Newsletter
BDSM as a lazy ideology and other things
January 17, 2025
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
Excerpt: I write a lot about ideologies here. Rituals of thought and behaviour that come out of our need to automatically solve predictable problems of a complex world. I also point out that ideologies ‘stack’. They all sort of ‘stick together’, making these bundles of beliefs and behaviours. Most of these are lazy: stacks of ideologies we adopt just because they’re there. I reckon BDSM might be just one of these. It might be an ideology stack that people gravatate to, not because it’s the most efficient way of expressing some core human need, but because it’s just the most common. Let me explain what I mean.
Main idea: BDSM is an ideology stack—a collection of behaviours borne of a culture that surrounds some core set of human needs. But is it lazy? Hard to tell. It seems easy to explain away parts of it as hormone hijacking and socialisation, but there is something deeper there.
ChatGPT isn’t so bad for the environment relative to other things we do, with specific reference to water consumption (though, how this is defined isn’t clear) and energy use. The graphs are very fun, though of course beware of graph fables.
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Is Elon Musk lying about how good he is at games? Amusingly comprehensive. Would be fairly standard for Musk?.
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Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes:
A common theory is that it was essentially a plot by modernist architects, who had a particular theory of what made a building “good” — “honest” buildings without excessive decoration or ornament … but this explanation misses a huge part of why this transition happened. Notably, this theory completely omits the role of the real estate developer, who has a greater influence than anyone else in how a building comes together … Unsurprisingly, it comes down to economics.
Takes a while to get there, but was interesting to discover why glass curtain walls got cheap.
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Storing data generationally—how to store for 100 years. I found it interesting because I’m very into data preservation, but also, it frames the problem in ways that I think are fairly intuitive. It’s easy enough to pass a box of photos to your grand-children, but how are you going to get your iPhone backups to them? Hardrives fail (faster than you’d think). Clouds rely on companies sticking around, or maintaining their services. Even magnetic tape degrades (although it’s the technical best option). Essentially, the article concludes that it should be a prompt for you to pick a method, any method, and commit to maintaining it.
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Why knowing things is hard. It’s fairly comprehensive, despite being a work in progress. Opinionated, but thoughtful.
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Against Optimisation. It’s very cute, peppered with stuff like:
The new god is called Optimization—and the disciples are legion.
but a skim will make you feel very validated if you’re irritated by the same kind of stuff the author is:
The most recent episode of one of America’s top podcasts—the Huberman Lab—is titled “Optimize your learning and creativity with science-based tools,”
I also like the pivot at the end, that we should be aiming for resilience rather than optimisation:
Resilience can often be produced by systems that feature:
- Diversity (lots of different kinds of components that work together are more robust than a uniform single structure, just as the Estonian power supply was augmented by a wide array of other electricity sources when one cable was severed);
- Redundancy (systems that are designed to work even after an unexpected failure or setback are more robust, illustrated by the Suez Canal, which had no backup option when the route became blocked).
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,