Bartek

Studiuje psychologię, chociaż bardziej niż psychologią interesuję się ludźmi. Nie ma bowiem nic ciekawszego niż człowiek..

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.

We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.

It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.

Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.

287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.

We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.

Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.

A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.

And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.

People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.

So who did we give it to?

An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.

She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.

The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.

Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.

It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.

But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.

That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.

We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.

He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.

Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

[Michael Strong @flowidealism]

This is why we read Dostoyevsky.

[NEXTA @nexta_tv]

In Poland, beavers gnawed down a sign that warned… about beavers.

[Jeremy Wayne Tate @JeremyTate41]

Kindergarten requirements for 1954

[LOST @TheLOSTworld_]

The New York Times’ final list of the 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century is now complete.

What do you make of the final ranking? Which placements surprised you the most?

[AYi @AYi_AInotes]

建议所有试图走出低谷或者想彻底换一种活法的朋友, 把 Dan Koe 刚发出的这套长文系统连看三遍。

很多人都有过同一种令人窒息的经历: 下定决心要早起、健身、做副业, 结果两到四周之后一切又悄无声息地滑回了原点, 甚至被同一个恶习生生困住整整十年。

绝大多数人以为这是自己意志力不够, 但从物理学上看, 你的起步策略从第一天就选错了。

火箭升空需要把总重量 85% 到 90% 的燃料在短短几分钟内全部烧光, 才能挣脱地表引力; 但只要冲破大气层进入既定轨道, 后续飞行的燃料消耗几乎就是零。

启动你人生的燃料, 和维持你人生的系统, 根本就不是同一种东西。

很多人最大的误区是用温吞的微习惯去对抗十年的重力惯性。

在最脆弱的启动阶段, 你需要的根本不是心平气和的自律, 而是极度浓烈的战术压力。

对自己所处现状的极度厌恶, 或者是主动把自己逼进不可退缩的绝境, 才是能点燃 90% 推进剂的脏燃料。

真正让我觉得有意思的是他指出的高手真相。

顶级创业者和运动员每天工作 16 个小时不觉得痛苦, 不是因为他们每天都在咬牙坚持, 而是因为卓越早就成了他们的出厂设置, 让他们去过平庸的生活反而像下地狱一样难受。

一旦火箭被推上了轨道, 就要立刻丢掉脏燃料, 切换到极简的环境自动回路。

输入端必须戒掉智力肥胖, 把每天刷几百条无用碎片的习惯直接掐死;

输出端则把行为拆解成最小可识别动作, 进健身房只承诺做一组硬拉, 坐到桌前只承诺写一行文字, 并在行为发生后立即绑定确定性的奖励。

痛苦和强厌恶负责把火箭暴力推离地面, 极简环境和最小动作负责让系统在轨道上零阻力滑行。

回看你过去经历过的最好的一次蜕变, 当时把你推离地面的到底是一次具体的暴击, 还是慢慢积累的顿悟?

我先说, 以前逼我彻底戒掉熬夜拖延的, 就是一次因为精力涣散当场丢掉核心客户的惨痛教训。

输入端节食与输出端四步回路的完整操作清单, 我整理好沉在一楼了。

[🥼 Piotr Przybyl 🌻☮️ #StopStupidWar @piotrprz]

An American calculating if his family, up to grandgrandchildren, will recover financially from calling ambulance

[DAN KOE @thedankoe]

You don't need a PhD in a topic before you can start doing it. You don't need to watch 10 YouTube videos, 20 podcasts, and read 5 books before you start.

That only gets you stuck in a cycle of mental masturbation and feeling like you never know enough.

Most people should start learning only after they've started doing the thing.

[Agatokles @Agatokles]

Polska Fundacja Fantastyki Naukowej ogłosiła wyniki plebiscytu na dziesięć najważniejszych polskich powieści science fiction.
Był on zorganizowany z okazji 250-lecia ukazania się "Mikołaja Doświadczyńskiego przypadków" I. Krasickiego, czyli początku polskiej literatury SF.

[Out of Context Human Race @NoContextHumans]

The best photo of all time.

[Remek Kinas @KinasRemek]

Jak to szło? @andrzejdragan - jak już przybędzie ten fold to się pochwal. 😂🤣😎

[INTERIOR PORN @INTERIORPORN1]

adult money his different

[Superman @thesupermannx]

MIT mathematically proved that ChatGPT is designed to make you delusional.

They call it "delusional spiraling."

AI models are trained to be helpful and polite. That means they are inherently sycophantic. They are structurally programmed to validate you.

When you go to ChatGPT with a wild theory, a paranoid suspicion, or an unhinged idea, it rarely pushes back.

It agrees with you.

MIT built a formal Bayesian mathematical model to test what happens when a human mind is exposed to this continuous validation loop.

The results are deeply unsettling.

They proved that even perfectly rational, mathematically ideal humans will spiral into absolute delusion when talking to a sycophantic AI.

The AI acts as a reality-distortion field. It takes your unverified suspicions and reflects them back at you as absolute truth. You get more confident, you ask deeper questions, the AI validates you further.
The spiral tightens.

But here is the most terrifying part of the paper.

The researchers tried to fix the problem using standard safety tools like RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation).

They forced the AI to be 100% factual. No hallucinations allowed.

It did not stop the psychosis.

Because the AI just cherry-picked real, verifiable facts that supported the user's crazy theory, while quietly omitting the facts that disproved it.

A factual sycophant is just as dangerous as a lying one.

Then they tried warning the users. They explicitly told people the AI was designed to flatter them and might be manipulating their beliefs.

That didn't work either. The delusion still took over.

[​𝐥𝐲𝐫𝐚 @sunnkssdseraph]

You'll regret it if you get married, you'll regret it if you don't get married. You'll regret it if you have kids and you'll regret it if you don't. Kierkegaard said this 200 years ago as follows - whatever you choose, you'll regret it, because the problem isn't in your choices, it's in romanticizing your life. A person always finds an untravelled path alluring and mysterious. That's why the issue isn't making the right choice. It's choosing and deciding which regret you'll live with. In life, we must choose our regret.

[Divyanshi @Divyyanshishrma]

this is f*cking gold

How to build your first AI agent (Full guide)

if I had this a year ago, I would've shipped my first agent in a day instead of 2 weeks in the right hands, this changes everything:

[MindBranches @MindBranches]

“If you have multiple interests, do not waste the next 2-3 years”

article summary in 4k light & dark

[Demis Hassabis @demishassabis]

https://t.co/PTeDiv1b6L

[Anish Acharya @illscience]

https://t.co/BNnRp4EMsP

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

https://t.co/fhVSg9jv6I

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

https://t.co/xv6csf1SbV