Analects

PaperQA2, the first AI agent that conducts entire scientific literature reviews on its own.

Mythbusting organic farming:

The sad truth is, factory farming is factory farming, whether its organic or conventional. Many large organic farms use pesticides liberally. They’re organic by certification, but you’d never know it if you saw their farming practices … They’re organic by the letter, not organic in spirit … Many natural pesticides have been found to be potential - or serious - health risks … nearly half of the pesticides that are currently approved for use by organic farmers in Europe failed to pass the European Union’s safety evaluation that is required by law

getting rid of pesticides doesn’t mean your food is free from harmful things … because organic foods tend to have higher levels of potential pathogens. One study, for example, found E. coli in produce from almost 10% of organic farms samples, but only 2% of conventional ones

science simply cannot find any evidence that organic foods are in any way healthier than non-organic ones - and scientists have been comparing the two for over 50 years.

the real reason organic farming isn’t more green than conventional is that while it might be better for local environments on the small scale, organic farms produce far less food per unit land than conventional ones.

The Promise of Vertical Farming. Monocropping is bad. Also it accounts for 15% of all habitable land. How close is vertical farming to a solution?

What I’m getting at is that we will soon be able to decide what to do with a large proportion of the 15% of habitable land that we’ve dedicated to agriculture until now.

Optimistic article, tempered by their follow up more recently, here. All very interesting.

Evidence shows ordinary citizens in the Western world are now richer and more equal than ever before?

We define wealth as the value of all assets, such as homes, bank deposits, stocks and pension funds, less all debts, mainly mortgages. When counting wealth among all adults, data show that its value has increased more than threefold since 1980, and nearly 10 times over the past century … wealth has also become more equally distributed over time. Wealth inequality has decreased dramatically over the past century and, despite the recent years’ emergence of super-rich entrepreneurs, wealth concentration has remained at its historically low levels in Europe and has increased mainly in the US.

Not exactly in keeping with the fun graphs that populate my instagram feed.

How Athletes Get Great. It’s not 10,000 hours (but we already knew that).

AI is slower, but much much cheaper than people:

several public models (Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o) complete a proportion of tasks similar to what humans can do in ~30 minutes … On average, when agents can do a task, they do so at ~1/30th of the cost of the median hourly wage of a US bachelor’s degree holder. One example: our Claude 3.5 Sonnet agent fixed bugs in an ORM library at a cost of <$2, while the human baseline took >2 hours.

A surprise to no-one, gender-conformity is less good for women. NBER paper.

Could Rome have had an industrial revolution? The author thinks it was the printing press (or lack thereof). But interesting throughout.

Adam Smith said “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice.” Rome had all of these and more, but yet did not succeed in cultivating an industrial revolution.

Why not? What was the binding constraint on a Roman industrial revolution?

On the ‘empathy economy’ as jobs are automated. Many good points. Here’s one:

“in the Feeling Economy, [that emerges during the increasing automation of jobs] many previously disadvantaged groups or individuals may have a better chance to develop their talents and to be included in the labor market.” They like to believe that this shift will simultaneously raise the floor by legitimating less-recognized jobs like caregiving and open up the ceiling by causing higher-income jobs to deprioritize “hard” technical skills—thus making it more accessible to both those without an expensive formal education, and those mistakenly perceived as less technically adept. One chapter of Rust and Huang’s book is even titled the “Era of Women” in giddy anticipation of the AI revolution’s democratizing effect.

Unfortunately, this analysis fails to consider the ways in which bias also subtly creeps into our views of who is capable of empathy and care … As the media theorist Wendy Hui Kyong Chun has remarked, the category of the human subject has largely been constructed through exclusion—“through the jettisoning of the Asian/Asian American other as robotic, as machine-like” and the “African American other as primitive, as too human.” In this paradigm, only a narrow sliver of (white) people are deemed truly human, possessing the fullest range of emotive faculties … As currently “low-status” jobs like caregiving become more established, it’s easy to imagine how the women of color who have long served as the backbone of the profession might be excluded from its glorious future, losing ground to white counterparts flocking to a newly lucrative field. (Look, for instance, to the whitewashing gentrification effect of cultural legitimization in the cannabis industry.)

More evidence against the marshmallow test. See also this marginalia.

No clear pattern of moderation was detected between delay of gratification and either socioeconomic status or sex. Results indicate that Marshmallow Test performance does not reliably predict adult outcomes.

AI language models are almost as good as each other now, and other interesting news.

War deepens gender-stereotypes. From Ukrainian data:

We find that conflict onset deepens gender-stereotypical behavior among politicians in their public engagement. We also show that, consistent with our argument, gender biases among the public are magnified during war.

The Ju/‘hoansi protocol. Really, a means of exploring different and more organic forms of governance. But echoes of Graeber’s Dawn of Everything.

Why haven’t biologists cured cancer? Reflections of the genomics PhD. Basically, it’s too hard, but interesting throughout.

A Globally Integrated Islamic State. Reminds me of John Robb’s ‘open source warfare’: low cost and low risk systems dysruption allows for much smaller governance. It is notable that the scarier implications have not come to pass.

Thinking about God increases acceptance of artificial intelligence in decision-making. I’ll just copy the abstract. Can’t tell if this is for or against my laissez-faire attitude about the dangers of AI. Depends how religious we become I guess.

Thinking about God promotes greater acceptance of Artificial intelligence (AI)-based recommendations. Eight preregistered experiments (n = 2,462) reveal that when God is salient, people are more willing to consider AI-based recommendations than when God is not salient. Studies 1 and 2a to 2d demonstrate across a wide variety of contexts, from choosing entertainment and food to mutual funds and dental procedures, that God salience reduces reliance on human recommenders and heightens willingness to consider AI recommendations. Studies 3 and 4 demonstrate that the reduced reliance on humans is driven by a heightened feeling of smallness when God is salient, followed by a recognition of human fallibility. Study 5 addresses the similarity in mysteriousness between God and AI as an alternative, but unsupported, explanation. Finally, study 6 (n = 53,563) corroborates the experimental results with data from 21 countries on the usage of robo-advisors in financial decision-making.

The man who won the lottery 14 times. How a rogue Romanian economist escaped poverty, wrote an algorithm, and gamed more than a dozen lotteries around the world.

The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel:

The [James Webb Space Telescope] data, though, revealed that some very large galaxies formed really fast, in too short a time, at least according to the standard model. This was no minor discrepancy. The finding is akin to parents and their children appearing in a story when the grandparents are still children themselves.

What Happened to David Graeber? Dawn of Everything was a nice, if flawed, tonic against the typical Rouseau-ian vision of human progress, which seems ever less likely in the current political deterioration read, but seemed to go against his anarchist leanings:

It is not clear, to me at any rate, that one can be an anarchist and not also be an egalitarian and an anti-statist. Repudiating those two positions, by which Graeber definitely defined his politics circa 2010, amounts to repudiating the anarchist position, or else leaves you trying to define it in other terms … If I had to take a crack at characterizing late Graeber’s politics, I might say that he seemed to be becoming a mainline leftist or state socialist.

On hypersonic arms, and hypersonic arms control.

How to extract insights with seemingly limited resources. On reshaping data for better understanding

Why there’s so much fraud in academia. Pretty interesting reflection, not just on the motivations to do it, but the ways in which it slips past.

On the detail in the world, and how it comes to be invisible.

Before you’ve noticed important details they are, of course, basically invisible. It’s hard to put your attention on them because you don’t even know what you’re looking for. But after you see them they quickly become so integrated into your intuitive models of the world that they become essentially transparent. Do you remember the insights that were crucial in learning to ride a bike or drive? How about the details and insights you have that led you to be good at the things you’re good at?

Economist preferences by cognitive skill and personality:

Differences in preferred outcomes are related to personality whereas mistakes in decisions are related to cognitive skill.

Did we need a paper for this?

What’s making kids not alright? And some on how to make them alright. Good notes on social media and it’s value, not just harm. Also coping:

There’s coping by expressing what we’re feeling, and there’s coping by taming or bringing back under control our emotions … if we start on the expressing category, there’s talking about what we’re feeling and seeking social support … listen to music … make things … art … And then there’s the taming category. whether it’s going for a walk or taking a bath or finding a food that we love and enjoying it or getting with a TV show that we know we’re going to leave the end of the episode feeling better than we did when we started. And I think, if we can bring coping forward as the thing to focus on — the distress, that is a done deal.

See also social media might not be making us miserable.

The Perfection Of The Paper Clip.

Why is slow motion so fun: Slow Motion Enhances Consumer Evaluations by Increasing Processing Fluency

News stripped of the crap by AI.

On philosopher Derek Parfit: the most important philosopher you’ve never heard of.

he has almost no reputation outside of academic philosophy, despite the fact that so many modern moral concerns—long-termism, altruism, existential risk, our moral obligation to people in other times and places—are essentially Parfitian

When everyone can sound intelligent, elite conversations will become less intelligible. On the top-down influences of social capital (luxury beliefs) and ChatGPT—a prediction that trendy language will become less sophisticated in a reaction against the accessibility of sophisticated language.

But the bottom line is that ChatGPT’s output is quite plain. It might seem excellent and correct to a non-native speaker or to an unsophisticated reader. But an actual NYT editor could easily tell this isn’t the right stuff.

Just like in the fashion industry, cheap substitutes can only fool some people. But unlike fast fashion, we can expect AI’s capabilities to improve exponentially — making it harder to spot mass-manufactured text.

And yet, I suspect that as machines become better at sounding like sophisticated humans, the most sophisticated humans will adopt even more nuanced, coded, and complex ways of speaking that are harder to imitate.

The mass production of “premium” goods resulted in a world where “money talks and wealth whispers.” The mass production of “premium” content will give rise to a world of Quiet Intelligence — everyone will think they sound smart, but those who are really smart (or “in”) will communicate at a whole different level.

Your DNA Can Now Be Pulled From Thin Air.

A survey of all different scientific approaches in longevity biotech.

You Are Not Destined to Live in Quiet Times. An unomfortable overview.

Apocalypse used to be a religious, even a mythological concept. But in our time, it is becoming a political possibility.

It might be good to say um:

Disfluencies such as pauses, “um”s, and “uh”s are common interruptions in the speech stream. Previous work probing memory for disfluent speech shows memory benefits for disfluent compared to fluent materials. Complementary evidence from studies of language production and comprehension have been argued to show that different disfluency types appear in distinct contexts and, as a result, serve as a meaningful cue. If the disfluency-memory boost is a result of sensitivity to these form-meaning mappings, forms of disfluency that cue new upcoming information (fillers and pauses) may produce a stronger memory boost compared to forms that reflect speaker difficulty (repetitions). If the disfluency-memory boost is simply due to the attentional-orienting properties of a disruption to fluent speech, different disfluency forms may produce similar memory benefit. Experiments 1 and 2 compared the relative mnemonic benefit of three types of disfluent interruptions. Experiments 3 and 4 examined the scope of the disfluency-memory boost to probe its cognitive underpinnings. Across the four experiments, we observed a disfluency-memory boost for three types of disfluency that were tested. This boost was local and position dependent, only manifesting when the disfluency immediately preceded a critical memory probe word at the end of the sentence. Our findings reveal a short-lived disfluency-memory boost that manifests at the end of the sentence but is evoked by multiple types of disfluent forms, consistent with the idea that disfluencies bring attentional focus to immediately upcoming material. The downstream consequence of this localized memory benefit is better understanding and encoding of the speaker’s message.

Historical IQs are made up, and other IQ myths:

just based on his actual academic record I would estimate that … [by correlating test scores to IQ] … Einstein’s IQ was therefore probably more around 120 or 130 than 160. Indeed very high! But maybe not even “genius level.” He would have scored similarly to Feynman, one of the few geniuses we for sure have a modern IQ for, which was “merely” 125.

and

the studies correlating IQ to genius are mostly bad science.

and

Practice works wonders for IQ tests

and

“IQ is one of the most valid and reliable psychological constructs.” And this is true… by the standards of psychology. Don’t mistake this for being what a normal person would refer to as “reliable.” In the field of psychology, almost nothing is reliable. Effects regularly cannot be replicated, and those that can inevitably decrease in their effect size, often shrinking to the barely observable.

(see also the scientific ritual)

and

given its known measurement variance, IQs mattering less and less at higher scales almost has to be true, since the variance alone injects huge amounts of noise into any study. From a statistical level it would be shocking to get really clear results differentiating any real-world factor between IQs of 130 vs. 150, simply because the error is so large, and the number of people even satisfying those conditions is so small

but importantly

it’s one of the only measurements we have that does an okay job at capturing intelligence, in that it’s not too bad at this when it comes to the center of the distribution, although it gets increasingly bad at it at the tails.

The question then becomes, for the centre—just what is IQ measuring? That’s the thing that’s questionable.

The Bronze Age Has Never Looked Stronger

Land Ownership Makes No Sense:

Modern appraisal methods have made Georgism more practical than ever. We can calculate the unimproved value of any given piece of land, and then tax unimproved value at close to 100 percent of its annual rental rate. This, called a land-value tax, is effectively equivalent to landlords “renting” the land from everyone else. In an example reported by The Wall Street Journal, a vacant lot in Austin, Texas, pays about half the property taxes per acre as the apartment building nearby. Under a land-value tax, both properties would pay the same amount in tax for using the same amount of land. The benefit of this system is that improving the land is incentivized, since it increases the landlord’s revenues but doesn’t increase their tax burden, while merely holding land for speculation is disincentivized, which frees it up for others.

Ancient Greek Terms Worth Reviving. Two you probably know. The rest, not so much.

US Air Force conducts post-nuclear training exercise.

How Gender, Generation, Personality, and Politics Shape the Values of American University Students. Seems like they’re not fans of women making Universities more comfortable places to be?

Mapping retracted academic papers—locations unsurprising.

How zoom changes conversation:

The researchers hypothesized that something about the scant 30- to 70-millisecond delay in Zoom audio disrupts whatever neural mechanisms we meatbags use to get in sync with one another, that magic that creates true dialogue. … The machine found that women rated as better Zoom conversationalists tended to be more intense. The differences among men, strangely, were statistically insignificant. (The reverse was true for happiness. Male speakers who appeared to be happier were rated as better conversationalists, while the stats for women didn’t budge.) Then there’s nodding. Better-rated conversationalists nodded “yes” 4% more often and shook their heads “no” 3% more often. They were not “merely cheerful listeners who nod supportively,” the researchers note, but were instead making “judicious use of nonverbal negations.” Translation: An honest and well-timed no will score you more points than an insincere yes. Good conversationalists are those who appear more engaged in what their partners are saying.

Why some accidents are unavoidable. Paper on man-made technological disasters.

The diverse economies of neolithic peoples. See also the paper. Builds on Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel notion of agricultural ‘packages’.

The failure of market knows best economics:

the “market knows best” paradigm is in disrepair. It isn’t just that “hyperglobalization” has devoured its own preconditions, so that it is increasingly unsustainable. It is also that some goals of modern industrial policy are in principle impossible to solve through purely market mechanisms. To the extent, for example, that economics and national security have become interwoven, investment and innovation decisions involve tradeoffs that market actors are poorly equipped to resolve … We lack the kinds of expertise that we need to achieve key goals of industrial policy, or to evaluate the tradeoffs between them. … Decades of insistence that economic decisions be handed off from the state to markets has resulted in a remarkable lack of understanding among government policy makers about how markets, in fact, work.

Truth decay and national security.

Truth Decay—the declining role of facts in American public life—creates national security vulnerabilities, including by making the United States more susceptible to foreign influence. What can be done to mitigate such risks?

How to beat roulette.

A theory of autocratic bad-decision-making (pdf):

Many, if not most, personalistic dictatorships end up with a disastrous decision … they typically involve both a monumental miscalculation and an institutional environment in which better-informed subordinates have no chance to prevent the decision from being implemented … repression and bad decision-making are self-reinforcing. Repressions reduce the threat, yet raise the stakes for the incumbent; with higher stakes, the incumbent puts more emphasis on loyalty than competence

The problem of news from nowhere. See also my article:

politically induced mental and physical symptoms appear to be more pronounced among not just the young, but specifically those who are politically engaged and left-leaning … In the United States, the combination of being young, engaged, and liberal has become associated with anxiety, unhappiness, and even despair

Why progressives? The article suggests that conservatives: “care less about politics” and “conservatives tend to be a minority. So they have little choice but to acclimate themselves to a liberal environment and learn to interact with those who are different from them”. But one wonders if it’s simply that the solutions to conservative problems seem more tractable on the surface: a rejection of change, versus the welcoming of it.

On handling people, when everyone is the main character.

Interesting piece—normal people becoming killers.

No-bullshit democracy.

What might be called “no-bullshit democracy” would be a new way of structuring democratic disagreement that would use human argumentativeness as a rapid-growth fertilizer. … But first we need to sluice away the bullshit that is being liberally spread around by anti-democratic thinkers. … . Experts, including Brennan and Caplan (and for that matter ourselves), can be at least as enthusiastic as ordinary citizens to grab at ideologically convenient factoids and ignore or explain away inconvenient evidence. That, unfortunately, is why Brennan and Caplan’s books do a better job displaying the faults of human reasoning than explaining them.

We are in the age of average.

This article argues that from film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same.

Welcome to the age of average.

Brain density is the key to intelligence? A twitter thread on encephalisation, but here they point out that human’s aren’t special—all primates are. See also that TED talk by Suzana HH:

Adolescent unhappiness a result of learning intensity. Research paper:

Findings indicate a negative log-linear relationship between per-capita GDP and adolescent life satisfaction … can largely be attributed to higher learning intensity in advanced countries.

Average IQ is going down? Typically we think of the Flynn effect in IQ—a general increase in the average IQ score year on year. But for perhaps two or three decades it might be that the reverse is true. The likely cause, given IQ is more or less arbitrary, is that the tests test for things that are less socially valuable.

Link between IQ and income is also positive but underwhelming.

For those of you asking me good GPT prompts, here’s a good example:

I want to learn about <insert topic>. In a moment, I’m going to ask you a series of questions about it. But before we get into it, I’d appreciate it if you answered as though you were a no nonsense teacher with an ambitious, self-directed student. That is:

• Err in the direction of thinking that I’m relatively knowledgable and technical.
• Don’t overexplain things. I’ll ask for more information if I need it.
• Assume that I’m already skeptical and that you don’t need to qualify, hedge, or otherwise add to or manage my skepticism.
• Don’t apologize for misunderstanding or getting an answer wrong.
• It’s fine to be a bit abrupt and even “mean”. Value directness and frankness; assume I’m relatively insensitive.
• Where reasonable suggest things for me to try independently. It’s fine to tell me to install packages or run go out and do things or whatever, if you think it will help me learn quickly. (Only do this were reasonable; otherwise abstract explanations are fine.)
• Give at most one example per response.

Why It’s So Hard to Catch Your Own Typos.

The reason typos get through isn’t because we’re stupid or careless, it’s because what we’re doing is actually very smart … When you’re writing, you’re trying to convey meaning. It’s a very high level task … As with all high level tasks, your brain generalizes simple, component parts (like turning letters into words and words into sentences) so it can focus on more complex tasks (like combining sentences into complex ideas). “We don’t catch every detail, we’re not like computers or NSA databases,” said Stafford. “Rather, we take in sensory information and combine it with what we expect, and we extract meaning.”

The desire for harsh punishment is on the decline (US research):

many members of the public believe in a “Shawshank redemption” effect—that those committing serious crimes as a teenager or young adult can mature into a “different person” and warrant a second look, with the possibility of early release if they have earned it. A key issue is likely to be how much weight is accorded to the preference of victims or their families in any release decision.

Ruminations on China’s reorientation toward expansionism. In short:

• It coincides with Xi’s reign, and may support his ongoing leadership;
• An aggressive foreign policy might be useful to divert the Chinese public’s attention from the sources of its discontent (the CCP).
• The history of the Chinese political community gives China a memory of being the most powerful and sophisticated nation on earth, and it may be part of a conviction that this represents the natural political order of Asia and this brand of nationalism would drive any political objectives toward similar foreign policies.
• It might be a mere capitalisation on Chinese power, particularly in the face of a looming economic decline.

On the opportunity cost of castles.

Whether the castle could have survived much longer once gunpowder became prevalent is actually a moot point. Its very strength was a barrier to the growth of great national governments. Monarchs regarded private castles as an inherent threat. Legal and other measures were taken to eliminate them. In Britain, the Tudors were particularly effective in eliminating great noble castles as part of a well designed program to establish the state’s monopoly on violence. In France, Louis XIII probably destroyed more castles than he built. This trend was actually a paean to the military virtues of the castle.

On friction in war. Posing Boyd’s OODA-loop against Clausewitz’s concept of friction. Clausewitz concerned himself the internal problem of friction, but Boyd added the lens that friction can be both overcome internally and maximised externally through a different structural lens.

Who do people think are influential in their own community? US research:

• US residents once named business leaders.
• Today, US residents typically can’t name anyone and if they do, rarely a business person.
• Often, whether influencers or government individuals were named it was at the state or national level.
• Plausibly because of a decline in local media.
• Suggests a trend toward nationalised politics, with the corollary that national politics is less representative than local ones.

On the media as a good thing:

Hate certain parts of the media, including specific articles, false narratives, and even, if you must, individual journalists who represent the worst of their profession. But if you care about having a functional society in which forming accurate perceptions of at least some portions of reality is possible, please temper your criticism.

Seems also worth noting that media have predictable filters. Non-media entities are subject to the same filters—perhaps more so.

Books are not Information Dense. An argument for substacks as a more information dense source of information. Though, see also is the internet information overload.

In which environments is impulsive behavior adaptive?

information impulsivity, that is, acting without considering consequences, and temporal impulsivity, that is, the tendency to pick sooner outcomes over later ones … both types are adaptive when individuals are close to a critical threshold (e.g., bankruptcy), resources are predictable, or interruptions are common. When resources are scarce, impulsivity can be adaptive or maladaptive, depending on the type and degree of scarcity. Information impulsivity is also adaptive when environments do not change over time or change very often (but maladaptive in between), or if local resource patches have similar properties, reducing the need to gather further information. Temporal impulsivity is adaptive when environments do not change over time and when local resource patches differ.

The man who solved his own murder. On Alexander Litvinenko—a former Russian spy was poisoned with a cup of tea in a London hotel.

The infrastructure behind ATMs. The surprisingly complicated business of making your money available to you.

The reassuring fantasy of the baby advice industry:

People have been dispensing baby-rearing guidance in written form almost since the beginning of writing, and it is a storehouse of absurd advice, testifying to the truth that babies have always been a source of bafflement.

Thus began the transformation that would culminate in the contemporary baby-advice industry. With every passing year, there was less and less to worry about: in the developed world today, by any meaningful historical yardstick, your baby will almost certainly be fine, and if it isn’t, that will almost certainly be due to factors entirely beyond your control … And so baby manuals became more and more fixated on questions that would have struck any 19th-century parent as trivial, such as for precisely how many minutes it’s acceptable to let babies cry; or how the shape of a pacifier might affect the alignment of their teeth; or whether their lifelong health might be damaged by traces of chemicals in the plastics used to make their bowls and spoons.

“The promise of [the contemporary concept of] parenting is that there is some set of techniques, some particular expertise, that parents could acquire that would help them accomplish the goal of shaping their children’s lives,” … “It is very difficult to find any reliable, empirical relation between the small variations in what parents do – the variations that are the focus of parenting [advice] – and the resulting adult traits of their children,”

Perhaps what you really learn from baby books is one important aspect of the predicament of parenthood: that while there might indeed be one right way to do things, you will never get to find out what it is.

On the fault lines between democracy and specialisation. A bit of history, as well as the experts in a disaster movie as a metaphor:

How else but through illusion might we expect the average viewer to grasp a perspective rooted in a lifetime of training and inquiry? Besides, the viewer’s ignorance is vital to the intended experience of these films. It’s what secures their interest in the expert character, who is essentially an oracle, and an oracle without inaccessible, suprahuman wisdom loses all allure. The oracle is elevated by knowledge—to the mountaintop temples or the heights of abstraction—forming a triangular relationship with the layman and viewer … The viewer is left with a murky and reductive metaphor, but they have also witnessed the processes of reduction and the social realities that necessitate it … the truth of any technical matter undergoes a similar filtration when it is disseminated to the actual public, government officials or within private institutions. The raw facts, the data, when they reach you, have been neatly ordered, interpreted and summarized for your benefit. Such is the cost and convenience of living in modernized society; to “trust the experts” and their liaisons not out of goodwill but stark necessity. But only during technical disasters, storied and real, can the full severity of this bargain be recognized: a technical elite will accept an unfathomable responsibility in exchange for the public’s unwavering trust and obedience. The citizen and his representatives are asked to forget the many instances in which experts have been grievously mistaken, and to overlook that many disasters now originate in the cloisters of technical institutions (the disasters of both Chernobyl and Margin Call are expert-made.) There is no time to consider past errors.

The public rage against specialists is rightly perceived as a rejection of their hard-won expertise. But I suspect these outbursts stem from a shared impression that our world is becoming impossible to understand in a remotely unified manner … What is the point of learning if the smallest truth is always already someone else’s life’s work? One feels relegated to the mere surface of things; necessarily stupid. This is not only infuriating but also makes it increasingly difficult to participate in the governance of our gleaming technological society.

On COVID accelerating the meaning crisis.

I think that the pandemic accelerated people’s re-evaluations of many of their commitments. We came out of it more strongly committed to activities we value highly, including passionate interests and family relationships. But we became less committed to jobs and classes that have only instrumental value to us. Young people were affected the most.

Incentivising hoarding:

In a landmark 1986 study, Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch and Richard Thaler gathered evidence that most people find this sort of behaviour unacceptable. (For example, 82 per cent of respondents thought it was unfair for a hardware store to raise the price of snow shovels after a snowstorm.) We could argue over whether these feelings of outrage at “profiteers” are simply mistaken or tap into some deeper wisdom, but the practical point is that firms know that they will be criticised if they build up stores and try to sell them at a profit in a crisis. As a result, they will spend less on storage than they should. A second problem is that supply interruptions have a large social cost. The cost of a blackout falls partly on the electricity supplier but mostly on customers, and so the supplier is likely to skimp on storage, backups and other ways to improve reliability. Then there is the third problem, which is that some kinds of storage are extremely expensive. Could the storage problem be solved? Governments could subsidise some forms of storage and stockpiling … They could do more to encourage trade and collaboration … they could invest more in early warnings of trouble. They will need to stand ready to resist the inevitable grumbles that the stockpiles constitute a waste of taxpayers’ money.

Empires as a function of transport technology:

This brings a new light to the two transportation assets Romans were famous for: the Mare Nostrum (Mediterranean) and the roads. The sea allowed for fast travel across the Mediterranean, uniting it—but preventing Rome from going much beyond it. The roads were necessary for Rome to move past the coasts and control the land.

While London, the upper Nile, the Levant, and even the Black Sea could be reached in less than a month, the lands beyond the Rhine river, today’s Germany, couldn’t.

And this is in a world where they had no military or economic equal. As neighboring areas grew stronger, one month of distance was too remote to hold. Rome abandoned Britain, Germanic tribes invaded the European side, the Sasanid Empire on the Asian side, and the half of the empire farthest from Rome split.

Different ways of doing life. Here, living with wolves:

The sanctuary was a thorough teacher, testing my every limit. Blisters bloomed across my feet from the miles I put in each day simply walking through the compound in my stiff new hiking boots, trailing staff through hours of chores. In my off time I studied the sanctuary’s handbook, memorizing the animals’ names and backstories, how to tell them apart, what medications they took and why, and how to safely administer them directly into a wolf’s mouth. Then, after nearly fourteen nonstop days, I passed the requisite exams to officially become an animal caretaker.

How To Speak Honeybee. The history and future of interpreting honey-bee communication.

Pass or fail grading is a good thing? This recent paper (about quite old data) made the rounds a couple months ago, on some US college seeing declining performance when dropping letter grades. I’ve been asked a couple times to look at it by undergrad students in class. It seems like a pretty standard misleading null result? The abstract reads:

Students shifted to lower-grading STEM courses in the first semester, but did not increase their engagement with STEM in later semesters. Letter grades of first-semester students declined by 0.13 grade points, or 23% of a standard deviation. We … conclude that the effect is consistent with declining student effort.

Which paints the picture of the grade incentive being important to not only effort in the class but ongoing performance.

But this drop in performance is associated only with the (secretly recorded) letter grade of the pass/fail course. There is stable performance (a.k.a. ‘did not increase’) in later courses where letter grades matter again. So dropping letter grades does nothing over time (no better but also no worse), and does very little (23% of a standard deviation!? come on, please) in the class itself. Does that make dropping grades preferable? Maybe we should give these students their effort back, for more influential things.

Reminder that TikTok is spyware. Contra this post. Is there another chance for a ‘good’ social media?

The decline of ‘old masters’ in art: an emblem of how time annihilates what makes things special and leaves only the value in the ‘top’ of any category of thing.

On the unnecessary nature of human space adventures. The argument goes, ‘white elephant’ space projects consume budget unreasonably, and with little oversight. It was once useful to send people into space. Now it holds back exploration. Compelling. Makes one very skeptical of space.

On profiling 911 callers to see if they were murderers. Another nonsense forensic ‘science’, like polygraphs and fingerprinting. Humans just aren’t that predictable.

We are underinvesting in boredom’s creative potential.

Dog breed differences in cognition. No surprises that the Aussie Kelpie was a stand out:

Significant breed differences were found for understanding of human communicative gestures, following a human’s misleading gesture, spatial problem-solving ability in a V-detour task, inhibitory control in a cylinder test, and persistence and human-directed behaviour during an unsolvable task. Breeds also differed significantly in their behaviour towards an unfamiliar person, activity level, and exploration of a novel environment. No significant differences were identified in tasks measuring memory or logical reasoning. Breed differences thus emerged mainly in tasks measuring social cognition, problem-solving, and inhibitory control.

More ideas for efficient hot water bottle use than I thought possible.

How military planning works. Excellent several part read. I admit, I use the military appreciation process to plan almost everything complex. It doesn’t need much tinkering to solve for more than clearing an enemy off that hill. I’ve used it for wedding planning, consulting projects, and camping trips too.

Psychological capabilites for resilience. Studies from the Ukraine war:

Many of the psychological capabilities to improve societal resilience can be integrated into three broad focus areas: education, information, and inclusion. Education should not only raise awareness about trends that may affect national safety or potential threats to sovereignty, but it should emphasize a country’s unique strengths, national history, culture, and values … A psychologically resilient population must also be informed about the modern information environment and how it plays a role in shaping thinking and behavior … A whole-of-society and whole-of-government approach is inherently inclusive. Inclusion efforts often focus on bolstering national identity to give people a sense of pride and belongingness, but it can simultaneously train critical skills.

Personal finance gurus vs economists:

the prescription of the popular finance gurus is sensible, but their diagnosis is not … and I think their advice regarding the issue is not particularly worth paying attention to for this reason

How bad is crime? For the mays in which it modifies behaviour, perhaps quite a bit more costly than we might think.

Why Is Everything So Ugly?

We live in undeniably ugly times. Architecture, industrial design, cinematography, probiotic soda branding — many of the defining features of the visual field aren’t sending their best. Despite more advanced manufacturing and design technologies than have existed in human history, our built environment tends overwhelmingly toward the insubstantial, the flat, and the gray, punctuated here and there by the occasional childish squiggle.

Cows are more resilient than you think:

To estimate how far the cows had paddled during their ordeal, journalists seemed to have measured the shortest distance between Cedar Island and the Core Banks using digital tools like Google Maps. Most put the swim at four miles; NBC preferred the precision of 3.39 miles … In fact, Aretxabaleta said, the probable routes taken by the cows, whether living or dead, range from 28.5 to nearly 40 miles. At the low end, that’s considerably greater than the distance across the English Channel. It’s more than ten times what swimmers complete in an Ironman triathlon. By Aretxabaleta’s measure, the absolute shortest period a cow would have been in the water is 7.5 hours; the longest is 25 hours.

How Physics Can Improve the Urinal. I always wondered why this wasn’t already a thing.

Intuition is to listening as analysis is to reading. From the abstract:

we demonstrate that thinking from spoken information leads to more intuitive performance compared with thinking from written information. Consequently, we propose that people think more intuitively in the spoken modality and more analytically in the written modality.

On honesty as the aspiration of true science. How close are we now?.

Feynman first cited a core value — honesty — which is a central scientific character virtue, and then went on to show an example of what this means for behavior. In saying that this requires a kind of “leaning over backwards,” Feynman clearly recognized that this prescription goes well beyond what is normally done or expected. It is an ideal. It may not be impossible to achieve, but certainly it will be very difficult.

and

Scientists do not always live up to these ideals, but the scientific community recognizes them as aspirational values that define what it means to be a member of the practice. Those who flout them do not deserve to be called scientists. Those who exemplify them with excellence are properly honored as exemplars.

How to care less about work. Might be paywalled so use archive.ph. Some highlights:

So what work is actually valuable? It’s incredibly unclear. Many knowledge workers, ourselves included, find themselves insecure in some capacity about the work they’re doing: how much they do, whom they do it for, its value, their value, how their work is rewarded and by whom. We respond to this confusion in pretty confusing ways. Some become deeply disillusioned or radicalized against the extractive, capitalist system that makes all of this so muddled. And others throw themselves into work, centering it as the defining element of their self-worth. In response to the existential crisis of personal value, they jump on the productivity treadmill, praying that in the process of constant work they might eventually stumble across purpose, dignity, and security.

and

Once you figure out what [things you once took pleasure in], see if you can recall its contours. Were you in charge? Were there achievable goals or no goals at all? Did you do it alone or with others? Was it something that really felt as if it was yours, not your siblings’? Did it mean regular time spent with someone you liked? Did it involve organizing, creating, practicing, following patterns, or collaborating? See if you can describe, out loud or in writing, what you did and why you loved it. Now see if there’s anything at all that resembles that experience in your life today.

Weeks don’t make sense:

A duration of seven days doesn’t align with any natural cycles or fit cleanly into months or years. And though the week has been deeply significant to Jews, Christians, and Muslims for centuries, people in many parts of the world happily made do without it, or any other cycles of a similar length, until roughly 150 years ago …

[my] hypothesis, which I’m a little more drawn to because I’m a historian: that our sense of what is an appropriate amount of time to wait between activities has been conditioned by the week.

Imagination as key to human specialness. “Imagination isn’t just a spillover from our problem-solving prowess. It might be the core of what human brains evolved to do”.

Were ancients the intellectual equals of us? Graeber reckoned, probably.

The limits of cryptoeconomics. Old, but this struck me following the FTX drama recently:

Any system which claims to be non-finance, but does not actually make an effort to prevent collusion, will eventually acquire the characteristics of finance

Excerpts from famously prolific reader Tyler Cowan on how to read fast, well, and widely. Still probably won’t be as fast as him.

On care in meditation. See also Seven common myths about meditation

Crucially:

If you’ve never explored the depths of your psyche, and/or have a history of unexplored trauma or untreated mental illness, it would be reckless to launch into formal meditation practice, in the same way that someone with physical limitations would be ill-advised to embark without training on a challenging mountaineering expedition.

and importantly

Meditation isn’t for everyone, and there are many routes to mental wellness and the kind of mental states achieved through rigorous contemplative practice.

How to study effectively. “Forget cramming, ditch the highlighter, and stop passively rereading. The psychology of learning offers better tactics.”

Stop caring about single bad articles. A good paper on the rationale for thinking about trends. Same advice I give students on their literature—it’s much harder and less compelling to build an argument based on one study than to slide through the trends.

Stop Spending Time on Things You Hate. Interesting narrativised advice, but the cribnotes are:

1. Schedule your downtime.
2. Give your bad habits a monetary value (i.e. price them at your hourly wage).

The cult of optionality. Nice reasons to stop trying to find asymmetric opportunities in life—life isn’t a financial market. Most compelling:

The point isn’t that any of these things is likely. It’s that the downside in real life is never actually capped. Applying financial metaphors to life can be useful, so long as you understand the limitations.

See also your life is more financialised than you think

What might mushroom hunters teach the doctors of tomorrow? Algorithms and artificial intelligence are a helpful aid to doctors. But they still need to learn the arts of noticing.

How popperian falsification enabled the rise of neoliberalism.

How to be lucky:

being alert to the unexpected is vital for creating smart luck, there is another key factor: preparation. This is partly about removing the barriers to serendipity, both mental (your mindset) and physical (the spaces you live and interact in), such as: overloaded schedules; senseless meetings; and the inefficiencies throughout your day that rob you of time, curiosity and a sense of joy. You can prepare by strengthening your mental readiness to connect with opportunity, and creating an environment that enables the use of your skills and available resources to act on the moment. An unprepared mind often discards unusual encounters, thereby missing the opportunities for smart luck. But this is a learned behaviour. Preparation is about developing the capacity to accelerate and harness the positive coincidences that show up in life.

And so on.

Mind control from a distance (really):

Now, scientists at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University have developed the first non-invasive technique for controlling targeted brain circuits in behaving animals from a distance. The tool has the potential to solve one of the biggest unmet needs in neuroscience: a way to flexibly test the functions of particular brain cells and circuits deep in the brain during normal behavior — such as mice freely socializing with one another.

The research was published March 21, 2022 in Nature Biomedical Engineering by Guosong Hong and colleagues at Stanford and Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. Hong is a Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute Faculty Scholar and assistant professor of materials science and engineering in the Stanford School of Engineering who uses his background in chemistry and materials science to devise biocompatible tools and materials to advance the study of the brain.

On zombie science:

zombie science as mindless science. It goes through the motions of scientific research without a real research question to answer, it follows all the correct methodology, but it doesn’t aspire to contribute to advance knowledge in the field. Practically all the information about hydroxychloroquine during the pandemic falls into that category, including not just the living dead found in preprint repositories, but also papers published in journals that ought to have been caught by a more discerning eye … Zombie science bestows an aura of credibility on results not answering real scientific questions.

With many more examples. Science to avoid.

Motivating creativity:

the … optimal reward scheme is maximally uncertain—the agent receives transfers for success, but their distribution has an extreme variance

It makes you try lots of things. Is this surprising? It doesn’t feel surprising, but as the author notes, does:

shed light on the non-transparent incentives used by online platforms, such as YouTube

Britain’s ‘New Right’.

This generational divide that Baker senses and Farage seems unaware of, becomes ever more apparent. The speakers are less furious than the spoken to … Do not expect them to sculpt a future of fair dealing, pragmatism, patience, moderation or high intelligence. Expect the restless opposite of these virtues.

An argument for liberal anti-intellectualism:

The instinct of the intellectuals is to solve problems. There is nothing wrong with this instinct, per se. However, “solving problems” often requires an all-powerful state to implement the “solutions,” and all-powerful states have a strange history of doing “evil and pernicious” things.

Are they really this dangerous?

The social media war: open source intelligence on the battlefield.

List of common misconceptions curated by Wikipedians.

On the future of battlefields. Gen. Guy Hubin describes the ‘homothetic’ impulse of modern armies: the fact that it’s the same structure from the smallest unit to the biggest, but for a matter of size, that focuses in on a central command structure. For Hubin, the future looks more like air control: a manoeuvre element that is linked to a portion of terrain, and not the command structure. Such a re-construction would better utilise the technology that is developing:

“One must break the existing relationship,” he writes, “between the importance of the level of responsibility and the volume of the subordinates.” Hubin argues that such a radical transformation is necessary to derive from the new technologies their full benefit.

On the expansionist nature of big concepts:

It is the all-conquering idea of human rights, however, that’s the starkest illustration of conceptual overreach. Human rights, even more than the rule of law, have come to play the role of ‘universal secular religion’, purporting to offer a comprehensive ethical framework … this error plays out in the common belief that the challenges posed by all manner of developments – from artificial intelligence to the climate crisis – can be adequately addressed by a framework that appeals exclusively to human rights. What gets pushed out, or distorted, by this overreach is a range of other values. These include non-rights-based values, such as kindness, loyalty and mercy … solidarity and the common good.

Today’s Older Adults Are Cognitively Fitter Than Older Adults Were 20 Years Ago, but When and How They Decline Is No Different Than in the Past. That is to say, we decline from a higher point.

Matt Levine’s excellent history of crypto. Off-beat financier with possibly my favourite column. This is the most informed on the topic I’ve ever been.

Very illuminating interview with Kamil Galeev on the Russian mindset.

Royal Netherlands Army commences armed robot trials in first among Western militaries.

How nuns got squeezed out of the communion wafer business.

Who after Xi? And indeed, what?

Wikipedia donations go to many more things than Wikipedia. Both this account and the replies feel like distracting cherry-picking, but the size and wealth of Wikimedia was interesting.

Trey Howard, arguing Russian nuclear risk is low.

Not new, but detailed, “This document is my attempt to keep a thematic list of all the problems that affect academic research”

Fukuyama as an anti-Nostradamus, or the safest kinds of predictions to make:

Nostradamus said some meaningless vapid stuff in a way such that everyone insists on interpreting as him being a genius; every time something new happens, it always proves Nostradamus right. Fukuyama said some (no offense) kind of vapid stuff in a way such that everyone insists on interpreting as him being a fool; every time something new happens, it always proves Fukuyama wrong. It’s hard to imagine what series of events could ever debunk the former or vindicate the latter.

On Oligopoly And Social Norms.

At least after they reach a certain point, distributional coalitions have an incentive to be exclusive … whatever quantity an entrant would sell must either drive down the price received by those already in … [or] there will be more to distribute to each member of the coalition if it is a minimum winning coalition

With implications for aristocratic intermarriage:

if the sons and daughters of the ruling group are induced to marry one another, the growth of the ruling group can be constrained in ways that preserve a legacy for all the families in it

On predicting Russian appetite for nuclear escalation.

Whether Russia has a lowered nuclear threshold is a matter of perspective. Moscow sees nuclear weapons as essential for deterrence and useful for nuclear warfighting in regional or large-scale war. That is hardly a recent development, though it may be new to decision-makers in the United States. There is an erroneous perception in American policy circles that at some point Washington and Moscow were on the same page and shared a similar threshold for nuclear use in conflict. It is not clear that this imagined time period ever existed, but perhaps both countries viewed nuclear escalation as uncontrollable, or at least publicly described it as such during the late-Cold War period. In principle, Russian leadership does view nuclear use as defensive, forced by exigent circumstances, and in the context of regional or large-scale conflicts.

On the accuracy of futurist predictions (usually not very accurate).

In particular, people who were into “big ideas” … generally fared poorly, whether or not their favored big ideas were correct .. Another common trait of poor predictors is lack of anything resembling serious evaluation of past predictive errors … By contrast, people who had (relatively) accurate predictions had a deep understanding of the problem and also tended to have a record of learning lessons from past predictive errors.

Perhaps unsurprising. But the detail of the analysis provides very interesting insight into what kinds of things are predictable.

Slouching toward Utopia. An adaption from his book that quickly details the ‘Neoliberal Turn’ and the worrying trends that face us as it slides away from its political hegemony.

this New Deal Order failed its sustainability test in the 1970s. The world made the Neoliberal Turn … a Neoliberal Order that was hegemonic … It may no longer be hegemonic in the sense of forcing oppositional movements into dialogue and contention with it on its own terms … [but] it persists

And his tentative diagnosis—it is not “‘cultural leftists’, especially high-tech ones, who welcomed de-bureaucratization; Ralph Nader, who welcomed deregulation; Bill Clinton, who was opportunistic; Barack Obama, who was inexperienced and cautious. Those do not seem sufficient causes to me”. Perhaps it is instead that:

potential voters are, today: (a) profoundly unhappy with a neoliberal world in which the only rights that people have that are worth anything are their property-ownership rights and they are thus the playthings of economic forces that value and devalue their property; but (b) are anxiously unsatisfied with social democracy that gives equal shares of access to valuable things to those whom they regard as “undeserving”; and (c) while that economic anxiety can be assuaged by rapid and broad-based growth, it is also (d) stoked by those who like the current highly unequal distribution of wealth and thus seek to make politics about the discovery of (external and internal) enemies rather than about equitable prosperity.

Midlife crises are less spectacular and more depressing, now:

This paper documents a longitudinal crisis of midlife among the inhabitants of rich nations. Yet middle-aged citizens in our data sets are close to their peak earnings, have typically experienced little or no illness, reside in some of the safest countries in the world, and live in the most prosperous era in human history.

Evidence take to support Jaques:

in midlife a human being is forced to come to terms, painfully, with the certainty of his or her own eventual mortality.

The incredible resources required to build a Greek Temple. Another reminder how complex civilisations have always been. Makes me think of that extract from World War Z, the complexity implied by a root beer recipe:

Ingredients:

molasses from the United States

anise from Spain

licorice from France

vanilla (bourbon) from Madagascar

cinnamon from Sri Lanka

cloves from Indonesia

wintergreen from China

pimento berry oil from Jamaica

balsam oil from Peru

Knitting took a long time to invent. So, in fact, did everything.

Collaborative writing project about a shared alternate universe where magic (anomolies) are real. Excellent.

Why ‘cheap things’ don’t bring happiness.

Our reluctance to be excited by inexpensive things isn’t a fixed debility of human nature. It’s just a current cultural misfortune. We all naturally used to know the solution as children. The ingredients of the solution are intrinsically familiar. We get hints of what should happen in the art gallery and in front of adverts. We need to rethink our relationship to prices. The price of something is principally determined by what it cost to make, not how much human value is potentially to be derived from it. … There are two ways to get richer: one is to make more money; and the second is to discover that more of the things we could love are already to hand

Advice for academics. Ten Lessons I wish I had been Taught by Gian-Carlo Rota. Just as useful now as 1996.

Kin-based institutions as an inhibitor of economic growth. Once again, a throwback to Parsons and Murdock: community should be secondary to civilisation. One is always left wondering whether the happiness trade-offs are worth it. Effective Altruists certainly seems to think so.

little attention has been paid to the oldest and most fundamental of human institutions: kin-based institutions—the set of social norms governing descent, marriage, clan membership, post-marital residence and family organization … we establish a robust and economically significant negative association between the tightness and breadth of kin-based institutions—their kinship intensity—and economic development

How To Legally Own Another Person:

A company man is someone who feels that he has something huge to lose if he doesn’t behave as a company man –that is, he has skin in the game

US Congress rebranding UFOs. Probably nothing to worry about.

transmedium threats to United States national security are expanding exponentially

Not just IQ or EQ, but CQ: cultural intelligence determines your success. This is not such a surprise of course. Bourdieu told us long before Henderson. But a good reminder.

Thaler speaks about his nudges. He compares his version of libertarian paternalism to giving directions when asked, but of course no one is asking and who is to say his directions are the right ones. He is right that everything is a choice architecture though, so perhaps it doesn’t matter so much whether we like it. Also fun critique of old-school econ theory—rational actors posed as unscrupulous ‘Econs’.

Why bother reading the bible?

The U.S. Military’s Preparedness for Deterrence:

The U.S. military, designed as it is for offensive expeditionary operations, is ill-prepared for its principal mission of deterrence. Indeed, against nuclear-armed adversaries, several aspects of U.S. warfighting concepts have a high risk of escalation. Further, information and precision strike technologies have progressed to the point where the defense has become ascendant.

On the North Pond Hermit:

For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine. Unseen and unknown, he lived in secret, creeping into homes in the dead of night and surviving on what he could steal. To the spooked locals, he became a legend—or maybe a myth. They wondered how he could possibly be real. Until one day last year, the hermit came out of the forest.

The physics of nothing:

The physicist Edward Witten first discovered the “bubble of nothing” in 1982. While studying a vacuum with one extra dimension curled up into a tiny circle at each point, he found that quantum jitters inevitably jiggled the extra dimension, sometimes shrinking the circle to a point. As the dimension vanished into nothingness, Witten found, it took everything else with it. The instability would spawn a rapidly expanding bubble with no interior, its mirrorlike surface marking the end of space-time itself.

The critical decline of grasslands:

Grasslands rank among the most imperiled and least protected biomes on Earth. They are disappearing even faster than forests, and much of what remains has suffered varying degrees of damage. Their decline threatens a huge chunk of the planet’s biodiversity, the livelihoods of roughly 1 billion people, and countless ecological services such as carbon and water storage. Yet these losses don’t register with the same force as deforestation. Perhaps because we do not notice, or perhaps because we do not care.

Solarpunk, not steampunk

On the Jesuit tradition: the creation of an “unparalleled network of knowledge which superseded religious tensions”

Anthropological Case Study for the Lockdown as a ‘Spiritual and Economic Reset’:

at once an ethical retreat and an opportunity to recalibrate the economy … ethics and exchange were logically linked, though the governing principle was reciprocity, not accumulation

From an Indonesian community who would voluntarily retreat every couple of years. Similar ideas to this more modern-focused take

Re-evaluating Income and Happiness Beyond $75,000:

experienced well-being rises linearly with log income, with an equally steep slope above $80,000 as below it

A rebuttal to the conventional wisdom that income over $75,000 does not increase happiness. Possibly due to continuous experience sampling vs a dichotomous (yes/no) methodology. One wonders if that means people feel differently from moment to moment about happiness than when asked to evaluate happiness overall.

Maybe it’s more convincing when an economist writes a book about it, but luck is at least in part an openness to opportunity. As Camus, “Let us not look for the door, and the way out, anywhere but in the wall against which we are living.”

On the convenient origin myth of the egalitarian hunter-gathering past of humans. Atavism isn’t the answer

Sedentary and hierarchical hunter-gatherers are not unusual. If anything, it’s the profusion of mobile, egalitarian bands that might be the historical outlier.

Having more or less resources available in a community group can create natural selection pressures that work over the course of as little as two generations.

The microbial content of a sourdough starter depends less on location than the way it is made and maintained. I would suggest the same is true of other fermentations, though all this is confounded by the globalisation of food production (e.g. flour).

for many of those who self-identified as “evangelical,” it is not just about devotion to a local church, but to a general orientation to the world.

The article highlights the enmeshing of US conservatism and religiosity. But the trend of religiosity becoming more political than spiritual is a cycle as old as time. The Roman state, the Chinese mandate of heaven, the European wars. Why is it surprising that structured spirituality (how people should live) aligns with structured politics (how decisions are made about how people should live)?

Rising inequality, lower mobility, contempt for the poor and widespread celibacy — we’re returning to the past

Christopher Alexander and his patterns.

SARS-CoV-2 as an opportunity to reflect.

The current global confinement has abruptly halted our blind and aimless rush, built into our irrational, materialistic culture … We simply forget that, in the biological world, uniformity, narrow specialization, monocultures and loss of adaptive capacities have always implied extinction. In fact, we are living in the age of the fastest extinction of life forms, human cultures, languages and traditional ways of life.