In spring 2025 I had a crisis of faith. I thought about what the technology I'm helping to create might do to our future, and got scared. M...
Togelius: Losing my religion
In spring 2025 I had a crisis of faith. I thought about what the technology I'm helping to create might do to our future, and got scared. M...
(Working Paper) Good Faith Design: Religion as a Resource for Technologists
Previous work has found a lack of research in HCI on religion, partly driven by misunderstandings of values and practices between religious and technical communities. To bridge this divide in an empirically rigorous way, we conducted an interview study with 48 religious people and/or experts from 11 faiths, and we document how religious people experience, understand, and imagine technologies. We show that religious stakeholders find non-neutral secular embeddings in technologies and the firms and people that design them, and how these manifest in unintended harms for religious and nonreligious users. Our findings reveal how users navigate technoreligious practices with religiously informed mental models and what they desire from technologies. Informed by this, we distill six design values -- wonder, humility, space, embodiedness, community, and eternity -- to guide technologists in considering and leveraging religion as an additional, valid sociocultural resource when designing for a holistic user. We further spell out directions for future research.
Can Religions Be Reborn? | Over The Mountains to Civilizational Renewal #9
[OPINION] Pope Francis: 'A moral giant in a world gone crazy'
Pope Francis taught me that faith is essential to surviving — and thriving — in the creative destruction we are living through
Opinion | The Day My Old Church Canceled Me Was a Very Sad Day (Published 2024)
There is a difference between peace and capitulation.
Masculist pushback: the threatened extinction of the great, white Judeo-Christian male
A political ideology rooted in fear is remaking the world in its own image and dragging us with it
AI as Christian Heresy
A pocket history of the rise of artificial intelligence, and some strategies for resistance.
The Rise of Silicon Valley’s Techno-Religion (Published 2025)
The Rationalists, a community focused on the risks of artificial intelligence, regularly gather with tech figures and other like-minded people in a complex that covers much of a city block.
The Techno-Religion at the Center of the A.I. Debate
Are those calling to slow down the development of artificial intelligence in a “doomsday cult,” as some critics say? Our reporter explains.
The Techno-Religion at the Center of the A.I. Debate
Podcast Episode · The Daily · September 18 · 34m
First They Built a Secular Apocalypse Belief System. Now They Want Religious Authority.
Over the weekend, a clip about “Anthropic thinks it’s building God” started making the rounds.
Opinion | The Semester That Shook My Faith as a Professor
AI has taken something fundamental from the business of teaching and learning.
Against Economics
Mainstream economists nowadays might not be particularly good at predicting financial crashes, facilitating general prosperity, or coming up with models for preventing climate change, but when it comes to establishing themselves in positions of intellectual authority, unaffected by such failings, their success is unparalleled. One would have to look at the history of religions to find anything like it. To this day, economics continues to be taught not as a story of arguments—not, like any other social science, as a welter of often warring theoretical perspectives—but rather as something more like physics, the gradual realization of universal, unimpeachable mathematical truths.
The Curious About Everything Newsletter #66
The many interesting things I read in August 2026
