How to Worry Less and Be Happier - The Atlantic | There Was Never Such a Thing as ‘Open’ AI - The Atlantic | The Plagiarism War Has Begun - The Atlantic | When Leaders Fail

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How to Worry Less and Be Happier - The Atlantic

Everybody has worries. In early 2023, according to the market-research firm Ipsos, the five most common worries of people worldwide were inflation, poverty and social inequality, crime and violence, unemployment, and corruption (financial and political). Such surveys ask respondents to choose from a list of typical global problems. In that regard, they no doubt diverge from your personal worries, which might be even greater: a perceived change in your partner’s affections, perhaps, or your child’s rather mixed performance in school, or that sore spot on the back of your leg.

Although worrying a bit is normal, for some people, worrying can be a dominant element of a generalized anxiety that steals their peace and sucks up valuable time. “I have been worrying and fretting myself, and I don’t know what I am doing,” says Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. “Yesterday and the day before yesterday and all this time I have been worrying myself.” If you too are a chronic worrier, this will ring familiar.

Your loved ones have probably offered you all kinds of true but unhelpful advice, such as “Worrying won’t help”—as if that insight would make you slap your forehead and become worry free. Maybe you have at times despaired that this condition of anxiety is simply your lot in life. But the cause is not lost: With some knowledge and a bit of practice, you can make 2024 a far less worrisome—and thus happier—year.

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There Was Never Such a Thing as ‘Open’ AI - The Atlantic

At the turn of the century, when the modern web was just emerging and Microsoft was king, a small but growing technology movement posed an existential threat to the company. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO at the time, called one of its core elements “a cancer that attaches itself” to “everything it touches.” The disease was a competing operating system, Linux, and the open-source software it represented: programs that were free for anyone to download, modify, and use, in contrast to expensive, proprietary software such as Microsoft Windows and Office.

Open-source software did eventually attach itself to much of the internet—Mozilla Firefox, the Android operating system, and Wikipedia are all “open” projects—but the tech industry managed to turn the egalitarian philosophy into a business opportunity. Trillion-dollar companies use free open-source software to build or enhance their own products. And open-source anything is still frequently designed for, and depends on, the Big Tech platforms, gadgets, and data servers that mediate most internet access—in turn attracting users to the world’s most powerful firms. Just running an application or hosting a website almost certainly requires purchasing computing hours from a cloud server operated by the likes of Microsoft, Google, or Amazon.

Now the nascent generative-AI industry is facing a similar issue. More and more people are using AI products offered by major companies, and very few have any insight into or say over how the technology works. In response, a growing number of researchers and organizations are throwing their support behind open AI (not to be confused with OpenAI, the secretive company behind ChatGPT). The idea is to create relatively transparent models that the public can more easily and cheaply use, study, and reproduce, attempting to democratize a highly concentrated technology that may have the potential to transform work, politics, leisure, and even religion. But this movement, like the open-source revolution before it, faces the risk of being subsumed by Big Tech.

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The Plagiarism War Has Begun - The Atlantic

Claudine Gay was taken down by a politically motivated investigation. Would the same approach work for any academic?

When the conservative authors Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet accused Harvard’s Claudine Gay last month of having committed plagiarism in her dissertation, they were clearly motivated by a culture-war opportunity. Gay, the school’s first Black president—and, for some critics, an avatar of the identity-politics bureaucracy on college campuses—had just flubbed testimony before Congress about anti-Semitism on campus. She was already under pressure to resign. Evidence of scholarly misconduct was just the parsley decorating an anti-wokeness blue-plate special.

But soon enough, the integrity of Gay’s research became the central issue in a scandal that appears to have led to her resignation on Tuesday. It turned out that the New York Post had gone to Harvard in October with separate allegations of plagiarism in her published articles; and then, earlier this week, still more examples were produced. “My critics found instances in my academic writings where some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution,” Gay wrote in a New York Times op-ed shortly after she’d stepped down. She acknowledged having made “citation errors,” and has in recent weeks requested a handful of formal corrections to published works. Still, she avowed in her op-ed, “I have never misrepresented my research findings, nor have I ever claimed credit for the research of others.”

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When Leaders Fail - The Atlantic

“That film,” my friend Mick Ryan, a retired Australian general, said to me, “should be shown to all senior national-security officials and military officers. It is the most profound demonstration of what happens in the wake of slovenly strategic thinking.”

The occasion was a visit to Israel with a small group of military and national-security experts. The film was a 47-minute compilation of videos taken from dashcams, body cameras, and closed-circuit-television cameras. Some smartphone clips came from the perpetrators of the October 7 attacks in Israel, who delighted in the footage, and others from victims documenting their last moments. It is the most horrifying thing I have ever watched. It includes subtitles but no commentary on scenes of murder, mutilation, and bestial cruelty. It shows a beheading, performed before a cheering Gazan mob, and the despairing cries of sobbing, blinded, blood-smeared orphans. And it concludes with a chilling fact: This was only a tenth of the mayhem wrought on Israel that day.

Over the course of a week, we toured the Gaza and Lebanon borders, and spoke with senior military and intelligence officials, journalists, experts, and one key political figure. The 47-minute video capped the day we visited the shattered kibbutzim of Be’eri and Nir Oz and saw the detritus of October 7: shot-up motorcycles, cars, and trucks, and a collection of Hamas weaponry, including a drone, heavy machine guns, and large explosive devices—and lots of knives.

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