Learning – Page 2 – Christopher Wink

Humanity is on ‘The Precipice’: How can we think about lasting a million years more?

Humanity is at a crucial moment in which our technologies are advanced enough to have created our own existential risks and secure enough to consider a longterm enough future in which natural risks pose true threats. This moment can be called the Precipice, the name of a 2020 book by Toby Ord.

I enjoyed it, came to it around organizing I’ve done toward longtermism, and another buzzy book on the topic.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

Inciting Joy

Late in his fall 2022 book Inciting Joy, essayist and poet Ross Gay confronts criticism he’s received for the writing he’s done on Joy. Most of it amounts to, the author says: how can a black man write about flowers in a time like this?

Earlier on, he gives his answer: Sorrow doesn’t need any help; “I think sorrow’s gonna be just fine.”

It’s an energizing and beautiful collection. I strongly recommend it. I share my notes for future reference below.

Advice on ‘the creative act’ from Rick Rubin

One of the most celebrated music producers alive can’t play an instrument.

Instead he follows and teachers creators to create. Rick Rubin published back in January a charming book called The Creative Act: A Way of Being. It reads like a book that any creator could pick up and source inspiration. I strongly recommend it.

My notes for future reference are below.

How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America

The debate about whether private equity provides any real value to the economy comes down to whether they force worthwhile business efficiencies. Or are instead, as it was memorably put in 2010 “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Little question the stance from the 2023 book “These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America” by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Gretchen Morgenson and financial policy analyst Joshua Rosner. It’s thorough and puts into context the people effected by private equity, a murky financial industry that owns businesses that employ something like 12% of all American jobs.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

Beyond Order

If his 2018 book came before he was a political shibboleth, then Jordan Peterson’s 2021 followup Beyond Order was an instrument of his unexpected partisan celebrity.

A psychologist-lecturer turned conservative firebrand I finished this followup right after reading the first. It’s longer than it needs to be, and he

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan Peterson

In 2018, before he had become an unexpected avatar of the American culture war, then-56-year-old Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson published 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.

It took a conservative tack on discipline and relationships, inspired by his clinical practice, his teaching and his politics. I certainly didn’t agree with all of it back then, but the framework of spinning a specific even prosaic rule-of-thumb into a bit of wider philosophy seemed like fun. Friends and I created our own lists.

In the years since, Peterson became an unexpected lightning rod, and a near cartoonish hero or villain depending on your politics. It was time to go back and read his breakout book. So I did just that. It’s too long and does dip into strange pseudoscience at times. I also think it presents a worldview that looked fresh and productive to many, especially young men.

My notes for future reference below.

Finding the Mother Tree

Trees communicate in ways we don’t entirely understand. They form a forest society.

That’s the big them from the 2021 book Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest Book by Suzanne Simard. She spent a career in this work, and was long sidelined as on the fringes of research. But credibility has come her way.

Older trees appear to know which other trees are their direct descendants, to which they send more nutrients too, though they share with all. Her work is all around “Mychorzzal fungal network”

It got deeper than I needed to get on the topic but others might appreciate it. As she writes “This is not a book about how we can save the trees. This is a book about how the trees might save us.”

What would it mean to build AI like octopuses, fungi or forests?

Framing intelligence as either the extractive corporate technological determinism kind or the pure human uniqueness kind is too limiting an understanding of intelligence. The world has far more kinds.

Artist and technologist James Bridle published in 2022 a compelling book called Ways of Being that reviewed research, themes and experiments in expanding our understanding of what technology can be. I recommend the book for others interested in a wider lens on AI and other advancements.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

The Hot Hand is real (with the research to prove it)

People in a rhythm get better at whatever skill they’re using.

This intuitive idea was assumed enough that the catchy phrase “the hot hand” traveled from sports to countless other disciplines. Then research seemed to overturn its reality. Decades later, the research proved our instincts out.

That journey and research on streaks makes the bulk of the 2020 book The Hot Hand by sports journalist Ben Cohen. It may not have needed to be a full-length book, but I enjoyed it and appreciated the research he referenced, though much of it was familiar.

More broadly, the author argues our sense of randomness is all wrong. For example, if truly random, a playlist should alternate artists, a roulette wheel can’t have a streak and an immigration judge expects to have an even split of cases accepted and rejected. This confuses the law of small numbers and the law of big ones. It’s also why we are so prone to fall for the hot hand fallacy — and the related gamblers fallacy.

For future reference I share my notes from his book below.