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Escape the algorithm

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  • Why you should become a magician

    The way to extraordinary growth and changes often involves a fundamental ontological or ‘lens’ shift in how you see the world. Magicians are wearing not just better, but fundamentally differently shaped lenses to the rest of us. And regardless of your skills and experience, it is likely that you are a magician to someone else.

    Meeting magicians is the first step to becoming one – when you are attempting to learn implicit knowledge that by definition you don’t understand, it is important to have a bunch of examples in front of you to feed your brain’s pattern-recognition systems. This will start to change your worldview without the controlling ‘you’ explicitly approving or denying every new belief or framework….Concrete steps I take to find them include asking my most interesting friends to introduce me to their most interesting friends, going down similar rabbit holes with the bibliographies of books that excite me, and generally living in ‘explore’ mode at various points in life, while recognising that not every avenue will lead to a jackpot.

    From the always interesting Autotranslucence. Read more about magicians here.

  • The PARA Method: The Simple System for Organizing Your Digital Life in Seconds

    Imagine for a moment the perfect organizational system.

    A system that told you exactly where to put every piece of information in your life – every document, file, note, agenda, outline, and bit of research – and exactly where to find it when you needed it.

    Such a system would need to be incredibly easy to set up, and even easier to maintain. After all, only the simplest, most effortless habits endure long term.

    I use the PARA Method for everything from folders to bookmarks. Highly recommended. Learn the PARA Method of digital organization here.

  • McDonald’s around the world

    In the United States, I feel like we utilize the chain for its speed and affordability, but in a lot of places overseas, it really is a symbol of Americana and everything that it represents. Of course, sometimes that feeling is anxiety about some of our more imperialist habits, but there’s definitely still a lot of joy. I remember reading this old news story about how when Serbians got their first McDonald’s, they would taunt the opposing team’s fans at Balkan soccer matches over not having one. That kind of pride for their area having gotten a bastion of the Golden Arches is very real.

    An excellent interview throughout, sharing perspective on the role McDonald’s plays in tying together communities. Worth reading the whole thing.

  • The Most Beautiful Game Ever?

    Talking about the Artful Escape:

    It’s a love letter to countless aspects and legends of music, art, and culture, and its passion to demonstrate this is all too clear: The Artful Escape exists to be enjoyed. As with all good love letters, it also ends on a remarkably emotional crescendo.

    it’s a masterfully crafted, beautiful experience, and one that completely removes you from the world around you. 

    After I finished playing, I walked around, looking at the walls and decorations of my house. I suddenly noticed the color and design. The game is so immersive; it does that to you. If you’re interested in amazing design, read more here..

  • Making mice with two dads

    When Katsuhiko Hayashi and his colleagues announced in March that they had produced mouse pups from the cells of two male parents, the news literally floored some researchers. 

    Hayashi and his colleagues took cells from the tails of male mice, which have both X and Y sex chromosomes, and converted them into stem cells. In the process, roughly 3% of such cells spontaneously lose their Y chromosomes. The team then isolated these Y-less cells and treated them with a chemical that causes errors during cell division.

    More here.

  • How to break free of Spotify’s algorithm

    Asking an algorithm to broaden our horizons is like having lunch with a friend who claims to be open to anything but vetoes everything you suggest. “Curiosity is an active mode,” McDonald says. It’s up to us to step outside our bubble. 

    …algorithms have taken the place of magazine editors and museum curators as gatekeepers of culture….“When a human interprets a piece of art, it adds value rather than takes it away. An algorithm has no capacity to interpret,” he adds.  

    Read the whole article here. It changed my listening habits dramatically, leading me to reorganize my library to focus on albums, using the PARA method to organize it.

  • What I’m Reading

    Appendix N: Weird Tales from the Roots of Dungeons & Dragons. Older pulp fantasy is weird and interesting, and I think it’s because authors weren’t competing with cell phones. They expected the reader to fill in more with imagination. So they relied on plot less. This book absolutely delivers:

    “In ages gone,” the Sage had said, his eyes fixed on a low star, “a thousand spells were known to sorcery and the wizards effected their wills. Today, as Earth dies, a hundred spells remain to man’s knowledge”

    That’s from Jack Vance, one of the selections. He’s also the inspiration for Vecna and the D&D magic mechanic. I thought this book would overpromise, delivering a tepid selection of stories chosen without passion. Quite the contrary; the choices are excellent. Get it here.

  • Did Phillip K. Dick live in Ancient Rome?

    The article “How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” by the author Phillip K. Dick, is one of the internet’s greatest treasures. He believed reality is an illusion created by the ancient Romans. He believed he was still living in Ancient Rome. One day, a girl came to his door in California:

    “What does that mean?” I asked her.

    The girl touched the glimmering golden fish with her hand and said, “This is a sign worn by the early Christians.” She then gave me the package of medication.

    In that instant, as I stared at the gleaming fish sign and heard her words, I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis — a Greek word meaning, literally, “loss of forgetfulness.” I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me. And not only could I remember it but I could see it. The girl was a secret Christian and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by the Romans. We had to communicate with cryptic signs. She had just told me all this, and it was true.

    For a short time, as hard as this is to believe or explain, I saw fading into view the black prison-like contours of hateful Rome. But, of much more importance, I remembered Jesus, who had just recently been with us, and had gone temporarily away, and would very soon return.

    It is worth reading the whole thing. And then, like me, to come back to it every now and then. Phillip K. Dick was a great gift to the world.

  • Why the Age of AI is the Age of Philosophy

    AI has brought a foundational subset of philosophy to the forefront of our lives — specifically, philosophy of mind and metaphysics.

    It’s taking a while, for instance, for society to get past the idea that it’s ok to assume that AI could be conscious simply because AI can tell us it’s conscious. If that were sufficient, then philosophers wouldn’t have spent so long getting hung up about whether other humans were conscious!

    The author is excited about the potential for philosophy in the coming years. Read more here..

  • Links of the Day

    Dear Mr. Vice President, Please Take Off Your Apple Watch.

    Magic the Gathering cards – with AI

  • Why hide information people want inside something that will get you into trouble?

    Johannes Trithemius was a Benedictine monk and arguably the founder of modern cryptography. Cryptography is a way to hide information, and Trithemius wrote a book about it — but he encoded this book as a false book about witchcraft.

    The false book (not the real, hidden one) got him dismissed from his job and disgraced. Why hide such useful information in such a self-damaging manner? Here”s one theory:

    If Trithemius’ intention was to avoid careful scrutiny of his manuscript, then his decision to frame it as a manual on spirit magic could not have been more inspired. Indeed, the prospect of wading through a lengthy Latin tome on necromancy was surely just as unappealing in the 1500s as it is today….how unreasonable is it to suppose that similar occult texts…might likewise be an elaborate ruse?

    Is that why he chose to hide his completely-acceptable book as something that would get him in serious trouble? The book has three volumes; the last one is still not decoded.

  • This is 81

    On aging:

    My elder daughter is two years shy of 60, and my younger daughter is 54. I like being old enough to follow the narrative of their lives. To see how they came out. You raise them, but if you die young you don’t get to see them become settled human beings with their sorrows and joys.

    …Aging has given me enormous peace of mind…now that my daughters are adults, we can have completely normal and useful conversations.

    Read more about the reflections of an 81 year old writer here.

  • Our Society is Not Prepared for this Much Awesome

    Almost all of the fears around AI that are circulating right now — fears of cheating, of “disinformation,” of scamming and spamming, etc. — all actually boil down to one thing: fear about what happens when a whole bunch of people, some of whom are stupid and/or irresponsible and/or malicious, instantly level up and get really good at making cultural objects.

    But also:

    Unexpected, AI-powered awesomeness isn’t all upside, because it’s happening too fast and breaking too many parts of our civilization that were invisibly dependent on the uneven distribution of awesomeness in the human population. So we have to figure out how to have a society where the awesomeness gradient is now a uniform distribution, and we’re already out of time.

    Here is the full link.

  • The Gervais Principle

    The Office is not a random series of cynical gags aimed at momentarily alleviating the existential despair of low-level grunts. It is a fully realized theory of management that falsifies 83.8% of the business section of the bookstore…

    A Loser who can be suckered into bad bargains is set to become one of the Clueless. That’s why they are promoted: they are worth even more as Clueless pawns in the middle than as direct producers at the bottom, where the average, rationally-disengaged Loser will do. At the bottom, the overperformers can merely add a predictable amount of value. In the middle they can be used by the Sociopaths to escape the consequences of high-risk machinations like re-orgs.

    Here is more. Its analysis of corporate politics is more interesting than its comparison suggest.

  • The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live the Entanglement

    On the new age:

    We have become so intertwined with what we have created that we are no longer separate from it. We have outgrown the distinction between the natural and the artificial. We are what we make.

    And more:

    We can no longer understand how the world works by breaking it down into loosely-connected parts that reflect the hierarchy of physical space or deliberate design. Instead, we must watch the flows of information, ideas, energy and matter that connect us, and the networks of communication, trust, and distribution that enable these flows. 

    Check out the whole thing.

  • The Office Goth

    A bit of extravagantly British writing that is fun to read.

    To tell you the truth, I don’t remember her last name, she had just turned twenty and always dressed in black, black dresses, black tights, black coats, as if she were attending a funeral rather than working as an office junior.

    And more:

    When I got into the office, Lynda was holding up a message, a ‘fax’ had come in on our super new Fax machine, it was in some weird script, but typed out rather than handwritten and ink. The message was to the effect once we managed to decipher it, that I was to meet my death in three months

    More here.

  • Are Dolphins Conscious?

    It was a dolphin whistle….It started at the top of my head, expanding as the frequency dropped, and showing me the inside of my skull, and went right down through my body. The dolphin gave me a three-dimensional feeling of the inside of my skull, describing my body by a single sound!

    Read the whole, interesting interview here.

  • Should we only vote on our values?

    An interesting theory for better government?

    …we should vote for a party based only on our values. The winning party is responsible for choosing an explicit mathematical function that represents how well the country is doing on its values. For example, this function might be “GDP”, or “percent of the population employed,” or “global happiness ranking,” or what have you. Probably, it will be some combination of these things.

    The government’s only job is to define what success looks like, and how we’re going to measure it. That’s all the government does. They don’t get to raise taxes, or allocate spending, or appoint judges, or anything like that. They are responsible only to pick the utility function, and to create any agencies that might be required to measure it

    The author recommends betting on whether metrics will be succeed or fail based on proposed policies. More here.

  • Nihilism’s last gasp, and other links of the day

    If you want to follow your dreams, you have to say no to all the alternatives.

    The anonymous wit and wisdom of Reddit’s winos

    Last gasp against nihilism. And then…(X)

    How to Be Found by Your People Online (YouTube)

  • Now your PDFs talk to you

    With LLMs, we can ask our documents questions. Reading will change:

    A static wall of text demands effort for diminishing insight. But a PDF piped into an LLM?…I can chat with it. Extract patterns. Mine underdiscussed takeaways. Highlight blind spots. Summarize arguments. It’s like outsourcing the heavy intellectual lifting (Subjective).

    We moved from the oral tradition, to the written word, to the PDF and then the blog and social media. Now we’re giving a voice to the documents we read, like spirits inhabiting books.

    Documentation will exist less as content and more as contextual proxies—something to interrogate, not ingest. We’re not building static libraries. We’re building living conversations.

    More here.