ANATOLY IVANOV / PROSE / CATEGORIES / ESSAYS

IGNORANTIA IMPOTENTIA EST – WHAT US VOTERS KNOW ABOUT ECONOMICS

ECONOMICS / EDUCATION / POLITICS / ESSAYS / 2024-11-15

Americans’ exposure to economics is limited to a 15-week course in school, focused on US-centric, outdated free-market principles. The curriculum neglects behavioral economics, socialism vs communism, global trade, and… tariffs.  + 

DO YOU LIKE TO WATCH OTHERS DIE IN THE SAND DUNES?

CINEMA / POLITICS / RELIGION / SOCIETY / ESSAYS / 2024-05-22

Dune — the book, the films… especially the latest ones — are about violence as the only virtue. On a real planet with a real war in a real Europe, killing and maiming real people as you read this, dismembering civilians and mercenaries alike in the most horrific ways… People watch  + 

THERE IS NO TRUTH

JOURNALISM / PHILOSOPHY / SOCIETY / ESSAYS / 2024-05-01

We acknowledge there are many different truths. I’m certain that the truth exists for you and probably for the person sitting next to you. But this may not be the same truth. This is because many people merge facts about the world with our beliefs  + 

WHERE ARE ALL THE SHINY HAPPY PEOPLE?

ECONOMICS / ENVIRONMENT / POLITICS / ESSAYS / 2024-04-18

Our current economic system does not serve humans well. As a community (fighting cruel wars in XXI centuries) or as the individual (born to compete against others, running through kindergarten to nursing home on SSRIs, painkillers and Ritalin)  + 

DOES ANYONE CARE HOW YOU LOOK, DAY-TO-DAY?

GADGETS / PSYCHOLOGY / SOCIETY / ESSAYS / 2024-03-19

Wear the same outfit for a month to notice that no one notices. If it’s clean — no one cares. Even if your jeans got holes. Even if you’re a woman, certain that you need a new dress and a matching handbag every day. People  + 

STUDY BIOLOGY OR FACE THE CONSEQUENCES

BIOLOGY / ECONOMICS / JOURNALISM / ESSAYS / 2023-12-30

We’ve had opposite extremes — capitalists & communists, Adam Smithians & Karl Marxists — completely miss the obvious. Humans are not rational, deterministic “utility functions” optimizing for individual or collective “good”. Free markets’ invisible hand will correct?  + 

I’M A CONSUMER, WHAT’S WRONG WITH THAT?

ECONOMICS / SOCIAL MEDIA / SOCIETY / ESSAYS / 2023-10-25

“I’m a consumer, what’s wrong with that?” The way you consume? The quantity? The fact that luck gave you an opportunity to NOT be an animal, to use that neocortex to create a better world, maybe?  + 

ODESSA’S DESTRUCTION OF UNESCO HERITAGE SITES

ARCHITECTURE / POLITICS / ESSAYS / OUTSIDE NEWS / 2023-09-27

As of 13 September 2023, UNESCO has verified damage to 289 cultural sites in Ukraine: 120 religious buildings, 27 museums, 109 buildings of historical and/or artistic interest, 19 monuments, 13 libraries… In Odessa alone, a city near and dear to me from childhood  + 

CHATGPT. IT’S A CHAT.

COMPUTERS / PRODUCTIVITY / ESSAYS / 2023-08-14

ChatGPT. It’s a chat. Not AI. It’s not Intelligent. It’s not even a knowledge base of Humanity, like Wikipedia or PubMed. It’s a collection of statistical models of knowledge. Some licensed, some stolen*. Oh, and no one understands how the inside works. The chat predicts  + 

RUSSIANS DON’T CARE

ECONOMICS / LINGUISTICS / POLITICS / ESSAYS / 2023-06-13

You know what? Russians still living in Russia, the remaining 140 million of them, don’t care about the war. Nor do they care about their rulers or the Western sanctions. Or the Western companies having left or banned. Russia is stuck in yet another historical  + 

SAM ALTMAN – EVERYBODY THOUGHT: FIRST AI WOULD DO PHYSICAL LABOR

ART THEORY / COMPUTERS / MUSIC / SOCIETY / ESSAYS / 2023-06-04

Everybody thought: first AI would do physical labor, then some cognitive labor, then the really hard cognitive labor, like programming… And then, last of all, but maybe never, because it’s magical and human… was creativity  + 

ИСКУССТВО КИНО – THE LAST ISSUE TO PRINT

CINEMA / JOURNALISM / ESSAYS / OUTSIDE NEWS / 2023-05-24

Искусство Кино — published since 1931 and thus, together with “Sight & Sound” and “Cahiers du Cinéma” one of the earliest magazines to cover the film industry, art and theory — has printed its last issue. Yes, my work has been featured in it. But  + 

ELON MUSK: IF AI COULD REPLACE ME, SHOULD I BE DOING THIS?

HEALTH / PSYCHOLOGY / SOCIETY / ESSAYS / 2023-05-17

Elon Musk just said on CNBC something I’d been thinking about a lot: “If we do get to this sort of magic genie situation, where you can ask the AI for anything. And let’s say, even if it’s a benign scenario… How do we actually  + 

HOW TO BE HAPPY? MY 5 MINUTES DIALOGUE WITH CHATGPT

COMPUTERS / HEALTH / LINGUISTICS / ESSAYS / 2023-05-16

My conversation about human happiness with ChatGPT took 5 minutes. Question: According to what is currently known to science, what 50 factors, listed from most influential to least, influence a human (male, with an IQ above 100) self-reported feeling of happiness  + 

THE GLOBAL HARMONIZED STANDARD OF WOMEN

HEALTH / INDUSTRIAL DESIGN / SOCIETY / ESSAYS / 2023-05-08

Social media, especially Instagram, has succeeded to complete the Global Harmonized Standard of Women™, an industrialized process started by the female magazines (Vogue, ELLE…) It’s all pretty… scary. We now have a draft proposal for ISO review.  + 

THE BLOCK FOREVER ARCHIVE

PSYCHOLOGY / SOCIAL MEDIA / SOCIETY / ESSAYS / 2023-05-02

Only thoughtless people do crazy things, publish emotional photos, record damming TikToks, break up “forever”… relying on the “Delete Chat” and “Block” buttons of messengers and social apps. Those unable to think ahead imagine they will never face the consequences. Our digital footprint describes our  + 

DELEGATE AN AI (LLM) TO TALK WITH YOUR TINDER MATCH

COMPUTERS / PSYCHOLOGY / SOCIETY / ESSAYS / 2023-04-21

Wow. The Match Group did indeed introduce chat-assist to Tinder. Just look at their suggestions to start a dialogue after a match: 😱 • Hiiii Jane! Getting into anything fun this week? • Hello Jane. How’s it going? • Hi there! Getting into anything fun  + 

MORE THAN HALF OF AMERICAN WOMEN ARE SINGLE

SOCIETY / ESSAYS / 2023-04-07

52% of American women were unmarried or separated in 2021. The rising share of single women households has been driven entirely by women who have never married. Over 80% of women under 30 have never tied the knot in 2021… Despite all the readily-available research  + 

CLIMATE CHANGE? NO, WE WILL NOT LIMIT ANYTHING.

CYCLING / ECONOMICS / ENVIRONMENT / ESSAYS / 2023-04-04

As a civilization, we’d known about our impact on climate since the 1950-60s. We’ve also continued to fail to agree on anything that would have prevented its negative impact… since the 1970s. 50 years later, the IPCC reports, again, that nothing’s changed. We will not  + 

MY DAILY YOGA SHORT ROUTINE

HEALTH / RUNNING / YOGA / ESSAYS / 2023-02-20

Yoga tools are almost limitless. But if I’m short on time, I do the following Best Of of Hatha Yoga™. Every day, before pranayama, running, meditation, filming and everything else. Warm up head rotation pull the head with our hands due to the force of  + 

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