Two New Studies Dig Into The Long, Curving Path That Cats Took Toward Domestication

Instead, the study suggests, domesticated cats flourished in China only by following the Silk Road, arriving there around 1,400 years ago. It’s also possible that climate change led to agricultural and population shifts in the region, possibly affecting how much food was available to the lurking Asian wildcats, the researchers suggest.

The paper published in Science, by contrast, focused on Europe and North Africa. It builds on previous work that had suggested the ancestors of domestic cats were a blend of Near Eastern and North African wildcats.

For the new research, the scientists analyzed samples of nuclear DNA—the main genome of an organism, containing both parents’ contributions—from the same specimens that were examined in the older study, which had not looked at this type of DNA.

Particularly intriguing was taking a new look at cats that lived in Turkey thousands of years ago. “I was so excited to have a look at their nuclear genomes for the first time,” says Marco De Martino, a paleogeneticist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and co-author of the study.

Yet the new analysis suggested something dramatically different to the older work. These Neolithic felines were pure wildcat. The finding, similarly to the results of the analysis done in China, suggests that cat domestication unfolded much more slowly than scientists had thought.

“The cat is a complex species; they are independent,” says Claudio Ottoni, a paleogeneticist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and another co-author of the Science study. “They were not just staying with humans—they would still go around and mix with local wildcats.”

Both findings suggest truly domesticated cats arose far later than previously believed—perhaps as late as 2,000 years ago. If that timeline is correct, it underscores just how rapidly cats have settled into the human world—and how much we have to learn about our feline friends.

- More Here

The two papers:

• The dispersal of domestic cats from North Africa to Europe around 2000 years ago

• The late arrival of domestic cats in China via the Silk Road after 3,500 years of human-leopard cat commensalism

What I've Been Reading

London is Tacoma before Tacoma is even a gleam in a Guggenheim’s eye. 

We pay attention to the wrong things. We make a mystery of Jack the Ripper. 

It’s not a mystery. It’s history.

Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser. 

Did anyone thought about asking this simple question of why there are less serial killers these days? Why?

Jessica Wolpaw Reyes was considering ideas for her PhD while worrying about lead paint since she was pregnant. She happened to listen to Steven D. Levitt's (of Freaknomics) talk. 

She narrowed down on the topic of "early childhood exposure and crime rate" in her dissertation (which was published in 2007). Her question became the seed for Fraser's brilliant book. 

This is yet another example of why it so important to meditate on why question to get at-least some of the causality behind a symptom. 

The most important question for us to ask now is - what is the x in 2025 compared to x = lead in 1950 to 1990 (almost 40 years time span)?

My answer is - consuming processed food, eating dead bodies from factory farming with horrible conditions and antibiotics, over eating sans fasting, plastic, cable news, talk radio, social media, cell phone, ecology collapse and living in concrete urban and sub-urban jungles, daily life sans biophilia and so on. 

Most reading this including myself will not be alive in 40 years if and when such a study comes out. 

One can wait for the next 4 decades or embrace precautionary principle now and avoid those potential mental and physical effects. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. 

Here's good excerpt from the book: 

According to Patterson, the average American during of age of leaded gasoline is so filthy when it comes to lead contamination that he's comparable to Pig Pen in the Peanuts comic strip. "Thats what people look like with respect to lead," he says. "Everyone. The lead from your hair, when you walk into a superclean laboratory like mine, will contaminate the whole damn laboratory. Just from your hair."

Not only that but Patterson calculates that the blood lead level of pre-industrial  humans would have have been 0.016 micrograms per deciliter, far lower than that of anyone living in the industrial age, American, he concludes, are suffering from "enough partial brain dysfunction, that their lives are being adversely affected by loss of mental acuity and irrationality. He devotes himself to campaigning against lead gasoline and to proving that everything Robert Kehoe ever said or upblished about "normal levels" of lead in blood is wrong.

The issue is currently its just not American's but the whole goddamn world is stuck in processed food, eating dead bodies from factory farming with horrible conditions and antibiotics, over eating sans fasting, plastic, cable news, talk radio, social media, cell phone, ecology collapse and living in concrete urban and sub-urban jungles, daily life sans biophilia and so on. 

Before even reading this book just last month I wrote: 

People who eat meat from factory farms pretending that nothing is going to happen to them is clearly a form of infallibilism.

I am not talking about the tragedy of commons in terms of moral and ecological consequences but their diet makes them live a parochial life, what thoughts they can think, how to live a good life, how to make better decisions for themselves and their families. 

In other words their diet makes their thinking and life stuck in a small rut of quagmire from which they cannot escape to realize the beauty of life right in front of their noses. Perhaps there are  thoughts we cannot think - in the spectrum of bandwidth of thoughts humans can think probably becomes even much smaller with their dietary choices which causes immense suffering. 

A much better payback happening here and now than some subjective future heaven and hell.

Take a moment and thank those men and women who fought so hard for decades to expose the effects of lead.  I bet "God" will appreciate that gulping dead bodies of Turkey.

Take a moment to identify the men and women are currently fighting to expose the cognitive and physical on human beings who are stuck in consuming processed food, eating dead bodies from factory farming with horrible conditions and antibiotics, over eating sans fasting, plastic, cable news, talk radio, social media, cell phone, ecology collapse and living in concrete urban and sub-urban jungles, daily life sans biophilia.

What I've Been Reading

I cannot remember the last time I laughed out so loud while reading a book :-) 

This is a master piece with around 10 minutes of reading time. 

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carlo M. Cipolla.

• Law 1: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. 

• Law 2: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person. 

• Law 3: A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. 

• Law 4: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake. 

• Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

Benefits of Wandering Mind

Self-awareness, creative incubation, improvisation and evaluation, memory consolidation, autobiographical planning, goal driven thought, future planning, retrieval of deeply personal memories, reflective consideration of the meaning of events and experiences, simulating the perspective of another person, evaluating the implications of self and others’ emotional reactions, moral reasoning, and reflective compassion.

- Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman via Jonathan Haidt's Babel - On The Death of Daydreaming

Meta Values - 41

In life, the most important traits in everything boils down to three P's. 

Patience, Persistence, and Perseverance. 

The sooner you grasp that, the better your life will be. 

Mine happened at 31 when Max came into my life. 

Wisdom Of Buffet

Very good consolidation of Buffet's wisdom: 

Humans behave the way humans behave, and they’re going to continue to behave that way in the next 50 years.

The proper temperament is far more important in investing than points of intellect. If you’ve got a reasonable intellect and the right temperament you’d get very rich, and if you’ve got the wrong temperament for it, you’ll get done in at some point. 

Human nature has not changed. People will always behave in a manic-depressive way over time. They will offer great values to you.

he better you understand human nature and are able to distinguish between different types of individuals, the better the investor you are going to be.

The veteran banker of Boston, the late Henry L. Higginson, asked one day by an investor what stocks he ought to buy with some idle funds replied, ‘Buy character.’ He meant that if one bought into any industry backed by men of experience and of high character and intelligence, one would at least be subject only to the usual risks of business, and chances of success would be excellent. On the other hand, no one could have faith in securities of any corporation operated by men of doubtful character.

In management you look for ability, trust & character.

We do not wish to join with managers who lack admirable qualities, no matter how attractive the prospects of their business. We've never succeeded in making a good deal with a bad person.

Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful.

Patience - an indispensable quality. If one were asked to name the quality which as much as any other is essential to success in speculation, the answer would be ‘patience.'

The biggest thing about making money is time. You don’t have to be particularly smart you just have to be patient.

The stock market is designed to transfer money from the active to the patient.

Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.

Read 500 pages every week ... That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.

An ability to detach yourself from the crowd — I don’t know to what extent that’s innate or to what extent that’s learned — but that’s a quality you need.

The financial calculus that Charlie and I employ would never permit our trading a good night’s sleep for a shot at a few extra percentage points of return.

Loss of focus is what worries Charlie and me when we contemplate investing in businesses that in general look outstanding.

Jonathan Safran Foer on Eating Animals

Ever since Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals came out, while Max was alive, I have been posting Foer's talk every year during Thanksgiving. 

So much irony in this day... billions get slaughtered after their short and miserable life full of pain and suffering.

Did I mention I love Robert Trivers and his "self-deception" hypothesis? 

This day is one of those days where human self-deception reaches a pinnacle. 

I am sorry for my fellow family who lost their lives today. 

10 Misconceptions About Evolution

• Evolution is “only a theory”  - Nope. 

• “Survival of the fittest” means that evolution favors those who are “strongest”  - “Evolutionary fitness” refers to reproductive success; more precisely, it’s a measure of the success of genes in getting themselves projected into the future and is achieved in many ways—including the ability to obtain food, to avoid becoming food for someone else, to overcome diseases, to adjust to local weather and climate, attract mates, and so forth. In a pioneering research report, male European red deer who were smaller and who bore less impressively developed antlers were often more “fit” than the hulking males, because these “sneaky fuckers” (don’t blame me: This descriptive phrase is part of the technical literature) copulated with the females while the more massive bulls were busy fighting antlero-a-antlero with other more physically developed specimens.  

• Evolution explains the origin of life (or it’s supposed to) - Nope. That is primarily a job for biophysics, biochemistry, and geology. 

• Evolution acts for the good of the species - It is estimated that something like 99 percent of species that have existed are now extinct, so if evolution is working for the good of species, it has done a terrible job! What really argues against “good of the species,” however, is the actual way natural selection operates. Although it is possible that species sometimes compete, and, as a result, better adapted ones replace their poorly adapted alternatives, evolutionary competition takes place almost entirely within species, not between them. 

• Evolutionary theory says that living things are the result of chance - No, it doesn’t. There’s a half-truth hidden here; actually, less than half. Natural selection’s power comes from differential reproduction, the logical, unavoidable process whereby some genetic variants are more successful—more fit—than others. As such, its raw material comes from genetic diversity, which is produced by mutations and, in the case of sexually reproducing species, the reshuffling of genes via meiosis and sexual recombination. These processes are essentially random. But that’s just the source of the building blocks employed by natural selection. Natural selection definitely isn’t random—it does the heavy lifting and fitting together, by picking and choosing among various options, with some genes being projected into the future more than their alternatives—i.e., our old friend differential reproduction once again. Then the process happens over and over, repeatedly retaining those that are more fit and abandoning those that are less so. 

• Because we rely more and more on brain power and less and less on our muscles, human beings in the future will have big heads and small bodies - It is similarly easy to get hung up on the Lamarckian assumption that insects, crustaceans, fish, and amphibians that inhabit pitch dark caves are often blind because they stopped using their eyes, which therefore disappeared. Not so. These evolutionary changes, which are entirely compatible with Darwinian natural selection, occur because eyes are useless in the dark—hence, they lose the selective advantage that they convey in lighted environments—and, moreover, they take energy to produce while also being vulnerable to injury and infection. So, go ahead and exercise, use your brains, and hang out in dark places if you wish … but your offspring won’t have larger biceps, bigger heads, or smaller eyes as a result. 

• Gaps in the fossil record argue against evolution - Of course there are gaps in the fossil record! It’s remarkable that we have any such records at all, given how unlikely it is that any given dead critter will be fossilized and preserved, to which we must add an additional low probability that these remains will be discovered and recognized as such, perhaps hundreds of millions of years later. As for “missing links,” picture a line between two taxonomic groups, with as yet unidentified species connecting them; now, identify something between (linking) them: Now you have two new missing links! So, any time we find intermediate forms, there will necessarily be “missing links,” because every time a linking specimen is found (such as the discovery of Australopithecines linking nonhuman primates and Homo sapiens), new missing links are produced. In short, the more fossils, the more “missing links.” 

• Human beings aren’t evolving any more - We are. It’s just that evolution is typically a very slow process, limited by selective pressures (differences in the reproductive success of different traits and the genes that underlie them), along with generation times. It is possible that human beings in the future will have evolved the ability to function and reproduce readily with microplastics and “forever chemicals” in their blood, not to mention Strontium-90 in their bones and DDT in their fat, or maybe enhanced ability to manipulate computer screens, if such individuals have more kids. Each person’s genotype is fixed, so as individuals, we don’t evolve biologically. But Homo sapiens does, and will continue to do so, unless all people and their genes reproduce identically. 

• Because of evolution, living things are always getting “better” - Not necessarily. Early in the Earth’s history, a few billion years ago, life was very simple. Since then, it has evolved increasing complexity and enhanced ability to flourish in a variety of environments. In that sense, living things have gotten “better.” But any notion of improvement is subject to human-centered bias.  

• Evolutionary biology isn’t a science because it’s a historical phenomenon and can’t be tested - Many sciences, notably astronomy and geology, engage uniquely with historical phenomena (we can’t experimentally manipulate stars or continents), and yet they generate impressive empirical testing, often based on detailed observational regimes along with falsifiable predictions. And there is no question of their status as bona fide sciences. Evolutionary biology is no different.  

- More Here

Moss Might Survive Nearly Two Decades in Space

Fujita and his colleagues first challenged the moss species Physcomitrium patens with space-like conditions in a lab, including extreme temperature swings, extreme UV radiation, and vacuum conditions. By assessing the impacts on three different structures from the moss—juvenile moss, specialized stem cells, and spores contained within reproductive structures called sporangium—they determined that the shielded spores had the best chance of making it among the stars. For example, the spores showed around 1,000 times more tolerance to UV radiation than did the stem cells.

The scientists chalked this up to the sporangium, which protects them from perils including UV exposure and extreme temperatures on Earth—a feature that has perhaps enabled them to ride out multiple mass extinction events.

Then, it was time for the ultimate test: In March 2022, the team handed off hundreds of spores to astronauts headed toward the International Space Station on the Cygnus NG-17 spacecraft. Once the crew made it to the ISS, they secured the spores on the station’s exterior. Spores were divided into groups and exposed to one of three different conditions: exposed to visible light uncovered but protected from UV radiation by a filter, blocked from any light (including UV) in a control group, or exposed to all the visible light and UV radiation hitting the ISS. After 283 days in the extraterrestrial elements, the spores returned to Earth.

“We expected almost zero survival, but the result was the opposite: Most of the spores survived,” Fujita said in the statement. “We were genuinely astonished by the extraordinary durability of these tiny plant cells.”

Testing revealed that more than 80 percent of the spores survived the experiment, and had germination rates of up to 97 percent for those not exposed to UV radiation in space. Meanwhile, the spores that weren’t shielded from UV radiation had a germination rate of 86 percent.The paper noted that a form of chlorophyll showed signs of damage in the spores exposed to space light but not in the spores kept in the dark.

With the data gleaned from the lab and space experiments, the team estimated that these moss spores could survive up to roughly 15 years in space. Now, this moss joins the ranks of other rugged Earthlings who have endured the space elements, including tardigrades and fungi.

The researchers say they hope that moss can aid extended human missions to other planets by providing oxygen and boosting soil fertility for crop growth on long cosmic journeys or on extraterrestrial outposts. 

- More Here

How Do The Pros Get Someone To Leave A Cult?

There are cults like we all "know" as cults. 

Then there is a toxic cocktail cults of ideology, culture, religion, politics, nationalism, socialism, capitalism, free-market, communism, human centrism, binary thinking lens et al., This cocktail cult is not called cult since billions of sapiens fall into this bucket. Somehow, this has been rebranded as something else - tribes. 

Then there are very very few people who are open minded to see these two cults and they make the wheels of civilization, kindness, decency, progress over time. These human had an ability to change their minds with time and grow as a living being. 

Thanks to those unknown humans for what they did so that I am able to live a very comfortable life. 

I hope I am doing a little of the same for the future when I am gone. 

We should have a lot more Ryan's and Kelly's in our worlds to help the cocktail cults:

What Ryan and Kelly do is unusual: they help people leave cults. Over the past 40 years, they have handled hundreds of cases – some simple and local, others stretching across borders and decades. They have been hired by families of both modest and considerable means. They say they have even been hired by government agencies, and that some cults they have investigated have left them genuinely afraid for their lives.

Although many people are involved in cultic studies and education, fewer than 10 people in the US do anything like what Ryan and Kelly do. And among those, only Kelly and Ryan practice their strange and unique method: embedding themselves in families’ lives, pulling on threads like marionettists, sometimes for years.

Their method goes something like this. A family reaches out about their daughter, husband, nephew or grandchild. Ryan and Kelly conduct an assessment that can take anywhere from a day to a week (they would not say exactly). They charge $2,500 for the assessment, then $250 an hour after that, interviewing the family until they understand the dynamics well enough to devise a strategy. Then, over months or sometimes years, they work to create the conditions in which a person might begin to question the beliefs their life has been built on.

Normally, Kelly and Ryan work by strengthening the existing relationships in a person’s life. It can be a long game. They will educate the family about the cultic group, and give advice about what to say (or not to say). They will bring in experts: psychiatrists, lawyers, priests that can provide perspective and counsel. The goal is to untangle the family dynamics that might have made someone vulnerable to a cult in the first place.

[---]

One of their cases in the 90s involved a cult leader who was systematically sexually assaulting the group’s members. “I can’t get into all the details,” Ryan said. “He was horrible, a horrible man.” Ryan and Kelly had been flying regularly to Australia to work on the case. The client’s niece, a girl in the group, was beginning to fall out with the cult. The leader had been arrested and was on trial for crimes related to the cult’s activities.

In their process, Ryan and Kelly require what they call 50 things: “You have to find 50 things that you could agree with the person on.” Ryan gestured to a painting on the wall in their living room. It was a strange, surrealist-looking canvas with a big Tesla coil in the center and lightning shooting out at some pigeons. Ryan said, “If you look at this piece of art and say, ‘That’s really ugly,’ then we’re going to start off … not on the right page, right?”

But if I could appreciate what he found appealing, then, he said: “I think you have the right to criticize it.” The number may seem arbitrary, but their goal is to find 50 things a family can appreciate about a cult before discussing what they do not agree with.

I put this number to Lalich and she said the notion of having to find 50 things seemed a bit extreme. “ I certainly could never find 50 things about my cult that I thought were good.” The spirit of it seemed right to her though, at least: that the family needs to tone down their rhetoric, or they will just push the cult-involved member away.

Hydromechanics Of Defecation - Most Mammals Need Only 12 Seconds To Poop

 or that mammal will be dinner to a predator. 

Its freaking common sense. 

I wrote about this few years ago: 

If someone breaks this rule daily then their health and/or diet is not good. There is something fundamentally wrong with their microbiome which in turn also affects their thought process, outlook of life and god knows what else we don't know. 

Hence, we could cautiously come up with a heuristic that not only eyes but "time to poop" is also a window to someone's character (I am not sure what soul means so let's stick to observable, known and simple words here). 

It should take 12 seconds. But that technical word "hydrodynamics of defection" is something new I learned today. 

AI Will Never Be A Shortcut To Wisdom

After nearly forty years teaching graduate students and advising some of the most inventive companies on the planet, I’ve earned the right to sigh a bit. But this isn’t about “kids these days.” In fact, it’s not about youth at all. The shift I’m seeing — this collapse of intellectual agility — is striking all generations. All cultures. All walks of life.

Studies on cognitive flexibility, coupled with anecdotal observations about the death of long-form journalism and the slow drift of reader attention, suggest something dire: We are growing unable to sit still with ambiguity. We no longer walk through the fog of a complex question — we skip across it, like stones. Our thoughts sprint, but the world is a marathon. And so, we are left with answers to the wrong questions.

What happens when we can no longer think through contradiction, paradox, tension? When climate change, homelessness, political division, and regional conflict are seen as disconnected problems with easy answers — when, in truth, they are tangled systems that resist simplicity?

The answer is only simple if you don’t understand the question.

This is the danger of living in a world where thinking is outsourced. Where cognition becomes project management. Where uncertainty is eliminated, not explored. Where truth is boxed and shelved, not wrestled with. If the world is a box of nails — individual facts, sharp and ready — then our minds become hammers. Tools of force and certainty. Banging out conclusions. Flattening nuance. And who builds a cathedral with a hammer? Who composes a symphony with a hammer?

This is no way to live. Because if you see the world as nails, you’ll mistake noise for knowledge. You’ll assume volume means validity. And when you no longer know how to recognize true expertise — because you yourself have never gained any — you will fall for the confident fool. The YouTube doctor. The Instagram monk. The LinkedIn philosopher.

[---]

If you want to reclaim your mind — not as a hammer, but as a compass, or a loom, or a garden — start here:

• Ask better questions.
• Be suspicious of certainty.
• Practice long-form attention.
• Sit with something confusing until it teaches you something.

We are not meant to be hammerheads in a world of nails. We are meant to wonder, to wander, to build. The true mind does not pound — it inquires, connects, reshapes. It listens to contradiction without collapsing. It plays. And most of all, it remembers that the world was never simple. It was just, for a while, flattened by search engines. 

- More Here

Karel Styblo’s Life Work Against Tuberculosis Created A System That Has Saved Millions

We not only moronic but ungrateful species who don't even know the names of hero's leave alone know their work. Btw., how many head of the name Norman Borlaug? The only human who saved billion lives. 

I bet most know the freaking names such as Aristotle to Columbus. 

On Dr, Karel Styblo's system: 

One of the most important scientists you’ve never heard of is Dr. Karel Styblo.

Styblo had a profound grasp of tuberculosis, in part because he survived it. He contracted tuberculosis while imprisoned at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Austria in 1944. After the war and over the next 40 years, as a doctor and epidemiologist, Styblo studied tuberculosis and learned to orchestrate all three parts of what I call the formula: See invisible threats, believe change is possible, and create systematic solutions. 

I previously wrote about the single question he asked me that changed my life. I had handed him a detailed report about tuberculosis in New York City, and when he asked me how many patients we had cured, I didn’t know the answer. The report detailed all who were diagnosed and treated, but not who had actually been cured. I was terribly ashamed. That simple question — Of the 3,811 patients with tuberculosis diagnosed in New York City last year, how many did you cure? — changed how I’ve thought and worked ever since. Styblo’s laser-like focus on outcomes underpins much of his systems and work.

Styblo’s genius is both scientific and practical. He studied tuberculosis and learned to orchestrate all three parts of the formula. He saw invisible trends. He established the concept of a technical package based on scientific and practical rigor. After a decade in Tanzania, he developed a powerful information system capable of transforming health care. He understood how tuberculosis spreads among people — and, even more importantly, how to scale a control program to reach an entire country.

Styblo’s tuberculosis control system has improved diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring of more than a 100 million patients.

If You Cannot Change Your Mind...

It's most likely that you have enough money and/or little time to think clearly. 

Over thinking, motivated reasoning or ideologue et al.,  fall under the same bucket.

The best thing you can give back to this planet is spend your time playing video games , watching TV, doing something passive and bid adios one day.

Believe it or not, even unwillingly this is the best thing you will ever do. 

No matter what, you will always be on the wrong side of history.  This is not my prediction but evolution of this planet works by adaptation. 

Good bye and long good night stagnant mind. 

Can the “Flow State” Save Us From Distraction?

Reading this beautiful piece reminded me of something I never consciously thought about. 

I always took for granted that the "flow" state is just for my deep work but yet, there are so many little things I do which brings me to the flow state.

Cleaning my house, cooking, walking, working out, gardening, writing, and reading are some of those activities.

And looking at Max’s pictures. 

Csikszentmihalyi moved to the United States — and dedicated his life to the study of positive psychology, which might be described as the scientific exploration of what makes life worth living. The Hungarian American’s legendary work orbited questions of happiness, purpose and creativity. What are the conditions that help people thrive? What happens when our attention is fully aligned with our actions? What sort of life unfolds when effort becomes its own reward?

If Csikszentmihalyi’s work offers an official definition of flow, it is this: “A state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”

It’s the sort of line you start highlighting before you’ve finished reading it. I remember where I was when I read it: in a coffee shop in the East Village, sitting amongst glowing laptops and somniferous surf rock, sipping a beer before grabbing dinner with a friend.

[---]

As freewheeling as flow feels, as mythical as it sometimes seems, the state does adhere to a qualifiable superstructure. Csikszentmihalyi spent decades studying people who regularly entered flow — from artists to surgeons and climbers to chess masters — and eventually identified nine “component states”: challenge-skills balance, action-awareness meaning, clear goals, unambiguous feedback, concentration on the task at hand, paradox of control, loss of self-consciousness, transformation of time, and autotelic experience.

That’s…a lot of words. What do they all mean?

Here’s a breakdown: In order to achieve flow, the performer must be well-matched to the activity at hand — not too expert, not too green. They should be challenged, not bored. Activated and engaged. The performer knows exactly what they’re trying to accomplish, including the many mini-steps along the way, and they have a clear sense of how they’re doing. But that’s about all they’re aware of. Time either slows to a crawl or flies by. Focus narrows to a pinpoint, shutting out would-be distractions. The performer forgets their ego (they neither consider nor care what they look like during flow), and abandons their needs (they don’t reach for snacks, or check the clock or wonder if they need a bathroom break). They simply float forward.

Once you’re in flow, it can feel bulletproof. As mental states go, it seems like a cheat code: temporary immunity to time, ego or distraction?! But reaching hyper-focus requires some entry-level focus. Unlocking flow is notoriously difficult; it demands a blend of creativity and curiosity, patience and practice. And the edge of flow is a tightrope. A phone notification, a self-conscious thought, one tiny shift in rhythm — they can all break your stride before you fully drop in.

[---]

In other words: flow was a commodity, which could run dry without discipline. He chose to cherish it, to never take it for granted: “As flow became a primary activity in my life, I was eventually able to turn it into a method. No hard conjuring necessary. It’s almost on speed-dial at this point.”

Descriptions vary, but this is a common refrain amongst the artists and athletes who regularly enter flow. It’s hard to say they’re “finding flow” or “unlocking” it — either image suggests someone reaching out in the dark, fumbling with their keys. When you hone your attentional faculty day after day, year after year, flow is no yeti. It’s your next-door neighbor. Ying said as much: “I think that I expect to get to flow now. It’s not a rare or mysterious thing. For me, it’s the result of good preparation and willful focus.”

[---]

In order to find true flow at work, though, the work has to matter to you. It has to feel meaningful, rooted in growth. You have to believe in it. And ideally, you’re already good at it — or at the very least, eager to get better. Whatever the task, there should be a clear sense of progression, and a sense that you’re fully present while doing it.

Tyranny Of Experts!

But the ethnographic record makes it amply evident that the large-scale adoption of shrimp farming has caused an ecological and social disaster in the Bengal delta, blighting once-fertile land and further impoverishing the poor and landless. This is largely because the species that was chosen for farming in Bengal is a saltwater variety preferred by Western consumers: tiger shrimp (Penaeus monodon, or ‘bagda chingri’); Bengalis generally prefer a variety of freshwater prawn called Macrobrachium rosenbergii, or ‘golda chingri’.

Saltwater ponds for tiger shrimp aquaculture are often dug on agricultural land that is otherwise used to grow rice, fruit and vegetables. Over time, water from these ponds seeps into nearby fields and aquifers, salinising the soil until it can no longer support rice or any other crop. Then fruit trees and orchards begin to wither, and even the grass disappears, making it difficult to keep livestock. Soon, once-fertile stretches of land dotted with trees, market gardens and rice fields do indeed become, to use Paprocki’s words, ‘threatening dystopias’.

Dewan quotes a woman who went back, after an absence of some years, to a village where shrimp farming had been introduced: “I returned to a lona desh [saline land] without vegetables,” she said. “The salt is even in the air, eroding the walls of the houses so they crumble. Everything is lona [saline]. Everything dies. There are no fruit trees; the few date and coconut trees here do not bear fruit. Goats and chickens are too expensive to buy, and they often die due to the saline water. We need to buy all [our] cooking fuel, there are no trees or cow dung for us to use. There is no grass for livestock, the ponds are too saline for bathing, clothes washed in saltwater do not get clean and ruin quicker. We need to buy everything and because of this we cannot afford to buy fruit, eggs, or meat… The canals are gone; we used to bathe in canals that are now no more… we must bathe in the saline river. Our eyes sting, our skin itches and becomes dark. Our ponds are now saline. We used to drink pond water filtered with fitkeri [alum stone], now we must drink tube well water that we collect from far away. We suffer now, but the rich do not care.”

The social consequences of shrimp farming are no less ruinous than its environmental impacts, because it requires only a fraction of the labour needed to cultivate rice. So when rice fields are converted into saltwater ponds, the poor and landless lose their main source of income, and are left with no recourse but to migrate to urban shanty-towns to eke out a precarious living. This outcome is actually welcomed by some development professionals, because they take a dim view of subsistence farming in general, and see proletarianisation as a step up on the ladder of ‘progress’. Similarly, experts who advocate managed retreat as the most practical response to sea-level rise also regard migration away from the coast in a generally favourable light.

Irony of ironies: people who are forced out of their villages because of shrimp farming are often classified as ‘climate migrants’ by aid agencies and bureaucrats, despite the fact that their displacement is the result not of global warming itself, but rather of climate solutions advocated by credentialed experts. In effect, this is a process, as Paprocki notes, of “anticipatory ruination”, intended to ward off the possible harms of the future by causing actual harm in the present day.

[---]

The shared assumption in all of this seems to be that the great majority of people eliminated by the apocalypse will be the underclasses of the poorer nations. But what is the likelihood that this will actually be the case? While there can be no doubt that vulnerable people in the Global South will indeed suffer greatly on an environmentally disrupted planet, the ethnographic record suggests that the future may have some surprises in store for complacent global elites. Bengali farmers, for instance, no matter how poor, are by no means willing to go quietly into the night. On the contrary, they are clearly determined to confront the future on their own terms, privileging the values that are most important to them. In this effort, it is possible that the skills inculcated by subsistence farming will be an important source of resilience: that is, after all, precisely the thinking behind the ‘prepper’ and survivalist movements in the West. Indeed, it seems to me that the people who will be most at risk if a planetary catastrophe were to occur are those who depend on complex industrial systems for their day-to-day survival. Those who know how to live off the land may well stand a better chance of getting by when conditions deteriorate.

There is perhaps one other factor that could work to the advantage of ordinary people in the Global South: the fact that they do not share the pessimism about the future that is increasingly prevalent in the West. Indeed, doomsaying has now become so widespread in Europe and America that it is hard to know whether it represents a rational appraisal of the relevant data, or is merely an offshoot of a more general sense of political dysfunction and historic decline.

In my experience, it is exceedingly rare to encounter apprehensions of impending doom in India, or Kenya, or Indonesia. The absence of this generalised anxiety is probably the reason why apocalyptic fiction hasn't really caught on in India or elsewhere in the Global South. But it is also possible that Asian and African writers have abjured end-of-the-worldism for other reasons. “When all is said and done, this obsession [with apocalypse] may well be specific to Western metaphysics,” the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe notes in Necropolitics (2019). “For many human cultures, the world, simply, does not end.”

- How visions of catastrophe shape the ‘climate solutions’ imposed by aid agencies , read the whole piece; its so grounded in reality. 

How To Be A Lichen

Contain multitudes without inner conflict. Linnaeus classified lichens as plants — a notion no one questioned until Peter Rabbit creator Beatrix Potter undertook her little-known scientific studies and made the revolutionary discovery that lichens are part algae and part fungus, with a sprinkling a bacteria — three kingdoms of life in a single organism, not warring for dominance but working together to make it one of the most resilient life-forms in nature and a keystone of many ecosystems. They are what that the German microbiologist and botanist Heinrich Anton de Bary was studying when he coined the word symbiosis, which is the technology evolution invented for unselfing.

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Cultivate healthy attachment that doesn’t syphon the energy of the other. Contrary to the common misconception, lichens do not parasitize the organisms on which they grow but only use them as a substrate and often contribute to the overall health of the ecosystem.

Become a pioneer of possibility amid the ruins of before. Lichens are often the first organisms to grow on the denuded rock left in the wake of landslides and earthquakes. They are the life that goes on living over the tombstones of the dead.

When you can’t change your situation, change your attitude. When environmental conditions harshen, lichens can shut down their metabolism for months, years, even decades. They survive in radioactive environments by entering a dormant state and releasing protective chemicals that block radiation and neutralize free radicals. They survive simulations of Martian conditions and even the black severity of outer space. 

[---] 

Know that you don’t need a partner to fulfill your life. Many lichens reproduce asexually — by dispersing diaspores containing a handful of cells from each of their inner kingdoms or simply by breaking off pieces of themselves to grow into new organisms.

Leave the world better than you found it. Lichens enrich the soil of deserts, stabilize sand dunes, and create loam from stone across the long arc of their lives. They are part of how mountains become golden sand.

Have great patience with the arc of your life. Some of the oldest living things on Earth, lichens grow at the unhurried pace of less than a millimeter per year. The continent I now live on and the continent on which I was born are drifting apart more than 250 times as fast. The Moon is leaving us four hundred times faster.

- More Here

Misusing Wisdom From Books via Motivated Misreading (a.ka. Using It As A How To Do Manual)

In a letter to investors earlier this year, he even approvingly quoted Samuel Huntington of “clash of civilisations” fame, highlighting his claim that the rise of the West was not made possible “by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence”.

- More Here review of the new book The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir and the Rise of the Surveillance State by Michael Steinberger

And what does Palantir actually do? (hint: nada on innovation nor any ground breaking AI) 

What does Palantir actually do? 

It’s a question that comes up time and time again in social media. 

It’s also surprisingly easy to address, despite the company’s occult reputation: Palantir collates disparate sources of data and makes them easy to search. It is Google for chaotic organisations, whose software connects various databases and computer systems into a single unified platform. 

If the company’s services could be applied to your life, it would look like a team of specialists who arrive at your house and rifle through your desk, updating your to-do lists, contacts and calendars; syncing and sorting the files you have scattered across a half-dozen old phones and and hard drives, and generally Making Things Organised. Wouldn’t you pay good money for such a service? Of course you would. 

Now, imagine you’re a country and this pandemonium is not personal but institutionalised – encompassing not just a few email inboxes and old USBs, but, say, an entire healthcare system, including payroll, procurement, and insurance, or a medium-sized war. Wouldn’t you then pay a lot of money? Wouldn’t you in fact pay millions and millions and be extremely thankful to whoever sorted this mess on your behalf? Thus: Palantir’s rise.

 

Evolution Under A Microscope

The longest-running and most celebrated of modern evolution experiments is the appropriately named Long-Term Evolution Experiment (LTEE). Started by Richard Lenski in 1988 at the University of California, Irvine, and continuing in the hands of Jeffrey Barrick at the University of Texas at Austin, the LTEE has been running nearly continuously for 80,000 generations of E. coli over nearly 40 years. This is equivalent to two million years of human evolution.

The experiment began when 12 genetically identical populations of E. coli were grown in liquid medium. Every day since then, one percent of the previous day’s culture has been transferred into fresh medium. The medium is a dilute sugary solution limited in glucose, which E. coli uses as its primary carbon source. After about seven generations the glucose runs out and the bacteria stop growing until the next day, when they are transferred into fresh medium. Like Dallinger’s warm water, glucose-limited media is a selective pressure on the microbes, spurring the evolution of adaptations that compensate for a lack of their preferred food source.

Every 75 days (about 500 generations), a portion of LTEE’s cloudy soup of bacteria is stored in a minus-80-degree-centigrade freezer. These remain as frozen fossil records that can be used for direct comparison to their descendants.

[---]

The LTEE has shed light on many unanswered questions about the dynamics of evolution, and experimentally validated long-running speculations. Do species improve indefinitely in a constant environment or will they stop at some maximum level? By comparing evolved E. coli with their ancestors, LTEE found that the rate of adaptation to the environment slows over time, but doesn’t plateau. Even after tens of thousands of generations in a stable laboratory environment, natural selection seems to be able to continuously eke out improvements.

Another major finding was that not all replicate populations follow the same evolutionary trajectory. In one replicate, named Ara-2, the population diverged into two coexisting lineages: one that rapidly consumes glucose and afnother that feeds on a byproduct of glucose metabolism called acetate. From a single population came a community of two.

But the most surprising finding was the observation that after about 31,000 generations, a different replicate, Ara-3, gained the ability to grow on citrate. Natural E. coli can’t metabolize citrate—in fact, it’s one of the defining features of the species—so the emergence of a strain which thrives on this carbon source could represent an entirely new species.

[---]

Today, labs around the world are running evolution experiments of all shapes and sizes, each using microbes to understand a specific facet of evolution. Some study predation by mixing predator and prey species, and observing how each adapts to the other. Other groups have studied starvation by growing bacteria for long periods of time without the addition of any nutrients, nor the removal of dead cells. And by selecting yeasts for increased size, others have directed the evolution of macroscopic multicellularity from single-celled ancestors.

Evolution by its nature takes time. With microbes we’ve been able to condense it down to more manageable timescales, but even 80,000 generations is a blip on the evolutionary clock. As these experiments continue to run, the more we’re sure to learn from them.

- More Here

The Simplest Argument For Veganism

I had a similar conclusion decades ago; the difference was I wasted a decade or so when Max was alive arguing. 

But thankfully, during the last few years of Max, I changed and realized these people don't give a flying fuck about anything else other than themselves and their goddamn family. 

People who eat meat from factory farms pretending that nothing is going to happen to them is clearly a form of infallibilism.

I am not talking about the tragedy of commons in terms of moral and ecological consequences but their diet makes them live a parochial life, what thoughts they can think, how to live a good life, how to make better decisions for themselves and their families. 

Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste.

Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark “Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think,” surprise you?

Evolution, so far, may possibly have blocked us from being able to think in some directions; there could be unthinkable thoughts.

- Richard Hamming

In other words their diet makes their thinking and life stuck in a small rut of quagmire from which they cannot escape to realize the beauty of life right in front of their noses. Perhaps there are  thoughts we cannot think - in the spectrum of bandwidth of thoughts humans can think probably becomes even much smaller with their dietary choices which causes immense suffering. 

A much better payback happening here and now than some subjective future heaven and hell.

If someone is sad or suffering in your home; there is no way on earth you can jump around and pretend to have "fun". It is psychologically, morally, physically and mentally impossible to do so for normal human beings. But that's exactly what people are doing with this diet. So much suffering on their dinner plate they are inevitably becoming inhuman in their thinking. 

So I simply wait for them to die while I keep breathing after Max to make our fellow beings suffering’s a little less. 

I am not sure I am trying enough to make a change in this world. But I cannot keep breathing and not try; if one stops the other will automatically stop. 

Thank you for writing this immensely powerful short piece:

Imagine that you found out that your friend raised his own chickens. One day, he invited you into his house and you saw how he treated them. Dozens of chickens were chained up in a cage too small to move, inhaling the feces of those above them. Those chickens, you learned, had been debeaked, meaning their beak had been sliced off with a hot knife, without anesthetic. This probably felt like having their nose cut off.

When his egg-laying hens produced a baby male chick, he would drop it into a shredder because it was useless. He’d force the pigs to give birth in a little concrete cell too small to turn around in, and would kill them by forcing them into a gas chamber. Over decades, he’d genetically engineered the chickens to be so large that they could barely move, and the full weight of their bloated bodies was thus constantly pressed against the metal of the cage. And sometimes, to produce more chickens, he’d hold the female chickens down and inject them with semen from male chickens.

It seems like he is doing something evil! He should stop. Probably you would not return to his house of horrors. More likely, you’d call the police.

But here’s a plausible principle: if it’s wrong to do something, then it’s wrong to pay other people to do it. Because it’s wrong to kill, it’s wrong to hire someone else to kill. Because it’s wrong to rob a bank, it’s wrong to hire someone else to rob a bank. So if it’s wrong to treat animals badly, it’s wrong to pay others to treat animals badly.

But that is what you do every time you purchase meat from a typical source. You pay for the product of months of torment and mutilation. Factory farms treat the animals on them every bit as badly as your friend in the above hypothetical. Every one of the practices I described is routine on the factory farms that house more than 99% of animals killed each year. So if it’s immoral to mistreat animals, then it’s also immoral to pay for others to mistreat animals. This would mean nearly all meat consumption is seriously immoral.

And note: nearly all the excuses that you give for your meat consumption could be given by your hypothetical friend. He could note that meat consumption is natural, lions eat meat, the animals wouldn’t have otherwise existed, and so on for all the excuses for meat eating. But no one would buy those excuses when employed by him. They’re no more successful when employed by you.

Most people, after reading this, will not go vegan. They will continue eating animal products, even if convinced by the moral argument, because they enjoy its taste. To such a person, I don’t have much to say, for while it’s easy to give arguments for the immorality of meat consumption, it is much harder to convince people to follow where the arguments lead.

All I can say is that if you continue eating meat after knowing how the animals are raised, then you will have to grapple with a legacy of knowingly supporting the shedding of innocent blood, of supporting gassing, torment, caging, and merciless carnage doled out on the innocent because you were too weak to stop doing what you knew to be wrong. If we one day appear before God and are asked to justify our actions, I wouldn’t want that to be my defense. At the very least offset.

In fact, I don’t think veganism is enough. We can spare thousands of animals from a torturous fate per dollar. We can make animals spend many fewer years in a cage with a single dollar. One who does nothing in the face of this holocaust will have to grapple with a legacy of inaction in the face of unspeakable atrocities; of ignoring the trillions of beings tortured, slaughtered, and dismembered because intervening would require trivial personal sacrifices. If there is a judgment day, I wouldn’t want that to be my defense. Doing something about the population vastly larger than the entire human race being kept in nightmare torture facilities strikes me as a bare minimum.

My fellow beings, my larger family, although we share this blue planet together as our home, I am so sorry that I am not able to stop your suffering. I am trying...

Disavowal vs. Denial

The biggest disavowal trait is not climate change but killing animals. 

Interview with Alenka Zupančič, author of new book Disavowal

And it’s a very interesting concept, because we are used to this other concept, which is simple denial. You know, denial of climate change, denial of this or that.

But disavowal functions in a much more perverse way. Namely, by first fully acknowledging some fact—“I know very well that this is how things are”—but then going on as if this knowledge didn’t really matter or register. So in practice, you just go on as before. And I think this is even more prevalent in our response to different social predicaments than simple denial.

[---]

They are doing perhaps more damage. Or, what is even more important, they are entrapped in this kind of pas de deux with the direct deniers, because they present themselves as much more rational. They say, “Look at these stupid people. They just don’t believe in climate change. But we are enlightened. We know all about it.” But in the long run, nothing really happens. The practices remain just the same. You organize a couple of climate conferences, but growth still remains the principle of social functioning, and so on. So I think, not only is it more dangerous because it is more prevalent—I mean, there are many more people who are into this kind of disavowal functioning—but it’s also dangerous because there is this dance between the two.

Happy Birthday Neo!

I cannot believe that little baby is now 6! 

Without him coming home within 4 days of Max passing away, I don't think I would have survived. 

His naughtiness, adamance,  and all those little traits of his gave me no time to get stuck in a quagmire. 

Only he knows if I had been fair to him while my mind is full of missing Max. 

Thank you my love for everything. 

 

The Evolution of Civilizationalism

In order to understand the civilizational turn, we need to look not only at the international political environment but also at domestic developments. Within the West and especially within Europe, the civilizational turn seems to be connected to a particular form of neoliberalism that seeks to “encase” the economy and protect it from democratic interference. As economic policy has been taken out of the space of democratic contestation in the last several decades, especially within the eurozone, political debate has shifted to cultural issues. Civilizationalism is a kind of identity politics produced by neoliberalism. 

In many non-Western countries, civilizational ideas have also become influential in the context of economic reform policies that opened up state-protected economies to the free flow of capital and market forces and drastically reworked the balance between public and private authority. Civilizationalism frequently serves as an idiom of legitimation for neoliberal reforms. For example, the Turkish state has used civilizational lessons about Ottoman practices of indigenous capitalism to justify neoliberal reforms while also championing civilization as a defense against the homogenizing effects of globalization. In China and India, civilizational assertions of power mirror the global aspirations of the new economic elites and middle classes and rationalize economic inequalities in terms of cultural reward. 

For all the differences among them, all cases of civilizationalism around the world are emerging in a context in which the distinction between authoritarianism and democracy is increasingly blurred. Both within the West and outside it, democracies are showing authoritarian tendencies—often referred to as “democratic backsliding”—and producing hybrid regimes. Conversely, even authoritarian states like China feel the need to draw on democratic rhetoric to legitimate themselves. This is why the concept of civilization is so useful to political elites as a source of legitimacy. 

Civilizationalism is not a phenomenon that should be identified exclusively with illiberal forces within and outside the West, as many seem to imagine. Rather, the global civilizational turn should be understood as a product of the way in which the boundaries between liberalism and illiberalism are becoming unclear as the center-right mainstreams and normalizes far-right ideas. If neoliberalism tends to produce identity politics, civilizationalism may be the form that this identity politics takes in a world in which international politics is increasingly being imagined as a competition between continent-sized powers.

- More Here

Vikram On Chola History

Negative-Sum Game Of US Political Ideology

Ross Dougthat hits the nail on the systemic plague that has engulfed US caused by political ideology. I have observed this very closely for almost three decades and it is true. I do feel sad when a young country full of promise and potential taking the path to ruin. 

One of the notable dynamics of American life today is that conservatives report being personally happier than liberals but also seem more politically discontented. The political left has become more institutionalist, more invested in experts and establishments, even as progressive culture seems more shadowed by unhappiness and even mental illness. Meanwhile conservatives claim greater contentment in their private lives — and then go out and vote for paranoid outsiders and burn-it-down populists.

These dynamics aren’t entirely new: As Musa al-Gharbi writes in an essay for American Affairs, the happiness gap between liberals and conservatives is a persistent social-science finding, visible across several eras and many countries. Meanwhile, the view that “my life is pretty good, but the country is going to hell,” which seems to motivate a certain kind of middle-class Donald Trump supporter, would have been unsurprising to hear in a bar or at a barbecue in 1975 or 1990, no less than today.

[---]

For liberals the problem is somewhat different. An organizing premise of progressivism for generations has been that the toxic side of conservative values is responsible for much of what ails American society — a cruel nationalism throttling a healthy patriotism, a fundamentalist bigotry overshadowing the enlightened forms of religion, patriarchy and misogyny poisoning the nuclear family. 

[---]

Then consider, too, that the entire organizing premise of post-1960s American conservatism was that the country as whole shared its values — hence the rhetoric of the “silent majority” and the “moral majority” — and that the problem was just an elite class of liberals, irreligious and unpatriotic but also out of touch with the breadth and depth of American society. Remove the weight of ineffective bureaucracy, end the rule of liberal judges, and watch the country flourish: That was the effective message of Republican politicians and quite a few conservative intellectuals for a very long time.

Fewer and fewer conservatives seriously believe that it’s this simple anymore. But where does conservative politics go without a traditional cultural foundation to conserve? To subcultural retreat, maybe — but if you don’t think the walls will hold, if you want a politics of restoration, it will be inescapably radical in a way that the conservatism of thirty years ago was not. And since nobody — not the policy wonks trying to grope their way to some new form of right-wing political economy, not the online influencers selling traditionalism as a lifestyle brand — really knows how to do a restoration, how to roll back alienation and disaffiliation and atomization, it isn’t surprising that conservative politics would often be a car-wreck, a flinging of ripe fruit against a wall, no matter how happy individual conservatives claim to be. 

[---]

Thus in many ways the transformations of the last few decades are ones that liberals sought: The America of today is more socially-liberal on almost every issue than the America of George W. Bush, more secular, less heteronormative, more diverse in terms of both race and personal identity, more influenced by radical ideas that once belonged to the fringe of academia.

Unfortunately in finding its heart’s desire the left also seems to have found a certain kind of despair. It turns out that there isn’t some obvious ground for purpose and solidarity and ultimate meaning once you’ve deconstructed all the sources you consider tainted. And it’s at the vanguard of that deconstruction, among the very-liberal young, that you find the greatest unhappiness — the very success of the progressive project devouring contentment.

[---]

Thus our peculiar situation: a once-radical left presiding somewhat miserably over the new order that it long desired to usher in, while a once-conservative right, convinced that it still has the secret of happiness, looks to disruption and chaos as its only ladder back from exile.

There is something fundamentally wrong happening here. 

I will write later on some causal reasons I think are behind these trends.

Andrew Interview With Karen Hao - On AI

A long long time ago, Micheal Lewis in an interview said something very wise about his first book Liar's Poker. I am paraphrasing here: 

"I wrote Liars Poker to expose all the bad things Wall Street is doing but little did I realize, lot of people were using this book as a 'how to guide' ! " 

I personally have lived and worked in the same industries during the dot-com bubble, real estate crisis and irony has it - in AI. 

What I am seeing is deja vu with AI - millions are using it as a ‘how to guide' to make quick buck although most know this is pure snake oil and is going to come down sooner or later. 

Tulips to AI - human freaking beings never learn.. well actually they are freaking so good at self deception (hence, I love love Robert Trivers' work) 

Brilliant interview (albeit they missed an important technical stuff - none of these was pioneered by Open AI) with Karen Hao author the new book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

Not many people make this connection but Andrew is not like other people - He puts Thiel, Musk and Altman in the same bucket as troubled creatures without morals. 

It's not clear to me that scaling AI models aggressively somehow makes it more dangerous in terms of military applications. Like, to me, the things that are dangerous for military applications are actually extremely simple AI models. Like, the reporting on Lavender that the Israelis were using to identify targets in Palestine, that was, like, an extremely basic approach. machine learning model that was practically just linear algebra. And the other thing that people worry about is autonomous weapons, which you do not use large language models to develop autonomous weapons. You use things like computer vision for identifying a target and then autonomously operating the weapon.

[---]

A lot of the concerns that people have about AI and military is they're actually talking about totally different types of technologies than what these companies are building. But then the companies are using the confusion to their advantage to say, oh, yeah, like keep giving us all the resources to build this completely wholly unrelated AI technology.

[---]

I'm not that interested in boardroom struggles and all that stuff, I have to say. But the one thing that does... That I did get from that is that we forget these people are humans. They have, the very brilliant ones, the ones that are making a lot of these decisions, Altman, Susqueva, Mirata, Musk, Teal, they're all complicated, flawed people. human beings. And they don't, because they're working in this industry, doesn't mean they have some sort of super intelligence or super morality. They don't. Altman himself, and this brings us to another, sort of just upsetting thing, which is his sister, which is this other story that comes out later, which also begins to just create a general sense of unease about this guy, because she has claimed publicly on many occasions that she was abused sexually by her family, including her brother. for many years, she ended up in a pretty rough state. I mean, she was, she was, she basically reduced only fans to keep herself going.

And she's the sister of this person. And they, of course, anybody involved in other family dynamics is going to, is, is, is dumb. It's obviously something I can't understand. I don't want to stand, but nonetheless, the disparity between this poor woman's utter cutoff, utter isolation, despair in such a massive enterprise that her brother is undergoing is,

[---]

We need to focus on AI development in the future is moving away from large scale models that are intending to be some kind of general purpose tool. And we should really be focusing on small task specific models again, which is what used to be what AI actually was. And the reason is it's so much less energy intensive.

You can train, you know, a cancer detection AI model on something like a powerful computer. You do not actually need cities of iPhones, as you so eloquently put it. And, like, that's, you know, that's very little cost for an extraordinary benefit. We want more cancer-detecting AI.

We also want more AI that can reduce the energy consumption of a building. We want more AI that can help do more accurate weather prediction and climate crisis prediction so that we can evacuate people more accurately when climate disasters strike.

But what Altman might say in return is, but you don't understand, AGI will solve climate change. Of course, which she says all the time. Which we'll get nuclear fission within a few minutes once Big Brain comes on. What are we going to call this thing?

What the fuck are we going to call this giant bloody thing that we all have to worship or that has the supreme intelligence? But yeah, that is the ultimate win-all argument, which is that, look, what we're developing is so smart, it will solve all the problems it creates.

And I have a facetious answer and a more legitimate answer. My facetious answer is throughout history, there have been people that have promised some kind of thing that will solve all your problems. And they have always been charlatans. Like if someone knocked on your door in the medieval ages and was like, I have this potion that's going to solve all your problems, you just have to give me everything, like your firstborn child and everything. Like you would be like, wait a minute, something's not quite adding up here. And now fast forward to today, that is essentially what these AI companies are saying.

They're like, give us everything and then we will give you a solution to all of your problems. I mean, if you just abstract it to that level, it suddenly becomes blatantly obvious what's actually happening. This is entirely a scam. But the less facetious argument is like, they are telling us, ignore all of the current, real, present-day problems based on the promise of something potentially arriving in the future. They've never actually, you know, we cannot guarantee that this technology is going to deliver all these things that they say they will. So how long are we willing to burn down our planet and run down our resources and gouge out our economy and do all of these things for the speculative payoff? Like, at what point do we decide, wait a minute, why don't we actually just reinvest all this capital in solutions that we know will pay off?

[---]

It needs to be dealt with by people who just live ordinary lives. And it needs to be brought back to the human. And what some of these individuals, I think of Thiel particularly, their aspirations are truly, truly important. beyond responsible in my my view and and inhuman and you see in their desire to live forever the obvious natural conclusion to where they go they want to be gods yeah and and ai and hei is really their pathway to become gods and and we're not And it is insane to do so. And we're going to destroy ourselves if we do it.

[---]

And the one possible solace, which is the people leading these companies, are actually solid, moral, sane people. It seems to be lacking. I mean, honestly, I mean... You just observe Elon Musk's tweets and you're like, I understand this man is obviously a genius in many ways, right? The evidence of his achievements are overwhelming.

But he's out of his fucking mind. And the things he's saying are just so loony. The story you tell of Sam Altman is of a deeply disturbed person. A really fucked up person. I'm sorry. I don't know where he's coming from. I feel... I feel kind of proud that a young gay man, openly gay man, has done this. But we gays, we often spend a lot of time in childhood alone looking at computers and things. I mean, it's not an accident that we're overrepresented in many ways at the top of many companies.

But at the same time, boy, are they not that well. And they don't have... values, structures, morals that most of us would understand as solid. I mean, Peter Thiel says he's a Christian because you've read René Girard, but I'm sorry, but no, I don't see it that way at all.

Well-Defined Problems vs. Poorly-Defined Problems

I hate compliments. This is not fake-humility but I really hate compliments and to make it worse, my red flags light up about the person who compliments me. In other words, I don't trust the humans who compliment me. 

A few times in my life I received a compliment, I liked it since I work hard for it. 

That word is - wisdom. A few times in my life, I heard someone utter the phrase - you are wise. 

And I gladly took that compliment as a commitment to work harder.

Word-hard for what? To be not bad at poorly defined problems a.k.a trying to be little less stupid tomorrow than I am today. 

This such an wonderful article on the same - Why aren't smart people happier?

I think all of our various tests of intelligence aren’t as different as they seem. They’re all full of problems that have a few important things in common:

• There are stable relationships between the variables.
• There’s no disagreement about whether the problems are problems, or whether they’ve been solved.
• There have clear boundaries; there is a finite amount of relevant information and possible actions.
• The problems are repeatable. Although the details may change, the process for solving the problems does not.

I think a good name for problems like these is well-defined. Well-defined problems can be very difficult, but they aren’t mystical. You can write down instructions for solving them. And you can put them on a test. In fact, standardized tests items must be well-defined problems, because they require indisputable answers. Matching a word to its synonym, finding the area of a trapezoid, putting pictures in the correct order—all common tasks on IQ tests—are well-defined problems.

Spearman was right that people differ in their ability to solve well-defined problems. But he was wrong that well-defined problems are the only kind of problems. “Why can’t I find someone to spend my life with?” “Should I be a dentist or a dancer?” and “How do I get my child to stop crying?” are all important but poorly defined problems. “How can we all get along?” is not a multiple-choice question. Neither is “What do I do when my parents get old?” And getting better at rotating shapes or remembering state capitals is not going to help you solve them.

We all share some blame with Spearman, of course, because everybody talks about smarts as if they’re one thing. Google “smartest people in the world” and most of the results will be physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and chess masters. These are all difficult problems, but they are well-defined, and that makes it easy to rank people. The best chess player in the world is the one who can beat everybody else. The best mathematician is the one who can solve the problems that nobody else could solve. That makes it seem like the best chess players and mathematicians are not just the smartest in their fields, but the smartest in the whole world.

THE POORLY DEFINED PROBLEM OF BEING ALIVE

There is, unfortunately no good word for “skill at solving poorly defined problems.” Insight, creativity, agency, self-knowledge—they’re all part of it, but not all of it. Wisdom comes the closest, but it suggests a certain fustiness and grandeur, and poorly defined problems aren’t just dramatic questions like “how do you live a good life”; they’re also everyday questions like “how do you host a good party” and “how do you figure out what to do today.”

One way to spot people who are good at solving poorly defined problems is to look for people who feel good about their lives; “how do I live a life I like” is a humdinger of a poorly defined problem. The rules aren’t stable: what makes you happy may make me miserable. The boundaries aren’t clear: literally anything I do could make me more happy or less happy. The problems are not repeatable: what made me happy when I was 21 may not make me happy when I’m 31. Nobody else can be completely sure whether I’m happy or not, and sometimes I’m not even sure. In fact, some people might claim that I’m not really happy, no matter what I say, unless I accept Jesus into my heart or reach nirvana or fall in love—if I think I’m happy before all that, I’m simply mistaken about what happiness is!

This is why the people who score well on intelligence tests and win lots of chess games are no happier than the people who flunk the tests and lose at chess: well-defined and poorly defined problems require completely different problem-solving skills. Life ain’t chess! Nobody agrees on the rules, the pieces do whatever they want, and the board covers the whole globe, as well as the inside of your head and possibly several metaphysical planes as well.

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So if you’re really looking for a transformative change in your happiness, you might be better off reading something ancient. The great thinkers of the distant past seemed obsessed with figuring out how to live good lives: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, even up through Thoreau and Vivekananda. But at some point, this kind of stuff apparently fell out of fashion.

And hey, maybe that’s because there’s just no more progress to make on the poorly defined problem of “how do we live.” But most well-defined problems were once defined poorly. For example, “how do we land on the moon” was a hopelessly poorly defined problem for most of human history. It only makes sense if you know that the moon is a big rock you can land on and not, say, a god floating in the sky. We slowly put some definitions around that problem, and then one day we sent an actual dude to the moon and he walked around and was like “I’m on the moon now.” If we can do that, maybe we can also figure out how to live good lives. It certainly seems worth it to keep trying.

 

So Messed Up Is My Species...

"Lions are the biggest group-hunting land predator on the planet, and thus ought to be the scariest," conservation biologist Michael Clinchy from Western University in Canada said in 2023.

But in over 10,000 recordings of wildlife on the African savannah, 95 percent of the species observed responded with far more terror to the sound of an entirely different beast. This animal isn't even technically an apex predator. It's us: humans.

We're the monsters lurking under other mammals' beds.

"The fear of humans is ingrained and pervasive," said Clinchy. "There's this idea that the animals are going to habituate to humans if they're not hunted. But we've shown that this isn't the case."

- There's One Super Predator in Africa That Instills More Fear Than Lions

There Nothing Contrarian In This Guy

This guy doesn't like silicon valley's biased world.

Most silicon valley idiots either believe in the magic of free markets sans morality and techno-centric-utopia which is nothing but refurbished Christianity.

And this guy doesn't even attempt to refurbish - he takes magic directly from Christianity.

Don't get me wrong, these guys are intelligent in one field and one field only - they are hyper-hedgehogs.

Well, I am talking about Peter Thiel. Here's The Gospel According to Peter Thiel:

For Kawas, Thiel’s economic and social vision borders on the mystic. “The real meaning of zero to one,” Kawas says, “is to make something new . . . the idea that we’re not stuck in the past. We can make something new from nothing . . . [and] that changes the nature of reality.” When resentful people see the world as a zero-sum place, they start redistributing assets, assigning guilt and blame to scapegoats. Instead, Kawas explains, “You can do magic. You can do tech.” This is, he insists, a “deeply Christian idea.” (Thiel himself has frequently publicly identified as Christian, though it’s worth noting that there is no Christian tradition in which the provenance of creating out of nothing—ex nihilo—is not understood as the specific and unique prerogative of God, rather than a right afforded to human beings.) It “rejects the blame” that comes from the erroneous belief that there’s “no way to change the reality.”

Thus, techno-capitalism-as-miracle: the notion that a few brilliant individuals can radically reshape the limits of human reality, which are revealed to be in part the product of intellectual sluggishness and moral fear. Thielism is the belief that a human being can—on his way, say, to a San Francisco speakers’ panel—conjure an idea for reshaping prestigious education in America. Old things must pass away, one way or another.

For starters, if he is really a so-called contrarian then he should drop the notion of "few brilliant individuals can radically reshape the limits of human reality."  No doubt he articulated some smart ideas ("capitalism and competition aren't synonyms" is a great one that made me look capitalism differently) but that doesn't make one contrarian.

Buddha was a contrarian. Ashoka was a contrarian. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were contrarians. Gandhi and Mandela were contrarians.

They shock the norm of centuries and most importantly they followed what they preached in their real life and had a huge skin the game. To call this guy a contrarian is sad.

Why many smart people believe in a single idea can change the world without any attempts to change people's minds, uh?

Do they even read any history? My hunch is they do but their ideologies are primarily driven by the want and need to be immortal. That's another flavor of the subjective needs of sapiens even after kicking the bucket.

One big thing that I changed my mind during this COVAD-19 phase is that I had deeply underestimated the lack of intelligence of some tech people who are rich and articulate nicely (that is a deadly combination - always watch out for it). I am not talking about Peter Thiel here but others like Naval, Musk, etc., who are talking gibberish with biology and complex system.

If you want proof, please go read their tweets and other posts since March 2020.

This hyper-hedgehogs missed the simplest of lessons from Smith:

Smith, to put it bluntly, knew that there is all the difference in the world between learning how to get ahead in life and learning how to live life well. 

 

Why Not Mars?

Funny, brilliant and insightful piece:

But fifty years of progress in miniaturization and software changed the balance between robots and humans in space. Between 1960 and 2020, space probes improved by something like six orders of magnitude[6], while the technologies of long-duration spaceflight did not. Boiling the water out of urine still looks the same in 2023 as it did in 1960, or for that matter 1060. Today’s automated spacecraft are not only strictly more capable[7] than human astronauts, but cost about a hundred times less [8] to send (though it’s hard to be exact, since astronauts have not gone anywhere since 1972[9]).

The imbalance between human and robot is so overwhelming that, despite the presence of a $250 billion[10] International Space Station National Laboratory, every major discovery made in space this century has come from robotic spacecraft [11]. In 2023, we simply take it for granted that if a rocket goes up carrying passengers, it’s not going to get any work done.

As for that space station, the jewel of human spaceflight, it exists in a state of nearly perfect teological closure, its only purpose being to teach its creators how to build future spacecraft like it. The ISS crew spend most of their time fixing the machinery that keeps them alive, and when they have a free moment for science, they tend to study the effect of space on themselves. At 22 years old [12], the ISS is still as dependent on fresh meals and clean laundry sent from home as the most feckless grad student.

[---]

If the head of NOAA Ocean Exploration (budget: $25 million) or the U.S. Antarctic Program ($350 million) held a press conference announcing a plan to fulfill human destiny, they’d be carrying their belongings home in a cardboard box before sundown. But our space agency is held to a lower standard.

All this would be fine if it was just talk. But NASA spent more on their Moon and Mars programs in 2022 than the total budget of the National Science Foundation. And in 2024, they plan to start launching pieces of a new space station, the Gateway, which by the laws of orbital bureaucracy will lock us in to decades of having to invent reasons to go visit the thing.

Somehow we’ve embarked on the biggest project in history even though it has no articulable purpose, offers no benefits, and will cost taxpayers more than a good-sized war. Even the builders of the Great Pyramid at Giza could at least explain what it was for. And yet this project has sailed through an otherwise gridlocked system with the effortlessness of a Pentagon budget. Presidents of both parties now make landing on Mars an official goal of US space policy. Even billionaires who made their fortune automating labor on Earth agree that Mars must be artisanally explored by hand.

The whole thing is getting weird.

[---]

The chief technical obstacle to a Mars landing is not propulsion, but a lack of reliable closed-loop life support[48]. With our current capability, NASA would struggle to keep a crew alive for six months on the White House lawn, let alone for years in a Martian yurt.

The technology program required to close this gap would be remarkably circular, with no benefits outside the field of applied zero gravity zookeeping. The web of Rube Goldberg devices that recycles floating animal waste on the space station has already cost twice its weight in gold[49] and there is little appetite for it here on Earth, where plants do a better job for free.

I would compare keeping primates alive in spacecraft to trying to build a jet engine out of raisins. Both are colossal engineering problems, possibly the hardest ever attempted, but it does not follow that they are problems worth solving. In both cases, the difficulty flows from a very specific design constraint, and it’s worth revisiting that constraint one or ten times before starting to perform miracles of engineering.

What makes life support so vexing is that all the subcomponents interact with each other and with the crew. There’s no such thing as a life support unit test; you have to run the whole system in space under conditions that mimic the target mission. Reliability engineering for life support involves solving mysteries like why gunk formed on a certain washer on Day 732, then praying on the next run that your fix doesn’t break on Day 733. The process repeats until the first crew makes it home alive (figuratively speaking), at which point you declare the technology reliable and chill the champagne.

Unlike the medical research, there’s no way to predict how long these trials might take. A typical exploration profile[50] needs two different kinds of life support (for the spacecraft and the surface) that together have to work for about 1000 days. The spacecraft also has to demonstrate that it can go dormant for the time the crew is on Mars and still work when it wakes up.

Twenty years of tinkering with the much simpler systems on the space station have brought them no closer to reliability. And yet to get a crew to Mars, we’d need to get this stuff working like a Swiss watch. Humanity does not need a billion dollar shit dehydrator that can work for three years in zero gravity, but a Mars mission can’t leave Earth without it.