Anna Gát: What to Read this Weekend #8
Forgiveness, luck, trad wives, the good life, adoptees, randomness, the psychopathology of evil, the neuroscience of time - and porn data, Nigeria, metaphors, Vichy France, Ezra Klein, AGI, and more
The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. (Barthes)
The role of luck in success
We play a crucial role in making our own luck. The more we appreciate that, the bigger the role we may be able to play. “Many complain of neglect who never tried to attract regard,” as Samuel Johnson said.
When you see Samuel Johnson’s name, you know it’s Henry Oliver!
The Limits of Forgiveness
[P]eople who do wrong make themselves lesser than the rest of us—through the commission of wrongdoing, they sustain a kind of moral injury that diminishes their rights. If you, like me, are the kind of person who believes that society functions best when we all have equal dignity and equal moral status, then it’s clear that the states of moral exception created when people wrong one another are antithetical to a good society. The best option would be for nobody to ever wrong anyone else. But the more realistic option, when faced with the fact that states of moral exception are potentially desirable and potentially permanent, is to generally counsel forgiveness.
The great Elizabeth Bruenig and Agnes Callard hosted a public exchange on forgiveness and apology, and this writer would have loved to have been there. Luckily, the lectures are being published. (The Point)
Nobody’s on the ball on AGI alignment
Current alignment techniques rely on human supervision. The problem is that as these models become superhuman, humans won’t be able to reliably supervise their outputs. (In this example, the series of actions is too complicated for humans to be able to fully understand the consequences.). And if you can’t reliably detect bad behavior, you can’t reliably prevent bad behavior.
My fellow Emergent Ventures grantee Leopold Aschenbrenner is producing excellent commentary on AGI alignment. I warmly recommend reading him.
The Problem With Everything-Bagel Liberalism
The result is that public projects — from affordable housing to semiconductor fabs — aren’t cost competitive, and that makes them vulnerable when a bad economy hits or a new administration takes over and the government cuts its spending. Liberalism is much better at seeing where the government could spend more than at determining how it could make that spending go farther and faster.
Ezra Klein on something that deeply fascinates me: when subversive/progressive/youthful liberalism becomes the ossified establishment, don’t we all become like the parents in Mrożek’s play Tango, the mess that reactionism is a natural (albeit not desired) correcting response to? (New York Times)
Searching for the good life - How to cope with the fear of death and other anxieties
But let’s not only hope that the future will be better. Setiya concludes with a warning: hope is dangerous. To act we need to hope that we will succeed; but if we fail we risk despair. Without action hope flounders as wishful thinking.
I love Skye Cleary’s writing on flourishing and authenticity because she always approaches the topic from a position of nuance and dynamism. Life is hard and scary, but yes, you can make good choices and make it better. (Times Literary Supplement)
How a sweaty armpit can alleviate loneliness
[H]ow annoyed you are by other people is also part of the cycle of loneliness. People who are more annoyed by other people probably spend more time alone, and people who spend more time alone are probably more annoyed by other people.
By Cathy Reisenwitz. As the kids say, I am feeling seen.
The many meanings of Anouilh’s Antigone - The French playwright Jean Anouilh's retelling of the Antigone myth was claimed as inspiration by both the Resistance and Vichy supporters. But who was the real Antigone?
A frequent misunderstanding sees Antigone as a revolutionary and a rebel. Sophocles, in fact, made her more strictly law-abiding than Creon. She transgresses Creon’s orders because they come neither from Zeus nor from ‘Justice who lives with the gods below’ (l. 450-451). The laws she follows are ‘the unwritten and unfailing ordinances of the gods.’
I wish it was still en vogue to explore political contradictions through playwriting... (Engelsberg Ideas)
Living in Adoption’s Emotional Aftermath - Adoptees reckon with corruption in orphanages, hidden birth certificates, and the urge to search for their birth parents.
Many adoptees have a persistent sense that they don’t exist, or aren’t real, or aren’t human—that they weren’t born from a woman but came from nowhere, or from space. Some picture themselves being birthed by a building—the hospital that was recorded on their paperwork.
Larissa MacFarquhar always breaks my heart. I wish she did so more often. (New Yorker)
How evil happens - Why some people choose to do evil remains a puzzle, but are we starting to understand how this behaviour is triggered?
When Hannah Arendt coined her expression ‘the banality of evil’ in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), she meant that the people responsible for actions that led to mass murder can be ordinary, obeying orders for banal reasons, such as not losing their jobs. The very notion of ordinariness was tested by social psychologists.
We live in the great era of pathologising moral failings, large and small. Some theories, like this one, are interesting. (Aeon)
We Don’t Know Enough About the Pornhub Acquisition - One of the world’s most important websites was sold and nobody cares
Depending on how the outcome is structured, investors in the deal may have access to data, rights, or privileges. None of this would need to be publicly disclosed.
The world’s largest porn site was quietly acquired, and apparently you should be worried. (Every)
Nigeria’s Hollow Democracy
Rage is brewing, especially among young people. The discontent, the despair, the tension in the air have not been this palpable in years.
By Chimamanda Adichie. A stark reminder that social media access does not by itself make politics more transparent. (The Atlantic)
Erik Hoel and Terry Nguyen on Interintellect - Web3 and Journalism
A casual salon by two leading young writers on the future of publishing, editing, and IP. We talked about audience capture, writing quality, gatekeepers, and more.
This whole series is good. Check it out.
Why Trad Wives aren’t real Christians - The family has never been the centre of the church.
For St Augustine, the monastic life pointed towards the kind of society that would characterise the world to come. This isn’t the spiritualised “Heaven” that people mistakenly think Christians believe in, but the real flesh-and-blood Kingdom of God where we will live after we’re resurrected from the dead. There will be no sexual reproduction or death, certainly no marriage.
An exasperating piece that will make you ask whether, in this logic, anybody is a real Christian. (New Statesman)
Isaac’s War - Before dying in the trenches, the Bristol-born, Lithuanian Jewish painter Isaac Rosenberg became the greatest English war poet that nobody’s ever heard of
"I am determined that this war, with all its powers for devastation shall not master my poetry—that is if I am lucky enough to come through all right. I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.”
I have a special place of anger in my heart for people and wars that kill artists. After Szerb, Radnóti, Rejtő, one more story for me to fume about. (Tablet)
Metaphors we believe by
There’s a tight feedback loop between the gods we believe in and the societies we create, which is why we must take seriously the metaphors we believe by.
My friend Aaron Lewis’s most popular essay to date. Worth revisiting regularly.
How Randomness Improves Algorithms - Unpredictability can help computer scientists solve otherwise intractable problems.
There’s something a bit paradoxical about it,” said Rahul Santhanam, a computer scientist at the University of Oxford. “Pure randomness is helping you get a handle on the structure that solves the problem.
In my experience, humans have no clue how to deal with randomness whatsoever. And yet we greatly benefit from its applications. (Quanta)
Daniel M. Lavery on the Reckless Optimism of Advice Columnists - “The letter-writer is free to cheerfully ignore the advice columnist.”
I always said the worst part about being Dear Prudence was not being able to read Dear Prudence. It’s a wonderful job, but it’s a lot more fun sitting in a pew.
Who gives you all that advice? (Literary Hub)
Brain rhythms have come of age
As in rodents, “replay” events in the human brain are also present in accelerated temporal sequences compared with actual experience. Importantly, replay does not simply recapitulate sensory experience but instead follows an order implied by learned abstract knowledge, embedded in the brain’s preexisting knowledge base, thus grounding the relevance of new knowledge.
No biggie, but it looks like time = neuronal space in the brain! (Cell)