Friday Fodder #3
What's trending and what's transcendent?
Gosh, it's almost like we're making this a thing..
Timely
Diary of a Lover Girl - Sherry Ning brings back romance and feelings and serendipity and all sorts of vibes that can’t be found swiping right. I too want to “live life at a biblical magnitude.”
The End of Joe Biden - Martin Gurri wrote one of the best modern nonfiction books (Revolt of the Public) on social change and technology. Here he talks about Bidenworld, the “establishment”, and the uniqueness of Biden’s public demise. I know there’s still an election going on for another 4 months or something crazy, but the social and political machinations around the first Biden-Trump debate remain the biggest event to understand for 2024.
Javier Milei’s WEF Speech - Milei brought a speech to the WEF earlier in the year that is rare for a politician. It is insightful, rigorous, and unabashedly opinionated. Milei pulls zero punches in rejecting statism. There’s no question that he’s on the right and is attacking the socialist left, but whether you lean Democratic or Republican there’s one thing we can agree on: all of them want more power. You can listen to it too (translated by AI of course).
Analysis of SB 1047 - Zvi does near daily deepdives on AI that are mindbogglingly long. Like, I’m not even sure I can type that much in a day let alone process all the rest of the energy required. Here he dives into the current state of California’s flagship AI regulation. If nothing else, read the tl;dr. Also, which is more dystopian: runaway AI or sweeping regulation in the name of safety from runaway AI?
Timeless
March of Dimes Syndrome - A serious take on what “moving the goalposts” really means and why the vibes get worse while the world gets better.
Meditations on Moloch - Scott Alexander is an incredible writer and this is one of his best pieces. It is long, sometimes obtuse, and absolutely impossible to summarize. Somehow, it’s about AI and tech and physics and the future and some of the most ineffable qualities of humans. Read it slow.
Scenius - “Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes.” Kevin Kelly talks about why talent clumps and how the collective intelligence of a group can make everyone in it better.
The Overfitted Brain - What do dreams actually do? We have ideas, but no answers. This is one of the most interesting answers: that daily stimuli risk “overfitting” to specific datasets and dreams help us generalize. Biology informed the construction of neural networks and ML techniques, and now ML techniques are being used to inform our understanding of biology and brains.
Books
The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han - This book is only 72 pages long, but it packs in a lot of insight about modern life. Like this gem of a sentence: “In social networks, the function of ‘friends’ is primarily to heighten narcissism by granting attention, as consumers, to the ego exhibited as a commodity.” Oof.
Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth - I’m not done this one yet, but I love it already. Each chapter is a dive into a particular form of rhetoric and how it can be used to make writing more memorable. He starts with simple alliteration and moves through other fancy things like aposiopesis (don’t worry, I have no idea what that is yet either) and approaches each with simple language, wit, and wonderful examples. I’m practicing practical particulars with each part of the book. See what I did there? Peachy!
Read Write Own by Chris Dixon - An optimistic view of the third stage of the internet by presenting an excellent history of the first two stages and extrapolating forward with current technologies. Hint: blockchains are important.
Tweets (Bonus!)
Twitter is an endless supply of lunacy, derangement, highly elevated bullshit and, occasionally, illumination. Here’s a couple tweets I saw this week that brought some fire.
Cheers!
