Beginning of year links
How is your 2024 going?
A belated happy new year everyone! Looking forward to another year of regularly posting to this substack. Here are some beginning of year links:
[1] A Manifold Market where you can bet against this substack.
[2] Are you stuck? Adam Mastroianni with “my compendium of bog phenomena, the myriad ways I get myself stuck, because unsticking myself always seems to be a matter of finding a name for the thing happening to me.” I love this one:
The infinite effort illusion…is the idea that you have this secret unused stock of effort that you can deploy in the future to get yourself unstuck. I'm always a week late responding to emails? No problem, I'll simply uncork my Strategic Effort Reserve and clear my correspondence debt.
This never works because there is no Strategic Effort Reserve. All of my effort is currently accounted for somewhere. If I want to spend more of it on something, I have to spend less of it on something else. If I’m consistently not getting something done, it’s probably because I don’t want to—at least, not enough to cannibalize that time from something else—and I haven’t admitted that to myself yet.
[3] What is this “non-dual awareness” thing that meditation people are always on about? A down-to-earth explainer from Sasha Chapin.
[4] Computation in physical systems.
[5] Annette Martín’s Lunalutions blog is back. Her 2024 project: do less!
[6] History is written by the losers: “The judgments of the historian do not serve the margins. They do not even serve the masses. They are a weapon in the hand of defeated elites, the voices of men and women who could be in power, but are not.”
[7] From Jonathan Birch: “Some say insects clearly don't feel pain because they don't tend injuries. But new evidence suggests this is wrong. Bees selectively groom the antenna touched by a heat probe.” Noxious stimulation induces self-protective behaviour in bumblebees.
[8] Nathan Barnard’s heuristics for deciding how much to trust a purported scientific finding.
[9] A very Stefan Schubert post pointing out that bon mots and clever quotes are seductive but harmful because “many of them are effectively false claims or invalid arguments”.
[10] Concise and insightful breakdown of arguments about one of the most important questions today: will AI scaling continue to work?
[11] Wonderful music theory analysis of why “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is such a good song.
[12] Jake Eaton in Asterisk Magazine on measurement and mysticism in the science of psychedelics.
[13] When I have a slower publishing cadence my blog grows faster.