Friday Fodder #5
What's trending and what's transcendent?
It’s my birthday today! So I’ll do what I want, thank you very much. What I want to do is read and think about the most interesting goings-on of our times, and share them with you. So no day off here, you’re stuck with me in your inbox. But damn, I’m old.
"Was just talking to my 94-year-old grandmother and I was saying something about how it would be cool if I could be 94 one day, a really long time from now. And she cut me off and said ‘it’s tomorrow.’
-Tim Urban
Timely
Google Thinks Beethoven Looks Like Mr. Bean by Ted Gioia - This is one of my favorite blogs to think about how culture is changing. The composers of two hundred years ago were not all comic book heroes and the nature of our present seems to be on a recurring mission to change the past. The memory hole is a real place, Winston.
Taxing Unrealized Gains is a Terrible Idea by Tyler Cowen - This should seem relatively obvious to nearly anyone, since things without a well-defined price ought to be difficult to assign, you know, taxes, but I guess it still doesn’t hurt to hear it from a real live economist. Prices really do confer information magically and we’ve known this all the way back to 1776, but not everyone believes in invisible hands and it seems like we need to re-litigate the details on occasion in modern polite society.
Crypto Is The Money for AIs by Alex Tabarrok - The more agentic that AIs become, the more valuable crypto will become. If you had to impress someone from 2008 that we’ve truly made progress and that our world is really better and different than theirs.. the top two answers that would seem like magic to them would be LLMs and digital money. We think of these technologies separately but they seem to be on a collision course..
Global Peace Index 2024 - A good checkpoint. There’s more war and famine but also some bright spots like El Salvador and Nicaragua.
Timeless
Things You’re Allowed To Do by Milan Cvitkovick - Weirdly, it’s hard to remember that we humans can just, you know, do stuff. This is an awesome list to remind yourself that you too can hire a research assistant, move, hire a coach (check!), cold call people, or randomly fly to a tropical island for the weekend. You can do these things now if you want.
Good Conversations Have Lots of Doorknobs by Adam Mastroianni - Ever talk to someone who ought to be interesting, but somehow they don’t know how to give or take, or it’s all about their story, and so there’s no leverage available to give the conversation some steam? Those leverage points are called affordances and there’s a skill to them that some people don’t have, that can be learned, and that we should be more conscious of. Because good conversations are one of the top reasons to be alive.
BDFxing, Or Post-Charismatic Distributed Leadership by Venkatesh Rao - I knew a Benevolent Dictator once. We in our car-racing organization literally called him The Benevolent Dictator. He was our leader and he was good at it and we loved him. There’s a lot of consultant-talk about leadership. Rao mixes it all up and sprinkles in a bit about how organizations are changing and becoming more distributed.
Eternity by Sam Kriss - Seeing as it’s my birthday, I’m thinking a lot about the passage of time and nothing I’ve seen is so captivating as this encapsulation of time passing and what it might mean. I’ve never watched nor rewatched Girls, but now I know what it feels like. And God what writing… seriously, this amazing fragment is in a freaking footnote: “We are no longer comprehensible to each other, we inhabit different systems of signifiers, and all the mediating fantasies have melted away…”
Books
The Son Also Rises by Gregory Clark - We think of social mobility as something that can be measured compared to our parents or grandparents, but Clark finds a fascinating method to measure it over ten generations and a couple hundred years. The results are striking: differences in status and income across many different cultures actually do persist over this time period. What does this mean? Lots of answers. And good Amazon reviews. This is a dense read.
Things A Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About by Donald Knuth - Knuth is one of the GOATs of Computer Science and this is one of his least known books, but my favorite. It’s a series of lectures he gives on what computers and math can teach us about God. My favorite lecture is the last, in which he discusses what really large numbers are actually like and what this tells us about the nature of the Divine. Liked it so much, in fact, that I have my own summary and thoughts on the ideas and what it should tell us about natural theology.
WTF: An Economic Tour of the Weird by Peter Leeson - People roll their eyes a lot when they say “why do people do that??”. Usually they think the other people are dumb, which is the basest fundamentation attribution error. Anyway, rational choice theory is a whole branch of economics that works to identify the actual non-dumb incentives people have for their behaviors and this book explains it with some laughs about Victorian wife auctions and legal trials for rats.
Cheers!