Things I read and enjoyed in February

Human mail, hyper-competition, happiness, hand gestures, humpbacks

[1] “Over time, people tend to stay at about the same level of happiness, pretty much no matter what. This is extremely weird.” Adam Mastroianni on why this might be.

[2] The “burden of knowledge” hypothesis for why ideas are getting harder to find is that scientists now have to spend more time getting up to speed before they can push knowledge forward. Maxwell Tabarrok argues that this theory is dubious.

[3] The wikipedia page Human mail: “The mailing of people weighing less than 50 pounds (23 kg), i.e., children, was occasionally practiced due to a legal ambiguity when the United States first introduced domestic parcel post in 1913, but was restricted by 1914. The children were carried along by mail carriers, but were not put in boxes.”  (ht depths of wikipedia)

[4] Things unexpectedly named after people: Taco Bell, Mars candy, German chocolate cake (!), and more. 

[5] It is nice to be the real Jean Baudrillard.

[6] 15 ways of looking at pointing.

[7] Why Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” is so unusual and so good. Among other things, her use of chromatic mediants.

[8] Brian Klaas on the perils of our modern enormous social world: “Modern social comparison isn’t just larger; it’s also constant. We are bombarded by unceasing reminders of where we stand not just on economic hierarchies, but social ones.” Related to competing with yourself.

[9] Anthony Etherin keeps producing great poems. 

[10] Another poem: “Missed Time” by Ha Jin.

[11] Karpathy against the “Learn X in 10 minutes” genre: “Unless you are trying to learn something narrow and specific, close those tabs with quick blog posts. Close those tabs of ‘Learn XYZ in 10 minutes’. Consider the opportunity cost of snacking and seek the meal - the textbooks, docs, papers, manuals, longform. Allocate a 4 hour window. Don't just read, take notes, re-read, re-phrase, process, manipulate, learn.”

[12] Scott Alexander: “Advice is disproportionately written by defective people” 

[13] Jake Seliger on the death of literary culture.

[14] Sometimes people defend philosophy like this: “You’re claiming that philosophy is useless. But why is it useless? Haha! You are now doing philosophy”. Philosopher Jason Brennan replies: “Even if this defense works, it is embarrassing if this is the best defence philosophy has. Yet it is not obvious that the defense succeeds. It may just be that all philosophy is unreliable except anti-philosophy philosophy.”

[15] The Atlantic on translating and talking to whales.

[16] Jacob Trefethen on 10 technologies that won't exist in 5 years, but really need to. Plus “footnotes” on said piece.

[17] Nice people vs. kind people.

[18] Ethan Perez’s tips for empirical AI alignment research.¹

1. Contains the engineering term “footgun”, which I was not familiar with. Explained here.