“Wars often begin with optimistic assumptions about timelines and outcomes. History repeatedly shows that those assumptions are frequently wrong.”
Tag: politics
Ask A Genius 1634: Ukraine Air Raid Reality and U.S.–Iran Conflict
“On my first day in Kyiv I heard a Shahed drone hovering above us—the closest comparison for a North American mind would be a lawnmower in the sky. They are not quiet; they are very loud.” — Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Ask A Genius 1633: Iran Regime Stability, COVID Trends, and Kyiv Under Air Raid
“External military pressure does not reliably produce stable democratic outcomes.”
Ask A Genius 1631: Kyiv Normalcy Under Fire: Risk, Reform, Exercise Micro-Dosing, and Sex Education
“My principles are universalist. I am pro–human rights.”
Ask A Genius 1622: Welcome to the Trump Show, Institutional Erosion, and the Overton Window
“The Overton window defines the range of ideas considered acceptable in public debate… Political actors on the far right actively work to shift that window.”
Ask A Genius 1621: Super Bowl Spectacle, Vaccine Backlash, and U.S. Credibility
“Confidence matters. When trust in U.S. governance declines, international investors become more cautious.”
Ask A Genius 1620: Geometry, Association Engines, and the Crackpot Index
“If you want to feel like you are a genius—misunderstood, unappreciated by the world—there is a lot of support for that. There is a whole misinformation industry, a delusion industry.”
Ask A Genius 1616: Bouncing, Barroom Safety, and Preventing Predation in America’s Largest Beer Gardens
“Out of the roughly 12,000 underage people I removed, simple math suggests I may have prevented several dozen sexual assaults.”
Ask A Genius 1614: Enshittification, Tech Decline, and Power
“Technology keeps getting more powerful, but our experience of it gets worse—because the business and cultural layer is about extraction, not improvement.”
Ask A Genius 1612: From a 1920s Report Card to Authoritarian Alarm: Found History, Memory, and Power in America
“People tuck things into books—and sometimes they tuck entire histories inside them.”
Rick Rosner 