January 2024 BenGoldhaber.com Newsletter
January 2024 BenGoldhaber.com Newsletter
Weddings, Festivals, and the Future
It’s nice when writing this newsletter to have a clear highlight from the month. Sometimes I have to scan my calendar to remember how I spent the thirty or so days, but this January my main highlight was straightforward; officiating the wedding of two dear friends in Puerto Vallarta. It was a beautiful event, and we paired it with several days of quality time with good friends hanging out and celebrating the bride and groom.
Most of the reflections I could share would be focused on how lovely it was to get to share time with people you care about during such a fun, inspiring, liminal moment - and it really was.
But there’s too much to say about that, and this newsletter is first and foremost a narcissistic exercise, so I will instead share a selection of quotes on love and marriage that I have highlighted or saved over the years that didn’t get into any official speeches or unofficial drunk toasts in that festive event.
It should be known that it it impossible for human nature not always to love something. - Origen
Author's Note: The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Especially you Jenny Beckman. B****. - 500 Days of Summer (my favorite RomCom)
I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you. - This is how you Lose the Time War
Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness - Esther Perel
…I do think I need to expand my quotes bookmark for more to do with love and relationships. Submissions appreciated.
This month I also wrote a new AI Vignette, An Honest Day’s Work. Longtime readers will know that I am a fan of reading (and writing) very short pieces of fiction about the unfortunately-not-so-distant future, and I took another stab at grounding AI scenarios in narrative form with a look at two scientists whose work patterns have been transformed by advances in AI. Unlike previous ones, this is more of a hopeful scenario - a portrayal of a relatively peaceful slice of life, not a world teetering on apocalypse as was the case with my previous AI Vignettes.
Skin Deep and Jackpot! were focused on superhuman persuasion - what happens when optimization forces outside of our control become much better at shaping our beliefs and desires. Winning the Corporate Mini-Game is a narrative zero-ing in on a slow takeoff scenario of AI growth, modeled around companies using it to become more productive but eventually letting it run them.
Of them, Skin Deep is my favorite as a self-contained, fun bit of writing. Corporate Mini-Game is less good as fiction, but is more-or-less my mainline prediction about the next decade; we might not get GooBook, but the corporate singularity featuring powerful, semi-and-increasingly-autonomous corporations has strong economic incentives. Whether that turns into doom or not remains to be seen - focusing on optimistic scenarios and working towards them seems right and possible.
#links
Escalation Theory: Compliance, Violence, and Overachievement In Society. Long but worth the full read. The author argues that violence is downstream of the institutional and economic pressures that shaped the paths that elites, and thus elite culture, follow.
Selecting an academic and professional elite whose dominating emotional urge is compliance, even when it conflicts with personal interest, has massive follow-on effects for the shape of society that elite tries to create.
The external authority — the one who passes judgment, A+ or A-, internship or no internship, swipe right or swipe left, worthy or not, college admit or not — must be satisfied before the boy allows himself his meagre reward.
…
There are 165 cities in America where you can be victimized on these 3 dimensions more often than in San Francisco. Whether you view this as an endorsement of San Francisco or an indictment of America is up to you and beyond the scope of this essay. Either way, it cannot be said that San Francisco is aberrant from the national norm on violent crime!
When it comes to grand theft auto, robbery, burglary, and theft, another San Francisco emerges.
Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize Awarded: Nat Friedman started a prize to decode ancient scrolls buried and preserved by the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius. Launched 10 months ago, the first scroll, imaged with high resolution CT scans and reassembled through ML, has been read:
Working independently, each member of our team of papyrologists recovered more text from this submission than any other. Remarkably, the entry achieved the criteria we set when announcing the Vesuvius Challenge in March: 4 passages of 140 characters each, with at least 85% of characters recoverable. This was not a given: most of us on the organizing team assigned a less than 30% probability of success when we announced these criteria! And in addition, the submission includes another 11 (!) columns of text — more than 2000 characters total.
The general subject of the text is pleasure, which, properly understood, is the highest good in Epicurean philosophy. In these two snippets from two consecutive columns of the scroll, the author is concerned with whether and how the availability of goods, such as food, can affect the pleasure which they provide.
Do things that are available in lesser quantities afford more pleasure than those available in abundance? Our author thinks not: “as too in the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant.” However, is it easier for us naturally to do without things that are plentiful? “Such questions will be considered frequently.”
If more scrolls are read and deciphered, and if this motivates the search for the full library that was preserved, it could dramatically increase the knowledge of the Antiquity era. Crazy to think how many theories about life in that time period could soon be dis/confirmed!
Nitric Oxide: I’ve continued to travel a lot, and especially before major events I want to take as many drugs as possible to stay healthy. I’ve doubled down on my stack of zinc lozenges + anti-viral nasal sprays. I can’t say that I’ve been perfectly healthy - there have been several days this past month with that ‘rundown’ feeling where you can’t tell if you’re sick or just need sleep - but I suspect these interventions have helped.
My best guess is that a single application (2 sprays in each nostril) of Envoid ~halves the viral load in your nose. Covid doubles in 3–6 hours, so that’s how much extra time you’ve bought your immune system to ramp up defenses. If you follow the more aggressive protocols in the literature and apply that treatment 6 times per day, you wipe out 95% of covid in the nose. I will attempt to translate this an efficacy estimate in that mythical future, but in the meantime siderea has a write-up on why reducing viral load is valuable even if you can’t destroy it entirely
Waymo has applied for permits to scale operations to the South Bay and to LA. I took my first fully autonomous ride ever, riding in a Waymo from the Embarcadero to the Giants Stadium. It was smooth, easy, and cheap. With more cities coming online it feels like the promise of autonomous vehicles is finally arriving.
How to be More Agentic: Cate Hall reflects on how she has dialed up her “manifest determination to make things happen” and the positive results that brought. Like a lot of writing of this type, I find it motivating, often in the same way that I think sermons and other timeless text are motivating - you hear the same pieces of advice often enough, it might catch you in the right moment for that hit of enlightenment for positive change.
The last couple times I was looking for a project, I made a point of meeting as many people doing related work as I could, even if there was no obvious benefit to doing so. At first, I did this just to advertise my existence to people as I entered a new field, because someone is always hiring or looking for a cofounder.
What I discovered by casting a wide net was that I have very little ability to predict how useful a call will be in advance. Relevance is easier to predict, but it’s not a very good proxy for usefulness, which is a product of lots of other things including the other person’s enthusiasm and the breadth of their interests. To some extent, the more confident I am that a conversation is relevant, the less likely I am to discover something exciting during it. Nearly all of my most fruitful collaborations over the last 3 years have come out of meetings I booked almost at random.
Michael Nielsen’s Notes on Differential Technology Development: Another superb, nuanced take from Michael Nielsen on the different ways society guides technology to safer paths.
There are certain kinds of DTD humanity does really well, where our society has already achieved alignment. And there are other kinds where we are far from achieving it. The implicit viewpoint of DTD is in some tension with the conventional market view. In that view, new technologies are developed, and safety is then supplied in response to consumer demand.
By contrast, when no consumer is bearing an obvious immediate cost, our society tends to have much poorer institutions for doing DTD. In those cases markets may amplify technology whose risk exceeds it's benefits.
Mobile ALOHA: open source robot: A project to create a cheap robotics testbed for few-shot learning. I would very much like to see this in person and see if it lives up to the video, because from what is on display it looks like it’s nearly at home butler level.
I’m happy to report that the tradition of lighting a piñata on fire to burn your regrets on New Years did in fact continue. Pictures below, including pictures from a *regional burn* where the hosts had far more clever ideas for how to burn a piñata llama. I love it. Expect instructions on how to hold your own festival in ten months time.
xoxo,
Ben
