June 2021 BenGoldhaber(.com) Newsletter
Hello and happy June!
If you sent me a copy of "Science Detective" as part of last month's bounty, ding ding ding you've won a prize. Since it came unsigned, to claim your bounty you'll need to tell me a.) the full title of the book and b.) where your stroke of inspiration came from.
#writing
I created a few tutorials at HASH this last month, including one on making a dashboard out of a HASH simulation, and another about using your existing devops config files to generate a HASH simulation of your cloud infrastructure.
Fun fact: If you live in the Bay Area longer than a year, you are cursed to one day casually write a sentence with the words 'devops' and 'cloud infrastructure' in them.
Still working on my longform essay on the FDA - my goal is to release it in late June, early July. Spoiler: I do not like them.
#links
Stuck in the middle with Bruce - Born to Lose: A classic essay from the Magic: The Gathering community about the propensity for people to subconsciously throw their games. It reminded me of the book Games People Play, a bestseller from the 60s that introduced 'transactional analysis', an interpersonal approach for understanding why people seem to engage in self-destructive patterns. It posits that people play social games where they seek to play particular roles ('the loser', 'the caretaker') in order to receive some type of secret payoff. It's a provocative, but I think largely true, explanation for why we might engage in predictably suboptimal ways. Note: It's really interesting reading old best sellers. I've encountered these ideas in various forms in the culture, and reading the initial text feels like a fish seeing the water its swimming in.
Regular newsletter readers will be unsurprised to hear that Twilight Imperium 4 was inspiration for me reading the MtG article, and they'll probably also be happy to know I won my prelim match in the TI4 tournament, which means my Cinderella-esque run continues into the semi-finals.
Upside Decay: Upside decay is when an organization, country, or person stop getting 'lucky breaks'. This lack of luck happens, at least in part, because they no longer have a positive reputation and so others don't offer to help them. The article applies the idea to China, which the author argues is suffering from upside decay due to its declining international reputation.
The Moral Foundations of Progress: A long form essay summarizing/introducing the major philosophical questions and concerns of Progress Studies. Particularly interesting where it touches on objections. Related: Returns to Scale in Broken Windows.
Swinging for the Fences: More things in the world seem to have the payoff structures of tournaments, leading to higher variance strategies being disproportionately effective.
Product Recommendations:
Finda: Finda is software to help you find things on your computer, whether that be files, browser history results, apps, etc. It's optimized for speed, both search speed and usability speed; the creator promises "results in 16 milliseconds or your money back".
Rectangle: Keyboard shortcuts to move and resize the windows on your screen. You can add simple shortcuts to snap a window to the left or right half of your screen, the first two thirds, second two thirds, or centered.
Here’s the law: Any project, if broken down into sufficiently small, predictable parts, can be accomplished for awfully close to free.
Seth Godin #good-quotes
#good-content
Castlevania: American Anime on Netflix about Dracula and monster hunters. Great art style, solid plot, enjoyable throughout.
Love, Death, and Robots: Sci-fi anthology with 10-20 min animated shorts about the future. They range from funny, to moving, to funny-and-moving. Very reminiscent of The Animatrix.
Conspiracy: I reread the excellent book detailing the conspiracy engineered by Peter Thiel to bring down Gawker. One way in which I've changed my mind over the past several years is thinking that conspiracies are more common, and much more effective, than how they are commonly portrayed in the mainstream.
xoxo,
Ben
