Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #41
Thanksgiving and general thankfulness edition 🍇 Self-help, OpenAI, Thiel, Spinoza, Byatt, Fermat, Van Gogh, Haneke, psychedelics, life coaches, suitcases, sperm, booze, healing the family, and more
Hello dear friends! I’m once again checking in from a hotel in Lisbon; I moved in for a few days thanks to the falling apart of the second highly priced rental I’ve tried to live in within the last 6 months, this time coupled with harassment by xenophobic neighbours. Ah, the joys of the immigrant life! In the hotel, there is heating and hot water at least, and I can work…
Thankfully, my US visa has finally come through. I’ll be in Berlin for 2 weeks in December to finalise it — come and say hi if you’re around, I’ll be hosting Interintellect dinners!
We have an exceptionally strong lineup coming up on Interintellect: keep an eye out for Esther Perel, Morgan Housel, Bruno Maçães (this coming Thursday!), Amy Finkelstein, Tyler Cowen, Yishan Wong, and the screenwriters of Succession and The Handmaid’s Tale.
We have a Black Friday deal on at the moment, for Interintellect memberships: check it out!
If you missed it, check out also my Eyes Wide Shut rewatch thread, very popular on the Interintellect forum right now.
I’m reading the galleys for Tara Isabella Burton’s new novel, Here in Avalon, which is incredibly good. And I went back to some good ol’ Tom Holland too: Dominion.
Below are some gems for your weekend - enjoy reading and let me know what you think! x Anna
Civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them. — Alfred North Whitehead
Power, money and human nature: Thoughts on OpenAI, a tragedy
Note, I think the non-profit board was wrong, but what I despise is the incompetence in how they did what they did. It’s perfectly okay for them to want to stop work in its tracks because they didn’t like the way it went towards their goal - to “safe artificial general intelligence is developed and benefits all of humanity”.
Rohit Krishnan
Divine Vulnerability: Healing the Human Family
With the help of a highly skilled therapist, I was able to see that the everyday disturbance of not feeling valued didn’t start with my wife and therefore wasn’t likely to end with her either. That pain goes back to the foundations of human vulnerability itself.
Thomas Wirthlin McConkie; Wayfare
Useful Books: The past and present of self-help literature (2020)
Despite these working-class roots, self-help quickly became associated with the “aspirational middle classes,” [Harvard professor Beth Blum] notes, who were uneasy about their status in industrial society. Through self-help, they could remake themselves so that their manners, interests, and values reflected those of the aristocracy and helped them retain or advance their class position.
Jennifer Wilson; The Nation
My husband founded a startup. Then our marriage got weird.
As Kyle was conceiving his startup, I found out I was pregnant. For that, I did confront him. I told him I'd feel more comfortable with him becoming a solopreneur if we moved from San Francisco, where rents were catastrophically high at the time, to New York, where we would be closer to family when the baby arrived. He agreed to my condition, even though it meant he'd be a continent away from the investors and talent he needed to court.
Melia Russell; Business Insider
13 Easy Tips for Politicizing Your Thanksgiving Dinner (2018)
If talk of politics starts to ruin the meal because of your failure to take the foregoing advice, don’t be afraid to bring up something else––there are a few other topics that can lead to engaging conversation. Sex is among the most popular––according to the Huffington Post, “Porn websites account for more monthly traffic than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined,” so folks around your table are almost certainly partaking. Money is another national obsession. How much does everyone make? Do they save enough or spend too much? And are there any outstanding debts owed to people at the table?
Never gets old 😆 — Conor Friedersdorf; The Atlantic
Reading notes for the Ethics: For seminar on oneness taught by Helen De Cruz (fall 2023)
1675: Stops publication of Ethics in Dutch, because “stupid Cartesians” and certain theologians were denouncing his views and painting him as an atheist. (Note: we see indirectly in later letters immense frustration and disappointment of S. that he would never see the Ethics published during his lifetime, esp given his deteriorating health. He did leave clear instructions on publication; the entire contents of his desk in an unmarked crate should be on a canal boat to Riewertz, the printer).
Helen de Cruz (listen to our excellent podcast conversation about free thought here)
Everyone is above average
We now have very strong evidence that AI elevates the skills of the lowest performers across a wide range of fields to, or even far above, what was previously average performance.
Ethan Mollick
I Don’t Want to Go Back — Introducing Higher Gossip: Problems in Sex and Love
We are desperate for information about how other people live because we want to know how to live ourselves.
Lillian Fishman, The Point
Why are there so many life coaches in America?
I have paid money to dubious people who promised dubious cures for my health ailments (in addition to the traditional healers who I do believe have genuinely helped me). I have blamed myself for being lazy and not resilient enough, when my health deteriorated after being consistently asked to work overtime at a corporate job, and falsely believed that more yoga and meditation classes would fix me.
Christina Waggaman
To Whom Much Has Been Given: Being welcomed when I was an outsider has taught me to open my own home and to share my abundance
Because I know what it is like to be a stranger and to be invited in.
Marilyn R. Gardner; Plough
How Social Engineering Drives Technology (2020)
Since the industrial revolution, the more machines that are used, the cheaper they become. It became viable to build socioeconomic niches based on mass adoption. This adoption at scale is what gives rise to highly centralized halls of production… Getting people to work in these halls was a entirely separate challenge. The industrial revolution required a breakthrough in the ability to educate masses of people on how to use new machinery.
Samo Burja; Palladium
Psychosis and psychedelics
At a neuroscientific level, there has been continued interest in the relationship between experiences of psychedelics and psychosis. It is still common to use psychedelics to model psychosis in animals, but the generalisation of this research to human beings is contested by some scientists.
Phoebe Friesen; Aeon
Pierre de Fermat’s Link to a High School Student’s Prime Math Proof
Pierre de Fermat has his name on one of the most famous theorems in mathematics. For over 300 years, Fermat’s Last Theorem stood as the ultimate symbol of unachievable mathematical greatness. In the 1600s, Fermat scribbled a note about his proposed theorem in a book he was reading, claiming to know how to prove it without providing any details. Mathematicians attempted to solve the problem themselves until the 1990s, when Andrew Wiles finally proved it using new techniques discovered hundreds of years after Fermat died.
Patrick Honner; Quanta
How to Pack a Suitcase: Lessons From My Late Father
Suitcase packing, applied, means you have the extraordinary ability to think, evaluate, and use your individual standard of judgement. You are free to order your life in a way that gives you control in overcoming inevitable challenges.
Sherry Ning
Understanding Q-Learning
OpenAI leaked Q so let’s dive into Q-Learning and how it relates to RLHF.
Q-learning is a foundational concept in the field of artificial intelligence, particularly in the area of reinforcement learning. It's a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm that aims to learn the value of an action in a particular state. The ultimate goal of Q-learning is to find an optimal policy that defines the best action to take in each state, maximizing the cumulative reward over time.
Brian Roemmele
The intricate art of AS Byatt
The richness of her work and the seriousness of her intellectual endeavour made Byatt more a part of a European tradition than a British one.
RIP AS Byatt, the great! — Erica Wagner; New Statesman
Against Alcohol (2022)
Alcohol is a drain on economic growth, damaging productivity and forcing us to spend money on healthcare that could be used elsewhere.
Fergus McCullough
Where to start with: Colette
If you don’t fancy the gorgeously frenetic prose of the Claudine series (translated by Antonia White), then you should start with The Vagabond (1910) translated by Enid McLeod. It’s here that Colette finds her voice in the measured sensuality, melancholy and humour of a woman determined to move on.
James Hopkin; The Guardian
Lessons from the 19th Century
In the 1940s and 1950s America’s corporate and state bureaucracies were simply far more effective at accomplishing their aims than they are today. Most of what I have written on this topic thusfar is focused on how people worked together and successfully solved problems in the world before management.
Tanner Greer
Flaubert’s letters are as hilarious and humane as his best fiction
When a friend urged him to hurry up and publish something already — he was, by this time, into his 30s — he replied, “May I die like a dog rather than hurry by a single second a sentence that isn’t ripe!”
Becca Rothfeld; The Washington Post
Sailors say they have discovered new way to defend against killer whale attacks – heavy metal music
Some say they have successly deterred orcas by playing loud heavy metal songs through underwater speakers, describing the method as a “game changer”.
Shweta Sharma; The Independent
What is your favorite book that no one else you know likes?
My response:
Some of my favourite novels (War and Peace, Howards End, The Age of Innocence) are widely revered.
Some (Oz's Black Box - Daniel Stein, Interpreter - The Luminaries - The Fawn - Journey by Moonlight) less so!
Tyler Cowen —> Twitter
Cat Couplings
A cat coupling is a kind of phrasing where it’s unclear whether an attribute is meant as justifiably picking out a subset, or unjustifiably describing the whole, and as a result strengthening the connection between the concept and the attribute.
John Nerst; Everything Studies
The Roaring 20s are back on track
Will the productivity boom last? As you can see from the graph above, the quarterly numbers tend to be pretty volatile; the line might go back down in the coming months. But this burst of productivity is encouraging for two reasons.
Noah Smith
Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself (2017)
“I don’t want to dismiss ethical concerns here, but I worry that ‘conflict of interest’ gets overly weaponized in our politics. I think in many cases, when there’s a conflict of interest, it’s an indication that someone understands something way better than if there’s no conflict of interest. If there’s no conflict of interest, it’s often because you’re just not interested.”
Maureen Dowd; The New York Times
A History of Getting Hammered, and Why Some of Us Should Keep Doing It (2021)
Drinking not only allows wary, self-interested individuals to drop their guard and collaborate, writes [Edward Slingerland], it also facilitates the creativity and playfulness our species needs to innovate and survive.
Zoë Lescaze; The New York Times
Isabelle Huppert Misses Michael Haneke Films as Much as We Do: We Need ‘His Vision of the World’
“He’s doing OK. We are in touch, yes, we are in touch,” she said in a Zoom interview out of Paris, “but you can’t have Michael Haneke doing anything he doesn’t want to do. Obviously, he’s been not busy for the past six years, as you say, and I don’t know. I have no idea if he will work again, if we will work together again. He’s been through a difficult time maybe after COVID. I don’t know enough. He’s in good shape. I can only make wishes that he will be working again.”
Ryan Lattanzio; IndieWire
Minds of machines: The great AI consciousness conundrum
“If we as a field will be able to use the theories that we have, and the findings that we have, in order to reach a good test for consciousness,” [Liad Mudrik, a neuroscientist at Tel Aviv University] says, “it will probably be one of the most important contributions that we could give.”
Grace Huckins; MIT Technology Review
Are Robots Replacing Women?
Structural transformation, exposure to women in positions of prestige and collective reflections encourage two ideological shifts:
- People come to personally believe that women are equally competent and deserving of status;
- People increasingly realise that gender equality is broadly supported in their wider community.
Growth alone is not sufficient, however. It does not necessarily create labour scarcity. If growth is based on robots or resource extraction, companies can profitably maintain their tastes for discrimination. If there’s a surplus of skilled men, willing to work ultra long hours, then they themselves will compete to please the boss. There is no call for women.
Alice Evans
Studying the Swarm
And there are gametes to spare. All over North America, unused embryos, eggs and sperm are termed as “abandoned” in fertility clinics — customers no longer wanting or able to pay yearly storage fees simply ghost. In the US alone, estimates for the total of abandoned embryos range between 90,000 and into the millions.
Kate Barss; Maisonneuve
Having a negative perception of masculinity is linked to worse mental health, study finds
Men who reported greater satisfaction with their personal growth had significantly higher mental positivity. This was the strongest predictor of mental well-being in both countries. Contrary to stereotypes of declining happiness with age, the study found that older men reported higher levels of mental positivity… Perhaps most notably, the study found that men who had a less negative view of masculinity reported higher levels of mental positivity.
Eric W. Dolan; PsyPost
Twitter’s Former Head of Trust and Safety Finally Breaks Her Silence
Biz was in full social mode and Ev was in full listening mode. It was a sort of yin and yang vibe that they had going. I remember that they very firmly believed spam was a concern, but, “we don’t think it's ever going to be a real problem because you can choose who you follow.” And this was one of my first moments thinking, “Oh, you sweet summer child.”
Lauren Goode interviews Del Harvey; WIRED
Stop Overrating the Discourse
I’m not the first person to note that Twitter is not real life, but when people say that, what they usually mean is that voters think differently than people who are active on social media. That is true, but this perspective ignores activists and interest groups without much of an online presence, or even one in the press, but with a great deal of real world influence, who may not be any more representative of public opinion than Twitter is.
Richard Hanania
The Continuity of Parks
Without looking at each other now, rigidly fixed upon the task which awaited them, they separated at the cabin door. She was to follow the trail that led north. On the path leading in the opposite direction, he turned for a moment to watch her running with her hair let loose. He ran in turn, crouching among the trees and hedges until he could distinguish in the yellowish fog of dusk the avenue of trees leading up to the house. The dogs were not supposed to bark, and they did not bark.
One of my favourite micro-stories, by Julio Cortázar
Huh? Wow! — A tour round the imaginary museum
In the past couple of years I have, in my capacity as an art critic, attended a seven-hour-recital of a looping two-and-half-minute passage from Franz Schubert’s “An die Musik”; travelled via virtual reality simulation to the surface of the moon not once but twice; watched an opera about climate change set on an artificial beach in an Italian military complex; taken a lesson in Sinhalese at a Manchester museum; and chaired a discussion about a video set in a Silicon Valley dystopia featuring a transgender dancer who brings Ayn Rand to climax. That all of these events have been framed as contemporary art could be taken as evidence that the term is meaningless, or that it has become so highly coded as to be indecipherable to anyone without a specialist education. Yet the fact remains that I found all of the above experiences in some way moving or enlightening…
Ben Eastham; Times Literary Supplement
Tamago-Ya of Japan: Delivering Lunch Boxes to Your Work (2007)
Tamago-ya is a family-owned business located in Tokyo, Japan. The company has captured a unique position in the market of selling pre-packaged lunch boxes to business professionals, by maintaining high quality and reliable delivery. In order for Tamago-ya to guarantee such a high level of customer service, it has created an operational culture where those who deliver orders also engage in judging customer demand and feedback, those who supply food materials must be able to respond to variation in demand on a daily basis, and those who plan the production and distribution schedule must forecast and adjust on a real-time basis.
Shinya Fushimi, Jason Kaminsky, Veronica Rocha, John Tsou, Seungjin Whang; Stanford Business
The Woman who made Vincent famous
In 1905, [Johanna van Gogh-Bonger] pulled off her most significant feat to date: the largest ever retrospective of Vincent’s work, held at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. More than 480 artworks were on display. Following this exhibition, the prices of Vincent’s work rose rapidly.
Van Gogh Museum
What is it like to be a crab?
Our current neurocentrism is in tension with the method of studying simpler systems first. Studying convoluted examples of conscious animals to understand consciousness is like reverse-engineering the electric calculator to understand how machines perform addition, rather than starting with the abacus.
Kristin Andrews; Aeon
Liz Phair on the Music That Made Her
Three decades later, Guyville has never stopped being relevant as a rejection of indie rock beta-male fuckery, but also as an affirmation of something bigger: embodied female sexuality and a hard-won sense of autonomy.
Jill Mapes; Pitchfork
Harmony Korine Finds New Forms for His Twisted Visions
Conversations with Korine tend to careen around and take off on such flights of fancy, as if he’s too creatively restless or dispirited by convention to stay rooted in humdrum reality. His mindset matches an artistic style that, from the beginning, has been less multidisciplinary than omni-disciplinary.
Andy Battaglia; Art in America
How 2023 scorched our dinner plates
More than 73 percent of federal crop insurance payouts are due to weather: heat, drought, excess moisture, hail, and frost. “Last year had the highest crop insurance payments in the history of the program,” Schechinger said. Payouts totaled $19.13 billion, up from $2.96 billion in 2001, according to the Environmental Working Group. In addition, the USDA is providing more than $3 billion in disaster relief to farmers.
Umair Irfan; Vox
Bonus:
Complicating the Narratives (2019)
In a meta-analysis of more than 100 studies on fear messaging, Kim Witte and Mike Allen found that fear without a sense of agency backfires — leading people to respond with denial, avoidance and disgust. The vast majority of news stories function precisely this way, which should give us pause. Generating denial, avoidance and disgust cannot be a good business model. But when people are reminded that a problem has possible solutions (some of which they agree with and can act on in the near future) they are more open to considering the warning.
Amanda Ripley; Solutions Journalism