Links harvest
Things I read and liked last month
[1] Holly Elmore on living your life in Purgatory: “The lure of Purgatory is that, there, everything feels changeable, perfectible—nothing is set in stone. Reality hurts because it's so blatant and final. Purgatory feels like a world of endless possibility…It's like I've convinced myself that I'm good enough because these imperfect versions of me aren't my final form. Only the perfect me can fully exist, so I'm in this half-life until I ‘arrive’.”
[2] A wide-ranging, vulnerable, and intelligent conversation between Cate Hall and Liv Boeree: poker, addiction, mystical experience, biosecurity.
[3] Adam Tooze on how to interpret China’s significant setbacks: “Growth has slowed dramatically in recent years. Under the impact of zero-COVID it was sometimes brought to a halt. The recovery since the abrupt end of zero-COVID has seemingly run out of steam.…We are witnessing a gearshift in what has been the most dramatic trajectory in economic history.”
[4] Zvi on dating: “Alternatively, what the data is also saying is that getting a first date is indeed the primary barrier to finding a relationship. If you went on four or more first dates in the past year, which is one every three months or ~1% of nights, then it is highly unlikely you are single.”
[5] Not new, but I recommend this post all the time: Ollie Base makes the case for regular, formal relationship reviews. In case it helps Ollie’s argument that relationship reviews are not just for unusual people, I can personally attest that Ollie is a normal (and excellent) guy who is in a very happy long-term relationship, recently engaged.
[7] J.L. Austin is one the most important philosophers of the 20th century. He was also one of the most important military intelligence officers of World War II. Tom Nagel, reviewing a new biography of Austin by M.W. Rowe, discusses how the war influenced Austin’s philosophical work:
Before the war, he had been a guarded and solitary scholar. Now he was ‘much more openly ambitious: he had enjoyed having power and influence in the army, and he now wanted power and influence in his civilian career.’ But most important was what military intelligence had taught him about method. He now knew that teamwork was essential for the acquisition of knowledge, and had learned that his natural authority and command of detail made him a very effective leader. He knew how to break down problems into smaller components, divide the task of solving them among many individuals and draw out the best from others in a collective enterprise. Rowe sees this as the impulse behind the philosophical programme Austin launched after the war. It was also, he suspects, a reaction against the extremes of the 1930s: ‘People became suspicious of grand ideas and wholesale solutions generally – especially those which might generate romantic ardour and fanaticism – and placed their faith in a sceptical, pluralistic, unillusioned realism.
[8] Cool linguistics newsletter, English in Progress.
[9] Letter from Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Wolf, August 1939.
I find one’s war-psychology very strange,—don’t you? Up to 12 o’clock noonday I am the complete coward, dreading air raids, bombs, gas, etc.—then after 12 noonday I become all brave and British again—and remain brave until the next morning—when the whole thing starts up again in its terrifying cycle of fear, dread and shrinking cowardice.
I think you are much braver than I am; or should I call it more philosophical? I don’t know what you feel. What strange stages of feelings one passes through, these days! I could not write about this to anyone I did not love as I love you.
[10] The New Yorker on what different people call foraging for leftovers:
I got curious about what other people called this activity. I polled friends. Turns out there are lots of fenders. Also scroungers, scavengers, and foragers. One friend’s family called it hunt-and-peck. Then I put the question to Instagram, and in a few days I received more than seventeen hundred responses. Here are my favorites: California plate, spa plate, eek, mustard with crackers, having weirds, getcheroni, goblin meal, gishing, phumphering, peewadiddly, picky-poke, screamers, trash panda, rags and bottles, black-cow night, blackout bingo, miff muffer moof, anarchy kitchen, mush gooey, fossick, going feral, going Darwin, schlunz, goo gots, oogle moogle, you getsty, jungle dinner, dirt night, mousy-mousy, and having Pucci.
I myself call this activity scrounging. What do you call it?
[11] Wikipedia: list of megaprojects.
[12] New substack by psychologist Paul Boom: Small Potatoes.
[13] Relatedly, this room full of potatoes proves just how good Starfield’s physics engine is.
[14] Michael Nielsen’s remarks to people working on AI at a screening of Oppenheimer: “People working on AI but deeply worried about AI risks seem to be in a situation akin to participants in the Manhattan Project. What moral choices are available to someone working on a technology they believe may have very destructive consequences for the world?”
[15] Paul Christiano reviews his bets about self-driving cars.
There is intriguingly no link for [2]