Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #21
Popes, sleep, Zuckerberg, Israel, private science, intellectual laziness, Hollywood blacklists, literary celebrity... Dickens, Darwin, Drake, Bruegel, Mary Gaitskill, Kyla Scanlon, Wengrow, and more!
Hi folks,
Excited to share this week’s list with you: it contains both my selection from this past—excellent—week and some of my favourites from the past years. As they say, welcome to my brain.
I went on my friend Erik Hoel’s new podcast where we discussed reading, learning, and the importance of curation. If you’re interested, give it a listen... On the Interintellect podcast, I interviewed the great Helen de Cruz; she has a series coming up with us on free speech and social media, featuring distinguished guests.
We’ve added a big discount on The Point subscriptions to our membership perks, and we have some cool SuperSalons coming up with writers: Simone Stolzoff, Taylor Lorenz, Eliot Peper, Visakan Veerasamy…
Let’s dive in. Read, attend, share, respond — and: enjoy! x Anna
The Social Network Was The Most Important Movie of All Time (2018)
It’s hard to tie changes in broad social phenomena to the arts, since popular tastes are a lagging indicator. Especially in movies and TV, where production takes an eternity. It’s easy to overrate a cultural moment when someone got lucky enough to tap into it: Springsteen didn’t invent post-Vietnam cynicism with “Born in the USA,” he just tapped into it…
The Social Network didn’t invent the startup founder mythos, but it definitely portrayed it better than previous attempts.
Byrne Hobart
How To Be Good (2011)
Parfit finds that his own belief is unstable—he needs to re-convince himself. Buddha, too, thought that achieving this belief was very hard, though possible with much meditation. But, assuming that we could be convinced, how should we think about it?…
“When I believed that my existence was such a further fact, I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer.”
The great Larissa McFarquhar; The New Yorker
The three pillars of stability: legitimation, repression, and co-optation in autocratic regimes (2011)
The article conceptionalizes the three pillars and discusses methods of concrete measurement. It then moves on to explain the stabilization process. How do these pillars develop their stabilizing effect? It is argued that reinforcement processes take place both within and between the pillars. They take the form of exogenous reinforcement, self-reinforcement, and reciprocal reinforcement. To illustrate the inner logic of these processes, I draw on empirical examples.
Johannes Gerschewski
What Gen X feminism forgets
Are the kids alright, or are they really, really annoying? …
The generation gap is real. I don’t deny that my daughters reject me in a hundred subtle ways every day, and that I sometimes smile inwardly to hear younger colleagues’ certainties about how the future will be. But not knowing something yet, not having fully lived it, is not the same as hating those who have.
Melissa Denes; New Statesman
‘I’ve never seen desperation like it’: UK soldiers relive the terror of leaving Kabul
Watching these young men and women re-examine the reality of having to make thousands of life-or-death decisions is sobering and harrowing. The rules of eligibility for a space on a plane kept shifting.
Tim Adams; The Guardian
Will AI inevitably seek power?
To paraphrase Carl Sagan: if you wish to make an apple pie, you must first become dictator of the universe.
Jason Crawford; The Roots of Progress
On Literary Celebrity
I’m not sure my inclusion on the ‘list’ had any effect on my writing life, beyond the massaging of my ego. It didn’t spur me on in any way, or result in any new commissions. Did I sell any more books? I don’t know. Did I feel as though I was now a member of a ‘special club’? No, not at all. Writers are generally pretty ‘unclubbable’.
Caryl Phillips; Granta
Exploration and Exploitation of Victorian Science in Darwin's Reading Notebooks (2017)
Charles Darwin’s well-documented reading choices show evidence of both exploration and exploitation of the products of his culture. Rather than follow a pure surprise-minimization strategy, Darwin moves from exploitation to exploration, at both the local and global level, in ways that correlate with biographically-significant intellectual epochs in his career. These switches can be detected with a simple unsupervised Bayesian model. Darwin’s path through the books he read is significantly more exploratory than the culture’s production of them.
Jaimie Murdock, Colin Allen, Simon DeDedeo
The Public Cost of Private Science
Philosopher of science Jingyi Wu uses network models to [look] at cases where one sub-group of scientists keeps their data private while still learning from all the data other scientists produce. In other words, she models the relationship typical of industrial and academic research. In her dissertation, Wu shows that the sub-group who does not share their data tends to learn better and faster than the one that does. This is in part because they get more information about the problem. Crucially, though, they also learn better because the “academic” group gets less information.
Cailin O'Connor; Nautilus
We Don't Need to Destroy the Economy to Save It
Adam Ozimek published a piece in the Atlantic that basically boiled down to ‘we don’t have to destroy the economy in order to fix it’ - which I love. There’s nuance, of course (rate hikes helped, we needed a bit of a slowdown) but the general idea that we don’t need unemployment to rise to get a Recession to sucker punch inflation is really good - we don’t need excessive pain to get progress. It’s all kind of icky.
Kyla Scanlon
Praying for Rain
We study the climate as a determinant of religious belief. People believe in the divine when religious authorities (the “church”) can credibly intervene in nature on their behalf.
Tyler Cowen; Marginal Revolution
Ancient traits in modern life
Anders Sandberg proposed that we have diverged from our biological evolutionary goals. We are now capable of valuing the quality of our lives over the quantity of our offspring. It is this radical shift, according to Sandberg, differentiates us from other species. However, he also mentions another important fact that differentiates us from other species: our ideas. This thinking, Sandberg says, “is a very separate part of our evolution, it is the evolution of our ideas, our ways of running our culture.” These ideas are not part of our genetic inheritance in any way.
Darcy Bounsall; The Institute of Art and Ideas
How to pass any first-round interview (even in a terrible talent market)
Behavioral interview questions were invented 50 years ago, in the 1970s. Studies quickly found that these questions were 55% more effective at predicting on-the-job performance than the prevailing interview questions at the time. They took the business world by storm and became the de facto interview technique. Today, they are used extensively in tech interviews (by my estimate, more than 60% of interview questions are behavioral)… But it’s been half a century, and behavioral question formats have evolved. Your approach to answering them needs to evolve too.
Coach Erika; Lenny’s Newsletter
'I Was an Artistic Golden Boy But I Never Achieved My Dreams!'
I blame my mean-drunk dad, RIP. I blame ADHD. I blame my gross, fake industry. But mostly I blame myself. I viciously judge myself for not becoming this thing that was so obviously what I was supposed to be, even when the opportunity was there, because (poor baby), I just had too many hangups. Talent lottery be damned.
Ask Polly
Wrong Hand/Wrong Children: Education of Left Handed Children in the Soviet Union (2019)
The opinion prevailed in the Soviet society that left-handedness was a defect that had to be overcome as quickly as possible so that the student joined successfully the general educational process. Statistics created by the Soviet propaganda is available that “proves” that people who are left handed most frequently turn out to be criminals, that they possess homosexual tendencies and different psychiatric illnesses. Therefore the opinion dominated both in the Soviet Union and Soviet Latvia that schools and preschools should do everything to teach children to use the “right” hand – until the perestroika period a mass-scale breaking of the left-handed children took place in the Soviet Union.
Zanda Rubene, Linda Daniela, Dace Medne
How Famous Artists Dealt with Insomnia
Artistic creativity has long been associated with bad sleep. Insomnia was a hallmark of the mythologized suffering, bohemian artist working in the dead of night. Marcel Proust wrote much of Remembrance of Things Past (or In Search of Lost Time) in the early hours of the morning. The liminal state of consciousness between sleep and waking was one of the book’s main themes.
Lydia Figes; Artsy
Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors (2019)
Walker claims that sleeping less than six or seven hours a night doubles one’s risk of cancer – this is not supported by the scientific evidence. In another instance, Walker seems to have invented a “fact” that the WHO has declared a sleep loss epidemic. In yet another instance, he falsely claims that the National Sleep Foundation recommends 8 hours of sleep per night, and then uses this “fact” to falsely claim that two-thirds of people in developed nations sleep less than the “the recommended eight hours of nightly sleep”.
A gem, by Alexey Guzey (Next week, we’ll talk more about why most popular science books suck.)
La Haine: jusqu’ici tout va bien?
Early on in La Haine, a Molotov cocktail is hurled at planet Earth, which encapsulates how the film landed on its release in 1995. The impact was explosive, enormous. The director Mathieu Kassovitz, only 27 years old, was awarded the Best Director prize at the Cannes Festival, where the film received a standing ovation... The current unrest arising from the banlieues is expressive of some of the problems Kassovitz depicted in [the film].
Muriel Zagha; Engelsberg Ideas
A silent ovation (1999)
The questions about Elia Kazan's honorary Oscar have no simple answers. When the 89-year-old director of "On the Waterfront," "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "East of Eden" accepts his Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy on March 20, there will probably be as many boos as cheers. I will be doing neither: just watching silently….
The problem with Kazan's testimony is that the evil of communism and the danger of subversion were not really the point. The purpose of the "un-American" hearings was to smear--to enforce guilt by association, to use congressional power to destroy careers in a way that would not have been proper in a courtroom.
Roger Ebert; Chicago Sun-Times
A Liberal Zion?
I had been told by Americans again and again that these protests concerned only or mostly the “judicial overhaul” that Netanyahu was trying to force through the Knesset. Even before I arrived I knew that this was an incomplete analysis, that the controversy about the Supreme Court was only the beginning of a Kulturkampf that Netanyahu and his government had ignited… The crowd in which I stood that evening was in distinguished company: like dissident liberals in other countries, Israelis have joined the struggle for the resuscitation of liberal nationalism, which may be the most urgent political cause of our time.
I say resuscitation, because Israel — like the United States — was founded on liberal nationalism. The country’s Declaration of Independence is a liberal document.
Celeste Marcus; Liberties
When the map is better than the territory
The causal structure of any system can be analyzed at a multitude of spatial and temporal scales. It has long been thought that while higher scale (macro) descriptions of causal structure may be useful to observers, they are at best a compressed description and at worse leave out critical information. However, recent research applying information theory to causal analysis has shown that the causal structure of some systems can actually come into focus (be more informative) at a macroscale (Hoel et al. 2013). That is, a macro model of a system (a map) can be more informative than a fully detailed model of the system (the territory). This has been called “causal emergence.”
Erik Hoel
The Miseducation of Mario Vargas Llosa
Why, when liberalism is merely the natural and rational position to hold, does it require such a defense? Vargas Llosa allows us a glimpse behind the curtain in his discussion of the argumentative style of the outwardly modest Isaiah Berlin: “Fair play,” he writes, “is only a technique that, like all narrative techniques, has just one function: to make the content more persuasive.”
Jack Hanson; The Nation
Intellectual Laziness
[Cote] argues that unless leadership enforces intellectual rigor, middle managers will manipulate their reported metrics (which he says that “any ninny” can do) while underlying business performance suffers. [He] shares numerous examples of this kind of short-term manipulation…
Philo; MD&A
The Cult Classic That Captures the Stress of Social Alienation
He feels distant from his family and freely criticizes his friends. He trains his considerable wit equally on social norms—which he finds almost uniformly silly—and on himself, for his unease in navigating them. He treats his alienation alternately as a joke and as a life sentence.
A reader discovering Yozo Oba today might see in his ironic detachment and biting self-judgment the telltale signs of an antihero.
Jane Yong Kim; The Atlantic
Book non-review: The Dawn of Everything
But I think reading books is overrated. Instead of moving my eyes over each page, highlighting here and there, I generally prefer to strategically extract what’s valuable and skip the rest. And in this case - based on reading the first chapter and a bunch of online criticism/commentary - I’ve decided that I don’t want to read or engage with this book: I’d just rather spend my precious moments another way. So instead of a book review, this post will explain my process for deciding not to read the book, despite its relevance for my interests.
Holden Karnofsky; Cold Takes
Why books work: A rebuttal to Andy Matuschak
Let’s go back to Matuschak’s test of whether a book hits home: when asked, can you recall and spit back the thesis and elements of a book?
Even if you can’t, that doesn’t mean those ideas aren’t in there. The inability to articulate them aloud is not the same as not having retained much.
Josh Bernoff
Blame food prices for France’s riots
One does not have to look very hard to find it. Just as in 1775, French food prices are increasing… The result of these rising costs has been a decline in French food consumption of nearly 17%, the largest such national decline since the data started in the early 1980s.
Philip Pilkington; UnHerd
Hindsight Devalues Science (2007)
Daphna Baratz exposed college students to pairs of supposed findings, one true (“In prosperous times people spend a larger portion of their income than during a recession”) and one the truth’s opposite.In both sides of the pair, students rated the supposed finding as what they “would have predicted.” Perfectly standard hindsight bias…
Hindsight will lead us to systematically undervalue the surprisingness of scientific findings, especially the discoveries we understand—the ones that seem real to us, the ones we can retrofit into our models of the world.
Eliezer Yudkowsky; LessWrong
The Wages of Estrangement - Paul Tillich on Sin—and Paul Tillich’s Sin
“‘Sin,’” preached Tillich in his most famous sermon, “You Are Accepted,” “should never be used in the plural.”
Charlie Riggs; The Hedgehog Review
Blind outrage - Reading Das Kapital as a Victorian crime novel
Major works published in the same decade as Das Kapital have a similar view of the poor, as victims of an injustice perpetrated by society. Growing public awareness of poverty as a cause of crime is reflected in a remarkable trio of novels: Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862) and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1865). In each of these, the criminality of the poor is symptomatic, not of a moral taint but of social injustice: for they can achieve respectability, if given a chance. Das Kapital, too, can be read as a crime novel…
David Aberbach; Times Literary Supplement
On Killing Charles Dickens
I gave up. I let him pervade my pages, in the same way he stalks through nineteenth-century London. He’s there in the air and the comedy and the tragedy and the politics and the literature.
Zadie Smith; The New Yorker
Looking at the face of the Earth
The painting shows the hunters, one bearing the meagre corpse of a fox, trudging heavily across the top of a wooded hill accompanied by weary dogs, all silhouetted against the stark snow. Below, in panoramic array, a landscape unfolds, marked indelibly by human presence and the ordering activity of irrigation and agriculture…
Bruegel is profoundly involved in acts of articulate seeing.
Martin Kemp; Nature
The True Story Behind the Movie The Two Popes
In 1990, Bergoglio was stripped of his leadership responsibilities and sent to Córdoba in central Argentina, where he spent two years in what he later described as “a time of great interior crisis.” When he returned, it was as a changed leader, with a new perspective gleaned from his interactions with that city’s poor.
Alejandro de la Garza; Time
The Petty Poetry of Drake’s Titles Ruin Everything
Most pages contain only one line.
Samuel Hyland; Pitchfork
Bing and I - AI and Everybody
When I actually started typing to a bot (which did not name itself) I got very unguarded very fast—faster than I would with another human. I also got very credulous in a way I would not get (so quickly) with a human.
Mary Gaitskill
20 years of the nonprofit behind Wikipedia
At the time, Wikipedia was run on just two servers. “I think back to the days when I would order a new set of servers and they would get delivered to my house,” [Jimmy] Wales said. “I would put them in the back of my little Hyundai, drive down to the data center, get my screwdriver, and put them in the racks.”
Wikimedia
As a Rabbi, I’ve Had a Privileged View of the Human Condition
No religious tradition, certainly not my own, looks at an individual and says: “There. You are perfect.” It is humility and sadness and striving that raises us, doing good that proves the tractability of the world and its openness to improvement, and faith that allows us to continue through the shared valleys.
David Wolpe; The New York Times
Email me at anna@interintellect.com.
