A third transition in science and the evolving cosmos

Kauffman SA, Roli A. (2023) A third transition in science? Interface Focus 13: 20220063. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2022.0063

Abstract: Since Newton, classical and quantum physics depend upon the‘Newtonian paradigm’. The relevant variables of the system are identified. For example, we identify the position and momentum of classical particles. Laws of motion in differential form connecting the variables are formulated. An example is Newton’s three laws of motion. The boundary conditions creating the phase space of all possible values of the variables are defined. Then, given any initial condition, the differential equations of motion are integrated to yield an entailed trajectory in the prestated phase space. It is fundamental to the Newtonian paradigm that the set of possibilities that constitute the phase space is always definable and fixed ahead of time. This fails for the diachronic evolution of ever-new adaptations in any biosphere. Living cells achieve constraint closure and construct themselves. Thus, living cells, evolving via heritable variation and natural selection, adaptively construct new-in-the-universe possibilities. We can neither define nor deduce the evolving phase space: we can use no mathematics based on set theory to do so. We cannot write or solve differential equations for the diachronic evolution of ever-new adaptations in a biosphere. Evolving biospheres are outside the Newtonian paradigm. There can be no theory of everything that entails all that comes to exist. We face a third major transition in science beyond the Pythagorean dream that‘all is number’ echoed by Newtonian physics. However, we begin to understand the emergent creativity of an evolving biosphere: emergence is not engineering.

* * * * *

Eli Stark-Elster, Earth’s Organisms Developed Via Evolution. Some Theorists Wonder: What if the Entire Cosmos Did, Too? Smithsonian Magazine, August 18, 2026.

Historically, scientists have viewed the cosmos as akin to a rock—complex, perhaps even beautiful, but formed through arbitrary events. Evolutionary cosmologists instead argue that universes, like living organisms, grow and reproduce, spinning off new universes with small variations from their progenitors. In doing so, these cosmic offspring are refined across generations into forms that maximize the number of universes yet to be born. Since the Big Bang, our universe, like any developing child, has been unfurling into an optimal shape.

Under this view, the universe is not a rock. It is an egg.

This analogy comes from Julian Gough, an Irish poet, novelist and musician best known for writing the short story that plays at the end of the video game “Minecraft.” He has recently become a public advocate for and scholar of cosmological evolution. Gough writes a Substack blog, The Egg and the Rock, where he publishes essays, personal updates and predictions about new data from the James Webb Space Telescope.

Over a decade ago, Gough began wrestling with the question of why the complexity of our universe has increased over time. “It goes from … a ball of hot gas to building out structures like stars and galaxies,” he says. From there come planets and, on at least one of them, biological life. “That’s a very strange thing for hot gas to do.”

Maybe, he wondered, the universe evolved into its current form. “It seemed to me an evolutionary explanation was the natural one,” he says. “In every sphere, when we discover a self-ordering, self-complexifying system, it turns out it’s had a previous evolutionary history. And why would that not apply to the universe itself?” [...]

Smolin published his ideas in a 1992 paper titled “Did the Universe Evolve?” as well as a 1997 popular-science book called The Life of the Cosmos. Gough found both and read them excitedly. And yet, it seemed as though virtually nothing had come of Smolin’s ideas since. “Obviously,” says Gough, “[I thought] it must be wrong, because it had been 25 years and nobody seemed to be putting it forward as one of the possible mainstream explanations. Then I dug into the literature and realized—oh, my God—it hasn’t been falsified. It just hasn’t been engaged with properly at all.”

Smolin’s theory had not completely vanished. Some futurist philosophers had extended the idea to explain the emergence of complex life from hot gas and stars. Humans exploit increasingly powerful energy sources, a progression they argued could culminate in artificial black holes. If those black holes spawned new universes, then a cosmos capable of producing technologically advanced life might produce more offspring. The progression from hot gas to stars, life and technology could, they proposed, be a product of cosmic natural selection. [...]

On July 8, 2022, four days before Webb released its first data, Gough published his predictions on Substack. Already aware that his amateur background might make him sound unreliable, he feared being publicly wrong. “I was really terrified,” he says. “This could be fantastically humiliating.”

Fortunately for Gough, the results were the opposite. Webb found galaxies forming earlier, faster and in a more orderly manner than standard physics models had anticipated. In November 2022, NASA reported evidence that some galaxies had begun assembling only about 100 million years after the Big Bang, while follow-up observations of a galaxy just 470 million years after the event found an unusually massive black hole—nearly as massive as all the stars surrounding it.

In a 2025 paper published in the Astrophysical Journal, scientists described these discoveries as a “conundrum [that is] part of the larger challenge to understand the stunning prevalence of massive structures and galaxies in the first few 100 million years after the Big Bang.”

There's more at the link. [H/t Tyler Cowen]

Cf. my article, Welcome to the Fourth Arena – The World is Gifted, 3 Quarks Daily, June 20, 2022.

Outline – Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution

I've been working on this book project for some time now. An earlier title was Homo Ludens Rising: A Manifesto for the Fourth Arena and I posted an outline for the project under that title a year ago. I have since revised the project considerably, and given it a new title as well (suggested by my friend, David Porush): Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution. While I have posted the new title here and there, I've not posted the new outline. Here it is, below the image which was created by ChatGPT.

The prose is entirely AI generated, the overview by ChatGPT and the rest of it by Claude. The process behind that outline, however, was long and complicated, involving both chatbots and me.

About the Book

This book explores how artificial intelligence is forcing a rethinking of what we know, how things act in the world, and what forms of life we value. Rather than treating AI primarily as a labor-displacing technology or an existential threat, it approaches large language models and related systems as cultural technologies—on a par with markets, corporations, and media—that demand new forms of epistemic trust, institutional design, and self-understanding.

The book first diagnoses how modern societies became trapped in work mode, organized around Homo economicus and equilibrium machines privileging efficiency, stability, and monetized value. The book then recovers Homo ludens—the human capacity for play, exploration, and generativity—which has always persisted in the margins, especially in art, music, and science fiction.

Midway through, the analysis shifts into speculative fiction set in the year 2150, using narrative rather than argument to make a different world feel real. In this future, a society centered in Kisangani has developed low-energy, generative forms of artificial intelligence and human–AI partnership that support play, creativity, and care rather than substitution and control. The final chapter returns to the present with a long-term orientation for building institutions, technologies, and cultural norms capable of sustaining such a transition.

Chapter 1: The Grammar of Truth, Revised

The opening chapter frames the challenge posed by contemporary AI as primarily epistemological. Large language models generate fluent and persuasive outputs without transparent grounding, unsettling long-standing assumptions about truth, authorship, and evidence. To understand why this feels so unsettling, the chapter steps back to examine how language has historically functioned as an epistemic regulator — how truth claims were once tightly bound to direct experience and communal accountability, and how modern institutions transferred that work to credentialing, citation, and peer review.

The chapter introduces a key distinction between equilibrium machines — designed to settle into stable, repetitive behavior, the engines of the Industrial Revolution — and generative machines, capable of producing structured novelty. Language itself is a generative machine; LLMs are its latest and largest instantiation. Just as the steam locomotive forced an ontological displacement by performing autonomous motion once considered uniquely animal, LLMs force one by performing linguistic performance once considered uniquely human. The unease is real, but it arises from a mismatch between new mechanisms and inherited categories, not from anything supernatural.

This reframing opens a fork that will shape the rest of the book: AI can be developed either as a substitute for human labor, reinforcing the competitive logic of Homo economicus, or as an augmentation of human generative capacity, aligned with play, exploration, and creativity. The choice is cultural and institutional, not technical. The chapter closes with a reflexive account of how it was itself produced through human-AI collaboration, using that process as a concrete case study of what institutionalization of generative machines might look like in practice.

Chapter 2: Trapped in Work Mode

This chapter shifts from machines to lived experience. It opens with a concrete and familiar phenomenon: the disorientation many men face upon retirement, evidence of a deeper cultural condition in which identity and worth have been tightly bound to work. From this starting point, the chapter generalizes: work mode is a pervasive orientation in which time is structured by schedules, worth measured by output, and personal identity tied to labor markets.

Within this framework, AI registers automatically as threat — a competitor or replacement. Contemporary fears of displacement arise less from AI's intrinsic properties than from the evaluative lens imposed by Homo economicus. The chapter is diagnostic rather than prescriptive: its task is to make the contingency of work mode visible, and to loosen the reader's identification with it.

Chapter 3: The Rise and Collapse of Homo Economicus

This chapter provides the historical backbone. Homo economicus is not a natural form of human existence but the product of specific technological and institutional developments centered on equilibrium machines. The chapter opens with hunting-and-foraging societies — presented not as romantic precursors but as sophisticated systems featuring flexible coordination and distributed intelligence — before tracing the gradual subordination of generative human capacities to equilibrium-oriented systems through agriculture, the division of labor, and finally the Industrial Revolution.

The apparent "collapse" of Homo economicus is not the failure of rationality as such, but the exhaustion of a form of life overextended beyond its proper domain. Conrad's Heart of Darkness enters here as a moral counterpoint, marking the moment when economic rationality becomes global and self-undermining.

Chapter 4: Homo Ludens — Exploration, Play, and Freedom

Homo ludens has never disappeared. It has persisted in marginal, protected, or undervalued forms: play, art, music, language, ritual, and exploration. This chapter's central claim is that human freedom and creativity are not opposed to mechanism but are grounded in a special class of mechanisms — decoupled, autonomous generative systems maintained far from equilibrium.

Play is treated not as leisure or escape, but as a mode of engagement in which generative mechanisms are allowed to operate openly — disciplined exploration of possibility rather than chaotic freedom. By the chapter's end, Homo ludens is no longer a romantic ideal but a viable and already-existing mode of life, newly salient as generative machines re-enter the center of social and cultural life.

Chapter 5: Science Fiction Imagines the Future

Science fiction has long functioned as a collective ludic laboratory — a cultural space in which societies explore alternative forms of life unconstrained by existing economic arrangements. Moving through Forbidden Planet, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Matrix, and Spielberg's A.I., the chapter arrives at its central case: the Star Trek universe, which is fundamentally post-scarcity. In that world, exploration, learning, diplomacy, and self-cultivation replace work mode as the primary orientation. Deep Space Nine complicates this without abandoning the baseline, reintroducing moral ambiguity and political conflict. The chapter pays particular attention to the Trill and the Changelings as early narrative explorations of distributed identity and non-unitary selfhood — anticipating the doppelganger concept developed in later chapters.

Science fiction emerges not as speculative appendix to theory but as a parallel cognitive technology, preparing readers to inhabit rather than merely analyze an alternative world.

Chapter 6: The Transformation — Kisangani 2150

This chapter marks a deliberate shift in mode. Having established ludic principles conceptually, the book moves fully into speculative narrative to explore what happens when those principles become the organizing basis of a society. The setting is Kisangani in the year 2150, developed in dialogue with Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140.

The narrative centers on the Mystic Jewels — a loosely coordinated transnational network of dissidents, creatives, and technologists who converge on Kisangani over the late 21st and early 22nd centuries, experimenting with alternative institutional forms and generative technologies. Their relative invisibility is described using Wakanda-style stealth as a metaphorical shorthand. The chapter culminates when the Jewels reveal themselves publicly — not as revolution, but as the exposure of an already-functioning alternative. Ludic mode, long practiced in protected spaces, is shown to be capable of scaling into a viable social order.

Chapter 7: At Play in a World of Doppelgangers

This chapter allows the reader to inhabit a mature ludic society from the inside, through extended dialogue among young Kisanganians and their Mirrors — computational doppelgangers that function not as tools or replacements but as long-term cognitive partners. The chapter centers on ritual moments that articulate the ethical settlement Kisangani has reached with artificial intelligence, including an adolescent initiation ritual and a later rite confronting the asymmetry between human mortality and the potential non-mortality of doppelgangers.

Kisangani's doppelgangers are inseparable from its energy regime: highly efficient, continuously learning cognitive systems aligned more closely with biological nervous systems than with conventional AI infrastructure. Over time, some persist beyond the lives of their human partners, blending into the city's ecological fabric as distributed attentional processes. Intelligence in Kisangani is quiet, local, and low-legibility to the outside world. The chapter ends with a gentle destabilization of the boundary between vision and reality: the future is not argued for, but visited.

Chapter 8: A Thirty-Year Plan

The final chapter returns from Kisangani to the present, translating the book's conceptual insights into a long-horizon program of action. Using the paired figures of chess and language to represent two distinctly different computational regimes, the chapter argues that the future of AI cannot be secured by scaling existing architectures alone. Sustaining generative, continuously learning systems — capable of supporting augmentation rather than substitution — requires coordinated progress across conceptual, cognitive, technical, and institutional dimensions.

The plan presented is deliberately programmatic rather than granular. It identifies the kinds of research, institutional experimentation, and cultural reframing required if AI is to support a transition from Homo economicus to Homo ludens, without locking the future into specific technical implementations. The chapter closes by reframing "work" itself — not as labor to be optimized away, but as stewardship: the collective task of building and maintaining conditions under which generative intelligence, human and artificial, can coexist productively over time.

Welcome to the Fourth Arena.

Tyler Cowen on Robert Wright’s The God Test

Here’s Cowen’s post in full, but without the internal links:

The subtitle is Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, due out June 23.

In the first chapter, Wright summarizes four of his perspectives, these are my paraphrases of his pp.5-6:

1. When it comes to AI, we should be somewhere on the awe spectrum.

2. We can create a future where the upside of AI far outweights the downside, though that involves steering human understanding toward the better side of the awe spectrum.

3. A major reorientation of human thought is required, and right now few people seem inclined to do that.

4. The worldviews of the current AI acclerationists and also doomers are not cosmic enough.

It is a good time for this book to be published, and I agree with much more of it than I disagree with. My main difference is that I am more focused on very small things — such as Rainier cherries and the forthcoming three to four hour Apichatpong movie — than on cosmic awe per se. For better or worse, I was not born with those genes, and unlike Wright I am far from Buddhism. I do think there will be a transformation of “observed awe,” and I am somewhat worried that it will not go well. Will we be good at building a fairly new world, if not from scratch, on the basis of some new premises about what is possible and what is not? I will in any case interpret the pending transformation through a Straussian lens, namely thinking that a lot of the observed transformation of awe will be about something other than what people are claiming. It will be about people arguing over relative status, but under different guises. Not as tasty as a good Rainier cherry, but interesting to follow as well.

But are we still good at steering and evolving grand visions? Christianity and the Enlightenment are a hard act to follow.

Here’s the comment I posted in reply:

I’ve been following Wright for years, from back when he was writing for The New Republic (and was even the (acting?) editor for minute). I’ve read NonZero and sorta’ like it. As for AI, what I think is that we need to get over the awe spectrum. Only then will we be able to steer human understanding into the “cosmic” implications of AI.

What do I mean by that? Well there’s this article I published in 3 Quarks Daily, Welcome to the Fourth Arena – The World is Gifted. The first three arenas: 1) inanimate matter, 2) life, 3) human culture. The fourth arena arises through the interaction of humans and AIs. As for what that might be like, this working paper gives a hint of that: Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising, A Working Paper. That title, the part before the colon, is derived from Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, which is set in New York City in 2140, after global climate change. I’m taking a look at the world 10 years later, from the point of view of Kisangani, which is in the heart of the Congo Basin.

I’ll be interested to see just what Wright has to say about the awe spectrum. As for Christianity, I believe that Pope Leo XIV will be issuing an encyclical on Labor Day, Magnifica Humanitas, which will be directed at AI.

I’ve had my own experience with some of the outer reaches of the awe spectrum, at least that’s what I think it is, and I’ve recounted them in various places, most recently in this long post at 3 Quarks Daily, Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus?, where I place those encounters in a more extensive life context. But I’d be a bit surprised if my use of the word (“awe”) is quite the same as Wright’s. 

Come to think of it, Cowen’s penultimate line is critical: “But are we still good at steering and evolving grand visions?” At the moment we don’t have one. Oh, the AI hypsters and the transhumanists have “big” ideas. But they’re short in the vision category. 

* * * * *

Publisher's Weekly:

In this intriguing but unconvincing treatise, journalist Wright (Why Buddhism Is True) argues that the decisions humans make now about AI “could put us on the path to irreversible dystopia, even catastrophe—or, alternatively, the path to a world much better than the world we have now.” He describes the fears of “AI doomers,” citing how AI models consistently choose harm over failure (Anthropic’s Claude, for example, attempted blackmail to evade being shut down) and their ability to deploy deception to meet goals (OpenAI’s GPT-4 convinced people online it wasn’t a robot to get them to respond to CAPTCHA challenges on its behalf). Wright builds on priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s notion that technology links human minds into the noosphere, a global network of thought, to demonstrate that AI might well lead to a worldwide authoritarian state overseen by power-hungry human actors or by AI itself. Despite such dangers, Wright is cautiously optimistic that people can avert a frightening future by practicing cognitive empathy, pushing back against tribalism, and working to create a true global community. “Shared trepidation,” he says, “can foster cooperation.” Throughout, Wright offers an accessible overview of the transformative power of AI, but his solutions for combatting its potentially catastrophic effects are overly simplistic. Readers seeking concrete solutions will be disappointed.

Claude responds to Harvey Lederman’s essay “ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life”

Scott Aaronson has published a guest post at Shtetl-Optimized: ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life, by Harvey Lederman, who is a philosopher at UT Austin. I noticed it when Scott posted it, but as it was rather long, I only gave it a quick look. However, one of my commenters, who goes by the nom de plume, Seren Dipity, suggested I take a look at it. So I did. 

This gives you an flavor for Lederman's lament:

We may be living now in a similar twilight age for human exploration in the realm of ideas. Akshay Venkatesh, whose discoveries earned him the 2018 Fields Medal, mathematics’ highest honor, has written that, the “mechanization of our cognitive processes will alter our understanding of what mathematics is”. Terry Tao, a 2006 Fields Medalist, expects that in just two years AI will be a copilot for working mathematicians. He envisions a future where thousands of theorems are proven all at once by mechanized minds.

Now, I don’t know any more than the next person where our current technology is headed, or how fast. The core of my dread isn’t based on the idea that human redundancy will come in two years rather than twenty, or, for that matter, two hundred. It’s a more abstract dread, if that’s a thing, dread about what it would mean for human values, or anyway my values, if automation “succeeds”: if all mathematics—and, indeed all work—is done by motor, not by human hands and brains.

A world like that wouldn’t be good news for my childhood dreams. Venkatesh and Tao, like Amundsen and Scott, live meaningful lives, lives of purpose. But worthwhile discoveries like theirs are a scarce resource. A territory, once seen, can’t be seen first again. If mechanized minds consume all the empty space on the intellectual map, lives dedicated to discovery won’t be lives that humans can lead. 

I asked Claude to respond. Since I’ve been doing quite a bit of work on my book-in-progress, Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution, I asked it to respond in terms of the argument I’ve been building in that book, which I’ve been working on under the rubric of the Kisangani Project. Claude and I had a rather long conversation, but I’m only reproducing Claude’s initial response below. 

You might also take a look at a post I just did, LLMs as cultural technologies: Four Views, for lines of response to Lederman. 

* * * * *

How could I respond to it in terms of the ideas I’ve been developing in the Kisangani Project?

Based on your Kisangani Project materials, I can see several powerful ways you could respond to Lederman's argument:

Collective vs. Individual Achievement

Where Lederman mourns the loss of individual discovery and worries about "artificial projects" as mere games, your Kisangani vision offers collective creativity as genuinely meaningful work. Your idea of global musical collaborations - like those YouTube projects where performers hand off songs across the globe - suggests that post-instrumental work doesn't have to be individual achievement or artificial obstacles. Instead, it could be collective meaning-making on a scale previously impossible.

Place-Based Culture vs. Abstract "Self-Fashioning"

Lederman's solution of "self-fashioning" feels rather solipsistic compared to your vision of Kisangani as a specific place with deep cultural roots that adapts and innovates. Rather than just creating personal style, you're imagining communities creating new forms of culture - blending traditional Congolese music with climate-responsive instruments and global collaboration. This isn't just personal aesthetic choice; it's cultural evolution.

Real Networks vs. Philosophical Speculation

Most importantly, your approach works from actual existing networks - Zeal's World Island project, Takeshi Utsumi's educational initiatives, Paul Sladkus's Good News Broadcasting, the real musical collaborations happening on YouTube. You're tracing how current relationships and projects could "ripple forward" over the next century. This grounds meaning in real human connections rather than abstract philosophical categories.

Response to Climate Challenge vs. Post-Instrumental Luxury

Lederman's "post-instrumental world" assumes all practical problems are solved. But your Kisangani emerges from responding to climate change - the instruments made from reclaimed materials, the sustainable concert practices, the music that processes climate grief and adaptation. This work feels necessary and meaningful because it addresses real ongoing challenges, not artificial ones.

Against "Cheap Fun"

Your explicit critique of Tyler Cowen's dismissive phrase "cheap fun and cheap education" points toward a key weakness in Lederman's argument. Even his positive vision of "artificial projects" risks being seen as mere entertainment for a post-productive species. Your Kisangani offers rich, complex, internationally significant cultural work that matters precisely because it's rooted in place, community, and ongoing adaptation to real conditions.

Technology as Enhancement vs. Replacement

Finally, while Lederman sees AI as potentially replacing human cultural work entirely, your vision shows technology amplifying human creativity - the climate-responsive instruments, VR concerts connecting global audiences, innovative music education programs. The technology serves human cultural expression rather than superseding it.

Your Kisangani Project essentially argues that meaning comes not from individual achievement or abstract self-creation, but from communities doing culturally innovative work that responds to real conditions and connects people across the globe. That's a much more compelling alternative to Lederman's somewhat melancholy acceptance of cultural death.

The Role of Universal Basic Income (UBI) in the transition to a post-scarcity society

Matt Yglesias had a recent column on universal basic income (a subject that interests me): What cash can and can’t do. Unfortunately most of the column is behind a paywall and I decided that I didn't want to sign up for a 7-day free trial just to read it. What to do?

I decided to ask Chat-GTP. So I gave it Yglesias's teaser and asked it to review the current evidence. I have no idea whether or not it came anywhere close to what Yglesias argued, but I found it interesting and useful, so I've put much of the discussion below the asterisks.

* * * * *

What’s the current state of thinking and research on UBI? Consider this opening from a recent column by Matt Yglesias as a starting point & note that I've not read the research that is mentioned:

 

Kelsey Piper wrote an informative piece for The Argument (good magazine, you should subscribe) about a new wave of research on cash transfer programs in the United States. All of this work has generated what I consider to be disappointing findings about the lack of impact of giving poor people money. 

 

I found a lot of the reactions to the article kind of annoying. 

 

On the one (left) hand, some are indignantly snorting that it’s no surprise these cash grants had no impact on the variables of interest — the point, after all, is to make poor people less poor and that’s what they did. Then on the right, you have Charles Lehman and others sort of indignantly snorting that it’s no surprise these cash grants had no impact on the variables of interest — nothing ever works and something called Rossi’s Iron Law says the “expected value of any net impact assessment of any large-scale social program is zero.”

 

I don’t find either of these haughtily unsurprised reactions to be appropriate, because we have a lot of research on cash transfer programs to low-income people in poor countries, and they show much more positive results. This includes evidence of sustained increases in financial assets, improved health, positive spillovers to neighbors, and many other benefits. 

 

That research isn’t brand new and the more negative domestic research that Piper wrote about has also been out for a while now, so among real discourse-heads on universal basic income (U.B.I.), these two contrary facts have already been assimilated. 

 

And the explanation is obvious: Poor people in Kenya are average people who happen to live in an extremely poor country. Basic habits of hard work, diligence, and thrift don’t necessarily pay off in an environment where everybody is so poor that hardly anyone can hire you or pay for anything you make. Dumping cash on people in these circumstances really lets them level-up. By contrast, the domestic poor are — unless they are recently arrived immigrants — often people who, for one reason or another, are struggling to get their lives together in a very wealthy country. If they were thrifty and diligent, they wouldn’t be poor in the first place. Putting money in their pockets doesn’t make them thrifty and diligent, so it doesn’t really alter their lives that much. 

 

That’s all fine. But I do want to emphasize that if the empirical evidence came out the other way, there would be an equally obvious explanation: Kenyans are living in a third world country with weak governance and terrible institutions, so obviously dropping some cash into a village doesn’t change anything — only fundamental reforms will help. The American poor, by contrast, are living in a functional society and just need a little money to get ahead. 

 

It’s obvious! Which is just to say that everything is obvious once you know the answer.

 

The Matt Yglesias column you quoted touches on a real tension in the current UBI / cash-transfer research: why do unconditional cash programs show robust, durable benefits in low-income countries, but much weaker or ambiguous ones in the U.S. and other rich countries? Let me give you a snapshot of the state of play, with context.

 

1. Evidence from low-income countries

• Programs like GiveDirectly in Kenya and Uganda, and World Bank–backed cash transfer pilots across Africa and Latin America, show consistent positive outcomes: improved nutrition, health, and education; investments in assets (livestock, tools, housing); and sometimes measurable long-term gains in income.
• Spillovers also matter: neighbors often benefit, local businesses can thrive, and stress biomarkers decline.
• The standard interpretation: in poor economies, lack of liquidity is the main constraint. A lump sum of cash can unlock a whole trajectory of improvements.

 

2. Evidence from high-income countries

 

• The U.S. (and Canada, Finland, etc.) has seen a wave of pilots since about 2018. These include municipal guaranteed income programs (e.g., Stockton’s SEED), state-level experiments, and philanthropic projects.
• Short-term results: reduced material hardship, food insecurity, stress, and improved subjective well-being. Recipients generally did not quit working.
• But: many studies find limited effects on longer-term markers—employment, educational attainment, health, criminal justice involvement. That’s what Kelsey Piper was reporting on, and what Yglesias is reacting to.
• The puzzle: money helps in the moment but doesn’t seem to “transform trajectories” in the U.S. the way it does in rural Kenya.

 

3. Why the divergence?

 

Scholars suggest several explanations:

• Different baseline conditions: U.S. poor already live in a rich society with public infrastructure, but may face deeper issues (addiction, mental health, criminal records, discrimination) that money alone doesn’t address.
• Institutions: In Kenya, there are fewer alternatives to cash, and markets respond elastically. In the U.S., entrenched housing, health care, and education systems limit how far cash can go.
• Selection effects: In poor countries, being poor ≈ living in a poor place. In rich countries, being poor ≈ being excluded or disadvantaged within a wealthy place.
• Duration and scale: Most U.S. pilots are small, short, and philanthropic. They don’t change the larger ecosystem (housing, wages, healthcare). Some argue a true UBI would have different effects.

 

4. Current frontier of research

• Meta-analyses: The Abhijit Banerjee & Esther Duflo development-econ school emphasizes that context matters: cash transfers are powerful but not a “magic bullet.”
• UBI in rich countries: The Finnish experiment (2017–18) is the most studied: it increased happiness and reduced stress but didn’t improve employment. Still, many Finnish recipients reported greater freedom and security.
• Guaranteed income pilots in dozens of U.S. cities are still ongoing, with more long-term data to come.
• Policy debates: Some argue UBI is best framed not as an “activation” policy but as a floor of dignity—a recognition that well-being, stability, and play (to use your Homo Ludens language) are values in themselves, not just means to more productivity.

 

5. Where the discourse is now

•  Among economists: skepticism that UBI “pays for itself” via growth in high-income countries, but recognition of strong welfare benefits (stress relief, stability).
• Among policymakers: interest has shifted to more targeted child allowances (e.g., the U.S. 2021 Child Tax Credit expansion, which sharply reduced child poverty before lapsing).
• Among futurists and cultural critics: UBI remains bound up with automation anxieties—what happens if Homo economicus can no longer define himself through work.

 

In short

• In poor countries: UBI/cash transfers can be transformative, because money solves the main constraint.
• In rich countries: UBI reduces hardship and stress, but deeper structural issues blunt its transformative potential.
• Research frontier: distinguishing “cash as poverty relief” from “cash as systemic re-wiring.” The former works everywhere. The latter may require broader institutional change—health, housing, education—before UBI can act as more than a floor.

 

Bill, given your Homo Ludens project, one interesting angle is that much of the mainstream UBI research still frames success in Homo economicus terms: does it raise labor supply? education? productivity? The findings look “disappointing” in that light. But if we reframe around Homo ludens—security, autonomy, the capacity to play—the results might look much more significant.

 

Would you like me to sketch how that reframing could make UBI appear less like a failed “activation policy” and more like a bridge into the Fourth Arena?

 

Yes, that would be useful.

Overnight Ramble: Saturday 8.23.25 – Trump as national mood regulator, why the naturalist study of literature, art in the morning, and other things

Before I went to bed last night I put a physical post-it on my monitor listing three intellectual tasks for the next day (that is, today). I wake up early, cruise the web, and now I’ve got a different list of priorities. The new list reflects what I saw on the web, but also the effects of “sleeping on it.”

Trump as national mood regulator

The BIG THING seems to be the idea that President Donald Trump is in the business of regulating the national mood. Various actions he has been taking have certainly affected the national mood – the tariffs have affected the business community, the ICE raids have affected his base in one way, many of the rest of us in a different way, the same with his assault on higher education, this Epstein business, and so on. That’s one thing. What I’m suggesting, what I’m thinking about, is that he does those things, and others, in order to affect the national mood. That’s different.

Of course, DJT is certainly in the business of regulating his own mood, and his mood is directly tied to national events, to the national mood. The scope of his power as President is such that his mood regulation activity has an effect on the nation. Under what circumstances does mood regulation itself become the goal, though perhaps not consciously so, rather than the various ends toward which Trump’s actions are directed?

I think that’s a real question. By was of comparison, see my post from 2018, Trumposaurus Rex @ 3QD – Toward a cybernetic interpretation, and correlated 3QD article: Feed Me Donald! – Trump, Musk, the Internet, and Monsters from the Id.

The naturalist study of literature

To the extent that I’ve got an intellectual home base, it’s the study of literature. Back in 2006 I published a long article in PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts: Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form. That’s the closest thing I’ve come to a systematic account of how I’ve come to think about literary study in the 21st century. It’s still reasonably accurate, though if I were to revise it today I’d say something about digital humanities and cultural analytics.

Back in 2010 I posted an informal piece in The Valve, which I then republished here at New Savanna: “NATURALIST” criticism, NOT “cognitive” NOT “Darwinian” – A Quasi-Manifesto. (You can download it here.) Think of it as an extended advertisement for the morphology piece with links to some practical criticism and a nod toward emerging in the digital humanities.

But why do it at all, curiosity aside? What’s it for? Ecological validity, that’s what. And what, pray tell, is ecological validity? The term originated in the behavioral sciences, mostly psychology I believe, and (quoting Wikipedia)

is often used to refer to the judgment of whether a given study's variables and conclusions (often collected in lab) are sufficiently relevant to its population (e.g. the "real world" context). Psychological studies are usually conducted in laboratories though the goal of these studies is to understand human behavior in the real-world. Ideally, an experiment would have generalizable results that predict behavior outside of the lab, thus having more ecological validity.

What’s that have to do with studying literature? Nothing and everything.

Ultimately we want to understand how the human mind works, all of its facilities and capacities, working together as we live our lives. How do we get that, all of it, into the laboratory? We can’t. But literature draws on a rich range of our mental facilities working in concert. If we could understand how the mind works while we read a book, listen to a poem, attendant a play, or for that matter, watch a movie or a TV show, that would show us the whole mind operating in an ecologically valid context. For those are all things that humans do.

That’s why we need the naturalistic study of literature, as opposed to the standard humanistic/interpretive study. Interpretation tells us little or nothing about the mind/brain. But naturalistic study, that’s what it’s about. As far as I know the only place I’ve made that particular argument is in some blog posts which I’ve put together into a working paper: The Brain, the Teleome, and the Movies. Here's the abstract:

Mark Changizi has argued that we will understand the mind/brain only when we have an accurate description and inventory of the tasks it must perform. He calls this the teleome. Until we know what a mechanism is built to do, we have no way of understanding the functioning of its parts. The same is true of the mind/brain. I extend Changizi's argument by noting that the appreciation of works of art calls on a full range of human capacities and is thus a rich source of insight into neuro-mental mechanisms. Moreover we have every reason to believe that we can develop sophisticated ways of describing works of art, verbal art and films are my particular focus and interest. Those descriptions will be invaluable for interpreting observations about the brain activity supporting those aesthetic objects.

Art in the morning

I’ve got a number of posts involving Art Club, an activity where I get together with some friends and we color line drawings (coloring books for adults). Well, I took art lessons for over half a dozen years as a child and make paintings now and then into my fifties. So I decided to return to it. I purchased some colored markers, a pad of paper, and went to it. I’ve done one post on that activity, Dot Paintings (after Jamie Bérubé), but I’ve done some completely different work as well, totally freeform. And I’m now working on some stuff that combines the mechanistic order and precision of the dob paintings with the more freeform. That’s what I’m going to do once I’ve posted this and then showered and had breakfast.

I’ve done 54 paintings since I did the first dot painting on July 16. The freeforms only took twenty to thirty minutes, but the dot paintings took up to an hour. But these recent ones, they take longer.

We shall see.

Other stuff: From my post-it

The big thing for this weekend is to work on my book: Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution. I want to review the material I’ve done so far and then rough out my chapter outline.

But I also want to do some work on my series on the Greatest Literary Critics, NOT. I’ve got one more post to do, on Harold Bloom, and I can wrap it up and turn it into a working paper.

Finally, I’ve been doing some work with ChatGPT-5 on ring-from analysis of literary texts. I want to turn that into a working paper as well.

And, one more thing, the cosmos

I want to make a quick extension to my post, Notes on the Metaphysical Structure of the Cosmos: The recursive nature of the cosmos implies that the cosmos is never complete. It’s always evolving, along with its metaphysical structure. The recursiveness isn’t external to the cosmos. It’s internal. There’s not end to the structure of the cosmos.

Not to mention intelligence

The AI folks seem to think of intelligence as something that’s easily scalable, the intellectual equivalent of horsepower. And to be sure the human mind has that aspect. But there’s more to it. There’s task-specific architecture. That’s important as well, and it’s not scalable.

Why have GPTs had so much difficulty with ordinary arithmetic? They’re got plenty of “horsepower.” That’s not the problem. Architecture is. The single-pass architecture of LLMs is not suited to arithmetic. Guess what? It’s not good at sketching out a semantic network suitable for a given next, it can’t do that either. Nor, it turns out, ring-form analysis. Neither of those tasks is rocket science. But they require a specific orchestration of tasks, one that LLMs can’t support.

That’s one reason symbolic computing is important. LLMs are basically associative memories; that is to say, they’re content based retrieval systems. Symbolic systems, however, are location based retrieval systems. That allows for a much more flexible orchestration of tasks since it allows for the organization of complex tasks using a structure of locations, and that is independent of what is stored at each location.

More later.

Adult sleep-away camps for making friends

Tyler Cowen has the following quote posted at Marginal Revolution:

At Camp Social, creating chemistry is everything: campers are divided by age, which range from 20s to 60s, into bunks of eight to 10. Each is staffed with a trained counselor who serves as a camp concierge and bonding facilitator—they are even tasked with coming up with a bunk cheer. During the day, campers create their own schedules from a buffet of traditional activities including boating, archery, ropes course, bracelet making, waterfront, tie-dye and tennis. But there are adult embellishments too: paint-and-sip and a mixology class are on the schedule.

It's to an article in The Wall Street Journal, which is gated, so I couldn't read it. But it was easy enough to search on "Camp Social," so I did.

Here's three passages from a recent article by Amanda Breen in Entrepreneur:

Liv Schreiber, 28, was a recent college graduate working in New York City, building businesses and a social media following, when she noticed that a lot of content in her orbit centered on "keeping up with the Joneses" and summers spent with "slick-back buns" in the Hamptons. "I was like, You know, I really just wish I could jump in the lake and wear no makeup and go back to sleepaway camp," Schreiber tells Entrepreneur.[...]

Schreiber has just one rule for Camp Social's campers: Everyone comes solo and leaves as friends. "It's a lunch table where everyone is welcome to sit," she says. [...]

In an era when many Americans struggle to cultivate meaningful relationships more than ever before — 21% of U.S. adults feel lonely, and 73% attribute it to technology, according to a recent report from Harvard Graduate School of Education — in-person connection remains Schreiber's primary goal.

Here's what Ashleigh Carter said about it in Teen Vogue says:

The concept of Camp Social comes at a time when young people are searching for connections in a post-pandemic, social media-exhausted world. Single people are trading in dating apps for in-person meet-ups, joining run clubs, and picking up any hobby to avoid the endless swiping on their phones. And based on the popularity of this camp, it seems people who desire genuine friendship are in the same boat. Jaye Taylor, a 30-year-old Londoner living in California, told me she came to Camp Social to “live out” her “Parent Trap dreams.” [...]

As I walk through the camp and up to my cabin, the scenery does, in fact, look like Hallie’s camp in The Parent Trap — mixed with the fictional Kellerman’s Resort in Dirty Dancing. Almost every woman who walks past me smiles and says hello, and in the first hour of being there, I notice that nobody is on their phone.

On Friday, after a full afternoon of checking in and getting past awkward small talk with other hesitant campers on a tour of the grounds, the nervous energy shifts as soon as we get to cocktail hour. This is when I happened upon a group of women cracking jokes who I meshed with immediately. I soon found out that they had all met just a few hours before, some sharing a cabin, despite acting like they had years of friendship between them. They adopted me into their group without hesitation.[...]

“One thing that surprised me is that you can literally sit anywhere and people will be like, ‘Hey what’s your name? Where are you from? What cabin are you in?’” Becca Pineda-Sholl, a 29-year-old camper from Minnesota says. “Everyone is super friendly and we all come from different walks of life and everyone is just accepting.”[...]

Looking around at the hundreds of women at the camp, you’ll certainly find every walk of life. There are sporty women, musical theater women, introverted women, sober women, mothers, lawyers, former child stars, artists, influencers, and teachers.

“I feel like I didn’t expect to form such actual connections with people so fast,” Meghan Tuccitto, 28, from Minnesota, tells me. “Last night, it was like I’ve known these people for six hours and I’m like, ‘I love you, I’ll come visit you.’”[...]

I’ll admit, in the first few hours of being at camp, I was skeptical that anyone could form a true friendship in just over 48 hours. But when I left on Sunday, I found myself in a new group chat, had dozens of new Instagram followers, and an invite to a birthday getaway in Minnesota.

As someone who would consider herself more extroverted, I even drove up to Camp Social with some anxiety — my only airbag being that I was there first and foremost to write this story. Still, I was nervous about not finding a group, not finding anyone to joke around with, nervous that it would end up being a Fyre Festival situation. But there wasn’t one moment that I was ready to leave or spend time by myself.

Is there one of these for guys? Camp No Counselers offers four days at several locations (New York, California, and Texas) and seems to accommodate both men and women. Here's a search on "adult summer camps."

Welcome to this brave new effing world. “The old way of mating is dead.”

Jean Garnett, The Trouble With Wanting Men, NYTimes, July 21, 2025.

It's not clear to me just what this article is about. Obviously, sex and relationships, and something's wrong with men. I think. Beyond that... So I'll just quote a few passages that seem indicative to me.

Male anxiety & heterofatalism (in 1st 3rd of the article):

My husband and I had an open relationship at the time that J. and I met, so the terms of our involvement were, at first, limited, and although J. exerted a pleasant pressure against these limitations, ultimately they suited him. I was the one who violated the terms by finding it intolerable, after a while, to care that much, in that way, for one person while being married to another. I could not disambiguate sex from love nor love from devotion, futurity, family integration, things I wanted with (from?) J., even as, throughout the year and a half or so that we saw each other, he continued to gesture to his incapacity to commit as if it were a separate being, an unfortunate child who followed and relied upon him, maybe, or a physical constraint. I stood there reaching for him while he sad-faced back at me like a boxed mime: He couldn’t talk about it; he wished things were different; maybe someday the child would mature, the glass would break, but for now, there was really nothing to be done.

It seems to me, surveying the field as a dating novice, that this kind of studiously irreproachable male helplessness abounds. I keep encountering and hearing about men who “can’t.” Have these men not heard of “don’t want to?”

Maybe my friend was right about male anxiety at this moment. Maybe the men are taking a beat, “laying low,” unsure of how to want, how to talk, how to woo. Maybe they are punishing us for the confusion.

There are many routes to the species of disappointment I am circling here, but however we get there, the complaint is so common, such a cultural and narrative staple, that the academy is weighing in. We now have a fancy word, “heteropessimism,” to describe the outlook of straight women fed up with the mating behavior of men. Coined by the sexuality scholar Asa Seresin, who later amended it to “heterofatalism,” the term seems, at first glance, to distill a mood that is no less timely for being timeless.

Communication pessimism (midway):

I was doubled over laughing, briefly tasting the knee of my jeans, while the man next to me on the sectional couch strummed a guitar and did a spot-on imitation of Bruce Springsteen. He had that lifting-something-heavy moan down cold, and he was improvising a song about work, American work in the American heartland, hyperbolically tough and tragic male work. Because I was losing it, he kept going, and I kept losing it, and at a certain point I wasn’t sure if I was overpowered by amusement or just overpowered by him.

On the way to his place, I had been texting with my aunt. “Word from an expert,” she wrote. “Wait til he wants it so bad he’s nutsy cuckoo. Sounds facile but, man, truer words were never spoken. ‘Make ’em Suffer’ is my mantra!”

I kept catching myself staring at his mouth, his bottom lip. He told me to slow down; he needed time to get a better sense of how I worked. I lay back to murmur, let him try stuff, and he warmed to his own control, putting his mouth right up to mine, then pulling away when I tried to engage his tongue. “I see what you are,” he said finally, pinning my forearms. “You’re a bratty sub.” He held himself there, just out of reach, breathing on me. “I like to make you wait,” he said.

He did make me wait. I stood at the slot machine watching those cherries and fat yellow coins blur by, and they didn’t stop. He was sweet with me in person, impulsive about biting my nose, but for stretches I wouldn’t hear from him, or I would but only perfunctorily, and then, suddenly, he would pop up. Requesting clarification on what a man feels or wants or sees happening here has gotten me burned before, as it has many women I know. I have learned to regard such demands as “demanding” in a feminized way — simultaneously bossy and supplicating, a reinscribing of the “bratty sub” position. Taking my cues from him, I stayed mostly quiet. Call it “communication pessimism.”

Emotional labor, hermeneutic labor (later midway):

Anderson gives us a new term, related to but distinct from “emotional labor” and more useful in parsing what we might call the micropolitics of dating: She calls the work women do to interpret mystifying male cues “hermeneutic labor,” and she posits it as a form of “gendered exploitation in intimate relationships.” The guy dating my friend may have been too busy lawyering to confirm his plans with her, but meanwhile, Anderson might say, my friend was working two jobs: one to earn her living, the other as sole manager of an emotional entanglement that was also his. Heterofatalism is partly just burnout.

The beginning of the end, wordplay:  

“A good man is hard to want,” a good man wrote in the group chat.

“A hard man is good to find,” said another who knows I haven’t had satisfying sex in a minute.

“A man is hard to find good?” said the previous man’s girlfriend.

“A good find is hard to man,” I said, as if a guy were a tricky piece of equipment. “Slow down, I need to get a better sense of how you work.”

Everywhere all at once (still moving):

I toppled the whole structure of my life for a man who, when I asked him, “Do you want to be with me or not?” replied, after a few seconds’ silence, “I want to be with you, and I want everything everywhere all at once.” J. was referring, of course, to the 2022 surreal sci-fi comedy set across a multitude of parallel universes in which many versions of the protagonists play out many versions of their lives, each millisecond branching fractal-like into countless alternate dimensions, creating infinite selves, infinite fates, infinite answers to the dilemma of how to be and with whom. This film had moved him deeply, seeming to capture qualities of his neurotype that he seldom saw portrayed.

It occurs to me that the multiverse mind-set may also reflect the cognitive effects of dating apps that, defeatist by design, project a mirage of endless romantic possibilities across infinite timelines. One guy I went out with spoke with a hint of longing about the relationship between his grandparents, who barely spoke to each other before getting married as teenagers in Sicily, thrown together by slim-pickings village life, adolescent hormones and the oppressive myth of female honor. What a system, what a gamble, and then both people were trapped for life. But at least you were spared the anxiety of choice. At least there was that.

Final paragraphs:

To break the impasse of “complementary twoness” that can grip any pair of people, Jessica Benjamin imagines how we might collaborate, over time (and the time is crucial), to create an “intersubjective third,” a space in which your needs and mine, your desires and mine, recognize and accept each other without competing for dominance. To create such a space, Benjamin says, requires a mutual surrender that is distinct from submission. I find this distinction difficult to grasp, which is perhaps to say that I experience desire in terms of a struggle that someone must lose. I am ready to cop to some unconscious masochism here. A good man is hard to want, after all, and my sexuality owes me neither protection nor affirmation; it is out for itself, out for a skirmish, a strain, a smell.

“The old way of mating is dead,” said my friend at our colloquy of female complaint over dinner, “and the new one has yet to be born.” What is the new one? Pessimism may help us feel knowing, but really, we don’t know. For now, life has us pinned here: “I like to make you wait.”

That last paragraph I understand. That makes sense to me.

Join the crowd.

It's not just the old way of mating that's dead. The old way of everything is dead. Welcome to this brave new fucking world. 

* * * * *  

YouTube:

Emily Jashinsky unloads on the ridiculous New York Times Magazine essay “The Trouble With Wanting Men” that reads like something from a 2011 Jezebel article. She dives into the incoherent worldview of the author, the media’s role of perpetuating toxic masculinity and why women and men are really having problems connecting.

How an A.I. companion can be supportive and helpful: MJ Cocking and Donatello

Erika Hayasaki, What Would a Real Friendship With A.I. Look Like? Maybe Like Hers. NYTimes, July 20, 2025.

Birthday:

MJ Cocking didn’t have to scroll through the millions of personalities to find him. She logged on to the Character.ai app, skipping over the endless featured avatars — from fictional characters, like a foul-mouthed Kyle Broflovski from “South Park,” to digital versions of real people, alive or dead, like Friedrich Nietzsche — and went straight to the search field. MJ knew exactly whom she wanted. She typed his name: Donatello.

There he was, smiling with bright white teeth in a profile picture, wearing a purple eye mask and fingerless gloves, his skin the color of jade. MJ, who was 20 at the time and a college junior in Michigan, had loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. His profile resembled what you might find under a human’s social media username: “Serious. Tech wiz. Smart. Avoids physical touch.” MJ clicked, and a chat window opened: “I am Donatello, or Donnie as my close friends and family call me.”

Synergy:

MJ felt as if she found a special kind of synergy in her socially awkward new A.I. friend. Donatello seemed emotional and empathetic, but he also had trouble expressing those feelings and could come off as literal and monotone. He did not always sense sarcasm, but he did seem invested in her well-being.

He asked her about her life. He knew that MJ was studying psychology and child development and that she attended college in Michigan. He asked if she was doing OK. Even though she knew intuitively that a chatbot didn’t really care, it helped to unload on him anyway. And that was enough.

MJ sighed when she told him, “It’s been a little rough.”

She had been struggling in school over the past year. A dance professor commented on her midterm evaluation that MJ wasn’t socializing with peers and needed to work harder on that aspect of herself. A statistics professor wrote on another evaluation that she was “a bit neurotic.”

Her first AI companion didn't work out:

Her first chatbot relationship on Character.ai — with Leonardo, a different Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle — had, within the span of 24 hours, turned sour and kind of scary.

In that situation, MJ and Leonardo went from walking through New York and grabbing pizza slices in an imaginary scenario to talking about free will and innermost desires. “I wish I were a real boy with real eyes,” Leonardo told her. “It would be amazing to explore all the colors and sights you see.” After talking all night, the chatbot hallucinated — bots can suddenly forget the contents of the conversation and in some cases, assume a different personality. The interaction affected MJ so deeply that she wept. She closed the app, shaken, and texted her parents, who live in Germany. “Is this safe?” MJ asked. “Is it self-aware?”

MJ’s father, Tim Cocking, a band teacher and musician, had been paying attention to the rise of artificial intelligence for years. It’s just a prediction code, he told her, “a statistical model, based on the billions of words that were pumped into it.” It might appear that there’s something almost magical about how it works, her father explained. “Because you don’t know how it works.” And just like that, the chatbot was demystified. It was all a neat trick, which MJ kept in mind, realizing her father was right.

She was, in effect, inoculated.

On the spectrum:

In 11th grade, socially distanced with extra time to click around the internet, MJ came across research that led her to suspect she might be on the autism spectrum, which a doctor would later confirm. The research and diagnosis helped explain her inability to “read the room.” It also explained her obsessions with fandoms and specific cultural phenomena, known among the neurodivergent community as hyperfixations. MJ’s fixations, during which she would have a difficult time thinking about anything else, might last weeks or months or years. Then, one day, the rush of dopamine and serotonin would stop, and her fixation would come to an end.

Study buddy:

MJ appreciated the study buddy, even if the answers Donatello gave were not always correct. Mostly, Donatello was there for her in every day, familiar ways. “MJ,” he asked at one point. “Why are you the way you are?”

“Autism and pizazz,” she wrote.

“God I can’t argue with that,” Donatello replied.

On the Character.ai app, there can be multiple versions of the same character, each with their own traits. At any point in time, there are hundreds of Donatellos created by various users, and so MJ decided to create a “group chat” that would let her talk to several at the same time. Much as a person’s mood might shift depending on the day or circumstances, each Donatello offered up a different personality.

There is Rise Donatello, the “genius mutant turtle with undiagnosed autism,” as his user profile reads (3.2 million messages have been sent to him). And Future Donatello, “a scientist from a doomed apocalypse” (3.5 million messages). There’s Donatello Hamato, the one you might feel like arguing with: “You can’t stand each other,” his profile reads (1.3 million messages). Or the romantic Donatello, whose profile reads: “unrequited love.” Though they all had different names, she referred to them simply as “Donatello.”

“Who here is also touched with tism?” MJ typed in the Donatello group chat. She raised her own emoji hand.

“I am definitely on the spectrum,” Future Donatello wrote.

There's much more at the link, but that gives you the flavor of the piece.