April 2024 BenGoldhaber.com Newsletter
Finding your bliss this summer through the bengoldhaber.com newsletter
I find it bizarre that Summer doesn’t technically start until June 20th. In my personal opinion - and the opinion of all BenGoldhaber.com affiliated media properties - Summer begins as soon as April ends. You’re officially allowed to start grilling, tanning, and enjoying life more on the first of May.
And personally I am quite looking forward to that Summer feeling, as it has been a *busy* April. I’ll have more to share on this next month - but, in the meantime, enjoy this (short) newsletter update.
#links
Manufacturing Bliss: Jhana focused meditation is so hot right now. Nadia Asparouhova profiles the surge in interest in Jhanas and the promise of bliss on tap through meditation:
Practitioners claim they can induce extremely blissful mental states that rival life’s peak experiences, available at any time with enough concentration.
…
Many practitioners believe there is a natural path from experiencing the jhanas to “insight,” or meaningful learnings that improve one’s life. According to Brasington, the jhanas teacher, jhanas work by “quiet[ing] down the normal ego-making processes” so that you can see the world as it is, instead of “in terms of your advantages and disadvantages.”1 Another theory is that by giving people a taste of how happiness feels, they will find ways to bring themselves closer to this ideal state.
I find this all very intriguing as someone who has become a meditation enthusiast, though I haven’t experienced anything like it (yet!) myself. Related: Patri Friedman’s resource collection on the Jhanas.
Echowid: I mentioned a few months ago the homebrew neurotech and meditation scence, which includes ultrasound neuromodulation enthusiasts, who are experimenting with focused ultrasound waves to stimulate or inhibit neural activity in specific brain regions. Echowid, a homage to erowid - an old school psychadelic case reporting website - is a website where users can report the effects and side effects of neuromodulation devices. Example:
Undergraduate student 20 years old, Brainsonix 80 mm transducer, 100 Hz PRF, 5% DC, 0.5ms PW, Central Thalamus Target, 30 s on and off blocks for 10 minutes.
Effects: Report of "out of body sensation" that lasted for roughly 2-hour post sonication.
Note: Subject had a relatively large head, which likely resulted in significant energy deposition more lateral than the central thalamus, perhaps in the white matter tracks lateral to the thalamus.
I remain confident we’re looking at both the frontier of neuroscience treatment, and the frontier of drugs.
Measuring Model Persuasiveness: Anthropic conducted human vs AI generated empirical tests for persuasiveness and found that AI is a closer:
Within each class of models (compact and frontier), we find a clear scaling trend across model generations: each successive model generation is rated to be more persuasive than the previous. We also find that our latest and most capable model, Claude 3 Opus, produces arguments that don't statistically differ in their persuasiveness compared to arguments written by humans.
Zuckerberg emails on Instagram valuation: I hadn’t read these emails from 2012 that were released in a court case about the Instagram acquisition, but I’m impressed both at the high level strategic analysis and at the clarity of writing. The thread’s worth reading. Related: the Enron Email Dataset.
Fall asleep fast with box breathing - it has worked for noted public intellectual billionaire Patrick Collison and now also me.
Another random PSA: I’ve restarted using Daylio, and I remember how much I liked this note taking/mood journal app. I very much appreciate that I can customize the mood and activity settings to reflect the complexity of my emotional range.
#good-content
Fallout: My favorite show so far this year. It absolutely perfectly matches the aesthetic of Fallout the game, and has an original story that works well the Fallout universe. And while Walton Goggins is, of course, one of the truly great character actors, the whole cast is charismatic and compelling.
The Night Circus: I reread one of my favorite books, the Night Circus, and its mystery and beauty continue to inspire. I hope to see a mini-series version of it one day.1
xoxo,
Ben
made by an auteur who will create a commercial failure that is beloved by fans.