2024-09-22

categorical

Sino-Japanese relations: Pekinology, Chinese Doom Scroll.

Anticipating the Unexpected has an section on Chinese retirement/pension reform, which interestingly I do not recall ever appearing in the above Weibo roundup.

80K Hours podcast on aging. Not really a huge fan of this episode, because the interviewee projects a holier than thou attitude throughout with the idea of letting the system work and looking down at any amateur interest in the field. Supposedly this is in the name of cost-benefit, but it really does seem like this cost-benefit is based around the Hippocratic oath, which is why bioethics is so out of touch with actual ethics. The FDA needs to classify aging as a disease.

Henry Oliver on Derek Parfit.

Noah Smith linkthread has some interesting items this week. Firstly, because it mentions both degrowth and slackers, and it seems to me that both are really two sides of the same coin, an (inevitable?) result of increased abundance that makes people feel like they have enough. Anyways, as a slacker myself, it’s clear to me that as with anything else, if it’s more convenient to bowl alone then that’s what ends up happening. That’s why slacker culture is gone even though slackers still exist. At the same time, I feel that even though the categorical imperative is clearly wrong, there definitely ought to be some sort of categorical imperative of status where things which cannot be scaled should be undertaken with some apologetic air of low status. “It costs a lot of money to keep this man in poverty”.

Upstream interview with Noor Siddiqui (Orchid Health). Conversations with Tyler with Tobi Lütke (Shopify). Both CEO interviews highly engaging.