We Are Not Saved

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by: Patrick Radden Keefe Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 by: Matt Ridley and Alina Chan Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science by: Karl Sigmund Columbus Day: Expeditionary Force, Book 1 by: Craig Alanson SpecOps: Expeditionary Force, Book 2 by: Craig Alanson Paradise: Expeditionary Force, Book 3 by: Craig Alanson Row Daily, Breathe Deeper, Live Better: A Guide to Moderate Exercise by: Dustin Ordway Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life by: Nir Eyal What is a p-value anyway? 34 Stories to Help You Actually Understand Statistics by: Andrew Vickers The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth by: Sam Quinones Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by: S. C. Gwynne Heart: The City Beneath by: Grant Howitt and Chri

It's time for my newsletter again, and after going step by step through the ideas of Taleb we finally arrive at his crowning idea: antifragility. Perhaps the biggest contribution Taleb makes to our understanding of the world that by grappling with the idea of the opposite of fragility he was able to define fragility, and point out that the modern world is chock full of it.

It's not the end of the pandemic or even the beginning of the end, but we might be at the end of the beginning, and since I just read three books on the subject I thought I'd see what could be said at this point. Come for the discussion of school closure and why it might have seemed so important in the beginning, stay for an overview of the lab leak hypothesis. But most of all just listen to the episode!

I return to a discussion of Douthat's "Deep Places" in particular what it tells about modern epistemology, or as I like to call it, "reality construction". I examine the reality constructed by Douthat, but also the differences between how we constructed reality during the 1918 pandemic vs. how we construct it now. Come for the history, stay for the murderous story of aspirin.

Why Liberalism Failed by: Patrick J. Deenen Leviathan Falls by: James S. A. Corey Termination Shock by: Neal Stephenson The Histories of Herodotus by: Herodotus  The Golden Transcendence by: John C. Wright The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by: Charlie MacKesy Doctrine and Covenants

It's that time of year when people make predictions. I also make predictions though I do them somewhat differently. Mostly I'm interested in Identifying potential catastrophes and dismissing potential salvation. For example, nukes will get used again, and a benevolent AI won't save us.  The key thing is not to make accurate predictions, but to make useful predictions. And as it turns out there's a big difference between the two.

I decide to take the end of the year off. But I didn't want to leave my loyal listeners without the normally scheduled episode. So here you go the first ever "We Are Not Saved" Classic!! It's my review and discussion of Neil Postman's classic "Amusing Ourselves to Death". One of the best books of the last 50 years!

The ninth book and sixth season of The Expanse were both just released. I haven't watched much of the TV show, but I did just finish reading the final book and as I did so it occurred to me that the way it handled Fermi's paradox might provide a useful way of understanding my own fixation on it. And why I think it presents a huge challenge to anyone who thinks that humanity is on an unending upward slope that will eventually take us to the stars. 

The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery by: Ross Douthat Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History by: Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damien Paletta The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by: Michael Lewis Morning Star by: Pierce Brown Star Trek: The City on the Edge of Forever Teleplay by: Harlan Ellison The Economics of Violence by: Gary M. M. Shiffman The Hobbit, or There and Back Again by: J. R. R. Tolkien Chorazin: (The Weird of Hali #1) by: John Michael Greer The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia by: Peter Hopkirk

Lately people have been using the idea that something is a black swan as excuse for being powerless. as an excuse. But this is not only a massive abdication of responsibility, it’s also an equally massive misunderstanding of the moment. Because preparedness has no meaning if it’s not directed towards preparing for black swans. There is nothing else worth preparing for. The future is the product of the black swans we have yet to encounter.

A couple of months ago Gwern published a list of improvements since 1990. I thought it gave short shrift to the many changes which have been wrought upon society by technological progress. He does include a section on "Society" but it's woefully inadequate, and despite having a further theme to the list of identifying "unseen" changes he overlooks many of the intangible harms which progress might or might not have inflicted on us. To illustrate this I bring in the story of my great-grandmother, which I don't want to cheapen with a summary.

I got some pushback on the episodes I did about Afghanistan. Some of it was directed at the idea that "we are no longer a serious people". But this pushback, rather than talking me out of the position made me explore it even more deeply. This episode is the result of that exploration. As part of it I bring in recent difficulties experienced by the CIA, the Vietnam War, and the differences between right and left brained processing.

Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by: Michael J. Sandel Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills by: Jesse Singal Kingsport: (The Weird of Hali #2) by: John Michael Greer The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War by: H. W. Brands Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by: Norm Macdonald Silmarillion by: J. R. R. Tolkien The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by: Carlo M. Cipolla The Last Place on Earth: Scott and Amundsen’s Race to the South Pole by: Roland Huntford How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion by: David DeSteno

There are at least two kinds of randomness in the world: normal, as in a normal distribution or a bell curve, and extreme. As humans we're used to the normal distribution. That's the kind of thing we dealt with a lot over the thousands of years of our existence. It's only recently that the extreme distribution has come to predominate. Nassim Taleb has labeled the first mediocristan and the second extremistan. In this podcast we explore the difference between the two and how the tools of mediocristan are inadequate to the disasters of extremistan.

As I record this Congress is debating whether they should pass a $3.5 trillion bill or only a $1.5 trillion one. The former would equal $27,000 per household, while the latter would only be $12,000 per household. And yet when people are asked whether they would pay more to deal with problems like climate change only 34% are willing to pay more than $10 a month. People have no skin in the game on the former and they can at least imagine they have skin in the game on the latter, and in this episode I argue that this makes all the difference.

Risk comes in lots of different forms. In Skin in the Game, Taleb's last, underrated book. He breaks risk down into ensemble probabilities and time probabilities. On top of that he demonstrates that risk operates differently at different scales. And that if we want to avoid large scale ruin—ruin at the level of nations or all of humanity—that we should be trying to push risk down the scale. 

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by: Carl R. Trueman Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by: Elizabeth Kolbert Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t by: Julia Galef Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution by: Mike Duncan This Is How You Lose the Time War by: Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism by: Sharyl Attkisson Plato: Complete Works by: Plato Stillness Is the Key by: Ryan Holiday The Sorrows of Young Werther by: Goethe

As human beings we have a unique ability to recognize patterns, even when confronted events that are completely random. In fact sometimes it's easier to see patterns in random noise. We pull narratives out of the randomness and use them to predict the future. Unfortunately the future is unpredictable and even when we have detected a pattern the outcomes end up being very different than what we expected.

The US-backed regime in Afghanistan lasted 9 days from the taking of the first provincial capital to the taking of Kabul. After the withdrawal of the Soviets in 1989. That government lasted over three years. What was the difference? Why after spending two trillion dollars and twice as long in the country did we do so much worse? Francis Fukuyama has asserted that the are no ideologies which can compete with liberal democracy. And everyone seems to believe that, but if that's so why did we have such a hard time implanting it in Afghanistan?

Philip Tetlock has been arguing for awhile that experts are horrible at prediction, but that his superforecasters do much better. If that's the case how did they do with respect to the fall of Afghanistan? As far as I can tell they didn't make any predictions on how long the Afghanistan government would last. Or they did make predictions and they were just as wrong as everyone else and they've buried them.  In light of this I thought it was time to revisit the limitations and distortions inherent in Tetlock's superforecasting project.