Newsletter
Men and women are from earth, fool pt. II and other things
September 20, 2024
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
Men and women are from earth, fool pt. II
Excerpt: I’m going to shit all over this ridiculous 30-year old pseudo-psychology book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus that people keep trying to talk to me about now that gender essentialism is getting trendy again. Here I cover, in depth, the emotional fragility of whatever it is Gray considers to be ‘men’.
Main idea: I guarantee, no matter how sexy traditional gender roles are to you, that you do not want to be like Gray’s ‘men’.
LA system that covers up police misconduct. Not just terrifying, but also what good website design.
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The rationalist community has a very sexy take on approaching the world. It’s the same take as the Effective Altruists (and so no surprise they overlap so heavily). Basically, we make decisions, but our decisions are very emotional. So we should look at the data, and make decisions on the basis of probabilities and deep understanding instead. Something like this, but worded so it sounds like a new idea, and in particular very contiguous with Scientism. They spend a lot of time litigating what this means, because they don’t want to fall into old, bad patterns of thinking. But they are very committed to the problem. It’s just very unfortunate that they suffer from all the same problems any new approach to psychology discipline suffers. They have to rediscover all the shit we’ve been tripping over forever. Here, this person talks about ‘trapped priors’, a statistical idea about how some kind of local minima can be confused for a global one (i.e. we assume something’s x because it has many of the characteristics of x, but actually it’s y, which has similar characteristics but is importantly different). It seems to be a bit of a revelation to this person, and they mention another very prominent rationalist’s similar revelatory discovery of the idea, then they speak of how spirituality might help uncover these kinds of deep psychological truths. But because this movement is a reaction to psychology, they fail to see that actually, probably, psychology might help uncover and in fact already has uncovered this specific deep psychological truth. It’s not a purely rationalist problem. ‘Cognitive science’ has rediscovered and renamed old concepts. Attention literature has advanced substantively past James’ musings in the early 1900s. It’s just, like, how often are we going to keep doing this, you know? There is this language problem that plagues people—say the same idea with different words and it will fail to get over the net. It’s such a waste of time.
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The Spiritual Is Not Weird:
I want to argue that this is all beside the point, since what can legitimately be described as the spiritual actually plays a significant role in our everyday lives. It is not to be found on the edges of experience but is central to the human condition and yet cannot be reduced to naturalistic causes. Through its zealous desire to rid the world of irrational ‘superstition’, naturalism has thrown the baby out with the bath water, leaving us with a world view that seems to leave no room for some of the most important experiences we have. The spiritual is not weird because it is completely familiar. One of its distinguishing features is, I believe, that it does not play a role in the causal nexus of reality
… Take our encounters with other people. We don’t primarily see someone we meet as a set of amazingly complex bio-chemical and bio-mechanical processes. We see a person, a centre of self-conscious subjectivity, with hopes, fears, passions, responsibilities, and a particular story and perspective on the world that is unlike any other … To say what it is we see when we see a face, a smile, a look, we must use concepts from another language than the language of science and make connections of another kind from those that are the subject matter of causal laws.
I’m not the only one pointing this out.
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Oil Explains the Entire 20th Century. Great interview with Daniel Yergin
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The Caliphate And The Modern Middle East. Or, the end of the Judeo-Islamic tradition.
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AI obstacles—there’s no data:
In order to get a nice standardized dataset that you can “do AI to” (or even “do basic statistics/data analysis to”) you need to:
- obtain the data
- digitize the data (if relevant)
- standardize/ “clean” the data
- set up computational infrastructure to store, query, and serve the data
Most industries have obstacles in place that prevent this.
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,