Unfathomable power, Guernica, E-Prime, Cheez Doodles
you are in all likelihood reading this on an unfathomably powerful machine.
the kind of machine whose creation requires the robust collaboration of 100,000s of people (a) and whose complexity rivals that of the brain.
take a moment.
let that sink in.
thousands and thousands and thousands of people across the planet, whom you have never met, using alphabets you cannot read, poured hour after hour of their best efforts into creating the computer in front of you, the phone you are holding in your hand.
a thing so complex that no single person can hold the full design of it in their mind.
... and here it is just chugging away, waiting for the next command, responsive to your next subtle touch.
truly we live in a glorious age!
the internet is at the center of all of this glory.
if you're anything like me, you've been finding yourself spending a lot of time here.
... and you've been noticing that spending time here well isn't a trivial undertaking.
what does it mean to spend time here in a good way?
what does it mean to be a good citizen of this place?
i don't have fully articulated answers to those questions (yet), but i think good online citizenship is served by good curation and tight responsiveness.
curation. there is so much content these days!
what of it is worth our attention?
what of it is worth memorializing so we can revisit it years from now?
thus far Big Tech has proven to be poor stewards of our material (a).
and their algorithms attempt curation, but struggle to disambiguate our higher-self desires from our lower-self desires.
so compiling a list of worthwhile things i encounter online each week feels additive, given the current state of play.
(the algos aren't doing it for us!)
responsiveness. what do the humans like? the humans like responsiveness (a).
in this season of life, it often feels like loops open faster than i can close them. i'm not as responsive as i aspire to be.
as an experiment, i'm tethering the compilation this newsletter with a systematic practice of reviewing my inbound from the week.
i have two intentions for this:
- regularly achieve something like inbox zero (a) across channels (Signal, WhatsApp, Messenger, SMS/iMessage, email)
- improve my responsiveness as a correspondent
i view this newsletter as an exercise in practicing these virtues.
and so without further ado...
MAPS & Lykos lay off large numbers of staff following FDA rejection of MDMA therapy for PTSD; Doblin steps down from Lykos' board: "I can speak more freely as a public advocate by resigning from the Lykos Board."
Why psychedelics just don't fit the "drug" paradigm.
John Doerr used to analogize training a new venture capitalist to training a new fighter pilot: "[it takes] probably six to eight years and you should be prepared for losses of about $20 million."
"The reward for coding errors found in Knuth's TeX and Metafont programs (as distinguished from errors in Knuth's books) followed an audacious scheme inspired by the wheat and chessboard problem, starting at $2.56, and doubling every year until it reached $327.68."
Picasso kept a photo of Guernica in his Paris apartment during WWII.
A visiting German officer asked, "Did you do that?"
Picasso responded, "No, you did."
Vitalik has reasons why you shouldn't support authoritarians just because they like crypto.
The last widow of a veteran of the American Civil War died in 2020.
Garrison Lovely in The Nation: California’s AI Safety Bill Is a Mask-Off Moment for the Industry.
Ben Landau-Taylor in Palladium: The Academic Culture of Fraud
From the history of email: "it was universally agreed that the trusting nature of the old internet was dead, and in fact harmful in the current setting."
Qiaochu has returned to writing about math: Does every proof need an axiom saying it works?
Cultural baggage on the threshold between Maiden and Mother. Includes this wonderful quote by Trudy Goodman:
"Sometimes the most important decisions in life you make are saying 'yeah, okay' to God."
Julia Wise on raising children on the eve of AI.
E-Prime is "a variant of English in which one avoids the use of the word 'is' and all its conjugations."
Tasshin on "you" vs. "u". "u" feels like a bridge too far for me at present, but i find myself pleasantly challenged by the lowercase “i” such that i am adopting it here.
You don't know what happiness is until you find the cheez doodles your past-self buried for you in the arctic wastes.