolutionary history. Quite a bit of the anatomy of advanced organisms is devoted to epistemic aims–the eyes, the ears, the nose, the sense of touch, memory, thought, and so on.
Knowledge is not a negligible adaptation. Yet it must have comparatively simple origins. It didn’t arise when a human woke up one bright morning and felt a love of wisdom in his bosom. It arose from primitive swampy creatures trying to survive another day.
Knowledge, like life in general, is a struggle with obstacles. Survival isn’t easy, and nor is knowledge. In both there are obstacles to be overcome, resistance and recalcitrance to be fought, battles to win or lose. Knowledge is hard: you know it don’t come easy. It’s a difficult task. Those books about the history of science draw this lesson repeatedly—it wasn’t easy to figure out the structure of the solar system or the laws of genetics. But that is part of the very nature of knowledge as an evolved capacity—the struggle to be informed. The organism needs to know if it is in danger, so pain came along; we would like to know whether the Earth is the center of the universe, so astronomy was invented. Knowing is the overcoming of obstacles, like the rest of evolved life. Knowledge was born in pain and struggle. It is not for the fainthearted. This is epistemology naturalized.
Spontaneously at any given moment, I cry out loud when I think about Max or something that reminds me of him or for no reason at all except breathing life in and out without him...
I don't care about a moron who cannot do a single push up or pull up but can tight lipped and call themselves a macho. This is another reason culture is dangerous. People follow what their dad did or some dude did without proper reflection. Neuroscience as we know - emotions and reasoning are combined with zillion other pieces for not only every decision we make or not make but just plain living everyday as a normal living being. If a moron is shutting down emotions it is similar to walking naked all the time. It is not civilized, period.
In recent years, the psychologist Ronald Levant has popularized the notion of “normative male alexithymia.” Alexithymia is the inability to recognize emotions (etymologically, it means lacking the words for feelings), and Levant argues that as boys are taught to repress their emotions for fear of seeming feminine, they lose the ability to identify them. Some research reveals that, at and before age 1, boys are more outwardly emotional than girls, but by age 2 they are less verbally expressive, and by 4 they are less facially expressive. By adolescence, the one emotion boys felt permitted to openly express was anger.
I have high respect for men who I know have cried, and I reach out to them on my own. Well, crying is not only the emotion I gauge but men who show normal emotions without any filters. Those are the men I will be friends with for life.
Since Max was a puppy, I have heard this reasoning when something bad happens - "Hey, this always happens; everywhere."
That drove me nuts. I phrased a term for this - "consoling the conscience."
Then I reminded myself of this Adam Smith quote from his least read book Theory of Moral Sentiments (remember, he wrote only two books):
If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.
People don't give a flying fuck about anything else other than themselves and their families but yet, what they love depends completely outside of that circle.
I would calm myself, and go play frisbee with Max. Max made a freaking little better living being. He was wiser than I will ever be.
I was barely out of my teens when Manmohan Singh and Narsihma Rao changed the destiny of India.
Of-course I have no idea on the profound implications of their wisdom. All I saw was Coke and Pepsi was available in India and Aamir Khan's Pepsi ad's were phenomenal.
And then my prefrontal cortex developed a little. Slowly, I understood their wisdom. I started developing not only gratitude but tremendous wisdom not only for their actions but they were able to pull this off in a country like India.
Then I read Margaret Mead's wise sentence:
Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.
What happened in India during 1991 was a ridiculous minority of three people (Green revolution happened because of Norman Borlaugh and most Indians don't know his name - god bless my species).
(Hey a good human from the future: If you are reading this after I am long gone - don't give up animals.
Keep up your good work. Change will come.
Love from Max and I will always be there for you.
Remember no one will remember you but that is the ultimate victory for you. Why would you want these fucked up being to remember you?
You will be one of those longest hours in the "Deep Time" when billions don't even make it micro-milli-second.)
The real reasons for the forgetting are deeper. And they’re not unique to India—they’re human. Which makes them harder to fix.
This is the deepest explanation, and it’s not Indian—it’s universal. It’s baked into how human memory works.
You cannot feel gratitude for something that didn’t happen.
The 1991 reforms prevented:
- Soviet-style economic collapse (remember what happened to Russia in the 1990s?)
- Possible mass famine (India was weeks from being unable to import food).
- Political fragmentation of a nuclear-armed state (India could have Balkanized).
- A generation of deeper poverty (another decade of 3.5% growth would have been catastrophic).
- The humiliation of permanent dependency on foreign aid.
- The brain drain accelerating until no one capable was left.
But because these didn’t happen, they’re not real to anyone. You can’t photograph the famine that didn’t occur. You can’t interview the refugees from the civil war that wasn’t fought. You can’t quantify the poverty that wasn’t endured.
The plane that didn’t crash. You don’t celebrate the engineer who prevented the disaster. You can’t point to a specific moment and say “there—that’s what they saved us from.” The counterfactual doesn’t have photographs. It doesn’t have victims whose stories can be told. It doesn’t have monuments or memorial days. It’s just... absence. An empty space where catastrophe would have been.
This isn’t an Indian problem. Americans don’t celebrate whoever prevented the 2008 financial crisis from becoming Great Depression II—assuming anyone did, assuming it wasn’t just luck. They barely remember Paul Volcker taming inflation in the 1980s—an achievement that made possible two decades of American prosperity. They’ve already forgotten the pandemic response that prevented millions more deaths. This is how human memory works. We remember disasters. We forget the people who prevented them.
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Here’s an irony: the reforms succeeded so completely that they became consensus.
Every government since 1991 has continued them:
- BJP under Vajpayee: accelerated privatization
- Congress under Singh: continued liberalization
- BJP under Modi: GST, Make in India, further opening
When policy becomes consensus, it stops being anyone’s achievement. It’s just... what we do now. The way things are.
Nobody campaigns on “I will continue the reforms of 1991.” They campaign on what comes next. The foundation becomes invisible because everyone builds on it.
Success erased the memory of who created it.
Indian mythology celebrates:
- Suffering: Ram’s fourteen-year exile, the Pandavas’ humiliation
- Dramatic confrontation: Arjuna’s crisis on the battlefield
What does this template not include? Competent technocrats who quietly solved problems and went home.
Singh didn’t suffer publicly. Rao didn’t sacrifice visibly. Ahluwalia just... did his job well. They made it look easy. They didn’t create drama. They prevented drama—which is the opposite of what heroes do in Indian narratives.
They don’t fit the heroic template. In India, that’s not a hero. That’s a bureaucrat.
There’s a deeper cultural explanation, and it connects everything.
The successful prevention of catastrophe is the most thankless achievement in human history.
Rao, Singh, and Ahluwalia prevented a disaster. They did it so well that the disaster became unimaginable. And the unimaginable cannot be remembered.
That’s why India forgot them.
And if you are thinking this is history - think again.
Its only because of steadfast minority refuses to live under totalitarianism that we don't live under totalitarianism. (via)
Whether an independent Fed is desirable is beside the point. The core issue is lawfare: the strategic use of legal processes to intimidate, constrain, and punish institutional actors for political ends. Lawfare is the hallmark of a failing state because it erodes not just political independence, but the capacity for independent judgment.
What sort of people will work at the whim of another? The inevitable result is toadies and ideological loyalists heading complex institutions, rather than people chosen for their knowledge and experience.
Another word I hate most is "Legacy". I know so many morons who talk about their legacy. These morons are people I know personally.
What freaking legacy? Just do the right thing. And if you do the right thing, there is high probability very few people will remember you and thank you. That is just a second order effect.
Our life is to do the right thing and stand up for truth. That should be a basic and decent categorical imperative.
Wow! Thats what I said out loud after I read first few lines. This is an unique and precious view into health which happens very rarely - unveiling the complexities of not just Parkinson's but life itself.
I had driven up to spend time with Jack, who has Parkinson’s disease, and his twin brother Jeff, who does not. Because they are identical twins with identical genomes, it may appear to be a mystery that only Jack is sick. Yet scientists have long known that genes alone cannot explain why some people get Parkinson’s and others don’t. While a handful of genetic mutations are linked to the disease, about 90 percent of cases of Parkinson’s are “sporadic,” meaning the disease does not run in the family. And twins, even identical twins, don’t usually get Parkinson’s in tandem. In one of the largest longitudinal twin studies of the disease, Swedish scientists reported in 2011 that of 542 pairs in which at least one twin had Parkinson’s, the majority were “discordant,” meaning that the second twin was unaffected. The discordance rate was higher for fraternal twins, who are no more alike genetically than any two siblings. But even identical twins had a discordance rate of 89 percent.
So if genes don’t explain most cases, how about the environment? Several environmental factors have been linked to Parkinson’s, which has been shown to occur at higher-than-expected rates in, for instance, people who were prisoners of war in World War II. There is also a higher rate in people who live on farms or who drink well water, probably because of exposure to certain pesticides.
But the environmental connection is precisely what makes Jack and Jeff so interesting. For almost all of their 68 years, they have lived no more than half a mile apart. They have been exposed to the same air, the same well water, the same dusty farm chores, the same pesticides. They built their homes a five-minute walk from each other, on two plots of their father’s 132-acre farm in eastern Pennsylvania. And since 1971 they have worked in the same office, their desks pushed together, at a graphic design firm they co-own. All this makes their particular discordancy tougher to explain.
The existence of a pair of twins with identical DNA and nearly identical environments in which only one is sick—that’s a researcher’s bonanza. Whatever difference can be untangled in the twins’ physiology probably relates directly to the disease and its origins. The genome can be held constant; environmental toxins and other exposures can be held constant; what remains, researchers are left to think, might be an odd shift in a particular neural pathway that has a relevant function all its own.
[---]
It’s where those parallel lives diverge, though, that might provide a lasting new insight. Beginning on the day in 1968 when Jack was drafted and Jeff was not, Jack suffered a series of shifts and setbacks that his brother managed to avoid: two years serving stateside in the military, an early marriage, two children in quick succession, a difficult divorce, and finally, in the biggest blow of all, the sudden death of his teenage son.
After these key divergences in their lives, Jack went on to develop not only Parkinson’s but two other diseases that Jeff was spared, glaucoma and prostate cancer. The twins place great stock in these divergences, believing they might explain their medical trajectories ever since. Scientists are trying to figure out whether they could be right.
[---]
Their lives diverged between the ages of 18 and 25, tilting their paths off course just enough to remain, forever after, the tiniest bit askew. First they chose different colleges: Jeff went to Moravian College in Bethlehem, about an hour from home; Jack went further away, to Syracuse University. They both reported to the draft board in 1968, but only Jack passed the physical. Jeff, who had had a childhood infection that left him nearly deaf in one ear, was classified 4-F.
[---]
The beauty of stem cell cultures is that they behave in the dish similarly to how they would in the body. That’s what happened in this case. The mid-brain dopaminergic neurons grown from Jack’s cells produced abnormally low amounts of dopamine. The Jeff-derived culture produced normal amounts.
But here was the first surprise: Even though Jeff showed no clinical signs of Parkinson’s or any other neurological disease, the Jeff-derived culture was not exactly normal. Both twins, it turned out, had a mutation on a gene called GBA (a mutation already known to be associated with Parkinson’s disease), and as a result, both of their brain cell cultures produced just half the normal amount of an enzyme linked to that gene, beta-glucocerebrosidase. They also both produced three times the normal level of alpha-synuclein, a brain protein usually broken down by a process involving the GBA enzyme. Alpha-synuclein is thought to be related to Parkinson’s, possibly by leading to the formation of the toxic lesions known as Lewy bodies that are a hallmark of the disease.
So rather than answering questions about the twins’ discordance, these findings only raised more. Jeff had the same Parkinson’s mutation his brother had, and his brain cells in culture behaved just as abnormally in relation to the GBA enzyme and alpha-synuclein. Yet he apparently has been spared. It was a puzzle. The scientists hoped the answer existed somewhere in those two Petri dishes.
[---]
To the twins, the “pressure cooker” way Jack dealt with stress, most grievously the loss of Gabe, helps explain Jack’s added health burden today: the Parkinson’s, the glaucoma, the prostate cancer. Jeff said those might be “physical manifestations” of the different ways they handled stress. “Jack internalizes more than I do,” he said.
The connection between stress and disease is a lively research topic, as scientists discover how life experiences alter gene expression and contribute to diseases ranging from diabetes to the common cold. But while statements about the “gene-environment interaction” have become a familiar trope, the twins’ story offers a different way to look at it. Traditionally, “environment” is defined as external events that occur over a lifetime, or the impact of those events at the molecular level, which is in the realm of epigenetics. According to Steve Cole, a professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine, the relevant aspect of “environment” in terms of the twins might be something more interior and personal. Cole is interested in “the environment we create in our heads”—not what literally happens, but how the individual experiences what happens. “That is the most interesting aspect of the story of the twins,” he told me recently. “Their experiential environments.”
[---]
For now, when they try to explain their divergent medical histories, the twins return to the tyranny of small differences: Jack’s more introverted personality, rockier life, quieter grieving style. In this belief they tap into the suspicions of a small cadre of neuroscientists trying to pinpoint the connection between stress and neurodegeneration. Maybe the twins are on to something the scientists are on the verge of identifying. Or maybe the brothers who have been all but inseparable are trying to protect themselves from the cruel realization that fate can unspool in dissonant ways.
And from here on, when we talk about “faith,” we’re using Kierkegaard’s meaning — not belief in a doctrine, but the inner stance required to live with unanswered questions.
If that sounds narrowly religious, it’s a misread.
Kierkegaard is describing a stance that shows up wherever people have to act without guarantees: in innovation, in design, in leadership, and many other forms of work.
This pandemic is not just related to religion but also has spread into politics, nationality, culture and even sports, to personal preference of a goddam LLM.
Wise minds observed how humans embrace this pandemic with wide arms - this is a timeless trait of humans. These priceless observations from one such wise mind:
People were comfortable with answers being given to them before questions were even asked. Faith was spoken about constantly, often with confidence, but this confidence felt rehearsed. Kierkegaard couldn’t tell if people ever wrestled with or questioned their beliefs.
Eventually, he realized there was nothing to question. The system had already done the hard part. The role of the individual was to nod in agreement. This created a kind of harmony, but a shallow one… a collective certainty that never had to prove itself against anything real.
As he grew older, Kierkegaard saw how quickly certainty had replaced belief. Whenever a group becomes too sure of itself, it stops producing individuals capable of doing the inward work that faith requires. People learn to perform conviction rather than develop it. Say something often enough and you can skip the part where you understand (or question) it.
He noticed another pattern: People spoke confidently about truths they had never encountered firsthand, truths they had never risked anything to understand. And inherited certainty revealed an uncomfortable vulnerability: Once you depend on a system to hand you your conclusions, you tend to move as the system moves… and you move with confidence.
Kierkegaard wasn’t worried about disbelief. He wasn’t even worried about people changing their minds. His concern was unearned belief. Conviction without scrutiny and identity without introspection. The key here, is that the desire for certainty often poses as a strength, but usually signals the opposite:
A lack of faith.
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Systems (institutions) depend on predictability, and certainty delivers. It keeps people aligned, keeps roles stable, and keeps operations smooth enough that no one has to confront the inner workings. Churches, governments, workplaces, even families in their more rigid forms, all learn to reward conviction that doesn’t ask questions. Call it clarity or discipline or commitment, but the effect is the same: the more certainty people perform, the less individual they become.
This creates a loop that’s hard to break. People adopt certainty because it makes them feel secure. Institutions reinforce certainty because it makes people easier to manage. And the more those two forces reinforce each other, the more faith becomes something referenced rather than lived.
Unearned certainty has consequences. As it takes over, faith has nothing left to do. The questions don’t disappear, but people learn to avoid them. Individuals learn to shrink to fit the expectations of the system… and the system rewards the shrinking.
[---]
It’s a familiar pattern. You don’t have to comprehend the complexity. You only need to sound aligned with it. Certainty becomes a performance of being well-informed, and systems reward the performance because it keeps everything moving in one direction.
This creates a strange contradiction. We now have unprecedented access to the full picture, but we rarely use it. We reach for summaries, frameworks, pre-digested opinions, and the moral scaffolding provided by the groups we belong to. We inherit not just the conclusions, but the emotional stance that comes with them. We feel confident long before we comprehend anything.
Getting information hasn’t been the barrier. The part no system can automate for us is the effort needed to understand the full picture.
People stop wrestling with ideas because the system makes wrestling feel unnecessary. Certainty is faster. Certainty is cleaner. Certainty signals belonging.
The tragedy is this: certainty has never been easier to acquire, and understanding has never required more from us.
The best sentences I have read the entire year - on the last day of 2025.
This is extremely important to understand:
Everyone’s hyped about “AI for Science.” in 2025! At the end of the year, please allow me to share my unease and optimism, specifically about AI & biology.
After spending another year deep in biological foundation models, healthcare AI, and drug discovery, here are 3 lessons I learned in 2025.
1. Biology is not “just another modality.”
The biggest misconception I still see:
“Biology is text + images + graphs. Just scale transformers.”
No. Biology is causal, hierarchical, stochastic, and incomplete in ways that language and vision are not.
Tokens don’t correspond cleanly to reality.
Labels are sparse, biased, and often wrong.
Ground truth is conditional, context-dependent, and sometimes unknowable.
We’ve made real progress—single-cell, imaging, genomics, EHRs are finally being modeled jointly—but the hard truth is this:
Most biological signals are not supervised problems waiting for better loss functions.
They are intervention-driven problems. They demand perturbations, counterfactuals, and mechanisms, beyond just prediction.
Scaling obviously helps. But without causal structure, scaling mostly gives you sharper correlations.
2025 reinforced my belief that biological foundation models must be built around perturbation, uncertainty, and actionability, not just representation learning.
2. Benchmarks are holding biology back more than compute is.
Let’s be honest: Benchmarking in AI & biology is still broken.
Everyone reports SOTA. Everyone picks a different dataset slice.
Everyone tunes for a different metric. Everyone avoids prospective validation.
We’ve imported the worst habits of ML benchmarking into a domain where stakes are much higher. In biology and healthcare, a 1% gain that doesn’t transfer is worse than useless—it’s misleading.
What’s missing isn’t more benchmarks. It’s hard benchmarks:
•Prospective, not retrospective
•Perturbation-based, not static
•Multi-site, not single-lab
•Failure-aware, not leaderboard-optimized
If your model only works on the dataset that created it, it’s not a foundation model—it’s a dataset artifact.
In 2026, we need fewer flashy plots and more humility, rigor, and negative results.
3. “Reasoning” in biology is not chain-of-thought.
There’s a growing tendency to directly apply the word reasoning onto biological LLMs.
Let’s be careful.
Biological reasoning isn’t verbal fluency, longer context windows, or prettier explanations. Those are surface-level improvements. Real reasoning in biology shows up elsewhere: in forming hypotheses, deciding which experiments to run, updating beliefs when perturbations fail, and constantly trading off cost, risk, and uncertainty.
A model that explains a pathway beautifully but can’t decide which experiment to run next is not reasoning, it’s narrating.
2025 convinced me that the future lies in agentic biological AI:
systems that couple foundation models with experimentation, simulation, and decision-making loops.
Closing thought:
AI & biology is not lagging behind AI for code or language. It’s just playing a harder game.
The constraints are real. The data is messy. The feedback loops are slow. The consequences matter.
If 2025 clarified anything for me, it’s this:
We won’t make progress by treating biology like text. We’ll make progress by building AI that behaves more like a scientist : skeptical, iterative, and willing to be wrong.
I am writing these words while sitting in a comfortable chair in a comfortable 70 degree house. And, I suspect, you are too. Basically comfortable, that is. Physically. Maybe you’re a little cold, but not consumed by the screaming anguish of an icy ocean you cannot escape. Maybe stressed, but not asphyxiating.
It’s times like these I find it far too easy to ignore the most urgent, most serious, most fundamental problem in our world.
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I think there is one way in which we gain a more true understanding. During a time of suffering, this crevasse dissolves and our mental representation of the experience converges with the experience itself. It is then alone we might catch a glimpse of suffering’s otherwise-unthinkable urgency.
And yet this urgency prevents its very own recognition. When we ourselves undergo the worst, our minds and bodies scream in a deafening tone. We do not regard the urgency, the suffering itself, in abstract or conceptual terms. They are not things to be pondered; they are instead experienced directly without the mediating influence of words and symbols. During such a time, empathy is not merely impossible but unthinkable. This is not a character flaw; even the most altruistic among us does not think of others while she is drowning.
Nonetheless, it is tragic.
During the rare occasion during which we viscerally understand intense suffering, it can be challenging to take action to help others. And when, thank God, the agony subsides and our minds return from its all-consuming hell, again capable of empathy, the visceral sense of urgency has taken flight.
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There is no cosmic justice in suffering on behalf of others, but there is something like cosmic justice in acting to prevent and ameliorate the worst experiences in our world.
Factory farming seems a reasonable place to begin, but wild animals plausibly suffer in far greater numbers. Veganism, though morally commendable, is not the sole means by which to help; very few among us, including those who eat meat, actively want animals to suffer. Perhaps we might reduce suffering the most by complementing the question of personal dietary consumption with a focus on preventing the maiming and castration of farm animals without anesthesia, among other interventions.
Among our own species, let us rectify the critical shortage of pain relief in low-income countries. And let us stare the very worst conditions right in their face, though merely as a first step to their mitigation. Cluster headaches, akathisia, and locked-in syndrome come to mind. I will not provide links; you may search for them if you wish. The elimination of these and similar conditions may be one of the most morally urgent issues that we face.
There is nothing beautiful or poetic about pain or agony. The world is not just. There is no virtue, no hidden meaning to be found. And I hope that my words might help to reduce the worst among it.
The meditation of life is the ability to understand the self-evidence of current matters before it becomes self-evident to the masses years or worse decades from now.
In order for something to be self-evident, stick to fundamentals for everything. If humanity lacks fundamental knowledge then it's not a self-evident candidate.
Dan Wang 2025 letter as usual is full of insights plus its funny when he pokes at Paypal mafia morons.
Narrowness of mind is something that makes me uneasy about the tech world. Effective altruists, for example, began with sound ideas like concern for animal welfare as well as cost-benefit analyses for charitable giving. But these solid premises have launched some of its members towards intellectual worlds very distant from moral intuitions that most people hold; they’ve also sent a few into jail. The well-rounded type might struggle to stand out relative to people who are exceptionally talented in a technical domain. Hedge fund managers have views about the price of oil, interest rates, a reliably obscure historical episode, and a thousand other things. Tech titans more obsessively pursue a few ideas — as Elon Musk has on electric vehicles and space launches — rather than developing a robust model of the world.
So the 20-year-olds who accompanied Mr. Musk into the Department of Government Efficiency did not, I would say, distinguish themselves with their judiciousness. The Bay Area has all sorts of autistic tendencies. Though Silicon Valley values the ability to move fast, the rest of society has paid more attention to instances in which tech wants to break things. It is not surprising that hardcore contingents on both the left and the right have developed hostility to most everything that emerges from Silicon Valley.
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One of the things I like about the finance industry is that it might be better at encouraging diverse opinions. Portfolio managers want to be right on average, but everyone is wrong three times a day before breakfast. So they relentlessly seek new information sources; consensus is rare, since there are always contrarians betting against the rest of the market. Tech cares less for dissent. Its movements are more herdlike, in which companies and startups chase one big technology at a time. Startups don’t need dissent; they want workers who can grind until the network effects kick in. VCs don’t like dissent, showing again and again that many have thin skins. That contributes to a culture I think of as Silicon Valley’s soft Leninism. When political winds shift, most people fall in line, most prominently this year as many tech voices embraced the right.
The two most insular cities I’ve lived in are San Francisco and Beijing. They are places where people are willing to risk apocalypse every day in order to reach utopia. Though Beijing is open only to a narrow slice of newcomers — the young, smart, and Han — its elites must think about the rest of the country and the rest of the world. San Francisco is more open, but when people move there, they stop thinking about the world at large. Tech folks may be the worst-traveled segment of American elites. People stop themselves from leaving in part because they can correctly claim to live in one of the most naturally beautiful corners of the world, in part because they feel they should not tear themselves away from inventing the future. More than any other topic, I’m bewildered by the way that Silicon Valley talks about AI.
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It’s easy for conversations in San Francisco to collapse into AI. At a party, someone told me that we no longer have to worry about the future of manufacturing. Why not? “Because AI will solve it for us.” At another, I heard someone say the same thing about climate change. One of the questions I receive most frequently anywhere is when Beijing intends to seize Taiwan. But only in San Francisco do people insist that Beijing wants Taiwan for its production of AI chips. In vain do I protest that there are historical and geopolitical reasons motivating the desire, that chip fabs cannot be violently seized, and anyway that Beijing has coveted Taiwan for approximately seven decades before people were talking about AI.
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By being the site of production, they have a keen sense of how to make technical improvements all the time. American scientists may be world leaders in dreaming up new ideas. But American manufacturers have been poor at building industries around these ideas. The history books point out that Bell Labs invented the first solar cell in 1957; today, the lab no longer exists while the solar industry moved to Germany and then to China. While Chinese universities have grown more capable at producing new ideas, it’s not clear that the American manufacturing base has grown stronger at commercializing new inventions.
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So here’s a potential way that China succeeds. Beijing’s goal is to make nearly every important product in the world, while everyone else supplies its commodities and services. By making the country mostly self-sufficient, and by vigorously policing the outputs of LLMs and social media, Xi might hope to make China resilient. He is building Fortress China stone by stone in order to outlast the adversary. Beijing doesn’t have to replicate American diplomatic, cultural, and financial superpowerdom. It might hope that its prowess in advanced manufacturing might deter the US. And its success in manufacturing might directly destabilize the US: by delivering the coup de grace to the rustbelt, the US might shed a few million more manufacturing jobs over the next decade. The job losses combined with AI psychosis, social media, and all the problems with phones could make national politics meaningfully worse.
I don’t think this scenario is likely to be successful. Authoritarian systems have always hoped for the implosion of liberal democracies, while it is the liberal democracies that have a better track record of endurance. But I also don’t think that authoritarian countries are obviously wrong to bet that western polarization will get worse. So it’s up to the US and Europe to show that they can hold on to their values while absorbing the technological changes coming their way.
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I wish that the tech world could learn to present broader cultural appeal. I hope that Silicon Valley could learn some of the humorousness of New York (or at least LA.) It’s unfortunate that any show or movie made about Silicon Valley is full of awkward nerds; by contrast, Hollywood reliably finds attractive leads when it makes movies about Wall Street. So long as the tech world is talking about the Machine God and the Antichrist, so long as it declines to read more broadly, so long as it is mostly inward looking, it will continue to alienate big parts of the world.
There’s a good likelihood that by 2050, all scientific research will be done by superintelligent AI rather than human researchers. Some humans might do science as a hobby, but they wouldn’t be making any useful contributions.
I am not a fan of the word ... well I hate the word intellectual.
I prefer more grounded in reality; phrases such as a good living being or not being dead while still physically alive or simply the word "life".
This is a well written beautiful piece (and I didn't know 95% of all Wikipedia articles led to philosophy):
Conway’s Game of Life is an example of emergence and self-organisation.
When we surround ourselves with abundant, diverse ideas, complex ideas emerge. These ideas are unique and do not resemble the ideas from which they emerged.
Even if the initial set of ideas seem simple and disconnected, spontaneous order can emerge, leading to brilliant ideas.
Emergence and self-organisation are all around us. In the sciences, society, art and in nature.
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Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem.
That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.
We all need to come down from our peaks. For us to truly learn something, we need to abandon our views about it. Because the act of coming down from the peak forces us to do three things
Understand the limits of our thinking: As we come down, and shed our views, we start seeing our field of knowledge more objectively, and understand that there are limits to our thinking, even though we are experts.
Open space for contemplation: Once we come down, and make our way to another peak, we start walking, which opens the space for contemplation.
Isolate ourselves from our ego: Once we have stripped ourselves of our views, and contemplated, we isolate ourselves from our Ego. This act of isolation humbles us, makes us realise our follies and helps us see illusions we have lived under.
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Here is how you could do it
Define 1-2 areas you’d want to learn about. Something you have been genuinely curious about, ideally for a long time.
Ask EVERYONE you know - Hey, I am interested in learning about Y. Do you know someone who knows a lot about Y?
Once you find a connection, ask for a warm introduction. I can almost guarantee you, the expert will be happy to give you their time.
Ask thoughtful questions. Don’t expect them to explain things to you, but ask them to point you to resources, or craft a learning path with them.
Put in the hours, immerse yourself in the resources and update them about the progress you have made and the things you have learnt.
This in turn will start a conversation.
Repeat 1 - 6 for the rest of your life.
And what will happen?
You have kickstarted your own version of ‘The Game of Life’. Remember, the Game of Life has only one variable: The starting point. You now have not just ideas from your field, but ideas from fields you know nothing about. You will now see ‘emergence’ in action.
