Links 5/5
Two of these are about spirituality, not that you're keeping track...
A fake skin condition called bixonimania, seeded by Almira Osmanovic Thunström into two preprints in spring 2024, was cited as real by Bing, Gemini, Perplexity, and ChatGPT within weeks. This is a great example of why we need some kind of real grounded layer of scientific evidence. Relying on the foundation models by themselves to know what’s real doesn’t work. Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real — Chris Stokel-Walker
L.M. Sacasas’s piece provides a very compelling metaphor for the way social media affects our minds: digital platforms are doing to inner life what land enclosure did to the commons — turning the psyche into a resource to be managed and extracted. “Resist the enclosure of the human psyche.” Our attention is our most valuable resource. The Enclosure of the Human Psyche — L.M. Sacasas
Evan Erickson on a failure mode in opening-awareness meditation: if your basic orientation toward experience is one of pushing-away rather than welcoming, the whole practice quietly becomes a more refined form of avoidance. In other words “remain uninvolved” as a meditation instruction can lead to a kind of bypassing. Unlearning Default Awayness — Evan Erickson