Linkpost April
Is death bad? Are hotdogs bad? And who is the mathematician who so thoroughly outclassed a fields medal winner that he quit math?
Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote a beautiful piece about his brother’s death at 19. Cherish your loved ones, folks:
I used to say: “I have four living grandparents and I intend to have four living grandparents when the last star in the Milky Way burns out.” I still have four living grandparents, but I don’t think I’ll be saying that any more. Even if we make it to and through the Singularity, it will be too late. One of the people I love won’t be there. The universe has a surprising ability to stab you through the heart from somewhere you weren’t looking. Of all the people I had to protect, I never thought that Yehuda might be one of them. Yehuda was born July 11, 1985. He was nineteen years old when he died.
…
Yehuda’s death is the first time I ever lost someone close enough for it to hurt. So now I’ve seen the face of the enemy. Now I understand, a little better, the price of half a second. I don’t understand it well, because the human brain has a pattern built into it. We do not grieve forever, but move on. We mourn for a few days and then continue with our lives. Such underreaction poorly equips us to comprehend Yehuda’s death. Nineteen years, 7053 days, of life and memory annihilated. A thousand years, or a million millennia, or a forever, of future life lost. The sun should have dimmed when Yehuda died, and a chill wind blown in every place that sentient beings gather, to tell us that our number was diminished by one. But the sun did not dim, because we do not live in that sensible a universe. Even if the sun did dim whenever someone died, it wouldn’t be noticeable except as a continuous flickering. Soon everyone would get used to it, and they would no longer notice the flickering of the sun.
My little brother collected corks from wine bottles. Someone brought home, to the family, a pair of corks they had collected for Yehuda, and never had a chance to give him. And my grandmother said, “Give them to Channah, and someday she’ll tell her children about how her brother Yehuda collected corks.” My grandmother’s words shocked me, stretched across more time than it had ever occurred to me to imagine, to when my fourteen-year-old sister had grown up and had married and was telling her children about the brother she’d lost. How could my grandmother skip across all those years so easily when I was struggling to get through the day? I heard my grandmother’s words and thought: she has been through this before. This isn’t the first loved one my grandmother has lost, the way Yehuda was the first loved one I’d lost. My grandmother is old enough to have a pattern for dealing with the death of loved ones; she knows how to handle this because she’s done it before. And I thought: how can she accept this? If she knows, why isn’t she fighting with everything she has to change it?
If you want to do something to make it so that someone else doesn’t have to grieve over the death of a Yehuda, so that one extra Yehuda doesn’t have to die, so that one fewer mother will be left grieving a Yehuda, so that one fewer brother will be left grieving the death of a Yehuda, I’d encourage you to donate to GiveWell top charities. For a few thousand dollars, you can save a life. In particular, if you can, sign the giving pledge—where you pledge to give 10% of your income—or the one for the world pledge where you pledge to give 1%. I sometimes doubt that this blog accomplishes very much, but if it gets one more person to sign the pledge, where at the cost of 1% of their income, they will save several people’s lives, it will have been worth it.
Giving can feel very demanding, but when you think about what it accomplishes, it shouldn’t. Most of us would torch half the world’s GDP if it saved the life of a loved one—a life being snuffed out is the ultimate tragedy. Yet to save the life of someone far away, someone whose parents love them just as much as your parents love you, someone whose brother loves them just as much as you love your brother, you don’t have to burn half the GDP—you just have to give a few thousand dollars. It costs less than the cost of a cheap car to preserve something of inestimable value.
In lighter news, I published my first paper! Those of you in academia should cite it extensively! They say there’s more rejoicing in heaven from one citation of my paper than from 100 citings of other papers.
I was interviewed by Brian Chau about various things. Brian is an interesting and smart guy—I had the pleasure of meeting him at the Emergent Ventures meeting in Arlington.
Brook gets wrecked by Bruenig in a debate. Bruenig is a really smart guy and quite good at arguing against silly libertarian sleight of hand. Brook seems to just like not get how to think, in a way that is typical of non-philosophers, and consequently massively shits the bed.
Peter Miller makes a good case against lab leak. Also read Scott’s article on how Miller won 100,000 dollar winning a lab leak debate and his follow-up article (this convinced me of zoonosis). Miller’s blog is great overall. Other good articles of his include Debunking the lead crime hypothesis, Explaining the crime wave of the 1980's, Alex Berenson blames school shootings on marijuana, Lockdowns didn’t make kids suicidal, but going to high school does, How to survive a nuclear war, Debunking Steve Kirsch’s claims about covid vaccine deaths, Bret Weinstein and a web of lies, Get ready for the next round of George Floyd riots, and The truth about sea level rise.
Shrimp: The animals most commonly used and killed for food production. First they came for the shrimp, and I did not stand up for I was not a shrimp. Next…
There was a poem that I quite liked, in Hamlet:
Doubt thou, the stars are fire,
Doubt, that the sun doth move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love.
I do doubt that the stars are fire!
Oldie but goodie from Slate Star Codex—Who By Very Slow Decay.
Ozy’s post about Chinese history is epic and hilarious.
This piece about rescuing animals is breathtakingly beautiful.
Jed Rubenfield wrote a very interesting law review article. It explains why one cannot treat the wrongness of rape exactly the same as they treat other violations of consent (for rape by deception isn’t generally considered rape, but deception does void consent in other contexts).
Is the first year of children's life miserable? Paul Bloom, author of one of the most interesting Substack around, says maybe.
Center Indifference and Skepticism is a super interesting paper trying to get precise about the principle of indifference across agents across worlds. I think I reject some of the conclusions because I accept 5-D indifference, and so think that presentism vs eternalism should be reasoned about the same way.
Recommending this article just for the hilarious title: Should We Respond to Evil with Indifference? It’s about a narrow technical problem in probability theory.
In her paper Phenomenal Powers, Hedda Hessel Morch demonstrates her phenomenal power to write good philosophy papers.
My view for a while is that there are no good arguments for halfing in sleeping beauty. There’s one—defended in the paper A Dutch Book For CDT Thirders.
Fortunately, there’s also a Dutch book that targets halfers. And another one that works if one’s an evidential decision theorist.
Here’s my chat with Michael Huemer about inverse gamblers and fine-tuning. I might have changed his mind!
Speaking of good poems, this one is really good.
The last book of the Narnia series, The Last Battle, is soooooo good.
Norm MacDonald had hilarious OJ jokes.
In one of the world’s funniest events, UFC fighter Renato Moicano after describing how tough he is says "If you care about your fucking country, read Ludwig von Mises and the six lessons of the Austrian economic school, motherfuckers." Ed Feser had the best response “You will hear of wars and rumors of war, and nation will rise against nation. There will be famine, and pestilence, and tattooed wrestlers ranting about Austrian economics…”
I find hearing about math very cool, though never understand what’s going on. This article was super interesting to just get a brief overview of some interesting fields of advanced math.
Hanania makes a good case that China won’t invade Taiwan.
Sebastian Montesinos explains why he’s an atheist. He apparently doesn’t like me now, but the piece is still great!
Tom Lehrer has lots of very funny songs. For instance, MLF lullaby, with the line:
Once all the Germans were warlike and mean,
But that couldn't happen again.
We taught them a lesson in 1918
And they've hardly bothered us since then.
Also Werner Von Braun, containing the lines:
Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department, " says Wernher von Braun.Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude,
Like the widows and cripples in old London town,
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.
My friend Amos has a hilarious article making fun of anti-EA hitpieces—it’s really good.
Utilitarianism is Implied by Social and Individual Dominance—according to Gustafsson, Zuber, and Spears. I find the argument a bit hard to follow, but looks interesting! Can anyone who knows tell me—feel free to email this to me at untrappedzoid@gmail.com if you’re not a paid subscriber and thus unable to comment—what kind of math would I have to learn to understand the math used in the proofs like Harsanyi’s and Gustafsson’s? If it’s not too advanced, maybe I’ll learn it.
Robin Hanson thinks medicine doesn’t much improve health based on some randomized control trails. This is one of those views that you hear about, seems a bit hard to believe but might be right, and then you forget about it. Well Scott Alexander didn’t forget about it and has written a quite comprehensive reply. He argues: 1) medicine improving is the only plausible explanation of improved survival rates from various diseases 2) various high-quality studies show medicine is good for health and 3) Robin misinterprets the studies he cites.
Rene Thom was an extremely impressive mathematician. He invented something called catastrophe theory and won the fields metal (the math equivalent of a Nobel prize). After this, however, he basically quit mathematics because he was so thoroughly outclassed by another mathematician named Grothendieck. He describes Grothendieck as follows:
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