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3 stars
Book Review: Elon Musk | Astral Codex Ten
This isn’t the new Musk biography everyone’s talking about. This is the 2015 Musk biography by Ashlee Vance. I started reading it in July, before I knew there was a new one. It’s fine: Musk never changes. He’s always been exactly the same person he is now.
I read the book to try to figure out who that was. Musk is a paradox. He spearheaded the creation of the world’s most advanced rockets, which suggests that he is smart. He’s the richest man on Earth, which suggests that he makes good business decisions. But we constantly see this smart, good-business-decision-making person make seemingly stupid business decisions. He picks unnecessary fights with regulators. Files junk lawsuits he can’t possibly win. Abuses indispensable employees. Renames one of the most recognizable brands ever.
Musk creates cognitive dissonance: how can someone be so smart and so dumb at the same time? To reduce the dissonance, people have spawned a whole industry of Musk-bashing, trying to explain away each of his accomplishments: Peter Thiel gets all the credit for PayPal, Martin Eberhard gets all the credit for Tesla, NASA cash keeps SpaceX afloat, something something blood emeralds. Others try to come up with reasons he’s wholly smart - a 4D chessmaster whose apparent drunken stumbles lead inexorably to victory.
#22. The Playful Nature of Hunter-Gatherer Religions | Play Makes Us Human
Some might take offense at the idea that religion is play. Religion, they might say, is sacred, and play is trivial. But if you have following me so far you know that I regard play as the highest form of human activity—it is what “makes us human”—so when a say religion, properly conceived, is play, I am elevating it, not demeaning it.
I have three main points to make in this letter. The first is that all of religion has its roots in play. The cognitive skills that make religion possible are the skills of play, the most central of which is make-believe. The second point, which follows on the theme of Letter #21 (on the play theory of hunter-gatherer egalitarianism), is that hunter-gatherer religions were overtly playful and were part of their way of promoting cooperation not just among themselves but with the entire natural world around them. The third point is that religions become dangerous when they become too divorced from their grounding in play.
Our climate change debates are out of date | Noahpinion
I get a little of this feeling when I watch Americans argue about climate change; the discussions seem stuck back in 2010, when solar power and electric vehicles were prohibitively expensive. For example, you still see tons of polls asking people whether they care more about economic growth or stopping climate change. […]
In 2010, this poll would have made sense. In 2010, decarbonizing the global economy really would have required big cutbacks in our standard of living. But to ask this question in a poll in 2023 reflects a deep misunderstanding of how technology has changed since 2010. And this misunderstanding — this failure to update our sense of what is possible — is absolutely poisoning every aspect of the climate debate in America.
Populism Makes Worse People | Richard Hanania’s Newsletter
I sometimes get accused of misanthropy. But it’s not true. I generally accept people how they are and have no ill will towards most of them. My worldview places a lot of value on normal people doing normal things, pursuing their narrow self-interest, as the engine of economic growth and making the world a better place.
But there is one sense in which the charge is true. I think most people have terrible views on social and political issues. It’s not that they disagree with me, but rather that they don’t make the bare minimum effort to have opinions that are logically consistent or humane. The stronger they feel about their views, in general the dumber they are. It seems to me that most people get into the world of ideas because they’re compensating for some kind of deep personal insecurity by imagining a world where their status would be higher.
Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier | One Useful Thing
A lot of people have been asking if AI is really a big deal for the future of work. We have a new paper that strongly suggests the answer is YES.
For the last several months, I been part of a team of social scientists working with Boston Consulting Group, turning their offices into the largest pre-registered experiment on the future of professional work in our AI-haunted age. Our first working paper is out today. There is a ton of important and useful nuance in the paper but let me tell you the headline first: for 18 different tasks selected to be realistic samples of the kinds of work done at an elite consulting company, consultants using ChatGPT-4 outperformed those who did not, by a lot. On every dimension. Every way we measured performance.
2 stars
The Quest to Pick Up the Lost Lifting Stones of Ireland | GQ
For centuries, Ireland’s stones were more than just a feature of the rugged landscape: The ability to pick them up off of the ground had deep practical and spiritual meaning. Lifting stones were used in tests of manhood (and, in a few cases, womanhood), hoisted at funerals to honor the dead, carried at weddings in celebration of the couple, and used to determine whether a man was strong enough to earn work as a farmhand. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, during British colonization, the practice largely vanished. Most of the stones remained untouched where they were last lifted.
This is how the man they call Indiana Stones came to be standing in the middle of a churchyard 60 miles north of Dublin, bale hook in one hand, crowbar in the other. He notices that something immediately feels wrong about this place: It’s too new, too pristine. If he’s going to find––and attempt to lift––a 400-year-old rock once stood upon during secret Catholic mass gatherings, and used to invoke curses upon one’s neighbors, it’s not going to be here.
Just as he starts to fear his four-hour journey was in vain, an elderly man pops his head out of the church door. That stone he’s looking for is close, the man says, about a mile down the road in another graveyard that’s overgrown with eight-foot-tall weeds. So off he goes.
The Rise and Fall of ESPN’s Leverage | Stratechery
On December 12, 1975, RCA Corporation launched its Satcom I communications satellite; the primary purpose was to provide long-distance telephone service between Alaska and the continental U.S. RCA had hopes, though, that there might be new uses for its capacity; to that end the company had listed for sale a 24-hour transponder that covered the entire United States, only to discontinue the offering after failing to find a single buyer.
Three years later Bill Rasmussen, the communications manager for the Hartford Whalers, was let go from his job; he had the idea of doing the same coverage he did for the team, but independently, along with other Connecticut sports, leveraging the then-expanding cable access TV facilities in Connecticut. These facilities existed to capture broadcast signals from New York and Boston using large antennas and deliver them to people’s houses; the cables, though, had capacity to carry more channels at basically zero cost, including Rasmussen’s proposed Connecticut sports network.
I Sheltered In An Apartment With A Total Stranger On 9/11. Two Weeks Ago, I Finally Found Her. | HuffPost
My eyes darted between watching the TV coverage and the billowing smoke outside the window. Then I suddenly remembered that I wasn’t alone in the apartment.
Who's afraid of the Huawei Mate 60 Pro? | Noahpinion
Fast forward 11 months, and China’s boosters are declaring victory over the chip controls. A new phone made by Huawei, the company that was the #1 target of U.S. restrictions, contains a Chinese-made processor called the Kirin 9000S that’s more advanced than anything the country has yet produced. The phone, the Huawei Mate 60 Pro, has wireless speeds as fast as Apple’s iPhone, though its full capabilities aren’t yet known.
Many in China are hailing the phone, and especially the processor inside it, as a victory of indigenous innovation over U.S. export controls. Meanwhile, in the U.S. media, many are now questioning whether Biden’s policy has failed.
‘A Pandora’s box’: map of protein-structure families delights scientists | Nature
The protein universe just got a lot brighter.
Researchers have mined a database containing the structures of nearly every known protein — more than 200 million entries predicted using Google DeepMind’s revolutionary AlphaFold neural network. The work has uncovered completely new shapes, surprising connections in the machinery of life, and other insights that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
#21. The Play Theory of Hunter-Gatherer Egalitarianism | Play Makes Us Human
Hunter-gatherers countered the human drive to dominate by cultivating the equally powerful human drive to play.
How not to be fooled by viral charts | Noahpinion
When I started writing this blog in late 2020, one of my first ideas for a post was called “How not to be fooled by viral charts”. I had a list of famous graphs all ready to go. But for some reason I postponed that post, and over the years, the list of charts kept growing longer and I kept putting it off.
Well, no longer. I’ve finally been so annoyed by a viral chart that I can no longer put off this post.
1 star
Tantalising sign of possible life on faraway world | BBC
Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope may have discovered tentative evidence of a sign of life on a faraway planet.
AI-Assisted Language Translation of Speaking, Including Mouth Movements | Kottke
Ok, this is a little bit bonkers: HeyGen's Video Translate tool will convert videos of people speaking into videos of them speaking one of several different languages (incl. English, Spanish, Hindi, and French) with matching mouth movements.
M51 (MIRI image) | ESA
The graceful winding arms of the grand-design spiral galaxy M51 stretch across this image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope.
Student-Built EV Car Goes 0-62 mph in Record 0.956 Seconds | Kottke
A group of students from ETH Zurich and Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts recently set a record for the fastest 0-62mph time with their hand-built electric car: 0.956 seconds. The 309-lb car got up to 62mph in just 40.3 feet, which is ~10 feet shorter than the width of a basketball court. The old record was 1.46 seconds, which this car just absolutely obliterated. For reference, the Tesla Plaid's 0-60 time is 1.99 seconds.
The video of their run is kind of amazing...the car is just so ludicrously quick that I started giggling when it leapt off the line.
The Evolution of Hummingbirds | Kottke
Really interesting video from Moth Light Media about how hummingbirds evolved into the unusual little creatures they are today.
Dear Duolingo: Are any words the same in all languages? | Duolingo
For this post, I wasn't able to research all 7000+ languages (unfortunately!). But I did look at a lot of them, and I found a surprising answer:
YES!!*
*Or, well… it seems like 2 words have come close. 😬 Let's take a look!