Things I read and liked in May

I read them on the internet

1. Samuel Hammond asks, did Alasdair MacIntyre indirectly cause the Beatles to break up? And, it sure looks like he did!

2. Compelling recommendation for Focusmate. I tried it as a result!

3. All the ways I want the AI debate to be better. (Andy Masley can’t stop writing bangers about AI.)

   Different tribes have developed vast catalogs of common beliefs about AI that are mostly wrong. It’s understandable that a lot of people don’t understand the specifics of AI, but many go way beyond this to both accept and make new bold false claims about AI’s current abilities, energy use, and other problems with it that don’t make sense if you allow yourself to think about AI for a few minutes without using memorized slogans from social media.

4. What it’s like to brief lawmakers about AI.

5. On Buddhism and violence:

   Buddhist soldiers in sixth-century China achieved the noble “status of bodhisattva” for killing their enemies. In feudal Japan, warrior Buddhist monks known as the Sohei used force to defend territory and fight against those associated with rival schools of Buddhism. In sixteenth-century Thailand, Buddhist holy men staged bloody revolts against the government. During World War II, Zen Buddhism provided a strong foundation for Japanese militarism, including Imperial Japan’s use of suicide warfare.

6. One of us, John Jeremiah Sullivan on animal consciousness.

7. New term: “AI cope bubble”

8. Writing advice from dynomight.

   I don’t know how to explain this, but I think it’s very important: You should be your reader’s ally. Or, if you like, their consigliere.

   As a simple example, why is the word “consigliere” up there a link? Well, not everyone knows what that means. But I don’t like having a link, because it sort of makes me look stupid, like I just learned that word last week. But I’m on your side, goddamnit.

9. Cate Hall on selective agency, might change your life.

10. Cate Hall nails why San Francisco is the way it is, both exhilarating and shallow, freethinking and cult-y:

    there are pluses and minuses to a culture that constantly asks, why don’t we do the most intense possible version of this? It’s a question that creates a bubbly environment—one where it feels like anything might erupt. Those eruptions include large and small fortunes, some bizarre parties, and cultural revolutions. You also get a few cults in the mix. I don’t think it’s avoidable. The kind of thirsty mind that comes to the Bay thoroughly wants to be captured.

    (You might have noticed that I quite like Cate Hall’s substack.)

11. Carl convinced me chimps wouldn’t go into space.

12. Fantastic Aella essay about her childhood. Come for the lurid stories of wack fundamentalist child-rearing, stay for the deep wisdom and compassion. “It is good and correct to have a part of you that is eternally sad”.

    My childhood was often very painful, but painful is not special. Children and grown adults across the world have been torturing each other in far worse ways throughout all of human history, and chopping off bits of their psyche to fit into the cracks allowed for them. I am just one of millions, undergoing what has, in the past, been a common experience that often continued unceasing into adulthood. Men have been marched by the legions into the woodchopper of war, women married off to drunkard husbands, children treated like animals. I am of this lineage, and the ability to enact and endure it is built into my bones, much as it is yours.

    I do not mean it doesn’t hurt, or that the hurt isn’t vast and important. I just mean that it’s only hurt. It’s just an infinite pool of agony inside you. It belongs there, and thus it is infinitely tolerable. It is good and correct to have a part of you that is eternally sad; there’s so much to grieve! It’s a part of living. Trying to push it away is disassociation, or denial, or suppression of a true thing that’s meant to be honored.