Things I read and liked in July

Prints, peer review, patience, Patel preps, The Precipice

1. From Brideshead Revisited: “I knew what she meant”.

   I knew what she meant, and in that moment felt as though I had shaken off some of the dust and grit of ten dry years; then and always, however she spoke to me, in half sentences, single words, stock phrases of contemporary jargon, in scarcely perceptible movements of eyes or lips or hands, however inexpressible her thought, however quick and far it had glanced from the matter in hand, however deep it had plunged, as it often did, straight from the surface to the depths, I knew; even that day when I still stood on the extreme verge of love, I knew what she meant.

2. How Dwarkesh Patel learns so much and preps his interviews.

3. The Great Wave of Kanagawa 🌊 with LEGO Bricks. 

4. How to stay in your body, a list

   

   Patience is Bitter, But its Fruit is Sweet (2023), Hamonshū

5. Toby Ord revisits The Precipice.

6. Byrne Hobart really does not like Graeber’s book and concept “bullshit jobs”, which Hobart argues is a “terrible, curiosity-killing concept” at the center of bad arguments and an incoherent worldview. As an opposite approach, Hobart writes, you can notice that “the world is full of people who are doing things that don't make sense to you, but do make sense to them. And if you start with that as a premise and keep pulling on threads, you end up with a view of the world that makes sense, too.”

7. Henry Shevlin, ethics at the frontier of human-AI relationships.

8. If you hang around analytic philosophers (what a dream!) you’ll likely have heard that Australia is conspicuously and somewhat mysteriously overpowered in the field: David Armstrong, David Lewis, Peter Singer, David Chalmers. Philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith, himself an Australian luminary, considers why.

9. Adam Mastrioni, The rise and fall of peer review.

10. Richard Ngo’s four criteria for evaluating AI evals, and some worries about the trend.

11. Matthew Adelstein continues to press the case for theism.

12. Japanese wood block prints had a huge influence on the development of Impressionism: “Perhaps the greatest gift Japan gave Monet, and Impressionism, was an incandescent obsession with getting the play of light and shadow, the balance of colors and the curve of a line, just right.”