Linksposting - March 2022
I’ve been doing a lot of Ukraineposting on Facebook this month, but I’ve limited it here since I assume you’re all already subscribed to Lawrence Freedman, Adam Tooze, the BBC’s Ukrainecast, and the FT. (If you’re not, you’ve missed out on the best writing produced in the last month.)
Things could be good - apparently this is a massively spicy take. The politics of this piece are not mine, to put it mildly, but it captures the vibes of British politics and its future better than anything else I could read. (This post is better on the politics, but simply cannot compete on vibes.)
Erika Reinhardt writes about doing work at the information frontier (thread)
The Worlds to Come - Instalment One - New World Same Humans, by Dave Mattin, might be my favourite Substack. The bread and butter is weekly links roundups on technology and the future, accompanied by incredibly insightful short-form commentary; but this is the first instalment of a mega-essay by Mattin that tries to make the case that ‘our coming journey into virtual worlds can cause a transformation in our relationship with this world’. The absolute coolest kind of philosophical futurism, I’m very excited for the next instalment.
Embedded Agency - following on from the Heideggerianism of the above, this long report is (unknowingly) about the challenges of mathematically modelling being-in-the-world. Part of me thinks that the problems they identify are insurmountable, that there’s something about embeddedness that makes it impossible to model mathematically (certainly, that would have been Heidegger’s position); but more of me thinks we should absolutely be able to get a good model going, even if it’s only contextually relevant. People who care a lot about AI alignment probably already know this post, but the rest of us should read it too.
It’s Murphy’s Law all the way down
Justice Creep - I’m loathe to link ACX since everyone already reads it, but the questions that arise from this are (a) just absurdly interesting and (b) about intellectual history, even if Alexander doesn’t immediately realise this about all of them.
The origin of lactation as a water source for parchment-shelled eggs - evolution is fucking sick.
Is the alcohol message all wrong?
Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Fight Over US History - my favourite episode of the Ezra Klein show ever?
And on a final note: