July 2020 BenGoldhaber(.com) Updates
Hello and happy August!
Some personal highlights from the past month:
I decided, after polling friends and family, to move to a place where I've been assured summer never ends - San Diego. Recommendations for things to do, particularly COVID-safe activities, are appreciated!
Published (collaboratively with Owain Evans) a write up of the Relay Game, an experiment we conducted in late 2018 where players would, in ten minute chunks, try to solve a math problem.
I've started to slowly share my working notes. I'm hoping to build a digital garden - all the cool kids are doing it - or at the very least have some motivation to write more permanent notes to my future self.
Excerpts from my July Notes
Three laws of behavioral genetics
All personality traits are to some degree heritable
The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of the genes.
A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioural traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families
Wu Wei - Natural Effort. Action that does not require excessive effort.
Every society, wrote astronomer Carl Sagan, needs a telos to guide it — ‘a long-term goal and a sacred project’.
Good Content in July
The Stormlight Archive: Awesome world building. I tore through the three books in the series.
Disney+ Hamilton: I've seen Hamilton in theater and honestly, I'm not sure which one I preferred. The original cast was exceptional.
Eurovision Song Contest - the Story of Fire Saga: Looked terrible, actually very funny and sweet.
Links
Nioono: Beautiful examples of converting an ethos and brand into visual language, a concept I really didn't understand until exploring this and related sites.
Argdown: A markdown syntax for creating argument maps.
RadVac: DIY Coronavirus Vaccine. Honestly, I'm tempted.
Hic Sunt Tyrannis: Society feels like it's collapsing on every dimension. We're in what Adam Elkus calls the "omni-crisis".
Be Impatient: Ben Kuhn's ode to the value of impatience. Having a constant desire to move faster, to streamline work flows, to execute quickly - is important because it drive improvements to your OODA (observe orient decide act) loop.
Polygamy, Human Sacrifice, and Steel - Why the Aztecs were awesome: I never realized how crazy the Aztec empire was until reading this essay, and how insane the conquistadors were, and how - I'm running out of synonyms for "extreme" - extreme the invasion of the new world was. Related, Daniel Kokotajlo on lessons Cortes has for AI takeover scenarios.
Against Environmental Pessimism: An essay arguing for a sunnier take on humanities impact on the environment, in particular underscoring how progress leads to people treating the natural world better.
Consensus Statement on Morality: A joint statement from several moral philosophers in 2010 on what they believed to be the basic tenants of morality.
Constraints and Slackness as a Worldview Generator: A compelling model of how to do scenario planning and forecasting - on the key constraints and how tech developments might introduce slack into those constraints.
Best,
Ben
p.s. If the spirit so moves you reply with what's been up with you over the past few months and any good links/content you've discovered; I really enjoyed hearing from y'all after my last email.