We Are Not Saved

I initially decided to to weigh in on Ukraine because so many other people were. But as the situation becomes more and more potentially apocalyptic it started to appear that I would have to. But don't worry, I don't rehash the same talking points as everyone else. My big worry is whether we can figure out some point of stability where nukes exist, but no one uses them. We had that during the Cold...

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth  by Jonathan Rauch Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality  by: Helen Joyce The Hard Sell: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup  by: Evan Hughes Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know  by: Adam M. Grant The Moth Presents Occasional Magic: True Stories about Defying the Impossible   by: Various Nicholas and Alexandra: The Fall of the...

It seems that some people are over-reacting to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. We have gone so long without a war that we can only imagine it in apocalyptic terms. But that's precisely what we don't want to do because unlike any other point in history this war could turn into the apocalypse, and that's the last thing we want to do.

At some point, in some episode (and probably several episodes) I asserted that: The world is changing faster than we can adapt to it .  Then (and now) this statement seemed obvious, so I remember being surprised when I got some pushback on it. But upon reflection it was also illuminating. Many disagreements come down to core values and assumptions which are so deeply embedded that we've forgotten...

I take a break from talking about the collapse of society and the world to rant about reading. In particular all the people who say I'm doing it wrong. 

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty   by: Patrick Radden Keefe Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19  by: Matt Ridley and Alina Chan Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science   by: Karl Sigmund Columbus Day: Expeditionary Force, Book 1  by: Craig Alanson SpecOps: Expeditionary Force, Book 2  by: Craig Alanson...

It's time for my newsletter again, and after going step by step through the ideas of Taleb we finally arrive at his crowning idea: antifragility. Perhaps the biggest contribution Taleb makes to our understanding of the world that by grappling with the idea of the opposite of fragility he was able to define fragility, and point out that the modern world is chock full of it.

It's not the end of the pandemic or even the beginning of the end, but we might be at the end of the beginning, and since I just read three books on the subject I thought I'd see what could be said at this point. Come for the discussion of school closure and why it might have seemed so important in the beginning, stay for an overview of the lab leak hypothesis. But most of all just listen to the e...

I return to a discussion of Douthat's "Deep Places" in particular what it tells about modern epistemology, or as I like to call it, "reality construction". I examine the reality constructed by Douthat, but also the differences between how we constructed reality during the 1918 pandemic vs. how we construct it now. Come for the history, stay for the murderous story of aspirin.

Why Liberalism Failed  by: Patrick J. Deenen Leviathan Falls  by: James S. A. Corey Termination Shock  by: Neal Stephenson The Histories of Herodotus  by: Herodotus  The Golden Transcendence  by: John C. Wright The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse  by: Charlie MacKesy Doctrine and Covenants

It's that time of year when people make predictions. I also make predictions though I do them somewhat differently. Mostly I'm interested in Identifying potential catastrophes and dismissing potential salvation. For example, nukes will get used again, and a benevolent AI won't save us.  The key thing is not to make accurate predictions, but to make useful predictions. And as it turns out there's a...

I decide to take the end of the year off. But I didn't want to leave my loyal listeners without the normally scheduled episode. So here you go the first ever "We Are Not Saved" Classic!! It's my review and discussion of Neil Postman's classic "Amusing Ourselves to Death". One of the best books of the last 50 years!

The ninth book and sixth season of  The Expanse were both just released. I haven't watched much of the TV show, but I did just finish reading the final book and as I did so it occurred to me that the way it handled Fermi's paradox might provide a useful way of understanding my own fixation on it. And why I think it presents a huge challenge to anyone who thinks that humanity is on an unending upwa...

The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery  by: Ross Douthat Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration's Response to the Pandemic That Changed History  by: Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damien Paletta The Premonition: A Pandemic Story  by: Michael Lewis Morning Star  by: Pierce Brown Star Trek: The City on the Edge of Forever  Teleplay by: Harlan Ellison The Economics of Violence   by: Ga...

Lately people have been using the idea that something is a black swan as excuse for being powerless. as an excuse. But this is not only a massive abdication of responsibility, it's also an equally massive misunderstanding of the moment. Because preparedness has no meaning if it's not directed towards preparing for black swans . There is nothing else worth preparing for. The future is the product o...

A couple of months ago Gwern published a list of improvements since 1990. I thought it gave short shrift to the many changes which have been wrought upon society by technological progress. He does include a section on "Society" but it's woefully inadequate, and despite having a further theme to the list of identifying "unseen" changes he overlooks many of the intangible harms which progress might...

I got some pushback on the episodes I did about Afghanistan. Some of it was directed at the idea that "we are no longer a serious people". But this pushback, rather than talking me out of the position made me explore it even more deeply. This episode is the result of that exploration. As part of it I bring in recent difficulties experienced by the CIA, the Vietnam War, and the differences between...

Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?  by: Michael J. Sandel Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills  by: Jesse Singal Kingsport: (The Weird of Hali #2)  by: John Michael Greer The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War  by: H. W. Brands Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir  by: Norm Macdonald Silmarillion  by: J. R. R. Tolkien The...

There are at least two kinds of randomness in the world: normal, as in a normal distribution or a bell curve, and extreme. As humans we're used to the normal distribution. That's the kind of thing we dealt with a lot over the thousands of years of our existence. It's only recently that the extreme distribution has come to predominate. Nassim Taleb has labeled the first mediocristan and the second...

As I record this Congress is debating whether they should pass a $3.5 trillion bill or only a $1.5 trillion one. The former would equal $27,000 per household, while the latter would only be $12,000 per household. And yet when people are asked whether they would pay more to deal with problems like climate change only 34% are willing to pay more than $10 a month. People have no skin in the game on t...

Risk comes in lots of different forms. In  Skin in the Game , Taleb's last, underrated book. He breaks risk down into ensemble probabilities and time probabilities. On top of that he demonstrates that risk operates differently at different scales. And that if we want to avoid large scale ruin—ruin at the level of nations or all of humanity—that we should be trying to push risk down the scale. 

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution  by: Carl R. Trueman Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future  by: Elizabeth Kolbert Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't  by: Julia Galef Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution  by: Mike Duncan This Is How You Lose t...

As human beings we have a unique ability to recognize patterns, even when confronted events that are completely random. In fact sometimes it's easier to see patterns in random noise. We pull narratives out of the randomness and use them to predict the future. Unfortunately the future is unpredictable and even when we have detected a pattern the outcomes end up being very different than what we exp...

The US-backed regime in Afghanistan lasted 9 days from the taking of the first provincial capital to the taking of Kabul. After the withdrawal of the Soviets in 1989. That government lasted over three years. What was the difference? Why after spending two trillion dollars and twice as long in the country did we do so much worse? Francis Fukuyama has asserted that the are no ideologies which can co...

Philip Tetlock has been arguing for awhile that experts are horrible at prediction, but that his superforecasters do much better. If that's the case how did they do with respect to the fall of Afghanistan? As far as I can tell they didn't make any predictions on how long the Afghanistan government would last. Or they did make predictions and they were just as wrong as everyone else and they've bur...