Harry Frankfurt wrote a wonderful essay called On Bullshit. His central move is a distinction most people miss: the difference between a liar and a bullshitter.
The liar cares about the truth. He has to. Truth is what a liar wants to conceal, and you cannot conceal what you have not first located. Lying is a truth-tracking activity performed in reverse.
The bullshitter doesn’t care about the truth at all. Not for it, not against it. Truth is simply not a variable in his function. His goal is to persuade, to impress, to manage how he is perceived. Whether the words happen to be true is incidental.
That’s an LLM model.
Month: September 2026
View from the inside
Mr. Walczak is quick to clarify something at this point in conversations about the missing film. He does not believe the pictures will reveal some hidden explanation for the events of that day. He is not a conspiracy theorist.
He is something different — a Sept. 11 completist. The two can look very similar from a distance, people foraging for things that will supposedly show what really happened on that day. But Mr. Walczak has a track record of actually finding them.
On an episode of a 2021 podcast he created, “Missing on 9/11,” he rattled off a list of photos that he has verified were taken on various floors of the towers: “One picture from the 48th, three from the 35th, one from the 51st, five from the 74th, two from the 61st.”
And in his sprawling, labyrinthine quest for those photographs, he would come to know a community of sleuths intent on finding and preserving unseen footage from that singular day. They huddle in Reddit threads, inspecting images and triangulating the exact positions of the photographers.
“People just assume everything’s been published,” Mr. Walczak said. “Not only is that not true, there’s a lot of fascinating footage that hasn’t been published.”
It is like they are working together on a puzzle that, 25 years later, still seems not quite complete. And new pieces keep emerging.
He’s Seen Images of 9/11 From Just About Every Angle. Except This One. – The New York Times
Why there will be a new moment of silence at this year’s Ground Zero ceremony
“As the years pass and the human toll grows, we reckon with the cost of September 11th whenever another New Yorker is stolen from us too soon,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said this week. “Now, close to 25 years later, more people have died from 9/11-related illnesses than were killed on the day itself.”
New York City released more than 170,000 pages of previously undisclosed records Tuesday, showing city officials at the time misled the public about air quality around Ground Zero. The release not only underscores how dangerous the conditions were, but it is also an important moment for responders and survivors who have long fought for help and recognition.
The World Trade Center Health Program, established in 2011 after years of advocacy for compensation for survivors, provides medical monitoring for first responders and survivors, and free treatment for 9/11-related conditions. More than 57,000 responders and survivors enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program have been diagnosed with cancer.
As of March 2024, nearly 7,000 people enrolled in the program have died.
Why there will be a new moment of silence at this year’s Ground Zero ceremony | CNN
Pokemon As Currency?
You may have so far ignored cards as a collectibles craze that will turn out to be a house of cards. But Levin continues to be enthusiastic about them, both from collectors’ and investors’ perspectives. After all, even The Wall Street Journal touted Pokémon cards as a “hot investment with a 3,000 percent return” a year ago, as their value gains beat the benchmark S&P 500 stock index. And a Cyberpunk trading card game, based on the popular video game of the same name, earlier this year set a Kickstarter record by raising $28 million, becoming the most-funded game and the No. 4 most successful campaign ever on the crowdfunding platform. Some analysts have estimated that the trading card market is worth $50 billion annually – with further growth ahead.
Trading Cards Growth, Pokémon Apocalypse: A Chat With Peter Levin
Love
Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. You had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from your branches you found that you were one tree and not two.
– Louis de Bernières, Corelli’s Mandolin
It’s looking true…
Dan Ariely, professor of business administration in the Fuqua School of Business, is once again under scrutiny after an article released Monday found evidence that he likely tampered with or fabricated data in an influential 2002 research paper on procrastination.
The findings — published in Data Colada, a blog run by three esteemed behavioral science professors that investigates and replicates academic research — identified four key “red flags” in the study’s data, which suggested the results were not possible without interference.
“We are unable to generate a benign explanation for all of the anomalies presented here,” the professors wrote. “Based on this evidence, we believe the data for Study 2 of Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) were severely tampered with or fabricated to produce the desired results.”
‘Insane data’: Duke professor Dan Ariely accused of additional research fraud – The Duke Chronicle
Now to find Biggie’s
Throughout the trial, Sanft poked holes in prosecutors’ narrative. He said investigators did not back up the claims made by his client, and he repeatedly pointed out a lack of physical evidence, such as phone records, that showed Davis was the shot caller.
“They have nothing in this case that says that man was here in Las Vegas on Sept. 7, 1996,” Sanft said during his closing argument.
In a rebuttal argument, prosecutor Marc DiGiacomo pointed to a scrapbook Davis kept containing articles about Shakur.
“This guy’s scrapbooking his murder, for God’s sake,” DiGiacomo told jurors.
Man convicted of first-degree murder for the killing of Tupac Shakur : NPR
It’s about ethics
When people have strong moral identities, they view unethical behavior as a violation — not just of the rules but also of their own values. They anticipate more guilt at the thought of wrongdoing and more pride at the prospect of doing the right thing. They believe their choices reflect their character. It’s powerful. And the best way to instill it is to get students to consistently think about the ethical consequences of their actions. The younger they start, the better.
Opinion | There’s Really Only One Way to Stop Students From Cheating – The New York Times
We are Borg…
As detailed in a new paper in the journal AI & Society, designed to build out a new framework and start a discussion, an international team of researchers suggested that the use of AI chatbots, specifically in customer service settings, could be making humans act more robotic even as bots become more like us.
“As generative systems and socially responsive service agents enter everyday consumption, human-AI interaction increasingly resembles a quasi-social encounter rather than a utilitarian interface,” they wrote.
The researchers introduced a new concept called “robotoid humanness” to put a name to the “emergent drift in which consumers come to experience themselves as most fluent, correct, or socially viable when they become compatible with machine legibility, machine pacing, and machine logic.”
Alarming Study Suggests That Using AI Is Turning Humans More Robotic