HeyJaredMatt Shapiro's Marginally Compelling
An honest attempt to parse data, wrestle with uncertainty, and suss out events in real time. Also cartoons. polimath.substack.com
- Indexed pieces, last 90 days
- 5
- Latest publication
- Sep 2, 2026
- Audience
- By platform
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 20, 2026
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They share a verified publisher identifier or are linked from the publication’s official site. People stay separate from their publications.
Latest pieces
The American Worker vs the Most Qualified Person (opens the original)
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This story started with a rage-bait comment from British tech entrepreneur Paul Graham:I believe the most qualified person should get the job.There are many ways to approach this statement, which lives passive-aggressively inside the context of tech hiring and immigration. American tech titan Palmer Luckey grabbed hold of this thread and spent the next few days throttling the life out of it. Graham took the position that if Luckey hires even one foreign employee, this
AI’s Culpability Crisis (opens the original)
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For more on AI and legal responsibility check out my essay “Stone the Algorithms”, published in my book A Misfit Highwire Act.It is long past time that we started talking seriously about artificial intelligence, sin, guilt, and punishment. This realization came to me as I read about how an OpenAI model escaped its sandbox (a digital environment designed to keep a process or program isolated from interacting with other machines or programs) and ran a sophisticated cyber attack on HuggingFace, a p
Data Centers Are A Culture War (opens the original)
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I moved from Seattle to Chattanooga in 2021. My house in Seattle was less than a mile from Microsoft campus. Whenever I went to an after-hours tech get-together or happy hour, everyone who attended worked at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, or some other massive tech company. Everyone around me was making tech wages and on the cutting edge of their field. I really enjoyed living there. The people felt like my people, we were all tech savvy, tech optimists, eager for work and building the lat
An Odyssey with Dr Richard Whitaker (opens the original)
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Following the last podcast / interview with Jireh Gardo about the pitfalls of Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself in correspondence with the Dr Richard Whitaker, the author of Homer’s Odyssey Three Ways: Recent Translations by Verity, Wilson, and Green. This was the paper that provided the foundation of the core criticisms of Wilson’s translation. In our conversation, it felt like there was more to say about t
Fixing What Woke Broke (opens the original)
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There was a recent minor fracas on twitter (where all the important fracases are held) in which Kat Rosenfield noted that, during the height of the woke era (circa 2020), an Oscar winning writer wrote in favor of banning Gone With The Wind. One journalist responded with the functional equivalent of “why are you so obsessed with this ancient sin”, which is not a very good way to get people to stop talking about something.I love it when two topics that I care about collide. In case, the two topics
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