Newsletter
Ideologies stack and other things
June 15, 2024
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
New Articles:
Excerpt: There’s a fairly well known observation that fringe or conspiracy theories ‘stack’. If I’m the kind of person who suspects we never landed on the moon, then others are much more likely to assume I harbour doubts about who shot JFK, or concern myself over the ‘real’ motives around the public health response to the Covid-19 pandemic. But really, all theories ‘stack’ in a similar kind of way. Mainstream ones too. What I think makes these stacks interesting is looking at just what motivates these different stacks. When we compare those motivations to our own, we can learn something valuable about ourselves. Then we can learn more by asking why different stacks look different. Let me show you what I mean.
Main idea: Fringe theories always seem to cluster together. It seems weird, but mainstream theories also do, we just don’t often examine them. Examining why different theory stacks arise reveals much about our biases, ideologies, and the influence of community-based knowledge.
New Marginalia: My links and notes on interesting content from around the web:
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. Link
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The genetic bottleneck in humans.
The bottleneck occurred between 813,000 years ago and 930,000 years ago, and reduced an ancestral human species to less than 1,300 breeding individuals. The issue persisted for 117,000 years, and aligns with a chronological gap in the African and Eurasian human fossil records in that period. Link
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A nice piece on the scientific history of alcohol and health. Explains the origins of the myth and the more recent reversal. It’s a good demonstration of how the biases in the scientific ritual play out. Link
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Mostly useful for the high level ideas on how to prompt AI better. Link
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Retrospective on AI by Jack Clark (of Anthropic fame). Obviously bullish, but interesting nonetheless. Link
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,