I can’t believe that a quarter of this year is nearly past. Lots of reading and learning this week - I’ll leave you to this week’s list.
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1. The Great Awakening
Ariana Huffington writes very nicely about the perils of the internet. We’ve seen lately that social media has been changing the landscape of interactions, politics, and the fabric of society itself. What should we do and be mindful of when using these services? Is it alright to let Facebook and Twitter sway our opinions? One thing that I liked and saw in the last month or so is the movement asking people to know about what they were sharing. Don’t share anything that you haven’t read, or cannot vouch for the authenticity of.
Gordon Hull, Philosophy Professor at the University of North Carolina. “In its current role, social media risks abetting a social reality where differing groups could disagree not only about what to do, but about what reality is.”
2. When Twenty-Six Thousand Stinkbugs Invade Your Home
Great writing from Kathryn Schulz - stinkbugs have become a huge pestilence in the United States. They invade homes, destroy crops, and populate themselves everywhere, all the time, and very efficiently. It seems like we may never really be able to get rid of them.
The brown marmorated stinkbug is not like this. It is, instead, a generalist par excellence; entomologists call it “highly polyphagous,” meaning that it will eat a stunning range of things. For instance, it, too, will eat ash trees. But it will also eat birch trees, juniper trees, cherry trees, tulip trees, maple trees (fifteen different kinds, including sugar maples, big-leaf maples, and vine maples), buckeyes, dogwoods, horse chestnuts, black walnuts, myrtles, magnolias, willows, sycamores, hemlocks, elms, and oaks. That is just a sampling, of just the trees.
3. How I Wrote Arrival (and What I Learned Doing It)
Ted Chiang’s short story The Story of Your Life is one of my favourite stories, and when it was made into a (better known) movie Arrival , I was very pleased. This is a lovely and raw account by Eric Heisserer, who adapted the short story into a movie screenplay. If you haven’t read the story or watched the movie, I recommend both highly. Here’s a picture from the piece, detailing how exactly a particular question would be asked to aliens whose language humans are just learning.
“This is one of the great advantages of adaptation: You aren’t alone. Of course, it’s also the great monster in the room, reminding you of the greatness to which you’re attempting to simulate in a new medium. And if I’m being nakedly confessional here, there were moments where I covered the book in dinner plates so I wouldn’t feel it quietly judging me.”
4. Mother of Invention
This is a profile of Maye Musk - the mother of (most famously) Elon Musk. Truly a “mother of innovation” - her other children have also started successful ventures - her son Kimbal is a food and tech entrepeneur, and her daughter Tosca is a film director. I found this intriguing - what was special in the way Maye raised her kids so that they could become so successful? The answer, actually, is: not much. What’s most impressive to me is the fact that Maye Musk is 69, and still actively works as a model.
5. Last Blog Standing, Last Guy Dancing
I wanted to share this a while back but I’d just missed it. Jason Kottke has been running a blog for over 20 years now, and his is one of the last standing. It’s interesting to see how the landscape has changed - blogs were apparently (I missed the golden age) all the rage ten or so years ago, but now we hardly see them. However, it is nice to see a resurgence of email newsletters, such as this one(, I guess). What do you feel about blogging and reading blogs? Do you check a few regularly every week or via RSS feeds?
Melancholy, I think, is the exact right word. Personally, I think I felt a lot worse about it maybe three, four years ago. I was like, crap, what am I going to do here? I can see where this is going, I can see that more and more people are going to go to Facebook, and to mobile, and to all of these social apps and stuff like that, and there’s going to be less and less of a space in there for blogs like mine. […] Since then, though, I’ve sort of come to terms with that. I’m like: Okay, if I can just keep going it, just keep doing it, it will work itself out somehow. I don’t know why I think that, but I kind of do.
6. The Middle Resistance
“An increasing wave of protests by China’s massive middle class, one of the products of the boom years, is more often than not quashed with brutal state power.”
Some now refer to a “normal country delusion”, the comforting myth that being a law-abiding, middle-class citizen is a bulwark against authoritarian anger. The Germans have another word for it: mitläufer—getting along to get by; the hope that obeying rules protects oneself in the event of accidentally breaking any.
“Comparing Chinese society to an “atmospheric tank”, scholar Zeng Peng warned, in a paper on protest, that “to prevent the gas tank bursting, on the one hand [the government] should stop the production of grievances, on the other hand repair the safety valves”.”
7. What Does a Batsman See?
As someone who loves/loved cricket, this was a lovely essay. It talks about how a batsman should conserve his mental energies, and how he must not only focus all the time, but focus intelligently.
“Chappell realised that he had three ascending levels of mental concentration: awareness, fine focus and fierce focus. In order to conserve his finite quantum of mental energy, he would have to use fierce focus as little as possible, so that it was always available when he really needed it. When he walked out to bat, his concentration would be set at its lowest, power-saving level: awareness. He would mark his guard and look around the field, methodically counting all ten fielders until his gaze reached the face of the bowler standing at the top of his mark”
8. The Shallowness of Google Translate
This is a piece by Douglas Hofstadter, for whom I have an immense amount of respect. He critiques Google translate by saying that it treats language as a code, or as a series of symbols that can be represented well in any language. I agree with him when he says that translation is a profoundly human task and cannot be handled by a machine program whose philosophy is to treat language as a “code” that has to be deciphered. He has some simple examples that show the shallowness of Google Translate.
Such a development would cause a soul-shattering upheaval in my mental life. Although I fully understand the fascination of trying to get machines to translate well, I am not in the least eager to see human translators replaced by inanimate machines. Indeed, the idea frightens and revolts me. To my mind, translation is an incredibly subtle art that draws constantly on one’s many years of experience in life, and on one’s creative imagination. If, some “fine” day, human translators were to become relics of the past, my respect for the human mind would be profoundly shaken, and the shock would leave me reeling with terrible confusion and immense, permanent sadness.
9. Why Humans Learn Faster than AI, for now
Haha, the fact that this one comes after the previous one is mere coincidence, I promise. This is an article from MIT Tech Review which talks about a recent research paper whose argument is that humans learn faster than AIs because they use background information that the AI just does not have. The AI learns only what you ask it to learn, where humans are more general, in some sense. This reminds me of David Deutsch’s argument regarding artifical general intelligences (AGIs).
10. The Economics Nobel Tries to Catch Up to the Field
Again, this is one of my pet topics - the Nobel prize. I don’t know too much about the economics one, but I learnt that it is awarded more to people who do theoretical work. And for that reason (and others, of course), the Nobel is ..behind. I find that this is the case with the science Nobel prizes too - they are always playing catch up and then recognizing or rewarding the people who don’t really need the money or recognition.
See you next week. I hope you enjoyed. I always would love to hear back from you, just reply to this email.