Wyclif's Dust on whether we should be worrying about phones, arguing that dismissing new modes of communication as something we’ve gotten over before ignores how disruptive adapting to them actually was. I actually have a theory about Gen-Z shyness and the phones, which is that humans become social animals through environmental conditioning, in which communication during physical interactions with peers during childhood piggybacks off the hardwired reward system meant for encouraging mother-infant skinship. When communication is primarily mediated through screens without physical contact, this mechanism is not triggered and determinations of whether or not to socialize become determined by unbiased effort versus expected value calculations instead (actually a miscalculation because of the significant positive externalities that come with socialization). Taken to it’s conclusion, the equilibrium result will be one which favors asynchronous online friends and AI partners over physical ones, resulting in a downward spiral in fertility necessitating radical life extension. The alternative future would involve a program of intentionally upregulating this link by cuddling your babies more, enrolling them in physical team sports, and inoculating them against screens (and maybe supplementing the reward system for social interactions - currently untested)
(Edit: sort of related, Nils Wendel discussing how GLP-1 agonists reduce incidence of schizophrenia, using the lens of predictive processing theory that dopamine increases tendency towards action by increasing the salience of internal predictions. A quick search online shows that GLP-1 agonists do seem to affect dopamine regulation, but in a more complicated way than merely lowering levels)
Obligatory politics: Noah Smith on tariffs. Kelsey Piper on PEPFAR, LGB(T), and picking your battles. Scott Aaronson with in my opinion the correct response on demands to pick a side, possibly related to this recent Aella tweet. It seems bad to only have the option of being either cruel or incompetent; it seems much more aspirational to be altruistic and effective (not saying anything about EA, of which I’m only a fellow traveler).
It’s weird, because the messaging by which Balaji launched Network School 2025 would have seemed countercultural as late as a year ago. Whereas then accusations of billionaires wrecking the world and then heading off to Galt’s Gulch would probably have been generally regarded as unfair, with the tech right ascendant it might not be the best approach right now to brag about how many VC luminaries are ready to head off and create a new society.
Sam Kriss on cultural backlash cycles. My model for what happens is every now and then you have landscape shifts from the development of a new idea of technology, which ripples out through society. It takes a differential amount of time for different people to notice the shift, then decide they need to react and how, whether by themselves, or in a coordinated direction. The result is a dynamical system governed by factors like demographic changes, the association of different personality traits, and chance. Reminder to myself that I need to reread A Confederacy of Dunces.
Asimov Press on the history of air quality. Convincing argument that the instinctive dismissal of HEPA filters is both natural and wrong.
Scott Sumner reviews Other Rivers by Peter Hessler, with an interesting anecdote that the smartest rural middle school students were placed into accelerated teacher training programs to fill the rural teacher shortage. “Of course, these teachers were also bright enough to realize that they were essentially being sacrificed for the sake of the larger system.” I think if I was given a choice, I might actually want to participate, but I would definitely be bitter if I was forced into it.
Razib Khan linkthread.
Works in Progress linkthread (bio).
