May 2024 Updates
Happy summer!
News
I’ve cheated on Vaden and started a new podcast with two Kiwis: Richard Meadows and Cam Peters. It’s all about fiction (well, it’s mostly tangents and inappropriate jokes, but ostensibly it’s all about fiction). We’ve had an ongoing bookclub for over a year now and started to record the episodes so that the world can bear witness to STEM nerds struggling with the classics.
Some of the episodes released so far are on: Waiting for Godot (Beckett), Stoner (Williams), The Razor’s edge (Maugham), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (Wallace), To The Lighthouse (Woolf), Map and the Territory (Houellebecq), and some Borges. Upcoming episodes on The Metamorphosis, Frankenstein, and Hamlet.
New writing
Solitude vs serendipity: On a tension I notice while trying to do good work.
P-values and counterfactuals: This one is technically a research note, but I wrote it with a lay audience in mind. If you like the philosophy of statistics, you might enjoy it.
Recommendations
There was a recent death in my family. Death sucks; I’m against it. There’s a lot of literature out there on the topic that death gives life meaning, and I think it’s mostly bullshit. If you got hit in the head with a hammer every morning you wouldn’t claim that the suffering gave the rest of your life meaning. Relationships, music, joy, laughter, and scotch give life meaning and it’s unimaginative to claim otherwise. Nick Bostrom has an essay about this. (Bostrom seems to have lost his mind on many other subjects but he’s good on death.)
Speaking of death (and living a hard life more generally), Glenn Loury gives a remarkable interview with Russ Roberts. The autobiography they’re discussing is out now.
I finally read the Count of Monte Cristo and it’s now among my all time favorite books. There’s a great audiobook that I recommend.
Henrik Karlsson wrote two nice essays about creativity and having ideas. The first notes that exceptional people often had childhoods marked by some sort of solitude. The second discusses the state of mind required to cultivate goods ideas.
Math Stuff
Notes on a dimension-free Bernstein bound.
Notes on what I’m calling the variational approach to concentration.
I’ll be in Amsterdam for the summer, so if you’re in Europe give me a shout!
All the love, ben