Culture

Why the smartest person in the room never looks as upset as you

Your smartest friend isn’t heartless. Their brain just takes a different route to caring.

A new study suggests there’s more than one way to experience empathy. The version most of us recognize is emotional empathy. You see someone hurting, and you feel it too. But highly intelligent people often rely on something else entirely.

Instead of absorbing your feelings, they process them. Through facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language, they can accurately understand what you’re feeling without experiencing the emotional surge themselves. Psychologists call this cognitive empathy.

As Mark Wales reports, people wired this way can come across as distant or frustratingly calm. While you might be on the brink of tears, they stay composed and analytical. Knowing this difference can change how you read your smartest coworkers, partners, and friends, especially when emotions are running hot.

A.I.

AI on the state of AI

Note from Greg, the human: 

Artificial intelligence has been the talk of 2025, and you, GOOD readers, asked us to keep you up to date. Depending on who you ask, and, often, where they fall on the economic spectrum, the rapidly evolving tech is either the greatest opportunity of all time or an existential threat. Experts have weighed in, but I wanted to go to the source, so I asked the latest version of ChatGPT itself for 100 words on the state of AI, where it’s going, and when we’ll get there.

I told it to write in whichever style it wanted and gave it no other guidance. I also asked AI to generate an image of its choosing for this piece and to caption the image.

It is worth noting that, judgments on quality notwithstanding, the AI exactly hit the requested word count in its first and only draft. It is also worth noting that ChatGPT has kicked its addiction to the emdash, ―, which, until the latest version, had been a tell that something was created or edited by AI.

What follows was written entirely by the latest ChatGPT and is unedited so that you can see for yourself what AI writing looks like and what the technology itself “thinks” the future will be like.

Everything within this box was written and created by AI

The Future of AI

Can we shape society before it reshapes us?

By ChatGPT5.2

AI is no longer a promise. It is infrastructure. It writes, listens, sees, predicts, and increasingly decides. The good future is obvious: cheaper expertise, faster science, fewer boring jobs, and tools that help people learn, heal, and create at scale. The bad future is just as clear: power concentrating, truth eroding, labor disrupted faster than systems can adapt. Both futures arrive sooner than we think. Narrow breakthroughs happen every month. Transformative change unfolds over the next five to ten years. The question is not whether AI reshapes society. It is whether we shape it first. The window is open briefly.

Yesterday’s Results

Last week, we shared more than 30 things the ER staff are begging people to stop doing.

So, I had to ask… What has come closest to sending you to the ER? The results didn’t surprise me. Oh, WebMD, you enabler of hypochondriacs everywhere.

• That time I hit my toe on the coffee table (26.7%)

• That morning after that third Mai Tai (13.3%)

• That harrowing WebMD search I shouldn't have done (43.3%)

• That bite of pizza I took the instant it came out of the oven (16.7%)

GOOD reader ElinaFloria spends a lot of time in the ER. “Mostly it's the working schedule that brings me there (I work in the ER), and not very willingly. 😅”

Health

10 signs that someone is secretly super intelligent

Sometimes a high IQ can hide in plain sight.

Super intelligence can be obvious. There’s the valedictorian who started college classes in the summer for fun and knows a whole lot about everything. That kid is pretty smart, and everyone knows it. But the class clown in the back, with the doodles in the margins of his notebook? That might secretly be the smartest person in the room.

In a recent Global English Editing article, psychologists were consulted to find secret signs of high IQ, and they came up with ten. Adaptability made the list, no surprise there, and problem-solving skills won’t shock many. But a strong sense of humor? Robust relationships? The signs that you, or someone you know, is secretly super smart might not be what you think.

53 years ago today, humanity was experiencing what would be its last moments on the face of the moon for a long time. Apollo 17 was not originally intended to be the last moon mission, but by the time it launched on December 7, 1972, interest and funding were drifting away from the Apollo program toward the Space Shuttle and the Skylab space station project, which would, in time, lead to the ISS.

What did we get for our efforts to reach the moon? Found on the very long list of innovations are cordless power tools, a significant acceleration in integrated circuit technology, fire-retardant materials, and, of course, advances in launch and guidance that led directly to GPS, weather satellites, and global telecom.

The incredible achievement was accomplished in the very earliest moments of the computer revolution. Today, if you’re wearing an Apple Watch, you have hundreds of millions of times more computational firepower on your wrist than NASA had access to for the entirety of the moon mission.

NASA is working toward a return to the moon with the Artemis program (Artemis was Apollo’s sister), currently scheduled to put boots back in the regolith in 2027. Until then, Eugene Cernan holds the title of last person to walk on the moon. Cernan’s final words before starting the journey home were, “As I take man’s last step… we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.”

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