Anna Gát's "Smart Watch": What to Read This Weekend #67
Birth and death, love and desire, Cultural Christianity and Puccini, betrayal and learning, Megalopolis and VR glasses, fertility and icebreakers, and much more...
Hi friends,
As always there is so much good stuff to read, but this week I’ll keep this short: tomorrow is a big day at Interintellect as we’re throwing our Ideas of Power festival in New York City.
If you’re a member, you will be able to watch the livestream and interact with the speakers online by visiting the “ideas of power” channel in our community Discord. (If unsure how to access Discord: log into our website as a member and click on Update Discord.)
During the past week, apart from the always fun online events hosted on the Interintellect platform by a myriad of fascinating hosts, there were in-person Interintellect socials in Washington DC, Austin…
I also, finally, updated my personal website! Background, Interintellect’s beginning, and other trivia.
I have just published, for my new podcast The Hope Axis, the video for episode #9 with death doula Emma Acker. A truly incredible person. (Audio coming soon.)
“Professional end-of-life doula Emma Acker joined me to discuss the mystery of dying -- and the forgotten art of being there with the dying. Her job is just this, and we talked about the various stages of departure, how the family might react, what administrative things one needs to take care of. But also about dying when young versus old, when in pain versus no pain, when religious versus atheist. There is no one like Emma!”
👉🏻 I also have just recorded an episode - episode 10 - with the one and only
🔥
This was a wide-ranging episode about his podcasting journey, the art of getting started, how to build a friend group, why
is the GOAT, how Zuck agreed to come on the Dwarkesh Podcast, why AI should be on everyone’s mind — and our mutual obsession with the World War II (and why that’s as much of a worthwhile obsession as Ancient Rome). We talked about religion, honesty, working in public, the importance of reaching out. And tycoons, secrets, boredom and more. Video soon.And now, let’s read… !
I should have been braver
The most direct piece of medical evidence there is in this case is two high readings of insulin observed in two babies after the prosecution’s experts went through various medical records of babies treated at the hospital. In 2019, they found 2 abnormally high readings of insulin dating from 2015, which they argued were proof that someone attempted the babies with insulin (the babies survived.) The only problem is that the assay that was used to measure insulin was not designed to show exogenous insulin administration, something that is actually written on the test itself.
I for one think is very brave. This trial is a major fiasco and a moral stain on Britain.
Lucy Letby was not working on day Baby C was harmed, BBC investigation finds
Letby was found guilty of killing a boy known as Baby C by injecting air into his system at the Countess of Chester Hospital in June 2016… “Pivotal evidence for one of the Lucy Letby murder convictions is deeply flawed, as she appears to have never met the baby at the time it was obtained.She had never been on shift. This, quite obviously, calls into question whether the conviction it underpins is safe.”
Sarah Knapton; The Telegraph — the stuff of nightmares.
Schooling Myself
My own homeschooling fused religious and institutional anxieties to produce a Christian-right unschooling. Before I was born, my mother had worked at a Christian school as a liaison with homeschooling families, and their children’s freedom to pursue their own interests had beguiled her. She didn’t want her own children to “get beaten down by school” like others she’d seen, she told me recently. Homeschooling, she believed, could keep us safe and set us free.
Elisa Gonzalez; The Point
Against The Cultural Christianity Argument
The challenge of modernity has felled both Christian theocracies and the virtuous liberalisms of the past alike. If modern atheists want a society better than our current one (or rather, better than wherever modern culture is leading us) they'll have to invent some new cultural package that's never been seen before.
Scott Alexander
The Unraveling of Space-Time
“To be clear, the potential emergence of space-time doesn’t make it any less real. Most of our world is emergent. Tables and chairs emerge from grids of jiggling molecules. You emerge from bursts of electricity between your neurons. The discovery of cells or atoms has in no way robbed us of our reality. On the contrary, emergent descriptions are in some sense more real than fundamental ones…”
Various authors; Quanta - Excellent and interactive
Metascience 101 - EP4: "ARPAs, FROs, and Fast Grants, oh my!"
Stripe Press’s Tamara Winter talks through the broad range of scientific funding institutions with guests Professor Tyler Cowen, Arc Institute Co-Founder Professor Patrick Hsu, and Convergent Research CEO Adam Marblestone…
Tyler Cowen: “I like the idea that it may be temporary: you achieve the end and then the institution dissolves. But people aren't used to that. Many institutions prolong themselves, carrying overhead, keeping friends and associates in jobs. There's something pernicious about that, but it does, in some ways, make it easier to hire basic talent. If you're going to do it differently, you have to be more innovative. You need a strong soft network to bring people in, and you need to pay them pretty well. I think that's part of the problem: people aren't used to the model of potential temporariness.”
Tim Hwang; Macroscience
No, Culture is Not Stuck
The Internet was supposed to democratize everything, do away with gatekeepers and in some cases, craft. We were prepared for that: the masses overtaking the institutions. But that’s not what happened. The gatekeepers and the craft both changed. And with it, so did ideas around authorship. It wasn’t a simple fight between independent creators and established ones. It was a complete reshuffling.
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She’s bloody clever — Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple approaches 100
Jane Marple made her first appearance in “The Tuesday Night Club”, published in the Royal Magazine in December 1927. From the beginning, Aldridge says, she was “a reassuring presence”, created at a turbulent time in Christie’s life. The year before had seen a bewildering mixture of professional success and personal crisis: publication of her brilliant, controversial novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; a deep depression following the death of her mother; her husband’s adultery and the end of her marriage; and the scandal surrounding her highly publicized disappearance. Little wonder, then, that she should crave someone whose “entire raison d’être was to be a calm point in a stormy sea”.
Nicola Upton; The Times Literary Supplement — no wonder I adore Miss Marple
The new media barons
As has been happening elsewhere (namely the United States, with the sale of Time magazine to the Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff and Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post), money made in other markets is buying into the press. Will the new media moguls save Britain’s oldest publications – or change them beyond recognition?
Will Dunn; The New Statesman
Michel Houellebecq’s Outlook for an Ailing France: C’est Fini
The French writer Michel Houellebecq has the sort of notoriety, Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote, that makes it easy to talk about him as if you’ve read him — even if you’ve not.
Dwight Garner; The New York Times
Can we scale cultures that support learning?
I also think that AI systems and zero knowledge proofs will provide us with interesting new design possibilities that could be useful when building better cultures.
Understanding Desire in the Age of Ozempic
GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro mimic a hormone that not only stimulates insulin production but also interacts with the brain’s reward circuitry. Scientists are still working out exactly how people respond psychologically. Despite some anecdotal reports of depression and anxiety, a recent study didn’t find an uptick in neuropsychiatric issues with semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, compared with three other antidiabetic medications; another found that the drugs are not significantly associated with increased suicidal thoughts. The question of desire is more subtle. Davide Arillotta, a psychiatrist at the University of Florence, recently led a study that analyzed tens of thousands of English-language posts about GLP-1 drugs on YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok and found that, unsurprisingly, many express enthusiasm about weight loss. But other people “reported a lack of interest in activities they once enjoyed, as well as feelings of emotional dullness,” he told me.
Shayla Love; The Atlantic — I often think about this
Great Works: An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768, by Joseph Wright of Derby\
Yes, just look at the fascinating range of responses, and see how they differ so dramatically from the youngest to the eldest. The youngest are fearful in the extreme – one of them cannot even bear to look at this poor, suffering bird – and the oldest (that seated man on the right of the table who leans on his cane) is the most steadily ruminative. And then, quite different again, there is the young couple who are standing to the left of the man who is the master of ceremonies. They are engaging in a bit of idle banter, aren't they? They are here because they are interested, but most of all they are pleased with each other, we feel.
Michael Glover; The Independent
Why you shouldn't (and probably can't) support anyone '100 per cent’
You might have gleaned that I don’t like consequentialism from the title of this Substack. ‘The ends don’t justify the means’ is a classic criticism of the consequentialist family of moral theories, which most famously includes utilitarianism. And I’ll admit that I am planning to use this Substack, sometimes, to attempt to further my life goal of countering consequentialist reasoning.
New Substack by Rebecca Lowe
Puccini’s battle of darkness and light
Puccini tests our tolerance for suffering to its limits.
Alexandra Wilson; Engelsberg Ideas
The VP Debate Shows How Performance Shapes Our Democracy
And as Americans watched on, the debate gave a glimpse into how much American politics relies on the power of performance to shape the way we move forward as a democracy.
Julia Sonnevend; Time
Politics in the ‘New Normal’ America
“On one level nothing happens, but it is nothing at the very center of the world you are part of,” the Newsweek correspondent Howard Fineman said to The New York Times by way of explaining the apparently intractable enthusiasm of American reporters for covering political conventions. “You are immersed to the eyeballs in the concentrated form of the culture you cover.”
Joan Didion; The New York Review
Are all relationships transactional?
Transactional relationships aren’t necessarily bad. In fact, they’re mostly good, and some of them can even look similar to non-transactional relationships so long as incentive structures are well aligned.
Game Theory Challenged: Humans Cooperate Despite Betrayal
Humans tend to cooperate even after being betrayed, defying traditional game theory expectations.
Neuroscience News
How does Low Fertility Affect Economic Growth, Worldwide? — With Jesús Fernández-Villaverde
“You're saying that the size of the working age population matters because people are generators of ideas and that's a primary driver, a structural determinant of structural transformation and growth and productivity. And even if some AI can do some of those things, then the problem is how do you tax AI? How do you get the government revenue to build all those essential services? So let me have, if that's a fair summary, let me have two points. So one is, okay, so we need government services to pay for stuff. But could we make paying for stuff a bit cheaper? So for example, can you solve a bunch of old age issues by having robots, you know, when I'm decrepit and lying on the floor, can a robot pick me up or something like that? And the other question, I guess, is, you know, so what I was saying earlier, and perhaps I didn't phrase it well is, I worry that AI development is shaped by market demand. And at the moment you see a lot of that being directed into longevity. So AI is not necessarily improving productivity, it could be directed to making rich people have much longer lives. And the issue then is then you get a pensions problem. You're not solving the production of, you're not increasing output, you're just increasing that dependency ratio.”
Alice Evans of course!
Why the U.S. Can’t Build Icebreaking Ships
Because polar bodies of water are often covered in ice, accessing these regions by ship requires specially designed ships which can break up the ice and create a path for other ships to follow. The need for icebreaking vessels will remain even as climate change reduces the extent of sea ice: paradoxically, as new polar routes become accessible and sea ice becomes more mobile, the demand for icebreakers is likely to increase. Russia has an aging fleet of more than 40 icebreakers, with several under construction. China has somewhere between 5 and 7 icebreakers (depending on exactly how you define “icebreaker”), with more under construction.
The U.S., on the other hand, has allowed its icebreaking capabilities to wither. The Coast Guard has handled all U.S. icebreaking since 1966, and estimates that it needs 8-9 polar icebreakers (4-5 heavy and 4-5 medium) to fulfill its needs. But it currently has only two: the heavy icebreaker Polar Star, and the medium icebreaker Healy. The U.S. hasn’t built a heavy icebreaker since 1976.
Brian Potter — guys!!
The Madly Captivating Urban Sprawl of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis”
Coppola’s protagonist is a controversial architect and designer named Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), who has the ability to pause time. “Time, stop!” he says, and everything freezes: people, cars, the clouds in the sky, even the crumbling of a public-housing development that was being demolished on Cesar’s own orders. But his supernatural powers are limited. Eventually, he must allow time to start up again, with a reluctant snap of his fingers.
Justin Chang; The New Yorker — I’m watching it next weekend, wish me luck
College students used Meta’s smart glasses to dox people in real time
In the demo, you can see Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, the other student behind the project, use the glasses to identify several classmates, their addresses, and names of relatives in real time. Perhaps more chilling, Nguyen and Ardayfio are also shown chatting up complete strangers on public transit, pretending as if they know them based on information gleaned from the tech.
Victoria Song; The Verge - OK yeah, let’s do the future but not this one