Alex Kaschuta on sex differences: “The science of sex differences could have increased understanding between the sexes. Instead, it's become an information hazard”. Not sure to what extent I agree, because while I acknowledge the way this information is generally applied is clumsy, I don’t think the current paradigm is serving most people well either. Outside of continued sliding into the atomized world, the only way forward I see involves understanding differences between groups and differences of individuals within those groups. Anyways, I finally got around to watching Barbie after reading Jacob Falkovich’s reviews on it, which seem spot on to me.
Eurydice with another contrarian take, that there should be more trying to control your emotions in order to avoid burdening others, which goes against the idea currently in vogue that men should be displaying more emotional effect. I wonder to what extent this is actually about the burden of empathy, or about what I’ve heard described as being attracted to the idea of the man being in control and unflappable.
Extelligence with a beautiful ode to his wife. Also another case of a self-described nerd finding his wife by being pursued.
Human Progress on the unpleasantness of historical marriage, which includes a link to an interesting discussion of economics in dating from 2015 from Cato, which must have seemed crazy at the time but which seems totally mainstream for our current gender discourse.
Erik Torenberg list of advice. Generally I don’t like these, particularly if it doesn’t come with information about how well they are doing (for example, in their personal life). But I like his podcasts, he seems pretty successful work-wise, and the advice seems generally decent.
SlimeMold on humans as control systems, with your need sensors as signals and your neurotransmitters as governors, and the implications for happiness.
Dynomight on what counts as research that requires an Institutional Review Board.
Asimov Press article on ML-designed enzymes. Notably, this is more than a single step but an entire chain which not only ends up with working molecules at the end, but also creates useful training data which can probably be used to improve the models. Related, Derek Lowe writing more skeptically on ML-designed antibodies.
Joe Carlsmith on AI alignment as maintaining human control, where in my opinion the really interesting part is Appendix II on the morality of control.
Joe Walker podcast on economic equality in Australia. I particularly like “parochial” discussions like this, because I think you’re generally more likely to get useful information by extrapolating outwards, rather than trying to fill details into abstract models which are not empirically tested. Anyways, it’s interesting to me how much of the inequality discourse today is about how different countries trade off on the innovation versus inequality curve as a function of the discount rate for future utility. Historically (at least in the Anglosphere), inequality was about class and therefore zero-sum (eg. Naomi Kanakia, reviewing Two Years Before The Mast). In the podcast, there’s an interesting theory that Australia cares a lot about wealth equality because of historical factors like having a low ratio of labor to land, as well as the gold rush making wealth more a factor of luck than merit (Now that I think about it, a lot of the more thoughtful bleeding-heart writers, like Philosophy Bear, are from Australia). A similar argument could be made that class is why Britain is the ideological hub for degrowthers. And insofar as class continues to matter in Britain, I predict this will be a fetter on their innovation, since it also raises inequality, occupying space which should be given over to innovation instead.
Back to the point of whether wealth is considered to be luck or earned, I overheard a discussion recently about whether it was better to live in Canada or China (which is more American than America where money is concerned). The consensus was that it was obviously better to live in China if you were rich, whereas in Canada, having money doesn’t really mean anything besides having money. This was rather surprising to me, given differences in cost of living. On the other hand, it’s unclear to me what was meant by rich, given they were people who went to university in Canada from China.
Also Naomi Kanakia, on audiobook narrators.
