Friday Fodder #6
Trending or Transcendent? Pssh.. be honest, politics is everywhere you look
Something something a debate happened this week. But also OpenAI released the O1 model and that seems far more civilizationally important.
Timely
The Ozempification of Everything - I just had my physical (all good, high cholesterol just like every year since I was 4) and I also asked my Doc about Ozempic. It’s the first time he’s not opposed to a diet pill because it really does seem to be self-control in pill form.
And yet… Tom White calls this “pharmaceutically-enabled stolen valor”, which is a fantastic and politically current turn of phrase, and I think he’s right. There’s a place in our lives for convenience and reduced friction and there’s a place for putting in the hard work and making shit happen brick by solitary brick. The problem of the modern world is to decide which should happen when. For now, I’m still in the gym 5 days a week.Human Drivers Are To Blame - I think Tesla is going to beat Waymo in the full self-driving department. That doesn’t mean Waymo is fairing poorly! And it’s great to see a breakdown of what happens when Waymo goes wrong. And it turns out that what usually goes wrong… is humans.
Your phone is why you don’t feel sexy - I love this muchly. Eros is an embodied experience and even after thousands of years, it is still underrated. This is a reminder of the chase, the urgency, and the necessity of friction in interaction. In a world where OnlyFans is in the news with billions in profit (and GLP1s, see Item #1), a reminder to embrace both risk and spontaneity.. but also modesty, secrecy, and discretion.
It’s Almost Shameful To Want To Have Children - When I look at the photographs in this article all I see is fossil fuels. Oil in the nylon of the clothing. Oil in the plastic they’re using to do their fancy composting. Oil in the masks they use to hide their faces during protest time. The modern world is made of petroleum and concrete and these are wonders of modern technology. They helped make a world where child mortality decreased by orders of magnitude. Just like capitalism helped make a world where you can sip a Starbucks latte while you denounce the rise of corporate oligarchy.
Related: Camila Thorndike just joined the Harris campaign as chief-climate-hawk. Now, I’m 100% behind sustainability and getting climate right (hey - nuclear not coal Germany!), but in her interviews I don’t believe the climate focus when it seems so inexorably linked to the death of capitalism, and fear of fascism, and racial justice. I mean, if climate is so existential why don’t we just focus on that? And, to my mind, that means a little more than making a pretty salmon mosaic out of 1200 pieces of cardboard that symbolizes swimming upstream for “beauty and love”. I wish she could meet Boyan Slat. Greta too, since she’s suddenly very preoccupied with Palestine.
Mostly, I just wish some of these people read a little less Naomi Klein and a little more Vaclav Smil.
<rant over>.. can you tell I dislike the disingenuous climate crowd?
Timeless
Barbell Strategies - Dwarkesh asks us to replace our normal behaviors and habits with an extreme duality. I’m a big fan of iterated and consistent progress and this serves as an excellent thought experiment to see when you should try something different.
The Most Precious Resource Is Agency - Kids used to do stuff besides sit in a classroom before they were 18. They helped adults in a workshop, learned a trade, or apprenticed to an artisan. Kids are mini-adults and, like adults, they like to feel useful. And agency is a skill like any other, and needs to be cultivated to grow. Where are the studios, anyway?
Science Is A Strong Link Problem - I am convinced that understanding the differences between strong-link and weak-link problems is one of the most powerful mental models available. Nearly all policy disagreements are fundamentally about groups seeing the same problem as strong-link vs. weak-link. It’s the tension between capitalism and socialism. Between educational policies. Between golf and baseball. Between focusing on income inequality or trickle-down economics. Even between loving or hating Elon.
The Silurian Hypothesis - Remember the TV Show Dinosaurs? I always wondered… if dinosaurs did have civilization… would we be able to know? After 100 million years would there somehow still be the vague noutline of a microwave in the fossil record? The Silurian Hypothesis tries to answer this, and says some interesting things about the Drake Equation and astrobiology along the way.
Books
How The World Really Works by Vaclav Smil - Everyone should read this. It explains how much oil is needed to grow a pound of tomatoes (a lot), how many calories are needed to feed a population, how much energy production goes into making concrete, and why globalization has been so useful. Vaclav Smil is one of the most important authors too few people know.
Green Philosophy by Roger Scruton - I’m pretty anti-performative — I’d like to go so far as anti-mimetic but that’s too aspirational. This means I also get quickly frustrated by all of the bullshit of the activist-grifter climate complex when there’s so much opportunity for real work to make things better and sustainable. Scruton is one of the best conservative writers and this is a very different take on what is still one of the most important topics of this century. Get ready to learn a bit about his rather comically named “oikophilia”.
The Player Of Games by Iain Banks - A few years back, a friend challenged me to think about what a truly post-scarcity society would look like. This is a surprisingly tough mental exercise and I didn’t know how bad I was at it until I had read some Banks. This isn’t my favorite in The Culture sci-fi series, but it’s a serious intro into understanding what Banks thought of a universe where no resource was scarce.. and his creativity makes for a read that sticks with you long after the story is over.
Cheers!