Thing I read and liked in January

Erasmus, elves, exposure therapy, ex-risk ecosystems

[1] Sarah Constantin, self-help tactics that are working for me. I’m especially intrigued by this idea: excessive guilt, since it comes from fear of social judgment, can be combatted via exposure therapy for social disapproval. (I’m a big exposure therapy fan recently)

[2] Michel Justen’s Guide to the AI tribes

[3] Cate Hall on burnout.

[4] Andy Masley on supposedly deeply held beliefs.

[5] Lydia Nottingham on how to read properly: Read with a project, questions, aims!

[6] A sad tale from Linch.

[7] Scott Alexander’s life of Scott Adams.

[8] Max Hodak on the binding problem.

[9] The Silmarillion

• On why the Elves love starlight: “By the starlit mere of Cuiviénen, Water of Awakening, they rose from the sleep of Ilúvatar; and while they dwelt yet silent by Cuiviénen their eyes beheld first of all things the stars of heaven. Therefore they have ever loved the starlight, and have revered Varda Elentári above all the Valar.”

[10] The Reformation: A History. Absolutely riveting. I’ll have to write about this book when I finish it. For now, links to some wild stuff I’ve encountered so far:

• Prester John. European explorers were really excited to find this guy: a ruler of a lost Christian nation in the East who would be able to swoop in and save Europe from the Turks. (Spoiler: he did not exist).

• Erasmus, one of the most sympathetic characters imo.

• The Donation of Constantine one of the first forgeries to fall to the new textual criticism (shout out to Lorenzo Valla).

• The Fourth Crusade, in which Crusaders never made it to Jerusalem and sacked Christian cities instead, including Constantinople.

[11] Daniel Greco Why I am not a humanist (in the academic disciplines sense of the word). “If your interests and skills are primarily humanistic, it can be tempting to see more questions as tractable via humanistic methods than really are. The characteristic temptation of the humanist is bringing exclusively humanistic tools to bear on questions that demand empirical evidence.”