I’ve a lot extolled right here the worth of recent data. Allow us to now hear a counterargument: Some months after Yale gave Mark Twain an honorary diploma in 1888, the author’s schedule cleared up sufficient for him to tug collectively a speech advising that the nice individuals of the faculty study much less.
“I discovered the astronomer of the college gadding round after comets and different such odds and ends,” he wrote. “I advised him it was no financial system to go on piling up and piling up uncooked materials in the best way of recent stars and comets and asteroids that we couldn’t ever have any use for until we had labored off the previous inventory.”
Greek must go “as a result of it’s so onerous to spell with, and so not possible to learn after you get it spelled,” and analysis in math “was not suited to the dignity of a school, which ought to deal in info, not guesses and suppositions.”
Yale didn’t heed the recommendation, and I don’t suppose Twain would actually have needed you to, both. So please—guess and suppose away.
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Monday, December 1, 2025
- William Shakespeare’s solely son, who died at age 11, had what identify—only a letter off from one of many bard’s most well-known tragic heroes?
— From James Shapiro’s “The Lengthy Historical past of the (REDACTED) Fable” - In AI-safety discussions, the probability that synthetic intelligence causes world cataclysm is popularly expressed as what statistical time period?
— From Charlie Warzel’s “The World Nonetheless Hasn’t Made Sense of ChatGPT” - Germans generally name their nation “The land of poets and thinkers,” or the land of what two vocations—the previous of which might apply to, say, Rilke, Schiller, and Goethe, and the latter to Hegel, Heidegger, and Arendt (otherwise you proper now)?
— From Isaac Stanley-Becker’s “The New German Struggle Machine”
And by the best way, do you know that Shakespeare’s grave doesn’t bear his identify? What it does bear is a curse. The engraving warns would-be tamperers, “Good buddy for Jesus sake forbeare, / To dig the mud enclosed right here. / Blessed be the person that spares these stones, / And cursed be he that strikes my bones.”
Proof means that the curse didn’t beat back everybody; ground-penetrating radar revealed in 2016 that Shakespeare’s cranium is nearly definitely lacking. After all, researchers may have opened the grave to verify—however would you’re taking that danger?
Solutions:
- Hamnet. The parable that Hamnet’s loss of life begot the tragedy of Hamlet has persevered for hundreds of years, Shapiro writes, however the truth that it’s compelling—see Chloé Zhao’s new film, Hamnet—doesn’t imply that it’s true. Learn extra.
- p(doom). Whether or not or not you utilize the time period, you’ve in all probability thought-about the chance of AI-occasioned doom, Charlie writes as ChatGPT turns three. The truth is, that psychological precarity is already a giant chunk of AI’s legacy, he argues, and the tech’s ever-evolving nature heightens the nervousness. Learn extra.
- Poets and thinkers. To various levels over the many years, this self-conception has been about each taking satisfaction in Germany’s mental custom and renouncing the nation’s militarism. As Isaac studies, this makes for a fraught transition as Germany steadily abandons pacifism and rearms in opposition to a destabilized world. Learn extra.
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