Newsletter

Hello,

Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:

New Articles:

Meditating for fun and for profit

Excerpt: Meditation has well and truly captured the imagination of wellbeing enthusiasts across almost every sphere they occupy. If you spend more than 30 seconds exploring any influencer’s guide to life, you will discover that meditation is at least part of their answer. Which is a shame, because sometimes, meditation is a bit fucked.

Main idea: Meditation generally involves either acknowledging or excluding thoughts, but can be problematic. Movement-based meditations (e.g. yoga, running) are better for people who can’t sit with themselves. More generally, many everyday activities meet the broad criteria.

New Marginalia: My links and notes on interesting content from around the web:

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. Link

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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. Link

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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. Link

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Status competition is a white-people thing?

We found that Black and White Americans tended to make status comparisons within their own racial groups and that most Black participants felt better off than their racial group, whereas most White participants felt worse off than their racial group. Moreover, we found that White Americans’ perceptions of falling behind “most White people” predicted fewer positive emotions at a subsequent time, which predicted worse sleep quality and depressive symptoms in the future. Subjective within-group status did not have the same consequences among Black participants. Link

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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. Link

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I hope you found something interesting.

You can find links to all my previous missives here.

Warm regards,

Dorian | btrmt.