I found one on my ear this morning. Not in the ear, not nestled in the canal where it might at least serve some vestigial purpose, catching dust or performing some other arcane evolutionary duty—but on the ear, sprouting from the fossa triangularis like a single black antenna, coarse and curly like the hair on my balls, and at least a centimeter long, which means it had been growing for weeks while I walked around thinking I was a person who had his shit together, talking to colleagues, kissing my girlfriend, presenting myself to the world as a human being worthy of civilization, all while this thing was just…there.

So I plucked it. What else could I do? Tweezers, bathroom mirror, pop!, a moment of pain. And of course you know it changes nothing, you know it’s coming back in a fortnight, you know Hair always comes back in the places where you least want it, you know, and you do it anyway because the alternative is surrender, and you’re not ready for surrender, not yet, not on a Tuesday.

Hair is time you can see. Stubble by noon, gray by forty. Hair grows with crushing regularity, so we build rituals around it. Its emergence or disappearance marks the days and seasons and years and decades. Wrinkles are slow, like glaciers. Hair is fast enough to taunt you. Hair is waging a permanent, multi-front insurrection against your dignity, and its victory is already guaranteed.

Hair is already dead, so it has nothing better to do than count down the clock until we join it. A few hundred haircuts, a few thousand shaves, and that’ll be it.

Hair makes you build an arsenal. Mirrors. Steel. Electricity. Gels, sprays, clays, creams from Korea, chemicals in matte-black bottles with minimalist fonts and a story about the spruce forests of Scändinävia. We wax, laser, epilate, thread, bleach, dye, sugar, crimp, braid, cut, trim, shape, buzz, layer, curl, and straighten it. We shave it into religious submission, crop it into military discipline, raise it in rebellion, or powder it into aristocratic arrogance.

Hair is painfully zero-sum. Hair will grow where it is least welcome and vanish where it is most desired. Your body is a socialist republic of follicular redistribution, taking away at the temples and giving out in the nostrils, the ears, the back, even the fucking knuckles. Especially the moles and warts, just to draw a little extra attention to them and make you worry about melanoma.

Hair haunts us, because it is both us and not us: produced by us, branded by our genes, yet once it leaves the follicle it becomes trash. It is both personal and indifferent. And the leaving is not elegant. Hair doesn’t retire with dignity; it abandons ship when you most need it. And the hair that abandons you first is the crown jewel, the hair on your head, the billboard you erect to say this is me, this is the version of me I recognize, the version I’d like you to recognize too. Each generation comes in thinner, shorter, paler than the last, a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.

So Hair is vanity, yes, but Hair, also, is survival, in the sense that the person I recognize in the mirror requires that hairline to be recognizable, and the alternative is meeting a stranger in the glass every morning. I’ll get used to it one day, I know. I’m just not quite ready yet. Not on a Tuesday. I don’t even feel shame anymore when I ask the barber for a cut that will strategically hide the retreat (less convincingly with each passing month). It’s like talking about anal warts with your proctologist. He is a consummate professional. I feel safe in his hands. He has seen this tragedy a thousand times.

We enlist drugs to help us decrease the hormones that destroy it. I read the list of side-effects on the side of a bottle of finasteride: chills, cold sweats, confusion, dizziness, and, hilariously, gynaecomastia. Of course. Of course! Of course the bargain for keeping your hair is growing a pair of flappy, disgusting man-tits. Biology is a bitch. But I have weighed my endocrine integrity against my hairline and the hairline was heavier.

The pill doesn’t cure anything. It holds the line. It buys time. And you know (the way you know that the sun will eventually expand and consume the Earth, distantly, theoretically, in a way that does not yet disturb your breakfast) that this is all temporary, and that one day it will all be gone.

Just yesterday, I was a virile young man who had never even thought of the hair in his nose. And today I had to insert a small electric rotary trimmer into each nostril, screeching with its high dental whine. Tiny black clippings fall onto my upper lip like the world’s worst confetti, and I blow my nose afterward and more come out for hours, and this is just Tuesday, this is just maintenance, this is the baseline cost of existence and participation in polite society.

Hair subjects us to absurd indignities. A lifetime of laser treatments that fire scorching light into your skin, heat traveling down the shaft to cauterize the stem cells at their source. There’s a faint singed scent in the air. The smell of Progress. But some Hair always survives the extermination campaign. The next day you find yourself bent over on crinkling paper under the glare of fluorescent lights, ass in the air, spreading your cheeks for the nice lady in latex gloves while she tries to keep the conversation buoyant to distract you from what’s going on. She presses the hot strip. Waits a moment. And rrrrrip! like velcro.

Hair is disgust. Hair in your mouth. Hair in your soup. Hair stuck to lip gloss. Hair caught in teeth like a wire. Hair growing sideways in a pocket of painful pus. Hair braided into the vacuum roller holding on to all the world’s dirt. Wet clumps of Hair in the drain. Hair on a fat old bastard in the locker room, a thick damp pelt stretching across his back and shoulders, releasing its sweaty miasma into the air. Hair is a breeding ground for pullulating microbes and mites and lice and all the uninvited tenants of flesh.

Her shaved armpit is in front of my face. I extend my tongue towards it and give it a good lick. Two animals in a room, grateful for the temporary smoothness, grateful for the illusion that we can edit ourselves into something cleaner than nature intended. We make love and we smell the products and the soap and the faint metallic tang of effort, and for a moment it feels like we’ve pulled one over on the universe. Then, the stubble returns. The little bristles rise up, mindless and stubborn reminders. You can shave the armpit, you can lick the armpit, you can write sonnets to the beauty of the armpit, but biology will always show up.

Hair is intimacy. Hair is the divine scent of coconut when you bury your nose in her long curls. Hair is pleasure, when you pull it back in your fist and hear her moan. Hair is heaven, when she drags it along your back, making you shudder with delight. Hair is hell, when you find one of her strands inexplicably still stuck to the pillow two months after she said “let’s stay in touch”.

Hair is brutal. Hair is tiresome. Hair is repetitive. You groom, you shed, you clean, and the enemy just keeps building more reinforcements inside your skin, more of this evidence that you are a thing made of rotting meat.

You impose your will on your biology, but it only lasts for a few hours. The oil returns. The wind gets to work. Gravity performs its quiet sabotage. Fingers run through and undo it. Sweat dampens it. A hat crushes it. Time advances its troops. You will go gray. Your body will shrivel up. Your ears will sprout forests and your nose will require the trimmer you keep in the second drawer, next to the dental floss and the expired ibuprofen. The hair on your temples will fade while the hair on your shoulders will thicken, and none of this is negotiable. In the end Hair wins in the only way that matters: you will die and Hair will not care.

But sometimes. Sometimes you step back from the mirror after that ludicrous ceremony of shit, shower, shave, trim, pluck, pill, comb, condition, spray, the little wipe of the sink—and you look at what you’ve managed to impose on this nasty animal. And for a moment it’s not so bad. A brief stay of execution. Absurd, yes, but also necessary, because that’s what it means to be alive: small losses, small restorations, a stubborn refusal to let the organism slide into decay just yet. And despite knowing the war is already lost, the feeling is one of—triumph. So pick up the hair. Wash. Comb. Cut. Shave. Style. Go out into the world and wear your dead filaments like a crown. And tomorrow you’ll do it again, wielding your arsenal of steel and chemicals and hope and once more unto the breach, dear friend. You will walk out the door as a person: groomed, beautiful, victorious, if only for an infinitesimal sliver of cosmic time. And it will feel like something—the only kind of meaning available to a creature made of meat that knows it’s going to die.

The antenna will return. But this Tuesday morning, in the mirror, with that single coarse black hair between my tweezers and the satisfying little pop of its root giving way, I won the moment. And for a creature like me, that’s close enough to Glory.

1. Erik Hoel on the semantic apocalypse. Scott replies in great form with The Colors Of Her Coat, blending Chesterton, medieval pigment supply chains, and getting meaning out of art in our time.

2. Chow, Halperin & Mazlish on transformative AI and interest rates, they argue that high long-term growth expectations would lead to high rates; we do not see high rates ergo the market does not expect TAI. Zvi provides commentary. And Nicholas Decker argues against.

3. Gwern on self-play scaling. "Every problem that an o1 solves is now a training data point for an o3."

4. Gwern on Dwarkesh! It's great!

5. Dwarkesh on what fully automated firms will look like.
   
   ”AI firms will look from the outside like a unified intelligence that can instantly propagate ideas across the organization, preserving their full fidelity and context. Every bit of tacit knowledge from millions of copies gets perfectly preserved, shared, and given due consideration.”

6. Jared Young on Youth, ambition, getting old, having kids. A gorgeous piece.
   
   ”The years that pass eat up your margin for error until there is no margin left. The mistakes you make are no longer flaws of inexperience, they are flaws of character. To be young is to be constantly on the precipice of perfection – just a little further and you’ll get there – but you never get there, and suddenly you’re old, and find yourself in a permanent state of imperfection, which you must reckon with.”

7. Richard Ngo with a triple review that combines preference falsification, common knowledge, military coups, and...Kierkegaard. Very good.
   
   ”Unfortunately, the mere realization that social reality is composed of hyperstitions doesn’t give you social superpowers, any more than knowing Newtonian mechanics makes you a world-class baseball player.”

8. A great thread by @crimkadid on the important of coinage in history, and especially its systemic effects on the Roman Empire. "Rome mined silver on an industrial scale; its achievement relative to Greece was to spread a lower density of coin over a vast space. But their time ran out too: in the Republic, there were 55 active mines in Iberia, at the Empire's height 173, and by the 3rd century only 21."

9. Another great thread, by Guillaume Blanc on why the demographic transition started in France 100 years before any other country.

10. Paper finds intelligence-income relationship plateaus at the high end in Sweden. Cremieux demolishes it.

11. Skittle Factory Dementia Monkey Titty Monetization:

    
    ”Your mind isn't creating thoughts—your thoughts are creating your mind. Every time you revisit a particular thought loop, you're voting for it to become your default operating system. Your thought patterns aren't just habits— they're prophecies, and what looks like a harmless habit today is actually destiny under construction.”

12. Genetic timeline of human brain and cognitive traits: "We systematically analysed the temporal emergence of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with modern-day human phenotypes over the last five million years. We show the genetic timeline of human-characteristic phenotypes to follow a distinct pattern with two bursts of genetic variation that co-emerge with milestones in the human lineage. Our findings suggest that SNPs associated with neocortical, neuropsychiatric, and ophthalmological traits appeared relatively recently in hominin evolution, with genes containing recently emerged SNPs linked to intelligence and neocortical area."

13. Fortunate Families? The Effects of Wealth on Marriage and Fertility

    
    ”We estimate the effects of large, positive wealth shocks on marriage and fertility in a sample of Swedish lottery players. For male winners, wealth increases marriage formation and reduces divorce risk, suggesting wealth increases men’s attractiveness as prospective and current partners. Wealth also increases male fertility. The only discernible effect on female winners is that wealth increases their short-run (but not long-run) divorce risk.”

    

14. "I Hired 5 People to Sit Behind Me and Make Me Productive for a Month"

15. Tragicomic piece on how the Taliban are adapting to city life. The rent is too high, there's too much traffic, and the office is boring! "I spend most of my time on Twitter. We're connected to speedy Wi-Fi and internet. Many mujahedin, including me, are addicted to the internet, especially Twitter." The restaurants are apparently good, though.

16. Hansonian news: Revisiting the Connection Between State Medicaid Expansions and Adult Mortality. "We find no evidence that Medicaid expansions affect any of the outcomes in any of the treated states or all of them combined."

17. On the nude.

What I've Been Reading

Civilization and its Discontents, by Sigmund Freud

On the tension between man's basic instincts and what is required from him by civilization; religion and the instinctive need for it; the parallels in the psychological development of individuals and civilizations. Guilt, sex, violence. Pessimistic and really with no solutions, I think Nietzsche identifies many similar issues but with a more positive spin on things, he sees a potential to transcend these limitations. Also, often very silly psychoanalytical stuff being treated as if it's physics. Overall: dense, short, and interesting.

Figuring, by Maria Popova

An alluring mix of science, history, love, love letters, poetry, art in general...The book constantly jumps around from one thread to another, and it occasionally gets exhausting and feels a bit like Popova was desperate to show off her erudition, but overall it works. The start and end are weak, but when it's going it goes really well, especially the sections that really pull you into the 19th century atmosphere.

Correspondence, by Paul Celan and Ingrid Bachmann

The mix of intellectual/literary/philosophical exploration, combined with raw emotion and processing it all through art and metaphor...and the intensity of it all. Using poetry to express things that are too difficult to say otherwise. On the other hand when they talk about their work it feels shallow, and where is the passion where is the desire? Constantly, they find it impossible to express themselves well, they misunderstand each other horribly, Celan is ridiculously over-sensitive. It's a strange relationship to understand, and in the end the relationship drowns in the ashes of the war and Celan kills himself. A lot of business talk about publishing here or there. Probably wouldn't recommend unless you're a Celan fanatic.

Letters to Vera, by Vladimir Nabokov

The early letters are delightful, Nabokov is very playful in general, has a lightness to him, a childishness even. Likes to play silly language games. One time he puts a parenthesis in every sentence, another he writes "fastbreak" instead of breakfast. Just a million silly little games. "Letterlet"! Crosswords, codes. But the letters get less playful and more bureaucratic as time passes, just dull records of dinners, clothing, weather, activities. There's very little in terms of what Nabokov is reading, what he's thinking, how he is writing, etc. Sometimes he will launch into a gorgeous description that reminds you that you're reading one of the Greats, though. In the letters from the 70s the style changes completely as he's obviously writing to an audience (to posterity), but all the earlier ones are raw. Overall: some flashes of brilliance but kind of dull on average.

Love Letters: Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West

Now we're really getting somewhere. These two have a peculiar relationship: Vita loves Virginia's brain; Virginia loves Vita's legs. The letters are fantastic, often caustically teasing, often insecure, often very loving. The collection also includes diary entries and letters from Vita to her husband (there's a hilarious one where she reassures him that despite having slept with Woolf twice, there's really nothing going on). They're both pushing up against the limits of social restrictions at the time and you can really feel it through their correspondence. Very interesting to see the lead-up to what is perhaps the greatest love letter of all time, Orlando.

A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953

Ah, this is the real stuff right here. Across decades, across continents, across marriages and affairs and children, they always keep going. They really pour their hearts out to each other, talk about their writing, literature, relationships, psychology, everything. They give each other so much. They are both fantastic writers and write great letters. Miller can be overwhelming when he's really spilling everything out. My favorite in the love letter series so far.

Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller

Inspired by the letters, I picked up Tropic of Cancer...there's not much to say about a book with such a reputation, is there? I would totally understand if someone hates this book, but I loved it. It's a primal scream, as Miller is just desperate to get all this life and ideas and word out of him, and in what spectacular fashion he does it!

The Deleted World, by Tomas Transtromer

These poems are just so Swedish. The dark forests, the ice, the cold, I felt like a moose might jump out of the book at any moment. They're good, evoke strong images and feelings and I enjoyed the translations by Robin Robertson who apparently does not speak any Swedish at all.

Selected Poems, by Osip Mandelstam

Dark, dark, dark, and heavy. A presentiment of both death and artistic greatness. Soviet-Jewish in multiple dimensions. Communism and poetry do not mix. The whole thing is tragic, really.

Poems and Songs, by Leonard Cohen

Melancholy, erotic, raw, bitter, full of love, overflowing with emotion. Often religiously inspired, some Cavafy, some Lorca in there. I think he works much better on the page than in audio but ymmv. Too many good ones to excerpt. Fantastic stuff.

The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth, by Veeraporn Nitiprapha

Comically melodramatic Thai novel about the interconnected lives of young lovers stuck in a love-rectangle (or is it a pentagon?). Parts of it are great, parts of it evoke cheap Mexican soap operas from the 90s. Jumps around in time in a way that's actually really interesting and effective, creating expectations and surprises. Not bad.

Their shadows undulate in a wild procession across the cave wall, massive, distorted, sliding over the great charcoal buffalo. The beasts captured in the middle of a charge, great curved horns sweeping forward, every sinew etched with care. A man kneels in the corner, his fingers blackened with coal. He leans close, his nose almost touching the stone, his eyes narrowing. He cranes his head and studies the dancers, then turns around and traces their shapes below the great beasts. He's deepening the lines, smoothing the curves. His breath is steady, every stroke thoughtful and exacting. But something catches his eye and breaks his concentration.

A dancer with feathers in her hair breaks from the circle. Her feet strike the ground in the same spot, over and over, carving a shallow dent into the earth. Her arms swing in wide arcs, each movement mirroring the last. Drums quicken. Feet pound. The voices rise in chants that climb and fall with the flames, the fire blazing wild in their eyes, a hunger flickering from face to face. The rhythm doesn't stop, they dance until their bodies remember what their minds cannot explain. This is how they hold the hunt in their bones. This is how they honor what feeds them. This is how they become more than flesh, how they become one.

The cave breathes.

The fire dims and fades to black—

A spotlight carves Anna Pavlova out of the infinite darkness; the violins surge, their aetherial notes climbing higher and higher; weightless, she rises onto the very tips of her toes, barely touching the floor at all.

Spin.

Her arms form a perfect circle above her head, unwavering.

Spin.

Thirty-two fouettés, each one mathematically identical to the last.

Spin.

Her final revolution completes. She freezes. For one breath, absolute silence—

And the theater detonates in an explosion of roaring throats and striking hands, a shockwave rippling through thousands of bodies as they surge to their feet, a thunderous cascade crashing against the stage and washing over her perfectly still form.

What This Is

Why should you listen to me? Because I'm a fairly regular dude who attracts women without any easy-mode levers like money or being a turbo-chad. I'm just a weird nerd who (after fifteen years of celibacy) decided to make dating his autistic special interest and discovered that it's actually not that difficult.

Before embarking on this experiment, I read a lot of dating content online and in books, and all the good advice can be boiled down to: self-improvement, self-respect, confidence, openness, honesty, and vulnerability. That all sounds a bit abstract though, so I'm going to break it down into some more concrete advice.

Ultimately the central point is that it's a lot easier than you might think. Before I started dating, I had no idea it was even possible to meet a hot young woman who begs you to spit on her face on the first date. But eventually I realized it's completely trivial and practically accessible to almost anyone: you go on the apps, have a fun conversation in a bar for a couple of hours, and it just happens. If you take anything away from this essay, it should be that this is easily achievable for a normal person who actually puts some effort into dating.1 But you need to actually try. You need to intentionally and consciously improve yourself and your approach.

I recognize that much of this advice comes from my personal experience. Dating is highly individualized, and what worked for me will not necessarily work for everyone else. But I think the broad principles will apply to the vast majority of cases, and it's up to you to adapt them to your particular situation.

Reality Check: The Modern Dating Landscape

The first thing you must understand is that dating markets are ruthlessly efficient at matching people of equivalent SMV. It's nearly impossible to consistently date out of your league. There is a kind of beauty in the brutal clarity of this system: it does not allow for any delusions about your position in the world of dating.

It has been said that dating apps brought gay dating norms to straights, but I don't think people have internalized exactly what that means. The truth is that if you are even a little bit handsome, you can hit a 3-digit bodycount (with attractive women) in a few years, easily.

Dating apps are a numbers game and must be treated as such. Very roughly the ratios for me were 100 swipes → 1 match → 0.1 dates → 0.05 lays → 0.005 meaningful connections. This is basically a funnel that would make a B2B SaaS startup founder hang himself. You will be rejected again and again and again. Eventually you get desensitised, but still there's a sense that one ought to be filled with a feeling of abject horror. How can one continue to believe in the existence of a benevolent deity in the face of these ratios?

Consider the time you spend on dating apps as a tax you pay for the possibility of sex and/or love. Some people are in a higher tax bracket than others, and yes, it's absolutely unfair. But people like to complain without actually putting in any work. You need to actually commit to the process, which means setting aside at least an hour a day for swiping and chatting on the apps, and consciously optimizing both yourself and your profile to achieve your goals. You need to try trying.

The relationship between attractiveness and results on the apps is a power law. If you improve your appeal by 5%, you're not going to increase your matches by 5%, you will double them. The people far above you are doing unimaginably well. Orders of magnitude, baby. Think Timmy Chalamet spreading chlamydia across the NYU campus like an STD crop plane.

Casual vs Serious

It doesn't matter, the fundamental principles are exactly the same: self-improvement, honesty, vulnerability, intentionality. The only thing that changes is what you explicitly state you're looking for.

However, even if your ultimate goal is a serious relationship, I strongly recommend that you start with casual dating. Not to stack bodies like some notch-counting sociopath, but because it's the only way to develop the skills, confidence, abundance mindset, and self-knowledge that serious relationships actually require. Serious dating without a hoe phase preceeding it is like trying to run a marathon without doing any training first. If you enter a relationship from a position of scarcity, insecurity, and desperation, of course things are going to be difficult. You need to figure out who you are and what you want before you can actually choose well. You will know when you're ready.

When I met my current partner, I instantly recognized something extraordinary precisely because I had enough data points to make that judgment. Without that contrast, without knowing what mediocre connections feel like firsthand, I'd have no idea what "exceptional" even means. You need a baseline for comparison.

The only real difference between casual and serious dating is how you articulate your intentions. For casual: "I'm not looking for anything serious right now". For relationships: "I'm looking for a long-term partner". Either way, the honesty, the vulnerability, the self-respect remain identical.

Practical Fundamentals

The Handcuff Rule

In everything you do, you should never go for broad appeal; always target the niche you're actually after. You do that by being polarizing in the right way. Example: I was looking for kinky, adventurous, open-minded women, so I had a picture of a pair of leather handcuffs on my profile. That's a really strong filter! It almost certainly decreased the total number of matches I got, but the ones I did get were a much better fit. Whatever niche you are interested in, the important thing is to create filters that draw in the target audience and pushes away everyone else. Finding your niche in the dating market and adapting your approach to the needs of that niche is crucial.

Table Stakes: Fitness, Looks, Life

Physical fitness is the highest ROI investment in your dating life. Actually in your life in general. It's entirely within your control, compounds benefits across your entire existence, and dramatically increases your options. Lifting heavy weights will improve your appearance, physical health, mental health, diet, sleep, and interpersonal interactions. Cartesian mind-body dualism is a fiction—your body is you. Hit the gym, lift heavy (aim for 1/2/3/4 pl8s), and get below 15% body fat.

Women aren't just selecting for aesthetics—they're selecting for the discipline, confidence, and vitality that a fit body represents. (And you want to be in a position where you can do the same!) As a bonus, you'll actually enjoy sex more when you're not wheezing after 30 seconds of mild exertion. Looking your best isn't shallow, it's a sign of respect for yourself and the people you hope to connect with. A fit body is a billboard advertising self-love, and if you can't love yourself, are you really ready to love someone else?

Beyond fitness:

• Wear decent clothes that actually fit your body (not what you hope your body looks like).

• Grooming and basic hygiene (shocking how many men fail at this).

• Lead an interesting life that your potential dates would want to be a part of. But do it for yourself first of all.

These are table stakes. Without them, you're not even in the game.

On the App

First of all, you need to pay for the apps. The system is pay-to-win, it's just how it is.

Pictures

Dating apps are fundamentally a visual medium. You can either whine about how shallow it all is, or just put in the work and get yourself some good pictures. Up to you. Just know that if you don't own a good camera or pay for a photographer, you're not serious about dating and should just delete the apps.

Your photos should be tailored to your target audience. Want an outdoorsy woman? Hiking pics. Intellectual type? Reading in a cool café. Don't try to appeal to everyone—polarize deliberately to filter for what you're actually looking for.

If you're serious about dating, you need to move up the photo quality hierarchy: professional photos > actual camera photos > high-quality phone pics. And absolutely nothing else is acceptable.2

What to do:

• A clear headshot

• A full-body shot that shows your build

• A social pic that proves other humans can sometimes tolerate your presence

• An activity pic showing something you're passionate about

• A conversation starter that filters for compatibility

• Cute animals

What not to do:

• Group shots where it's unclear which person you are

• Sunglasses in every photo

• Photos with women that could be exes

• Photos with babies

• And definitely no fucking pictures with dead animals, what is wrong with you people

If you have the physique for a shirtless pic, include one, but only in a context that makes sense: at the beach, not a dirty bathroom mirror selfie. If you don't have the physique, then lift and diet until you do, then take the pic.

The purpose of these photos isn't just to show what you look like—they're telling a story about your life. Make sure it's a story someone would want to be part of. If your photos show a boring life, don't be surprised when interesting women swipe left.

Finally, test your pics. Use PhotoFeeler or just ask female friends which ones work best. Your perception of how you look often doesn't match reality, and there are stark gendered differences in how pictures are perceived. Guys routinely pick photos where they think they look cool but women find intimidating or off-putting.

Bio

Depends on the app. On Hinge, the classic "you, me, us" triad of answers works well: one prompt that describes you, one prompt that describes who you want, and one prompt that describes what life would look like for the two of you together. Again, do not be generic. Do not go for mass appeal. Polarize your audience and filter for what you're looking for.

Convos

App conversations should be brief. Your goal isn't to build a deep connection through text, it's to establish basic rapport and move to an in-person meeting ASAP. Three to five exchanges is ideal before suggesting a date, but don't force it against the flow of conversation.

Be direct but not desperate. "I'm enjoying our conversation. Want to continue it over drinks?" works better than the endless pen-pal routine many guys fall into. Ask questions, engage with their profile, and respond with something that gives them material to work with. If the convo feels forced, then it's probably time to move on. If you're after a kinky casual relationship then it's perfectly fine to be up-front about it. If you're after marriage and 4 children you should be up-front about that.

Dating

Logistics

If you schedule a date more than 3 days out, you can pretty much write it off, it's gonna be a flake. I don't really understand why it be like this, but it do. For some reason people feel like they can be incredibly rude when it comes to first dates; this is by far my #1 annoyance with dating apps.3

You are in charge of planning the date; you wouldn't believe how many men out there don't have the mental capacity to pick a bar. Pick venues where you can actually talk. Bars work better than restaurants or coffee shops—there's just enough ambient energy, and alcohol helps loosen people up without the commitment of a full dinner. Activity dates can work if there's still room for conversation.

Location matters. Make it convenient for both of you. If you're planning to get laid, walking distance from your home is a good idea.

Confirm the day of. A simple "Looking forward to seeing you later" can save you from showing up to an empty bar.

The Dates

Honestly I don't have much advice on how to make first dates fun, other than have a good conversation. I'm a shy, introverted nerd and I never really had an issue with this. This is great advice on being a good conversationalist.

I think most dating failure comes down to neuroticism, people getting in their own way. They overanalyze, try too hard, and lose their chill the moment they actually like someone. The solution is trivial: relax, stay present, don't be an idiot. Be open and vulnerable, but also don't traumadump. Merely knowing this doesn't make it any easier to follow, though.

If I was into someone, I would always go for a kiss on the first date (and I highly recommend asking for consent first: "is it alright if I kiss you?").4

Connection isn't always instant. My most significant relationship started with a fairly lukewarm first date., but by the third date we couldn't keep our hands off each other. If you think the basics are there, give people a chance to open up. First date nerves are real, and some people take longer to show their true selves.

Sex

This one really depends on your own tastes. When I was starting out, I tried to have sex as soon as possible after meeting, but I eventually realized that it was better to wait a bit, even for completely casual relationships. Delaying sex to the second date made both of us more comfortable, relaxed, secure, and just generally improved the vibes, which led to better sex and better retention rates.

That said, I think you should have sex on the first date at least once, just so you know you have it in you. Afterwards you can do whatever you want. It also helps with insecurity issues.

For serious relationships the trajectory might be a bit longer, but the decision about when to have sex isn't about following arbitrary rules, it's about what works for you. Wait as long as you want, but don't turn it into a power struggle or test. Whether casual or serious, the sex timeline should feel natural, not strategic.

Rejection

Rejection hurts. The difference between successful daters and unsuccessful ones isn't that successful people don't feel the sting—it's that they don't let it stop them. The brutal truth is that you need to get rejected repeatedly until you're somewhat desensitized, but it never really goes away.

Remember the numbers game aspect: even with good photos and a solid profile, men will need to swipe hundreds of times for a handful of matches, and many of those matches won't lead to dates. There will be long stretches where you don't get any matches. This isn't a reflection of your worth, it's just how the system works, and you need to stay grounded and keep grinding.

Sometimes you'll fall madly in love and they won't like you back. The third person I went out with after I started dating was incredible: hot, interesting, weird, it felt like we clicked right away, really a one in a million kind of person. We went on four dates in total. She just wasn't that into me. It fucked me up real hard, to the point that I was still dreaming about her more than a year later. After just four short dates! It hurt like hell, but in the end it's all worth it.

The only guaranteed way to fail is to stop trying.

Feedback

Getting better requires feedback, and feedback is really difficult to get in the dating world. People are not exactly incentivized to be honest, and you'll probably never hear back from your failed dates anyway. One solution is to talk things out with your friends and have them tell you what you're doing right and wrong, share tips on what you feel is working or not. You can also talk with your partners: after you have dated someone for a while, ask about their impressions of your first few dates. What did they like, what did they not like, how did they see it from their perspective.

Keep a dating journal. Take notes on what you did, how you reacted to certain situations, what you were afraid to say or do. Experiment on the apps with different pictures, bios, or approaches to conversation. Find what works for you.

Sometimes the truth is "she wasn't into you" and there's nothing to learn. But often, there are things you could be doing better. Dating is a skill, and getting better at that skill means figuring out what you're doing wrong, fixing it, and then iterating over and over.

Mindset

Team Sport, Not Battle

The biggest mistake people make in dating is treating it like warfare. They think of the opposite sex as adversaries to be fought through tactics and manipulation. This mindset is not just toxic, also just plain ineffective. Dating is a team sport. When dating is working well, you and your dates are on the same team, working together towards a common goal. You're not trying to trick someone into bed or a relationship; you're finding someone who wants the same thing you do. This is an atmosphere that you have to cultivate, and it starts with you making the first move of vulnerability and openness. You must lead by example, and your partners will reciprocate.

The team sport mentality applies especially in bed. Sex isn't something you "get" from women—it's something you create together. The goal isn't conquest but mutual pleasure. This mindset alone puts you ahead of 90% of men who are focused only on their own gratification or ego.

The most successful men I know are completely honest about their intentions. Openness and honesty alows potential dates to make an informed decision about whether they want to go out with you. Some will bounce, and this is good, you've saved both of your time and the ones who stay are actually on board with what you're offering.

I must acknowledge that this is not an easy thing to do. If you are insecure about your appearance, personality, experience, skills, or anything else, it's natural to try to hide away and refuse to confront that. When I started dating I was terribly ashamed of sharing the details of my 15 years of monk mode and was totally dishonest about it. It felt awful, and of course my dates picked up on the insincerity. I quickly learned that I had to be open about these things. And two years later when I met my current girlfriend, one of the things that initially pulled her in was my weird sexual history: turns out it was not even a weakness.

This extends to seeing multiple people too. The mental gymnastics guys do to hide this are absurd. Just say, "I'm seeing other people as well." Most women in the app ecosystem are doing the same. Transparency creates trust, even in casual arrangements, and trust is necessary if you want to have great sex. This is partly why women trust me to tie them up with 20 meters of rope just a couple of hours after we first meet.

Another benefit of honesty is that it attracts honest people and pushes away everyone else. People who play games (which is generally a symptom of insecurities) tend to match up with other people who play games, a perfect little soup of toxicity. Again, some will bounce, and this is good.

Above all, do not be ashamed of your sexuality. Sexual desire isn't something to apologize for or disguise behind fake intentions. It's not something to trick people into satisfying. Women are horny too, and great sex can be a profound experience. Confidence in your desires is magnetic. It signals self-respect. You're not desperate; you're selective. You know what you want, you are offering something valuable, and you're looking for compatible partners.

This brings me to standards. Have them. High ones. Not just for physical appearance, but for personality, intelligence, kindness. If the women you're meeting aren't worth talking to, that's on you. Make yourself worthy of more interesting women. Build a life that attracts the kind of partner you want—whether for a night or forever.

Honesty is always difficult and always a work in progress. Nobody is perfect. But approaching dating with transparency isn't just ethically superior, it's pragmatically superior. It leads to better connections, better sex, better relationships, and less wasted time.

Authenticity & Connection

Be Genuine(ly cool)

Your job in dating isn't to make people like you—it's to be your best self and see who's compatible.

Stop sweating all the small stuff. When to kiss, how to escalate, negging, how long to wait until to text, being suave 24/7 with some James Bond quip always up your sleeve. None of that matters much. Just chill. Just be nice. Be cool, honey bunny. A woman who wants to fuck you will make it easy for you. Cooperate with her! You are not enemies, you are not fighting over control of a scarce resource, you are on the same team, looking for the same thing.

I've often asked women to come back to my place without even having kissed them. No elaborate escalation ladder, no push/pull, no "3 points of contact before suggesting location change", none of that bullshit. Just a pleasant chat over a drink or two and "we should get out of here, want to go back to my place?" If she's into you, this works. If she's not, no technique in the world will change that. It's true that some people use sex as a tool in relationship power dynamics; you should stay far, far away from them, and that will just happen naturally as long as you stay true to yourself.

Nice Guys Finish On Her Face

Women really like guys who are nice. Not "nice guys" who are nice from a place of weakness, from a place of dishonesty, neediness, insecurity, hiding their intentions, etc. Women like it when you are nice from a place of confidence, strength, and magnanimity, when it's genuine. Sometimes the nice thing to do is tie someone up and spank them until they cry. Being genuinely nice means being attuned to what the other person actually wants, not what you think you're supposed to provide. And it definitely doesn't mean concocting hidden agreements where you expect to receive something in return for your niceness. So be nice.

The foundation of all meaningful connection is honesty and vulnerability. You need to make the first step here—show your cards before asking to see theirs. When you're vulnerable first, you create space for the other person to reciprocate. This doesn't mean trauma-dumping on a first date, but it does mean being real about what you want, what you enjoy, and who you are.

Casual Sex Attitudes

One of the weirder discoveries of my dating adventures was women's bizarre relationship with casual sex. Many are having it despite not particularly enjoying it. They're often chasing the feeling of being desired rather than pleasure itself. I've slept with beautiful women who admitted they don't really enjoy hookups but keep doing it anyway. When I asked why, the answers were all variations of "I like feeling wanted" or "It's validating" or just "well it was something to do". For them, sex is an abundant but joyless resource: easily gained, but almost never satisfying.

This divorce between sex and pleasure was a big surprise for me. The act has somehow become weirdly performative, less about the actual raw experience itself and more about what it represents. Are you sexually liberated? Desirable? Normal? The apps amplify this dynamic by creating an endless marketplace of validation where actual human connection is almost beside the point. People mindlessly performing scripts about freedom and desire while feeling increasingly alienated from both.

This mind-fucked dynamic explains a lot about modern dating, honestly. When neither party is primarily motivated by actual desire or connection, is it any wonder most casual sex is so mediocre? The good news is that you can easily set yourself apart by crushing the competition on this front.

Sexual Compatibility

Whether you are looking for something casual or a life partner, sexual compatibility is non-negotiable. Different people have radically different preferences, but are usually very reticent about discussing them up front; this is how you end up divorced 5 years down the line. Some women want romance and tenderness; others want to be thrown against the wall and degraded. Some prioritize their pleasure; others get off primarily on yours. There's no universal "good at sex"—there's only "good at sex with this particular person."

This is why sexual honesty is crucial. It filters out mismatches before emotional investment makes the inevitable split more painful. The right sexual match creates a feedback loop of mutually reinforcing desire and fulfillment that elevates the entire relationship. The physical connection elevates the mental one and vice versa. When you're sexually compatible, everything else becomes easier: communication improves, resentment decreases, and your bond deepens through shared vulnerability. Do not, under any circumstances, settle for mediocre sex

If you want better than mediocre—and you should—then aim higher. Be honest, be present, be genuinely interested in your partner's pleasure, and be good at sex (more on that in my next essay). The bar is so low it's practically underground.

Intentionality: Design Your Relationships

Being authentic goes hand in hand with being intentional. Most people are not really choosing their relationships. They're just stumbling into whatever arrangement emerges from unconscious social scripts. They fuck on date 3 because they're supposed to fuck on date 3, they go exclusive because that's what you do after a while, they move in together because rent is expensive, and then they wake up five years later wondering what the fuck happened.

Intentional dating means actively designing your relationships rather than letting them happen to you. This starts with brutal honesty about what you actually want. Not what you think you should want, not what dating coaches say you should pursue, but what genuinely brings you fulfillment.

This is another thing that's going to limit your target audience, but ulltimately works in your favor. Yes, being upfront about wanting casual arrangements means that many people will swipe left, but the ones who match are actually going to be interested in the same thing. No wasted evenings, no disappointed expectations, no messy situationships.5

This intentionality should extend to all aspects of a relationship. A friend of mine told me the story of her first divorce: he was her first boyfriend, they had been dating for 8 years starting in college, and eventually decided to get married. So they have a lovely ceremony, exchange vows, eat cakes and all that, and the next day the husband says: "time to start trying for kids now". She was absolutely horrified as she had absolutely no intention of having kids with him. This is an extreme example, but people go through relationships based on unstated assumptions and expectations when it comes to jealousy, communication, security, living arrangements, life goals, and how to enhance each others' lives that are often totally incorrect.

The most successful relationships are those that involve two people who act as conscious architects and not passive participants. This might sound clinical, but it actually creates space for deeper emotional connection. When the structural elements are clear, you can focus on actually enjoying each other rather than constantly renegotiating unspoken rules. Do not let life just happen to you. Have you tried trying?

Yes, But...

"But Alvaro, I'm too fat/ugly/old to succeed at dating."

Have you put in consistent effort at the gym for a year? Have you optimized your diet? Have you invested in clothes that actually fit? Have you gotten professional photos? No? Then you haven't actually tested this hypothesis. These are all easily fixable issues, and you just need to stop complaining and put in the work. You don't need to be a male model—you just need to be the best version of yourself.

"But Alvaro, I'm too short. Women won't date men under 6 feet."

I'm not going to tell you that height preferences are not real. They can be brutal, and they are totally unfair. But if you're fixating on the women who reject you for immutable characteristics rather than focusing on the many who don't care, you're creating your own prison. The height issue is real, but the impact is wildly exaggerated by men looking for an uncontrollable excuse for controllable failures.

"But Alvaro, I'm socially awkward/on the spectrum/have anxiety."

What do you think my social skills looked like after 15 years of monk mode? I get social anxiety all the time, and from the silliest things. But social skills are just that—skills. They can be learned and improved like any other. As long as you keep practicing intentionally, figuring out what you can do better, and keep putting yourself in new and uncomfortable situations, you will improve. The alternative to that is to resign yourself to using your temporary weaknesses as a permanent excuse, which guarantees failure.

"But Alvaro, there are no interesting women in my area."

Have you tried living somewhere else? I'm entirely serious. If dating is important to you and your location is legitimately terrible for it, moving is a rational decision. I've known people who relocated primarily for dating prospects. Besides, most likely, there are interesting women around you—you're just not interesting enough to attract them yet. Focus on building a life and personality that naturally draws in the kind of people you want to meet.

"But Alvaro, the dating market is rigged against average men."

Is the market difficult? Yes. Is it "rigged"? No. The problem is that most men are putting in minimal effort while expecting exceptional results. They have terrible photos, boring lives, mediocre fizeeks, and underdeveloped social skills, yet somehow believe they deserve supermodel girlfriends who fall into their laps without effort.

Dating markets are highly efficient. You generally get what you're worth. Tinder is a mirror disguised as a window. If you're not getting what you want, you have two options: improve your market value or adjust your expectations. Both require honest self-assessment and real effort.

"But Alvaro, I don't have time for all this."

Then you don't have time for dating. If you can't commit a few hours a week to swiping, a few hours in the gym, and a few hours on dates, you're not actually prioritizing this area of your life. That's fine, but admit it's a choice rather than pretending it's an impossibility.

Wrapping Up

Dating is a skill like any other. I went from a decade and a half of celibacy to more casual sex than I knew what to do with, and ultimately to finding someone truly remarkable. You just need to work on it, try different things, iterate, improve yourself. Love thyself. Do not lower your standards, do not accept "good enough" in yourself or others, do not hide behind masks that attract the wrong people. Focus on what you're best at, but don't be terrible at anything. I'm not claiming everyone will achieve identical results with identical effort. What I am saying is that nearly everyone can substantially improve from their current baseline, whatever that may be.

Most men fall into one of two categories: the reliable "boyfriend material" guy who fails to inspire true desire, or the exciting "fuckboy" who can't maintain a meaningful connection. The sweet spot is being both—reliable enough to trust but exciting and hot enough to desire. It's not about being perfect at everything, but about being good enough across the board. It's about honesty and skills and confidence. When you're not constantly worried about hiding your insecurities or playing tactical games, you can be present and actually enjoy the person across from you.

I cannot emphasize enough that the same principles serve both casual and serious dating. Honesty, vulnerability, self-respect, and intentionality create better experiences across the board. These aren't just ethical considerations—they're pragmatic strategies that lead to better sex, better connections, and less wasted time.

Much of this post focuses on casual dating, but most people will eventually get bored of that, and finding the right teammate changes everything. When you meet someone who genuinely gets you, who wants the same things you do, the entire experience transforms. Dating stops feeling like a grinding job interview process and becomes an exciting collaboration. The right partner will enhance your life, pushing you to grow to ever greater heights.

Approaching dating with intentionality and treating it as a skill to be developed changes everything. Your dating life isn't happening to you; you're actively creating it. You are in control of your romantic destiny.

Further reading, in case six thousand words on dating wasn't enough for you:

• Putanumonit: Dating: a Research Journal, Part 1

• Most Online Dating Advice is Terrible

Stay tuned for the final installment in the series, How to be Good at Sex.

Closure. I keep hearing that word.

Of the qualities which ordinarily raise novels to eminence, Bouvard et Pécuchet has absolutely none. It is unfinished. It is a failure on almost every level: it is gimmicky, repetitive, the characters are shallow, there is no plot, it is supposedly comedic but never funny, and it tells instead of showing at every turn. Flaubert was well aware of its faults, writing to Émile Zola that "there are no quotable excerpts, no brilliant scenes, just the same situation over and over…" Yet this novel counts among its admirers Borges, Calvino, and Pound. Bolaño classes it among the "great, imperfect, torrential works that blaze paths into the unknown", while Gass says that "it is not for the faintly minded. It is a devastation, a blowup as total as the bomb".

Laurel and Hardy at Epidaurus

On a horizon that receded further each day, they glimpsed things at once strange and wondrous.

The year is 1872. Flaubert starts working on something he's had on his mind for a very long time. The intention is to write a comic novel of ideas, viciously skewering the stupidity he sees everywhere around him. At its center will be two fools, a slapstick duo of dilettantes who embody everything that is wrong with the world and are justly punished for it—a picaresque of knowledge starring two Quixotes and no Sancho. In their adventures they will try their hand at virtually every art and science known to man, from horticulture to theology—and fail, painfully, at every single point. In a letter, he writes:

I’m contemplating something in which I’ll vent all my anger. Yes, at last I shall rid myself of what is stifling me. I shall vomit back onto my contemporaries the disgust they inspire in me, even if it means ripping my chest open.

But Flaubert is nothing if not a perfectionist, and if he must write about stupidity then he must first make a comprehensive survey of it. He reads one tome. He reads ten. He reads a hundred. By the time he reaches one thousand it is clear that he's still nowhere near the end. In 1879 he announces to Zola that he has finally finished his readings and will not open another book until the novel is done, but before long he finds himself lost in the pages of yet more ecclesiastical texts. By the end of his life (which will not be long enough to complete his work) he will have read more than 1500 books in his quest to understand the minds of François Denys Bartholomée Bouvard and Juste Romain Cyrille Pécuchet.

He's never really sure about the work, writing to his sister in 1877 that "at times, the immense scope of this book stuns me. What will come of it? I only hope I’m not deceiving myself into writing something goofy rather than sublime."1 In another letter he writes that "one must be mad to undertake such a task." And between all this, he is also repudiating his earlier style, deconstructing and demolishing the conventions of the realist novel, replacing them with irony, self-reference, and the endless fragmentation of language and meaning. The line between author and characters is blurred, the linear becomes circular, and the very act of reading itself is interrogated as Flaubert inaugurates the 20th century modernist tradition in literature

They Gave Up

What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano.

The novel follows two Parisian copy-clerks who meet by chance and quickly bond over their shared intellectual curiosity. When Bouvard unexpectedly inherits a fortune, they retire together to the countryside to devote their lives to learning and self-improvement. Flaubert shoves his characters into a labyrinth of intellectual disciplines and subjects them to relentless misfortune; barely a paragraph goes by without some absurd failure; there is no pause, no space whatsoever for comedic timing, and the joke unfolds in the same way every time—with the inevitability of a mathematical proof.

The vicious cycle begins with curiosity, moves on to true belief, then disillusionment and contrarianism, only for them to give up at the end. A series of grand revelations, each leading nowhere, or worse, back to the beginning. And was the journey worth it? Flaubert offers no answer to that question. The pace is astonishing: in the span of a few paragraphs, they become theologians, stumble on the answer to Job, get depressed, and quit.

Our world is therefore but a point in the totality of things—and our universe, which the intelligence cannot penetrate, only one universe in an infinity of neighboring universes with infinite modifications. Extension envelops our universe, but is enveloped by God, who contains in His thought all possible universes, and His thought is itself contained in His substance.

They felt as if they were in a balloon, at night, in the glacial cold, carried along in an endless rush toward a bottomless abyss—with nothing around them but the ungraspable, the immobile, the eternal. It was too much. They gave up.

When they tire of studying things, they begin studying the discourse about them instead. While trying to understand history, they acquire a totalizing notion of historical truth which is then subverted in the same paragraph; they then immediately move on to historiography, only to find themselves stuck in yet another cul-de-sac.

They no longer had a single fixed idea about the individuals and events of that time. To form an impartial judgment, they would have to read every history, every memoir, every newspaper and manuscript, for the slightest omission could foster an error that would lead to others, and on unto infinity. They gave up. But they had acquired a taste for history, a need for truth for its own sake. Perhaps the truth was more easily uncovered in earlier periods? Surely the authors recounted events more dispassionately at a greater remove. And they delved into the good Rollin. “What a load of hogwash!” cried Bouvard as of the first chapter.

The first moment of true pathos only appears near the end of the novel, as our two protagonists reach their nadir and decide to commit suicide. Just as they are about to hang themselves, they are saved by the gleam of distant lanterns, lit in celebration of a midnight mass, only for the Sisyphean torment to begins anew. They go from suicidal, to being saved by religion, to fanatics of the faith spending a fortune on relics, to skeptics and Spinozists, to mythologists debating priests, to Buddhism (first ironically, then really), and finally to liberation by way of disgust.

C'est moi

Certain authors extol the pleasures of a picnic or a boat ride.

At some point Flaubert discovers that he has been writing about himself all along. What appeared to him as a comic work of social criticism (what was intended as a work of social criticism), ends up being a melancholic meditation on his own being. The act of writing this novel has forced him into the same kind of bookish learning and bewildered ascetic impulse that he mockingly inflicts on his characters. Driven by a barren obsession for knowledge, he has turned himself into an encylopedia of the universe and alienated himself from the real world. The impulse had always existed in Flaubert: decades earlier, in 1854, he wrote in a letter to Louise Colet: "One ought to know everything, to write!"

He writes to Turgenev in a moment of despair, confessing: "At times, it seems to me that I am becoming idiotic." Perhaps this should not surprise us from the man who said "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." It certainly surprised him though:

Bouvard and Pecuchet have filled me up to such a point that I have become them! Their stupidity is my own and I am bursting with it….I live as much as I can in my two fellows…the stupidity of my two characters has invaded me.

As Flaubert becomes more like them, they become more like Flaubert, disenchanted, dissatisfied, and disappointed with everything they see around them:

Then their minds developed a piteous faculty, that of perceiving stupidity and being unable to tolerate it. Insignificant things saddened them: newspaper advertisements, a burgher’s profile, an inane comment overheard by chance. And reflecting on what was said in their village, and on the fact that one could find other Coulons, other Marescots, other Foureaus stretching to the ends of the earth, they felt upon their shoulders the weight of the entire world.

By the end of the novel they are little more than stand-ins, and Flaubert even grants them the authorship of his own Dictionary of Received Ideas.

And if Flaubert is writing about himself, what does he have to say on the subject? He writes about an infinite curiosity that is always subverted by human finitude; he suffers simultaneously from a superabundance of learning and a desire that will never be quenched. And the novel, too, is torn in opposite directions: between comedy and tragedy, between greed for experience and a corrosive suspicion of Ideas.

Ideas and pain are inextricably linked, right from the beginning: "...their newfound curiosity caused their intelligence to bloom. [...] And, having more ideas, they suffered more acutely." Imagine Faust—sans Mephistopheles! And while our heroes abandon every field they touch, they never give up the greater quest. The struggle of Bouvard and Pécuchet (and Flaubert (and me (and you))) is not comic, but tragic and Romantic—they and he and we are not buffoons but martyrs, tortured and broken on the wheel of the human condition.

The Problem of Knowledge

I've studied now Philosophy

Are the failures of Bouvard and Pécuchet a commentary on our norms of knowledge? Is the problem with the people, their sources, or how they handle them? Is it a declaration of the triumph of skepticism over truth? Is it a more general attack on Western civilization (as Gass would have it)? Or is it perhaps a condemnation of the entire universe?

The original subtitle of the novel was "An Encyclopedia of Human Stupidity", which was later changed to "On Lack of Method in the Sciences". This change represents a shift in how Flaubert saw his task: it started as a mere attack on the follies of his contemporaries, but in the end it was a much broader assault. The flaws of the characters are still there, but they are not imbeciles: in many ways their faults are understandable.

While the overall structure repeats itself, the actual errors they commit are diverse: sometimes it's a matter of an over-reliance on book learning, at other times it's an issue of science vs metis. Sometimes it's a question of stupid experimental methods, while at other times it's a matter of social epistemology. Flaubert systematically dismantles epistemic authority, pitting each source against another in a cascade of contradictions. His protagonists' earnest curiosity is crushed by the disorienting barrage of information that assaults them from every direction.

The fields they try to tackle are too vast and too complex, so they are too fast, too shallow, and fail to synthesize or think critically. They see knowledge as a conclusion, when it should be a process. They fail to realize the limits of their knowledge. Even when they do acquire some truth, they put it into practice in the wrong way. They believe that knowledge is acquired easily, and once acquired will solve all problems.

But Bouvard and Pécuchet are not just bad learners—Flaubert's true concern runs deeper: they are constantly striving for meaning in a world that resists clear answers. Their epistemological failure is a minor reflection of a much greater existential failure. Their desperate search for meaning in a universe that is indifferent to such inquiries leads only to alienation and disappointment.

Flaubert is not interested in specific epistemological criticisms: those questions are left open to interpretation and that's part of the appeal. Flaubert's ultimate target is the pursuit of absolute truth, epistemological certainty, the idea of reaching the end of thought. He declares that ineptitude is not understanding the twilight.

"Yes, stupidity consists in wanting to conclude. We are a thread and we want to know the pattern. [...] What mind of any strength—beginning with Homer—has ever come to a conclusion?" And this novel certainly revels in its refusal to conclude! For Flaubert, the search for knowledge is an existential trap, a synecdoche for the futility of reaching any kind of certainty or ultimate purpose. Both for him as for his characters, this quest for knowledge leads only to disorientation.

One Must Imagine Flaubert Happy

End with a view of our two heroes leaning over their desk, copying.

Bouvard et Pécuchet is an Ecclesiastes for the 20th century. For Qohelet this was all tragic. For Flaubert, it's an unintentional tragicomedy. For both, it's an existential torment. While Qohelet has a way "out" (unsatisfying as it is) in God, Flaubert has no such option. We moderns, having ripped off the theological blinders of our forefathers, can appreciate the cosmic irony, and—perhaps—laugh back at it. While the ancient existentialist can preach a sense of acceptance and resignation, Flaubert instead gives us...The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, except the wanderer is about to trip and fall under the fog again.

Bouvard and Pécuchet act out of compulsion, convinced that the next piece of knowledge will somehow save them, redeem them, or justify their existence, but it never does. The universe, for Flaubert, is not only meaningless and indifferent, it is also indecipherable. We are doomed to absurdity and contradiction. Even at our best, we may only ever reach the truth of chessmasters, never that of angels.

This sense of futility is not just reflected in the characters—it was Flaubert's experience in writing the novel itself. It's fitting that a book against concluding was left unfinished, almost feels like it's part of the joke. A great work of circularity, with no ending of its own! It even infects its readers: I have been writing this review for more than two years now. The irony of an unfinished novel about the impossibility of finality speaks louder than any conclusion could.

In the novel's intended finale, after so many futile attempts to learn and improve themselves, Bouvard and Pécuchet would return to copying, caught in an eternal loop of seeking, failing, and beginning again. Whether this vision is beatific or horrific is left to the reader to decide.

Every year, despite my best efforts, my to-read list gets longer. Soon it will exceed what I can reasonably hope to achieve before my death. Like Bouvard, like Pécuchet, like Flaubert, like all men—I am destined to spend my meager allotment of time chasing an ever-receding horizon. We are doomed to seek, knowing we will never arrive.

Lord, give me chastity and continence, but not yet!

St. Augustine

In 1863, William Lang ran a mile in 4 minutes and 2 seconds, a record that would endure for 80 years. Standing undefeated across the decades, across two world wars, from horse and cart to television and airplanes, the record attained a mythical status. After innumerable failed attempts at breaking it, the 4 minute mile was considered impossible. Experts claimed the human heart would explode from the strain.

In 1954, Roger Bannister did what doctors had declared physically impossible: he ran a mile in under 4 minutes. A few weeks later the record was crushed again, and then another 46 times within just three years.

The essay you are reading right now is the four minute mile of Fucking.

Monk Life

Starting in my 20s, I spent about 15 years being celibate. Not because I couldn't get laid, I just chose not to. I was more interested in reading books than chasing women. A mediocre relationship as a teenager, feeling like I had to change who I was in order to get women (and turn into something I didn't like), feeling like I was undesirable, and generally just being more interested in learning at this time led me down that path. Then one day, at 34, I got bored and suddenly decided to make Fucking my autistic special interest. Soon, I was juggling relationships with multiple women and turning down eager propositions because I had better things to do.

Of course, I had to leave some things behind. I betrayed the philosophical life. Didn't read very much, and certainly didn't write anything. The mind atrophies as more and more blood is dedicated to engorging the penis, starving the brain of its essential nutrients and withering away its noumenal capacities.

This isn't a pickup guide. It's the story of a self-experiment. It's a case study in arbitrary limitations and choosing one's character. It's about social scripts. And it's about the discovery that what many consider to be rare and precious is actually abundant and easily accessible, if only you choose to pursue it.

People convince themselves of the absurd nonsense like "I'm just not good with women", "I'm too old to start dating seriously", "I'm not attractive enough for casual sex". These are nothing more than meaningless fixed ideas, and you can just wake up one day and decide to follow a different one.

Before we go further, let's establish that I'm not some gigachad by nature. I'm in my late 30s, tall and lean, not particularly handsome, and with the kind of light balding that says "I read too much philosophy". I'm a pretty good baker, I have a decent job that nobody is impressed by or interested in, and in the end I'm fundamentally a weird nerd writing esoteric blog posts on the internet.

What's a Vagina?

So what is it like to be a manwhore? Pretty sweet, actually. (If you were wondering why I haven't written a real essay in 2 years, now you know.) But it didn't start out that way...

My approach to trying new things is to dive into the deep end of the pool and figure out if I can swim. So, naturally, the first thing I did was to buy some leather handcuffs and a wand vibrator. I took a few decent pics, created a tinder profile, and started swiping.

My first date a few days later was a cute 21 year-old Ukrainian girl. We had a quick chat on the app and I invited her out for a drink. We met up outside the metro, walked to a bar and had a pleasantly anodyne chat for about an hour or so. I did not touch her beyond an initial hug. At that point I asked her if she wanted to come back to my place; she was up to it, and we headed off. On the walk back I thought to myself: "what the hell are all those people on the internet talking about? Dating is the easiest thing in the world".

She asked me about my sexual experience, especially with BDSM, but I was too insecure to tell her the truth, so I bullshitted about how some ex introduced me to the idea a couple of years ago.

We got back to my place and started making out on the couch a bit. It was at this point that ambition and reality came crashing into each other. I suddenly realized that I did not remember how any of this worked. I was basically a virgin all over again. I took her into the bedroom, but everything was off. I was too nervous, too eager, moving too fast. Neither of us was comfortable. I could barely get hard. Neither of us came. A disaster on every level.

I walked her down to the tram stop and never contacted her again. The embarrassment was just too bad.

The second time around was...not much better. And the third one too. Let me quote some of my dating notes from this time:

It is probably too early to judge after 4 dating partners, but thus far the apps have brought me nothing but disappointment, pain, and anxiety. I can't even get hard for the women I sleep with. I sincerely hope there is something better down the line because otherwise I am so fucked.

Initially thought I'd just fuck around, but very quickly discovered I was not built for casual sex. Don't enjoy sex all that much to begin with tbh. Can barely cum from it, when I manage to get hard! (Later note: maybe this was a bit misguided? (Later later note: it was misguided.)) [note from significantly later: casual sex is good actually]

But I kept trying, figuring out what to do and what not to do, getting feedback from my partners, experimenting with all sorts of new things, and just generally getting the hang of it. About a month after starting, I met someone I became madly infatuated with, fumbled it hard, and it was all over after just 4 dates. My notes are amusing in retrospect, so earnest:

Intrusive thoughts all the time, even when I'm spending intimate time with other women [...] I'm terrified of doing the wrong things, being too honest or not honest enough, coming on too strong or not strong enough. I'm scared that by liking you too much I'm going to start repulsing you: afraid of challenging you, acting like a doormat. Nobody wants a doormat.

Went from fucking being happy all on my own to the utter bullshit of limerence, loneliness, neediness...this shit better be worth it in the long run, man.

What if in the end our relations are the only thing that really matters, and it's too late for me? What if I'm totally fucked?

That was my first inkling that I really wanted something more than just casual sex, but I also felt the need to explore more before trying to settle down.

I had grown up on a steady diet of third-hand dating wisdom: I needed to act like a douche, develop "game," become some sort of Alpha Chad. Early on, dating felt like a rollercoaster partly because I was not really secure in myself. A week without any matches would feel depressing, a week with multiple dates would make me feel like I was on top of the world. Fundamentally the issue was that I was looking for external validation and trying to protect or build up a fragile ego.

So easy to get discouraged, even when things are going relatively well, I'm banging multiple women, etc. One failure and I'm feeling bad ffs.

What took a while to figure out was that being a weirdo worked just fine. More than "just fine", it was the right thing to do, because that's the only way you can attract people who are really into you. Breaking through the initial pain and anxiety was crucial though, I think it's easy to get caught in a cycle of low self-esteem, failing to improve, and self-sabotaging, which just causes more low self-esteem. But I just picked up the pieces, kept learning, and kept going. I tried to embrace rejection: fear of rejection is paralyzing, yet actual rejection gives clarity, courage, and finality. The absurd thing is that even after dozens of rejections, the fear never gets easier. The lesson seems impossible to internalize—maybe I needed more repetitions? Should've done 5x5 rejections twice a week like some kind of twisted gym routine?

The Harem of an Autist

Between August 2022 and June 2024 I went on 36 first dates with women of 26 different ethnicities. I slept with 17 of them, and had steady relationships with 7. From portfolio managers to women with shaved heads and dagger tattoos on their chest, I was mostly drawn to the "art hoes".

I don't play guitar or skate.

It didn't take long for me to figure out what to do in bed. Six months after my first date, one of my friends with benefits used the words "transcendent" and "I felt something die in me" to describe our night together. But my brain was busy cataloguing her self-absorption and being bored.

A curious thing I noticed was that many of the women I dated weren't actually seeing other guys on the side. Some were uninterested, unwilling to put in the effort, while some (even really cute girls) seemed to have trouble finding even someone willing to bang them. So I found myself in a weird harem situation, dating 3-4 women at a time, having threesomes and generally living a life of debauchery. My calendar looked like a messy game of Tetris.

This is the timeline of all my dates/relationships (blue: had sex; red: no sex):

Nothing says 'catch' like a man who Gantt-charts his dating history.

The reality of being a "player" was not always what I had imagined it to be though. Take Alice, for example: she was kind of a hopeless romantic who had spent a decade pining over her ex. Three dates in, she was clearly falling for me harder than I was for her. She was lovely: beautiful, intelligent, great in bed, had her shit together. She wrote me poems. We even lived together for a couple of months. And yet for some reason beyond my understanding, I felt an emotional distance that could not be overcome. I think on some subconscious level I was getting off on making her fall for me even more, but the screwed up power dynamic just gave me a hollow feeling. I almost stopped reading during my relationship with her, and my creativity died completelyal. I realized that I needed something different out of my partner, something with more intensity, even if it means having to go through more turbulence. Alice thought we'd date for a year and amicably go our separate ways, and that's what happened in the end.

Having women compete for your attention, maintaining multiple relationships, the power to say "no"—it pumps up your ego in a way that feels amazing at first but eventually reveals itself to be a bit empty. You end up creating these parallel lives, each relationship its own little universe that never quite achieves escape velocity. Sometimes that's exactly what you want. But it gets old.

In the midst of all this, I met some truly remarkable people. Despite things not working out romantically in the long run, I'm genuinely grateful for their presence in my life. I don't think failed relationships are a waste of time, not every connection needs to last forever to be meaningful. Some people are just passing through your life, leaving it better than they found it. And hopefully you leave them better than you found them. I also fucked up, more than once. I hurt people who didn't deserve it—made promises I didn't keep, acted in ways that I'm not proud of. Sometimes other people had to pay the price of my learning curve.

The one thing I was consistent about was being radically open and honest about everything, including seeing other people. Every time I tried to be "strategic" it backfired spectacularly. The whole pickup artist mythology about being a manipulative seductor is complete bullshit.

The Dating

Sex is easy to get in enormous quantities; finding someone you actually like is basically impossible. In the end, the game is probabilistic—you have to keep trying, keep meeting people, keep rolling the dice until you find something real. The scariest thing is that compatibility is mostly ineffable. The evidence collected by gwern is extremely interesting, and basically boils down to this: it's impossible to predict a couple's romantic success based on their explicit characteristics. Understanding this also helped me understand why the relationship with Alice didn't work out. The best you can do is try to minimize false negatives by letting go of your preconceptions and dating broadly.

That said, I found myself drawn to women who were independent, challenging, intelligent, creative, and unapologetically weird, the ones who weren't entirely sane but were intensely curious about the world. Other than lack of physical attraction, the most typical reason I would reject someone was "they're boring"—after spending years hanging out with 155 IQ schizophrenic metapolitical anarchomonarchists on the internet, conversation with normal people can start to feel a bit plain.

More on this in a future essay.

The Sex

Great sex comes from the same place as great relationships: openness, honesty, and genuine confidence. When you're comfortable with yourself and actually give a fuck about your partner's pleasure, spectacular things can happen. Sometimes your partners will orgasm so hard they start crying, and that's a good thing.

Just as runners for decades believed breaking that barrier was physically impossible, most people have convinced themselves that transcendent sex is out of reach, that "good enough" is the best they can hope for. They've internalized stories about how men are just naturally bad at sex, how women are difficult to please, how great sexual chemistry is rare and magical rather than just a learnable skill. But mastering this skill means leaving your ego at the door.

The truth is this: the bar for men is on the fucking floor. The vast majority of guys are absolutely terrible at sex, to a degree that is almost unbelievable. I met multiple beautiful women with bodycounts in the dozens who had essentially never had good sex in their lives before meeting me. Not because I'm some magical sex god, but simply because I gave a damn and put some passion into it.

A strange realization: I have vastly more sex than Aella, who is famous for being a whore. If even Aella isn't getting laid enough, what hope is there for normal people? How do we increase the fuck rate for the masses? I think the answer is depressingly simple: most people don't have more sex because the sex they do have is mediocre at best. They settle for "good enough" and stop looking for better, stop trying to be better. It's like someone declaring they don't like sushi after only eating gas station California rolls. So, to answer Tyler's question: people don't have more sex because most sex is lame.

More on this, too, in a future essay.

Imaginary Barriers

Nice guys: a lot of people think you need to be a jerk to get laid, but that's just another fake social script. The truth is this: being "nice" from a position of weakness is dating kryptonite. Women can smell the desperation. But being genuinely kind from a position of confidence and abundance is incredibly attractive. The difference isn't in the behavior itself, but in the energy behind it. True kindness flows from having clear boundaries and standards, from being genuinely interested in someone's wellbeing and pleasure—not from being a pushover hoping to trade basic decency for sexual access.

The power to say no:

One of the most liberating discoveries wasn't the sex, but realizing I could...say no to it. At some point I started waiting for the second date before getting physical—the connection was better, the sex more comfortable. But it resulted in the strange scenario of girls practically pleading to come back to my place on first dates. Women find it bizarre when you say "no" in that situation, it's just not in their script. They're so accustomed to men desperate to get their dick wet that when you flip the dynamic, it short-circuits their entire understanding of dating.

This whole pathetic dance of men begging for a crumb of sex, trying to push the girl to come back to his place while she resists and acts as a gatekeeper to sex, etc.—it's entirely a choice. A collective delusion that persists only because everyone keeps playing their assigned role. You can simply reject it.

Abundance mindset: when I had 2-3 concurrent partners, I became extremely selective and rejected almost everyone I went out with. The psychological impact of abundance is to make you secure in your own judgments, to push up your standards to where they should be in the first place and stick with them. Scarcity creates artificial commitment to bad relationships. Abundance helps you realize that compatible partners aren't unicorns—they're just people you haven't met yet. And entering a serious relationship with the perspective and attitude that abundance bestows on you makes everything so much easier.

Cold approach: the barrier I have not broken yet. I'm too fucking terrified to cold approach women in public, yet at the same time, I've had way more sex than friends who regularly chat up strangers. A friend casually mentioned hitting on a cute girl in a museum, talking to her for an hour, and then bailing unceremoniously, not knowing how to close the deal. The very thought of hitting on a stranger makes me sink into the floor, melting through the boards, my liquefied body dripping right into the third circle of Dante's hell, but I have infinitely (literally, divided by zero) more sex than he did at the time. This makes absolutely no sense and completely contradicts conventional wisdom about "getting out there".

Finding Fluorescence

Once sex becomes easy, it loses some of its mystique. I found myself having as much sex as I wanted, but it was a fleeting satisfaction that left me yearning for more. One of the notes in my dating journal, following a breakup, reads:

All I'm left with is a nostalgic longing for a future that never was.

Maybe that's not such a bad thing. Getting your heart stomped when someone doesn't reciprocate your feelings is a special kind of hell, but it turned out to be a necessary step.

Last year, I wrote to myself:

I'm not looking for someone who ticks my boxes. I'm after "I can't believe you exist", I want to be amazed, I am after fluorescent effervescence and electric bolts running up my spine, I want to feel like I'm on amphetamines 24/7, entirely incapable of sleeping, lose my job and end up in an early grave because of my romantic obsession.

Perhaps my relationship standards had been set by reading too many Russian novels, but then, improbably, unbelievably, astonishingly, I found her! And while boatloads of casual sex was pretty damn good, it doesn't hold a candle to settling down in a loving, inspiring relationship with a fantastic partner.

But here's the thing: I don't think I could have found it, or been ready for it, without all the fucking around first. The experience, the confidence that comes from abundance, from knowing you can walk away, from having your pick of partners—it fundamentally changes how you interact with the world. Without experiencing the wrong relationships—the boring ones, the sexually charged but emotionally empty ones, the ones where you're more therapist than partner—you lack the contrast needed to recognize something extraordinary when it does appear.

This stuff often fucking hurts. There's a reason the Buddha thought desire was the root of all suffering. But you know what? Fuck the Buddha. Some pain is worth having.

Sometimes I wonder if getting into all this so late in life was a mistake. Did those years of celibacy permanently rewire my brain? Did I miss some crucial developmental window? A friend of mine said that celibacy has already destroyed my psyche. But I don't think that's true, it's never too late to fall in love.

So, what's next? Back to the books, or happy-ever-after relationship wireheading? One thing about breaking through arbitrary limitations is that it leaves you facing real ones, like how to spend the few days you have left on the planet. Nobody knows what the future holds, but I'm really happy with my life right now.

Fin

We're all role-playing, and most people don't realize that they can just switch roles. You can just choose to be whatever you want. You Can Just Do Stuff™. So here's the four-minute mile of Fucking: if you're a reasonably put-together guy in his mid-30s, you could be having threesomes with cute college students. You simply have to make the choice to do it, the barriers are all inside you. If you're actually handsome or successful, you can basically live like Leo in perpetuity, though you'll probably get bored of it faster than he does.

But even if that's not what you want, I still recommend making sex your autistic special interest for a year or two. Not just for the obvious benefits, but because it opens up new mental and emotional states, teaches you surprising things about how people work, and most importantly, lets you enter a serious relationship knowing exactly what you want and what you're worth. And then you can make an informed decision: do I want to go monk mode, or full Simon Sarris? (Those are the only legitimate options).

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

We are going around the table on new year's eve, rating our past year on a scale of 1 to 10. The guests: artists, fashion designers, jewelers, and one or two people with real jobs sprinkled in for diversity. Two immaculately groomed poodles run around and entertain the visitors. Before us, an exactingly curated procession of morsels: blini with salmon and caviar, black brioche with cured egg yolk and parmigiano foam, ravioli with pumpkin and cod with browned butter and crispy sage. The apartment, naturally, is luxurious without being gauche (that would be unforgivable) every piece selected with impeccable taste and just the right amount of personal touch. And so we rate our years, the numbers start coming out, and it is a parade of 2s and 3s, each delivered with a sort of practiced weltschmerz. One of the guests plans to commit suicide soon. The only 10 in the room: me. Is it because I've been perfectly happy, carefree? No—not quite.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately, about my relationship with suffering. All this pain in the past few months, I think most people would recoil from it. Instead, I'm drawn towards it. Is it psychological masochism? The intensity of emotion—it makes me feel alive, present, it gives me a heightened awareness of everything, inside and out.

I compulsively play with the pain in my mind: my thoughts trace its edges like fingers mapping an unknown shape in the dark; I run my mind over its surface to feel its texture, sometimes sharpcutting, sometimes soft and dull; I press against it, and see how it reacts; I savor it, let it melt in my mouth and glory in its bitterness; I feel the heat radiating from it like the dying embers of a fire late at night, and other times like x-rays blasting out of a black hole; I spin it around examining it from each and every angle one by one, appreciating its style from every point of view; I push it far away and look at it with a telescope to admire its entire structure, and then bring it right up to me and inspect every microscopic little element on its surface, and then sometimes I dive in and give myself over to it and let it envelop me and permeate my whole being until I feel and perceive nothing else and time stops completely.

(And sometimes I will take a good look at myself as though I were a case study: "Subject displays strong tendencies toward self-dramatization, perpetually overthinking and rationalizing their emotions through baroque metaphors.")

I am even amused and entertained by it. I laugh at my life and these surprising and delightful and wretchedly dark alleyways it's leading me down. A dull psychiatrist would say it's nothing more than a defense mechanism. I don't believe that at all. This is not about protecting myself or "processing". It's "saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems"—not to be liberated from terror and pity, but "in order to be oneself the eternal joy of becoming". There is a kind of distance there, but it's not a detachment, it is rather a doubling of perception. It's a way of transmuting things. It's not that the pain becomes less real or less painful—it becomes more real, more vibrant, more itself—but it also becomes something else simultaneously.

To treat reality as a medium, to live life with the texture of a novel—this is part of the bargain of being me: simultaneously the author and his character. The paradox: rather than dulling your emotions, this splitting of consciousness instead makes everything more vivid. Like adding a mirror to a mirror and creating—infinity. When you view yourself from the third person, as someone whose life you are sketching out, every powerful emotion is a delight. And it's not just pain that works this way—joy, too, takes on this double character, I'm swept up in it while also watching myself being swept up, and somehow the watching makes the feeling more intense rather than less. I am both the alchemist and his quicksilver, the sculptor and the clay, creature and creator.

I love my life — aesthetically.

It's not a mechanical collecting of experiences to dissect on a couch or on the page. Baudelaire writes of the artist-dandy as "a man possessing at every moment the genius of childhood, in other words a genius for whom no edge of life is blunted." Not "making meaning" after the fact, but in the experience of every moment. A perpetual state of creative tension, of becoming and self-overcoming.

That is―Anti-Buddhism. Self-examination not to feel less, but to feel more. Not to avoid suffering, but to glory in life. Not to detach but to overcome. Not to escape, but to revel in life! Not to transcend, but to heighten. Cultivating not detachment, but intensity and sensitivity, with a poet's intentionality, making the self into an artist in the joy of its own eternal becoming. Creating a layer of aesthetic appreciation that runs parallel to the raw experience, and shapes it. Saying No! to the inhuman, life-denying ascetic nihilism of seeking "liberation" from attachment and suffering, No! to the naiveties about pleasure and pain that constitute this intellectual morass that surrounds us.

Everywhere people seek to smooth life's edges. Instead of riding its violent waves, they seek to transform them into a tepid swimming pool suitable for gentle laps without the least chance of drowning. They cling desperately onto old religions when they talk about enlightenment but mean only quietude, when they preach transcendence but mean only escape. What petty bargains with existence! This is not wisdom, but cowardice masquerading as enlightenment. They seek to tame, diminish, and bridle everything that should be wild! What is this if not a rejection of life itself? Life, which knows nothing of balance but only of tension, nothing of peace but only of creative strife! What sickness entices you to paddle in the shallows instead of making infinite demands on life and always finding yourself in some new wilderness? For "life consists with wildness, and the most alive is the wildest."

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – do you not know that it is this discipline alone which has created every elevation of mankind hitherto? That tension of the soul in misfortune which cultivates its strength, its terror at the sight of great destruction, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, exploiting misfortune, and whatever of depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cunning and greatness has been bestowed upon it – has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?

I used to view the tortured artist with both envy and skepticism. It was a Romantic idea that I thought I wanted, while at the same time dismissing it as an affectation, a trope, a false source of inspiration, or perhaps just a tool to seduce women with. Sour grapes, I suppose. Now I have become him (inadvertently? or by design?) and the view from the inside is not quite what I was expecting...it is both more silly and more real than I thought it'd be. There is certainly an absurd theater to it all. But the authenticity lies precisely in embracing the sublime and the ridiculous, in realizing that the real thing is both more serious and more playful than the cliché suggests. But it's not about turning pain into art, it's this splitting of consciousness that makes the darkest moments shimmer with beauty. Pain is not raw material to be processed later—it's already art in the moment of perception, if you've developed the right kind of vision. "Art from pain" is shallow, I am talking about a methodology of life and consciousness: Amor fati!

The great sickness of our age: the belief that life is something to be managed rather than a drama to be enacted.

Anyway, this is all a bit melodramatic if not pretentious...

—A wonderful piece.

Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid

A mix of fiction, history, and autobiography as a failed author and high school teacher navigates 80s Bucharest. Cărtărescu is a great stylist. Filled with surreal episodes in the liminal space between the droll ordinary life of late communist Romania and an incredible psychedelic fantasy world. People protest against death and have sex while levitating in the air, abandoned factories hide fantastical secrets. About writing, literature, art, humanity, dreams, death, life, love, bureaucracy. Nihilism and its defeat. Very wide array of influences, including H. P. Lovecraft, Jorge Luis Borges, all the Latin American magical realists as well as Bulgakov, Bolano, Pynchon, Dylan Thomas, Franz Kafka, even Cronenberg.

We search like idiots, we look in places where there is nothing to find, like spiders that weave webs in the corner of a bathroom where flies don’t come, where not even mosquitos can reach. We shrivel in our webs by the thousands, but what doesn’t die is our need for truth. We are like people drawn inside of a square on a piece of paper. We cannot get out of the black lines, we exhaust ourselves by examining, dozens and hundreds of times, every part of the square, hoping to find a fissure. Until one of us suddenly understands, because he was predestined to understand, that within the plane of the paper escape is impossible. That the exit, simple and open wide, is perpendicular to the paper, in a third dimension that up until that moment was inconceivable. Such that, to the amazement of those still inside the four ink lines, the chosen one breaks out of his chrysalis, spreads his enormous wings, and rises gently, leaving his shadow below in his former world.

Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II

Not quite as strong as Civilization & Capitalism, but it's a brilliant work, the result of decades of painstaking research. The Braudelian world-view is felt on every page, the interlocking systems of trade, production, geography, crops, animals and people. Mountains shape trade routes, climate patterns determine harvests, sea currents guide merchants - everything connects to everything else in Braudel's Mediterranean. Written in a Nazi POW camp, it brought a fresh perspective on how to think about history: not kings and battles, but the slow dance of geography and climate, the rhythms of peasant life, the endless circulation of ships and goods. Immensely ambitious and beautifully written.

But we cannot hope for precise measurements; at most we shall discover an order of magnitude. In this respect the Mediterranean was still broadly speaking the same size in the sixteenth century as it had been in Roman times, that is, over a thousand years earlier. Or to put it another way, the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century was comparable, mutatis mutandis, to the entire globe in 1939. It was vast, immeasurable, and its reputation as a 'human' area was earned only by contrast with those other monsters which sixteenth-century man was just beginning to tackle - the Atlantic Ocean, not to mention the Pacific. These were truly monsters, alongside which the Mediterranean was more like a domestic animal, but certainly not the 'lake' it has become in the twentieth century, the sunny resort of tourists and yachts where one can always reach land within a few hours and along whose length the traveller could be transported in the Orient Express. To understand what it was like in the sixteenth century, one must mentally magnify its area to a maximum and draw on remembered images from travellers' tales of the days when months, years, even a whole lifetime, could be spent on a voyage.

Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

Basically nothing happens in this book, and it is absolutely spectacular. Non-stop linguistic fireworks. A masterpiece. Outcasts, drifters, hobos, and various other miscreants in 1950s Knoxville. Among its many virtues: the best ever passage about someone fucking a watermelon. Funny and human, no Judges or cosmic pain here.

Dim scenes pooling in the summer night, wan ink wash of junks tilting against a paper sky, rorschach boatmen poling mutely over a mooncobbled sea.

Benjamin Labatut, The MANIAC

The book is split in two portions: first, a semi-fictionalized biography of von Neumann, with each chapter being told from the perspective of the people who knew him (his mother, brother, wife, scientific collaborators, etc). It doesn't focus strongly on the science, more on the person and his relations, and the recurring theme is one of petty resentment and inability to understand von Neumann because he was simply so far above and ahead of everyone else around him. The resentment often manifests as a kind of petty moralism, and Labatut basically makes everyone in von Neumann's life look rather pathetic. I don't know how factual that is, but it certainly works as a literary device.

The second part concerns Lee Sedol and AlphaGo. It's a bit drawn out, but it's an exciting story that's well-told. The point is essentially to underscore just how much von Neumann could see 60+ years ago, when everyone around him was essentially blind. AlphaGo is to the greatest humans as von Neumann is to normal ones -- we should expect the relations to play out in a similar way in both cases.

I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue, and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother-in-law, Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends, and Albert Einstein was a good friend too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Janos von Neumann. I remarked on this in the presence of those men, several times, and no one ever disputed me. Only he was fully awake.

Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems

Deceptively simple, philosophical, dark, ecstatic. Autistic at times. Incredibly dense. Loneliness, death, beauty, nature. I keep returning to her poems.

I taste a liquor never brewed –
From Tankards scooped in Pearl –
Not all the Frankfort Berries
Yield such an Alcohol!

Inebriate of air – am I –
And Debauchee of Dew –
Reeling – thro' endless summer days –
From inns of molten Blue –

When "Landlords" turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove's door –
When Butterflies – renounce their "drams" –
I shall but drink the more!

Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats –
And Saints – to windows run –
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the – Sun!

Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

A short story of an incredibly intense and mostly one-sided love affair. Raw, intimate, with complete lack of dignity, it felt like an invasion of her privacy. Living life novelistically. How lovers really only exist in our minds. I think the essential, unique part of the story is that there is no attempt at justification, explanation, etc. She accepts and presents the bare facts about herself, and almost nothing about her lover. In a way this is a portrayal of incredibly deep passion, on the other hand her approach also makes it feel really shallow: he's handsome, drives a fast car, career-minded. We have absolutely no clue what her passion is for exactly, but that's exactly the point, that the reason of the passion is irrelevant or unknowable or inexplicable or not worth explaining, what really matters is her own experience and what she takes from it ("I do not wish to explain my passion—that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify—I just want to describe it." and "Whether or not he was “worth it” is of no consequence.") She considers herself luckier than him because she has the obsession and he does not, that really stood out as the cornerstone of the whole thing.

When he rang to arrange a meeting, his long-awaited call had no effect on me and I remained locked in the same state of anxiety as before. My condition was such that not even the sound of his voice could make me happy. It was all infinite emptiness, except when we were together making love. And even then I dreaded the moments to come, when he would be gone. I experienced pleasure like a future pain. I longed to end the affair, so as not to be at the mercy of a phone call, so as not to suffer, realizing at once what this would entail, seconds after the separation: a series of days with nothing to wait for. I preferred to carry on at any cost—let him have another woman, or even several. (In other words, accepting a torment far greater than the one that made me want to leave him.) Compared to such emptiness, my present situation seemed enviable and my jealousy a sort of frail privilege which I would have been mad to want to end since one day it would end anyway, outside my control, when he would leave the country or would decide to stop seeing me.

Ctrlcreep, Fragnemt

A collection of tweets and very short stories from @ctrlcreep. "Why would I want to own a collection of tweets", you might think, but these are brilliantly etched little gems: dense, fantastical, inventive, awe-inspiring and terrifying.

The forest's immortal animals are weary of life. Stags rest in the shade for years, antlers growing, intertwining with ivy and brick

Tiny bots build nanoliths, defining sacred spaces on the underside of leaves, between scales of bark, in the grooves of your fingerprints

My brain is a temple, my body is the crowd of money-lenders and market stalls desecrating its courtyard

Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

Man being pulled apart between his civilized and the wild nature. Intellectual and spiritual crisis; despair; isolation in bourgeois society. Both the protagonist (Henry Haller) and the manic pixie dream girl Hermine are essentially Hesse self-inserts. Sex, drugs, jazz, liberation from the shackles of over-thinking, transcendence. Written in the 1920s, but parts of it feel straight out of 60s psychedelic culture (especially the hallucinatory magic theater section). A perennial favorite with intellectual misfits for a reason.

But, when he was a wolf, the man in him lay in ambush, ever on the watch to interfere and condemn, while at those times that he was man the wolf did just the same. For example, if Harry, as man, had a beautiful thought, felt a fine and noble emotion, or performed a so-called good act, then the wolf bared his teeth at him and laughed and showed him with bitter scorn how laughable this whole pantomime was in the eyes of a beast, of a wolf who knew well enough in his heart what suited him, namely, to trot alone over the Steppes and now and then to gorge himself with blood or to pursue a female wolf. Then, wolfishly seen, all human activities became horribly absurd and misplaced, stupid and vain. But it was exactly the same when Harry felt and behaved as a wolf and showed others his teeth and felt hatred and enmity against all human beings and their lying and degenerate manners and customs. For then the human part of him lay in ambush and watched the wolf, called him brute and beast, and spoiled and embittered for him all pleasure in his simple and healthy and wild wolf’s being.

Camille Pagile, Sexual Personae

Paglia said this book "was intended to please no one and to offend everyone." It's not quite as offensive today, 35 years after its original publication, but it still manages to maintain a sharp edge. Paglia brings sex into art history in an incredibly entertaining style. Everything is rapid and extreme, grand pronouncements jump at you from every page, and Paglia's erudition will dazzle you. Sex, decadence, Apollo vs Dionysus. Bombastic and aphoristic. It's a bit too long, and the energy of the first few hundred pages isn't maintained to the end, but well worth experiencing. You'll never look at art the same way again.

Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.

Paul Cronin, Herzog on Herzog

Few people have led more interesting lives in the 20th century than Werner Herzog. The drive, the vision, the creative power, the collaborations, and the endless series of insane situations he put and found himself in make the whole thing feel fictional. Provocative thoughts on art, life, and everything in between. "Inspirational" is generally a dirty word when it comes to book reviews, but this is truly inspirational in the best way possible.

Months before, I had hired local Indians who had captured the hundreds of savage little monkeys, the ones who overrun the raft with Kinski. I paid only half the money for them because I knew if I paid full price, the guy organizing everything would run off with the cash. The monkeys had been sitting in Iquitos for weeks, but when it came to actually having to use them for the scene it turned out they had all been sold to an American businessman and were already on a plane waiting to go to the US. We ran to the airport and insisted we were veterinarians and that we had to see the vac- cination papers for the animals. We shouted so loudly that they admitted they had no papers, and they embarrassedly unloaded the animals from the plane. We just put them into our truck and left. When it actually came to shooting the sequence, the monkeys had some kind of a panic attack and bit me all over. I could not cry out because we were shooting live sound at that point.

Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony

Kafka's best short work. In the Penal Colony starts as meticulous horror: a bureaucrat proudly explaining an elaborate torture device, and ends as transcendent horror with an almost religious ecstasy. Kafka pulls off a perspective shift that transforms everything that came before. The Officer's devotion to the old system, his obsession with procedure and machinery, and the Traveler's polite detachment capture the essence of instituional horror, yes, but the story evolves into something completely different.

Can you now appreciate the work of the harrow and the entire apparatus? Just look!” He bounded up the ladder, turned a wheel, called down, “Watch out, step aside!” and everything started moving. If the cog hadn’t screaked, it would have been wonderful.

Richard Zenith, Pessoa: A Biography

Pessoa is one of my favorite writers and this biography is fantastic, very well-written, almost consistently captivating over nearly 1100 pages. Reveals a lot of hidden and surprising aspects of Pessoa's life, and made me want to be part of the Lisbon literary scene of the early 20th century...Astrology, magic, weird politics, a series of lost literary movements, and at the center of it all: a bizarre life. Would have been interesting to dedicate more space on his posthumous reception though, it ends kind of awkwardly in a place where he has only published a single book and is not well-known in Portugal and completely unknown in the rest of the world.

For Pessoa as for Campos, who in this case served as his creator’s faithful spokesman, the self’s true emotions cannot be intelligibly known, much less expressed, and the self is unreliable, its reality forever fluid, contingent on its changing relations with the surrounding environment. Self-knowledge, or individuality, is therefore a matter of attitude, of acting. The great artist, or great anything, is a great pretender. In the coming years, the editors of Presença would repeatedly invoke sincerity of expression and trueness to one’s self as hallmarks of superior art, while Pessoa would repeatedly question whether words such as sincerity and trueness can signify anything useful for a creative artist.

The Worst

Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century

Utterly irredeemable garbage.

This was sold to me as a kind of sequel to Braudel's Civilization & Capitalism, one of my favorite books. I was really disappointed to find something completely different; Arrighi has none of Braudel's strengths, but is happy to copy his weaknesses. He displays none of the curiosity, none of the interest in data (while Braudel's work is filled with numbers, it would not surprise me if Arrighi was innumerate). But he does share Braudel's attitude towards growth (which is to say that he ignores it). To ignore productivity growth in a study of the 15-18th centuries is bad enough; to ignore it in a study of the "long twentieth century" is downright deranged. Not to mention ignoring demographics...

Arrighi writes about economic history but does not seem to have opened even a 101 econ book in his life. He frequently uses terms of art like "comparative advantage" incorrectly. Wild causal claims are made without any basis in data whatsoever.

While Braudel famously approached history in a highly quantitative manner, for Arrighi economics seem to be a kind of language game rather than something that can be measured and analyzed. It's all "as X has argued..", "as Y has suggested..."! Evidence? What's that? He likes to quote Robert Reich! His predictions about the US's decline have of course not been borne out. And it's terribly written on top of everything.

Indeed, to be the Venice of the nineteenth century was still the objective advocated for Britain by leading members of its business community at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. And the same analogy was evoked again – albeit with negative connotations – when the nineteenth-century expansion of British wealth and power began reaching its limits.

Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.

A pleb filter is a piece of art which, by virtue of its impenetrability, "filters out" people with bad taste. What makes the pleb filter such an entertaining addition to online Discourse is that it's a ready-made kafkatrap,1 a perfect concept for trolls and shitposters to weaponize: once an artwork has been declared a "pleb filter"—no matter how absurd the claim—any disagreement instantly labels you an unsophisticated rube, a pleb who has been filtered.

Thus one may find oneself in futile internet conversations trying desperately to explain that, no, Ishtar really is quite bad, that Ringo is not the best Beatle, and that Joel Schumacher's nipple-Batman is not actually a sublime work of misunderstood cinematic genius. The troll choices are virtually infinite, but work best when applied to creations that are universally agreed to be terrible: the prequels, St. Anger, or the oeuvre of 6ix9ine.

There are fake filters, like Tarr's Werckmeister Hamornies—art which tries to be challenging and hints at great depths while actually being quite shallow. A picture of a pool drawn on a piece of paper, and often frustrating because they are a pleb's idea of a pleb filter. Still, some (like The Magus or The Recognitions) have their charms.

Finally we have the actual pleb filters, works which are both brilliant and inaccessible. Trout Mask Replica, Michael Mann's Miami Vice, Faust Part Two, Enter the Void, the Paradiso, Season 2 of True Detective, Fanged Noumena, the Iliad's catalogue of ships.

The IQ of Shitposters

To proclaim the genius of Hamlet is commonplace; to successfully defend The Two Gentlemen of Verona as Shakespeare's greatest play takes some serious intellectual firepower. Defending the indefensible is a great signal of sophistication: a recent study finds that "bullshit ability is associated with an individual’s intelligence and individuals capable of producing more satisfying bullshit are judged by second-hand observers to be more intelligent". The pleb filter is not just a fun tool for trolling, it also offers a great opportunity to show off one's smarts.

It is genuinely challenging to truly appreciate the talent and artistry that goes into bullshit—Armond White (perhaps the greatest bullshitter of our time) is himself a pleb filter, perhaps the ultimate one. Some are liable to react with horror, but I think it's a game worth indulging in.

At the same time, there's a countersignaling game being played. On the barber pole of intellectual status, the highbrow will adopt lowbrow tastes in order to signal that they're not midwits. Thus we get fancy restaurants serving mac and cheese, and big-brained shitposters defending Showgirls. It is no coincidence that the very idea of the pleb filter was invented on a website whose users are famous for being very smart and pretending to be very stupid.

Sometimes isolated communities spiral local status markers into overdrive, creating unintentional bad pleb filters, with wild signaling and counter-signaling battles cascading downwards, leaving outside onlookers utterly bewildered. The famously unintelligible world of high fashion offers a memorable, and sometimes beautiful, instance of this phenomenon.

Criticism and the Anxiety of the Filter

The pleb filter is also a formidable force in the realm of art criticism: the critic must always maintain a position of superiority over his audience, for it is this stance which gives him the authority to dictate what is good or bad. He must therefore never be filtered, and even more importantly never appear to be filtered. Thus he will praise formulaic "high culture" garbage, lest he be mistaken for someone who doesn't get it.

When a critic encounters a work that eludes his understanding, something that may surpass his grasp, the anxiety of being filtered becomes palpable—and he often reacts to such works in an extreme way by denigrating them. This is why so many of the great classics were initially met with unfavorable reviews: The Thing, Moby-Dick, Lolita, half of Kubrick's movies. Chimes at Midnight, Orson Welles's best film, was savaged when it came out and barely got distribution due to the terrible advance reviews. The anxiety of the filter is to the critic what the anxiety of influence is to the artist.

The Case of Michael Thomas Green

The most interesting pleb filters are those that lie exactly on the line between being a troll pleb filter and a real pleb filter: Speed Racer, Love Exposure, the Book of Numbers, the Metal Gear Solid series, perhaps Dhalgren—works where powerful arguments can be made in both directions, works stuck in the limbo between stupidity and genius. Who can forget the iconic image of Sean Connery in the red trunks from Zardoz? There's a particular form of failure that is borne of great ambition. Take Southland Tales, for example, an utterly bizarre work of deranged grandeur. It is bad beyond belief. And yet there's something there, something alluring, something that pulls you in and props you up and keeps you watching.

In 2001, Tom Green wrote, directed, and starred in Freddy Got Fingered, a stupid yet brilliantly fearless comedy about a failed cartoonist and his relationship with his family. The critics hated it, filling their reviews with adjectives like "embarrassing", "witless", "vile", and "sad", but the film maintains a dedicated following to this day. Some have described it as a surrealist masterpiece, others as a $14 million dollar prank on a movie studio, others as a film before its time. Nathan Rabin writes that "studios exist precisely to keep films this audacious, original, and transgressive from ever hitting theaters", while Lindsay Ellis calls Green "the Orson Welles of our time" and describes Freddy as a film of pure insight into the soul of its creator and a "dadaist masterpiece".

Freddy offers a perfect example of the anxiety of the filter: Ebert gave it zero stars, but in his infamous review he compares Tom Green to Buñuel, and declares that "the day may come when "Freddy Got Fingered" is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism." 16 months after his initial review, Ebert was still thinking about the inscrutable genius of Freddy, writing in his review of Stealing Harvard:

Seeing Tom Green reminded me, as how could it not, of his movie Freddy Got Fingered, which was so poorly received by the film critics that it received only one lonely, apologetic positive review on the Tomatometer. I gave it—let's see—zero stars. Bad movie, especially the scene where Green was whirling the newborn infant around his head by its umbilical cord. But the thing is, I remember Freddy Got Fingered more than a year later. I refer to it sometimes. It is a milestone. And for all its sins, it was at least an ambitious movie, a go-for-broke attempt to accomplish something. It failed, but it has not left me convinced that Tom Green doesn't have good work in him. Anyone with his nerve and total lack of taste is sooner or later going to make a movie worth seeing.

Ἐγὼ δ ̓οἶδα μὲν ὡς αἱ ὑπερμεγέθεις φύσεις ἥκιστα καθαραί

Longinus, in his essay On the Sublime, observes that mediocre artists don't make mistakes: their works are faultless because they stay within convention and take no risks. Perfection is an merely artifact of insufficient ambition. Errour is the purview of the Great!

Is it not by risking nothing, by never aiming high, that a writer of low or middling powers keeps generally clear of faults and secure of blame? Whereas the loftier walks of literature are by their very loftiness perilous? [...] Though I have myself noted not a few faulty passages in Homer and in other authors of the highest rank, and though I am far from being partial to their failings, nevertheless I would call them not so much wilful blunders as oversights which were allowed to pass unregarded through that contempt of little things, that “brave disorder,” which is natural to an exalted genius; and I still think that the greater excellences, though not everywhere equally sustained, ought always to be voted to the first place in literature, if for no other reason, for the mere grandeur of soul they reveal. [...] Would you rather be a Homer or an Apollonius?

Bolaño plays with this notion in the famous passage on the bookish pharmacist, but I find the most striking echo of this idea is found in Flaubert's final novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet. He spent nearly a decade working on it, but did not manage to complete it before his death. It is a strange, repetitive work teetering on the brink between comedy and tragedy; ostensibly a work of social criticism, it is really about Flaubert looking inwardly. And it was a radical departure from anything that he (or anyone else) had written before. He writes in a letter:

At times, the immense scope of this book stuns me. What will come of it? I only hope I’m not deceiving myself into writing something goofy rather than sublime. No, I think not! Something tells me I’m on the right path! But it will be one or the other.

He even places some self-relferential meta-commentary on just this topic within the book—

He was assailed by doubts. For if mediocre minds (as Longinus observed) are incapable of faults, then faults are committed by the masters—and we should admire them? That’s too much!

And for critics, it is exactly this ability to appreciate something great and flawed, as opposed to something small-souled and perfect, that separates the plebeian from the noble taste.

...We Yearn, Nonetheless...

What unites these works in the interstice between the goofy and the sublime is a reckless ambition that goes against all standards of good taste, no not even against but beyond, powered by some unprincipled eruption of creative élan, and not due to some misguided contrarianism but because the old standards are simply incapable of containing the artist's vision which, pushing out against its own limits, bursts like a star. They are a dive off the edge, a rejection of any interpolation between known points, a heroic leap beyond the confines of the billion-dimensional latent space of ideas, riding exotic vectors into unknown territories, vectors invisible to to all but their discoverer—what Bolaño had in mind when he was writing about those "great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path into the unknown".

Perhaps this ought to be our attitude not just toward our artistic creations, but also the sculpting of our life and character and even our beliefs.

Great philosophers and artists have always endeavored to chart their own path, to avoid recapitulating the shackles of their social conditioning, to find new vantage points that will allow them to see farther and more clearly. Is this not what Plato was after when he sought out the Pythagoreans in Italy? Is this not what Herodotus was looking for when he was interviewing the sages of Egypt and the Scythians of the Don? Is this not what Nick Land was reaching for when he was "lying on the ground, croaking into a mic while Mackay played jungle records in the background"? It doesn't always work. But one must at least try.

"There are two kinds of scientific progress," declares my old pal Prokhor, "the methodical experimentation and categorization which gradually extend the boundaries of knowledge, and the revolutionary leap of genius which redefines and transcends those boundaries. Acknowledging our debt to the former, we yearn, nonetheless, for the latter." We yearn indeed, but what dear old Prokhor has omitted is that the leap is risky, and the risk usually fails to pay off. Make no mistake—this is a perilous path. Tradition is Smarter Than You Are, so striking out in your own direction is almost always doomed to fail. Rapid change is almost always for the worse. Human beings are almost constitutionally incapable of taking ideas seriously. Virtually every gene in our body militates against it. "The more people have epistemic learned helplessness and less they trust extreme ideas, the more they'll just default to playing Civilized American." But the Romantically low odds of that heroic action have a bewitching appeal, and our social epistemology works only to the extent that brilliant people are able to ignore it.

This all converges on liberalism, which postulates that ideas are not to be taken seriously.2 All true masterpieces bear within them an implication of extremism, a deep conviction in the importance of some new, radical idea, an implication that this singular point of view really does matter, and has the strength to overcome all others. Every great artwork is a fascist revolt—a form of revolt that, alas, does not fit very well into our æra.

Freddy Got Fingered can be streamed on Amazon. Why not check it out tonight? Perhaps you will catch a glimpse of the sublime in the scene where Tom Green jerks off an elephant and sprays his father with a pachyderm-penis firehose of sperm. You're not a...pleb, are you?

Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger/Stella Maris

A salvage diver (Bobby Western) is sent to investigate a plane at the bottom of the ocean. Somehow the plane is intact and one of the passengers is missing. When he gets back, shadowy government agents are after him. Western is also a genius mathematician and a racing car driver. This is a potboiler!

On the other hand we have the deranged visions of his sister, in a Pynchonian absurdist mode. The thriller plotline is quickly abandoned, and the rest of the novel plays out mostly in a series of conversations. Mathematics, physics, the atomic bomb, JFK assassination conspiracy theories, the role of the unconscious: this is a novel of ideas in many ways. At the same time it's deeply romantic, filled to the brim with longing, regret, loss, and love. It's an incredibly sad book.

Overall this is a novel that strikes out in many directions, many times in unsatisfying and imprecise and undisciplined ways, but it somehow achieves an effect. "Blaze paths into the unknown" etc. To the usual McCarthyan mix of Hemingway and Captain Ahab, he now adds heavy doses of Pynchon and DeLillo.

Perhaps the passenger is the conscious, or the unconscious, or they're both passengers (probably all of the above).

The second novel is a series of conversations between Bobby's sister Alicia and her psychiatrist, a short time before she commits suicide. It's mostly a companion piece, and many times it feels like Alicia is McCarthy's mouthpiece. It's about mathematics and giving up mathematics and the foundation of mathematics, about language, about meaning in a godless world, about the inability to experience the world directly and the effects of various intermediation mechanisms (including language), about love and longing, about the burden of knowledge, about intelligence, evolution and evolutionary psychology, physics and the bomb and the sins of the father. Both books try their damnest to tackle Gnosticism.

One of the best works in many years, I can't wait to go back to it.

Here is a story. The last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darkens about him. Who sorrows all things with a single sorrow. Out of the pitiable and exhausted remnants of what was once his soul he’ll find nothing from which to craft the least thing godlike to guide him in these last of days.

Cantor, Gauss, Riemann, Euler. Hilbert. Poincaré. Noether. Hypatia. Klein, Minkowski, Turing, von Neumann. Hardly even a partial list. Cauchy, Lie, Dedekind, Brouwer. Boole. Peano. Church is still alive. Hamilton, Laplace, Lagrange. The ancients of course. You look at these names and the work they represent and you realize that the annals of latterday literature and philosophy by comparison are barren beyond description.

Gene Wolfe, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories

Slightly uneven but the best stories are really great: in particular I loved Feather Tigers, Death of Dr. Island, Toy Theater, and Seven American Nights. Loads of classic Wolfeian mindfuckery. Many of the stories are in that classic Wolfe style where you have to piece together what's going on from tiny hints left in the text, and it's all a bit ambiguous in the end and so on. There's a lot of focus on religion (often explicitly Christian) and death. Two stories, The Hero as Werwolf and The Doctor of Death Island, being fairly explicitly death-ist. Technology and its social effects, the problem of evil, mastery of art versus human relations, the hollowness of immortality, how people would react to a messianic figure, and more!

An exaggerated and solemn respect always indicates a loss of faith.

François, Baron de Tott, The Memoirs of the Baron De Tott, on the Turks and the Tartars

A look into the past, from the past. Filled with fascinating little observations (I found the book through an anecdote about forks which Braudel mentions in C&C). Roughly at the time the American revolution was happening, the same time when Johnson and Boswell were drinking too much claret at the Mitre, de Tott was joining the Crimean Tatars on a slave raid into Southern Russia. He spent many years in the Ottoman empire over two stints, and finally also traveled around the middle east. Most fascinating for its observations of Ottoman society, and the role de Tott played in the Russo-Turkish war of '68-'74. Somewhat niche, but definitely worth a read if this is your kind of thing.

What causes the fall of empires? Culture, Tott says: all decay ultimately comes from within. He's particular critical of the effects of despotism in government: everyone's place is precarious and there is no room for prosocial ambition. Simultaneously totally lawless but also extremely despotic—anarcho-tyranny at its finest, made worse by abitrary and capricious system of punishments.

Oh, and the introduction by the translator is absolutely hilarious (unintentionally).

How can so Sovereign a contempt for human nature amongst the Turks consist with that whimsical beneficence they display towards certain animals the most useless to fociety? Barbarity itself, no doubt, stands in need of some relaxation, whilst it crushes mankind under the weight of its iron secptre, it condescends to smile on objects whole insignificance give no occasion for alarm; and the pride of the despot blending all beings together in one common Contempt, selects its favourites from amongst the weakelt.

Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

A review of a fictional philosophical tome on clothing, with various notes on the life of its author, the also fictional Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. Imagine a mix between Borges, Laurence Sterne, and Fichte. And it's got Carlyle's ridiculous style (which was extreme even in his own time) to top things off. And you can almost never tell when it's serious and when it's not. This book caused Emerson to start corresponding with Carlyle, and even inspired Borges to learn German!

In Sartor Resartus, only a lifelong quest for knowledge can lead one to the truth that knowledge is unattainable (or perhaps the other way around?). Carlyle hates the limiting effect of the standard philosophical approaches of his time, so he instead opts for this extreme type of illegible, non-linear anti-discourse in which everything is both deadly serious and potentially an ironic joke. What I'm saying is that Carlyle was the first zoomer.

The age of Curiosity, like that of Chivalry, is indeed, properly speaking, gone. Yet perhaps only gone to sleep: for here arises the Clothes-Philosophy to resuscitate, strangely enough, both the one and the other! Should sound views of this Science come to prevail, the essential nature of the British Dandy, and the mystic significance that lies in him, cannot always remain hidden under laughable and lamentable hallucination. The following long Extract from Professor Teufelsdröckh may set the matter, if not in its true light, yet in the way towards such. It is to be regretted however that, here as so often elsewhere, the Professor’s keen philosophic perspicacity is somewhat marred by a certain mixture of almost owlish purblindness, or else of some perverse, ineffectual, ironic tendency, our readers shall judge which

Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

To say that it's about a dockworker would be both true and misleading. Nostromo is the dashing Capataz de Cargadores, a man obsessed with his image and driven to heroic tasks out of a desire to maintain it.

A chopped-up story from various points of view, the narrative is kaleidoscopically structured: fragmented, unclear, conflicting, and circular. Character motivations and world-views clash with each other as the fate of Costaguana is determined. Politics, heroism, revolt (internal and external), the worth of social status, reputations, perceptions, allegiances, and material vs idealistic interests. Betrayals of all kinds. Private and public vindications and redemptions. Great stuff.

To be a millionaire, and such a millionaire as Holroyd, is like being eternally young. The audacity of youth reckons upon what it fancies an unlimited time at its disposal; but a millionaire has unlimited means in his hand—which is better. One's time on earth is an uncertain quantity, but about the long reach of millions there is no doubt.

Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

A story set in a future in which a cloistered religious-academic order is devoted to playing the Glass Bead Game, a kind of unification of all the arts and sciences. A kind of nihilistic telos for all intellectual pursuits, with an alluring beauty all of its own. The actual game itself is never described; instead we follow the life of Joseph Knecht from student, to leader of the order, and the next steps after that, as he is torn between the real world and the ivory tower.

The Borges influence can be felt throughout, and there's nothing quite like it.

The life of the mind, asceticism, the lifecycle of organizations, hierarchies and servitude, purpose and nihilism, beauty, sacrifice, duty, transcendence.

Especially for young men with gifts like those of Joseph Knecht, who have not been driven by a single talent to concentrate on a specialty, but whose nature rather aims at integration, synthesis, and universality, this springtide of free study is often a period of intense happiness and very nearly of intoxication. Were it not preceded by the discipline of the elite schools, by the psychic hygiene of meditation exercises and the lenient supervision of the Board of Educators, this freedom would even be dangerous for such natures and might prove a nemesis to many, as it used to be to innumerable highly gifted young men in the ages before our present educational pattern was set, in the pre-Castalian centuries. The universities in those days literally swarmed with young Faustian spirits who embarked with all sails set upon the high seas of learning and academic freedom, and ran aground on all the shoals of untrammeled dilettantism. Faust himself, after all, was the prototype of brilliant amateurishness and its consequent tragedy.

Laurent Binet, HHhH

Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich. The story of Operation Anthropoid (to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich in Prague) and everything that led up to it. 257 short chapters, sometimes consisting of nothing more than a quotation. It's a blend of a mostly-historical retelling of the operation with a ton of metafictional elements on top. Binet constantly comments on the issues with constructing a historical novel, compares his approach to other books and movies, and even brings his personal life into it. Irony, humor, self-consciousness (especially about the author's view of Heydrich), the tension between history and fiction, and a slow, horrific build-up that absolutely fills you with terror. Incredible that this book can manage such a powerful emotional effect despite the ironic tone. The absurd scenes (whether comical or horrific) are true, which makes the whole thing so strange. Goring is showing off his model train set to Heydrich when he's there to get the final solution started...

Anyway, the RSHA hydra has enough heads to keep him busy. So now he has to delegate. He gives each of the RSHA’s seven divisions to a colleague who is selected first and foremost for his abilities rather than his politics—and this is rare enough to be worth mentioning in the lunatic asylum that is the Nazi regime. Heinrich Müller, for example, who is put in charge of the Gestapo—and who identifies so completely with his job that hereafter he is known simply as “Gestapo” Müller—is a former Christian Democrat: an affiliation that does not prevent him from becoming one of the Nazis’ most devastating weapons. The other RSHA offices are given to brilliant intellectuals: youngsters such as Ohlendorf (Inland-SD) and Schellenberg (Ausland-SD), or experienced academics like Six (Written Records). Such men contrast strongly with the cohort of cranks, illiterates, and mental degenerates who populate the Party’s higher echelons. One minor branch of the Gestapo—a status that does not reflect its true importance, but it’s always better to remain discreet with such sensitive subjects—is devoted to Jewish affairs. Heydrich already knows who he wants to run it: that little Austrian Hauptsturmführer who did such good work before, Adolf Eichmann.

Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet

It's difficult to write anything about this bizarre, unfinished novel. Despite being comic or satirical, it's never really funny. It's extraordinarily repetitive. There are really no characters, no plot, no development of any sort. And yet it's a powerful commentary on the tragedy of the human quest for knowledge. With it, Flaubert renounced all his earlier technique and essentially inaugurated the 20th century (post-)modernist tradition in literature. I can't really recommend it, but it's a unique masterpiece.

They no longer had a single fixed idea about the individuals and events of that time. To form an impartial judgment, they would have to read every history, every memoir, every newspaper and manuscript, for the slightest omission could foster an error that would lead to others, and on unto infinity. They gave up. But they had acquired a taste for history, a need for truth for its own sake. Perhaps the truth was more easily uncovered in earlier periods? Surely the authors recounted events more dispassionately at a greater remove. And they delved into the good Rollin. “What a load of hogwash!” cried Bouvard as of the first chapter.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Here's a book that manages to entirely live up to its reputation. Parts of it can be a slog, but it's filled with great observations on psychology, sociology, economics, politics, law, the future of America, and more. Tocqueville's analysis of the pressures of social conformity prefigure the (great) work of Timur Kuran.

Fascinating both for how it reveals how things have changed, and how they have stayed the same.

The Americans of the United States must inevitably become one of the greatest nations in the world; their offspring will cover almost the whole of North America; the continent that they inhabit is their dominion, and it cannot escape them. What urges them to take possession of it so soon? Riches, power, and renown cannot fail to be theirs at some future time, but they rush upon this immense fortune as if but a moment remained for them to make it their own.

The Worst

David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

An unstructured mishmash of warmed-over pop science and a cavalcade of bad arguments around abduction, philosophy of science, intelligence, infinity, qualia, etc.

The arguments about superhuman general intelligence not being possible because humans are universal Turing machines are utterly absurd.

One of the worst treatments of abduction in the history of philosophy, and that's really saying something.

Deutsch's comments on heritability are downright idiotic, and it's clear that he didn't even bother spending 30 seconds reading the wikipedia page. He just makes stuff up (incorrectly). A lot of uppity commentary about shit he doesn't understand.

And then it's just filled with a whole bunch of random shit, like a galaxybrained theory of why the UK has the best voting system, a terrible theory of aesthetics, etc.

Qualia are currently neither describable nor predictable — a unique property that should make them deeply problematic to anyone with a scientific world view (though, in the event, it seems to be mainly philosophers who worry about it).

Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies

Tainter's theory mostly comes down to decreasing marginal returns to additional societal complexity, which eventually leads to collapse. Parts of it are highly reminiscent of Chaisson's Energy-Rate Density paper (which everyone should read), but much more limited in scope. He's too focused on explaining everything with a single theory, leaving little room for contingency in history. He ignores the aspect of time: just because a system works well for 10 years does not mean it can work for 1000. And he treats rulers as being virtually unconstrained in their policy choices.

Ultimately I just found it badly argued and completely unconvincing. Full review.

In the evolution of a society, continued investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy yields a declining marginal return.

Tad Williams, City of Golden Shadow

Absurdly overlong scifi story about virtual realities and sinister conspiracies. There's a series of parallel fantastical stories set in a virtual reality and they're all pointless and awful. After 800 pages there is no resolution, only sequelbait. A bit outdated in terms of how it imagines the internet, it does have a few interesting ideas but overall not worth the effort at all.

Ho! We are being taunted by some sort of otherworldly fireflies. Someone fetch me my rifle!

There's just a little problem with all of this: there was never any austerity in the UK. It's a pure media fabrication that persists only because nobody cares to look at the data.

So, let us bring out the charts! First of all, the UK has been running deficits for more than 20 years now. The deficits were huge even right in the middle of the supposedly austere period. Living beyond your means is not austerity, it's profligacy.

What does Wallace-Wells say to justify his claims about "austerity"?

In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, and in the name of rebalancing budgets, the Tory-led government set about cutting annual public spending, as a proportion of G.D.P., to 39 percent from 46 percent.

This is technically true, but stupid. The 46% figure comes from the middle of the Global Financial Crisis, when GDP dropped by more than 15% and the government was trying to stimulate the economy. A decade later, spending as % of GDP had simply returned to its pre-recession level. This isn't "austerity", it's just good old regular Keynesian countercyclical fiscal policy. In fact, the UK had already escaped from recession in 2010, and it continued to run huge deficits anyway.¹

And to emphasize just how unsustainable this profligacy has been, the UK's debt-to-GDP ratio has gone from ~35% to ~100% during this period of "austerity"!

Did spending ever actually go down? Nope:

"But Alvaro, there were cuts to this one particular thing I care about, therefore there was austerity." Sure, spending has been moved around a bit; some areas have gotten more money and others less. As you'd expect from an aging society,² the UK spends a lot more on healthcare these days than it did 20 years ago; this is just a natural shift in priorities, not austerity. Here's inflation-adjusted spending broken down by category, straight from His Majesty's Treasury:³

I would also add that despite the huge increase in healthcare spending, this is the one area that Wallace-Wells chooses to highlight in his article blaming austerity!

On average, English ambulances were taking an hour and a half to respond to stroke and heart-attack calls, compared with a target time of 18 minutes; nationwide, 10 times as many patients spent more than four hours waiting in emergency rooms as did in 2011. The waiting list for scheduled treatments recently passed seven million — more than 10 percent of the country — prompting nurses to strike. The National Health Service has been in crisis for years, but over the holidays, as wait times spiked, the crisis moved to the very center of a narrative of national decline.

Despite this incredible profligacy, the effects of deficit spending on growth have clearly not been very successful—why then does Wallace-Wells expect that yet more profligacy would somehow avert national decline? The UK government and economy obviously have many problems; austerity is not one of them.

1. You could make some output gap arguments for deficit spending here but whatever.

2. The median age in the UK has increased by ~6 years since the GFC; the elderly have gone from ~15% of the population to over 25%.

3. Note that the education figures are not comparable before and after 2011 due to a methodological change.

Cormac

1. The Passenger: A brief and imperfect guide for the perplexed. A bit over the top, but I thought this was the best piece on The Passenger.

The Passenger is an omni-dissolver, an intergalactic acid rain, a necromantic encyclopedia whose entries are unfamiliar tarot cards.

2. A new conversation with David Krakauer. 100% worth listening to.

3. An article by Krakauer in Nautilus: The Cormac McCarthy I Know. Montaigne, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Melville, and more.

It is over tea and lunch with our friends and colleagues that we discussed everything. A typical day might include new results in prebiotic chemistry, the nature of autocatalytic sets, pretopological spaces in RNA chemistry, Maxwell’s demon, Darwin’s sea sickness, the twin prime conjecture, logical depth as a model of evolutionary history, Godel’s dietary habits, the weirdness of Spengler’s Decline of the West, and allometric scaling of the whale brain. I believe Cormac’s recent novels The Passenger and Stella Maris have their origins partly in this foment of ideas that connect domains of unyielding precision to the frailty of life and the militancy of society.

4. James Wood's review is pretty good: "To traffic in serious mathematics is to commune with truth; to traffic in words, to merely write novels, is to produce dim approximations of the truth. This is what too many colloquies at the Santa Fe Institute will do to a novelist’s self-esteem."

5. Joy Williams is also not bad: Great, Beautiful, Terrifying

Perhaps the business of The Passenger, for all its somber romanticism and Gnostic leanings, is to defer to this unconsciousness, to give shape to that which might well be the soul, or at least its most faithful companion.

McCarthy is not interested in the psychology of character. He probably never has been. He’s interested in the horror of every living creature’s situation.

6. This negative(!) review in Slate compares the book to Pynchon, DeLillo, Ellroy, and Lovecraft.

Machine Learning/AI

7. Building A Virtual Machine inside ChatGPT

So, inside the imagined universe of ChatGPT's mind, our virtual machine accesses the url https://chat.openai.com/chat, where it finds a large language model named Assistant trained by OpenAI. This Assistant is waiting to receive messages inside a chatbox.

8. On the persistent mental effects of looking at AI art: Relaxed/Flawed Priors As A Result Of Viewing AI Art. "Since this period of consuming a large amount of this flawed AI art, perhaps a dozen notable times, I've recognized myself initially parsing some visual stimulus in an incorrect way - one that maps to some flaw common in AI art - only to moments later consciously realize that I must have parsed the stimulus incorrectly and fix my initial perception."

9. Ebook semantic search using AI.

10. Wordcraft Writers Workshop

The Wordcraft Writers Workshop is a collaboration between Google's PAIR and Magenta teams, and 13 professional writers from a diverse set of creative writing backgrounds. Together we explore the limits of co-writing with LaMDA and foster an honest and earnest conversation about the rapidly changing relationship between technology and creativity.

11. Midwit AI: Inverse scaling can become U-shaped

12. Riffusion: using an image model to generate images of spectrograms, which are then turned into audio.

13. Nintil makes predictions about AI in 2026.

Forecasting

14. Scoring the midterm election forecasts from PredictIt, 538, and Manifold.

15. Prediction market does not imply causation

Take the other 95% of the proposed projects, give the investors their money back, and use the SWEET PREDICTIVE KNOWLEDGE to pick another 10% of the RCTs to fund for STAGGERING SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS and MAXIMAL STATUS ENHANCEMENT.

16. Michael Story: Why I generally don't recommend internal prediction markets or forecasting tournaments to organisations.

Metascience

17. Nintil: Limits and Possibilities of Metascience.

The failure of meta-entrepreneurship to establish deep links with entrepreneurship, given stronger incentives for improvement, makes me be pessimistic about the possibilities of these bidirectional linkages from manifesting in metascience. Hence I predict metascience and metascience entrepreneurship will continue walking separate paths: The next big NIH reform or new institution started will not be strongly influenced by academic or theoretical metascience.

The Rest

18. The Sweet Life: The Long-Term Effects of a Sugar-Rich Early Childhood. Using the end of WWII rationing in the UK to look at the effects of early sugar consumption. "Excessive sugar intake early in life led to higher prevalence of chronic inflammation, diabetes, elevated cholesterol and arthritis." Not entirely convinced, a lot of marginal/non-significant results, but Figure 5 is really wild.

19. On Galton: How to keep cakes moist and cause the greatest tragedies of the 20th century (Straussian)

Here’s a few highlights of Galton’s many experiments, studies, and investigations:

• Tries to learn arithmetic by smell, succeeds

• Worships a puppet to see if he can convince himself it has godlike powers, succeeds

• Makes a walking stick with a hidden high-pitched whistle inside it, takes it to the zoo and whistles at all the animals (most don’t care, but the lions hate it)

• Replaces the blood of a silver-grey rabbit with the blood of a lop-eared rabbit to see if it can still breed (it can)

• Tells himself that everyone is spying on him to see if he can make himself insane, succeeds

• Tries to consciously control all of his automatic bodily processes, nearly suffocates

• Hears animal magnetism is all the rage, learns it in secret (it’s illegal), magnetizes 80 people

20. Scott Sumner on...Robert Louis Stevenson?! A very good piece that will probably add some items to your to-read list. "So what’s going on here? It cannot be that Stevenson is too difficult for the literary establishment, as he’s also popular with average readers. I suspect it is more nearly the opposite problem—Stevenson is too pleasurable. Some critics wrongly equate greatness with difficulty."

21. What it's like to dissect a cadaver. One of the many hidden benefits of living in the Bay Area?

22. The robot on EA. Don't fully endorse it, but quite interesting.

23. Walking with Nietzsche

The path that Nietzsche took is documented, so I followed him in his walking again (this time solo), starting with the Le Chemin de Nietzsche from the Hotel Cap Estel, the exact hiking trail Nietzsche took almost daily, now dedicated to him. The 2.5-mile arduous ascent with coastal views of the Mediterranean, which goes from the village of Èze bord-de-Mer to the main town of Èze, is perhaps the most beautiful hike I had ever summited, crowned by Èze’s Église Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption, perhaps also the most sublime church I had ever seen.

24. Pynchon's archive.

25. Erik Hoel on the MFA's influence on literature.

Faulkner didn’t finish high school, recent research shows Woolf took some classes in the classics and literature but was mostly homeschooled, Dostoevsky had a degree in engineering. Joyce did major in literature, but even he entered medical school (before leaving), and also failed multiple classes in his undergraduate days. Not one of these great writers would now be accepted to any MFA in the country. The result of the academic pipeline is that contemporary writers, despite a surface-level diversity of race and gender that is welcomingly different than previous ages, are incredibly similar in their beliefs and styles, moreso than writers in the past.

26. Stuart Ritchie on the NIH deliberately crippling human genetics research because the results are politically inconvenient: The NIH's misguided genetics data policy.

Audio-Visual

27. And here's the 37-minute live version of Sister Ray.

What I've Been Reading

• The Passenger/Stella Maris, by Cormac McCarthy. Dark and beautiful. This may well be the last great novel of the human era in literature. It would be fitting for the 89-year old McCarthy to be writing a coda for himself and humanity at the same time. Especially since he views the 20th century productions of science and engineering as far more important and groundbreaking than those in literature.

  The plot is mostly irrelevant. Both books consist mostly of conversations: bars and restaurants for the first, a psychiatric institution for the second. McCarthy grapples with every idea that's been on his mind for the last few decades: mathematics, physics, language, the unconscious, the sins of the father, Kant, evolution, psychology, gnosticism, genius. It's not just a novel of ideas, though—The Passenger is filled with yearning, regret, nostalgia, isolation...just an incredibly melancholic atmosphere in general. Stella Maris is geekier, and basically The Virgin Internal Voice vs The Chad Cerebration: The Novel.

  To the usual mix of Hemingway and Captain Ahab, McCarthy adds strains of Pynchon and DeLillo. It works.

  There's even a cool, oblique Borges allusion: toward the end, Bobby writes down a couple of lines from a 17th century German poet, Daniel von Czepko. Those lines form the epigram of A New Refutation of Time!

• Tiger Technology: The Creation of a Semiconductor Industry in East Asia, by John a. Matthews. This book comes out of academic "management" studies, which entails a lot of bullshit. A lot of overdone abstract ideas that are never really tested, a lot of extremely silly diagrams, etc. And its predictions about the future (it came out in 2000) turned out quite wrong. Viewed purely as a collection of facts it's quite an interesting book, however.

• Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology, by Chris Miller. Much stronger than the above, and also up to date as it just came out. Covers both the history of chip production across the world, as well as current issues and where they will lead in the future.

• Bouvard and Pecuchet, by Gustave Flaubert. A comic(?) novel of ideas, which is also about Ideas. Quite weird, very bad, very good, not sure if I can really recommend it to anyone. Full review forthcoming.

• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick. Some interesting differences between the book and the movie. The latter is vastly superior. There's very little of the cyberpunk aesthetic present here, and Scott wisely ripped out almost everything about the artificial animals, the futuristic cult with the TV host antagonist, etc. Still, it's not bad.

• Children of Dune, by Frank Herbert. I can confirm these get sillier and worse as the series goes on.

• The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, by David W. Anthony. Pretty cool book on the origins of Indo-European, combining archaeological and linguistic evidence. Unfortunately it was written just before the ancient DNA era, so it contains some things we know today are inaccurate (though to Anthony's credit, he was leaning in the right direction). Dull in sections (dry lists of finds at various sites), but easily skimmable. It's difficult to recommend it when Reich's Who We Are and How We Got Here exists.

• The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. I love some of his work, but overall not a fan of the average poem.

• Flashman and the Mountain of Light, by George MacDonald Fraser. The audiobooks for this series are really well done. This time Flashman gets embroiled in the First Sikh War, a rather silly affair all around even without the fictional elements. Naturally, he gets his hands on the Koh-i-Noor. Not the best Flashman novel, but still good fun. The ending is pure perfection.

• Murder as a Fine Art, by David Morrell. Historical detective fiction, in which an old, opium-addled De Quincey and his hot, spunky daughter are roped into a murder mystery and become citizen-detectives. Meticulously researched but not very good, unfortunately.

• Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays. Just a dull collection of academic essays focusing on pointless minutiae and ignoring the big questions.

We quickly began to see a divergence, starting with the "superforecaster" phenomenon: researchers noticed that certain people consistently outperformed the rest, and if you focused on their views you could outperform both the experts and the crowd. Competitive prediction aggregation/market platforms also have serious issues with information sharing between participants, which is a big part of why teams of top forecasters outperform markets as a whole. It has taken a long time for this movement to play out, but I feel it has been accelerating lately and wanted to write down a few comments on where I think forecasting is headed.

One issue is identifying superforecasters. If you don't have access to them (they are GJO's moat in a way), then you need to find them on your own (or at least find a way to reach out to them and attract them). Thus other projects like CSET/INFER ran crowd forecasting platforms and then picked out the top predictors for their "pro team", for example. Recent AI forecasting efforts have also tried to pick out a small number of top forecasters. And then you have groups like Swift and Samotsvety (as Scott Alexander says, "If the point of forecasting tournaments is to figure out who you can trust, the science has spoken, and the answer is “these guys”."). Why pay tens of thousands for a prediction market (which takes time and effort to organize) when you can just give a couple of grand to Nuño and get better answers, faster?

Others have tried to do away with the market mechanism even without having access to top forecasting talent. The DARPA SCORE program (which I've written about before) had two separate components for prediction, one market-based (Replication Markets) and another which used a structured group discussion format to arrive at estimates (RepliCATS). The results aren't out yet, but my understanding is that RepliCATS outperformed the markets.

Personally, I find the shift from open markets and various fancy scoring and incentive mechanisms to "put a handful of smart dudes in a room and ask them questions" a bit disappointing. Why did we even need the markets and forecasting platforms in the first place? To identify the smart dudes, of course—but is that all there is to it? As the top forecasters abandon markets and start competing against them, they are (in a way) pulling up the ladder behind them. We need the public tournaments to identify the talent in the first place, but if the money just goes straight into Samotsvety's pockets instead of open tournaments, new people can't join the ecosystem any more. Where is the next Samotsvety going to come from? Part of the problem is that there's a positive externality to identifying forecasting talent and it's difficult to capture that value, so we end up with a bit of a market failure.

Perhaps the only way to make markets competitive is to make them lucrative enough that it's worthwhile to form hedge fund-like teams which can generate internal benefits from information-sharing and deploy those onto the market, with the added benefit of honing them through competition. But that seems unlikely at the moment, the money just isn't there.

In one of the possible worlds ahead of us, the endpoint of this process will be the re-creation of the consulting firm—except for real this time. With the right kind of marketing angle I could easily see Samotsvety becoming a kind of 21st century McKinsey for the hip SV crowd that wants to signal that it needs actual advice rather than political cover. Could the forecasters avoid the pitfalls of the consultancy world?

What are the limits to forecasting accuracy? Eli Lifland is skeptical about the possibility of improving his abilities, but I'm not sure I buy that line entirely. We're still very early on, and many obvious low-hanging fruits have yet to be tried. If the forecasting-group-as-consultancy takes off, I would expect to see many serious attempts at improvement, starting with things like teaching domain experts forecasting and then putting them in close collaboration with top-tier generalists and forecasters.

What worries me is that this is a movement away from objective scoring and back towards reputation-based systems of trust. Once you leave the world of open markets and platforms, you become disconnected from their inescapable, public, and powerful error-correcting mechanisms—weak arguments can once again be laundered in the dirty soapwater of prominence and influence. Perhaps the current crop of top forecasters have the integrity to avoid going down that path, but how can that be maintained in the long run, with a powerful headwind of incentives and entryism blowing against us?

You're (probably) all theological anti-realists; just apply the same reasoning to the existence of moral facts! If the magical invisible sky god is obviously fake, why do you accept magical invisible sky moral facts? Just take the standard "rationalist" toolkit, apply it to realism, and it disappears in a puff of smoke. The arguments can just be copy pasted: for example, one of the classic (and most powerful) arguments from the New Atheism internet wars was that theists are really atheists about every god except their own. The moral realist is an anti-realist about all moral claims except the ones he happens to like! What is the base rate of moral truth, and why do you believe your inside view is enough to overcome that?

Realist arguments always come across as utterly absurd because their task is 1) extremely simple and obvious, and 2) impossible. All they have to do is say "we used methods x, y, z to uncover moral facts a, b, c, and you can replicate the procedure independently to verify our results". But it's never like that, it's always some interminable verbcel nonsense to cover up the fact that they don't actually have any access to the moral facts that their theory says they should have access to!

Whenever I hear the word "intuition" out of the mouth of a philosopher I reach for my Browning!1

It comes down to this:

• Naturalism: no evidence

• Non-naturalism: magic

Often they'll back off and come up with excuses about why moral facts aren't accessible in that way, but that just wrecks the whole thing. Even if realism is true, if there's no reliable empirical access to moral facts, then that's functionally equivalent to anti-realism. Any defense based on the immunity of moral propositions to empirical investigation also makes it impossible to find the truth. Your metaethics either has to have a way to determine what's true in ethics, or you're practically a nihilist.

Traditionally the problem has been solved with an appeal to God but EAs are, to a first approximation, 100% atheist. You can't pull an Euthyphro any more, so WHAT'S YOUR MORAL EPISTEMOLOGY MOTHERFUCKER? Why do epistemic standards seem to suddenly disappear when it comes to utilitarianism? Why am I constantly being asked to believe in the existence of these ontologically redundant entities?

The theologians at least have the decency to offer some kind of story: ask them about the origin of God and they might invoke the cosmological argument or the principle of sufficient reason. Ask a moralogian about the origin of moral facts and all you'll get in return is a stupefied bovine expression. The theologians can at least appeal to miracles. The moralogians appeal to nothing and expect you to accept it! Is the origin of moral facts natural, or supernatural? If natural, can we engineer our own? Why or why not? The universe, fundamentally, is dumb. You are positing the existence of entities that are very much not dumb. Where the hell did they come from?

Above all the moralogian is conspicuously shameless. Even in the 13th century, a man like Aquinas (who would not meet a single doubter in his entire life) felt it necessary to justify his faith and present arguments in favor of the existence of God. Today's moralogian on the other hand feels no such compulsion, although he is beset on all sides by skeptics! The EA.org page on meta-ethics speaks for itself:

Is this an excess of certainty, or is it because deep down the moralogian knows he has no real arguments?

And the moralogians are not stuck in airy castles of thought, they operate in the real world. The neoconservatives, for example, are a showcase of what happens when the moralogian takes hold of the reins of foreign policy—and it is a consistent ideology that genuinely seeks to spread the values it values. Buckhardt wrote that the foreign policy of Italian states of the Renaissance, free as it was from "moral scruples", gave him "the impression of a bottomless abyss". But who today could not prefer that naked self-interest to the neocon disaster of democracy and human rights? The effective altruists have yet to screw up that badly, but just look at the people who want to eliminate all wildlife and you have a good preview of what is possible—"Man, your head is haunted!"

Peter Singer offers one of the most memorable instances of intellectual cowardice in the entire history of philosophy. Like any reasonable person, he used to be an anti-realist. Then he read Parfit and realized that anti-realism meant utilitarianism was not the case (not sure why it took Parfit to point that out to him). Instead of abandoning utilitarianism, he became a realist just to salvage his ideology! Pathetic.

Hilariously, Parfit later abandoned realism for what he calls "non-realist cognitivism", which is basically the Sam Harris view except with bigger words.2 Part 7 of vol. 3 of On What Matters is an incredible trainwreck, worth skimming just to see what kind of pretzel shapes people will contort themselves into in order to avoid accepting the obvious. At least Parfit understands that adding a magical normative layer on top of reality is completely incompatible with the scientific weltanschauung.

"But Alvaro, your instrumental goals are sort of like morality, maybe we could just re-brand..." Just let it go, man.

From Straight Ahead: What's Going On Here?

You're not actually a utilitarian anyway. At best it's a kind of ideal. That's why you tithe 10%. Just go with the 90% of your intuition that says "this shit is whack, yo". How do ideologies avoid purity spirals? Heuristics against demandingness. It’s one heuristic battling another! Why not go all the way with the one that’s winning?

So you're probably not a realist, and probably not a utilitarian either...where does this EA compulsion come from? You must have been memed into it. Don't feel bad, it happens to all of us, that's how these things work.

From Below: Genealogy

Nature has never generated a terminal value except through hypertrophy of an instrumental value. To look outside nature for sovereign purposes is not an undertaking compatible with techno-scientific integrity, or one with the slightest prospect of success.

Banger tweet Mr. Land, as the */acc transsexual teenagers of twitter dot com like to say.

Instead of getting tangled up in all this philosophy mumbo jumbo we can just pulverize the question with Bulverism.3

What is morality for, exactly? What does it mean for altruism to be "effective"? EAs take it for granted that the most effective altruism is the altruism that helps its targets the most. I would argue that altruism is really meant to help the altruist, not the altruee. That's the only way it could have evolved. So here's my pitch to you: effective altruism is the altruism that raises your status the most. The conspicuous lack of caring about the "effectiveness" of altruism among normal people is a hint! Hundreds of millions per year for the NY Metropolitan Opera? Sure, why not! They're not misfiring, you are.

Of course the problem with optimizing for status is that if you're seen as optimizing for status rather than having a plausible excuse4, it's bad—the altruism that increases your status the most is also the one that you can credibly signal that you actually believe in. Thus we get Triversian self-deception where the altruist "really means it" (but of course if he really meant it he wouldn't be giving 10%). So Actual Effective Altruism is simply too gauche to exist. If you hang around the Bay Aryan rationalists then EA may well satisfy those goals (and I'm sure there are many in EA purely for cynical reasons). But if you're not part of that crowd...

Scott Alexander writes that "all of our values are unjustifiable crystallizations of heuristics at some level", and then continues specifically on utilitarianism:

To be absolutely brutal about it:

EXPLICIT MODEL: Helping others will key me in to networks of reciprocal altruism and raise my status in the community
EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE: Desire to help others, empathy, horror at the suffering of others
REIFIED ESSENCE: “Utility”
ENDORSED VALUE: Utilitarianism, the belief that maximizing utility is the highest good regardless of what other goods it produces"

It's spot on! How someone can write that and go on believing in utilitarianism is beyond me, and Scott offers no explanation.

Now, you might be thinking "But Alvaro, you idiot, we're adaptation executors, not fitness maximizers! This is all perfectly alright, you see." Sure, we're adaptation executors, but that doesn't give you a blank check to execute whatever retarded adaptation was bred into your hairy great-....great-grandfather 500,000 years ago, and is now incompatible with the world you live in (or worse, become enslaved to "unjustified crystallizations" and meticulously engineered hyperstimuli designed to abuse your adaptations). Effective altruism is the coca cola of morality, and you are morally obese!

The adaptation for helping out people in your community has hypertrophied in the toxic sludge of modern civilization into an absurd ideology about maximizing imaginary sky utilons by helping people you will never meet, or who do not yet (and may never) exist. Given the rapid shift in our environment it's unsurprising that there are maladaptations in our system; but we can recognize and avoid them. Your "adaptation execution" has been memetically hijacked—where once you would get good things in return for your "altruism" (a stronger community, status, reciprocal altruism, coalition-building, or even "niceness, community, and civilization"), a runaway meme has now convinced you that it's actually better to get nothing!5 You get all the costs of religion, and none of the prosocial benefits! Even worse, the infected are trying to spread this meme to others. Things are in the saddle, and ride you! It's a particularly dumb version of your typical California cult in which there isn't even a creepy guy with a harem of underage girls at the top. What's the point, man?

There was a type of deer in Ireland whose antlers hypertrophied (probably through sexual selection) to the point that it killed off the entire species. When I look at effective altruists, all I see is overgrown antlers pulling them to the ground.

The absurdity is heightened because we obviously know where these tendencies come from, regardless of what philosophers try to imagine. We know where the evolved desire to gobble up an entire cake comes from—as you resist the clarion call of the chocolate cake, so you must also resist the call of "effective" altruism. A serious valuing of values can only begin when this baggage is dispensed with and laughed at.

Fin

There are plenty of arguments against utilitarianism's internal logic: problems with interpersonal comparisons, aggregation, second-order effects, negative utility, average utility, discounting, etc. Whether you go negative, average, rule, or fluorescent there are tons of inescapable and fatal flaws. Empirically, human beings don't have coherent utility functions so what are we even maximizing? Above all, utilitarians ignore the value (and necessity) of suffering—for life and for Life. The fine porcelain of your being was forged in the fires of hell.

But I don't think it's necessary to meet utilitarianism on its own turf, so...6

Let me also say that atheism for the masses, in retrospect, was an enormous error. Organized religion as a social technology is invaluable and the modern atomized welfare state is a pathetic replacement. Atheism for the intellectual class is perfectly alright, but in the age of mass literacy there is really no barrier between them and the rest of society. Was atheism inevitable? Perhaps. But the New Atheists certainly didn't help. Extrapolating this line of reasoning is left as an exercise to the reader.

Are there values which are not merely instrumental? In a way—Gnon and all that. Do they have anything to do with the values of effective altrusim? Of course not. But that's a story for another time.

Machine Learning/AI

1. Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Program Better

2. Ajeya Cotra update on AI timelines (shorter, of course).

3.The Library of Babel, stable diffusion edition. I love this bit from the Borges story:

When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure. The universe was justified; the universe suddenly became congruent with the unlimited width and breadth of humankind's hope.

The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms.

4. On how various plans miss the hard bits of the alignment challenge.

5. Understanding Conjecture: Notes from Connor Leahy interview

We think that in order for things to go well, there needs to be some sort of miracle. But miracles do happen. When Newton was thinking about stuff, what were the odds that motion on earth was governed by the same forces that governed motion in the stars? And what were the odds that all of this could be interpreted by humans? Then you see calculus and the laws of motion and you’re like “ah yes, that just makes sense.

6. Inverse scaling prize winners!

Forecasting

7. Five Questions for Michael Story: "Nearly all forecasters are paid more by their day jobs to do something other than forecasting. The market message is “don’t forecast”!"

8. On training experts to be forecasters. Lots of good points in this one, especially on the softer social aspects of forecasting.

Metascience

9. Rain, Rain, Go Away: 192 Potential Exclusion-Restriction Violations for Studies Using Weather as an Instrumental Variable

10. Status bias in peer review. Would be curious to see an attempt at estimating how much of this is actually justified. After all, research quality follows a power law, and past results are certainly indicative of future performance. Perhaps there is not enough status bias in peer review!

The Rest

11. All the cool kids are listening to The Lunar Society. José Luis Ricón says Dwarkesh "is probably the best podcaster there is right now". Tyler Cowen says "highly rated but still underrated!". The Stephen Hsu episode is my favorite, but do check out the other ones too.

12. From the robot: the map is of the territory. "I am affirming that you have write access to the realm of the Gods."

13. From the banana, on the efficacy of depression treatments and more.

14. Dysgenics by the Numbers. In my view probably overstates the rate of loss within societies a bit. But overall completely right. Probably doesn't matter though.

15. Scraping training data for your mind. “But Karl Ove”, Renberg says about his writing, “there is… nothing _there_”.

16. A Future History of Biomedical Progress

Progress in tools has created the potential for a radically different research ethos that will end biomedical stagnation. But to understand this new research ethos, we must first understand the telos of the mechanistic mind and why it is at odds with the biomedical problem setting.

17. Good interview with Vitalik. "The kinds of communities you get when low taxes are the primary reason to come are just really boring and lame".

18. Evaluating Longtermist Institutional Reform. Public choice, counterfactuals, long-range forecasting.

Audio-Visual

What I've Been Reading

• Nostromo by Joseph Konrad. Tangled, fragmented, unclear, conflicting, and circular narratives/motivations/goals/priorities. A chopped-up story from various points of view, taking a look at a world filled with great characters surrounding the titular Nostromo. Politics, heroism, revolt, the worth of social status, reputations, perceptions, allegiances, and material vs idealistic interests. Betrayals of all kinds. Private and public vindications and redemptions. Great stuff.

• The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. Fascinating Borgesian novel about a futuristic game that combines all arts and sciences into some sort of grand unified plaything. It's about music, duty, the lifecycle of organizations, transcendence, the life of the mind, and probably much more on top of that. Highly recommended.

• Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age by Stephen R. Platt. Kind of weirdly structured, it mainly takes a look at the era from the point of view of various minor players, mostly traders, "supercargos", and so on. The big politics don't get much attention. Somewhat revisionist I guess? It's fine.

• Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique; Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky by John Carroll. A fairly shallow exegesis, written in an indefensible style. Just go straight to the primary sources.

• The Twilight World by Werner Herzog. Another Herzog book! Nowhere near as brilliant as Conquest of the Useless, unfortunately, but still not bad. Concerns of those Japanese soldiers who kept up the guerilla war for decades after the end of WW2, refusing to surrender and refusing to face reality. Very Herzogian with the jungle and everything. Some wonderful metaphors.

• City of Golden Shadow by Tad Williams. Gwern gave it 5 stars so I couldn't resist, but I didn't enjoy it at all. Absurdly overlong at 800 pages, it just ends with a cliffhanger (and there's more than one sequel). There's a series of parallel fantastical stories set in a virtual reality and they're all pointless and awful. A bit outdated in terms of how it imagines the internet, it does have a few interesting ideas but overall I don't think it's worth the effort.

• Zero to One by Peter Thiel. I guess it's the best business book I've ever read. A bunch of concepts from it have penetrated the broader culture (definite vs indefinite optimism for example). It's a quick read so go for it

• Philip Larkin: Poems selected by Martin Amis by Philip Larkin. His best poems are great, but be warned that they are also extraordinarily pathetic in a way that can really fuck up your mood (if not your soul).

• HHhH by Laurent Binet. Split into 257 short chapters, it blends a straightfoward and minimally fictionalized retelling of Operation Anthropoid (the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich) with all sorts of metafictional elements, as Binet constantly comments on the issues with constructing a historical novel, compares his approach to other books and movies, and even brings his personal life into it. Irony, humor, self-consciousness (especially about the author's view of Heydrich), the tension between history and fiction, and a slow, horrific build-up that absolutely fills you with terror. Strange how powerful emotionally a book that is at the same time so detached can be. Quite good and very different.

• The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth by Paul Hoffman. Fun and highly readable pop biography, I blasted through it in a day. "I doubt if he would have recognized my first name even though I worked with him for twenty years. The only person he called by his first name was Tom Trotter, whom he called Bill."

• The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution by Sean B. Carroll. A curious artifact from a different era. Perfectly captures the zeitgeist of the peak of internet atheism and creationism debates. One could make statements about human evolution then which would be quite dangerous today. The stuff on DNA and evolution is pretty wide and not that deep. All of it has been covered better elsewhere. There's a chapter on EvoDevo for example, but it stays on the surface of things and I would recommend reading Endless Forms Most Beautiful (by the same author!) instead. On top of the evolution stuff you also have a random sprinkling of skeptic-related causes (dull and cringey rants about chiropractors), plus a very generic liberal environmentalism which basically ignores everything the author had written up to that point. Probably more interesting as a marker of a (short, but memorable) era than a book about DNA and evolution.

• The Moon and Sixpence by Somerset W. Maugham. A fictionalized retelling of the life of Paul Gaugin, as a middle-aged English man abandons his family to go be a painter in Paris (and eventually Tahiti). I wasn't convinced by the central character, and there's nothing to this novel beyond him. The "egotistic, single-minded genius" trope has been done much better elsewhere, and the novel really strays very far from the actual life of Gaugin.

• The Golden Bowl by Henry James. I made it about 50 pages in. Not for me.

• The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deusch. An unstructured mishmash of warmed-over pop science and a cavalcade of bad arguments around abduction, philosophy of science, intelligence, infinity, qualia, etc. The arguments
  about superhuman general intelligence not being possible because humans are universal Turing machines are utterly absurd and could be added verbatim to "On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines". One of the worst treatments of abduction in the history of philosophy, and that's really saying something. Deutsch's comments on heritability are downright idiotic, and it's clear that he didn't even bother spending 30 seconds reading the wikipedia page. He just makes stuff up (incorrectly). A lot of uppity commentary about shit he doesn't understand. And then it's just filled with a whole bunch of random shit, like a galaxybrained theory of why the UK has the best voting system, a terrible theory of aesthetics, etc.

• First Light by Geoffrey Wellum. Fairly conventional WW2 memoir from a British fighter pilot. Not bad, not great.

• The Marsh Arabs by Wilfred Thesiger. A standard tale of a British explorer somehow making himself accepted and comfortable among the primitive natives (look up Thesiger's pics), and bemoaning the disappearance of their way of life. This particular one, among the pastoral tribes of the marshes of southern Iraq. Perhaps what makes it unique is that it is set not in the 19th century, but in the late 1950s. Comfy but unexceptional, ultimately the Madan are just not that interesting.

Machine Learning

1. Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners: "Simply adding “Let’s think step by step” before each answer increases the accuracy on MultiArith from 17.7% to 78.7% and GSM8K from 10.4% to 40.7% with GPT-3." Here's how different prompts compare:

2. DALL·E 2 is pretty crazy. Tons of good threads on twitter featuring its work, here's one of my favorites.

3. Gwern comments on GPT-3's 2nd Anniversary

A psychologist thrown back in time to 2012 is a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind, with no advantage, only cursed by the knowledge of the falsity of all the fads and fashions he is surrounded by; a DL researcher, on the other hand, is Prometheus bringing down fire.

4. Speaking of AI and Prometheus...

5. A model trained on /pol/ data successfully(?) sends out thousands of shitposts.

6. Yarvin contra AI x-risk fears. I am not convinced.

Forecasting

7. Very good and important: Beware boasting about non-existent forecasting track records.

8. Future Fed Chair Basil Halperin on prediction markets and monetary policy.

9. Nuño Sempere released 3 short and sweet papers on designing prediction scoring rules. Also subscribe to his excellent forecasting newsletter if you haven't already.

Metascience

10. The New Science report on the NIH. Enormous but very much worth your time.

11. On that baby brainwave study and more general issues around that sort of research.

12. In the Guardian: The big idea: should we get rid of the scientific paper?

13. Ideological biases in research evaluations? The case of research on majority—minority relations

Within this field, social contact and conflict theories emphasize different aspects of majority—minority relations, where the former has a left-liberal leaning in its assumptions and implications. We randomized the conclusion of the research they evaluated so that the research supported one of the two perspectives. Although the research designs are the same, those receiving the social contact conclusion evaluate the quality and relevance of the design more favorably. We do not find similar differences in evaluations of a study on a nonpoliticized topic.

Note the effect is quite small though.

Economic History

14. On the role of millet, rice, and timing of agriculture in Chinese state formation.

Book Reviews

15. The SSC book review contest is pretty strong this year as well. My favorite thus far: The Dawn Of Everything

A “Gossip Trap” is when your whole world doesn’t exceed Dunbar’s number and to organize your society you are forced to discuss mostly people. It is Mean Girls (and mean boys), but forever. And yes, gossip can act as a leveling mechanism and social power has a bunch of positives—it’s the stuff of life, really. But it’s a terrible way to organize society. So perhaps we leveled ourselves into the ground for 90,000 years.

16. Judge Woolsey on Ulysses: ""[i]n respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of [Joyce's] characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring. [...] [W]hilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac."

17. SMTM on Disco Elysium.

18. Devis Kedrosky reviews Koyama & Rubin's How the World Became Rich.

The Rest

19. Latest news from the Good, Actually dpt: incarceration cuts mortality by half.

20. Matt Lakeman continues his travel blogs, this time he reports from Ukraine.

21. What I learned gathering thousands of nootropic ratings.

22. Daniël Lakens has released a free ebook on improving your statistical inferences.

23. New evidence on the genetic history of Ashkenazi Jews: "our results suggest that the AJ founder event and the acquisition of the main sources of ancestry pre-dated the 14th century and highlight late medieval genetic heterogeneity no longer present in modern AJ."

24. Mechanical Watch (lots of crazy shit on this blog)

25. On foreign aid and ethnic conflict.

26. Eigenrobot gives advice to academic refugees.

Academia is characterized by well-trodden problems, hashed over for decades, and negligible novel data for resolving them. Industry is by comparison a mass of green field areas of inquiry with large budgets, minimal bureaucracy, and ample data.

Audio-Visual

27. And here's Masayoshi Takanaka's The Rainbow Goblins.

What I've Been Reading

• Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville. Lives up to its reputation. Fascinating observations on law, politics, psychology, sociology, America's Westward expansion, and more. Prefigures Timur Kuran in many ways. Incredibly prescient. Interesting both in terms of what has stayed the same since it was written, but also for a look at all that has changed. "The French lawyer is simply a man extensively acquainted with the statutes of his country; but the English or American lawyer resembles the hierophants of Egypt, for like them he is the sole interpreter of an occult science."

• The Memoirs of the Baron de Tott, on the Turks and the Tartars, by the Baron de Tott. Found through Braudel. Written just a few decades before Democracy in America, the Baron de Tott went East instead of West. And instead of seeing the future, he saw the past. Roughly at the time the American revolution was happening, the same time when Johnson and Boswell were drinking too much claret at the Mitre, de Tott was joining the Crimean Tatars on a slave raid into Southern Russia. Most fascinating for its observations of Ottoman society, and the role de Tott played in the Russo-Turkish war of '68-'74. Somewhat niche and obviously nowhere near as insightful as Democracy in America, but definitely worth a read if this is your kind of thing. What causes the fall of empires? Culture, Tott says: all decay ultimately comes from within.

• Collapse of Complex Societies, by Joseph Tainter. Tainter's theory mostly comes down to decreasing marginal returns to additional societal complexity, which eventually leads to collapse. Parts of it are highly reminiscent of Chaisson's Energy-Rate Density paper (which everyone should read), but much more limited in scope. He's too focused on explaining everything with a single theory, leaving little room for contingency in history. He ignores the aspect of time: just because a system works well for 10 years does not mean it can work for 1000. And he treats rulers as being virtually unconstrained in their policy choices.

  The examples he marshals in support of this theory are not particularly convincing, and (at least in some cases like the Western Roman Empire), the Mancur Olson view which focuses on public choice issues (which Tainter pretty much dismisses out of hand) seems like a vastly better fit to me. Especially when it comes to contemporary society, the examples Tainter brings up seem like a slam dunk in favor of Olson and against Tainter! Take education for example: is it really plausible that the ballooning costs and declining efficiency of educational spending over the past few decades is due to increased complexity? Of course not, it's clearly an issue of special interest groups with socially misaligned incentives. Tainter misses it because he never actually dives into the details of exactly how increased complexity is supposed to be working to produce all these effects.

• The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, by James Burnham. On Machiavelli and some of his successors: Mosca, Sorel, Michels, Pareto. Published in 1943 and it shows. Strong on the general ideas about the objective treatment of power and politics, divorced from sentimentality and moralizing. Pretty weak on the specifics. I was expecting something deeper based on its reputation. A bit dull overall.

• Sartor Resartus, by Thomas Carlyle. Borges mentions that it inspired him to read German philosophy and that's how it ended up on my list. What can I even say about this crazy book? Carlyle invents a fictional German philosopher, who has written a treatise on clothing, and then also invents a fictional English editor who tries to explain the German philosopher's work, which turns out to be a philosophy of everything. Layer upon layer of irony and postmodern misdirection, and that outrageous Carlylean 19th century style to top it off. Heavily influenced by Tristram Shandy. Surprisingly influential (especially in America), though I'm really not sure how seriously one is meant to take the ideas presented within.

• Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX, by Eric Berger. Fast-paced and exciting, mostly based on insider interviews, Liftoff gives a good idea of what the crazy early years were like at SpaceX. Once they start launching the Falcon 9 it skips over a decade in a few paragraphs, which kind of sucks. If you were wondering exactly what factors made SpaceX succeed where everyone else has failed, you will probably come away from the book disappointed. Still, recommended.

• Apollo: The Race to the Moon, by Charles Murray (yes, that Charles Murray). One of the better Apollo books, this one is focused mostly on the bureaucratic aspects with a few glimpses into engineering as well. At 500 pages it still feels far too short, as some major events and personalities are given very little space. Overall very strong, and it's truly astonishing how there was almost nothing at all in terms of the space program in 1960, how young everyone was, how nobody really knew what they were doing, etc. For some reason it seems to be out of print.

• The Book That Changed Europe: Picart & Bernard's Religious Ceremonies of the World, by Lynn Hunt. The story of the publication of the titular book, and a look at the religious environment of the 18th century. Freethinking Protestant refugees congregate in cosmopolitan Amsterdam and make waves through their printing presses. Fascinating subject, terrible execution. Unorganized, repetitive, badly written, and filled with pointless digressions. There's an irrelevant digression in the very first paragraph of the book! Maybe if a competent editor had gone to town on it...Also, I think the authors wildly overrate the book's ultimate importance.

• A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, by Barbara Tuchman. Audiobook. A look at 14th century Europe, mostly as it was seen from the perspective of the French nobleman Enguerrand VII de Coucy. Mainly based on the Chronicles of Froissart. Plague, the 100 years' war, religious fanaticism, popes and antipopes, peasant revolts, crusades, etc. Very entertaining, but it sacrifices quite a lot of rigor to get there. Too many blatantly false statements from the 14th century are taken at face value. And there's more than a bit of Monty Python about this: at points, I thought I discerned the distant—but unmistakable—beat of coconuts in the background of the audiobook. This sentence gives you the vibe: "A decision was perforce taken to march straight through the dark, fobidding forest of the Ardennes, where, Froissart remarks with awed inaccuracy, "no traveler had ever before passed.""

• Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir. Audiobook. It's the same schtick as The Martian all over again, but with more plotholes and a more impressive setting. Pleasant scifi entertaintment for the gym.

Machine Learning

1. Incredibly cool from deepmind: ML applied to ancient Greek fragments can generate restoration hypotheses for the missing text and locate the fragment's origin in both time and place. Paper in Nature.

2. Incredibly uncool:

These researchers built an AI for discovering less toxic drug compounds. Then they retrained it to do the opposite. Within six hours it generated 40,000 toxic molecules, including VX nerve agent and "many other known chemical warfare agents.

Sufficiently advanced AI alignment is indistinguishable from AI risk?

3. Fantastic Gwern theory-fiction: It Looks Like You're Trying To Take Over The World.

4. Also on LW, Brain Efficiency: Much More than You Wanted to Know:

Eventually advances in software and neuromorphic computing should reduce the energy requirement down to brain levels of 10W or so, allowing for up to a trillion brain-scale agents at near future world power supply, with at least a concomitant 100x increase in GDP. All of this without any exotic computing.

5. Also on LW, New Scaling Laws for Large Language Models.

Forecasting

6. Karger, Atanasov & Tetlock, Improving Judgments of Existential Risk: Better Forecasts, Questions, Explanations, Policies.

7. How good are generalist forecasters vs experts, really? Gavin Leech revisits the literature and argues against the superforecasters. They still do as well or slightly better than the experts, but not by much. I feel the way the results are presented is a bit misleading.

Metascience

8. Derek Thompson in the Atlantic on Silicon Valley science funding.

9. In what sense is the science of science a science?

What makes my spidey sense tingle is that the objects in any such theory are (in part) a hypothetical space of possible discoveries, of possible explanations of the world. I called it a theory of discovery just above, but it might equally well be called a theory of the unknown, or theory of exploration, or theory of theories. Of course, some of the objects of any such theory would also be amenable to more standard descriptions: things like exploration strategies, or group dynamics. But some would be a lot stranger: currently unknown types of explanation, currently unknown types of theoretical entity.

Economic History

10. WW2 Japanese internment camps? You guessed it, Good, Actually! Internment had a positive effect on long-run incomes on the order of 9-22%. And remember to burn the cities, too. h/t ADS

11. Some issues with Putterman & Weil (2010), judging by the new results it doesn't seem all that problematic to the deep roots lit?

Book Reviews

12. There's a new Landmark Edition out, Xenophon's Anabasis. Here's a short review.

13. ZHPL on TLP's Sadly, Porn.

14. Scott on the same (the reviews are complementary goods).

Covid

15. Vaccination Rates and COVID Outcomes across U.S. States finds that it takes about $5000 worth of vaccines to save a life. Would be interesting to see a comparison to molnupiravir in terms of dollars per life saved.

16. A report from a covid human challenge experiment. Hopefully this paves the path for a faster response against the next pandemic.

The Rest

17. Against the Naming of Fungi

The egotism and futility of these costly initiatives is quite mind-boggling as the human threat to biological diversity multiplies. Rather than competing with animal and plant taxonomists, mycologists should show pluck in asserting philosophical independence from the waning fields of zoology and botany. By turning our attention towards experimental questions and away from cataloguing, mycologists may escape the shackles of Linnean fundamentalism.

18. Related(?), SMTM on citrus taxonomy, "in which the Bene Gesserit attempt to breed the Kumquat Haderach".

19. Luttwak on China: The myth of Chinese supremacy

Always improbable, G-2 became impossible when Xi Jinping arrived. For him only G-1 is good enough. Not because he is a megalomaniac but the opposite: he thinks, accurately, that unless the Party establishes an unchallenged global hegemony, with its rule is deemed superior to democratic governance, Communist China will collapse just as Soviet rule did. He is right.

20. Indian National Stock Exchange CEO scandal:

The drama intensified in February, when the Securities and Exchange Board of India released a 190-page regulatory order disclosing that Ramkrishna had sent sensitive information to an outsider described as a yogi in the Himalayas. [...] The yogi was non-corporeal, she said, but corresponded using the email address rigyajursama@outlook.com

21. On the role of mathematics in the neolithic revolution. "The mathematical abilities of Neolithic humans advanced in concert with the new requirements of agricultural life. These needs can be summed up into three categories: Surplus, Trade, and Time." Here's wikipedia on the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus which dates to the 16thC BC.

22. From the new Institute for Progress, Progress is a Policy Choice.

23. Ed West on the coming demographic issues: 'Children of Men' is really happening (actually understates the problem imo).

24. Theses and counter-theses on sleep. Seems like one of those things where there's tons of variation and you're probably best off doing some rigorous self-experimentation?

25. Death Toll of Price Limits and Protectionism in the Russian Pharmaceutical Market. In 2012, Russia put price caps and protectionist regulations on various pharmaceuticals. The result was a decrease in supply, leading to a striking increase in mortality from diseases those drugs protect against.

26. Fluvoxamine-caffeine interaction:

Just learned that fluvoxamine, a common SSRI used to treat depression and other psychiatric conditions, increases the half-life of caffeine in the bloodstream. Like, to an absurd degree:

27. Modeling assortative mating and genetic similarities between partners, siblings, and in-laws

We found evidence of genetic similarity between partners for educational attainment (rg = 0.37), height (rg = 0.13), and depression (rg = 0.08). Common genetic variants associated with educational attainment correlated between siblings above 0.50 (rg = 0.68) and between siblings-in-law (rg = 0.25) and co-siblings-in-law (rg = 0.09). Comparisons between the genetic similarities of partners and siblings indicated that genetic variances were in intergenerational equilibrium. This study shows genetic similarities between extended family members and that assortative mating has taken place for several generations.

28. New EA GWAS with N=3 million, 12-16% variance explained.

29. "Las Pozas ("the Pools") is a surrealistic group of structures created by Edward James in a subtropical rainforest in the Sierra Gorda mountains of Mexico. It includes more than 80 acres (32 ha) of natural waterfalls and pools interlaced with towering surrealist sculptures in concrete."

30. The Senseless, Tragic Rape of Charles Bukowski’s Ghost by John Martin’s Black Sparrow Press

31. Stalin's amused notes on Lysenko.

32. A letter from Claude Shannon to Warren McCulloch, in behalf of L. Ron Hubbard.

33. No peeing towards Russia.

Audio-Visual

34. They found Shackleton's ship in the Antarctic, and it's perfectly preserved.

35. Kogonada's After Yang is one of my favorite new films in years. What if Roy Batty was a personal assistant, what happens to his adopted family after he dies? A poignant and wistful film about memory, death, and the legacy we leave behind us.

36. And here's DJ Shadow remixing King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard.

What I've Been Reading

• How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education, by Scott L. Newstok. A Romantic old-man-yells-at-clouds tirade about modern education practices. It didn't change any of my views, but it didn't really attempt to do so in the first place: Newstok is a reformist, while I am strictly an abolitionist—and therefore far outside the target audience. I find it hard to separate mass education from the commoditization of knowledge, while Newstok believes we can have our cake and eat it too. In any case, if you want a passionate argument in favor of high-quality education interspersed with Shakespeare quotes, this is the book for you.

• Dune, by Frank Herbert. Pretty great, Herbert constructs a deeply alluring world which pulls you in despite some rather hilariously implausible aspects. It's interesting how so much of the "plot" actually happens in the background. The audiobook is quite good.

• Dune Messiah, by Frank Herbert. I was told the sequels get crazy, and this is a pretty good start in that direction! Can't wait to see where this nonsense ends up. This is basically a book of palace intrigue and scheming, with a rich religious/predestination/weird time loop sauce on top.

• Star Maker, by Olaf Stapledon. I kept thinking that it felt like a really weird throwback to the 1920s-30s, then I looked it up and it was written in 1937. Whoops. It's a non-stop torrent of interesting science fiction ideas, but there's no continuity, no characters to latch on to, and the examination of the ideas stays at the surface level. It's just a series of "this happened, then this happened, then this happened" which I found rather boring.

• The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, by Gene Wolfe. Some fantastic stories in this collection, in particular I loved Feather Tigers, Death of Dr. Island, Toy Theater, and Seven American Nights. Many of them are in that classic Wolfe style where you have to piece together what's going on from tiny hints left in the text, and it's all a bit ambiguous in the end and so on. There's a lot of focus on religion and death (with two stories, The Hero as Werwolf and The Doctor of Death Island, being fairly explicitly death-ist).

• Orphans of the Sky, by Robert Heinlein. Fairly standard generation ship story. Juvenile and ham-fisted (there's a scene where the protagonist literally yells out "and yet it moves!"). Mutants and knife fights and all that. 12 year old me would've loved it.

• Wittgenstein's Nephew, by Thomas Bernhard. Bernhard documents his friendship with Paul Wittgenstein (not the pianist), a black sheep of the Wittgenstein family who suffered from various mental problems. They're both rejected by Austrian society, and they both reject it. Bernhard's attitude toward awards (he views them as a kind of insult and punishment) really sums up his relation to his country. A bitter book, sad and pathetic and miserly. Recommended if you're in the market for a feel-bad memoir.

• The Status Game: On Social Position and How We Use It, by Will Storr. There's quite a bit of overlap with The Elephant in the Brain, but Storr's book is obviously more focused on status. Also reminiscent of Goffman's Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Lots of references to Boehm, Henrich, Kuran, Wrangham, etc. (You're probably better off going straight to the source?) If I had to choose between this and Elephant I'd go for Elephant, but they're fairly complementary so it won't be a waste of your time to read both. Parts of the book are focused on contemporary culture war issues, which felt a bit shallow and tiresome. Overall it's not bad though.

• The Biology of Moral Systems, by Richard Alexander. There's a great core here, but I wouldn't recommend it. The basic idea of approaching moral systems from an evopsych perspective is useful. However, huge swathes of text are wasted on dull and low-quality academic bickering, many of the specifics (eg the arguments on the development of religion) are completely off, and the last third of the book is dedicated to a mostly fruitless discussion of nuclear war and mutually assured destruction.

Ibn Battutah, The Travels of Ibn Battutah

Also known as A Masterpiece to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling, this is a wonderful travelogue from the 14th century (or, more appropriately, the 8th century of the Hegira). Battutah was born in Morocco; he was not wealthy, but he was well-educated and went into the family business of Islamic law. At age 21, he set out for the pilgrimage to Mecca. He would extend his journey for decades, however, following traders in ships and caravans, relying on generous Muslim institutions and his talent for befriending rulers. He eventually covered virtually the entire Islamic world and beyond, from North Africa to China.

Battutah gets into all sorts of adventures (luckily escaping death by disease, shipwreck, pirates, bandits, and so on) and provides us with some incredible ethnographic observations. In Constantinople, he meets the Emperor. In India, he becomes a prominent and wealthy administrator under the rule of an erratic Sultan. In the Maldives, he marries six local women and lives a life of leisure under the shade of the palm trees. Yet his wanderlust compels him to keep moving. Battutah himself as a person, however, remains tantalizingly obscure.

Having divorced my wives I set sail. We came to a little island in the archipelago in which there was but one house, occupied by a weaver. He had a wife and family, a few coco-palms and a small boat, with which he used to fish and to cross over to any of the islands he wished to visit. His island contained also banana bushes, but we saw no land birds on it except two crows, which came out to us on our arrival and circled above our vessel. And I swear I envied that man, and wished that the island had been mine, that I might have made it my retreat until the inevitable hour should befall me.

Don DeLillo, Libra

A semi-fictionalized biography of Lee Harvey Oswald in the Oliver Stone tradition, suffused with that great DeLillo style. There's also a kind of meta parallel story of an FBI agent trying to piece together all the evidence, meticulously going through even the tiniest element (much like DeLillo himself). It's quite Pynchonesque with all the criss-crossing conspiracies, the CIA, paranoia, axes of control and influence, a series of coincidences, taking liberty with history...and the ultimately mysterious "fate" that brought Oswald to the assassination. It lacks Pynchon's humor though.

"I don't know what they want me to do." "Of course you know." "Tell me where it happens." "Miami." "That means nothing to me." "You've known for weeks." "What happens in Miami?" Ferrie took a while to finish chewing his food. "Think of two parallel lines," he said. "One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It's not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It's a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny."

Christopher de Hamel, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts: Twelve Journeys into the Medieval World

Twelve chapters, each one dedicated to a different medieval manuscript, from the 6th century Gospels of St. Augustine to the 16th century Spinola Book of Hours. The book is filled with fantastic, gorgeous, high-quality prints from these manuscripts, interspersed with history and commentary in a pleasant conversational style. It's not just about the manuscripts themselves, but also who owned them, their condition, how they've been maintained or altered, where they're housed, and the people taking care of them. Cultural differences in library regulatory practices are a virtually infinite source of comedy. Just lovely all around. Make sure you get the hardcover as the paperback is apparently printed in black & white.

Confirmation that he was indeed both scribe and artist is found in the shape of the spaces left for the insertion of initials. Both scribes 2 and 3 (let us exclude 1 for the moment) left simple rectangular blank spaces where large initials were to be painted later, without thought to their shape or composition, and they added guidewords in the margins to indicate what letters were to be supplied. When Hugo came to fill them in, his flamboyantly fluid and multi-tentacled initials fitted uncomfortably into these big draughty square apertures. However, during the stint written by the last scribe from folio 185v onwards, the edges of the script are moulded line by line to fit around the curves and limbs of the painted initials, nestling together snugly like a newly married couple in bed. Text and decoration must have been executed simultaneously by the same person. In short, scribe 4 must be Hugo.

Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann

Short, dense, and with a great balance between accessibility and dumbing down complex subjects. Bhattacharya approaches his subject by focusing on ideas. The first chapter takes care of JvN's early life, and the rest of the book is split up based on the subjects he worked on: mathematics, quantum mechanics, the nuclear bomb, computing, game theory, RAND, and artificial life. Large parts of the book (I'd say about a third) are dedicated not to von Neumann but rather the work other people did based on his ideas. The game theory chapter, for example, covers Nash, Schelling, Aumann, etc. in economics, and John Maynard Smith, Price, Hamilton, etc. in evolutionary game theory. Bhattacharya is good at making all these technical subjects accessible without dumbing them down too much. The one failing point is that JvN's personality, personal life, and professional relationships don't get much attention.

From 1944, meetings instigated by Norbert Wiener helped to focus von Neumann’s thinking about brains and computers. In gatherings of the short-lived ‘Teleological Society’, and later in the ‘Conferences on Cybernetics’, von Neumann was at the heart of discussions on how the brain or computing machines generate ‘purposive behaviour’. Busy with so many other things, he would whizz in, lecture for an hour or two on the links between information and entropy or circuits for logical reasoning, then whizz off again – leaving the bewildered attendees to discuss the implications of whatever he had said for the rest of the afternoon. Listening to von Neumann talk about the logic of neuro-anatomy, one scientist declared, was like ‘hanging on to the tail of a kite’. Wiener, for his part, had the discomfiting habit of falling asleep during discussions and snoring loudly, only to wake with some pertinent comment demonstrating he had somehow been listening after all.

Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects

History by way of biography—Vasari tells a tale of rebirth and artistic progress as Europe emerges from the dark ages, rediscovers the ancients, and then strives to surpass them. Tons of interesting observations on competition, collaboration, the spread of technology, and the psychology of (artistic) greatness. More than 180 lives in over 2000 pages, starting with Cimabue in the 13thC and reaching a climax with Michelangelo in the 16th. Somewhat gossipy and often inaccurate, it nonetheless remains our best source of information on the art and artists of Renaissance Italy. Vasari was a fairly successful painter himself, and his personal aquaintance with both the technique and the business of painting gives us an inside view of the craft. Full review.

It is clear that Leonardo, through his comprehension of art, began many things and never finished one of them, since it seemed to him that the hand was not able to attain to the perfection of art in carrying out the things which he imagined; for the reason that he conceived in idea difficulties so subtle and so marvellous, that they could never be expressed by the hands, be they ever so excellent. And so many were his caprices, that, philosophizing of natural things, he set himself to seek out the properties of herbs, going on even to observe the motions of the heavens, the path of the moon, and the courses of the sun.

Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

Excerpts from Parerga und Paralipomena. Unexpectedly hilarious; Arthur would've been one hell of a poaster. Surprisingly similar to the pragmatists in many respects. Spans a huge number of topics: ethics, the will, intelligence, animal welfare, religion, suicide, writing, and much more.

Thus we see, for example, the Catholic clergy totally convinced of the truth of all the doctrines of its Church, and the Protestant clergy likewise convinced of the truth of all the doctrines of its Church, and both defending the doctrines of their confession with equal zeal. Yet this conviction depends entirely on the country in which each was born: to the South German priest the truth of the Catholic dogma is perfectly apparent, but to the North German priest it is that of Protestant dogma which is perfectly apparent. If, then, these convictions, and others like them, rest on objective grounds, these grounds must be climatic; such convictions must be like flowers, the one flourishing only here, the other only there.

Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War

I'm a Herodotus man through and through, but I can appreciate the Thycydidean perspective as well. Though I'm not entirely sure what that perspective entails: how much of his work is prescriptive and how much of it is descriptive? He's obviously a skeptic when it comes to the supernatural, and there's very little room for morality in his history; is this an artifact of the lack of morality in the way the Athenian went about their affairs, or is this something Thuc projects onto them? In any case, while reading this, one must always keep in mind that the Athenians lost!

It's interesting to read an ancient historian write about battles with 60 hoplites and 20 archers, and that kind of accounting accuracy perfectly captures Thuc's personality.

"... For Athens alone of her contemporaries is found when tested to be greater than her reputation, and alone gives no occasion to her assailants to blush at the antagonist by whom they have been worsted, or to her subjects to question her title to rule by merit. Rather, the admiration of the present and succeeding ages will be ours, since we have not left our power without witness, but have shown it by mighty proofs; and far from needing a Homer for our eulogist, or other of his craft whose verses might charm for the moment only for the impression which they gave to melt at the touch of fact, we have forced every sea and land to be the highway of our daring, and everywhere, whether for evil or for good, have left imperishable monuments behind us. Such is the Athens for which these men, in the assertion of their resolve not to lose her, nobly fought and died; and well may every one of their survivors be ready to suffer in her cause."

J. A. Baker, The Peregrine

10 years of obsessive, monomaniacal peregrine-watching in the East of England distilled to 200 pure, intense, astonishing pages. An incredibly rich dish that you can only eat so much of before needing to take a break. Reflects and contains nature both in its form and content. Somewhat reminiscent of Urne-Buriall in that it starts out in a dry, scientific tone and then reaches stylistic extremes later on.

Famously recommended by Werner Herzog (along with Virgil and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber), and it is indeed extremely Herzogian. There's no green idealism here, the endless cycle of killing which sustains the peregrine is presented unapologetically. "Beauty is vapour from the pit of death", Baker writes.

He hovered, and stayed still, striding on the crumbling columns of air, curved wings jerking and flexing. Five minutes he stayed there, fixed like a barb in the blue flesh of the sky. His body was still and rigid, his head turned from side to side, his tail fanned open and shut, his wings whipped and shuddered like canvas in the lash of the wind. He side-slipped to his left, paused, then glided round and down into what could only be the beginning of a tremendous stoop. There is no mistaking the menace of that first easy drifting fall. Smoothly, at an angle of fifty degrees, he descended; not slowly, but controlling his speed; gracefully, beautifully balanced. There was no abrupt change. The angle of his fall became gradually steeper till there was no angle left, but only a perfect arc. He curved over and slowly revolved, as though for delight, glorying in anticipation of the dive to come. His feet opened and gleamed golden, clutching up towards the sun. He rolled over, and they dulled, and turned towards the ground beneath, and closed again. For a thousand feet he fell, and curved, and slowly turned, and tilted upright. Then his speed increased, and he dropped vertically down. He had another thousand feet to fall, but now he fell sheer, shimmering down through dazzling sunlight, heart-shaped, like a heart in flames. He became smaller and darker, diving down from the sun. The partridge in the snow beneath looked up at the black heart dilating down upon him, and heard a hiss of wings rising to a roar. In ten seconds the hawk was down, and the whole splendid fabric, the arched reredos and immense fan-vaulting of his flight, was consumed and lost in the fiery maelstrom of the sky.

And for the partridge there was the sun suddenly shut out, the foul flailing blackness spreading wings above, the roar ceasing, the blazing knives driving in, the terrible white face descending, hooked and masked and horned and staring-eyed. And then the back-breaking agony beginning, and snow scattering from scuffling feet, and show filling the bill’s wide silent scream, till the merciful needle of the hawk’s beak notched in the straining neck and jerked the shuddering life away.

And for the hawk, resting now on the soft flaccid bulk of his prey, there was the rip and tear of choking feathers, and hot blood dripping from the hook of his beak, and rage dying slowly to a small hard core within.

And for the watcher, sheltered for centuries from such hunger and such rage, such agony and such fear, there is the memory of that sabring fall from the sky, and the vicarious joy of the guiltless hunter who kills only through his familiar, and wills him to be fed.

The Worst

William Hazlitt, Selected Writings

I despise the style of his political writings. Puffed up, aiming to dazzle rather than illuminate. The cheap rhetoric of the ochlagogue. Actively offensive. The non-political writings are much better: they are merely unreadable and sophomoric. Hazlitt's entire aesthetic philosophy just boils down to "art should imitate nature" repeated over and over again, and I can't stand the way he expresses it.

It is not denied that the people are best acquainted with their own wants, and most attached to their own interests. But then a question is started, as if the persons asking it were at a great loss for the answer,—Where are we to find the intellect of the people? Why, all the intellect that ever was is theirs. The public opinion expresses not only the collective sense of the whole people, but of all ages and nations, of all those minds that have devoted themselves to the love of truth and the good of mankind,—who have bequeathed their instructions, their hopes, and their example to posterity,—who have thought, spoke, written, acted, and suffered in the name and on the behalf of our common nature. All the greatest poets, sages, heroes, are ours originally, and by right.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

Just a dull airport novel. The coincidences pile on top of eachother as we are treated to interminable exposition dumps from improbable sources that conveniently know everything. Stylistically it tries too hard and achieves nothing.

Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.

Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning

Love Palmer's blog but this book just wasn't for me. Even though I read plenty of older books, I found the affected faux-18thC style absolutely grating. The plot mostly seems to be based on the Star Wars prequels, with endless scenes of characters talking about the taxation of trade routes or some other similarly boring nonsense. And there's a magical boy thrown in there for good measure, as well.

I could ask any contemporary here, ‘Are you a majority?’ and I know what he or she would answer: Of course not, Mycroft. I have a Hive, a race, a second language, a vocation and an avocation, hobbies of my own; add up my many strats and you will soon reduce me to a minority of one, and hence my happiness. I am unique, and proud of my uniqueness, and prouder still that, by being no majority, I ensure eternal peace. You lie, reader. There is one majority still entrenched in our commingled world, a great ‘us’ against a smaller ‘them.’ You will see it in time. I shall give only one hint—the deadliest majority is not something most of my contemporaries are, reader, it is something they are not.

In the preceding tale, I have tried to narrate the process of failure, the process of defeat. I thought first of that archbishop of Canterbury who set himself the task of proving that God exists; then I thought of the alchemists who sought the philosopher’s stone; then, of he vain trisectors of the angle and squares of the circle. Then I reflected that a more poetic case than these would be a man who sets himself a goal that is not forbidden to other men, but is forbidden to him. I recalled Averroës, who, bounded within the circle of Islam, could never know the meaning of the words tragedy and comedy.

History and literature offer many cases of ironically failed quests for knowledge.

Some phenomena disappear immediately once someone describes them. Douglas Adams wrote of a theory "which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear". The modern world offers many such anti-inductive cases, above all in the movements of the stock market: successful trading strategies tend to stop working after they become known. On a civilizational scale, Malthusianism became irrelevant right at the time someone was able to articulate the idea, and it seems that the moment we are able to improve ourselves through genetic engineering, we will be wiped out by our artificial creations.

A second type of ill-fated seeker is one who finds what he is looking for, but his goal is also a punishment. William Beckford, categorically rejecting Ulysses' actions at the land of the Sirens (perhaps inspired by his own life, and perhaps commenting on all attempts to comprehend the universe) created the apostate Caliph Vathek whose obsessive quest for knowledge results in his damnation, and for whom Hell is both the object of desire and the punishment for that desire. There are those who argue that the libertine Beckford only adopted this biblical attitude against the Faustian spirit as an ironic orientalist façade, but the Caliph resists all attempts at interpretation.

Some seekers reach their goal, only to have it slip out of their hands. Scientists will occasionally chance on the right idea but lack the ability to prove it: Aristarchus of Samos was doomed by the apparent size of the stars and the lack of parallax. The Royal Navy discovered that lemons prevent scurvy, and then through terrible epistemic luck managed to lose that knowledge over the course of the 19th century: lemons were replaced by limes low in vitamin C, but nobody noticed because the ships were faster. The problem only reappeared when polar explorers started suffering from scurvy despite bringing lime juice with them—and the answer was only discovered by the miraculously good luck of experimenting on guinea pigs, one of very few animals that don't produce vitamin C on their own.

Finally the most ironic case of them all, that of the Dalmatian archbishop and heretic Marco Antonio de Dominis: a seeker who is able to find the answer, but is condemned to believe it is false. De Dominis, a contemporary of Kepler (who wrote in favor of the lunar theory of tides) and Galileo (who mocked it), was also an amateur astronomer and wrote a book on the tides titled Euripus.

The archbishop begins by presenting both empirical and theoretical arguments in favor of the thesis that the earth is a sphere. He then describes the luni-solar theory of tides: he (correctly) writes that tides are caused by the combined gravitational action of the sun and the moon, (correctly) predicts that high tide occurs simultaneously at antipodal points, and (correctly) shows that the cycle of spring and neap tides can be explained by the combined action of the sun and moon. He also (correctly) deduces that the diurnal inequality between tides will be greatest when the moon is above the tropic of Cancer or Capricorn. Finally, de Dominis explains (incorrectly) that since the two daily tides are always equal to each other, the theory must be false. The heretical archbishop died behind the bars of the Castel Sant'Angelo before his book could be published.

Metascience

1. Investigating the replicability of preclinical cancer biology: "50 experiments from 23 papers were repeated, generating data about the replicability of a total of 158 effects [...] for positive effects, the median effect size in the replications was 85% smaller than the median effect size in the original experiments"

2. A catastrophic failure of peer review in obstetrics and gynaecology: "I estimate that across these 46 articles, 346 (64%) of the 542 parametric tests (unpaired t tests, or, occasionally, ANOVA) and 151 (61%) of the 247 contingency table test (Pearson's Χ² or Fisher's exact test) that I was able to check were incorrectly reported."

3. The Business of Extracting Knowledge from Academic Publications: "Close to nothing of what makes science actually work is published as text on the web."

4. A large replication project in marketing, with fairly catastrophic results. Amusingly the abstract doesn't mention the rate of successful replication.

5. Increasing Politicization and Homogeneity in Scientific Funding: An Analysis of NSF Grants, 1990-2020. The methodology is somewhat questionable, but insteresting nonetheless.

Covid

6. Scott Alexander on the Ivermectin literature and the trouble with trying to wade through a bunch of questionable papers. Alexandros Marinos responds.

7. Zvi's latest.

You are probably going to get Omicron, if you haven’t had it already. The level of precaution necessary to change this assessment is very high, and you probably don’t want to pay that price.

8. ADS on the Zvi-Holden bet and taking ideas seriously.

Making a blockchain game might genuinely be the best use of Zvi’s time, and he might be acting both rationality and ethically in choosing to pursue it. And so this situation is Good, but only in a very limited and local sense. The tragedy isn’t Zvi’s decision, it’s that a scenario even exists where this is the decision he has to make.

9. Omicron spreading faster than delta because of immune evasion? SARS-CoV-2 Omicron VOC Transmission in Danish Households. Plus twitter thread.

Forecasting

10. Forecasting in the Field: academics and non-experts try to predict the effects of development interventions.

the average correlation between predicted and observed effects is 0.75. Recipient types are less accurate than academics on average, but are at least as accurate for interventions and outcomes that are likely to be more familiar to them. The mean forecast of each group outperforms more than 75% of the comprising individuals, and averaging just five forecasts substantially reduces error, indicating strong “wisdom-of-crowds” effects. Three measures of academic expertise (rank, citations, and conducting research in East Africa) and two measures of confidence do not correlate with accuracy. Among recipient-types, high-accuracy “superforecasters” can be identified using observables. Small groups of these superforecasters are as accurate as academic respondents.

Economic History

11. The United Fruit Company? Good, Actually.

Using administrative census data with census-block geo-references from 1973 to 2011, we implement a geographic regression discontinuity design that exploits a land assignment that is orthogonal to our outcomes of interest. We find that the firm had a positive and persistent effect on living standards. Company documents explain that a key concern at the time was to attract and maintain a sizable workforce, which induced the firm to invest heavily in local amenities that can account for our result.

Book Reviews

12. Reviews of Moby Dick from 1851. "This is an odd book, professing to be a novel; wantonly eccentric; outrageously bombastic; in places charmingly and vividly descriptive." I love it when modern editions of old books include their contemporary reviews, unfortunately it's not done very often.

13. ADS on Stubborn Attachments and Straussian writing.

Crypto

14. Bloomberg report on Tether, including the story of how a French screenwriter ended up owning a Bahamian bank.

15. Vitalik Buterin on Crypto Cities.

16. A Glimpse of the Deep: Finding a Creature in Ethereum's Dark Forest.

This monster was watching Ethereum for an obscure mistake deep in the process of creating a transaction: the reuse of a number while signing a transaction. I went searching for this creature, laid bait, saw it in the wild, and found unexplained tracks. To understand how this bot works, we need to begin by reviewing ECDSA and digital signatures.

The Rest

17. Some answers to my questions about Borges, Browne, and Quevedo: On Borges and Quevedo. "The (sad) irony in Tlon’s ending is, therefore, not in a contrast Quevedo vs Browne, then, but in the contrast (Borges + Quevedo + Browne) vs Tlon. Or, maybe, grecolatin tradition versus modernity. With a tinge of sad resignation for the slow but unstoppable victory of the second over the first."

18. And here's a very interesting essay (in Spanish) on Borges's "francophobia".

19. SMTM wrap up the Chemical Hunger series on the causes of obesity after 20 posts.

20. On the NIH and the challenges of funding alcohol consumption RCTs. The big alcohol study that didn't happen: My primal scream of rage.

21. RCT of health insurance in India finds few positive effects: Effect of Health Insurance in India: A Randomized Controlled Trial.

22. "Many young females report joining Draco Malfoy as his girlfriend."

23. An interesting ACX comment on reversals in artistic "progress".

it's a pattern that has repeated throughout history and around the world, one of naturalist art executed with great skill being deliberately replaced with highly abstract art not requiring as much skill.

The cave paintings of Chauvet Cave in France ca 30,000 BP (before present) are more natural and technically much more sophisticated than any cave or rock paintings found after 20,000 BP (some of which are quite abstract and stylized).

Reminds me of this paper on bursts of technological development 60-80kya that lasted for a few thousand years and then disappeared. Related, a great new article on the Antikythera mechanism.

24. The Browser interview with QNTM.

25. Nemets on the genetic history of the ancient Greeks and the identity of the Sea Peoples.

26. Razib Khan: Out of Africa's midlife crisis

two San from different groups both living in Namibia’s Northern Kalahari desert, and speaking click languages from the same family, are more genetically distinct from one another, by a solid 20%, than a person from Stockholm is from a person from Shanghai.

27. Don't take psychedelics. "Results revealed significant shifts away from ‘physicalist’ or ‘materialist’ views, and towards panpsychism and fatalism, post use."

28. Blind people have a pretty good understanding of color.

Audio-Visual

29. Interface | Part II, cool animation project.

30. A project that made 999 forgeries of a Warhol drawing, then randomly mixed in the original, and sold them.

31. How to Build a Supersonic Trebuchet.

32. And here's a cool remix of Hugh Masekela's Stimela.

What I've Been Reading

Non-Fiction

• The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya. Bhattacharya approaches his subject by focusing on ideas. The first chapter takes care of JvN's early life, and the rest of the book is split up based on the subjects he worked on: mathematics, quantum mechanics, the nuclear bomb, computing, game theory, RAND, and artificial life. Large parts of the book (I'd say about a third) are dedicated not to von Neumann but rather the work other people did based on his ideas. The game theory chapter, for example, covers Nash, Schelling, Aumann, etc. in economics, and John Maynard Smith, Price, Hamilton, etc. in evolutionary game theory. Bhattacharya is good at making all these technical subjects accessible without dumbing them down too much. JvN's personality, personal life, professional relationships, etc. on the other hand are given scant attention.

  Overall it felt a bit too short. In less than 300 pages we get such a wide array of ideas, and the story of how they influenced so many people, that it often feels like we're just skimming the surface in a speedboat. I'd like to take a deeper, more ponderous ride in a submarine some day.

• Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel. Fantastically gorgeous book, filled with high-quality prints of medieval manuscripts. Pleasant conversational style. Just lovely all around. Not just about the manuscripts themselves, but also who owned them, their condition, where they're housed, the librarians taking care of them, etc.

• The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald. A book of digressions. The frame is a walking tour of England, and on it are bolted various musings on Sir Thomas Browne, Joseph Konrad, silk manufacture, the Taiping rebellion, and so on. The subjects flow into each other so you don't know where one digression begins and the other ends. However, Sebald kind of undersells how interesting his subjects are; comparing his notes on FitzGerald to the famous Borges essay, for example, makes me wonder how Sebald managed to turn such a fascinating subject into such a dull essay.

• Conquistador: Hernán Cortés, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs by Buddy Levy. I didn't love the book (it felt a bit sloppy, and the style isn't great), but Cortes is an incredible character. The determination, the ingenuity, the absolute ruthlesness. When he murders his wife at the end of the book, all you can think is "well of course he did". And self-aware too: "I and my companions suffer from a disease of the heart that can be cured only with gold"! Perhaps it is the contrast against the Aztecs that, in a way, softens his image? Going to try Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico next.

• Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe by Laurence Bergreen. Solid narrative pop history. Feels a bit rushed after the point of Magellan's death. Exciting, adventurous stuff as you'd expect from the age of exploration.

• A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin. Covers the entire thing plus a ton of backstory, very thorough (within its scope). Focused on the astronauts, and much of it is the preoduct of interviews with those astronauts, which is kind of obvious at many points as you're only getting one person's perspective on certain events. It would have been better with a broader, more objective view, in my opinion. The latter parts (after the first moon landing) include a surprising amount of geology! I read three books on the early space program this year and none of them was completely satisfying, I'm still trying to find the Richard Rhodes of Apollo...