August 2025 Linkpost

When even Stone Age families couldn’t agree on dinner plans, things got a little too literal—talk about ultimate family elimination.

Philosophy & Human Nature

Why God Picked France for a Teenage General (nytimes.com)
Ross Douthat dives into the wild improbability of Joan of Arc—a peasant teen with zero military chops—who shows up claiming divine voices, rallies the French court, and flips the Hundred Years’ War like it’s no big deal. Drawing from a sharp review of the evidence, he tallies 115 witnesses to her “miracles,” from prophecy fulfillments that demanded instant battlefield genius to a trial performance so slick it screams supernatural backup. Key takeaway: her story nukes easy skepticism, as no rationalist can wave away how one girl rewrote European history without some cosmic nudge. I would note that while the “why France?” theories range from mercy on war-torn peasants to prepping the Reformation stage, it’s the sheer documentation—late medieval paperwork on steroids—that makes her sainthood feel less like legend and more like a historical glitch. Shared this after chatting about her as a rare case with actual evidence trails, not just hagiography; turns out, even skeptics end up quoting, “Okay, have 115 witnesses to miracles… Now, what were you saying about not being a Christian?”

Crowdsourcing a Weird Wedding (or Baby Daddy) (aella.substack.com)
Aella lays it all out: drop her a recommendation for a polyamorous, “ominously sexual” Bay Area guy in her wealth bracket who digs kids, and pocket $100k if she says “I do”—or score $300k by lining up a $10M benefactor to impregnate her via screened frozen eggs (she’s got 67 banked) for solo mom duties. It’s raw math on modern mating: her “date-me” survey snagged a four-year partner before, filtering for that tiny 3% overlap of traits like self-acceptance and high-status thrill without the auto-catch vibe. She admits it’s low-status to bounty-hunt romance, but hey, efficiency over ego—plus, it weeds for folks who get her earnest weirdness. A pal tossed this my way amid gripes about anti-America vibes and job hunts, and I’d say it nails how we’re all crowdsourcing life now, just with bigger checks; imagine retrofitting that for Joan of Arc’s era.

Academic Research & Science

Suddenly, Shopping for Smarter Embryos (astralcodexten.com)
Scott Alexander unpacks the polygenic revolution hitting IVF: companies like Genomic Prediction and Herasight now rank embryos on health scores pulling from millions of genomes, slashing risks for stuff like Type 2 diabetes (up to 12% absolute drop) or breast cancer (46% relative) across 5-20 embryo batches. Herasight’s edge? Within-family validation on 16/17 diseases shows no accuracy dip, plus an IQ booster of 6-9 points—think closing income gaps via better-optimized genes, backed by studies explaining a few percent of trait variance without the usual population biases tanking predictions. Methodology’s solid: train on adult data, holdout-test, then apply to sibs for real-world punch, though caveats like antagonistic pleiotropy (lung cancer genes hiking leukemia odds) keep it humble. Implications? Massive for longevity (1-4 extra healthy years) and equity—if costs crash from today’s $100 sequencing to universal access. I would point out this feels like antibiotics 2.0 for humanity, but with ethical tripwires like race gaps (47% diabetes win for Europeans vs. 29% Africans); shared it while musing on public nudity and national treasures, because why not layer biotech ethics on casual chats?

Stone Age Family Feast Gone Wrong (livescience.com)
At Spain’s El Mirador cave, archaeologists pieced together a grim snapshot: 11 locals (infants to elders, spanning a nuclear family) slaughtered, skinned, boiled, and munched in a frenzy around 5,600 years ago—hundreds of fragments with cut marks, bite indents, and percussion cracks for marrow pulls, all dated tight (5,709-5,573 years old) via radiocarbon, confirming they hailed from nearby farms. No famine vibes or ritual flair; chemical traces peg it as quick-hit violence between Neolithic neighbors, per co-author Francesc Marginedas: “This was… the result of conflict,” not some cultural norm. Broader read: even tiny foraging-to-farming bands weren’t all kumbaya—war cannibalism as “ultimate elimination,” echoing ethnographic tales of enemy-munching to assert dominance. I would highlight how the infant femur’s bash marks hit hard, underscoring that human nastiness predates swords; flagged this amid talks on cultural anxiety in Albion’s Seed, because nothing says “original immigrants” like realizing our ancestors were the ultimate “others.”

Technology & Society

Humans’ Dirty Secret: We Crave AI Slop (threadreaderapp.com)
Rohit Krishnan’s thread roasts our tastebuds for junk: a Nature study blind-tested poems, and AI slop not only passed as human but topped ratings on wit and everything else—indistinguishable, yet preferred, like fast food edging Michelin if you can’t spot the diff without a snobby panel. He pins it blunt: “The real underlying problem is that humans just absolutely love slop,” crediting Colin Fraser for the dig. No deep methodology dive, but the attached chart screams universal thumbs-up for bot verse. Ties into bigger AI creep: if we lap up synthetic schlock now, what’s left for “authentic” creativity? A buddy linked this while we chewed on Trump’s Caucasus deal (sick, right?) and immigrant angst—fitting, since it mirrors how we romanticize “real” culture while bingeing the fake.

Moonshot for an AI Lab Rat (futurehouse.org)
FutureHouse is gunning to automate science itself: layer up from predictive tools (AlphaFold-style) and workflow bots (protein design, lit scans) to a full AI Scientist that quests big—like decoding brain wiring or gene-zapping any cell—via endless hypothesis loops, experiments, and paper drafts. Philanthropy-fueled, their 10-year bet is on world models that self-update, turning “cure disease” prompts into solo breakthroughs for climate fixes too. No team deets, but the philosophy’s clear: stack human quests on AI grunt work to 10x discovery speed. Someone in the crew hyped this as a fair-bit upgrade on biomed toys, right before groans about slow AI takeovers at work—resonates, since it’d finally let us offload the tedious quests while chasing wilder ones.

AI Sidekick for Gene Hunts (biomcp.org)
BioMCP’s your natural-language bridge to biomed goldmines: pipe queries into PubMed (30M+ papers with entity tags), ClinicalTrials.gov (400K trials), variant annotators, and cancer portals, spitting structured hits with synonym smarts and cross-links—like “BRAF V600E in melanoma” pulling tailored articles or local trials within 50 miles. Twenty-four tools for sequential brainstorms, streaming replies, and context carryover, all Claude-pluggable or CLI-scriptable (pip install and query TP53 genes in seconds). Use cases? Lit reviews, variant calls, drug digs—efficiency hacks for researchers dodging database hell. A colleague dropped this amid laughs over GPT-5 teases and job replacement fears; spot-on for when AI’s “coming 4u,” turning biomed slogs into chatty wins without the install hassle.

Politics & Current Events (2025)

Old Folks Running the Show—Everywhere (slowboring.com)
Ben Krauss maps the gray wave: Biden’s 78, Congress’s 25% over-70, judiciary median at 69— but it’s not just pols; CEOs past 65 tank firm value 0.3% yearly (per 17K-firm study), academics’ output fades post-middle-age, and culture’s stalled too, with over-65 workers up 33% in a decade while under-35 pay lags 61% behind since ‘79. Data screams incumbency bias: richest dudes tack 0.2 life-years annually, hogging slots and stifling youth dynamism, from Biden gaffes to Feinstein’s fade-out eroding trust. Fixes? Ditch tenure, fund young scientists even, make races competitive—though age caps feel undemocratic. I would observe this hits close after Joan chats, since divine picks aside, our elites’ wrinkle factor might just be the real historical drag; surfaced it pre-saint talk, tying into why even medieval miracles feel fresher than today’s geronto-gridlock.