All of these things are firmly within our control.

Congratulations, you have described the system that's been in place for decades.

Thank you for translating the paper into something this structural biologist can grasp.

Also, it's not like the authors of the Nature Medicine paper thought one thing and wrote another. Read their correspondences! Their thoughts evolved over time. It's almost as if that's how science is supposed to work.

From the original paper:

"Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to disprove the other theories of its origin described here."

And

"More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another."

I don't see the issue here.

It is not incoherent if you believe art to be an expression of the human condition. You still need humans in the writer's room to know what they want the audience to get out of a show. That is not something that ChatGPT can understand.

Also, maybe people should have some feelings "about the economic fates of career writers." Who are we even building this hyper-efficient economy for?

The "trans issue" itself is not a weird topic. But there are certain ideas that seem to have taken hold ("the MASSIVE risk of fentanyl candy", "the HUGE threat of trans women using the bathroom", etc) that are objectively weird and, in the grand scheme of things, non-issues. For a regular person off the street, I might ascribe having an idea like that to ignorance. For people like Rowling, Adichie, etc I can only attribute it to bad intentions.

But people pushing back on what someone says is a normal, healthy part of discourse and it absolutely should scale with the power and influence of the person voicing that opinion (Kanye is the perfect example).

People have weird opinions all the time. I'm sure I have many myself. The difference is that she's an influential author with a wide reach who can reasonably be expected to think just a little more before she voices an opinion on something that affects a marginalized community.

Even if mining all of the lithium and copper weren't such a disastrously extractive and exploitative process, big personal steel boxes would still be an awful mode of transportation for most people. Our insistence on building infrastructure such that cars are the only truly viable method of getting around diminishes my enthusiasm about what is otherwise amazing technological progress.