All posts tagged: Meaningless

Stop creating meaningless work. Start having hard conversations.

Stop creating meaningless work. Start having hard conversations.

Published by Jenni Sidey

4:47 p.m. Slack notification. “ Hey, the client wants to see the deck reformatted first thing tomorrow morning. Can you turn this around before you log off?“ You had dinner plans that you’ll now have to skip, but that’s not really the problem. You agreed to work hard when you took this job. You’ve pulled late nights before, and you’ll do it again. The problem is that you know — and your project lead knows — the client doesn’t actually need this. It’s cosmetic: a different color scheme, bullet points instead of paragraphs. Your lead just won’t have the hard conversation to say, “This can wait until Monday.” So they’re passing their unwillingness to have a hard conversation down to you. You’ll do it. But something shifts. The work you loved yesterday suddenly feels hollow — not because it got harder, but because it became meaningless. Sound familiar? The pattern This is the destruction of meaning in real time. It’s everywhere, and it sucks: The return-to-office (RTO) policy that lands via company-wide email with no …

AI and the Meaningless Gap

AI and the Meaningless Gap

Published by Jenni Sidey

Let’s start here: We’ve spent years measuring the distance between human and artificial intelligence without asking whether the two occupy the same space at all. We are obsessed with the gap, both technologically and philosophically. How far ahead is AI? How fast is it moving? When does artificial general intelligence arrive? OK, these feel like reasonable questions, until you examine the assumption buried inside them: that human intelligence and artificial intelligence exist on the same continuum, separated by some place along a line and not by something more fundamental and different. The gap is real. I’ve written about it, felt it, watched others wallow in it. That deflation when AI produces in seconds what took you hours. But somewhere in our fixation on the size of the gap, we stopped asking whether it was even the right thing to measure. A Different Kind of Different I’ve argued that AI represents what I call anti-intelligence—not a faster or more capable version of human cognition, but something on a perpendicular axis entirely. It doesn’t think the way …

AI benchmark numbers are meaningless — here’s what to look for instead

AI benchmark numbers are meaningless — here’s what to look for instead

Published by skeptic

Every time a new AI model launches, the cacophony of AI benchmarking sites whirs into life and bombards us with colorful charts, imperceptible and marginal improvements to uncontextualized numbers that really mean nothing to most people. Most of the time, if you’re not an AI researcher, most of these figures and charts mean nothing. I mean, sure, “numbers go up = AI gets better” is a basic level of understanding, but those numbers often don’t reveal the information pertinent to how most folks use AI. In that, the problem isn’t that benchmarks are useless. It’s that they’re catering to the wrong audience, functioning more like marketing than explaining clearly what’s new, what works, and how it’ll save you time. Why AI companies love benchmark charts And why that’s what causes all the problems The reasoning behind AI benchmarking, like all benchmarking tests, is sound. They help to simplify complex systems into easy-to-understand numbers. Instead of describing subtle improvements in reasoning or language understanding, companies can point to a chart and say their model scored 92% …

People with “dark” personality traits see the world as fundamentally meaningless

People with “dark” personality traits see the world as fundamentally meaningless

Published by José Betancourt

A set of four studies of German-speaking adults found that individuals with a more pronounced Dark Core of personality tended to hold more pessimistic worldviews. In other words, these individuals tended to view the world as less pleasurable, less stable, less regenerative, and less meaningful. The paper was published in the Journal of Personality. The Dark Core of personality is a general underlying tendency that unites various socially aversive personality traits. It was proposed to explain why traits such as narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, everyday sadism, and spitefulness tend to correlate with one another. The concept suggests that these traits share a common dispositional core rather than being entirely separate characteristics. This core has been described as a general tendency to maximize one’s own benefit while disregarding or accepting harm to others. Individuals high on the Dark Core are more likely to justify unethical behavior if it serves their interests. The concept builds on earlier ideas like the “Dark Triad,” which focused on three related traits, by suggesting an even broader common factor. As such, the …

How Did Meaning Emerge in a Meaningless Universe?

How Did Meaning Emerge in a Meaningless Universe?

Published by Jenni Sidey

This post is Part 1 of a series. In an earlier post, I explored how meaning might arise in a physical, meaningless universe—drawing in part on physicist Carlo Rovelli’s relational account, which treats meaning as emerging when physical correlations acquire evolutionary significance.[1] But that post left largely unexplored how this actually happens in brains. How do electrical signals come to be about something? How does significance arise from circuitry? This four-part series explores how the brain generates meaning, tracing how meaning emerges in living systems—from biological value and goal-directedness (Part 1), through the neural representations that guide action (Part 2), to shared symbols grounded in social cognition (Part 3), and finally to the cultural institutions and personal narratives that give meaning its richest human forms (Part 4). The Gap Between Pattern and Purpose Physical systems exhibit patterns—molecular arrangements, light wavelengths, temperature distributions, etc.—that we can describe in informational terms. Claude Shannon’s information theory, developed in the 1940s for telecommunications, formalizes informational description by treating unpredictability as the measure of a signal. Predictable patterns (like “AAAAA”) …

Is Life Meaningless? Existentialism in the Bible’s ‘Ecclesiastes’

Is Life Meaningless? Existentialism in the Bible’s ‘Ecclesiastes’

Published by skeptic

Published: Nov 10, 2025written by Mirjana Jojić, BA Literature and Theory of Literature, in-progress   The idea that everything is vanity and that we come from dust and return to it raises a fundamental question about the purpose of life. If we accept that our existence is ultimately meaningless, then what is the point of existence? Is there a larger purpose to our lives that we are meant to discover, or do we simply exist for the sake of existing? However, by examining our beliefs and values, we can begin to explore the meaning of life and what it means to live a fulfilling existence.   The Book of Ecclesiastes: Genre, Date, and Mysterious Author Statue of King Solomon, by Juan Bautista Monegro, the facade of the basilica of the monastery San Lorenzo of El Escorial, Spain, ca. 1581-1583. Source: Public Domain   Since the earliest times, man has been faced with thoughts about life and how it should be treated. Hence, wisdom literature, which deals with these issues and is primarily didactic, appeared in many ancient …