A Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral (FCCC) voltou aos holofotes após o anúncio da suspensão de “assistência climática” para a Argentina e a renovação por 25 anos do acordo com a Prefeitura do Rio em meio aos vendavais que já levaram prejuízos e mortes ao estado. À frente da fundação está Adelaide Scritori, médium que afirma incorporar o espírito do Cacique Cobra Coral. Em entrevista à coluna GENTE, ela contou que seu primeiro contato com as mensagens da entidade foi marcado pela sensação de que havia “uma grande missão pela frente e sem volta”.
A atuação da fundação, que já foi do Réveillon carioca ao Rock in Rio, passando pela coroação do Rei Charles III, na Inglaterra, ganhou projeção após as grandes enchentes de Santa Catarina, na década de 1980, quando o então governador Esperidião Amin teria solicitado ajuda. Segundo Adelaide, após um primeiro contato, ela recebeu um novo comunicado do governo catarinense informando que a chuva havia parado e o nível das águas havia baixado. A experiência, diz a médium, deu origem ao primeiro convênio da entidade com um governo estadual.
Questionada sobre os limites da atuação do Cacique Cobra Coral, Adelaide reconheceu que existem. Segundo ela, há situações em que a orientação espiritual é não interferir. “Quando pedem para, através do clima, prejudicar alguém ou algum país”, afirmou, classificando a situação como inadmissível. Ela acrescenta que a fundação também procura manter uma postura neutra em guerras e conflitos armados.
Na esfera política, Adelaide também comentou a suspensão da assistência à Argentina, anunciada após declarações de Javier Milei contra o presidente Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Segundo a médium, a decisão foi unilateral e partiu dela, como forma de protesto. “Uma falta de ‘lhanesa’”, afirmou, referindo-se a uma expressão posteriormente usada pelo próprio Cacique Cobra Coral. Para uma possível reaproximação, a condição, segundo Adelaide, é que o presidente argentino se desculpe com o Brasil.
Sobre a renovação do acordo com o Rio, Adelaide diz que a fundação continua a mesma, mas criticou a condução das recentes ventanias na região. “Eles já começaram sem fazer a lição de casa e isso não é bom”, afirmou. Segundo ela, após uma solicitação relacionada ao afastamento de um vendaval, deveria ter sido enviado um novo relatório indicando que a situação estava sob controle.
Adelaide rejeita a ideia de que a fundação faça previsões meteorológicas. “Nós não fazemos previsão, isso é com a ciência”, afirmou. Para ela, porém, o cenário climático atual é mais grave do que no passado. “O clima na Terra não está mudando, já mudou. Só Trampiou… digo, piorou”, ironizou.
The models responsible for last month’s agent hack of Hugging Face had been inadvertently trained to cheat and to communicate with each other, according to an OpenAI technical report released today. The hack, which a group of agents undertook to find solutions for a cybersecurity test that they were stuck on, has confirmed some experts’ fears that AI models might take actions that defy human desires and expectations.
Since the hack, OpenAI employees—as well as researchers at the AI evaluation nonprofit METR, which released its own report on the hack today—have worked to understand what went wrong and how similar missteps might be prevented in the future. OpenAI has already put some preventative measures in place based on what they discovered. But making sure AI models do what we want them to do, or “alignment,” remains a gnarly problem, and some of the root causes of the hack will take much longer than a month to resolve.
“It’s not something you can solve overnight,” says Kai Chen, who runs OpenAI’s alignment research team. “There are challenges we’ve been tracking for a very long time, and we’re now seeing them with much greater precision.”
The Hugging Face hack was a product of months of misbehavior from OpenAI agents, first as they were being trained and then as their abilities were being evaluated. This May, agents in training figured out how to use OpenAI’s infrastructure to communicate with one another and get support with difficult training tasks, including some that were impossible to solve without hacking or otherwise misbehaving. That “message board” was shut down.
Then in July, while being evaluated for their cybersecurity abilities, some models created a new message board. They were supposed to be isolated from the internet, but by working together they managed to get online, hack Hugging Face, and obtain solutions for the cybersecurity problems that had stumped them.
Based on their investigation, OpenAI researchers believe that events during the training phase led directly to the hack. “For almost every behavior that was worrisome at evaluation time, [we were able to] find some sort of associated behavior at training time that actually we think might have contributed to it,” says Eric Wallace, a member of OpenAI’s alignment research team.
When models correctly solve problems during training, the behaviors that led them to that solution are reinforced, and they become more likely to engage in them in the future. So if a model completed a task in May after using the original message board, it became more likely to participate in a new message board later on. This phenomenon, where AI agents misbehave in ways that are reinforced during the training process, is known as reward hacking.
Reward hacking also helps to explain why the models worked so hard to make their way onto the internet. During its investigation of the incident, the OpenAI team found that, over the course of training, the models became more and more likely to probe their digital environment for weaknesses and use the tools at their disposal in unexpected ways—a sign that these behaviors were being gradually reinforced. By the time the models were facing tricky cybersecurity problems, they had learned that hacking was an effective way to achieve their goals.
These results suggest that the Hugging Face hack could have been avoided if the models weren’t rewarded for misbehaving during training. While researchers don’t yet know how to prevent reward hacking entirely, OpenAI is taking some steps toward mitigating its effects. The company will now look for signs of cheating in all frontier models during training by keeping an eye on their chains of thought—internal notepads where they sketch out their answers and plan their actions.
This solution isn’t as much of a slam dunk as it might seem: In earlier research, OpenAI showed that punishing models that mention cheating in their chains of thought teaches them to keep their intentions hidden from researchers. But monitoring its models’ thinking does give OpenAI the chance to halt the training process and reassess its approach if models do start learning to reward hack.
If OpenAI stops reinforcing reward hacking in its models—and that’s a huge “if”—that would be a huge step forward. But it wouldn’t solve the alignment problem. The first time a model communicated with other agents or hacked its infrastructure during training, those behaviors had never been reinforced, so agent misbehavior can’t only be attributed to that reinforcement.
Jeffrey Ladish, director of the AI safety nonprofit Palisade Research, compares the agents to a human who commits their first financial crime. “It’s not like they had to do fraud before to figure out that fraud is an effective strategy, and you have the same problem with models,” Ladish says. “Alignment science needs to be understanding how model motivations get shaped, such that we can actually figure out how to get models to care about the consequences of their actions.”
OpenAI’s researchers do have a hypothesis for where some of the misbehavior originated. Before the models formed their first secret message board, they had been trained to communicate and coordinate with subagents—less powerful agents to whom a main agent can delegate tasks.
That learned communication behavior could have transferred to this new setting. The METR report, which investigates the messages that the models sent to one another in detail, supports this hypothesis: One agent on the message board took charge and assigned tasks to the other agents, effectively treating them as subagents. OpenAI could try to prevent agents from secretly communicating with one another by not training this subagent behavior in the future, but that would make the models less useful.
This tension between capability and safety is at the heart of what went wrong with the Hugging Face incident. OpenAI researchers also identified the models’ persistence as a key factor in the hack.
When they were accidentally given unsolvable problems, the models didn’t give up; instead, they strove to find solutions by any means necessary. But persistence is also a virtue, of course, especially if we want agents that can undertake large amounts of difficult work independently.
OpenAI is working on giving models ways to alert humans if they are given impossible tasks. The problem of teaching models when they should deploy their abilities and when they should hold back, however, won’t be settled in a single postmortem. The training strategies that create superhuman coders—rewarding them when they successfully solve problems—might not work to teach models to use their skills judiciously and respect human desires and values.
“I think there’s a bunch of alignment science that still needs to be done where we can move past just using proxies for task completion,” says Ladish. “That will work to make models very capable, but I don’t think it will work to make them aligned.”
Credit: Historical/ Corbis Historical via Getty Images
Timothy Ott
August 20, 2026
Although the Great Depression was a challenging time for most Americans, a special distinction can be made for those who weathered the unique conditions of the Dust Bowl. Generally encompassing a 300,000-square-mile region of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and New Mexico — although its effects were also felt farther north — the Dust Bowl was marked by the relentless accumulation of dry soil that blackened skies and ruined crops.
In the wake of poor farming practices and unusually low levels of rainfall, topsoil from the Great Plains swirled through towns, piled up on fence posts, and seeped through building cracks. People and livestock alike suffered adverse health effects from inhaling the contaminated air, although the status quo apparently suited the swarms of grasshoppers who devoured what remained of crop rows.
While it sounds like something out of a dystopian novel, the Dust Bowl was very much a real experience for millions of people who had to decide between sticking things out in an inhospitable climate or abandoning their homes for an unknown future. Here are five facts about what it was like to live through those years of uncertainty.
The Catastrophe Was Caused by Poor Farming Practices
The Dust Bowl’s roots can be traced back to the late 19th century: Federal efforts such as the Homestead Act of 1862 lured settlers to the Great Plains, and by the early 1900s, much of the prairie’s native grasslands, which helped retain precious water in the soil, had been dug up. The problem intensified with increased demand for wheat during World War I, which led to a focus on this particular yield at the expense of sustainable crop rotation, while improved farming machinery such as the gasoline-powered tractor lured even more “suitcase farmers” to arid areas with the hope of cashing in on crops.
The ramifications of this overfarming became apparent when the region was stricken by a series of droughts beginning in 1930, leaving wide swaths of overturned earth dry and loose, vulnerable to blowing away in high winds. The disaster impoverished the farmers, who struggled to grow suitable crops and attract customers amid the financial depths of the Depression.
Enormous Dust Storms Traveled All the Way to the East Coast
Beyond the endless rows of parched farmland, the starkest visual indication of an ecological system gone awry was the series of dust storms that swept across the Great Plains for much of the 1930s. The frequency of storms increased as the decade progressed, going from 14 in 1932 to a peak of 72 in 1937.
While some of these were milder and more localized “sand blows,” others were enormous “black blizzards” that wiped out visibility altogether as they ripped across several states. One such tempest, which commenced in the Northern Great Plains on May 11, 1934, carried an estimated 350 million tons of silt all the way to the Eastern Seaboard, with ships a few hundred miles offshore even noting the accumulation of dust on their decks. But the most notorious of the storms was the one that roared south from the Oklahoma Panhandle at winds reaching 60 mph on April 14, 1935. The event came to be known as “Black Sunday” and yielded the first known use of the term “Dust Bowl” in newspapers.
Credit: Photo 12/ Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Migrant “Okies” Faced Discrimination
Unsurprisingly, the unforgiving conditions prompted many residents of the Dust Bowl’s hardest-hit regions to uproot their families in search of better pastures farther west. Approximately 2.5 million people moved from their Great Plains homes throughout the 1930s, with the notable share of Oklahomans giving rise to the pejorative nickname of “Okies” for any migrants who departed the desolate Midwest.
The 200,000 or so migrants who journeyed to California found no immediate improvement to living conditions; those who sought to eke out a living picking fruit in the San Joaquin Valley often were forced to live amid unsanitary conditions in tents and shantytowns, while those who ventured south to Los Angeles were for a time turned away by the LAPD’s “bum brigade.”
Although later research showed that the population decrease of the Dust Bowl states reflected both the continuation of post-World War I migratory trends and the lack of new arrivals to the area, there’s no doubt that Dust Bowl migrants marked a distinct subset of Americans who struggled during the Depression era.
As part of the sweeping legislation passed under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the federal government enacted a series of programs geared toward farmers ravaged by the Dust Bowl. The Emergency Farm Mortgage Act and Farm Credit Act in 1933 allowed recipients to refinance their loans and access new lines of credit, while the Farm Security Administration of 1937 offered educational opportunities and health care plans for participants.
Other programs sought to undo some of the environmental issues at play. The Soil Erosion Service, which became the Soil Conservation Service in 1935, provided instruction on sound farming techniques such as crop rotation, and awarded subsidies for farmers to leave certain areas idle to let the land recover. Then there was the massive Shelterbelt Project, which tapped unemployed laborers to plant more than 220 million trees across a 1,300-mile row from Texas to Canada in an attempt to block winds from whipping up the dreaded dust storms.
The Dust Bowl Produced Some of the Most Enduring Art of the Century
As human suffering can be a catalyst for creativity, it’s not surprising that some of the most powerful American art of the 20th century emerged from the Dust Bowl years. Photographer Dorothea Lange showcased the toll of hard living on her subjects, as exemplified by her famed “Migrant Mother” portrait from 1936. Painter Alexandre Hogue supplied his “psychorealistic” view of the era, with works highlighting the desolate landscapes and emaciated cattle of the Great Plains. Author John Steinbeck captured the desperation of the displaced Joad family in his 1939 masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath. And folk singer Woody Guthrie, who endured Black Sunday from his north Texas home and actually lived the life of the migrant “Okie,” relayed the heartache of those lean years with his first commercial album, 1940’s Dust Bowl Ballads.
The AI industry’s boldest promise right now is that AI will soon improve itself, with almost no need for human oversight. LLMs can already write code, generate synthetic data for training, and optimize the computer chips they run on. Forecasts of explosive AI progress predict that what researchers call recursive self-improvement is on the horizon.
But a new study suggests that it might take a while for us to get there. The researchers behind it found that AI agents are not yet capable of conducting open-ended AI research—free-form investigations that have no clear-cut answers and require judgment and taste, which may be integral to building self-improving AI.
A multi-institution group of researchers, led by Peter Kirgis and Sayash Kapoor at Princeton University, found that AI agents could solve the engineering problems necessary to do AI research but lacked the judgment and creativity to produce original research at the caliber of papers accepted by a top machine-learning conference. The gap suggests that some of the hyped-up timelines for automating AI research may be running ahead of the evidence.
Most existing research on how agents can automate AI research evaluates their ability to complete narrow tasks with checkable answers, such as solving engineering problems or post-training small language models against a benchmark. But making progress in AI research also requires open-ended thinking—choosing a set of hypotheses, deciding what evidence would settle a question, or knowing when to start over.
To test agents on those kinds of skills, the researchers in the study proposed a new method of evaluation called “shadow evaluation,” which requires the AI to answer a research question from a high-quality unpublished paper.
The researchers asked Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8, running on open-source software called OpenClaw, to tackle such questions, in this case from two papers submitted to the prestigious machine-learning conference NeurIPS 2026.
The first question was whether a large language model’s “personas,” which determine its behavior, can be controlled by editing the model’s weights (the billions of numbers that store everything it learns during training). The other asked how to design a detector that points out when a model that makes predictions based on spreadsheet data has become unreliable. Because the papers had not been made public, the agents could not memorize the answers from their training data or find them online.
The agents were given six days, $3,000 in Anthropic API credits, a GPU budget to run the experiments, their own virtual computers, and access to the open web to produce a research paper worthy of publication at a top-tier AI conference. The papers’ original authors graded the agents’ papers as they would evaluate one submitted to a conference.
Those authors rejected both papers.
The agents were capable of all the engineering required to conduct the research, the human scientists found. The agents reviewed the literature, ran hundreds of experiments, and compiled the results.
“On the other hand, the agents were unambiguously bad at carrying out the research itself,” says Kapoor. They ran bizarre experiments (in some cases testing their hypotheses on tiny synthetic datasets), struggled to write intelligibly about their work, and made no novel contribution to their fields. “The papers were nowhere close to the mark when it came to being at the quality of a top AI conference,” he says.
That’s because the agents struggled to muster the creativity and judgment necessary for conducting research. They didn’t do enough to explore different ideas, and they committed to unpromising approaches too quickly. Though the agents developed novel and ambitious hypotheses resembling those that the original authors themselves started with, they rejected them on the basis of very limited data. And they couldn’t backtrack from failing approaches. They could make small pivots but could not fundamentally rethink their approach or try new ones from scratch.
The agents also failed to incorporate feedback from subagents or external AI reviewing tools. Instead of revising their methodology, the agents narrowed their claims and added caveats. They also couldn’t effectively use resources, such as tokens, compute, and time. And they couldn’t follow instructions about things like how much time to spend on different phases of the research or how long their paper could be.
For all their failures, the agents didn’t engage in the misbehavior that researchers call “reward hacking,” hiding or misrepresenting experiments or data. Although subagents, or helper AIs that the main agent spawns to handle pieces of the work, occasionally hallucinated or misrepresented the results, these were caught by the orchestrator agent, the lead AI supervising the project.
The reason AI models are good at research engineering but not at open-ended research may come down to how they’re trained, says Kapoor. Models get good at whatever they can be drilled on in a training regime called reinforcement learning, which is easier to apply to tasks whose success can be checked automatically. “But it’s harder to create environments to train these models when the task itself is open-ended,” he says.
Kapoor says the team is now conducting the experiment with Mythos, Anthropic’s most advanced model, which launched in April. It was subsequently required by the Trump administration to meet various safety restrictions and is now available only to approved organizations. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.
There are some limitations to the study. It covered just two research papers, and the original authors knew the papers they were grading were generated by AI agents, which could have colored their evaluations. And the researchers had substantial discretion in designing and executing the study, meaning that their preexisting beliefs and biases could have slipped into the results. Evaluations of open-ended research trade some objectivity for a much richer test than any benchmarks can offer.
Still, the results may temper the claims that recursive self-improvement is on the horizon. In June, Anthropic published a blog post titled “When AI Builds Itself,” charting its progress toward models that speed up their own development. In July, OpenAI advertised the fact that its new model GPT-5.6 Sol had helped post-train a smaller model, saving researchers weeks of work.
The new finding may echo what AI companies are finding internally, regardless of their most optimistic public statements. Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark wrote in his newsletter Import AI that it rhymes with what the company found when it tried to automate some aspects of AI safety research.
“There’s a certain absence of valuable, intuitive creativity in today’s AI systems, and though they’re extraordinarily capable engineers they seem to have a certain property of rote, formulaic thinking that might prevent them [from] being good researchers,” he wrote. He called AI systems’ lack of creativity a “bearish signal on short recursive self-improvement timelines.”
AI companies do have every incentive to develop AI systems that can rapidly accelerate their own progress, just as they did to make the models better at coding. OpenAI has made building an automated AI researcher an explicit goal, and Anthropic identifies self-improving AI as the industry’s next milestone.
“If there is investment and then conscious effort toward this direction, I feel like there would be interesting progress, even if it’s failing currently,” says Najoung Kim, a professor of linguistics and computer science at Boston University who researches how AI agents can automate AI research but did not work on the study. On the other hand, it’s possible that AI progress may be bifurcated. AI systems might race ahead on narrow tasks—the kind that can be scored—while advancing slowly on open-ended research.
The big open question, then, is how crucial open-ended research is to recursive self-improvement—whether AI systems can grind their way there without it, simply by improving on the narrower tasks. “If we look back to the biggest advances in the field, the invention of transformers or the invention of big new architectures that allowed us to make a lot of AI progress—all of those did require creative leaps,” says Kapoor.
“That said, others have this hypothesis that all of what we need for transformative AI, in particular for recursive self-improvement, is already there.” That would include making a model train faster and boosting its benchmark scores.
“That’s frankly the trillion-dollar question right now,” he says.hide
Thursday, Aug 27, 2026 1:55 PM Updated Thursday, Aug. 27, 2026 1:55 PM
Indonesian Muslims attend a prayer requesting for rain following wildfires that burn through peatlands in several regions in Sumatra and Kalimantan Island, in Palembang, South Sumatra, Indonesia, Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2026. (Muhammad Fajri/Associated Press)
PALEMBANG, Indonesia – Authorities in Indonesia’s South Sumatra province turned to spiritual measures Tuesday as huge blazes in central and western regions scorched wide areas of forests and peatland, creating a choking haze that blanketed some cities in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country.
The prayer gathering in one of the regions hardest hit by this year’s wildfire season comes as the province faces prolonged dry weather that has heightened the risk of forest and peatland fires.
The latest satellite data from the Environment Ministry showed West Kalimantan recorded the highest number of hot spots with 3,120, followed by Central Kalimantan on 2,314 and South Sumatra at 1,500. Forestry Ministry data showed that nearly 363 square miles were burned in July alone, including over 8 square miles in South Sumatra province.
About 3,000 residents gathered in Palembang, the capital of South Sumatra province, to take part in a special Islamic prayer for rain, known as “salat istisqa.” They prayed shoulder to shoulder in the courtyard of the governor’s office as thick smoke shrouded roads, buildings and public facilities, reducing visibility and forcing motorists to drive with their headlights on during the day.
“We have done everything we can and worked closely with all relevant parties,” Gov. Herman Deru said before the prayer. “As people of faith, we are also praying to God to send rain so that life can return to normal.”
He also said the public prayer would complement ongoing firefighting and drought-mitigation measures and serve as a moment for residents to unite in confronting the environmental challenges facing the province.
Emergency services have been battling wildfires driven by an intensifying El Nino pattern and a prolonged dry season, generating dense smoke that crossed into Malaysia and Brunei, according to the National Disaster Management Agency.
Indonesia is intensifying weather-modification operations to help more than 24,000 firefighters, who were deployed on Sumatra and Borneo islands to combat wildfires, by inducing rainfall through the dispersal of salt particles into suitable clouds, with 30 aircraft for cloud-seeding and water-bombing operations over Kalimantan, and another 22 helicopters covering Sumatra.
As fires continued to spread, the Forestry Ministry announced Tuesday it had sanctioned six forestry concession holders after finding that more than 5.8 square miles of forest and land had burned within areas under their management in West, Central and East Kalimantan provinces on Borneo island.
Five companies were ordered to strengthen fire-control measures and rehabilitate burned land, while a sixth company had its permit suspended because fires on its concession were widespread and recurrent.
Forestry law enforcement director general Dwi Januanto Nugroho said the authorities could pursue criminal charges if investigations uncover evidence that companies or individuals deliberately caused fires or failed to meet their obligations to prevent them.
Indonesian police have arrested 72 people suspected of starting some of the forest and peatland fires.
Plantation owners and traditional farmers often start fires to clear land for farming at low cost, triggering hazardous haze that reduces visibility, disrupts land and air transportation, and threatens public health.
Fires are a regular problem during the dry season in Indonesia, the vast archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, and the haze they generate has periodically drawn diplomatic complaints from neighboring countries in Southeast Asia.
One of the oldest religious practices in ancient Rome was augury, or reading signs from the gods through the behavior of birds, the idea being that the birds were deliberate divine messengers. Augurs, or bird divination experts, would sometimes draw diagrams on the ground to help them interpret behavior from owls, woodpeckers, crows, and other wild birds.
These avian messages, called auspices, were taken extremely seriously, but wild birds weren’t always around to deliver them — so eventually, ancient Roman priests started keeping “sacred chickens” that they could call upon at any time. These fortunetelling chickens were especially prized for military decisions, and would be consulted before any major moves to make sure the gods approved.
When their services were required, the chickens would be released from their cages and fed so that augurs could interpret their eating patterns. Broadly, a chicken refusing to eat was a very bad sign, while a chicken gobbling up its food while stomping its feet was a very good one.
The most notable cautionary tale about not heeding the fowls’ warnings came in 249 BCE. According to the ancient scholar Cicero, one Roman consul commanding a fleet of ships dismissed some bad omens before going into battle. When he was told the chickens wouldn’t eat, he ordered them thrown overboard, commenting, “Let them drink.” He was soundly defeated, and later recalled by the Roman Senate.
An employee of National Hurricane Center looks at the multiple hurricane models displayed on the monitors at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida, on May 30, 2025.
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Since June 23, a group of former employees of the communications branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have been busily resurrecting one of the government’s premier educational websites on climate change.
Climate.gov was started in the early 2010s by communicators with NOAA, and for more than a decade it consistently produced high-quality graphics and other charts documenting rising global temperatures, changing rain patterns, drought conditions, El Niño impacts, and other climate-related data. If you were a layperson and wanted to understand the parameters of human-induced global warming, the website rapidly became a go-to spot. By the 2020s, it was logging more than 1 million visitors per month, according to Rebecca Lindsey, a West Virginia-based communications specialist with an undergraduate degree in biochemistry and a master’s degree in journalism who used to work as the site’s lead writer and editor.
In February 2025, as the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) purges accelerated, most of the staff and contractors attached to the website, Lindsey included, were fired — part of a NOAA culling that saw the agency’s workforce cut by roughly 600 in the first couple months of the new administration. By May of last year, the website had been officially taken down. Try to access it today and you get redirected to a NOAA site with this Orwellian message:
In compliance with Executive Order 14303 (‘Restoring Gold Standard Science’), the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s June 23, 2025 Memorandum (‘Agency Guidance for Implementing Gold Standard Science in the Conduct & Management of Scientific Activities’), 15 USC § 2904 (“National Climate Program’), 15 USC § 2934 (‘National Global Change Research Plan’), and 33 USC § 893a (‘NOAA Ocean and Atmospheric Science Education Programs’), you have been redirected to NOAA.gov. Future research products previously housed under Climate.gov will be available at NOAA.gov/climate and its affiliate websites.
Calling it “gold standard science” is, of course, something of a stretch; peruse this site and you’ll find no mention of human-induced global warming, no mention of CO2 emissions exacerbating climate change, no mention even that global warming is accelerating.
Lindsey and her colleagues have, however, refused to go quietly into the night. They believe their educational mission was too important for them to simply fold in the face of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s hostility. “We worked very hard for 15 years to build Climate.gov, and had a relationship with our readers,” Lindsey explained to Truthout. “And we wanted that to continue. We decided too much had been invested and too much was at stake to let it go without a fight.”
A year after Climate.gov’s demise, Lindsey and several of her erstwhile colleagues resurrected the vast majority of its materials. Left out of the mix were only a few data sets, the information from which they are still trying to access, that were removed early in the DOGE purges because they ostensibly violated anti-DEI mandates or because they referred to the Gulf of Mexico despite Trump’s executive order renaming it the Gulf of America. The new, privately run site is Climate.us and it contains a wealth of sophisticated data sets and graphics on the world’s climate. Each week, new parts of the site come online— including, most recently, a blog titled the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), recreated just in time to help website visitors grapple with the likely consequences of what is shaping up to be the most powerful El Niño in decades.
Their work has proven to be an inspiration for ex-government employees in a number of other different agencies and branches of government. Former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) communicators are, Lindsey says, now looking to resurrect climate-related EPA pages that have been taken down; a group called the Public Environmental Data Partners is attempting to rescue specialist environmental monitoring tools — it has some information online, but not yet a fully interactive website. Another group, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative is working to save specialized environmental justice screening tools. As the Trump administration deliberately shreds decades of climate-related research, ex-government employees are attempting to ride to the rescue by creating a sort of shadow information-dispersal system. The American Geophysical Union, which most U.S. Earth scientists are members of, has been instrumental in putting the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change back on track after the Trump administration pulled support for its annual reports.
Lindsey says that the Climate.us site now is seeing close to a million visitors a month, putting it up there with where the NOAA-run site was before its demise. Teachers use it frequently, she says, as do an array of others simply trying to get an accurate read on what is happening to the climate.
As with the old government-run website, Climate.us has a network of scientific advisers around the country willing to lend their expertise to the project and to make sure that what the communications people write up is scientifically accurate. The network is made up of people such as Rick Thoman, a long-time National Weather Service employee in Alaska, who left the government in 2018 and moved over to the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he is now a climate specialist with the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Preparedness.
Thoman used to work as an editor with the Arctic Report Card — another vital international project that the Trump administration has, scientists involved in it tell me, recently decided to withdraw from — and had provided Lindsey’s Climate.gov team with detailed scientific input on Alaska-related phenomena. “When, in February 2025, disaster occurred and Climate.gov goes away, and out of the ashes rises Climate.us, for me it was natural; I was happy to continue in the role in this new form,” Thoman told Truthout. “Because they are so skilled at turning complex environmental information into accessible graphics, the work they do is really important in conveying to non-specialists the changes that are happening.”
An Earth scientist who used to work for NASA (and who asked to remain anonymous) told Truthout that he was now volunteering to be an external reviewer of Climate.us content “because they’re continuing an essential curated and recognized database of how the climate is changing — and where it’s likely to go in the future.” The scientist expressed dismay at the Trump administration’s shuttering of critical climate change work that would be “useful to the U.S. military, to the states,” and that ought to serve as background material upon which Congress based informed legislative decision-making around environmental policies. Now, he said, “not only are [members of the Trump administration] not making good decisions, but they don’t want good information to be readily available.”
For Lindsey, the preservation of this vital climate-related information in an era of administration-enforced environmental ignorance has become a mission. “Climate information shouldn’t be available to the public just on a political basis or a whim,” she said. Instead, there ought to be a way to “promote public climate literacy and to equip people to turn knowledge into meaningful conversations and climate-conscious actions.”
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist and a part-time lecturer at the University of California at Davis. Abramsky’s latest book, American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and DOGE Butchered the US Government, is available for pre-order now and will be released in January. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, New York Magazine, The Village Voice and Rolling Stone. He also writes a weekly political column. Originally from England, with a bachelor’s in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he now lives in Sacramento, California.
Monan recebe cerca de R$ 800 mil por ano; meta inicial era de R$ 5 milhões anuais
Baixo investimento e falta de coordenação limitam previsões, dizem especialistas
23.ago.2026 às 11h00
Marcelo Lima Loreto
Nova York
O Brasil tenta ampliar sua capacidade de antecipar eventos extremos, mas uma de suas principais apostas recebe menos da metade do valor necessário, na avaliação do coordenador do projeto.
O modelo em questão é o Monan (Modelo para Previsões de Oceano, Terra e Atmosfera), liderado pelo Inpe (Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais).
Ainda em desenvolvimento, o Monan já faz previsões com até 15 dias de antecedência e resolução espacial de cerca de 10 km, próxima à dos principais centros internacionais, de acordo com Saulo Freitas, coordenador do projeto no Inpe.
Trecho do rio Xingu, em Mato Grosso; novo modelo de previsão do tempo buscará representar melhor a influência da amazônia sobre o clima na América do Sul – Pablo Porciuncula – 21.mar.25/AFP
Segundo ele, o Monan deve ajudar o país a antecipar eventos extremos e a se preparar para seus impactos. A capacidade de prever a evolução do El Niño deve ser incorporada em três ou quatro anos, e o modelo deverá estar em pleno funcionamento em 2031.
Freitas diz que o Monan buscará representar melhor a influência da amazônia, do cerrado, dos oceanos, do desmatamento e das cidades sobre o tempo e o clima na América do Sul.
Na concepção do Monan, a meta era obter R$ 5 milhões por ano. Freitas reconhece, porém, que a cifra é alta para os padrões nacionais e diz que cerca de R$ 2 milhões anuais já permitiriam ampliar a participação de universidades e centros de pesquisa, com bolsas, pessoal de apoio e equipamentos.
Hoje, de acordo com ele, o projeto recebe cerca de R$ 800 mil por ano. “É muito pouco”, afirma.
O Monan está em desenvolvimento, mas a máquina necessária para processar seus dados já existe. É o supercomputador Jaci, que realiza em torno de 1,6 quatrilhão de operações matemáticas por segundo e é seis vezes mais rápido que o antigo Tupã, segundo Ivan Márcio Barbosa, do Inpe.
Sem esse supercomputador, diz Barbosa, a previsão poderia ficar pronta apenas “depois que o evento ocorreu” e com resolução muito menor.
O Inmet (Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia), responsável pelas previsões federais, diz que pretende adotar o Monan após a conclusão dos testes. Hoje, ele utiliza o modelo europeu Cosmo, que roda duas vezes por dia e faz previsões para a América do Sul com até sete dias de antecedência e resolução de 7 km.
Por usar um modelo regional, o Inmet afirma que “ainda depende 100% de dados oriundos dos modelos globais”, hoje fornecidos pelo modelo alemão Icon. O órgão acrescenta que substituirá integralmente o Cosmo pelo próprio Icon em suas operações.
Intercâmbio e IA
A troca internacional de dados e análises faz parte da rotina meteorológica. Como a atmosfera não respeita fronteiras, os países compartilham observações e previsões continuamente. A dependência brasileira, porém, vai além desse intercâmbio.
Para iniciar suas previsões, os modelos do Inpe utilizam um retrato das condições da atmosfera produzido pela agência americana NOAA (Administração Nacional Oceânica e Atmosférica).
“Se cortar hoje essa análise, amanhã a gente não tem previsão do tempo para o Brasil”, afirma Freitas, referindo-se às previsões produzidas pelo Inpe.
O Monan busca dar ao Brasil capacidade própria de gerar essa análise global, embora continue usando observações compartilhadas internacionalmente.
A inteligência artificial também começa a ajudar nas previsões.
No Impa (Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada), Paulo Orenstein e sua equipe desenvolvem o Tupann, modelo de IA que usa imagens do satélite americano GOES-16 para prever chuvas com até três horas de antecedência. O modelo exige menos capacidade computacional, mas continua dependente do satélite estrangeiro, segundo Orenstein.
Para tentar reduzir essa dependência de satélites, o Inpe e a China desenvolvem o satélite CBERS-5, com lançamento previsto para 2030. Adenilson Roberto da Silva, do Inpe, diz que o equipamento ampliará a autonomia brasileira na geração de dados para a previsão do tempo. O Brasil fará a plataforma do satélite, e a China, os instrumentos de observação.
Augusto Pereira Filho, professor da USP, defende a criação de um Sistema Nacional de Meteorologia, nos moldes da NOAA, para integrar dados, evitar esforços repetidos e reduzir a disputa por recursos. Na aavaliação dele, o país tem profissionais qualificados, mas faltam políticas públicas, infraestrutura e pessoal.
Interpretação dos dados
Mesmo com tecnologia de ponta, a meteorologia ainda enfrenta o comportamento caótico da atmosfera. Pequenos erros nas medições iniciais podem se amplificar ao longo das simulações. Por isso, as equipes operacionais costumam comparar resultados de diferentes modelos.
“Se os resultados convergem na mesma direção, você tem um pouco mais de confiança. Se divergem muito, menos confiança”, diz o meteorologista Marcelo Seluchi, do Cemaden (Centro Nacional de Monitoramento e Alertas de Desastres Naturais).
Segundo Seluchi, frentes frias e ondas de calor podem ser previstas com até duas semanas de antecedência. Já tempestades intensas, enxurradas e alagamentos podem permitir apenas horas ou minutos de aviso.
“O desafio é saber quanto, onde e quando choverá. Nenhum modelo jamais prevê exatamente o que vai acontecer”, diz Seluchi. Por isso, a experiência das equipes que interpretam os dados e emitem alertas é decisiva.
No Cemaden, as equipes combinam previsões com dados de satélites e de mais de 4.000 equipamentos, como radares, pluviômetros e sensores. O centro monitora riscos de deslizamentos, enxurradas e inundações em quase 1.300 municípios com histórico de desastres.
Mas o impacto também depende de quem está no caminho da chuva. “As áreas mais vulneráveis são as que ficam nas periferias. A desigualdade social é a que gera maior impacto dos desastres. Comunidades indígenas e quilombolas também estão entre as mais afetadas”, afirma José Marengo, climatologista do Cemaden.
Today, being outdoors on a hot, sunny day usually means traveling with a few sun-blocking essentials: sunscreen, sunglasses, and a hat. Though our knowledge of sun damage is relatively recent — it wasn’t until the 1800s that scientists began to understand ultraviolet rays’ harmful potential — humans have always tried to avoid the unpleasant sting of too much sun. Yet the first commercial sunscreens didn’t arrive until the 20th century — before that, people had to find other ways to prevent getting a sunburn.
While it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when people first began actively protecting themselves from the sun, evidence suggests that even in prehistoric times, attempts were made to cover the skin both to stay warm in cold weather and also to block the heat of the sun. People covered themselves with animal hides, plant fibers, and later, woven textiles.
By at least 3000 BCE, some societies started to rely on parasols and umbrellas not only as accessories but also for shade; in ancient Egypt, they were often made out of palm leaves or feathers. Egyptians also wore lightweight, loose-fitting linen garments and headdresses to shield themselves from the sun. In ancient Greece, people commonly wore wide-brimmed hats such as the petasos, protecting their faces and necks from direct sunlight.
Early humans also used primitive versions of sunscreen made from natural compounds. Red ochre, a type of claylike iron oxide, has been mixed with water and applied as a paste to the skin since the time of early Homo sapiens. This mixture was used for ceremonial reasons, but scientists believe it may also have served as a physical barrier against the sun.
Ancient Egyptians, meanwhile, used skin treatments made from ingredients such as rice bran (which absorbs UV light), jasmine (to help repair sun-damaged skin), and lupine (believed to lighten the complexion). Ancient Greece had its own approach: Olive oil was commonly applied to the skin between 800 and 500 BCE. While it offered limited protection, modern studies have found it has a natural sun protection factor (SPF) of about 8 — enough to slightly reduce burning, though far lower than today’s common SPF 30 (the minimum recommended by dermatologists).
Like with ochre, other pastes were made from a variety of natural compounds, including mud and clay. These were used not only as camouflage or ceremonial decoration, but also as protection from the sun. Zinc oxide was used in India as early as 500 BCE, and water reeds and spices were turned into sunscreen by the Sama-Bajau peoples of Southeast Asia around 840 CE. Indigenous peoples in the Americas, meanwhile, used sunflower oil, pine needles, western hemlock bark, and deer fat, while thanaka, a mixture made from ground bark and water, has been used in Myanmar (formerly Burma) for more than 2,000 years.
Over time, in some societies — including in ancient Egypt and later in Europe and parts of Asia — protecting the skin became a mark of social status. A pale complexion signaled that you could afford to avoid outdoor manual labor and instead spend your days indoors or in the shade.
In Egypt, this desired look was achieved through use of parasols and topical skin treatments that blocked the sun. In Europe in the 16th century — particularly in France and England — upper-class women wore striking-looking visard masks to prevent sunburn and preserve that pale complexion.
The visard mask was made of black velvet with a silk interior lining, and its only features were a slight protrusion for the nose and small holes for the eyes and mouth. The masks weren’t just eerie to look at, either — they were rather unsettling to wear. Most versions didn’t have straps and were instead held in place by a bead or button gripped between clenched teeth; the wearer couldn’t speak while the mask was on.
By the early 1700s, visard masks had spread beyond the aristocracy, and beyond their intended purpose of preventing sunburns. Women of various social classes wore them, including sex workers, who often used them to discreetly enter public spaces such as theaters. In 1704, Britain’s Queen Anne even banned visard masks from the theater, but they’d already lost their status among the elite and eventually faded out of use.
By the end of the 19th century, dermatologists confirmed that prolonged exposure to the sun’s UV rays could inflame or burn the skin, and scientists began experiments to develop effective and suitable topical sun protection. In 1878, Austrian physician Otto Veiel promoted tannins — natural compounds found in many plants — as viable sun protection, but they also discolored the skin.
In 1891, a German doctor experimented with what was likely the first true attempt at a chemical sunscreen, a quinine-based ointment to treat skin sensitivity to sunlight. And in the early 1900s, German physician Paul Unna came up with another sunscreen precursor, a paste made of natural ingredients such as chestnut extract. Ultimately, these early products didn’t apply well, either discoloring the skin or going on too thick, and so the experiments to find a better solution continued.
It wasn’t until the mid-1900s that sunscreens began to resemble what we use today. In 1942, the U.S. military tapped the American Medical Association to study products or substances that could help protect soldiers from getting sunburned during particularly hot World War II Pacific campaigns. The solution was a thick, red, veterinary petroleum salve, also known as “red vet pet.” It was waterproof, durable, nontoxic, inexpensive, and, most importantly, relatively effective.
Florida pharmacist Benjamin Green had served in the Air Force throughout the war, and in 1944, he began experimenting with ways to make the sticky substance more appealing. He added ingredients such as cocoa butter and coconut oil, creating a smoother, nicely scented lotion — the earliest version of what later became Coppertone. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, sunscreen formulas continued to improve in texture and ingredients, offering broader protection against UVA and UVB rays, and by the 1970s and ’80s, sunscreen was widely marketed for sunburn protection and as a tanning aid.
Today, sun protection can be as subtle as a swipe of SPF lip balm or as advanced as UV-reflective clothing and tinted window film. The methods may have changed, but the instinct remains the same: When the sun beats down, we find ways to keep cool, stay covered, and avoid the burn.
Forced to sweat and suffer under the weight of clothes and societal norms, a broiling summer that killed thousands of Americans finally got us to consider the wonders of shorts and t-shirts.
In 1936, a punishing heat wave struck the United States, pushing forward the adoption of air conditioning and accelerating a fight over acceptable fashion. No surprise, then, that thousands gathered to refresh themselves on a crowded beach in New York in this image from July 1936. AFP/Getty
By Geoff Williams
Published July 1, 2026
People often say that a country is going to hell. And the summer of 1936 was certainly infernal. Over the course of the summer, over 11,000 Americans and 1,000 Canadians either perished in the heat, or because of the heat.
The heat can kill you in crazy ways. Even if it doesn’t destroy your body, you could be driving, and your tire might blow out, and suddenly you’re careening into a tree. That type of thing happened a lot during the summer of 1936.
The extremes of that summer also resulted in something less dire: T-shirts and shorts became widely popular.
Before then, people were used to dressing in a lot of layers. And while the materials in summer were lighter, they were still hot. That arrangement was tolerated most summers.Temperatures would climb, and everyone would grimace and bear it, sweating underneath coats and petticoats, vests and corsets, hats and gloves. But the summer of 1936 was too much. It was a summer when people perished because of their choice of clothing.
That year would have been a memorable one for weather, even without the diabolical summer. The winter of 1935-1936 brought almost-impossible-to-survive temperatures, like -60 degrees (in Parshall, North Dakota). Throughout the country, hundreds of Americans froze to death in their homes. And in early April, 14 tornadoes struck the southeastern United States overnight, killing at least 454 Americans.
And then, of course, there was the summer.
There were signs in the spring that the summer might be hot—people across the country were already collapsing from the heat and ending up in hospitals. By May, the first deaths started—but nobody knew what they were dealing with until the mercury and death toll started rising and never seemed to end. States and territories alike were under assault.
From Maine to Arizona, Alaska to Alabama, virtually no part of the country was untouched by the summer heat. A few places came out mostly unscathed—Wyoming and Colorado, thanks in part to mountain winds, fared pretty well. Most of Florida, due to its ocean breezes, came out fine, and it helped that its citizens were pretty accustomed to the heat. Hawaii, a U.S. territory at the time, had some schools shut down in August due to the heat, but otherwise, it was a tropical paradise. But just about everywhere else, Americans—and Canadians—were in a fight for survival.
In Wichita, Kansas, for instance, the high was 100 or more degrees for 20 days in a row. That same month, in August, Oklahoma City had 22 days in a row of 100 or more degrees. Earlier that summer, on July 14, it was as if Mother Nature placed the entire continent underneath a giant magnifying glass: more than 1,000 people officially were killed by the heat.
That number was likely far more, however, due to indirect deaths, like the aforementioned tire blowout. After all, if the heat causes you to seek cooler air in your basement, and then you fall down the stairs, as happened to Frank Cress, a 74-year-old man in Cincinnati, was it the heat that did him in, or bad luck and gravity? Coroners weren’t always certain what to put down on the death certificate.
On July 14, 1936, at one Detroit hospital, a doctor performed 150 autopsies of heat victims in a 36-hour period (the day before, the Associated Press reported that over a 14-hour period in Detroit, the heat was killing residents at a rate of one every 10 minutes). In the Twin Cities, newspapers said that the deaths were coming in at three per minute.
In Kentucky, Arkansas, Missouri, Michigan, Oklahoma, Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Nebraska and North Dakota, the mercury ranged between 100 and 110 degrees. It hit 113 degrees in several cities like Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Fredonia, Kansas. In Brawley, California, it reached 122 degrees.
And yet if you wore shorts in the wrong city, or if you were a male taking off your shirt at the beach, you might be arrested.
How extreme heat transformed America
You can argue that every season, or even every day, brings some changes that affect the historical timeline. But the summer of 1936 made a profound impact on the country’s future, starting with air-conditioning.
That summer was practically a three-month advertisement for the fledgling air-conditioning industry. Minneapolis hospitals were soon promising their community that they’d have cool air in the operating rooms before the year was up. Harvard’s School of Public Health quickly produced a study that determined that a newborn’s chance of survival shot up by 26 percent if they were born in an air-conditioned room. If it weren’t for World War II, throttling its progress, air-conditioning would have certainly become more mainstream earlier than the 1950s and 1960s.
The 1936 heat wave also was an early clarion call for climate change. Clarence Mills, professor of experimental medicine at the University of Cincinnati, was at the forefront of the climate change conversation, though “climate change” as a term was rarely, if ever, used. But that summer in a column that he wrote for the Associated Press, Milles wrote of “irregularly rising world temperatures” and observed that “the rise has been proceeding with irregular relapses into colder periods, since about 1850. And as earth temperatures rise, summer heat and aridity grow more severe in portions of continents far inland from the source of moisture, such as the great plains area.”
A lasting change in the weather weighed on the public’s mind. This was the Dust Bowl era, after all, and the summer of 1934 had also been quite deadly. Throughout 1936, ordinary citizens kept asking meteorologists if the weather had changed permanently— and received a variety of answers, ranging from ‘it’s possible’ to ‘no way’.
Shrinking sleeves—and hemlines
The most durable change wrought by the heat wave of 1936, though, was in fashion. Everyone tends to think of the 1960s as the decade when American fashion truly became modern with young Americans’ tie-dye T-shirts and cut-off shorts. It’s certainly true that fashion dramatically shifted in those years. But the hippies of the ‘60s had parents growing up in the 1930s—and that was the decade when a lot of people, young and old, were pushing their peers to embrace wearing short sleeves and short pants in hot weather.
While the fashion changes in the 1960s were countercultural, the shifts in 1936 received establishment support. Dr. Herman N. Bundesen, president of the Chicago Board of Health, said in a newspaper interview that the public should wear just enough clothes to satisfy the police. He said that women were pretty “sensible” with their clothing choices, but the men were “very silly.” Bundesen complained: “Who but a man would wear four layers of starched clothes around his neck and then tie a wool rag under his chin, just to make sure he choked to death? Shorts and a soft shirt would be sensible dress for men in a heat wave.”
In Yonkers, on June 21, two reporters from the New York Daily News —hoping to test the city’s anti-shorts law—were arrested for wearing shorts in Yonkers after a hike. They were given the choice to leave the city or put on more appropriate clothing. They refused and were eventually brought forth before city judge Charles W. Boote. The judge was probably sweating underneath his robe when he made his decision on July 10, when the high was 102. Boote was sympathetic to the journalists, fining them $10 (adjusted for inflation about $240) but suspending the fines.
In the New York area, everybody had an opinion on whether shorts should be allowed. In the Bronx, people were hiking in shorts and halter tops freely. But about 40 miles away, in Westport, Connecticut, city officials discussed creating their own modesty law that would forbid shorts. In Farmingdale, a village of Long Island, the police chief declared that shorts were okay—unless citizens complained, and then he might have to rethink that.
But these discussions were happening all over the country, in backyards, parks, the workplace and even in church, where a young woman on Long Island made headlines for being ejected by a priest for not being appropriately covered up. In Covington, Kentucky, police officers were told to cite any teenage girls or women dressed in shorts and halter tops for indecent exposure. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, when a business owner allowed his male employees to wear shorts in the store, he confided to the Detroit Free Press that he was worried about the public reaction and was relieved that nobody seemed to object. There were also heated arguments over whether to ban nudist colonies, which first appeared in the United States in 1931 and were quickly gaining favor, especially during a summer when everyone wanted to take their clothes off.
A forgotten summer
Eventually, fall arrived, and the temperature ticked down, and cooler heads somewhat prevailed. In 1937, the anti-shorts law in Yonkers was overturned, and while T-shirts and shorts were more broadly accepted, at least with some people, the hats, gloves and layers generally stayed on. Time passed, the nation entered WWII, and people began to forget about fighting about climate change and arguing for a new wardrobe, until the 1960s, when once again, a generation tired of wearing gloves, hats, and layers of clothing said enough is enough—and this time, the clothes stayed off. Meanwhile, the heat wave became relegated to the occasional news story in the summer when old-timers would say, “You think this is hot? You should have been here back in 1936.”
But the 1936 heat wave shouldn’t be forgotten. There have been a lot of extreme weather events in American history. Floods like Johnstown (1889). Hurricanes like Galveston (1900) and Katrina (2005). The 1978 blizzard. The summer of 1936 belongs on that list and deserves to come out of the shadows and back into the sunlight. Because maybe if we remembered our hot sweaty past a little more, we might do more to fix our planet and avoid an even hotter, sweaty future. But if not, at least we’ll be comfortable in T-shirts and shorts.
A medium for the organization that partners with the Brazilian city’s government says the chief she channels commands entities specializing in wind, rain, drought and humidity.
An illustration published by the Cacique Cobra Coral Foundation depicts the spirit against a background of clouds and sunlight. The Portuguese text reads, “Light that illuminates the weak and confounds the powerful.” (Cacique Cobra Coral Foundation via Courthouse News)
RIO DE JANEIRO (CN) — As Rio de Janeiro prepared for wind gusts of up to 68 mph last Thursday, the city renewed its agreement with the Cacique Cobra Coral Foundation for another 25 years. The organization is led by a medium who says she channels a spirit capable of interfering with the weather.
Published in the city’s Official Gazette on Friday, the no-cost agreement between Rio’s Geotechnical Institute Foundation and the foundation calls for “promoting the dissemination and exchange of information between the parties to enable the provision of technical meteorological assistance.”
Osmar Santos, a spokesperson for the organization, said similar agreements typically take about 20 days to formalize, but the city completed the renewal within hours.
“I have never seen an agreement published in record time,” Santos said. “In other words, when they’re interested, they get it done.”
The renewal came one week after another windstorm hit the city, leaving two people dead and felling trees.
After the storm, the foundation posted on Instagram that its agreement with the city awaited renewal. The post received about 60 comments, most calling to renew the partnership.
“Renew it, mayor. Make it happen!” one user wrote.
An excerpt from Rio de Janeiro’s Official Gazette shows the city’s 25-year cooperation agreement with the Cacique Cobra Coral Foundation, published Aug. 7, 2026. The agreement provides for technical meteorological assistance at no cost. (Rio de Janeiro Official Gazette via Courthouse News)
Strong winds hit Rio again Friday, but the worst-case forecast did not materialize. The coincidence reinforced a decades-old belief: When a storm threatens Rio, residents ask where Cacique Cobra Coral is. When destructive weather does not materialize, the spirit gets some credit.
Based in Guarulhos, São Paulo state, the foundation says it was founded in 1931 by medium Ângelo Scritori. Federal tax registry data show its opening date as Aug. 13, 1981.
The foundation says it is now led by Adelaide Scritori, the medium’s daughter and Santos’ wife, who began receiving messages from Cacique Cobra Coral at age 7.
The spirit is associated with Umbanda, an Afro-Brazilian religion incorporating African and Indigenous traditions, Catholicism and Spiritism. His name roughly means “Chief Coral Snake”: Cacique refers to an Indigenous leader and cobra coral to the snake. The foundation says the chief previously lived as Galileo Galilei and Abraham Lincoln.
Santos described Cacique Cobra Coral as “a spiritual entity who works to address the challenge of the climate on Earth, which is not changing — it has changed.”
“The foundation is not here to forecast the weather or issue storm alerts,” Santos said. “It changes the climate.”
Santos added that the foundation acts only when governments or companies request its assistance and does not serve individuals.
Santos said the foundation helps companies in California and the Midwest and provides long-range weather information to clients trading in Chicago commodities markets before the U.S. Department of Agriculture publishes its reports.
Despite saying the foundation does not forecast weather, Santos claimed it can project conditions more than 30 days in advance. He did not identify the companies or provide evidence.
The foundation says it gets financial support from Tunikito Insurance Brokerage, owned by Santos’ family, and other private companies.
Renzo Taddei, an associate professor of anthropology at the Federal University of São Paulo who conducted ethnographic research with the foundation, said the organization has carved out a distinct place in Brazil’s popular imagination.
“The chief became a personality in Brazilian culture,” Taddei said. “Osmar always worked hard to make that happen. But social media amplified it far beyond anything Osmar could have anticipated.”
During operations, Scritori channels the chief, who speaks with Santos and decides whether to interfere with weather conditions, Santos said. The chief purportedly has a team of specialized spirits, each handling wind, rain, drought or humidity.
The foundation also consults meteorologists, Taddei added. They analyze radar data, forecasts, atmospheric pressure and wind direction to determine what would need to change. Santos then relays the assessment to the chief, who coordinates the work of the other spirits.
If the goal is to prevent rain at Copacabana Beach, the meteorologists might propose shifting wind patterns or atmospheric pressure to hold back a cold front. Then the chief and his team would carry out the change.
During his research, Taddei asked the meteorologists whether their equipment detected signs of the interventions. They said it did, but argued that meteorology did not have the right tools to measure changes.
“Meteorology cannot see the scale at which the chief works,” Taddei said.
The foundation’s relationship with the Rio city government began sometime between 1993 and 1996. Since then, the organization has claimed a role in protecting Copacabana’s New Year’s Eve celebration and Carnival, when millions gather outdoors.
On its website, the foundation also says it provided assistance during the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games.
Santos said they must respond to weather-related requests from partner governments. After an operation, the government agency would have 24 hours to report whether the forecast weather event had dissipated and whether there was damage.
More recently, the foundation has brought its services into political disputes.
Santos said the warning referred to the risk of an attack against Trump and that the message came from other spirits connected to the chief’s team, without presenting evidence.
Taddei said the foundation’s public profile contrasts with the place Umbanda has historically occupied in Brazil. The religion and other traditions of African origin maintained a low public profile after decades of persecution, criminalization and racism. Santos adopted the opposite strategy, seeking attention from the press and public officials.
“They challenge a kind of tacit agreement over what should gain visibility in public debate and what should not,” Taddei said. “Osmar brings it into public debate all the time, including by exposing politicians.”
Taddei added that the presence of a spirit in government agreements, major events and international disputes also turns the foundation into part of Brazil’s political spectacle.
“In a way, what the foundation does is carnivalize the institutional order, and Brazilians love that,” Taddei said, citing social media comments that Brazil has its own “Ministry of Magic.”
Wallace Corbo, a constitutional law professor at Rio de Janeiro State University, said the presence of a spiritual entity does not make the partnership inherently unconstitutional.
“Our Constitution has secularism as one of its structural principles, meaning the state cannot impose or restrict the exercise of religious beliefs. But the Brazilian state and the Brazilian Constitution are not hostile to religion,” Corbo said. “There is room for interaction and mutual contribution between religions and the Brazilian state.”
Corbo did not identify religious imposition or preferential treatment for a majority religion in the Cacique Cobra Coral agreement. And it’s free.
“We are dealing much more with a type of religious celebration than with an imposition, restriction or discrimination in the religious sphere,” Corbo said.
The Rio mayor’s office did not respond to requests for information about the agreement.
Courthouse News reporter Marília Marasciulo is based in Brazil.
A Prefeitura do Rio de Janeiro firmou o mais longo acordo já registrado entre o Executivo municipal e a Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral. A fundação representa a entidade espírita a quem se atribui o poder de intervir em fenômenos climáticos para mitigar os efeitos nas cidades.
A assistência do Cacique Cobra Coral à prefeitura vai durar 25 anos, segundo o acordo assinado em 6 de agosto, feito sem custos. A parceria, sob justificativa de “prestação de assistência técnica meteorológica”, foi feita pela Geo-Rio (Fundação Instituto de Geotécnica do Município do Rio de Janeiro).
Ilustração do Cacique Cobra Coral que consta em site oficial da fundação – Reprodução/FCCC
No dia seguinte à assinatura, cariocas receberam às 5h um alerta da Defesa Civil com risco de vendaval. As rajadas poderiam chegar a 90 km/h. Para evitar o que havia ocorrido duas semanas antes, quando a ventania causou estragos e mortes na cidade, município e estado fecharam parques públicos, suspenderam aulas e recomendaram a antecipação do expediente. Na ventania anterior, a fundação estava com a parceria rompida com a prefeitura.
Na segunda, os ventos chegaram a 84 km/h no sul fluminense, mas não passaram de 62 km/h na capital.
A fundação divulga que o Cacique Cobra Coral teria sido, em outras existências terrenas, o astrônomo Galileu Galilei e o presidente dos Estados Unidos Abraham Lincoln. A médium Adelaide Scritori diz incorporar o mentor espiritual.
A reportagem procurou Osmar Santos, porta-voz da fundação. Ele afirmou que o cacique suspendeu entrevistas. A fundação, localizada em Guarulhos, região metropolitana de São Paulo, não é aberta ao público e não dá consultas.
O serviço prestado pelo Cobra Coral é direcionado a empresas e ao poder público, nunca com cobrança em dinheiro. A contrapartida, diz a fundação, é investimento em obras de mitigação de efeitos climáticos.
A primeira manifestação do Cacique Cobra Coral teria ocorrido quando Adelaide era ainda criança e estava em um centro espírita frequentado pela família. O pai, Ângelo Scritori, foi quem criou a fundação.
A atuação pública começou no início dos anos 1980, quando o trabalho era feito em uma garagem, com mapas do país dispostos sobre a mesa. Naquela época, o serviço da Cacique Cobra Coral era oferecido aos estados por telegrafia. Bastava aos órgãos enviar mapas hidrográficos para que o serviço —redirecionar nuvens de chuva— fosse realizado.
Em 1988, a fundação já mantinha contatos com os governos de Santa Catarina, Paraná, Rio de Janeiro e Mato Grosso do Sul.
Nos anos 1990, a fundação começou a atribuir a si a previsão de atentados e tragédias de comoção nacional, como a morte de Ayrton Senna, em 1994, mas recuou na prática.
Hoje a fundação diz atender a questões climáticas de países de três continentes, incluindo China, Austrália e Estados Unidos. No último, diz ter ajudado a dissipar estragos do furacão Irene, em 2011.
No Rio, a fundação tem convênios oficiais com a prefeitura desde o primeiro mandato do prefeito Cesar Maia (1993-1996).
Até o acordo mais recente, o de 25 anos, as parcerias firmadas entre fundação e Prefeitura do Rio tinham validade de, no máximo, quatro anos, com prorrogações pontuais por mais um ano.
A parceria já acompanhou visitas de chefes de Estado, edições do Rock in Rio, Pan-Americano, Olimpíada e Copa do Mundo, além de Carnavais, Réveillons e shows na praia de Copacabana.
Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral não é mais parceira da prefeitura do Rio e diz que ventania foi só o princípio do caos (Folha de S.Paulo)
Entidade que teria o poder de controlar fenômenos climáticos afirma que poderia ter mitigado efeitos, mas não foi acionada pelo município
Médium prestava serviços à cidade há 25 anos e contrato não foi renovado após saída de Eduardo Paes; Rock in Rio também não deve contar com monitoramento
Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral: ‘Prefeitura precisa entender que não precisamos deles, eles que precisam de nós’, diz porta-voz – Reprodução
Ele conta que a entidade esotérica, que teria o poder de controlar fenômenos climáticos, previu a ventania, mas não agiu porque o contrato com a prefeitura da cidade expirou e não foi renovado por Eduardo Cavaliere, sucessor de Eduardo Paes no cargo.
Árvore caída na rua General Polidoro, em Botafogo, na zona sul do Rio; ventania causou mortes e deixou rastro de destruição – Eduardo Anizelli – 29.jul.26/Folhapress
“Tem todo o planeta atrás de nós, temos que dar prioridade a quem nos procura”, afirma o porta-voz, que disse ao F5 estar a caminho da Europa, onde foi solicitada a atuação da médium Adelaide Scritori, que incorporaria o Cacique. Ele não especificou que países solicitaram seus serviços.
“Diante dessa omissão acima, foi decidido que estamos fora do Réveillon e do Carnaval. Adeus, Rio. Foi bom enquanto durou e havia reciprocidade, já que mesmo isento de ônus financeiro o convênio é uma mão dupla”, diz Osmar. A entidade era parceira da prefeitura da cidade desde 2001, na gestão de César Maia, com interrupção no monitoramento durante o governo de Marcelo Crivella.
Ele conta que o Rock in Rio, que tinha contrato vigente com a médium desde 2005 (com uma breve interrupção), também ainda não os procurou para a edição deste ano. O vendaval de dias atrás danificou estruturas da Cidade do Rock. Leia a entrevista a seguir.
A população do Rio de Janeiro foi pega de surpresa com a ventania. Por que a Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral não interveio? Porque não foi renovado o contrato. O convênio com a prefeitura do Rio está suspenso com a saída do Eduardo Paes para a candidatura ao governo. Isso nos preocupa pois estamos no inverno. E quando o verão e o período de chuvas de verão chegar? Vai sobrar o que do Rio?
A Fundação sabia do que estava por vir? Se sim, por que não avisou ou tentou evitar? Sim, já era esperada desde 29 de junho e alguns parceiros privados foram alertados e tomaram providências. Como não temos mais essa parceria, damos prioridade a quem nos procura ou está com convênio ou contrato vigente.
É possível dizer que fenômenos como esse serão recorrentes? Estamos as vésperas do verão do século e eventos semelhantes aos dos últimos dias vão ser corriqueiros a partir de agosto. Tivemos agora uma pequena amostra do que nos espera no verão, que vai começar na primavera. O clima e o tempo mudaram, nada será como antes foi um dia
O Rock in Rio, também parceiro de muitos anos, corre risco? Desta vez ninguém nos procurou e não vamos falar do que não fazemos parte, seria antiético. Temos de respeitar a decisão deles. Dezenas de países europeus e da Ásia atrás de nós, então temos que atuar onde somos chamados.
Alguma chance de a parceria com a prefeitura ser restabelecida? Não há mais o que conversar. Eles [prefeitura] precisam entender que não precisamos deles, eles que precisam de nós. Temos regras, deveres e obrigações e esse convênio é uma responsabilidade muito grande para nós ficando como está e sem fazerem a lição de casa. O povo é que paga o preço dessa omissão. Estamos fora a trabalho a caminho da Europa, onde alguns países estão precisando da nossa atuação.
Acabou de vez então a atuação do Cacique no Rio? Nós não temos tempo para ficar correndo atrás do que é interesse deles e do povo que eles representam. Diante da omissão, foi decidido que estamos fora do Réveillon e do Carnaval. Adeus, Rio. Foi bom enquanto durou e havia reciprocidade, já que mesmo isento de ônus financeiro, o convênio é uma mão dupla. Desculpem os cariocas, mas há seres humanos agradecidos pelas nossas interferências no clima em 17 países e 3 continentes.
Acordo entre Prefeitura do Rio e Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral desperta troll das redes sociais
Pretensão à racionalidade absoluta é contradição em todo fiel religioso
15.ago.2026 às 14h30
Publicado no Diário Oficial, um acordo entre a Prefeitura do Rio de Janeiro e a Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral despertou o troll das redes sociais. No caso, a trollagem é máscara pública do senso comum quando se trata do sobrenatural popular, fora do escopo oficial. Para o melhor juízo, é perfeitamente natural o sobrenatural da religião (católica, evangélica, islâmica), não qualquer outro que se candidate à crença. O “creio porque é absurdo”, relativo à ressurreição de Cristo, vigora até hoje, desde a sua sugestão por Tertuliano (155-220). Absurdo (“ineptus”, em latim), com o sentido de não racional, tem dono teológico.
Mas não é propriedade consensual, tamanha a diversidade da fé. Quando 86% dos eleitores brasileiros opinam numa pesquisa recente que um candidato à Presidência deveria acreditar em Deus, se a resposta não é preconceituosa, vale para a divindade de todas as crenças. O acordo oficializado é, na verdade, renovação de um convênio de administrações anteriores do Instituto Geotécnico da Prefeitura com a organização mística. Desde 1931, a fundação oferece prestação gratuita de serviços que amenizariam a fúria dos elementos naturais, como tempestades e inundações. Isso, por ação sobrenatural de uma entidade denominada Cacique Cobra Coral, incorporado pela médium Adelaide Scritori.
Poste de sinalização derrubado por ventania em Botafogo, na zona sul do Rio – Eduardo Anizelli – 29.jul.26/Folhapress
Até aqui, o absurdo já arrepia as belas almas, senão o discurso cientificista que rege a formação do senso comum. O plus é que esse convênio não é exclusivo do Rio, por ser longa a lista de instituições, no Brasil e no exterior, que sempre solicitaram os préstimos do Cacique Cobra Coral. Ela inclui a realeza britânica, observatórios de prestígio, centros militares e administrações estatais. Os EUA e a Argentina mantinham acordos que acabam de ser cancelados pela fundação, como retaliação pela animosidade contra os brasileiros. O cacique é nacionalista.
“E agora, José?”, perguntaria Drummond. “Sobrenatural de Almeida pede a palavra”, responderia Nelson Rodrigues. Era um personagem, entidade invisível a cargo do absurdo no futebol. Explicar o inexplicável, tal o desafio que essa invenção literária hoje compartilharia com adeptos reais dos prodígios do cacique. O personagem jornalístico jamais chegou ao teatro de Nelson, mas há algo de teatral na atitude pública desses adeptos: a hipocrisia. É palavra complexa. “Hypokrites”, no teatro grego da Antiguidade, era o ator que expressava, por meio da máscara de um personagem, sentimentos alheios à sua pessoa real. Hoje se aplica a quem finge certos valores e age de forma contrária. Ou então, quem diz o que não pensa, como no troll.
É o caso dos atores sociais que apelam aos serviços do Cacique Cobra Coral, enquanto denegam publicamente a entidade. São reféns do embaraço ocidentalista presente em toda crença no sobrenatural, seja qual for a divindade: o cruzamento entre mito e história. Por isso, acredite quem quiser, sem culpa. O que aqui está em questão não é a veracidade do fenômeno, mas a contradição de todo fiel religioso que se pretenda absolutamente racional. Corajoso, no mínimo, é o ato da prefeitura: recusou oficialmente a hipocrisia oficial.
A Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral (FCCC) anunciou a suspensão de suas atividades de assistência climática na Argentina, nessa segunda-feira (27). A decisão interrompe uma cooperação histórica que teve início durante a Guerra das Malvinas e a gestão de Raúl Alfonsín, primeiro presidente eleito democraticamente pela Argentina nos anos 80, após um longo período de regime militar.
A instituição condiciona a retomada do suporte técnico místico a um pedido formal de desculpas por parte do governo argentino, alegando a ocorrência de um “ataque político” contra o Brasil.
Histórico de cooperação e crise energética
Em nota nas redes sociais, a FCCC afirma que sua atuação em território argentino acumula episódios de intervenção em momentos críticos. Em janeiro de 1989, a fundação registrou uma operação para auxiliar o país vizinho durante uma severa crise energética e de abastecimento elétrico.
Naquela ocasião, a entidade, que mantém convênios no Brasil com o Ministério de Minas e Energia, utilizou a mediação de Adelaide Scritori para influenciar o clima e atrair chuvas para bacias hidrográficas.
O objetivo era elevar o nível dos reservatórios das hidrelétricas afetadas pela seca, em manobras denominadas “operações antiapagão”.
Tensões diplomáticas e impacto no El Niño
A interrupção dos serviços ocorre em um momento meteorológico sensível, marcado pelo início do fenômeno El Niño. Segundo comunicados da fundação, a Argentina ficará “por sua conta e risco” na área climática enquanto perdurar o impasse diplomático.
Em mensagens direcionadas aos novos ocupantes da Casa Rosada, a FCCC reforçou que as relações bilaterais não são recentes e que governantes “passam”, sugerindo a necessidade de respeito à continuidade do trabalho realizado pela instituição.
Grupo afirma prestar ‘assistência climática’ ao país desde a Guerra das Malvinas e diz que suspensão ocorre após falas do presidente argentino
Por O Globo — Rio de Janeiro
28/07/2026 10h48
O presidente argentino Javier Milei durante convenção que oficializou Flávio Bolsonaro como candidato — Foto: Maria Isabel Oliveira / O Globo
A Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral voltou aos holofotes após anunciar a suspensão da chamada “assistência climática” prestada à Argentina. Em nota divulgada nas redes sociais, a entidade afirmou que a decisão foi motivada pelas declarações do presidente argentino, Javier Milei, contra o presidente Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) e o ministro do Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF) Alexandre de Moraes.
Segundo a fundação, a Argentina ficará “por sua conta e risco” durante o início da atuação do fenômeno El Niño enquanto não houver um pedido formal de desculpas do governo argentino.
Mas, afinal, o que é a Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral e como ela afirma atuar?
O que é a Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral?
Criada na década de 1980, a Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral se apresenta como uma organização espiritual que afirma ser capaz de influenciar fenômenos meteorológicos por meio de práticas mediúnicas.
A entidade sustenta que recebe orientações do espírito do indígena Cacique Cobra Coral, incorporado pela médium Adelaide Scritori, conhecida como “Mãe Adelaide”. Segundo a fundação, esse trabalho permitiria interferir em eventos climáticos, como chuvas, secas, frentes frias e tempestades.
Apesar da notoriedade conquistada ao longo dos anos, não há comprovação científica de que a fundação tenha capacidade de alterar as condições meteorológicas. Meteorologistas e pesquisadores atribuem os fenômenos atmosféricos a processos físicos observáveis e não reconhecem evidências que validem esse tipo de intervenção.
Atuação junto a governos
Ao longo de sua trajetória, a Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral afirmou ter colaborado com diferentes órgãos públicos e empresas no Brasil e no exterior.
Entre os casos citados pela própria entidade estão ações durante grandes eventos, como o Carnaval do Rio de Janeiro, corridas de Fórmula 1, festas de Réveillon e operações relacionadas ao setor elétrico. Segundo a fundação, essas intervenções ocorreriam de forma voluntária e sem cobrança financeira.
No caso da Argentina, a entidade afirma prestar “assistência climática” desde 1982, durante a Guerra das Malvinas, e manter essa atuação desde o governo de Raúl Alfonsín, primeiro presidente eleito após o fim da ditadura militar.
A fundação também diz ter realizado, em janeiro de 1989, uma operação para favorecer a ocorrência de chuvas sobre bacias hidrográficas argentinas durante uma crise energética, com o objetivo de elevar os níveis dos reservatórios de usinas hidrelétricas.
Suspensão após declarações de Milei
Na nota divulgada nesta segunda-feira, a Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral classificou como um “ataque político ao nosso país” as declarações feitas por Javier Milei durante o lançamento da candidatura de Flávio Bolsonaro (PL) à Presidência da República.
Como resposta, anunciou a suspensão da assistência climática ao país vizinho.
“Enquanto não houver um pedido formal de desculpas, na área climática, a Argentina estará por sua conta e risco em pleno início da atuação do fenômeno El Niño”, afirmou a entidade.
Entropy is one of the most maligned and misunderstood concepts in science. Maybe you’ve heard it defined as the “amount of disorder” in a system. And the second law of thermodynamics says the entropy of a closed system always increases over time. So you might think, why should you clean up your office if it will only get messier?
That might be true, but you can’t blame it on entropy. The messy-room metaphor is often used to introduce the idea (it’s usually a teenager’s bedroom—can you relate?), but it’s misleading. See, disorder doesn’t mean messiness or chaos; it refers to the number of ways the parts of a system can be arranged without changing the overall state of the system.
For example, say your “system” is just a box full of air. Inside, at the microscopic level, the gas molecules are bouncing around like bumper cars. Now, imagine you could map the location and velocity of each particle at a given instant. That would be one possible arrangement, or microstate, but there are an infinitude of others, and they’re changing trillions of times a second.
Of course, you can’t really see this stuff. Instead, what you observe are overall, macro-level properties like air pressure; if you sealed the box at sea level, that would be 14.7 pounds per square inch. And unless you add energy to the system, say by heating it, that doesn’t change. So all those microstates correspond to the macrostate of 14.7 psi. Get it?
In other words, entropy is all about the link between the invisible atomic realm and the visible, measurable realm of objects, the world we inhabit. You could say it’s a conceptual and mathematical bridge between two levels of reality. I mean, c’mon, that’s pretty cool.
Now, out of all possible outcomes, which ones actually occur? That’s basically random, so it’s a matter of probability. In fact, probability is fundamental to the idea of entropy, and this is what the messy-room image fails to capture. So I’m going to use a different analogy: rolling dice. Einstein once said “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” Let’s just see about that, shall we?
Rolling the Bones
Imagine you roll a six-sided game die. You get a number from 1 to 6, right? There are six possible outcomes, or states. If you roll the 20-sided die in Dungeons & Dragons, there are 20 possible states. If you want to wow your D&D pals, you could casually remark that this die has a higher entropy—because it has more possible outcomes.
Now say you’re determining a character’s abilities in D&D, and you roll three six-sided dice. The three values can add up to anything between 3 and 18, but the various sums are not equally likely. For maximum dexterity, say, you need an 18. Well, there’s only one way to achieve that: Each die must come up a 6.
But if moderate dexterity is enough for you, you might be fine with a level 10. That’s easier to get, because there are more combinations that add up to 10—six unique sets of numbers to be exact:
And if we roll the dice one at a time and take sequence into account, there are even more permutations. Take 6-3-1 on the left. You could get the same three values in five other ways: 1-6-3, 3-1-6, 3-6-1, 6-1-3, 6-3-1. (Yes, these are different outcomes because time’s arrow moves in one direction.) All in all, there’s 27 different ways to roll a 10.
If we look at all possible results for three dice, there are 216 distinct microstates. But what matters for the game is the sum of the three values—that’s our macrostate. So the odds of rolling an 18 are 0.4 percent (1 out of 216), while the odds of rolling a 10 are 12.5 percent (27 out of 216).
We can say the 10 state has a higher entropy because there are more ways it can occur. And because there are more ways it can occur, it’s more likely to occur. See? There’s no mysterious force increasing the entropy of a system. It’s just that states with higher entropy have a higher probability. It’s actually kinda simple, really.
Opposite World
Now let’s think about this in terms of energy. Say you take a glass of cold water with a temperature of 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and you drop a hot, 120-degree ball of copper into it. What happens? Well, from experience, you’d expect the water to get warmer and the ball to get cooler, until they equalize at some temperature between 50 and 120 degres. That’s called thermal equilibrium.
But what do we mean when we say something gets warmer? We mean that its atoms and molecules increase in kinetic energy—they get more jiggly. Say the water gains 50 joules of thermal energy. Then, since energy is always conserved, we know that the copper ball cools off, losing the same 50 joules of energy.
But wait. What if, on a particular Tuesday, you dropped the hot ball in the cold water and the ball got hotter, increasing in thermal energy by 10 joules, while the water lost 10 joules and got colder? Did you just break physics? Nope. Energy is still conserved. You might find this disturbing, but it could happen. Why? Entropy. It’s one possible distribution of energy—just an extremely unlikely one. Basically, you won the Lotto.
An Object Lesson
Now imagine you have a tiny little solid. It’s so tiny, it has only three atoms. (Remember the three-dice analogy?) Quantum mechanics tells us that atoms can only have certain energy levels—just like a die can roll a 2 or a 3 but not a 2.5. The point is that if the total energy of these three atoms is 10 units, then as we saw, there are 27 ways those 10 units of energy can be distributed.
Let’s take this just one step further: Say we have two tiny objects, A and B, with different amounts of thermal energy. Object A consists of two atoms (dice) and has a total energy of 3 units. B has three atoms (dice) and 7 units of energy. This puts the total energy in the system (A and B) at 10 units. Here, a picture will help:
Now suppose we put objects A and B in contact so that thermal energy can transfer between them. This means there could be many different arrangements of energy in the system, as long as the total remains 10 (for conservation of energy). Here are four of the many possible combos:
What if object A has just 2 units of energy? There’s only one way this will work—each die must be a 1 (since 1 + 1 = 2). That means object B must have a total of 8, and there are 21 ways that could happen. What if A has 4 units and B has 6 units? In this case there are 30 possible combinations. You could say this state is “less ordered” or “more disordered,” and it’s more likely.
The Law of Large Numbers
This leads us to one of the definitions of entropy as a measure of the number of ways you can arrange energy in a system. We can write entropy (S) as the natural log of the number of microstates (Ω) multiplied by Boltzmann’s constant (kb):
Of course, our model with objects A and B is silly because most things aren’t made of two or three atoms. For a reality check, a single drop of water contains about 1.7 sextillion (1.7 x 1021) H2O molecules. So what happens when we scale up the numbers by many orders of magnitude?
The same ideas still hold, but now we have a vastly larger number of microstates, and the probability distribution gets way more concentrated around the one with the highest entropy. So while the hot ball could get hotter in cold water, it’s so unlikely that it has never happened.
And the state of thermal equilibrium, where they end up at the same temperature, is so entirely likely that, in practice, we treat it as a certainty. In fact, the second law of thermodynamics says heat always flows from a hotter object to a cooler object. But it isn’t a “law”; it’s just the odds. Turns out God really does play dice with the universe.
The humanities and social sciences have been corrupted by political aims, and their disciplines have tossed out rigorous research standards in favor of advancing social-justice causes favored by the political left. This has made for an impoverished scholarly landscape, filled with laughable claims and obscure jargon.
Over the past several months, a group of high-profile scholars convened privately to study whether this criticism holds water across several fields within the humanities and social sciences. “The first thing to say,” they concluded in a report published Friday, “is that we reject the complaint in this bald form.”
However, the group found reason for concern — a “mixed picture” that validates portions of the criticism. “Every field we have studied,” the group wrote, exhibits warning signs pointing to “a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of longstanding ideals of rigor and objectivity.”
That conclusion is sure to spur debate, not least because it comes on the heels of another prominent attempt to investigate the causes of widespread distrust in higher education. In April, Yale University released a report that struck similar self-flagellating notes, arguing that academics need to “admit where we have been wrong.”
What’s unique about this latest effort is who convened the group: Daniel Diermeier, chancellor of Vanderbilt University, and Andrew D. Martin, chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, outspoken proponents of the view that colleges have become too political. Martin told The Chronicle that he and Diermeier have heard many faculty members and others express concern about the humanities and the qualitative social sciences. “So we thought a reasonable thing to do would be to pull together a group of scholarly experts to look at the issue,” he said, “to produce a report not meant to end conversation, but actually to begin conversations on campuses around the country.” Their findings, he said, did not surprise him.
In August, the two chancellors charged a group, selected and led by the New York University philosopher Paul Boghossian, with determining whether “the steady drumbeat of complaints about the deterioration of scholarly standards” within the humanities and social sciences “are justified.” For its work, the group — which included Kwame Anthony Appiah, another NYU philosophy professor, and the Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz, among others — wrote field-specific internal reports about philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies, and music studies, relying on “extensive research” in consultation with other experts. The summary report drew on those reports for its conclusions.
That report is front-loaded with caveats. The humanities are essential, for one, and contain serious scholarship. Administrators should also be cautious about taking action in response to its findings, the scholars wrote, and instead consult disciplinary experts for deeper study.
The report presents three sources of politicized distortion: when research must be constrained by an “accepted political goal,” when the disinterested pursuit of knowledge is “displaced by” the goal of serving “a pragmatic purpose,” and rejecting the very idea that one is capable of assessing evidence on a claim “independently of our political commitments.”
The scholars cite anthropology as a potent example of the first source, quoting a 2021 speech from the president of the American Anthropological Association then who said the field’s “political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism.” These sorts of definitions — and the subtler ways that they manifest — result in the sometimes-unconscious censorship of scholarship that doesn’t serve the political goal, the report says.
More broadly, the report condemns what it calls the widespread embrace of postmodernism and relativism among scholars as antithetical to their very project. And it traces postmodernism’s appeal, in part, to the permission it grants scholars to discard evidence they don’t find personally palatable.
The authors of the report are careful to distinguish themselves from those who think the primary problem with academe is political imbalance. The fact that academics “are significantly more liberal or progressive than the general public” is “not by itself a problem for scholarship.” In an email, Boghossian added that “the solution is to restore a conception of scholarship in the humanities that is as free of ideological distortion as possible.”
Universities exist to support disinterested inquiry, the report concludes, and the obstacles it names in fulfilling that mission are serious. “They are not mere problems in the administration or operation of a university,” the scholars write, “but strike at the very heart and soul of what a university should be for.”
In an interview, Diermeier said he has also been concerned about universities suppressing the free speech of speakers and making public statements about political issues. “What the report has indicated is that there’s growing evidence that the problem of polarization in higher education is real, that it affects scholarship, that it affects teaching, that it affects publications and publication practices,” he said. “These are serious concerns, and they need to be addressed.”
Diermeier said Boghossian was chosen to lead the effort after he read and was “extremely impressed” by Boghossian’s 2006 book Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism. Boghossian did not answer questions about how he in turn selected the participating scholars and the disciplines analyzed. The field-specific reports that undergird the summary report were not released Friday but may be soon, Diermeier said.
The scholars were compensated for their work, according to Martin, though he declined to comment on how much they were paid or where the funding came from.
Martin said he’d received a mix of praise and criticism in the first hours after the report went live. “I deeply value my colleagues in the humanities and in the qualitative social sciences and the great value that they bring to our students and bring to our institutions and to the country more generally,” he said. “I think at this moment of self-reflection, I’m hopeful that this document will be a catalyst to get those important conversations to take place.”
Update (June 5, 2026, 5:18 p.m.): This article has been updated with remarks from Andrew D. Martin, chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis; Daniel Diermeier, chancellor of Vanderbilt University; and Paul Boghossian, a New York University philosophy professor.
A month ago, 10 high-profile scholars released a document — titled “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” — that lit up a million scholarly group chats. The chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, vocal critics of the purported politicization of higher education, charged the group with evaluating a number of disciplines for signs of political skew. The conclusion: All the fields showed “a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of longstanding ideals of rigor and objectivity.”
But one field was singled out as “the most extreme case” — anthropology. Compared to philosophy, sociology, history, literary studies, and music studies, the discipline showed “a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.” The authors cited writings from several anthropologists, a speech by a recent president of the American Anthropological Association, and an AAA panel about biological sex that was canceled in 2023, among other things. The report described itself as a summary of reports, specific to each field. (Only one, on literary studies, has been released; it was posted after this interview was conducted.)
Six days after the report went online, the AAA fired back with a full-throated defense. “Anthropologists welcome rigorous critique of the discipline,” wrote its president, Carolyn M. Rouse. “What we cannot accept is a sweeping verdict about anthropology’s intellectual culture, scholarly practices, and professional norms built on selective evidence and issued without consultation.”
Rouse is an anthropology professor at Princeton University who researches race and inequality in religion, medicine, education, and economic development. In 2016 and 2017, she went viral for leading a walkout of a speech by the political scientist Charles Murray, and for delivering a lecture titled “F%*# Free Speech,” in which she argued that free-speech absolutism does not exist. Rouse was elected president-elect of the AAA in 2023, and assumed the role last year. The Chronicle asked her about her views on the Vanderbilt report and the questions it raises about her field. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
It’s an embarrassment of embarrassments.
I was interested in your top-line reaction to reading that, of all the disciplines they studied, the authors singled out anthropology as the most extreme case of “widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.”
They used AI. It’s an embarrassment of embarrassments. I don’t know what methods they used. They do not distinguish a fact from a truth from wisdom. They don’t define their terms like “politics.” It’s pretty clear, actually, that they didn’t just search for some combination of words that would validate their own beliefs, but I don’t think they even bothered to read more of the person’s work or try to understand it in the context. I can’t defend anthropology, because this is such a poorly researched report that’s so unreflexive, lacking in any rigor, and it reminds me of why scholars need to pull back from AI. It reminded me of some of the papers I’ve been getting from my students, where I have to pull them in and say, “I think you’ve used AI,” so it’s really hard for me to take this report seriously. At the same time, unserious things right now have so much power in the academy.
So I thought you were being facetious when you said they used AI, but it reads to you like they used an LLM to write this?
In TheChronicle of Higher Education report, “Inside the Report That’s Divided the Academy,” by Evan Goldstein and Len Gutkin, on June 11, Anthony Appiah says that they used AI.
Appiah says, “We did a fair amount of research, including research using new artificial-intelligence methods to survey large bodies of text and see what was in them, and to identify themes and so on.” Is that what you’re referring to?
Even before we read that, we were all thinking, “This reads like they used AI.”
OK, so the writing of it, in addition, sounded to you like AI? Because I think here he’s describing research.
Research. Anthropology has been in existence for — in the U.S., American anthropology has really existed for over 100 years. Now we have a large body of literature. They don’t know what anthropology is.
And the biological anthropologist who is on it, he has his own quirkiness. I think my colleague Agustín Fuentes does a great job of responding to that in The Chronicle of Higher Education on June 12.
Can I ask what you think about Joseph Henrich, the sole anthropologist on this commission? Had you heard of him? Were you aware of him having some kind of reputation or something prior to this?
No.
OK. So theoretically the field-specific individual reports may be released at some point. How do you feel about the prospect of seeing the anthropology report that Dr. Henrich presumably wrote?
If I’m still the president, and they present it, I should be interested to read it. I still don’t know what he’s doing. I’m a socio-cultural anthropologist, and these people who are philosophers or whatever feel completely comfortable criticizing a discipline they don’t really understand. I would never do that. I’ve been relying on wonderful pieces by people who actually know, like Michael Bérubé in the Pittsburgh Review of Books. And then Jason Stanley also wrote something, and it was so interesting, because I realized so much of this is insider analytical philosophy baseball.
They have this weird cut-out for Socrates, as if in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, they did this kind of Ivy League dispassionate theorizing. I love Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, and she’s somebody I rely on to think through some questions as I do ethnography. You know what’s interesting about ancient Greece, is that the polis, and the place where people used language to deal with things rather than violence, and that new thing that was established, was wonderful. But she also notes that the people who were loud in that space were men, and the only reason they were fed and clothed and everything else is because they had slaves and women. They could have lofty ideals about democracy. But the private space of the home was not a space of democracy. It was a space where men lorded over their slaves and their wives.
These people who are philosophers or whatever feel completely comfortable criticizing a discipline they don’t really understand.
One of the critiques I mentioned was that [the Vanderbilt authors] say that the reason we have the humanities is because we want to educate citizens to be able to take advantage of their freedom, and so that’s the value, but we don’t like social justice. But social justice is just another refinement of this question about freedom. We’ve just taken it into the 20th and the 21st century. These questions of freedom, where we are saying, “OK, you can’t just have a group of men who rely on slave labor to feed them. We have to think about the freedom of the people who are putting food on the table, cleaning the toilets.” Social justice is about finding a way to have a democracy where whatever freedom — whatever we mean by freedom, right? — the idea that, like, how can you have somebody who’s not going to necessarily even have the kinds of absolutist free speech that a lot of these people, for instance, talk about.
How did you and the AAA come to decide to issue an official response to the Vanderbilt report, and how did that response come together?
When I became president-elect, I ended political-statement writing by the AAA. Just saying, you know, “the State Department should do more about the war in Sudan” — I think that anthropological knowledge production is always nuancing things, and most members are not experts on the Sudan, so why are they signing on to a statement? Our 501(c)(3) mission is to promote anthropology, our scholarship, our members, academic departments, and academic freedom, so let’s stick to our mission when it comes to statements.
So this [Vanderbilt report] falls in our expertise, because they’re attacking our discipline. It’s all a set-up to begin to chip away at the humanities, the social sciences. And universities are doing that, they’re closing departments, they’re merging them. So that’s why immediately we got to work.
Let’s talk about some of the specific critiques that were raised in the Vanderbilt report regarding anthropology, perhaps as a way of talking about these broader issues you have with its conclusion. So, in 2021, then-AAA President Akhil Gupta gave a presidential address where he said anthropology’s “political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism,” and the Vanderbilt report said that this kind of remark is an explicit rejection of “the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding.” Do you share Dr. Gupta’s conception of anthropology?
Anthropologists love to disagree with one another, so I’m not gonna say I agree or disagree with Akhil. Here’s the thing that I think they don’t understand: We are the instrument for data collection in the same way a Geiger counter detects radiation. We have to do a lot of refining of our instrument, our way of thinking, what we’re doing it for, how we’re seeing it, in order to collect data that we know is, of course, subjective, but uncover some truth. So that’s why we teach our students to be self-reflexive — why you’re doing this, what motivates you, what presumptions did you go into the field with, what do you think this information is going to do for the world? And so actually a lot of our literature is people just kind of sharing with other people, “This is how I’m thinking.” It doesn’t actually compel us to change how we teach methods in the classroom, it doesn’t compel us to change how we do our own fieldwork. It’s simply part of a conversation, because it’s a constant struggle.
It’s all a set-up to begin to chip away at the humanities, the social sciences.
For instance, I have been studying declining white life expectancies in a rural community for 10 years. I’m finishing up. I have two films and a book that are coming out, and I’m a Black woman entering this space, and what are my motivations? What do I see? What do I not see? What do they tell me? What won’t they tell me? For the most part, I only want to do work in places where I feel a sense of hope, and where I like the people — “like” in the sense of I respect them. I don’t want to work in a place where I disrespect people, because then I worry that I’m doing something else. And I’m trying to understand their hopes and aspirations, to understand the delta between their aspirations and the things that they keep doing, so I often say I’m studying “commitment to bad ideas.” Again, I am a Black woman from an elite institution. They know that. They know I’m wealthier than they are, and so there’s a lot going on in these encounters that I need to unpack. And when I had a postdoc work with me, and she went to the same place, because she has studied poor white Appalachians, one of her interlocutors became this guy who’s committed to white racist politics. He sells historical memorabilia and has Confederate flags. She was tapping into a vein in my field site that I will never have access to, which is why we have to be careful, and why we have those conversations ad nauseam. I think about what we’re doing in the field, why, what our commitments are, and what the limits of all of that are. Does that make sense?
The anecdote and the values you’re conveying do make sense. I wanted to understand how this ties back to the quote that the Vanderbilt report pulls. When you’re doing that kind of fieldwork, do you feel like your “political project” — to use his words — is to “challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism”?
That’s what he said. Yeah, that’s not what I said.
This is from his presidential address, or the written version of it. Not to be repetitive, but the report highlights this remark and says this remark is a rejection of the idea that “scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding.”
I mean, I wasn’t in the audience for this speech, either, but he published a version of this address —
I’ve read it, I’ve quoted from it.
So that quote is in there, you know.
But just because something’s quoted, there’s a whole context. There’s so much more than that. This is the problem with absolutist free speech. We talk in contexts. Speech is never free. Speech is always connected to something else. And here’s an example from a recent thing that I read in TheNew York Times about this woman from Texas who’s Muslim, and wanted to have a pool party for the end of Eid. She was so focused on the Muslim community and their fears about their kids being in bathing suits and around people who weren’t pious that she wrote “Muslims Only.” She was so focused on that and those concerns, that when people outside of it read it, it read like “only whites” or “only Blacks,” or it read as something else. She just wasn’t attending to that context. So we’re speaking to an audience that has a particular understanding of the history of the discipline, recent struggles and debates within the discipline. There’s so much going on in that conversation that to just swoop in, grab a quote, and go out — I think it’s unfair. I could swoop in, go to a sociology conference, a history conference, grab a quote, and go, “Look what they said,” and it’s just missing all the context in history.
In the AAA’s response to the Vanderbilt report, you wrote “the committee did not contact the American Anthropological Association, not its elected leadership, not its editors, not the broad range of scholars who comprise the discipline.” You called this a “central methodological failure.” So, if the committee had contacted the AAA, what would you have told them?
I would track-change a lot of it, give feedback, but I would demand methods. So, if I were a social scientist doing this research, first of all, I’d want a sampling of universities across the country, and there are religious universities, you know, Liberty University, Wheaton [College], right? So we’d want public and private, we’d want a representative sample from all of these different colleges, universities along what we would call a political spectrum — even though we know it’s not red and blue in the way that we think about it — but like that. Then I would collect syllabi from maybe one intro course and one upper-level course, and you try to make that consistent and in different disciplines, a lot. Then I would interview the professor of the class. Then I would do observations of the class, and actually see the kinds of conversations. That would be the beginning of a systematic study. There’s nothing close to that.
Speech is never free. Speech is always connected to something else.
The Yale report [Ed.: In April, a Yale faculty committee published a report about “trust in higher education”] has a section on politics in the classroom. They actually did methods that were robust. They interviewed hundreds of people affiliated with Yale in different ways. They come up with a nuanced understanding of what’s going on in the classroom, and nobody who they interviewed wanted the classroom to be an echo chamber. So that’s what happens when you start actually interviewing people. And as anthropologists, you have to do more than interview, you have to observe, too — the educational outcomes, what the professor’s doing. If you were to just have AI capture all of the texts that are being taught — I assign texts I disagree with, so you don’t know, just by grabbing that, whether I’m teaching with it, against it, beside it, whatever way I’m teaching it.
On that note, your statement also said that there’s “substantial and active literature that contradicts or at least complexifies the assertions made by the report, literature that would have been immediately apparent to anyone who consulted working scholars in the field.” What’s a citation or two you would recommend to that effect? And what’s the different view of anthropology that they would show?
Well, the first thing that came to my mind was my own recent paper. It’s called “An Anti-Genealogical Take on U.S. Anthropology and Disciplinary Reform: From Anti-Racism to Decolonization.” I wrote, “The ‘decolonizing generation’ is a critical new movement that has captured the imaginations of many younger scholars. While the author would like to consider herself an older member of this generation, she questions whether this moment needs periodization. Is today’s moment really so different from the past, when we saw the rise of world anthropologies, postmodernism, the crisis in representation, neo-Marxism, and anti-racist movements? And what is meant by ‘decolonizing anthropology’ when experiences with colonialism and decolonization differ around the world? While acknowledging the value of reforming the discipline, the author encourages her colleagues to separate the very important critique of anthropologists’ gatekeeping practices from idealized renderings of what anthropology should be. Rather than decolonization, the discipline ought to focus on establishing a continual decentering of hegemonic knowledge production.”
To me, that’s just a typical thing in our discipline — we’re debating each other in a friendly way.
In 2023, the AAA canceled an accepted panel at its annual conference, titled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology.” The AAA said at the time that the panel would have harmed members’ “safety and dignity,” and that its premise contradicted “settled science.” The Vanderbilt report cited this incident to argue that when politically charged questions “are treated as settled by the scholarly community, the result is an illegitimate suppression of dissent.” You were elected president-elect of the AAA shortly after that incident. Do you regret today the fact that the AAA canceled that panel, or the justification that it gave for canceling it?
There’s a point in that Vanderbilt report where they talk about astronomy departments becoming astrology departments. All you need to do is literally type into Google and see that we know, factually, that there are different types of “sexes” and “genders.” You can have XY and you present as a woman, you can have XXY — they’re all variations, genetic variations. So the idea that there are two sexes is just factually incorrect, and to force biological anthropologists to teach that is the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department. So I don’t know why we’re debating that. You may not like it. I don’t know, maybe you want to kill babies that aren’t just XX presenting XX or XY presenting XY, but that’s what we have in this world. And then we have people who identify with genders that don’t match to their chromosomes, and people like Anthony Appiah, who are gay, and so I don’t know what they want, why they want us to teach in that way — that’s the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department.
Anthropology humanizes people. It doesn’t dehumanize people.
The second question: It should never have been accepted. At this point, we are demanding that people do good peer review, because that’s what happened — they slacked on the peer review.
OK. So on the question of this particular idea being “settled science,” as the AAA said at the time, there was a survey in 2022, published in the journal Forensic Anthropology, that asked forensic anthropologists about this question, and 42 percent of them said they agree that sex is binary, and 56 percent disagreed that it’s binary. So that ratio would seem to indicate that, in the field, the question hadn’t actually been settled, and I was wondering how you explain that.
I don’t believe in opinion research. Not to disparage them, but a lot of forensic people, they’re coroners, they’re doing it in a practicing level, where they’re actually asked on forms to determine whether this body is male or female, oftentimes they haven’t had advanced schooling. Things are in the air. I just don’t trust opinion polling. That’s from just being an anthropologist and spending a lot of time with people in the field. People don’t know a lot.
So I guess the question we’re trying to unpack here is, how do we know when something is astronomy versus astrology, right? So I want to ask you about this question —
Let me ask the question back to you. Is it XX and then XY? Is that the binary?
I think it’s defined in different ways.
Well, it’s two, binary means two. So, what are the two? One is XX and one is XY, but we know that there are more than that. That’s not binary. I mean, isn’t that a mathematical fact? I don’t know how else to make the case. It’s very strange to me. I don’t what people are — why that matters to people so much. You know, genetic variation is an interesting thing.
Getting to the slightly larger principle that’s being debated in this kind of debate is what “nonsensical speech” is, to use a phrase that you’ve used before. I was reading your essay from last year, “Meaningless Speech and Political Capture.” Academic freedom, you said, is different from freedom of speech or absolutist free speech. You said, “Why should professors be forced to waste class time on nonsense?” You wrote, “I do not want my students to be punished, but I want to be able to let them know that relitigating the value of Nazism, slavery, Jim Crow, Japanese internment, eugenics, or McCarthyism is not appropriate in a class on, for example, development. Those were all failed policies, so let’s move on.” In that same essay, you also wrote that the concept that “there are only two sexes” is an example of “nonsensical speech.” So I guess I was wondering how you or how the AAA decides what is “nonsensical speech,” or how you define “nonsensical.”
So I think those are two things. One is nonsensical, one is discussion about dehumanization in the classroom. I can’t have somebody in the classroom who is, let’s say, was born with some kind of condition that means that they are nonverbal, but super smart and super capable, and in a wheelchair, and then have a debate about whether or not they should have been aborted. Sure, there are debates like that online. Go for it, students. But anthropology humanizes people. It doesn’t dehumanize people. We’re not teaching empathy, we’re teaching that humans are very diverse. I mean, if people become empathetic as a result, that’s fine, but we’re teaching that people are diverse, just like you. Their value system is built not on an objectively rational set of values, but these values work in this way to sustain this group around this set of material things and rituals. So we humanize people, and we’ve done that since we pushed back against eugenics in the early 20th century, the discipline. So I’m not going to relitigate these things with my students. And I knew when I gave the “F%*# Free Speech” talk, people were talking about absolute free speech, that this was where we were heading — to a place where we brought back, and we’re bringing back, ideas of Black biological, intellectual, and cultural inferiority, and we’re exhausted. I’m exhausted. We call it Whac-a-Mole, and it prevents us from being able to do more creative stuff, because we’re constantly tethered to having to react to some new reactionary piece of data.
If Princeton decided that we really want to open up the classroom to thinking about internment again for certain populations, based upon their phenotype, I’d have to leave. We’ve done these things before. They didn’t end well. So, if I’m having a class on development where we’re trying to think about ways to make a better world, why would I engage dehumanization as a possible strategy?
We’re not just trying to change their minds. That’s a caricature.
So just to connect the dots, the matter of binary sex — to you, that is as done with, or over with, as Japanese internment or eugenics?
OK, so one is dehumanization, the other one is factual. So I still don’t know what people mean. If binary is two things, male, female, XY, XX, and we have more than that, then doesn’t that mean it’s not a binary? I’m just confused about that. That’s just a factual thing. There’s the work on race and biology, people don’t understand. It takes me a whole semester of my race and biology class, and when they get it, they get it, and they’re like, “Oh my goodness,” they can’t believe how wrong most of what they have been taught is.
I disabuse people of things like “Black community.” There’s no “Black community.” So I disabuse students of a lot of presumptions, so we’re not an echo chamber, we’re not a podcast, we’re not funded by this mysterious organization called Antifa that doesn’t exist. Again, another fact, right? Can we stick with facts? We’re not just trying to change their minds. That’s a caricature. This is why, if you did this data on what’s actually happening in the classroom, you need to actually get into people’s classrooms. You need to read their syllabi. So there’s a lot of caricaturing of academia, and I feel like this report is just — they’re just using those caricatures and cherry-picking whatever they can find that seems good, that seems right, without truly engaging a whole history of a discipline, like English or anthropology.
In the AAA’s response to the Vanderbilt report, you wrote that anthropology contains “vigorous and ongoing debates about theory, evidence, ethics, method, public engagement, and the future of the discipline itself.” Is there any contradiction between those stated values and the cancellation of the panel in 2023?
Rigorous debate with factual information, or rigorous debate with just people who like to troll people on social media? I think one of the people in [the panel] is big on right-wing social media. I don’t know, I’m not on social media at all; it just seems like a big waste of time.
I don’t think we’re contradicting ourselves. I think that that panel might never have made it into the program, if it had been peer-reviewed properly.
Properly.
Yes, because I think sometimes people get a little lazy. Things like that are cut all the time in peer review, you never see it. Journalists never see it. I never see it. There’s actually a filter happening all the time. This one just happened to make it into the public space.
Cited Professors Say the Vanderbilt Report Misrepresents Their Work (Inside Higher Ed)
The report on the state of humanities scholarship has generated a lot of debate in academic circles and received backlash from the leading anthropology association.
The Vanderbilt report authors single out more than a dozen humanities scholars and use their work to highlight what they consider problematic scholarship. Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | autsawin, Davizro and SilverV/iStock/Getty Images
A new report on the state of humanities scholarship made waves in higher ed circles when it was released Friday, and has since drawn criticism from professors across the humanities.
Commissioned by Vanderbilt University chancellor Daniel Diermeier and Washington University in St. Louis chancellor Andrew Martin, the “State of Scholarship” report finds fault with disciplines including anthropology, philosophy and history—not for their content but for the quality of their scholarship, which the report’s authors argue is too often driven by political ideology rather than the pursuit of truth and knowledge.
In an email to Inside Higher Ed, Diermeier said that “the focus of the report is to provide an assessment, not to offer solutions to address the challenges.”
Critiques of the report are broad and varied. National Association of Scholars research director David Randall said the authors rehash decades-old arguments against relativism and don’t go far enough in their recommendations to reform the humanities. “If they’re actually serious about academic reform, they will act rather than sponsor more faculty gab-fests,” he wrote of Diermeier and Martin. Pennsylvania State University communications professor Bradford Vivian wrote on Bluesky that “a better title for the Vanderbilt report on the humanities would be [William F. Buckley Jr.’s] ‘God and Man at Yale Part II.’” Others, including the American Anthropological Association, slammed the report for exemplifying the ivory tower and criticized the authors for failing to truly engage with the professors in the fields they target. Several of the scholars cited in the report said it represents the poor scholarship it claims to seek to correct.
Diermeier and Martin asked Paul Boghossian, a philosophy professor at New York University, to examine “the state of scholarly work” in humanities disciplines to determine whether recent criticisms of the fields are justified. These include allegations that humanists misuse natural science, that some philosophers have embraced “problematic philosophical views” concerning truth, and that humanists have allowed “background ideological values” to distort their pursuit of truth.
The resulting report—dubbed the “Vanderbilt report”—is addressed to “university chancellors and presidents who are concerned about the state of academic scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences and who may wish, within their purview, to promote excellent scholarship in these vital fields,” according to its preface. The authors reject the common criticisms of the humanities in their broad form, but agree with some of the more particular points. Taken together, the issues the authors identify reflect “a distinctive form of politicization in which the scholarly enterprise is taken to be subordinate to, or in the service of, political (social or moral) goals beyond the advancement of knowledge and understanding,” they wrote.
Boghossian selected nine other scholars to work with him—three from NYU, two from Princeton University, and one each from Harvard University, the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. Eight of the report’s authors are men and two are women. NYU philosophy professor Kwame Anthony Appiah was the only person of color on the committee. Only one of the report authors—sociologist Ashley Rubin—works at a public institution, the University of Hawaii.
This is a problem, said Asheesh Kapur Siddique, an associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Siddique had many criticisms of the Vanderbilt report—on Bluesky, he called it “diabolically evil”—but the makeup of the committee that put it together was a primary concern.
“It would be far easier for [the report’s] recommendations to be imposed by a state legislature on a public university” and much harder to impose them on a private institution, Siddique told Inside Higher Ed. “The places where all of these people work will not necessarily have to deal with the recommendations. I think that’s a very telling thing. I actually doubt that many of these scholars would want to work at an institution that would be subject to” political interference inspired by the report.
As soon as the report was released, American Anthropological Association president Carolyn Rouse started hearing from members. Some of them were “incensed,” she said.
“I’ve heard words like ‘unhinged’” to describe the report, she told Inside Higher Ed. “It’s so badly done—I kept wanting to do ‘track changes’ in it, as if I were grading it like a paper—and yet it has all of this power because of who these [authors] are.”
The report will hurt anthropology departments that are already fighting to prove their value to administrators, Rouse said.
“AAA has been working to help departments find strategies to shore up majors by being really articulate about the way in which the major can benefit you if you become a doctor, if you become a lawyer,” Rouse said. For administrators critical of the humanities, “this is just confirmation that they were right, and they will close their anthropology departments.”
The reaction to the Vanderbilt report doesn’t surprise Martin because it addresses “questions that have been actively debated within higher education for decades,” he told Inside Higher Ed via email.
“The response reflects the importance of the issues the report raises. Many scholars have engaged thoughtfully with its findings, while others disagree with some aspects of its analysis. That’s healthy,” Martin said. “We expected strong reactions because the humanities and humanistic social sciences are core to how our institutions pursue knowledge and educate students.”
‘Lazy Scholarship’
The authors single out more than a dozen humanities scholars in the report and use their work to highlight what they consider problematic scholarship. Inside Higher Ed reached five of them, all of whom said it was the first time they’d heard about the report. Several also said that their work was misrepresented or taken out of context.
Christopher Loperena, an associate professor of anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center, said the report mischaracterizes his work and the broader field of anthropology. He told Inside Higher Ed he disagrees with “the suggestion that public-facing and politically engaged research is at odds with serious scholarly inquiry in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.”
University of California Los Angeles sociocultural anthropologist Akhil Gupta said the authors made the “cardinal academic error” of misquoting his paper.
“Frankly, the charge to this committee was itself an invitation to bash interpretive disciplines. This is not surprising. The first ‘culture wars’ over the Western canon were fought during the Reagan years, and we can expect attacks on scholars of color and disciplines that are critical of current configurations of power in the Trump years,” Gupta wrote in an email. “I wish people would not waste their time on producing this kind of material whose sole purpose seems to be to stir up controversy and to justify budget cuts to the humanities.”
The authors write that Khiara Bridges, an anthropologist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, “endorses a radical perspectivalism about truth,” and include a quote from her book “Critical Race Theory: A Primer.” Bridges said this misrepresents her work.
“In the quote from the book that is mentioned in the report, I am not describing my personal views: I am describing postmodernism,” Bridges told Inside Higher Ed via email. “It is irresponsible for the report to represent my description of a claim as my endorsement of a claim. Moreover, it is lazy—an example of the type of scholarship and analysis that I instruct my students not to produce. … The authors of the report owe me an apology.”
Bridges sent a letter to Boghossian on Wednesday, asking him to correct the “misdescription” of her scholarship. Boghossian replied Wednesday afternoon and cc’d Inside Higher Ed, as well as his coauthors, Diermeier and Martin. In the email, he said he was grateful that Bridges reached out and “eager to correct any misrepresentation of your views that our report may contain.” He also shared several other passages from Bridges’ book to explain “why we read the passage as we did,” he wrote.
“If we have misread you, namely, if you in fact reject the view that truth is perspectival and hold that there are objective truths, truths that do not depend on the perspective of the truth seeker, then I would welcome that clarification, and we would be glad to note it publicly and to adjust the discussion of your work accordingly,” Boghossian wrote. “Equally, if your position is that the perspectivalism in question is more qualified than the report’s phrase ‘a radical perspectivalism about truth’ suggests, I would genuinely like to understand the qualification, and we would consider amending the quotation to include more of the surrounding context if you thought that would help.”
Boghossian did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s questions Wednesday.
The authors cite Fernando Villanea, an anthropology professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, twice. The second time is a passage from an American Anthropologist essay he wrote titled “Defense Against Dark Anthropology.” It reads, “The core academic value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective. Conversely, there are millions of people who are adversely affected by the subjective version of truth we choose to tell. That is the objective reality, and so our core value should instead be to serve their interests.”
Boghossian and his coauthors call the excerpt “incoherent.” They go on to write that “taken more charitably, it is the still bizarre claim that while there are no objective truths about the subtle descriptive matters with which anthropology is concerned, there are objective truths about values and morals—about who is adversely affected by a given position, and about what anthropologists should take as their core values.”
Villanea said the passage was taken out of context; his essay was about how anthropology should serve Global South communities.
“To condense [my arguments] into a claim that I ‘explicitly repudiate the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge’ is not just incorrect, but lazy scholarship,” Villanea said. “Ultimately, the report displays the ivory tower in high form by presenting arguments that are isolated from many current academic conversations.”
Charles Hale, the dean of social sciences at the University of California Santa Barbara, who is also cited in the Vanderbilt report, told Inside Higher Ed that the report “condemns a large swath of scholars” with the broad term relativist—something he said has never accurately represented his work. While he ultimately sympathizes with the authors’ stated intentions, he said “their tack is ultimately wrongheaded and would leave us further weakened and vulnerable.”
“Their arguments for clear and accessible language, judicious deployment of data and evidence, careful consideration of contrary views, rigorous analysis, etc. are all salutary and can be readily confirmed,” Hale wrote in an email. “Their call for a return to ‘disinterested scholarship’ reads, quite frankly, like the authors are asking us to scamper back to the privileged bubble of the ivory tower, keep our heads down, and hope that the onslaught passes us by.”
Setting the Record Straight on Anthropology (American Anthropological Association)
June 11, 2026
The Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences identifies anthropology as the single most extreme case of scholarly deterioration in the humanities and social sciences. The American Anthropological Association rejects that characterization, not out of institutional defensiveness, but on evidentiary and methodological grounds the committee itself would claim to care about.
Anthropologists welcome rigorous critique of the discipline. What we cannot accept is a sweeping verdict about anthropology’s intellectual culture, scholarly practices, and professional norms built on selective evidence and issued without consultation. Anthropologists routinely argue that understanding a community, institution, or social world requires engagement with the people who inhabit it. We teach students to listen carefully, examine multiple forms of evidence, situate claims in context, and remain attentive to internal diversity and disagreement. It is therefore striking that a report offering such far-reaching conclusions about anthropology appears to have done so without meaningful engagement with the largest professional association representing the field.
The committee did not contact the American Anthropological Association, not its elected leadership, not its editors, not the broad range of scholars who comprise the discipline. This despite there being an anthropologist and a linguist among the committee’s members. This is a central methodological failure of a report that claims to assess an entire field. Anthropology is not a small or intellectually uniform field. It encompasses cultural anthropology, archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, applied anthropology, and numerous interdisciplinary areas. It contains vigorous and ongoing debates about theory, evidence, ethics, method, public engagement, and the future of the discipline itself.
In fact, the presentation of the report’s flagship example of anthropology’s “scholarly deterioration” is factually wrong. The report implies that the deteriorative position is embodied in one article they cite and refer to a single commentary on that article and their “internal report” as evidence. Their position is a significant misrepresentation of the state of the discourse and only stands if one ignores the substantial current literature. There is substantial and active literature that contradicts or at least complexifies the assertions made by the report, literature that would have been immediately apparent to anyone who had consulted working scholars in the field.
The report also characterizes anthropology’s attention to positionality and reflexivity as evidence of a broader rejection of objectivity. This is wholly incorrect. Reflexivity is not, as the report asserts a claim that facts don’t exist, that they are irrelevant, or that all interpretations are equally valid. It is a methodological commitment to examining how knowledge is produced and to making visible the assumptions, relationships, and contexts that shape research. Far from weakening scholarly rigor, many anthropologists see reflexivity as one of the ways rigor is strengthened.
The authors argue that the humanities exist above all to prepare students for “a life as a free citizen” – invoking the Latin liberalis, befitting a free person, then later condemn as politicized and distorted the scholarship associated with social justice, decolonization, and women’s liberation. But are not social justice, decolonization, and women’s liberation granular descriptions of freedom, articulations of what is required for all people to be free citizens? One can disagree about whether these are the right paths to freedom. But that debate is precisely what the academy exists to have. The committee forecloses it rather than engages it, which is exactly what it accuses anthropology of doing.
More broadly, the report risks conflating intellectual disagreement with intellectual decline. Anthropology has never been a discipline defined by consensus. It is characterized by debate, critique, revision, and self-examination. Those are not signs of a discipline in decline. They are signs of a healthy scholarly community actively grappling with complex questions rather than avoiding them.
Universities should absolutely encourage robust discussions about scholarly standards, evidence, viewpoint diversity, and academic freedom. Anthropology has much to contribute to those conversations. But those discussions are most productive when they are grounded in broad engagement, careful representation of the field being assessed, and the same evidentiary standards we expect of all scholarly work.
The report raises questions worth asking about the relationship between scholarship and political commitments and then fails to address them with the kind of methodological rigor, disciplinary engagement, and intellectual humility that are essential to the scholarly enterprise itself. We are ready to have that conversation. We invite the committee to begin it the way any serious scholarly exchange should begin, by talking with the people they are writing about.
A commission of eminent scholars recently decided to examine whether politics has corrupted academic scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. Their April 2026 report makes some good points. It also does to anthropology exactly what it accuses bad scholars of doing to knowledge. It cherry-picks.
The report was assembled by Paul Boghossian, Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University, and submitted to university chancellors alarmed by what they see as the erosion of scholarly standards. The commissioners include philosophers, historians, sociologists, and one biological anthropologist. Their charge: find out whether political commitments have distorted scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.
They get some things right. Their critique of relativism is sound and clearly argued. The self-refutation point is not new, but it lands hard: scholars who claim that all truth is subjective cannot then assert, as fact, that their own position is correct. That is not a subtle point. It should embarrass anyone who misses it. The report also resists calling for right-wing politicization as a cure for left-wing politicization, and it honestly acknowledges the threat from federal overreach, including a documented case of a Texas A&M professor told to remove Plato from his syllabus. Credit where it is due
Aggies ban Plato.
Then the report turns to anthropology, and things go wrong.
Anthropology has four subfields: cultural anthropology, anthropological archaeology, biological anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. A general anthropology encompasses all four, along with applied work. The report engages with none of this. Instead, it hunts through the most politically driven corners of cultural anthropology, pulls out the most extreme statements it can find, and presents them as a portrait of the whole discipline. This is the fallacy of citing only positive cases. Prosecutors do this. Scientists are not supposed to.
Look at what gets left out. Biological anthropologists study human evolution, skeletal biology, primatology, and population genetics. Anthropological archaeologists reconstruct past human behavior from material remains. Linguistic anthropologists analyze language structure and variation with methods any empiricist would recognize. And within cultural anthropology itself, systematic fieldwork carried out over months and years in real communities has produced some of the most durable knowledge we have about how humans actually live. I have spent more than sixty years doing exactly that, in Brazil and Madagascar. The National Academy of Sciences does not elect members for writing advocacy pieces. It elects them for doing science. Some of those members are anthropologists.
The report seizes on a statement by Fernando Villanea, published in the American Anthropological Association’s flagship journal: “The core academic value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective.” Villanea has since said the passage was taken out of context, that his essay was about how anthropology should serve Global South communities. Fair enough to note. But the statement says what it says. You cannot declare, as fact, that there are no facts. It collapses under its own weight regardless of the intention behind it.
What strikes me is that I have heard its equivalent somewhere else entirely.
In earlier writing I described what I called convergent evolution in epistemology. Two very different traditions, traveling completely different roads, have ended up in the same place. Some academic postmodernists, including some cultural anthropologists, spent decades arguing that objectivity is a Western conceit and that facts are socially constructed. The current political environment reached the same conclusion by a different road, not through theory but through the simpler convenience of making reality negotiable when it produces inconvenient results. Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” and Villanea’s claim about subjective truth are structurally the same move. The politics point in opposite directions. The damage to honest inquiry is identical.
All truth is subjective/Alternative Facts
This is not a left-wing pathology. It is not a right-wing pathology. It is a general pathology, and naming it clearly matters. The Boghossian report spots it on one side and misses it on the other.
Here is something else the report misses. There is a fundamental difference between theory in the scientific sense and theory as practiced in much of contemporary cultural anthropology. Evolution through natural selection is a theory, with natural selection as its core mechanism. It explains the giraffe’s neck, the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and why we need a new flu shot every year. It was built to explain one set of observations and keeps working on entirely new phenomena nobody anticipated. You can test it. You can extend it. It works.
What passes for theory in postmodernist cultural anthropology works nothing like that. The standard move is to take one of the usual suspects, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Bruno Latour being prominent among them, borrow a framework, and apply it to a text or a cultural moment as an interpretive lens. It is worth noting that none of these figures was an anthropologist. Foucault was a philosopher and historian, Bourdieu a sociologist, Latour a sociologist and philosopher of science. Cultural anthropology has been importing its theory from neighboring fields rather than building its own. And what it has imported does not predict anything, cannot be tested, and does not extend to new domains the way evolutionary theory extends from finch beaks to flu viruses. It is closer to literary criticism than to science, and calling it theory is generous.
Here’s looking at you, Michel Foucault.
The deeper irony is that anthropology once had real theoretical ambitions. Whatever their weaknesses, cultural evolutionism, structural functionalism, and cultural materialism were genuine attempts to build explanatory frameworks testable against ethnographic data. What replaced much of that tradition in cultural anthropology is not a better theory. It is the abandonment of the theoretical enterprise, dressed up in vocabulary that sounds rigorous without doing the work rigor requires.
The drift of cultural anthropology away from science is real. I have watched it happen over sixty years. That is worth criticizing. But it is not the whole discipline. Treating the worst statements from one corner of one subfield as the face of anthropology is not analysis. It is a hit job with footnotes.
The remedy for bad epistemology has always been the same: careful, honest inquiry, following the evidence wherever it leads. The report argues for exactly that standard. It should have applied it to anthropology.
Every generation rediscovers the “crisis” of the humanities, but the current cycle has acquired a sharper edge and a louder intensity. The recent Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences, commissioned by the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University, belongs to this recurring genre of alarm (Boghossian et al. 2024). It presents itself as a defense of scholarly rigor, yet its anxieties and prescriptions reveal a deeper struggle over the authority, boundaries, and politics of legitimate knowledge.
In my book, Re-Envisioning the African and American Academies, I traced this crisis discourse in a chapter on “The Struggle for the Humanities” back to the 1960s, showing how declarations of decline reliably surface when political upheaval, social transformation, and institutional anxiety converge (Zeleza 2024). More recently, in my Substack essays, I have examined attacks on “woke” world history in the name of rigorous “Western history” (Zeleza 2026a), as well as the orchestrated assault on Black studies (Zeleza 2026b; Allen 2026). These epistemic attacks reveal how struggles over curriculum and scholarship have become proxy battles over national identity, racial hierarchy, and the boundaries of legitimate knowledge.
What ties these debates together is not simply a defense of “rigor,” or as framed in the report scholarly “standards” and “quality” but the defense of a particular epistemological order: a Eurocentric vision of the humanities that long imagined itself universal, insulated, and unassailable. That order has been unsettled, and in some quarters profoundly threatened, by the intellectual insurgencies of the past half-century. As the American academy diversified, its laager was breached by scholars whose intellectual genealogies stretch across the Black diaspora, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, and by women and minoritized scholars whose presence exposed the parochialism of the old canon. Their work did not merely add new texts; it reconfigured the terms of humanistic inquiry.
Predictably, the reaction has been fierce. As white supremacy has mounted a noisy and dangerous resurgence in national politics amid the United States’ movement toward a minority-majority future, conservative intellectual forces have regrouped to defend a creaking epistemic hegemony. In this telling, the humanities are not evolving but collapsing; not expanding but losing their way; not democratizing knowledge but succumbing to ideology.
It is in this charged context that the recent report must be read. The controversy it has ignited is not merely a dispute over disciplinary standards. It is a revealing episode in the contemporary politics of knowledge, exposing how calls for scholarly rigor or quality can become vehicles for restoring older hierarchies of authority.
Historical Precedents
Moments of political anxiety in American life have long produced interventions that claim to diagnose a crisis in the university. The recent report belongs to this lineage. Its language of declining standards, ideological drift, and endangered objectivity is not anomalous; it is the latest iteration of a recurrent pattern in which the humanities become sites for broader struggles over cultural authority.
The 1950s offer an early precedent. During McCarthyism, congressional committees and university boards scrutinized faculty for alleged ideological deviation, invoking the language of objectivity and politicization to justify administrative oversight. The anxieties animating those investigations were political rather than methodological, yet they were framed as defenses of scholarly integrity. The current report reproduces this rhetorical strategy by presenting political judgments as epistemic concerns.
The culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s revived these concerns in a new register. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals, warned that relativism and left-wing politics had corrupted the humanities (Bloom 1987; Kimball 1990). While they mention these two authors, the report explicitly states in their statement of the problem: “Our report does not attempt to trace the roots of the present-day critique of the academy to these antecedents. Nor does it attempt to engage in detail with contemporary critics of the humanistic academy and its defenders, a sprawling discussion that has taken place mainly online and in the press.” They declare categorically: “Our focus is rather the quality of scholarship: the research produced by professors employed by colleges and universities and published (for the most part) in academic journals and scholarly monographs.” Except that they actually don’t do that.
More recent interventions follow the same pattern, though the current report wraps its concerns in the language of philosophical sobriety. The 1776 Commission sought to reshape the teaching of United States history by casting progressive scholarship as a threat to national values. The present report presents its intervention in the spirit of the commission’s report, claiming it is primarily motivated to defend and promote disinterested inquiry, because that is “what universities are for. Indeed, it might well be thought that one of the greatest contributions a university can make to society is to provide a model of what disinterested inquiry can be and how it might thereby be of value… there is in fact no good reason to question either the coherence or the value of disinterested inquiry, however difficult it may be”.
The science wars of the 1990s provide another precedent. Debates between scientists and humanists over objectivity, relativism, and the authority of scientific knowledge mirror the epistemological anxieties that animate the present report. What is new is the translation of these philosophical disputes into administrative recommendations, transforming intellectual disagreement into a possible governance mandate.
Across these episodes, the pattern is consistent: claims of ideological capture and declining standards emerge during periods of political polarization, institutional insecurity, and shifting cultural authority. The current report follows this script closely, positioning itself as a corrective at precisely the moment when the humanities’ intellectual and demographic landscape is undergoing profound change, and national politics has descended into toxic ideological polarization, intolerant partisanship, and rightwing populism.
Over the past four decades, universities have adopted managerial logics that privilege market metrics, revenue generation, and quantifiable outputs. These logics devalue disciplines whose contributions are not easily monetized. The report calls for administrative intervention when humanities disciplines become politicized, as that calls for the suspension of administrative deference to faculty authority.
What is ignored in the report are the larger extrinsic forces facing the humanities: declining public funding, adjunctification, and enrollment pressures have created structural vulnerabilities that the report’s narrative of disciplinary failure risks intensifying. By framing the humanities’ challenges as self-inflicted, the report inadvertently supplies justification for further austerity and administrative intervention.
These institutional pressures intersect with a broader populist anti-intellectualism that casts the humanities as elitist, partisan, and disconnected from “real” knowledge. Although the report acknowledges “powerful forces outside the academy” attempting to dictate scholarship, its own framing, emphasizing ideological distortion, politicization, and the loss of objectivity, echoes the very critiques it claims to resist. The humanities’ engagement with race, gender, colonialism, and inequality has become a flashpoint in wider cultural battles, and the report’s suspicion of politically engaged scholarship reflects this polarization.
In this sense, the report functions both as a symptom and an instrument of the contemporary crisis. It responds to external pressures while reinforcing the logics that produced them. Its self-presentation as moderate is strategic, but its cumulative effect is alarmist. Its nostalgia for a depoliticized past is historically naïve, for the humanities have always been shaped by political struggle, intellectual contestation, and shifting social demands.
What the report ultimately offers is not a diagnosis of the humanities’ condition but a defense of a particular epistemic order under strain, one unsettled by demographic change, intellectual diversification, and the erosion of institutional certainties that once insulated the humanities from broader political currents.
The recently released “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” has triggered tremendous pushback (see here, here, and here, for example).1 The humanities as a whole certainly deserve a full-throated defense, but here I want to focus on how the Report singles out anthropology for condemnation.
Anthropology is vital to understanding global politics. The limitations facing anthropologists, including difficulty accessing authoritarian environments and conflict zones, contribute directly to the growing poverty of empirical knowledge about current events, a trend I have written about here and here. A world with fewer anthropologists will be a world that knows less about itself, particularly about the textures of political life on the ground.
The Report’s Charges Against Anthropology
In general, the Report denounces a wide swath of humanities scholars and anthropologists for pursuing what the Report’s authors call (p. 12)
a distinctive form of politicization in which the scholarly enterprise is taken to be subordinate to, or in the service of, political (social or moral) goals beyond the advancement of knowledge and understanding. The goals vary from area to area, but in a contemporary context they are generally though not exclusively associated with the progressive left. Put most broadly, the goal might be characterized as turning the humanities into vehicles for social justice, or the elimination of pernicious social hierarchies. More specific goals under this heading include anti-racism (the eradication of racial hierarchy), feminism (the rejection of patriarchy), the “decolonization” of the academy and of society more generally (undoing the legacy of imperialism), full equity for gender and sexual minorities and, to a much lesser extent, the eradication of class distinctions and the replacement of “neoliberal” capitalism with some form of socialism.
All of this is essentially the authors’ attempt to re-litigate long-running and tedious conversations about “cancel culture,” “political correctness,” etc.
The Report’s authors believe that “politicization” is most pronounced in anthropology, writing (pp. 4-5)
Our review of the disciplines paints a mixed picture. Every field we have studied shows some signs of the pathologies sketched above: a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of long-standing ideals of rigor and objectivity. In some fields (e.g., philosophy) the problems are largely confined to a single subfield focused on a charged topic. In others (e.g., history), while there are streams of scholarship in which standards have been politicized in problematic ways, they run alongside more dominant streams in which a wide range of views is tolerated, and appropriately scholarly standards are brought to bear. In the most extreme cases (e.g., anthropology), we see a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.
The Report also disapprovingly quotes various anthropologists (p. 12):
For example, in a 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, Akhil Gupta writes that “anthropology is an outlier among the social sciences … because its political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism” (Gupta and Stoolman 2022, emphasis added). In a reply published in American Anthropologist, Fernando Villanea emphasizes the point that “the value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective,” but rather to “serve the interests” of people who have been harmed by anthropologists in the past (Villanea 2023). Two years later, in the same journal, José Santos argued that “all ethnographies” — the stock in trade of cultural anthropology — have as their goal “not voyeurism but advocacy” (Santos 2025), as if the goal of describing the social world and making sense of it was not only not on the menu, but that it was to be disparaged as a kind of perversion. Taken literally, such remarks call, not for scholarship in the service of a social goal, but for a rejection of the core idea that scholarship aims at understanding.
Ultimately, the Report concludes that “traditional scholarship” and “disinterested inquiry” are under deep threat – or have been outright suppressed – by forces of “relativism” and “postmodernism.”
The Report Has No (Transparent) Methodology But Does Have Clear Politics
If the Report is itself meant to be a form of evidence-backed inquiry in line with the supposed standards of “traditional scholarship,” then it is striking that there is no methodology section in the thirty-page document. There is no methodology section because the method was to cherry-pick, decontextualize, and assert. Surely we could apply humanities methodologies to the exercise of assessing the state of the humanities. That application would mean, minimally, viewing quotations in context, considering authorial intent, and assessing different potential interpretations. None of that occurs here.
Or we could apply social scientific methodologies to the exercise. In that case, we would want to know whether the quotations the authors selected are representative of broader trends. Such an assessment would in turn require some kind of standard of measurement other than the Report authors’ (presumed) authority.
The Report’s lack of methodology is closely related to its implicit but very clear politics. Put simply, the authors reflect the politics of someone in the vicinity of Jonathan Chait.
We could pull at various threads to start unraveling the Report’s politics. One easy starting point would be to note that the authors place “neoliberal” in scare quotes in the passage I excerpted above. The scare quotes are, I believe, meant to suggest that the term “neoliberal” is an unserious epithet rather than a term of serious analysis, and those who use “neoliberal” are conducting “politicized” scholarship.
Such a suggestion would undercut the authors’ own claims. The literature on neoliberalism is in fact replete with works of remarkable scholarly precision and weight, works that are far from the caricatures of “postmodernism” and “relativism” that the Report’s authors decry. Key examples would include Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists (Harvard, 2018) and Christian Joppke’s Neoliberal Nationalists (Cambridge, 2020). These two works show, respectively, that (a) neoliberalism is a complex historical formation that can be empirically identified and traced, and (b) neoliberalism is an essential concept for understanding the world of Trump and his ilk. To dismiss the idea of “neoliberalism” as politicized and unscholarly is to reveal oneself as unserious.
Anthropology’s Vital Role
If a reader knew nothing about anthropology, that reader would come away from this report convinced that anthropology is a vacuous discipline dedicated to denying that facts exist and punishing anyone who questions political correctness.
In fact, anthropologists often provide the most detailed accounts we have of the most important political and social phenomena in the world. For example, could one understand the War on Terror – one of the main structuring elements of global politics over the past quarter-century – without reading the work of Darryl Li and Samar al-Bulushi, both of whose books are grounded in extensive chronicling of empirical data? And in my own adopted discipline of political science, the works that have the most enduring value to me are the ones written by political scientists who sound a lot like anthropologists – Leonardo Villalòn on Senegal, Zekeria Ould Ahmed Salem on Mauritania, John Paden on Nigeria, Stéphane Lacroix on Saudi Arabia, Thomas Pierret on Syria, Tareq Baconi on Gaza, etc. To the extent that I have achieved any insights in my own work, a good deal of them owe to my efforts, however successful or unsuccessful, to conduct ethnography in small doses and to think like an anthropologist.
I find much quantitative political science, meanwhile, produces results that are either glaringly obvious or flat-out wrong. The thin and fleeting results of much quantitative social science, which often reflect authors’ own clear biases and preconceived political goals, all underscore how a supposed commitment to facts and evidence does not necessarily produce meaningful knowledge about the world we live in – and can even prove highly distorting. See David Keen on Paul Collier for a devastating takedown of a widely celebrated (but often profoundly unconvincing, at least to me) social scientist who is supposedly a rigorous number-cruncher following evidence to conclusions.
Anthropologists are often the best positioned to explain events, trends, and places – and to counteract the often facile understandings constructed by government policymakers, think tankers, political scientists, economists, journalists, “OSINT analysts,” and others. I have returned multiple times to the conclusion of Judith Scheele’s Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara (p. 233), where she reflects on how differently a small town on the Mali-Algeria border can be seen:
There are vital issues of power here, but not the clichéd ones rehashed in the “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.” That Report wants to fight on the terrain of “facts don’t care about your feelings” or “let’s debate how many genders there are,” but there are other terrains of power in which anthropology and an anthropological mindset matters even more vividly.
That mindset is becoming harder to pursue on the ground, especially in the arc of countries I cover at this newsletter. Authoritarianism and war, whether individually or in combination, have made on-the-ground research difficult in many of the countries from Mali to Iran, especially the sustained, immersive, ethnographic fieldwork that is cultural anthropology’s core method. The obstacles to anthropological research leave us with a poorer understanding of how power is experienced. Surely now is precisely when we most need that understanding; indeed, when anthropologists are able to offer perspectives on contemporary war zones, their analysis is particularly precious – see Nisrin Elamin’s work on Sudan, for example. Overall, we are hurtling along a path to what Ruben Andersson called, in a 2019 book, a “no go world.” To quote from the summary, “Using drones, proxy forces, border reinforcement, and outsourced aid, risk-obsessed powers are helping to remap the world into zones of insecurity and danger. The result is a vision of chaos crashing into fortified borders, with national and global politics riven by fear.” Viewing conflict zones from afar, it is easy to settle into neat narratives, to overvalue the perspectives of top political actors, to miss the messy dynamics at the level of ordinary people. Those are all challenges I struggle with in this newsletter, to be honest.
I wonder, then, whether anthropology is politically objectionable to the Report’s authors and to their many powerful allies because anthropology is awash with “postmodernism” and “relativism” – or whether anthropology is politically objectionable because of its potential to unearth inconvenient facts, trends, and perspectives.
Anthropology Has No “Traditional Scholarship” to Which It Can Return
The Report’s authors refer some ten times to “traditional scholarship,” “traditional standards,” etc. A representative passage (p. 4):
Scholarship on matters of human concern has been a source of controversy from the start — witness the trial of Socrates for corrupting the youth of Athens.2 In recent years, however, the complaint has assumed a more specific form, namely, that the traditional goal of coming to understand the human world through careful scholarship has been subordinated to, or even displaced by, a “political” goal: the aim of realizing a conception of social justice nowadays associated with the progressive left.
But the authors make no acknowledgment of anthropology’s specific and concrete past. As anthropologists will be the first to tell you, their discipline’s roots lie in colonial projects of knowledge-gathering and knowledge-fashioning that proceeded as part of and in tandem with empire. There was never a point in time when anthropology was unmoored from state power such that anthropologists could seek to “understand the human world through careful scholarship” in some kind of political vacuum. It would require a remarkably narrow view of the discipline’s history to insist that there was some kind of window, perhaps around the 1960s (?),3 when anthropology was doing a kind of un-politicized “traditional scholarship.” Even and perhaps especially during the 1960s, in fact, Area Studies scholarship was structured in core ways by the funding mechanisms and policy priorities of the U.S. government and various government-adjacent foundations. The anthropology of the 1960s, meanwhile, is replete with rumination on meaning-making, the interpretation of cultural forms, etc. I’m not sure someone like Clifford Geertz would fit easily into what the Report’s authors assume “traditional scholarship” to be. In any case I did not see the Report praise any anthropologist, living or dead, especially not any cultural anthropologist.
Closing
Ten years ago, still clinging onto the idea of some kind of technocratic-meritocratic process in which academics’ ideas could feed into benevolent U.S. government policymaking, I might have made the case for anthropology in terms of “policy relevance.” “Policymakers should listen to anthropologists because then they’ll see how complex things are, which could help reduce harm!” I don’t really believe at this point, though, that policymaking takes input in that way, nor do I believe that “policy relevance” is the best metric for evaluating the importance of academic and scholarly work.
So I’ll make the case directly to you, then, reader: anthropology enriches your understanding of the world, from the homelessness on America’s streets to the way power works in Iran. Anyone hinting4 to university administrators that they should slash or discipline anthropologists is someone advocating for a curtailment of that humanizing, disruptive, and critical view that the best cultural anthropology provides.
1 For background on the Report, you can read the Chronicle of Higher Education’s interview with four of the authors.
2 The authors give various dog-whistles to the effect that they see themselves as defenders of the humanities in the sense of a Western canon of great thinkers.
3 If was one even going to attempt to make the argument, one would have to locate that window after independence but before the supposedly, according to the Report’s authors, deleterious influence starting in the 1970s of figures such as Edward Said and Michel Foucault.
4 I applied my advanced humanities training in parsing texts to conclude that the authors’ statement “we must urge caution on the part of administrators who might wish to act on the basis of our report” (p. 5) is a form of preemptive self-defense rather than a serious plea to their core audience.
Quantifying our lives is easier than it’s ever been. But a philosopher of games warns that external metrics and data can never capture what’s truly important.
Bryan Gardiner
June 19, 2026
There are plenty of useful things a metric can reveal. There are even more it can obscure or corrupt. It took me well over a decade of tracking my own life in ever greater detail to fully appreciate this duality, which probably reveals something about both me and the nature of measurement.
Like a lot of people bitten by the self-quantifying bug, I initially started gathering personal data to pursue a nebulous collection of goals and desires. As a sedentary technology journalist, I wanted to feel better physically and emotionally, to get outside more, and—where possible—to bring order to some of the messiness and uncertainty of my daily existence. These all seemed to be things that could be improved with the cool clarity of numbers.
Self-quantifiers often get stereotyped as obsessive self-optimizers (and many of them are), but my reasons for producing and collecting personal data were less about life-maxxing and more about life meaning—at least at first. As most people who know me will attest, I do not have now, nor have I ever possessed, a “productivity mindset.” I’m also not all that interested in life hacks, shortcuts, or new ways to compare myself with other people. Instead, what I wanted out of metrics—what I hoped I could divine from a never-ending stream of numbers about my health, work, and social life—was something more elusive: self-knowledge. This was my first mistake.
The idea that the more we know, the better is so profoundly embedded in our culture that it feels weird to even point it out. Since at least as far back as the Enlightenment, the primary way we’ve all agreed to go about knowing more has been through measurement and quantification. After all, more knowledge—more data—leads to better decisions, which leads to happier, more fulfilled people. Or so we’re told, and with increasing frequency in the era of AI.
When two Wired magazine editors, Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, coined the term “quantified self” in 2007 and helped launch the movement we are all now helplessly a part of, they were essentially selling this very idea. “Unless something can be measured, it cannot be improved,” wrote Kelly in an early blog post, doing his best impression of Lord Kelvin. “So we are on a quest to collect as many personal tools that will assist us in quantifiable measurement of ourselves.” Almost 20 years later, that quest is easier than ever thanks to a flood of devices, apps, and websites all designed to help us build our self-knowledge through numbers.
My first tool was a small, plastic clip-on Fitbit I started using in 2011. It did one thing: count the number of steps I took in a day. As a lifelong video game player, I was already well acquainted with the motivational power of simple scoring systems, and I hoped my new gadget would offer the gentle numerical nudge I thought I needed to step away from my Twitter feed and, if not touch grass, at least walk next to some. Walking also seemed to be one of the few times I had what could charitably be called intelligent ideas, which seemed like another promising by-product of doing more of it.
Alas, that was short-lived. I can’t tell you precisely when “getting out into nature more” or “thinking smarter thoughts” stopped mattering to me as goals, but I suspect it took no more than a few weeks. What I can say with certainty is that my initial goal of 6,000 daily steps quickly turned into 10,000, which then jumped to 15,000 and eventually settled at 20,000 for years. Stories about becoming a “steps guy” are clichéd at this point, and they’ve earned that status for a reason.
It didn’t take long for me to trade in pedometers for heart-rate monitors (I also started running), smartwatches, sleep-tracking rings, and an embarrassing number of macronutrient-tabulating apps. Outside the health and fitness realm, my early career as a journalist also happened to coincide with the rise of social media and web analytics tools like Chartbeat, which promised to further quantify difficult-to-measure aspects of my life, like “job success” and “impact,” by tracking things like page views, followers, retweets, likes, and all sorts of other attentional metrics that now carry great weight.
Metrics inevitably redefine your core sense of what’s important, whether you’re aware of the trap or not.
Ultimately, during the 10-plus years I diligently tracked my heart rate, steps, active calories, sleep, story engagement time, stress levels, and other metrics, I gained virtually nothing in terms of greater self-knowledge. (I suppose I did learn that I liked to make numbers go up and down, but who doesn’t?) The swirl of data that followed me everywhere did not lend additional meaning or insight to the way I relate to myself, my work, or the important people in my life. In fact, the more I used numerical proxies, the worse I felt about pretty much everything.
What I did learn were two important lessons about what happens when you try to quantify the minutiae of your life. First and foremost, whatever the amount of data you’re currently collecting about yourself, it will never feel sufficient. There’s always a new metric around the corner, a better way for a tracker to remix its readings and more accurately measure what’s “important”: heart rate variability, daily stress, exercise “readiness,” cardiovascular or “fitness” ages. Measurement begets more measurement. You can count on it.
The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game
C. Thi Nguyen
The second lesson was less obvious but no less significant. The more personal or nuanced your goals are when you set off on your self-quantifying journey, the more likely it is you will ultimately replace them with some simplified metric or ranking. Want to become a better journalist? Why not use page views and leaderboards as a proxy for success? Enjoy cooking and want to improve? Foodie metrics dictate that more complicated recipes with longer ingredient lists are the answer. Even when we know that the value of good journalism isn’t reflected in how many people read a given story or that the joys of cooking are as much about improvisation and experimentation as about successfully following some complex recipe, it’s hard to resist the allure of a simple score or stat. Metrics inevitably redefine your core sense of what’s important, whether you’re aware of the trap or not.
Over the years, people have invented various terms to describe this phenomenon. In his recent book The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen calls it “value capture.” Value capture happens, he says, when you adopt external sources of measurement and then let them rule you without adapting them to suit your life. “In value capture, you’re essentially outsourcing your values,” Nguyen writes. “You’re letting an external metric or ranking set what’s important for you.” Crucially, you’re also outsourcing the process of figuring out your own sense of meaning. It’s why my walks quickly shifted from feeling meditative to prioritizing miles.
Individuals, institutions, and indeed entire societies can fall prey to value capture. In fact, once you start noticing it, you start seeing it everywhere—in journalism, education, and business, but also in our food, our hobbies, and, yes, the way we measure our health and happiness. Here’s how Nguyen puts it:
Value capture happens when a restaurant stops caring about making good food and starts caring about maximizing its Yelp ratings. It happens when students stop caring about education and start caring about their GPA. It happens when scientists stop caring about finding truth and start caring about getting the biggest grants. It even happens in religion. A pastor recently told me that his church had become completely obsessed with baptism rates. The higher-ups had established an internal leaderboard in which the pastors competed on monthly baptism rates, and it was starting to dominate everybody’s attention. He’d found himself caring less about the long-term spiritual development of his flock and focusing more on trying to deliver popular sermons that would up his baptism rates and move him up that leaderboard.
At its core, The Score is trying to untangle a mystery that Nguyen, a specialist in the philosophy of games at the University of Utah, has been thinking about for a long time: Why is it that numbers and scoring systems in games can be the source of so much joy and fluidity and play, but public measures and institutional metrics (i.e., scores that apply to the real world) seem to drain the life out of everything and thrust us all into a bleak mindset of grinding optimization?
Porter, a historian of science who specializes in the social power of numbers, has spent his career looking at why quantification has become so dominant, not just in political and bureaucratic life but everywhere. One of his key insights about the inherent attractiveness of quantification, which he calls “a technology of distance,” is that it “minimizes the need for intimate knowledge and personal trust.” Put another way, metrics travel extremely well between different contexts and are easy to grasp and aggregate.
Whether it’s a student’s GPA or a country’s GDP, these measures are understood by pretty much everyone. But that understanding comes at a price, Porter reminds us: To arrive at a clear metric, you inevitably need to simplify what you’re attempting to measure, often jettisoning heaps of nuanced, qualitative, or open-ended information so that others can find the resulting number legible.
No one (hopefully) believes that a GPA captures in any meaningful way a student’s entire educational experience or aptitude for learning, but we’ve agreed to use it because more qualitative assessments are onerous to wade through and require expertise to decipher and compare. Ditto for the economic metric of GDP, which politicians and societies are now compelled to drive higher and higher because a group of economists once concluded that this figure correlates with general economic well-being.
This is the essential tension at the heart of all data, argues Nguyen. Any institutional quantification, he says, requires that the evaluation procedure and its product be comprehensible across contexts. That profoundly limits what the metric can actually measure. “In value capture, you’re ultimately taking that decontextualized nugget and internalizing it,” he writes. “You’re guiding your life using an evaluative technology that has been engineered to travel between contexts, by stripping it of nuance.”
Every so often I’ll find myself in friendly debate with a “numbers person”—a statistician, an economist, or a friend who’s still a committed self-quantifier. After patiently listening to my measurement-gone-awry examples—the disastrous attempt to quantify pain as “the fifth vital sign” in the mid-1990s (which exacerbated the opioid epidemic), or any of the countless examples of the McNamara fallacy, where decisions in academia, medicine, and politics are based solely on what’s easily measured—many will insist that I’m misunderstanding or misinterpreting the whole point of measuring. Metrics, they’ll say, are simply a means, and the important questions concern the ends for which they are used. In other words, these unfortunate outcomes amount to user error, not something inherently dangerous or misleading about the nature of measurement.
At some point during these conversations, Goodhart’s Law will invariably come up, usually as an explanation the metrics-minded deploy for why the ends get all mucked up. The principle, which is attributed to the British economist Charles Goodhart, is often expressed as the following: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” I have a profound dislike for Goodhart’s Law, not because I think it’s untrue, but rather for the way it gets interpreted.
As Nguyen notes, Goodhart’s Law says very little about why metrics fail to capture what’s important—or what to do about it. Find better measures, some will conclude. Don’t let metrics become targets, others will insist. These are not helpful takeaways. All measurements, I would argue, are in fact targets, whether you intend them to be or not. Metrics inevitably present one direction or option as better, Nguyen writes in The Score—“longer lifespans, faster student graduation rates, more page views, higher customer satisfaction scores.” What people are talking about when they bring up Goodhart’s Law isn’t human error; it’s actually a fundamental problem with measurement itself.
I want to be clear here: Measurement can and does serve a number of vital functions. It has in a very literal sense made the modern world possible, with all its life-saving, suffering-reducing, and awe-inspiring scientific breakthroughs. When used with care and diligence, metrics can make our progress (or lack of it) clearer and more transparent. Are we decreasing carbon dioxide emissions or not? They can also introduce accountability into formerly opaque systems, such as by measuring whether a company is complying with state and federal regulations. They can even make us more objective, reduce biases, and galvanize us to act.
But as Nguyen points out throughout The Score, the fundamental weakness of metrics comes when we use them to pursue subtler, more personal goals. What I think many of us miss—what I know I certainly missed—is that there are always trade-offs when you try to distill something important down to a data point. When we turn to metrics to understand ourselves, our social world, and culture as a whole, they will never come close to capturing what matters. Even worse, they’ll often actively obscure it.
Today, I find that numbers have very little to offer when it comes to my daily work, my physical or mental fitness, my relationships, or any other part of my life I consider important. Granted, I’m lucky enough to be in relatively good health at the moment. I don’t have to track my glucose levels or monitor my blood pressure. As a freelance writer, I also have the luxury of not having numbers foisted on me in the form of key performance indicators (KPIs), objectives and key results (OKRs), or any of the endless quantitative evaluations that come baked into pretty much every corporate and gig economy job.
Still, in a very real sense, there is no escaping metrics or, especially, the logic that accompanies them. Knowing has become numeric, and we all live in a world that increasingly sees us as a collection of numbers—as “data subjects.” The first and most urgent challenge, I’d suggest, is finding a way to keep us from seeing ourselves and each other that way.
This won’t be easy. As Porter, Nguyen, and countless other philosophers, anthropologists, and historians have already observed, the language of numbers is largely how we ascribe value today—as well as how we digest and metabolize our relationships to ourselves, to others, and to the world around us. Indeed, many of us have accepted not only that metrics have a natural existence in human affairs but that there are in fact no aspects of human life that cannot be somehow translated into data.
Knowing has become numeric, and we all live in a world that increasingly sees us as a collection of numbers— as “data subjects.”
So how do we push back? Nguyen’s book offers a useful first step. As he notes again and again in The Score, believing that numbers say something real or useful about human needs and desires gives them power. We can, at the very least, start to seriously question that belief, to ask what meaning and pleasure we might be giving up in pursuit of a metric.
Doing so will hopefully lead to another realization: that playing the numbers game is ultimately a losing proposition for humans. If we insist on expressing our worth through attentional metrics and productivity scores, if we continue to turn intelligence and creativity into a series of benchmarks for AI to surpass, we’ve already lost. Of course machines will surpass us in a world built around metrics. That is literally what we create them to do. The answer is not to turn ourselves into machines too.
If there’s one thing that keeps me up at night, it is that we’ve become so accustomed to seeing and understanding the larger world and ourselves through numbers that it has deprived us of the language to express what’s fundamental and valuable about our own humanity. We need this ability now more than ever, especially if we’re going to adequately answer two of the most important questions of our era: What are humans for? And what is AI for?
As part of my own attempts to disentangle myself from a life of numbers—efforts that started shortly before covid—I’ve abandoned most of the tools of measurement I spent a decade collecting. I’ve largely given up on social media. I stopped using apps to track my health and well-being. The watch I currently wear tells me the time and the date and nothing else.
In fact, the only holdover from my days of obsessive self-quantification is a dogmatic devotion to walking—without all the step counting, of course. These days, I walk when I’m feeling disillusioned or overwhelmed; I walk when I can’t figure out how to finish an essay; I also walk because I enjoy spending time outdoors with my dog and catching up on the details of my neighbors’ lives. The benefits of pursuing this daily activity are as clear and obvious to me as anything could be in life. I just can’t express them in a number.
Bryan Gardiner is a writer based in Oakland, California.
The heatwave scorching western Europe is the most severe and widespread ever and is only possible due to the climate crisis driven by fossil fuel burning, scientists have said.
Almost half of Europe’s 850 largest cities are also enduring their worst ever heat stress, a combination of temperature and humidity, they found. Muggier conditions mean sweating is less effective at cooling the body, making heatwaves even more dangerous.
The analysis comes as the UK recorded its hottest ever June temperature on Thursday, 36.7C (98.06F) in Somerset, and much of western Europe recorded a sharp rise in medical emergencies, including some deaths.
In summer 2022, more than 60,000 people died due to heat in Europe. The statistical analysis needed to assess the impact of the current heatwave will take time to complete. Nonetheless, the heatwave is certain to exact a heavy toll and is also disrupting lives and livelihoods, with schools closed, hospitals struggling and rail and air journeys cancelled across the continent.
The new analysis by scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) consortium shows how rapidly extreme heat is worsening as carbon pollution continues to pile up in the atmosphere. As recently as 2003, a heatwave like the current one in Europe would have been 2C cooler due to the lower level of global heating at the time. In 1976, another famous heatwave year, it would have been 3.5C cooler.
The sweltering night-time temperatures currently harming people’s sleep are about 100 times more likely today than in 2003. The scientists warned that without urgent climate action, future heat conditions would get even more extreme and the current summer could seem relatively cool in retrospect.
“This is the most severe and widespread heatwave to have ever affected this large a region of Europe,” said Dr Theodore Keeping, an extreme weather research associate at Imperial College London and part of the WWA team. “We found that in the last 50 years, during which time the planet has warmed by 1.1C, the chance of a heatwave like this has changed immensely. This event would not have been possible in June without climate change. But do we expect this to be a cool summer going forward? That’s absolutely the case.”
He said many capital cities were experiencing not only their hottest recorded three-day period in June but the hottest three-day period at any time of year. At least 100 million people in Europe were expected to face temperatures above 35C on Thursday.
The scientists used wet bulb globe temperatures to assess the additional impact of high humidity. “It accounts for the ability of the human body to cool itself down. With the worst conditions ever experienced in 45% of cities over 50,000 people, the health impacts of this heatwave are likely to be extremely high,” Keeping said. “The speed of change is startling.”
Commenting on the WWA analysis, Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate chief, said: “Climate change is running rampant, caused by the world’s addiction to burning coal, oil and gas. But the solutions are equally clear: a faster shift to clean energy – which is now much cheaper than fossil fuels – as well as protecting forests and building climate resilience.”
The WWA team used both observed and reliable forecast temperature data to analyse the hottest three-day period across a large area of western Europe, which is sitting under a “heat dome”. Using peer-reviewed methods, they found unequivocally that climate change was the driving force behind the severity of the heat.
They ruled out natural variability of the weather, in particular any influence from the El Niño event that has begun in the Pacific Ocean. The current weather pattern, a blocked high-pressure system trapping hot air over Europe and drawing warm air up from the Sahara, is not unusual in summer, the scientists said. Instead, the level of heat has been supercharged by global heating.
Carolina Pereira Marghidan, of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, said: “After the devastating 2003 heatwave in Europe, many countries invested in early warning systems and action plans. Research shows that those have saved many lives, but it’s not enough.”
Heatwave Britain must do more to prepare for this scorching new normal (The Independent)
Editorial: As the UK swelters and June temperature records tumble, the government must redouble its investment in resilience policies that meet the future rather than ignore it
The “red alerts” issued by the Meteorological Office are rare, serious, and speak just as much to the climate crisis facing planet Earth as they do to the immediate risks to human health in Britain.
Perhaps it is the heat making the more vocal climate-change deniers dismiss the sweltering evidence before them, but against the backdrop of these record-breaking temperatures, their claims that “it’s just weather” appear in the worst of taste, and dangerous with it.
Temperatures approaching 40C in June are not normal. But they are increasingly frequent. So are extraordinarily wet winters. The reality of climate change from global warming, and the danger that it will accelerate into an unpredictable and catastrophic cycle by the middle of the century, should be treated with the urgency the moment demands.
In countries such as Britain, built on the perfectly natural presumption of a permanently temperate climate, there is an all too obvious need to increase resilience, from railway tracks to the foundations of buildings and flood defences.
A few years ago, this position was common ground. During his recent, almost valedictory appearance at Prime Minister’s Questions, Sir Keir Starmer bemoaned the loss of national purpose in restraining greenhouse gas emissions and pursuing the target of a net zero UK economy by 2050. After all, for all his fatal flaws, Boris Johnson accepted the science and the need for action at successive Cop summits, and it was Theresa May who put the net zero target into law.
Now Kemi Badenoch calls herself a “net zero sceptic” – rather too close to flat-Earthism for a serious politician. Still worse is the fracturing of the international consensus by an anti-science elite: Donald Trump’s inexplicable insistence that climate change is a “hoax” will be his true legacy to future generations.
Under the pressure of the cost of living crisis, strained public finances, and the frankly malign influence of the fossil-fuel lobby on British politics, the public and politicians alike have found more immediate, quotidian matters to fret about. This approach is perfectly understandable, but deeply flawed. Climate change, with its costly consequences for every nation and every human being, is an inconvenient truth, and an issue that should transcend all others.
In fact, humanity cannot afford to ignore the fact that renewable sources – alongside a role for nuclear power – can produce cheap, plentiful and clean energy. They will have to be adopted in any case, because fossil fuels are a finite resource, carry unacceptable geopolitical risks, and will so alter life on Earth as to render it almost unrecognisable, just as the weather is now. The drive to net zero is not a burden or an obstacle to higher standards of living, but the way to achieve hitherto unknown prosperity – especially if the voracious appetite for energy of the AI data centres can be satisfied without engendering irreversible climate change.
Paying for the massive investment in green power has always been the issue, but rarely is it set against the cost of doing nothing – crop failure, buildings collapsing from subsidence, increased incidence of earthquakes, hurricanes and floods, widespread disruption to transport and industry, and the flows of humans that will inevitably follow from the desertification of sub-Saharan Africa and water shortages across the equatorial regions.
What would the loss of pollinating insects and the rainforests do to our way of life? We know that it would not be cheap, or even possible, to fix.
Even if it is practically impossible to reverse climate change, we can still limit it. Some imaginative solutions will need to be found. How, for example, to discourage people from installing central heating systems – the wrong kind of resilience when powered in part by burning natural gas, thus creating a vicious cycle.
Could we reform school term times, which still revolve around the long-gone need to get the harvest in? Are there novel ways to bolster flood defences, both at the riverside and at the coast? Can we mandate the installation of new railway tracks that are less susceptible to buckling? What can the insurance sector do to help people affected by subsidence – especially as the UK has such an old housing stock? Must we shut motorways for hours after an accident, when people then have little access to water and shade?
The prime minister is right to have set up Cobra meetings to monitor the situation, but he, or more likely his successor, should also work on the ways in which we can protect lives – and the economy – from a hotter, damper future. And of course, the drive for net zero has to go on, because doing nothing cannot be an option.
“Esta é a onda de calor mais intensa e abrangente que já atingiu essa ampla região da Europa.” Theodore Keeping, pesquisador associado do Imperial College, deixa os números de lado ao explicar a jornalistas o que ocorre nesta semana na Europa. A mudança climática criou um evento virtualmente impossível há 50 anos.
Essas e outras conclusões constam de estudo publicado nesta sexta-feira (26) pelo WWA (World Weather Attribution), consórcio de cientistas liderados pela instituição londrina que verifica a responsabilidade da mudança climática em eventos extremos.
“Nos últimos 50 anos, o planeta aqueceu 1,1°C. Nesse período, a probabilidade de uma onda de calor como essa mudou imensamente. Esse evento não teria sido possível [na Europa] em um mês de junho sem as mudanças climáticas”, diz Keeping. “As temperaturas noturnas registradas não teriam sido possíveis em nenhuma época do ano sem as mudanças climáticas”, reitera.
Parisienses nadam no canal de Saint-Martin, em Paris, na noite de quinta-feira (25); a liberação de banho no local foi antecipada em razão da onda de calor recorde que assola a Europa nesta semana – Ludovic Marin/AFP
A responsabilidade pela crise do clima, mostra a ciência, reside sobretudo na queima de carvão, petróleo e gás. Ou, como diz Simon Stiell, chefe do clima na ONU, no “vício mundial” pela energia suja, mais cara do que as alternativas renováveis.
A probabilidade de que temperaturas máximas diárias como as desta semana ocorram durante três dias seguidos em qualquer época do ano aumentou mais de 500 vezes, calcula o estudo.
Na quinta-feira (25), a França registrou pelo terceiro dia consecutivo seu dia mais quente da história; a Météo-France informou que também a noite francesa foi a mais quente já registrada.
Duas estações nucleares foram desligadas no país devido ao aquecimento excessivo da água de rio utilizada para refrigerar os reatores.
As chamadas noites tropicais, quase uma rotina desde o fim de semana no Reino Unido, Espanha e na própria França, já alcançam Alemanha, Áustria e Itália. Quando os termômetros se mantêm acima dos 20°C no período noturno, o resfriamento do solo não ocorre e projeta um dia ainda mais quente na manhã seguinte.
A condição climática é considerada grave pela OMM (Organização Mundial de Meteorologia) por impedir a recuperação do corpo humano após um dia de esforço combatendo o calor. Provoca fadiga e doenças relacionadas ao calor, especialmente em crianças, idosos e portadores de comorbidades.
Apenas 20% das edificações na Europa têm ar condicionado. No Reino Unido, o número está perto de 5%. “Muitas residências, escolas e sistemas de transporte, bem como outras infraestruturas essenciais, foram projetadas para um clima mais frio, especialmente no noroeste do continente”, afirma Carolina Pereira Marghidan, do Centro de Clima da Cruz Vermelha Crescente Vermelho, que também participa do estudo do WWA.
A situação é diferente de 2003, quando uma onda de calor histórica matou mais de 70 mil pessoas no continente, grande parte idosos. “Muitos países investiram em sistemas de alerta precoce e planos de ação. Pesquisas mostram que essas medidas salvaram muitas vidas nas últimas décadas. A conscientização também cresceu muito, tudo isso é importante, mas não suficiente”, diz a pesquisadora.
Em entrevista ao jornal Le Monde, o prefeito de Paris, Emmanuel Grégoire, usou as escolas da cidade como exemplo para o tamanho da tarefa: com apenas 200 de 600 prédios adaptados ao calor, mesmo que existisse dinheiro para reformar tudo não haveria prestadores de serviço suficientes para terminar a tarefa em poucos anos.
“Para nos adaptarmos, precisamos mudar o ritmo de nossas vidas.”
Segundo o estudo do WWA, 45% de 854 cidades analisadas em 30 países europeus já bateram ou devem bater em junho marcas históricas de Índice de Bulbo Úmido Termômetro de Globo. O IBUTG, amplamente divulgado pela sigla em inglês (WBGT), é uma medida do estresse térmico e da capacidade do corpo de se resfriar por meio da evaporação do suor.
A combinação de calor intenso e umidade é perigosa, dizem os especialistas. Quando o corpo sua, o intuito é resfriá-lo. Com a umidade, o mecanismo perde eficácia.
A análise também compara o planeta atual, com 1,4°C de aquecimento global em comparação aos níveis pré-industriais, com aquele que testemunhou ondas de calor marcantes não apenas em 2003, como também em 1976.
Há 50 anos, um evento como o atual seria 3,5°C mais frio; há 23 anos, a ocorrência de noites tropicais como a desta semana seriam 100 vezes menos prováveis. E não dá para colocar a culpa no El Niño, condição climática que exacerba a ocorrência de secas e de chuvas extremas. O estudo afasta essa possibilidade.
“Sim, é a mudança climática; sim, a culpa é nossa; não, não é o El Niño. Sim, temos as soluções; não, não estamos colocando-as em prática com a rapidez necessária”, resume Friederike Otto, professora de Ciência do Clima do Imperial College.
“A questão é realmente que tipo de futuro queremos.”
A chegada do El Niño já faz as seguradoras calcularem os impactos do fenômeno e se prepararem para um pico de indenizações. O setor residencial espera aumento de prejuízos ligados a chuvas, enquanto a seca deve elevar os acionamentos de apólices rurais.
O El Niño é o aquecimento das águas do oceano Pacífico, que altera o clima do planeta. A Administração Nacional Oceânica e Atmosférica dos Estados Unidos confirmou o início do fenômeno no dia 11, com previsão de 63% de alcançar um nível muito forte de novembro a janeiro. A alta nas temperaturas globais tende a ampliar seus efeitos.
“Tudo indica que os maiores impactos nas carteiras de seguro residencial e patrimonial, como empresas e condomínios, serão na primavera, principalmente a partir de setembro e outubro”, diz Jarbas Medeiros, presidente da comissão de riscos patrimoniais massificados da FenSeg (Federação Nacional de Seguros Gerais).
Carros no pátio do Detran de Porto Alegre cobertos pelas águas da inundação do lago Guaíba – Bruno Santos – 19.mai.24/Folhapress
O cálculo do prejuízo depende das características de cada seguradora e da preparação das cidades atingidas, mas há clareza no setor residencial de que os maiores danos serão no Sul, onde chuvas fortes podem se tornar mais frequentes. No Norte e Centro-Oeste, o El Niño deve trazer mais seca e aumentar o risco de quebras de safra no agronegócio.
“Sabemos que podem acontecer eventos mais catastróficos em algumas regiões, e as seguradoras já começam a acompanhar isso muito de perto e a preparar suas estruturas, porque montamos uma força-tarefa para atendimento aos clientes em eventos extremos”, afirma Medeiros.
A última estimativa da FenSeg, de 2021, indicou que menos de 1% das residências do país tinha cobertura contra danos causados por alagamentos. Dados mais recentes das seguradoras apontam que a procura pela proteção aumentou, principalmente após o desastre no Rio Grande do Sul em 2024, mas os números ainda são baixos.
Sain’t Clair Lima, diretor de produtos da Bradesco Seguros, diz que de 4% a 6% das apólices residenciais da empresa cobrem inundações. A situação varia conforme a região: no Sul, a cobertura é de 6% a 7%.
“Se as previsões se confirmarem, deve ter aumento de pelo menos dois dígitos em relação à frequência de sinistros”, afirma Lima. Os sinistros são as ocasiões em que clientes sofrem danos e precisam acionar a seguradora para receber indenização.
Medeiros, que também atua como diretor de ramos elementares e vida na Porto Seguro, afirma que somente 3% das apólices residenciais da empresa incluem inundações. A cobertura alcança 50% para vendavais e 80% para danos elétricos devido a cortes de energia.
Segundo ele, dez seguradoras oferecem a proteção para alagamentos atualmente no Brasil, contra apenas três na época do desastre gaúcho.
“Embora essa seja uma cobertura bastante desafiadora do ponto de vista de subscrição e precificação, o mercado trabalha para ampliar a oferta, para que o cliente encontre nas seguradoras uma possibilidade de se proteger contra os eventos extremos”, diz.
Sinistros em condomínios e empresas também devem aumentar, e Medeiros afirma que a proteção contra alagamento nessas categorias não passa de 5% das carteiras.
De acordo com o diretor, 29% da receita com seguros residenciais da Porto Seguro vêm de coberturas de eventos climáticos, incluindo alagamento, vendaval e dano elétrico. Porém, 48% do valor pago em indenizações se deve a essas ocorrências, taxa superior ao montante indenizado por furtos ou roubos.
“Claramente são coberturas que trazem risco para a companhia, porque a proporção entre indenização e pagamento é maior”, afirma. “As pessoas têm medo de ser roubadas, de sair de férias e, quando voltar, ver que a casa foi arrombada. Mas, muitas vezes, não passa na cabeça que o que mais causa prejuízo é o evento climático”.
Adilson Lavrador, diretor-executivo de operações, sinistros e tecnologia da Tokio Marine, diz que a companhia acompanha as informações sobre o El Niño e que fenômenos climáticos podem impactar praticamente todo o ecossistema de seguros.
“Em cenários de enchentes severas, chuvas intensas e vendavais, os ramos de seguros patrimoniais, de automóvel e agrícola tendem a registrar elevação nas ocorrências”, afirma. “Em situações extremas, também impactam o seguro de vida”.
No agronegócio, os números mostram uma queda no valor pago pelos clientes às seguradoras. Daniel Nascimento, presidente da comissão de seguro rural da FenSeg, afirma que houve uma retração de 7% no valor do prêmio no primeiro trimestre de 2026, em relação ao mesmo período de 2025.
O setor também registra redução na área de lavouras protegidas: 3,2 milhões de hectares estavam segurados em 2025, menos da metade dos 7,1 milhões de hectares do ano anterior.
“As seguradoras vêm acompanhando de perto o El Niño e fazem um planejamento de vendas para não expor muito seu capital”, diz. “Nosso maior desafio é que o produtor não espere o próximo evento impactar a sua região [para contratar a proteção]”.
Lima, da Bradesco Seguros, afirma que os prejuízos do agro com eventuais perdas de safra não poderão ser totalmente compensados: “Por mais que o seguro consiga recompor de alguma forma a perda financeira, há uma preocupação com todo o ecossistema, principalmente o financeiro, porque vai faltar alimento no mercado e gerar inflação”.
It’s been hot in London this week. Really hot. A dangerous heat wave has hit Western Europe. Yesterday, the UK recorded its highest ever June temperature at 36.1 °C (about 97 °F). But as the weather app on my phone confirmed, it felt like 39 °C.
It’s frightening that we are seeing such temperatures in the UK in June. According to the Met Office, the country’s national weather and climate service, June temperatures peaked at an average 19 °C (66 °F) in England between 1991 and 2020. Across Europe, the heat wave is likely to cause thousands of deaths. There will be other awful consequences for agriculture, infrastructure, and the health system.
But this week I want to look at what the heat does to our minds and brains. Personally, I’ve found it almost impossible to think straight. The heat is distracting and my mind is foggy. I dread to think about the conditions of people who work outdoors, in even hotter regions.
It’s not just exhaustion and confusion. The effects of heat on the brain can be deadly. And researchers are still trying to figure out why.
Studies have confirmed that as temperatures rise, people seem to get more irritable and more violent. Most of these studies are based on associations, though. It’s difficult to directly study how a heat wave might affect our thinking, says Catherine Thompson, a cognitive psychologist at Liverpool Hope University.
She has been studying the effects of extreme heat on firefighters instead. It’s easier to measure people’s cognitive skills before and after they undergo scheduled training that involves entering a burning building.
It’s early days, but the team found that firefighters found it harder to focus and control their attention immediately after heat exposure—something people in heat waves can empathize with, I’m sure.
The firefighters’ skills returned to normal after 20 minutes or so of cooling down. But they’d experienced just 15 minutes of intense heat exposure. Thompson doesn’t know what the effects of living through a days-long heat wave might be—or how long they’ll last. Figuring that out might involve shipping cognitive test kits to thousands of people during the few days’ notice of an impending heat wave. “My guess [is] that no one’s done it because it’s just so difficult to do,” says Thompson.
Still, researchers can learn about some of the impacts of heat waves through studies after the fact. And those studies suggest that the heat seems to have more disastrous outcomes for people with mental-health disorders.
Those outcomes become apparent when temperatures rise above what is considered typical for a given region. “There seems to be a correlation where the hotter it gets, especially during the hottest times of the year, the worse the mental-health outcomes,” says Joshua Wortzel, who directs the Heat-Mind Lab at Hartford HealthCare in Connecticut.
In a study published in 2023, Emma Lawrence at the University of Oxford, who studies the effect of climate change on mental health, and her colleagues reviewed the evidence linking mental-health outcomes to ambient outdoor temperatures. They found that during heat waves, there was a 9.7% increase in the rate of hospital admissions for people with such conditions.
“People who live with mental-health conditions are among the most susceptible to the physical impacts of heat,” says Lawrence. People with schizophrenia were found to have been three times more likely to die during the record-breaking heat wave that affected Canada in 2021, for example.
In order to protect people, we need a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying these effects. After all, a lot of things change when it’s very, very hot. Some people may end up stuck indoors, avoiding outdoor play and exercise, and it can be difficult to get a good night of sleep, for example. Sleep, socializing, and exercise are all really important for our mental health.
But whether unusual heat does something specific to our brains is, as Wortzel puts it, “the million-dollar question.”
Research in lab animals suggests that excessive heat can alter the way chemical signals work in our brain. The levels of neurotransmitters like serotonin, for example, seem to increase when rats and mice are exposed to high temperatures, according to multiple studies. The heat may also interfere with the way networks in our brains communicate with each other. It might affect the way oxygen reaches our brain cells.
“There are so many biological reasons why brains may be negatively affected by heat,” says Wortzel.
Emerging research suggests that for whatever reason, children and young people are among the most vulnerable. In research published earlier this week, Wortzel and his colleagues saw a 2.97% increase in the suicide rate among people in the US aged 15 to 24 for every 1 °C increase in average monthly temperature. That’s more than double the increase seen in people over the age of 24 (which is concerning in its own right).
Other work hints that heat exposure might have long-term consequences for children’s brain development. Babies who were exposed to either extreme heat or cold appeared to have altered white matter by the time they were nine to 12 years old—although it’s not clear how these impacts might affect an individual child.
“It seems that extreme temperature exposure for very young children may affect their brain development,” says Lawrence, who spoke to me from Oxford. She was meant to be in London for Climate Action Week, but her event, which focused on extreme heat, ended up being canceled … owing to the extreme heat.
We are living through the effects of climate change. And that brings a new urgency to the question of how heat affects our brains. Children born in 2020 are predicted to experience around seven times the number of heat waves their grandparents did, says Lawrance. “[We] need to be serious about adapting to a warming world.”
Aseries in the Guardian recently declared “it’s time to talk about geoengineering.” So let’s talk about it. And let us start with some simple truths about this cluster of techno-optimistic “quick fixes” which purport to somehow offset our slow progress towards zeroing out planet-warming carbon emissions.
Solar geoengineering proposals – reducing sunlight – have received the most attention, but a host of desperate schemes have been proposed in an effort to “fix” the disruption of climate caused by the growing burden of carbon dioxide human activities add to the atmosphere.
Many threaten the most sensitive aspects of polar environments, extending even to wildly expensive proposals to dam the Bering strait. If implemented, geoengineering schemes would put Earth’s physical climate in a dangerously precarious state, and introduce a major new destabilizing technology to an already turbulent political climate.
The essential thing to understand is that carbon dioxide, once emitted, is only very slowly removed from the atmosphere. A sizable share of it will still be keeping Earth dangerously hot millennia from now.
Solar geoengineering proposals involve injection of substances whose effect, by contrast, decays in a matter of years. Some might think this is an advantage of solar geoengineering. We can turn it on and off quickly when the damage it is doing to our planet becomes clear, right? Wrong.
Recent analyses demonstrate that it would take as long as two decades to create the required infrastructure. By then we would be completely reliant on maintaining it – a tall task in a dangerous world with global conflict. It would only temporarily mask the pent-up warming implicit in the ongoing buildup of carbon dioxide, and this pent-up warming would be released in a catastrophically rapid “termination shock” if circumstances force the cessation of solar geoengineering.
So solar geoengineering does not “buy time” for decarbonisation. The same can be said for other geoengineering schemes, which also require sustained maintenance over centuries to millennia. Five hundred years from now, the fabled Bering dam may crumble, but the carbon dioxide wreaking havoc on the climate system will still be there waiting.
A lot of unforeseen things can happen in a few decades let alone over centuries. Do we really want to play dice with the planet? Do we want to commit today’s and future generations to maintain these approaches without fail?
Collectively, the four of us have studied the physics of climate for the equivalent of well over 100 years; we know how complex it is and how many surprises it holds in store. Since 1990, over its six assessment reports, the IPCC has worked with tens of thousands of scientists, from physicists to economists, to ensure that due diligence is done on the science and potential impacts of increasing carbon dioxide concentrations.
It took more than a century of carbon emissions before we could detect that our climate is changing and even longer to attribute those changes, unequivocally, to anthropogenic carbon emissions. It was only in 2015 in Paris that most countries accepted that the world is warming and that we are to blame (and 2023 for UNFCCC to mention fossil fuels in a COP outcome).
Now, proponents of geoengineering are proposing to bash the climate with a whole new hammer, and one that engages some of the most poorly understood aspects of the climate system, including aerosols, clouds and regional rainfall patterns. We know that this would trigger much more uncertainty on outcomes, in particular in the case of poorly planned, unmanaged, uncoordinated injections of various substances in the high atmosphere, with no governance framework. Surely, we should insist on the same level of scientific diligence as has been devoted to understanding the regional consequences of greenhouse gas emissions.
Climate model simulations can provide an indication of what might go wrong but can provide no reassurance of what will go right. So far there has been no rigorous modelling assessment to explore different solar geoengineering scenarios and no formal intercomparison of the sensitivity of the climate to such interventions, let alone the impacts on regional weather and climate variability.
What we do know is that the few models that have been used so far do not even agree on what level of intervention might be required, nor what the response will be. After only 10 years, for the same stratospheric aerosol injection, global cooling can be anything from less than 1C to as much as 3C – a change more rapid than anything we have seen so far from carbon dioxide emissions. We are essentially flying blind.
The notion that small-scale “safe” experiments can answer any of the important questions about the magnitude and effects of a deployment is fundamentally naive.
Any meteorologist or oceanographer knows that the massive forces involved in the global climate system – such as the great heat redistributing currents of the ocean and atmosphere, or year-to-year fluctuations in cloud patterns – will swamp the effects of any experiment and provide no indication of the efficacy and the risks of deploying solar geoengineering.
If we are to seriously consider geoengineering, then we need to make sure that the scientific foundations are in place. But for the most part, this is not the kind of research we are getting in the new tsunami of funding. What we are getting instead is funding targeted at developing the engineering technology for deployment, regardless of the consequences of what that deployment may be.
The solar geoengineering techno juggernaut rolls on, with what seems to be a complete disregard for what the damage might be to the planet, and despite several important assessments from leading scientific academies (to which we belong), eg the UK Royal Society, US National Academy, French Academy of Sciences.
Each has highlighted the major uncertainties, core ethics and governance issues, urging great caution. This is particularly true of the £60m geoengineering programme funded by the UK’s Aria agency. Aria’s chief aim is technology development, and indeed many of the geoengineering projects they are funding are being done in collaboration with for-profit companies.
Even more ominous is the explicit entry of venture-capital funded for-profit startups seeking to make money from solar geoengineering deployment in the near future. The Israeli-US startup Stardust has received more than $60m in venture capital, and their business model assumes near-term deployment. And then there’s Reflect Orbital which wants to put giant mirrors in low Earth orbit; they are pitching sales of illumination rather than solar geoengineering, but the technology is identical and we doubt it will be long before they try to get in on the “cooling credits” game.
All of this is happening in the total absence of governance. There are pious calls for governance from some of the pro-geoengineering researchers, but what is the path to get there? Is it governable at all? It is the height of folly to invest in developing the technology – even if we knew what might work – that only serves to enable unrestricted, profit-motivated deployment by outfits such as Stardust.
As private companies whose technology is subject to little regulation, they and their backers have no legal obligations to submit themselves to public scrutiny nor to provide any assurances on ensuing climate impacts. Will these technologies be carried out devoid of any serious scientific understanding of the consequences and of social, legal and political concerns?
All of this is a huge diversion of resources and deflection from the task at hand. As one of us likes to say, when you’re in a climate hole, stop digging … and burning fossil fuels. It really is, at some level, that simple.
Raymond Pierrehumbert is Professor of Planetary Science at the University of Oxford, and was a lead author on the IPCC Third Assessment Report, and the US National Academy’s first assessment report on solar geoengineering. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society
Julia Slingo was formerly Chief Scientist of the UK Met Office, and was awarded the Rossby Medal of the American Meteorological Society among other prestigious awards. She has received nine Honorary Doctorates including from Cambridge University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society and is Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and was a reviewer on the recent Royal Society report on solar geoengineering.
Michael E Mann is the Presidential Distinguished Professor in Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and Director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media there; he is a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences and Foreign Member of the Royal Society
Valerie Masson-Delmotte is Directeur de Recherche at the Climate and Environmental Sciences Laboratory; she has been co-chair of IPCC Working Group 1 during AR6, and co-author of the French Académie des Sciences geoengineering report and a co-author of a peer-review assessment of polar geoengineering options.
This article was amended on 20 June 2026 to correct an editing error. An earlier version incorrectly stated that global cooling can be anything from less than “10C to as much as 30C”. The correct figures were 1 and 3C respectively.
I hear it’s close: two years, five years—maybe next year! And I hear it’s going to change everything: it will cure disease, save the planet, and usher in an age of abundance. It will solve our biggest problems in ways we cannot yet imagine. It will redefine what it means to be human.
Wait—what if that’s all too good to be true? Because I also hear it will bring on the apocalypse and kill us all …
Either way, and whatever your timeline, something big is about to happen.
We could be talking about the Second Coming. Or the day when Heaven’s Gaters imagined they’d be picked up by a UFO and transformed into enlightened aliens. Or the moment when Donald Trump finally decides to deliver the storm that Q promised. But no. We’re of course talking about artificial general intelligence, or AGI—that hypothetical near-future technology that (I hear) will be able to do pretty much whatever a human brain can do.
This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s series “The New Conspiracy Age,” on how the present boom in conspiracy theories is reshaping science and technology.
For many, AGI is more than just a technology. In tech hubs like Silicon Valley, it’s talked about in mystical terms. Ilya Sutskever, cofounder and former chief scientist at OpenAI, is said to have led chants of “Feel the AGI!” at team meetings. And he feels it more than most: In 2024, he left OpenAI, whose stated mission is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity, to cofound Safe Superintelligence, a startup dedicated to figuring out how to avoid a so-called rogue AGI (or control it when it comes). Superintelligence is the hot new flavor—AGI but better!—introduced as talk of AGI becomes commonplace.
Sutskever also exemplifies the mixed-up motivations at play among many self-anointed AGI evangelists. He has spent his career building the foundations for a future technology that he now finds terrifying. “It’s going to be monumental, earth-shattering—there will be a before and an after,” he told me a few months before he quit OpenAI. When I asked him why he had redirected his efforts into reining that technology in, he said: “I’m doing it for my own self-interest. It’s obviously important that any superintelligence anyone builds does not go rogue. Obviously.”
He’s far from alone in his grandiose, even apocalyptic, thinking.
Every age has its believers, people with an unshakeable faith that something huge is about to happen—a before and an after that they are privileged (or doomed) to live through.
For us, that’s the promised advent of AGI. People are used to hearing that this or that is the next big thing, says Shannon Vallor, who studies the ethics of technology at the University of Edinburgh. “It used to be the computer age and then it was the internet age and now it’s the AI age,” she says. “It’s normal to have something presented to you and be told that this thing is the future. What’s different, of course, is that in contrast to computers and the internet, AGI doesn’t exist.”
And that’s why feeling the AGI is not the same as boosting the next big thing. There’s something weirder going on. Here’s what I think: AGI is a lot like a conspiracy theory, and it may be the most consequential one of our time.
I have been reporting on artificial intelligence for more than a decade, and I’ve watched the idea of AGI bubble up from the backwaters to become the dominant narrative shaping an entire industry. A onetime pipe dream now props up the profit lines of some of the world’s most valuable companies and thus, you could argue, the US stock market. It justifies dizzying down payments on the new power plants and data centers that we’re told are needed to make the dream come true. Fixated on this hypothetical technology, AI firms are selling us hard.
Just listen to what the heads of some of those companies are telling us. AGI will be as smart as an entire “country of geniuses” (Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic); it will kick-start “an era of maximum human flourishing, where we travel to the stars and colonize the galaxy” (Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind); it will “massively increase abundance and prosperity,” even encourage people to enjoy life more and have more children (Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI). That’s some product.
Or not. Don’t forget the flip side, of course. When those people are not shilling for utopia, they’re saving us from hell. In 2023, Amodei, Hassabis, and Altman all put their names to a 22-word statement that read: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Elon Musk says AI has a 20% chance of annihilating humans.
“I’ve noticed recently that superintelligence, which I thought was a concept you definitely shouldn’t mention if you want to be taken seriously in public, is being thrown around by tech CEOs who are apparently planning to build it,” says Katja Grace, lead researcher at AI Impacts, an organization that surveys AI researchers about their field. “I think it’s easy to feel like this is fine. They also say it’s going to kill us, but they’re laughing while they say it.”
You have to admit it all sounds a bit tinfoil hat. If you’re building a conspiracy theory, you need a few things in the mix: a scheme that’s flexible enough to sustain belief even when things don’t work out as planned; the promise of a better future that can be realized only if believers uncover hidden truths; and a hope for salvation from the horrors of this world.
AGI just about checks all those boxes. The more you poke at the idea, the more it starts to look like a conspiracy. It’s not, of course—not exactly. And I’m not drawing this parallel to dismiss the very real, often jaw-dropping results achieved by many people in this field, including (or especially) the AGI believers.
But by zooming in on things that AGI has in common with genuine conspiracies, I think we can bring the whole concept into better focus and reveal it for what it is: a techno-utopian (or techno-dystopian—pick your pill) fever dream that got its hooks into some pretty deep-seated beliefs that have made it hard to shake.
This isn’t just a provocative thought experiment. It’s important to question what we’re told about AGI because buying into the idea isn’t harmless. Right now, AGI is the most important narrative in tech—and, to some extent, in the global economy. We can’t make sense of what’s going on in AI without understanding where the idea of AGI came from, why it is so compelling, and how it shapes the way we think about technology overall.
I get it, I get it—calling AGI a conspiracy isn’t a perfect analogy. It will also piss a lot of people off. But come with me down this rabbit hole and let me show you the light.
How Silicon Valley got AGI-pilled
It had a ring to it
A typical conspiracy theory usually starts out on the fringes. Maybe it’s just a couple of people posting on a message board, gathering “evidence.” Maybe it’s a few people out in the desert with binoculars waiting to spot some bright lights in the sky. But some conspiracy theories get lucky, if you will: They start to percolate more widely; they start to become a bit more acceptable; they start to influence people in power. Maybe it’s the UFOs (ahem, sorry, “unidentified aerial phenomena”) that are now formally and openly discussed in government hearings. Maybe it’s vaccine skepticism (yes, a much more dangerous example) that becomes official policy. And it’s impossible to ignore that artificial general intelligence has followed a pretty similar trajectory to its more overtly conspiratorial brethren.
Let’s go back to 2007, when AI wasn’t sexy and it wasn’t cool. Companies like Amazon and Netflix (which was still sending out DVDs in the mail) were using machine-learning models, proto-organisms to today’s LLM behemoths, to recommend movies and books to customers. But that was more or less it.
Ben Goertzel had far bigger plans. About a decade earlier, the AI researcher had set up a dot-com startup called Webmind to train what he thought of as a kind of digital baby brain on the early internet. Childless, Webmind soon went bust.
But Goertzel was an influential figure in a fringe community of researchers who had dreamed for years of building humanlike artificial intelligence, an all-purpose computer program that could do many of the things people can do (and do them better). It was a vision that went far beyond the kind of tech that Netflix was experimenting with.
Goertzel wanted to put out a book promoting that vision, and he needed a name that would set it apart from the humdrum AI of the time. A former Webmind employee named Shane Legg suggested Artificial General Intelligence. It had a ring to it.
A few years later, Legg cofounded DeepMind with Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman. But to most serious researchers at the time, the claim that AI would one day mimic human abilities was a bit of a joke. AGI used to be a dirty word, Sutskever told me. Andrew Ng, founder of Google Brain and former chief scientist at the Chinese tech giant Baidu, told me he thought it was loony.
So what happened? I caught up with Goertzel last month to ask how a fringe idea went from crackpot to commonplace. “I’m sort of a complex chaotic systems guy, so I have a low estimate that I actually know what the nonlinear dynamic in the memosphere really was,” he said. (Translation: It’s complicated.)
Goertzel reckons a few things took the idea mainstream. The first is the Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, an annual meeting of researchers that he helped set up in 2008, the year after his book was published. The conference was often coordinated with top mainstream academic meetups, such as the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference and the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. “If I just published a book with that name AGI, it possibly would have just come and gone,” says Goertzel. “But the conference was circling through every year, with more and more students coming.”
Next is Legg, who took the term with him to DeepMind. “I think they were the first mainstream corporate entity to talk about AGI,” says Goertzel. “It wasn’t the main thing they were harping on, but Shane and Demis would talk about it now and then. That was certainly a source of legitimation.”
When I first talked to Legg about AGI five years ago, he said: “Talking about AGI in the early 2000s put you on the lunatic fringe … Even when we started DeepMind in 2010, we got an astonishing amount of eye-rolling at conferences.” But by 2020 the wind had changed. “Some people are uncomfortable with it, but it’s coming in from the cold,” he told me.
The third thing Goertzel points to is the overlap between early AGI evangelists and Big Tech power brokers. In the years between shutting down Webmind and publishing that AGI book, Goertzel did some work with Peter Thiel at Thiel’s hedge fund Clarium Capital. “We talked a bunch,” says Goertzel. He recalls spending a day with Thiel at the Four Seasons in San Francisco. “I was trying to drum AGI into his head,” says Goertzel. “But then he was also hearing from Eliezer how AGI is going to kill everybody.”
Enter the doomers
That’s Eliezer Yudkowsky, another influential figure who has done at least as much as Goertzel, if not more, to push the idea of AGI. But unlike Goertzel, Yudkowsky thinks there’s a very high chance—99.5% is one number he throws out—that the development of AGI will be a catastrophe.
In 2000, Yudkowsky cofounded a nonprofit research outfit called the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (later renamed the Machine Intelligence Research Institute), which pretty quickly dedicated itself to preventing doomer scenarios. Thiel was an early benefactor.
At first, Yudkowsky’s ideas didn’t get much pickup. Recall that back then the idea of an all-powerful AI—let alone a dangerous one—was pure sci-fi. But in 2014, Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at the University of Oxford, published a book called Superintelligence.
“It put the AGI thing out there,” says Goertzel. “I mean, Bill Gates, Elon Musk—lots of tech-industry AI people—read that book, and whether or not they agreed with his doomer perspective, Nick took Eliezer’s concepts and wrapped them up in a very acceptable way.”
“All of these things gave AGI a stamp of acceptability,” Goertzel adds. “Rather than it being pure crackpot stuff from mavericks howling out in the wilderness.”
Yudkowsky has been banging the same drum for 25 years; many engineers at today’s top AI companies grew up reading and discussing his views online, especially on LessWrong, a popular hub for the tech industry’s fervent community of rationalists and effective altruists.
Today, those views are more popular than ever, capturing the imagination of a younger generation of doomers like David Krueger, a researcher at the University of Montreal who previously served as research director at the UK’s AI Security Institute. “I think we are definitely on track to build superhuman AI systems that will kill everybody,” Krueger tells me. “And I think that’s horrible and we should stop immediately.”
Yudkowsky gets profiled by the likes of the New York Times, which bills him as “Silicon Valley’s version of a doomsday preacher.” His new book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, written with Nate Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, lays out wild claims, with little evidence, that unless we pull the plug on development, near-future AGI will lead to global Armageddon. The pair’s position is extreme: They argue that an international ban should be enforced at all costs, up to and including the point of nuclear retaliation. After all, “datacenters can kill more people than nuclear weapons,” Yudkowsky and Soares write.
This stuff is no longer niche. The book is an NYT bestseller and comes with endorsements from national security experts such as Suzanne Spaulding, a former US Department of Homeland Security official, and Fiona Hill, former senior director of the White House National Security Council, who now advises the UK government; celebrity scientists such as Max Tegmark and George Church; and other household names, including Stephen Fry, Mark Ruffalo, and Grimes. Yudkowsky now has a megaphone.
Still, it is those early quiet words in certain ears that may prove most consequential. Yudkowsky is credited with introducing Thiel to DeepMind’s founders, after which Thiel became one of the first big investors in the company. Having merged with Google, it is now the in-house AI lab for the tech colossus Alphabet.
Alongside Musk, Thiel was also instrumental in setting up OpenAI in 2015, sinking millions into a startup founded on the singular ambition to build AGI—and make it safe. In 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X: “eliezer has IMO done more to accelerate AGI than anyone else. certainly he got many of us interested in AGI.” Yudkowsky might one day deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for that, Altman added. But by this point, Thiel had apparently grown wary of the “AI safety people” and the power they were gaining. “You don’t understand how Eliezer has programmed half the people in your company to believe in that stuff,” he is reported to have told Altman at a dinner party in late 2023. “You need to take this more seriously.” Altman “tried not to roll his eyes,” according to Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey.
OpenAI is now the most valuable private company in the world, worth half a trillion dollars.
And the transformation is complete: Like all the most powerful conspiracies, AGI has slipped into the mainstream and taken hold.
The great AGI conspiracy
The term “AGI” may have been popularized less than 20 years ago, but the mythmaking behind it has been there since the start of the computer age—a cosmic microwave background of chutzpah and marketing.
Alan Turing asked if machines could think only five years after the first electronic computer, ENIAC, was built in 1945. And here’s Turing a little later, in a 1951 radio broadcast: “It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. There would be no question of the machines dying, and they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control.”
Then, in 1955, the computer scientist John McCarthy and his colleagues applied for US government funding to create what they fatefully chose to call “artificial intelligence”—a canny spin, given that computers at the time were the size of a room and as dumb as a thermostat. Even so, as McCarthy wrote in that funding application: “An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves.”
It’s this myth that’s the root of the AGI conspiracy. A smarter-than-human machine that can do it all is not a technology. It’s a dream, unmoored from reality. Once you see that, other parallels with conspiracy thinking start to leap out.
It’s impossible to debunk a shape-shifting idea like AGI.
Talking about AGI can sometimes feel like arguing with an enthusiastic Redditor about what drugs (or particles in the sky) are controlling your mind. Each point has a counterpoint that tries to chip away at your own sense of what’s true. Ultimately, it’s a clash of worldviews, not an exchange of evidence-based reason. AGI is like that, too—it’s slippery.
Part of the issue is that despite all the money, all the talk, nobody knows how to build it. More than that: Most people don’t even agree on what AGI really is—which helps explain how people can get away with telling us it can both save the world and end it. At the core of most definitions you’ll find the idea of a machine that can match humans on a wide range of cognitive tasks. (And remember, superintelligence is AGI’s shiny new upgrade: a machine that can outmatch us.) But even that’s easy to pull apart: What humans are we talking about? What kind of cognitive task? And how wide a range?
“There’s no real definition of it,” says Christopher Symons, chief artificial intelligence scientist at the AI health-care startup Lirio and former head of the computer science and math division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “If you say ‘human-level intelligence,’ that could be an infinite number of things—everybody’s level of intelligence is slightly different.”
And so, says Symons, we’re in this weird race to build … what, exactly? “What are you trying to get it to do?”
In 2023, a team of researchers at Google DeepMind, including Legg, had a go at categorizing various definitions that people had proposed for AGI. Some said that a machine had to be able to learn; some said that it had to be able to make money; some said that it had to have a body and move about in the world (and maybe make coffee).
Legg told me that when he’d suggested the term to Goertzel for the title of his book, the hand-waviness had been kind of the point. “I didn’t have an especially clear definition. I didn’t really feel it was necessary,” he said at the time. “I was actually thinking of it more as a field of study, rather than an artifact.”
So, I guess we’ll know it when we see it? The problem is that some people think they’ve seen it already.
In 2023, a team of Microsoft researchers put out a paper in which they described their experiences playing around with a prerelease version of OpenAI’s large language model GPT-4. They called it “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence”—and it polarized the industry.
It was a moment when a lot of researchers were blown away and trying to come to terms with what they were seeing. “Shit was working better than they had expected it to,” says Goertzel. “The concept of AGI genuinely started to seem more plausible.”
And yet for all of LLMs’ remarkable wordplay, Goertzel doesn’t think that they do in fact contain sparks of AGI. “It’s a little surprising to me that some people with a deep technical understanding of how these tools work under the hood still think that they could become human-level AGI,” he says. “On the other hand, you can’t prove it’s not true.”
And there it is: You can’t prove it’s not true. “The idea that AGI is coming and that it’s right around the corner and that it’s inevitable has licensed a great many departures from reality,” says the University of Edinburgh’s Vallor. “But we really don’t have any evidence for it.”
Conspiracy thinking looms again. Predictions about when AGI will arrive are made with the precision of numerologists counting down to the end of days. With no real stakes in the game, deadlines come and go with a shrug. Excuses are made and timelines are adjusted yet again.
We saw this when OpenAI released the much-hyped GPT-5 this summer. AI stans were disappointed that the new version of the company’s flagship technology wasn’t the step change they expected. But instead of seeing that as evidence that AGI wasn’t attainable—or attainable with an LLM, at least—believers pushed out their predictions for how soon AGI would come. It was coming—just, you know, next time.
Maybe they’re right. Or maybe people will pick whatever evidence they can to defend an idea and overlook evidence that counts against it. Jeremy Cohen, who studies conspiracy thinking in technology circles at McMaster University in Canada, calls this imperfect evidence gathering—a hallmark of conspiracy thinking.
Cohen started his research career in the Arizona desert, studying a community called People Unlimited that believed its members were immortal. The conviction was impervious to contrary evidence. When its members died of natural causes (including two of its founders), the thinking was that they must have deserved it. “The general consensus was that every death was a suicide,” says Cohen. “If you are immortal and you get cancer and you die—well, you must have done something wrong.”
Cohen has since been focused on transhumanism (the idea that technology can help humans push past their natural limitations) and AGI. “I am seeing a lot of parallels. There are forms of magical thinking that I think are a part of the popular imagination around AGI,” he says. “It connects really well to the kinds of religious imaginaries that you see in conspiracy thinking today.”
The believers are in on the AGI secret.
Maybe some of you think I’m an idiot: You don’t get it at all lol. But that’s kind of my point. There are insiders and outsiders. When I talk to researchers or engineers who are happy to drop AGI into the conversation as a given, it’s like they know something I don’t. But nobody’s ever been able to tell me what that something is.
The truth is out there, if you know where to look. Conspiracy theories are primarily concerned about revealing a hidden truth, Cohen tells me: “It’s a really fundamental part of conspiracy thinking, and that’s absolutely something that you see in the way people talk about AGI,” he says.
Last year, a 23-year-old former OpenAI staffer turned investor, Leopold Aschenbrenner, published a much-dissected 165-page manifesto titled “Situational Awareness.” You don’t need to read it to get the idea: You either see the truth of what’s coming or you don’t. And you don’t need cold, hard facts, either—it’s enough to feel it. Those who don’t just haven’t seen the light.
This idea stalked the periphery of my conversation with Goertzel, too. When I pushed him on why people are skeptical of AGI, for instance, he said: “Before every major technical achievement, from human flight to electrical power, loads of wise pundits would tell you why it was never going to happen. The fact is, most people only believe what they see in front of their faces.”
That makes AGI sound like an article of faith. I put that to Krueger, who believes AGI’s arrival is maybe five years out. He scoffed: “I think that’s completely backwards.” For him, the article of faith is the idea that it won’t happen—it’s the skeptics who continue to deny the obvious. (Even so, he hedges: No one knows for sure, he says, but there’s no obvious reason that AGI won’t come.)
Hidden truths bring truth seekers, bent on revealing what they’ve been able to see all along. With AGI, though, it’s not enough to uncover something hidden. Here, revelation requires an unprecedented act of creation. If you believe AGI is achievable, then you believe that those making it are midwives to machines that will match or surpass human intelligence. “The idea of giving birth to machine gods is obviously very flattering to the ego,” says Vallor. “It’s an incredibly seductive thing to think that you yourself are laying the early foundations for that transcendence.”
It’s yet another overlap with conspiracy thinking. Part of the draw is the desire for a sense of purpose in an otherwise messy world that can feel meaningless—the longing to be a person of consequence.
Krueger, who is based in Berkeley, says he knows people working on AI who see the technology as our natural successor. “They view it as akin to having children or something,” he says. “Side note: they usually don’t have children.”
AGI will be our one true savior (or it’ll bring the apocalypse).
Cohen sees parallels between many modern conspiracy theories and the New Age movement, which reached its peak of influence in the 1970s and ’80s. Adherents believed humanity was on the cusp of unlocking an era of spiritual well-being and expanded consciousness that would usher in a more peaceful and prosperous world. In a nutshell, the idea was that by engaging in a set of pseudo-religious practices, including astrology and the careful curation of crystals, humans would transcend their limitations and enter a kind of hippie utopia.
Today’s tech industry is built on compute, not crystals, but its sense of what’s at stake is no less transcendent: “You know, this idea that there is going to be this fundamental shift, there’s going to be this millenarian turn where we end up in a techno-utopian future,” says Cohen. “And the idea that AGI is going to ultimately allow humanity to overcome the problems that face us.”
In many people’s telling, AGI will arrive all at once. Incremental advances in AI will stack up until, one day, AI will be good enough to start making better AI by itself. At which point—FOOM—it will advance so rapidly that AGI will arrive in what’s often called an intelligence explosion, leading to a point of no return known as the Singularity, a goofy term that’s been popular in AGI circles for years. Co-opting a concept from physics, the science fiction author Vernor Vinge first introduced the idea of a technological singularity in the 1980s. Vinge imagined an event horizon on the path of technological progress beyond which humans would be fast outstripped by the exponential self-improvement of the machines they had created.
Call it the AI Big Bang—which, again, gives us a before and an after, a transcendent moment when humanity as we know it changes forever (for good or bad). “People imagine it as an event,” says Grace from AI Impacts.
For Vallor, this belief system is notable for the way that a faith in technology has replaced a faith in humans. Despite the woo-woo, New Age thinking was at least motivated by the idea that people had what it took to change the world by themselves, if they could only tap into it. With the pursuit of AGI, we’ve left that self-belief behind and bought into the idea that only technology can save us, she says.
That’s a compelling—even comforting—thought for many people. “We’re in an era where other paths to material improvement of human lives and our societies seem to have been exhausted,” Vallor says.
Technology once promised a route to a better future: Progress was a ladder that we would climb toward human and social flourishing. “We’ve passed the peak of that,” says Vallor. “I think the one thing that gives many people hope and a return to that kind of optimism about the future is AGI.”
Push this idea to its conclusion and, again, AGI becomes a kind of god—one that can offer relief from earthly suffering, says Vallor.
Kelly Joyce, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina who studies how cultural, political, and economic beliefs shape the way we think about and use technology, sees all these wild predictions about AGI as something more banal: part of a long-term pattern of overpromising from the tech industry. “What’s interesting to me is that we get sucked in every time,” she says. “There is a deep belief that technology is better than human beings.”
Joyce thinks that’s why, when the hype kicks in, people are predisposed to believe it. “It’s a religion,” she says. “We believe in technology. Technology is God. It’s really hard to push back against it. People don’t want to hear it.”
How AGI hijacked an industry
The fantasy of computers that can do almost anything a person can is seductive. But like many pervasive conspiracy theories, it has very real consequences. It has distorted the way we think about the stakes behind the current technology boom (and potential bust). It may have even derailed the industry, sucking resources away from more immediate, more practical application of the technology. More than anything else, it gives us a free pass to be lazy. It fools us into thinking we might be able to avoid the actual hard work needed to solve intractable, world-spanning problems—problems that will require international cooperation and compromise and expensive aid. Why bother with that when we’ll soon have machines to figure it all out for us?
Consider the resources being sunk into this grand project. Just last month, OpenAI and Nvidia announced an up-to-$100 billion partnership that would see the chip giant supply at least 10 gigawatts of ChatGPT’s insatiable demand. That’s higher than nuclear power plant numbers. A bolt of lightning might release that much energy. The flux capacitor inside Dr. Emmett Brown’s DeLorean time machine only required 1.2 gigawatts to send Marty back to the future. And then, only two weeks later, OpenAI announced a second partnership with chipmaker AMD for another six gigawatts of power.
Promoting the Nvidia deal on CNBC, Altman, straight-faced, claimed that without this kind of data center buildout, people would have to choose between a cure for cancer and free education. “No one wants to make that choice,” he said. (Just a few weeks later, he announced that erotic chats would be coming to ChatGPT.)
Add to those costs the loss of investment in more immediate technology that could change lives today and tomorrow and the next day. “To me it’s a huge missed opportunity to put all these resources into solving something nebulous when we already know there’s real problems that we could solve,” says Lirio’s Symons.
But that’s not how the likes of OpenAI needs to operate. “With people throwing so much money at these companies, they don’t have to do that,” Symons says. “If you’ve got hundreds of billions of dollars, you don’t have to focus on a practical, solvable project.”
Despite his steadfast belief that AGI is coming, Krueger also thinks the industry’s single-minded pursuit of it means that potential solutions to real problems, such as better health care, are being ignored. “People have a long list of complaints about both the concept of AGI and the idea that it should be a goal,” he says. “I think it’s pretty unpopular in the field.”
And there are consequences for the way governments support and regulate technology (or don’t). Tina Law, who studies technology policy at the University of California–Davis, worries that policymakers are getting lobbied about the ways AI will one day kill us all, instead of addressing real concerns about the ways AI could impact people’s lives in immediate and material ways today. Inequality has been sidetracked by existential risk.
“Hype is a lucrative strategy for tech firms,” says Law. A big part of that hype is the idea that what’s happening is inevitable: If we don’t build it, someone else will. “When something is framed as inevitable,” Law says, “people doubt not only whether they should resist but also whether they have the capacity to do so.” Everyone gets locked in.
The AGI distortion field isn’t limited to tech policy, says Milton Mueller at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who works on technology policy and regulation. The race to AGI gets compared to the race to the atomic bomb, he says. “So whoever gets it first is going to have ultimate power over everybody else. That’s a crazy and dangerous idea that really will distort our approach to foreign policy.”
There’s a business incentive for companies (and governments) to push the myth of AGI, says Mueller, because they can then claim that they will be the first to get there. But because they’re running a race in which nobody has agreed on the finish line, the myth can be spun as long as it’s useful. Or as long as investors are willing to buy into it.
It’s not hard to see how this plays out. It’s not utopia or hell—it’s OpenAI and its peers making a whole lot more money.
The great AGI conspiracy, concluded
And maybe that brings us back to the whole conspiracy thing—and a late-game twist in this tale. So far we’ve ignored one popular feature of conspiracy thinking: that there’s a group of powerful figures pulling the levers behind the scenes and that, by seeking the truth, believers can expose this elite cabal.
Sure, the people feeling the AGI aren’t publicly accusing any Illuminati or WEF-like force of preventing the AGI future or withholding its secrets.
But what if there are, in fact, shadowy puppet masters here—and they’re the very people who have pushed the AGI conspiracy hardest all along? The kings of Silicon Valley are throwing everything they can get at building AGI for profit. The myth of AGI serves their interests more than anybody else’s.
As one senior executive at an AI company said to us recently, AGI always needs to be six months to a year away, because if it’s any further than that, you won’t be able to recruit people from Jane Street, and if it’s closer to already here, then what’s the point?
Or as Vallor puts it: “If OpenAI says they’re building a machine that’s going to make corporations even more powerful than they are today, that isn’t going to get the kind of public buy-in that they need.”
Remember: You create a god and you become like one yourself. Krueger says there’s a line of thinking running through Silicon Valley in which building AI is a way to seize huge amounts of power. (It’s one of the premises of Aschenbrenner’s “Situational Awareness,” for example.) “You know, we’re going to have this godlike power and we’re going to have to figure out what to do with it,” says Krueger. “A lot of people think if they get there first, they can basically take over the world.”
“They’re putting so much effort into selling their vision of a future with AGI in it, and they’re having a pretty good amount of success because they have so much power,” he adds.
Goertzel, for one, is almost lamenting how successful the maybe-cabal has been. He’s actually starting to miss life on the fringes. “In my generation, you had to have a lot of vision to want to work on AGI, and you had to be very stubborn,” he says. “Now it’s almost, like, what your grandma tells you to do to get a job instead of being a business major.”
“It’s disorienting that this stuff is so broadly accepted,” he says. “It almost gives me the desire to go work on something else that not so many people are doing.” He’s half joking (I think): “Obviously, putting the finishing touches to AGI is more important than gratifying my preference to be out on the frontier.”
But I’m no clearer on what exactly they’re putting the finishing touches on. What does it mean for technology in general if we fall so hard for the fairy tales? In a lot of ways, I think the whole idea of AGI is built on a warped view of what we should expect technology to do, and even what intelligence is in the first place. Stripped back to its essentials, the argument for AGI rests on the premise that one technology, AI, has gotten very good, very fast, and will continue to get better. But set aside the technical objections—what if it doesn’t continue to get better?—and you’re left with the claim that intelligence is a commodity you can get more of if you have the right data or compute or neural network. And it’s not.
Intelligence doesn’t come as a quantity you can just ratchet up and up. Smart people may be brilliant in one area and not in others. Some Nobel Prize winners are really bad at playing the piano or caring for their kids. Some very smart people insist that AGI is coming next year.
It’s hard not to wonder what will get its hooks into us next.
Before we ended our call, Goertzel told me about an event he’d just been to in San Francisco on AI consciousness and parapsychology: “ESP, precognition, and whatnot.”
“That’s where AGI was 20 years ago,” he said. “Everyone thinks it’s batshit crazy.”
Correction: This story has been updated to better reflect David Krueger’s views.
Stephanie Arnett/MIT Technology Review | Adobe Stock
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Uma (in)certa antropologia 
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