Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #19
God and dads, humanities and motorcycles, Dostoevsky and Leibniz, mediocrity and Silicon Valley's civil wars, submarines and AI philosophers, poetry and phones, The Princess Bride and MDMA, and more
Hi everyone,
The thing I like most about building a startup is that it’s a very raw experience. You live and work very close to the fire of creation. Nothing exists — and then they do because of the things you do. I know it’s not for everyone; I know living and feeling like this are for me. I remember my years in film looking around and thinking, Wow, all this energy, all this talent, all this time goes into…. a movie?, something people might watch once, or never? Which I guess is fine for some, but I, I kept thinking, what if we built something real? What would that feel like?
In life we get our answers.
The past months I’ve been revamping our team at Interintellect. I remain a believer in remote work because it gives wider access to and for talent and more lifestyle choices. But I’ve come to think that every company (or artists’ group, lab, extended family) has its right combination of how many people can be scattered in its diaspora and how many must live near HQ. As we’re moving to a Lisbon/NYC setup for good, Interintellect is rethinking who’s where, who collaborates physically, who travels over occasionally. It’s quite fun to plan if you have a little OCD and love maps. Next week, my head engineer is flying over to Lisbon, and I can’t wait to be nerding with him over our new platform all week! After that, I’ll be heading to New York. Read this digest for all the Very Important Updates on heatwaves, airport delays, and of course the best stuff to read over the weekend!
I’ve been reading — for the first time actually, before I had only seen the legendary stage production on TV — György Spiró’s Chickenhead, a play that helped me understand what the culture I was born into looked like around the time of my birth. Spiró was my prof at uni, I took multiple classes with him on Chekhov, Shakespeare, Milán Füst, Gombrowicz, and how theatre works in general, both learned almost everything I know about dramatic writing from him, and spent class after class sobbing with laughter (and soaking my notebooks) because Spiró does understand the comedy in Chekhov, and boy will he tell you about it. In English, you can read his magnum opus, Captivity, an Ancient Roman/Judean Forrest Gump-like story; I haven’t read the translation but the original Hungarian is marvellous.
Some other, shorter, recommendations for your weekend below (just because Captivity is 1,200 pages). If you want to listen to something too, I went on Paul Millerd’s podcast and talked about work, immigration, calling, and doing culture without the culture war.
Let us read…
The Maintenance Race was just the beginning - A new book from Stewart Brand, serialized on Works in Progress
Philosophers don’t write extremely popular books about repairing cars, but two have about repairing motorcycles. Examining what interests them about fixing a motorcycle might turn up some instructive ways to think about repair in general.
Nick Whitaker; Works In Progress
Resourceful Indigenous Kids Survive 40 Days in Amazon Jungle
13-year-old Lesly took charge. She was raised by her grandmother in a remote village and learned to cook at age 8. When her parents were off working, she often took care of her siblings.
After the kids ate a sack of cassava flour they salvaged from the plane, Lesly led them off to hunt and gather. They took with them some clothes, a tarp, mosquito netting, a flashlight, and a music box.
In the jungle, they collected water in a soda bottle and ate avichure (something like passion fruit) and milpesos (which supposedly taste like avocados). They hid in tree trunks to avoid predators; Lesley made shelters from branches held together with hair ties.
Searchers traversed over 900 miles looking for the children, at one point passing within 200 feet of them. In the end, the kids were found about four miles from the crash.
Lenore Skenazy; Reason
Humanities on a Burning Planet
The issue is not whether crises—injustice, suffering, death, hopelessness—demand our attention. They obviously do. The issue, rather, is whether or not these crises demand all of our attention. Poetry and art do not exempt us from striving to improve the world; but neither does the need to save or improve the world excuse us from—and I realise this is a strong claim—our duty to bear witness to the beauty and goodness that are in it.
Brian Treanor; The Philosophers’ Magazine
Taylor Swift Has Rocked My Psychiatric Practice
“What would Taylor Swift do?” is a refrain among certain patients in my practice.
Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell; The New York Times
The Autofiction Writer and the Torturer
Halfway through Yoga, [Emmanuel] Carrère’s narrator—modeled and named after himself—admits, “I can’t say of this book what I’ve proudly said of several others: ‘It’s all true.’” He explains, “While writing it, I have to distort a little, transpose a little, erase a little,” and he alludes to the terms of his divorce settlement: “Especially erase, because while I can say whatever I want about myself, including less flattering truths, I can’t do the same with others.”
Marcus Hijkoop; Compact Magazine
All possible worlds
Leibniz drew on the work of the 16th-century Spanish Jesuit priest Luis de Molina, who posited that God contains ‘middle knowledge’, the knowledge of what a person would do if placed in a given situation. In any given possible world, a person’s actions are fixed but, from one world to another, they may act differently because of changes in their life circumstances. Hence, God gives us a kind of free will, which is essential to holding us responsible for our actions but, by his middle knowledge, places us in the best possible world for the greatest number of people; in this world, our choices are predetermined.
Timothy Andersen; Aeon
Old Motifs Made New
Brown revels in annihilation in other paintings, too. Memento Mori I, featuring a cramped interior scene dominated by a billowing avalanche of pastel colors, pays homage to Heinrich Hoffman’s Victorian-era nursery tales. One presents “Fidgety Phil,” a boy who rocks back and forth in his chair at the dinner table with his stern parents. Unable to sit still, Phil loses his balance and latches onto the tablecloth for support, sending everything—dishes, plates, utensils, food—crashing to the floor. Like many Victorian fantasies (Brown’s 2006 The Picnic, also included in the show, adapts Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland), Phil’s story holds a grim moral for its young audience ... It’s as if Phil’s rebellion has become an act of creation, and a declaration of freedom.
Griffin Oleynick; Commonweal
Get Phones Out of Schools Now
Last year, I banned all screens—even laptops for taking notes—from all of my undergraduate and MBA classes, and at the end of each semester, students strongly agreed that this improved the class for them.
Jonathan Haidt; The Atlantic
Book Review: Raise A Genius! (2017)
The closest Raise A Genius comes to anything like a specific prescription is [Laszlo Polgar, father of chess grandmaster Judit Polgar and her sisters]’s description of what a day might be like in some kind of imaginary Polgar genius school:
In genius education it is necessary that the pedagogue (whether the parents or professional teachers or tutors) stay in direct, constant and intensive contact with the child. Because of this we imagine groups of only 10-15 members. In practice an intensive collaborative contact between the child and an adult must be formed, in which the child does not feel “subordinate.”
Slate Star Codex
A Time of Regret - FOMO and other modern ills
Jorge Luis Borges depicted time as a garden of forking paths, ramifying and intersecting indefinitely and leading to many possible time series. This vision becomes instantiated in the technology of managerial charts, in which possible futures lie on a plane organized as a flow chart … We moderns have acquired a new experience of time, partly as a result of the development and application of probability and decision theory. That altered sense of temporality has, of course, been driven and amplified by new technologies, the key one being the Internet. Older forms of media certainly gave access to other forms of life and to information about unfolding events, but the Internet makes such information more immediate.
Paul Scherz; The Hedgehog Review
Silicon Valley’s Civil War
Those in tech were caught wholly off-guard by the turn in public sentiment. Until then, tech had enjoyed an extremely favorable relationship with the government, academia, and media. In an interview with The Verge two days after the November 2016 election, Zuckerberg confidently stated that, “Personally, I think the idea that fake news on Facebook … influenced the election in any way—I think is a pretty crazy idea.” To make such a statement in the wake of the election suggests that Zuckerberg had expected to be treated the way Facebook had always been treated: as a media darling. When that didn’t happen, Zuckerberg and many other tech executives got into a defensive position ... Tech was at a crossroads.
Nadia Asparouhova; Tablet
Tensor Church - “Type a message to start the conversation”
“Hi! I'm an AI Religion Scholar. I'm able to answer any questions you have that might be answered across all major religious books, mainly the Bible, Quran, Book of Mormon, Bhagavad Gita, and Analects. Feel free to describe a current situation you're in, reference a verse, or ask me a question.”
tensor.church
How to Escape From a Sunken Submarine (2020)
Witt and Thomsen released their captain and allowed him to flood the sub. The increase in the partial pressure of the carbon dioxide was temporarily difficult to tolerate, leading to gagging and choking, but the submarine flooded quickly and the pressure was equalized. The trio got blown out through the liberated hatch door and rocketed safely to the surface like they were the “corks of champagne bottles,” as Bauer later put it.
Bauer, Witt, and Thomsen were the first three submariners ever to successfully escape a submarine. They did it in the year 1851, and they did it through a mastery of the scientific principles of the underwater world. The Brandtaucher was plucked out of its mud hole in the ocean and conserved.
Rachel Lance; WIRED
The Humble Genre Novel, Sometimes Full of Genius (2000)
The purpose of literature is to Delight. To create or endorse the Scholastic is a craven desire. It may yield a low-level self-satisfaction, but how can this compare with our joy at great, generous writing? With our joy of discovery of worth in the simple and straightforward?
David Mamet; The New York Times
Can Poetry Matter? (1991)
By abandoning the hard work of evaluation, the poetry subculture demeans its own art. Since there are too many new poetry collections appearing each year for anyone to evaluate, the reader must rely on the candor and discernment of reviewers to recommend the best books. But the general press has largely abandoned this task, and the specialized press has grown so overprotective of poetry that it is reluctant to make harsh judgments.
Dana Gioia; The Atlantic
Shadows Meet The Clouds, Gray On Gray, Like Dusty Charcoal On An Ashen Brow, Nation's Poets Report (2012)
Citing both the ageless gloom of morning and a weary sun, its astral luminescence wrapped in arid gauze, the nation's poets told reporters this week that doubt lingers in the frail minutes of a young dawn, adding that said doubt was a heathen doubt—a father's doubt—untouched by faith.
The Onion
Young People Have No Idea What We Used to Do After Work. Let Me Regale You.
Matt: I didn’t even have voicemail yet. I think I still had an answering machine, with a tape in it.
Sally: You’d have bar arguments about what was true or not, and you couldn’t resolve it immediately, because no one could check the internet! It would go on forever. For days.
Rebecca: We went to the movies a lot. Like as a pack, after work.
Sally: We went to see American Pie—a whole group of us! Eight or nine of us on a weekday. Who does that now?
Dan Kois; Slate
Grammys exclude AI from winning awards: Only 'human creators' eligible
“A work that contains no human authorship is not eligible in any category,” they said, under new “Artificial Intelligence (AI) Protocols” released Friday.
“The human authorship component of the work submitted must be meaningful," the new requirements read.
USA Today
Resurrection AI Heralds A New Era For Human Rights But It’s Complicated
If a band has a falling out with one band member, who they dismiss for perhaps having the wrong opinions on social issues, how likely will it be that the band employs AI to remove that person from any promotional materials of the past (given that most are now digital) or erase them entirely from a recording?
Tracey Follows; Forbes
Psychedelics reopen the social reward learning critical period
During specific periods of brain development, the nervous system exhibits heightened sensitivity to ethologically relevant stimuli, as well as increased malleability for synaptic, circuit and behavioural modifications. These mechanistically constrained windows of time are called critical periods and neuroscientists have long sought methods to reopen them for therapeutic benefit. Recently, we have discovered a novel critical period for social reward learning and shown that the empathogenic psychedelic MDMA is able to reopen this critical period.
Romain Nardou, Edward Sawyer, Young Jun Song, Makenzie Wilkinson, Yasmin Padovan-Hernandez, Júnia Lara de Deus, Noelle Wright, Carine Lama, Sehr Faltin, Loyal A. Goff, Genevieve L. Stein-O’Brien and Gül Dölen; Nature (I hope they wall went camping!)
Should We Take Vagueness Seriously?
Vagueness is an intrinsic part of quantum mechanics, the study of the world at the atomic and subatomic level. In particular, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle tells us that we cannot know exactly both a wave-particle’s position and its momentum (or other given pairs of properties). We must choose to ignore these features if we want to talk in exact terms. Moreover, at school we learnt that atoms have a nucleus consisting of little spheres – protons and neutrons – with other little spheres – electrons – orbiting it. But this is an oversimplified, if not totally wrong, picture of the atom.
Apostolos Syropoulos; Philosophy Now
Does anyone have the right to sex? (2018)
There is a risk … that repoliticising desire will encourage a discourse of sexual entitlement. Talk of people who are unjustly sexually marginalised or excluded can pave the way to the thought that these people have a right to sex, a right that is being violated by those who refuse to have sex with them. That view is galling: no one is under an obligation to have sex with anyone else
Amia Srinivasan; London Review of Books
On Mary Wollstonecraft
Was domesticity a trap? What was worth living for if you lost faith in the traditional goals of a woman’s life? What was worth living for at all—what degree of unhappiness, lostness, chaos was bearable? Could I even do this without my mother beside me?
Joanna Biggs; The Paris Review
In Experiment, AI Successfully Impersonates Famous Philosopher
“Even knowledgeable philosophers who are experts on Dan Dennett’s work have substantial difficulty distinguishing the answers created by this language generation program from Dennett’s own answers,” said Schwitzgebel, a professor of philosophy at University California Riverside.
This experiment was not intended to see whether training GPT-3 on Dennett’s writing would produce some sentient machine philosopher; it was also not a Turing test, Schwitzgebel said.
Instead, the Dennett quiz revealed how, as natural language processing systems become more sophisticated and common, we’ll need to grapple with the implications of how easy it can be to be deceived by them.
Shayla Love; Vice
Meta says it’s totally fine for 10-year-olds to wear its VR headset, probably
Meta provides a document mentioning many of the potential hazards of VR, from the fact that the helmets are much heavier for a small child than an adult to the potential for eye strain and nausea. All the sections, however, end in Meta saying something along the lines of “but we’ve found no evidence that this is harmful.”
TechCrunch
Dads Can’t Have It All Either
Before my two boys, now 4 and 6, were born, a writer gave me similar advice, much more succinctly. “Work, family, scene,” he said. “Pick two.”
Ryan Holiday; The Free Press
Paternal Postpartum Depression
While sitting on that bench crying, my eternally sad basset hound watching tears run down my face, I tried to get a handle on what was happening ... I knew that what I was feeling wasn’t “normal,” so I started searching online about why I might be feeling this way. Whilst googling things like new dad sad and why am I crying new dad, I came across an article written by a doctor who had trouble connecting with his second child. I read the symptoms and felt an odd sense of relief…
Guest post by “Kevin”, via Emily Oster (Her note: If you’re a dad struggling with your mental health — or want to support someone in this position — take a look at The New Fatherhood’s Therapy Fund.)
The Way of Mediocre Man
Great Men and Women Do Exist, But You Are Not One. It is worth acknowledging that great men and great women do exist. But we are tricked by their proximity. We see them 18 inches away on our screens and assume we are like them. Or that we should be like them. This is a mistake. I have also met many people who are wired to operate at higher levels of energy and total commitment to work, combined with the self-confidence that they are meant to be doing such things. But here’s the thing about these people: they have never had to force themselves to be this way. They have been wired like this their whole lives. They aren’t reading this essay. They are going hard on their thing.
Paul Millerd
Accidentally Wes Anderson
I was … most taken by a scene near the movie’s end, set in an acting class led by Saltzburg Keitel (William Dafoe). The play’s ensemble cast is rehearsing for a scene where all the characters fall asleep on-stage. To this end, Salzburg declares rather eerily: “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep,” presumably a reminder to the actors (and the audience) that everything is play-pretend. A spotlight migrates, zooming in on each actor’s face as they in turn declare: “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.”
Terry Nguyen; Dirt
Dostoevsky (1949)
Can Raskolnikov morally endure the overstepping of the boundaries? And principally: what are the motives which work in him for and against the crime? what moral forces come into play? what psychological inhibitions affect his decision before and after the crime? what psychic forces is he able to mobilize for this decision and for his perseverance afterwards?
The mental experiment with himself assumes its own dynamism; it continues even when it has lost all practical significance. Thus the day after the murder Raskolnikov goes to the flat of the pawnbroker in order to listen again to the sound of the doorbell which had terrified and upset him so much after the killing and to test again its psychic effects on himself.
George Lukács
The Italian Communist Composer Who Wrote Revolutionary Music for the Working Class
[Luigi Nono], born in 1924, grew up a committed anti-fascist, and became a communist during his university years in Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. Nono’s approach to music and politics took after Antonio Gransci’s idea of the “organic intellectual,” an artist or thinker who advocates for the interests of the working class against capitalist and imperialist influence in academia, the arts, and government. Rather than pursue art solely for art’s sake, the organic intellectual sees art as a class effort.
Joe Wilkins; Jacobin
Brain Waves Synchronize when People Interact
Researchers are discovering synchrony in humans and other species, and they are mapping its choreography—its rhythm, timing and undulations—to better understand what benefits it may give us. They are finding evidence that interbrain synchrony prepares people for interaction and beginning to understand it as a marker of relationships. Given that synchronized experiences are often enjoyable, researchers suspect this phenomenon is beneficial: it helps us interact and may have facilitated the evolution of sociality.
Lydia Denworth; Scientific American
Profanity & Profundity: Catching Up With Miriam Margolyes, Our Naughtiest National Treasure
“It’s a strong position if you’re not afraid to be who you are,” she says. “We’re all so insecure. People are frightened such a lot of the time and what I’ve always tried to do is to make people feel more relaxed, make people feel good about themselves, and just try and lessen the torture for people a bit.”
Chris Godfrey; Vogue UK
Could cancer become a chronic, treatable disease? For many, it already is.
There are many and varied explanations for the progress, says Memorial Sloan Kettering oncologist Larry Norton, including “better early diagnosis, better imaging, better blood tests, better preventive measures and better treatments, including precision medicine with gene-profiling of patients’ tumors.” Among all these developments, Norton says he’s most impressed by the rise of immunotherapy, a treatment strategy that alters and enlists a person’s immune system to help fight the disease.
Katherine Ellison; The Washington Post
An Anomalous Wire Made of Manganese and Platinum in the Pacific Ocean Site of the First Interstellar Meteor
Ryan Weed and Jeff Wynn analyzed in detail this unexpected wire and concluded that its composition is anomalous compared to human-made alloys.
OK….. 👽👽👽👽👽
‘The Princess Bride’ at 50
Reiner’s movie is probably better than Goldman’s book, but Chapter Five of the book is better than the corresponding scenes in the film, because backstory is much easier to establish in a novel. Chapter Five brings Inigo Montoya’s father, Domingo, alive for us in a way that the film never even attempts. It also gives us Fezzik’s backstory: his birth, his childhood, his kindly parents, his long career as a globetrotting professional wrestler hated by audiences because of his invincibility in the ring. And it tells us much more about the relationship between Westley and the Dread Pirate Roberts.
After Chapter Five, the novel takes some extremely dark turns. Traditional children’s literature is full of horrors, of course, but the latter half of The Princess Bride presents a good deal of torture as entertainment for the reader.
Kevin Mims; Quillette
Bonus reading: