Here are some articles that have influenced my thinking, as a local thinky man, throughout the years. A lot are from Slate Star Codex/Astral Codex Ten (Scott Alexander’s blog). Part of the motivation for me to share these articles is to make conversation more streamlined. It's nice if I can just say something is e.g. like Newcomb's Paradox, or Chesterton's Fence without attempting to clumsily explain what it is off the cuff.
Rationalist concepts
The Rationalist Movement is a bunch of bloggers who came up writing for LessWrong. Their schtick is to abstract over arguments and bring your attention to logical fallacies (e.g. identify Motte & Bailey or Argument From Authority). The community rubs a lot people the wrong way and is not helped by the fact that they are by and large unattractive nerds, and also Sam Bankman-Fried. Much of their writing is compelling to me because they can crystalize a type of argument or phenomenon that I start to see everywhere. Maybe I just like categorization.
Meditations on Moloch explains why some things suck despite no one wanting them to suck. It's a great explanation of Game Theory (Nash Equillibria, Schelling Points, Prisoner's Dillema, etc.) with tangible examples. I read this a long time ago and probably shared it with some of you. The Inadequate Equillibria book review also covers a lot of this ground.
Levels of Simulacra categorizes speech/symbols into 4 levels of interaction with reality. This one is pretty abstract and it took me a while to really grok level 4, but I find myself categorizing arguments in this taxonomy all the time now.
In a similar vein (and by the same writer) Levels of Friction categorizes inconveniences from automatic/by default to impossible. An example of automatic (no friction) would be Motor Voter -- getting your driver's license automatically registers you to vote. Impossible level of friction would be something like time travel. This is another abstract one, probably in need of some more concrete examples. Key take-away: we really screwed up on marijuana and online gambling legalization. They should be legal (IMO) but not nearly as frictionless as they are now.
Speaking of gambling, Prediction Markets are maybe the future of decentralized expertise. This is a pretty old post. We are now seeing the rise of prediction markets becoming widely available to people. Though, I'm seeing a lot of them mostly used in elections or a round-about way of just doing sports gambling.
Book Reviews
Scott Alexander's book reviews are great because he brings to bear a lot of his own thinking and philosophy on top of summarizing the book.
Albion's Seed Book Review describes the 4 groups of emigres to America: Puritans, Cavaliers, Quakers, and Borderers. It goes into how these groups' mentalities continue to influence American culture and politics to this day. The book is 950 pages long, so I'm sticking with just reading the book review on this one.
Surfing Uncertainty Book Review is an explanation on the Predictive Processing model of cognition. I read the review, then read the book. The review hits the main take-aways from the book AFAICT. After reading the book, I asked my friend, who was studying neuroscience at the time, about whether this was an accepted model: he said it was. Warning: this may make you want to try LSD to really feel what it's like for your top-down perception to get faulty.
Seeing Like A State Book Review goes into why civilization is structured the way it is. It goes into governments optimizing for legibility over utility. I think about this when working with Jira at work -- it's ostensibly for us to organize our project status at a glance, but is being used by management to track productivity metrics, so we have to bend our tracking to conform to their expectations. Granted, far more trivial than, say, causing a famine because of a blight in easy-to-track monocultured grain.
The Secret Of Our Success Book Review describes how essential cultural evolution is to our survival and ability to live in almost all climates on Earth before the invention on writing. The book's author, Joseph Henrich was recently interviewed on Dwarkesh Patel's podcast on this topic.
Libertarianism (hear me out)
Obligatory re-share of Georgism. You know the drill. Not strictly libertarian, but hits on some of the themes of well intentioned policies can lead to disastrous results.
Has anyone heard of Prospera? It was a model city in (attached to?) Honduras with a Libertarian governance model. It existence has since been challenged by incoming Honduran president Castro (no relation). It still exists by uncertainty around its future has AFAIK reduced a lot of investment. All the worst tech-right people are attached, but I still like the idea of radical experiments in governance (given they respect human rights).
Surprising finding that car seat regulations reduce Total Fertility Rate.
Repeal the Jones Act! It was created to increase the amount of American ship building. It likely has had the opposite effect and causes prices to rise, not to mention how much harder it makes disaster assistance.
Repeal the Foreign Dredge Act! Similar idea as the Jones Act repeal, but I had never heard of the Foreign Dredge Act before reading this (so take my opinion with a massive grain of salt). I really never thought about how essential dredging is to commerce.
Repeal NEPA! The National Environmental Policy Act likely has an adverse impact on the environment. It is used to sue developers who are trying to, among other things, create green infrastructure. It represents the Green type of environmentalism in the Green vs. Gray Environmentalism dichotomy I first heard from Ezra Klein. I (and Noah Smith) aren't saying that we should not have environmental protection policies: just that this one is bad and we must to better.
Mainstream media
Some articles from not my specific corner of the internet
Seeing Around Corners is a really cool exploration on how scientists use surprisingly simple models to predict complex behaviors. I'm surprised I was able to find an archived version of this article (for free!).
Utopian for Beginners: a DMV worker creates the "perfect" constructed language (ConLang) and ends up in surprising places. I found a non-paywalled version of this. Suck it The New Yorker!
A Pickpocket’s Tale. Another routed-around-the-paywall New Yorker article profiling a criminal-turned-performer pick-pocketer.
My corner of the internet has thoughts on education
The Educated Mind Book Reivew argues there's a better way to do primary and secondary education: by leveraging natural interests and abilities of kids at the right age level.
Alpha School argues there's a better way to do primary and secondary education by leveraging technology and its ability to facilitate individual pacing.
School argues there's no better way to do primary and secondary education, at least not in a way that is society-level scalable.
School is Hell. Arguing what is says on the title.
Uncategorized
New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed. Do you remember how every comments section used to devolve into theism vs. atheism discourse no matter what the original article was about? That argument has largely dissipated. Even the people that came to prominence in the New Atheism movement don't dedicate a ton of time to that e.g. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, etc. This article provides a theory as to why.
The Colors Of Her Coat is just a well constructed article. Scott Alexander starts with an interesting historical lead to frame his argument against another blogger's concept of a "Semantic Apocalypse".
Planetary scale vibe collapse: The death of liminal consciousness as the origin of human suffering. Quiet mind and its potential benefits told from the perspective of anthropologists.
