July 2021 BenGoldhaber(.com) Newsletter
Hello!
Not too many projects to report on this month - my girlfriend and I spent a lot of the last month traveling, including attending an East Coast wedding, which was delightful. Additionally we moved to a new apartment in San Diego. I strongly recommend only moving places within several miles of where you live now - it's a dramatically easier process.
I'll be publishing my anti-FDA piece next week, provided I can come up with a good title in that time. Expect a special, additional email.
Speaking of titles and emails, should I retitle this newsletter? A friend suggested Goldhabits, which, honestly, is fire. Leave any suggestions in the comments.
#links
Venture Capitalists are Much Less Ambitious than their Private Equity Siblings: Venture Capitalists rarely take the advice that they give the startups they invest in - "be dominant in the market, have a single CEO" - while a comparable peer group, Private Equity, does.
Some interesting theories in the article for why this is; I'll suggest that there seem to be 1.) social network games and 2.) quant games. In the former, personal relationships, public perception, and trust matter for success. Being too ambitious is punished by other players because it threatens to upend the structure of the game. You have to care about the meta - "what do the players at the table think about me". Contrast this with 'quant games', where all of the energy goes into identifying and perfecting tactics which are evaluated on their object level performance and not the perception of them. 'Diplomacy' vs. 'Chess'. My stereotype is that VC is closer to a social network game while PE is closer to, but not fully, a quant game. Other forms of finance like hedge funds and high frequency trading outfits are much closer to pure quant games.
As always, it's important to know what game you're playing.
Can a $110 million dollar helmet unlock the secrets of the mind?: Widespread, cheap EEGs combined with better statistical decoding methods makes me think we're close to breakthroughs in decoding the mind. I'd wager in the next five years there will be software that can reliably use EEGs as an input to consumer level applications. It's worth keeping an eye on progress in lie detection, which would be a very disruptive technological development.
Note: I have friends, who know a lot more about neuroscience than I do, who are very skeptical of this and Neuralink and similar efforts. The crux of our disagreement is, imo, how applicable the Bitter Lesson is to their field. Using large amounts of computation + search techniques/ML has worked very well in AI, and I think that it will work for any field where you can get lots of training data, which helmets like this will provide.
Facebook is other people: A lot of people are unhappy - a lot of people are suffering in ways that has been up until now excluded from the discourse. Trolling, harassment, and general bad behavior online are, in small ways, the uncomfortable reminding the comfortable of their existence. See also: Are twitter trolls mentally ill?
Pension Apocalypse: People aren't having kids and pensions haven't adjusted their payouts, so lean years are coming. China in particular is not in a good demographic place. I'm struck by how much our global political culture implicitly depends on and assumes high levels of economic growth.
Gwern's GPT Choose Your Own Adventure: A little technical, but in this reddit post by Gwern outlines a cool idea of using ML generated text plus a user feedback system to build next-gen choose your own adventure games. A similar system could work for dialogue trees in games, chatbots, etc.
Dominic Cumming's testimony to Parliament: It's long, but very interesting and revealing about the UK's response to COVID, and how government works in practice. Meta level interesting for how different the testimony is to the media coverage of it - read primary sources.
Tyler Cowen: How do you ask good questions: Some good practical advice on asking interesting questions. Also from TC, this excellent quote from his interview of Agnes Callard:
COWEN: …I’m skeptical, but let’s just say I were to live forever. How bored would I end up, and how do you think about this question?
CALLARD: [laughs] I think it depends on how good of a person you are.
COWEN: And the good people are more or less bored?
CALLARD: Oh, they’re less bored… By bad, I don’t just mean sort of, let’s say, cruel to people or unjust. I also mean not attuned to things of eternal significance.….if we’re talking about eternity, or even thousands of years, you’d better find something to occupy you that is really riveting in the way that I think only eternal things are. I think that what you’re really asking is something like, “Could I be a god?” And I think, “Well, if you became godlike, you could, and then it would be OK.”
#good-quotes
Also, quotes about America for July 4th. #good-quotes
#good-content
Inside: Great Bo Burnham comedy (horror?) special. The songs have been stuck in my head for a month.
Shiva Baby: We actually watched this a few months ago and I forgot to share, but a very good film, another one that toes the line between comedy and horror.
Invincible: Great superhero series, and really good western animation style.
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Only watched a few episodes so far but I'm enjoying it.
This short clip of Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd promoting the original Ghostbusters.
#questions
What's your awkward, socially-weird life advice? Social acceptability bias is real, and pervasive, and I notice that I personally have gotten a lot of benefit out of weird self-help but feel reluctant to express them to others. So I'm probably missing out on a lot of good ones too. Here's an anonymous google form where you can leave suggestions. Examples would be a book you read about how chaos magic is the secret to self-actualization, and for whatever reason yeah it totally worked - or a specific series of affirmations that you say to yourself in the mirror everyday and there was a noticeable improvement in your programming speed. I'll share selected ones in next months newsletter.
xoxo,
Ben
