Tag: culture

Instagram is garbage

INSTAGRAM was leaving its trace on the physical world. People in search of ’grammable content were mobbing restaurants, public lands, and private neighborhoods in greater numbers, causing their stewards to think differently about design and crowd control. I read an article about rue Crémieux in Paris, where residents of pastel-painted houses were begging for a gate so tourists would stop taking photos in front of them. “It’s become hell. On weekends we get 200 people outside our windows. Our dinner table is right by the window and people are just outside taking pictures.”

Internet of beefs

The standard pattern of conflict on the IoB is depressingly predictable. A mook takes note of a casus belli in the news cycle (often created or co-opted by a knight, and referred to on the IoB as the outrage cycle), and heads over to their favorite multiplayer online battle arena (Twitter being the most important MOBA) to join known mook allies to fight stereotypically familiar but often unknown interchangeable mook foes.

Intellectual Progress

the single most important thing I discovered this decade (due to a random comment in the SSC subreddit!) was the predictive coding theory of the brain. I started groping towards it (without knowing what I was looking for) in Mysticism And Pattern-Matching, reported the exact moment when I found it in It’s Bayes All The Way Up, and finally got a decent understanding of it after reading Surfing Uncertainty. At the same time, thanks to some other helpful tips from other rationalists, I discovered Behavior: The Control Of Perception, and with some help from Vaniver and a few other people was able to realize how these 2 overarching theories were basically the same. Discovering this area of research may be the best thing that happened to me the second half of this decade (sorry, everyone I dated, you were pretty good too).

Psychedelics are clearly interesting, and everyone else had already covered all the interesting pro-psychedelic arguments, so I wrote about some of my misgivings in my 2016 Why Were Early Psychedelicists So Weird?. The next step was trying to fit in an understanding of HPPD, which started with near-total bafflement. Predictive processing proved helpful here too, and my biggest update of the decade on psychedelics came with Friston and Carhart-Harris’ Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain, which I tried to process further here. This didn’t directly improve my understanding of HPPD specifically, but just by talking about it a lot I got a subtler picture where lots of people have odd visual artifacts and psychedelics can cause slightly more (very rarely, significantly more) visual artifacts. I started the decade thinking that “psychedelic insight” was probably fake, and ended it believing that it is probably real, but I still don’t feel like I have a good sense of the potential risks.

In mental health, the field I am supposed to be an expert on, I spent a long time throwing out all kinds of random ideas and seeing what stuck – Boorsboom et al’s idea of Mental Disorders As Networks, The Synapse Hypothesis of depression, etc. Although I still think we can learn something from models like those, right now my best model is the one in Symptom, Condition, Cause, which kind of sidesteps some of those problems. Again, learning about predictive processing helped here, and by the end of the decade I was able to say actually useful things that explained some features of psychiatric conditions, like in Treat The Prodrome. Friston On Computational Mood might also be in this category, I’m still waiting for more evidence one way or the other.

Routine meals

Variety doesn’t really matter to me. I would be perfectly happy to eat the same Caesar salad or peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich every day. 1 survey estimated that 17% of British people had eaten the same lunch every day for 2 years; another indicated that 33% of Brits ate the same lunch daily. But it’s hard to say for sure how common this really is, since these surveys tend to have been conducted by food purveyors, who might be inclined to exaggerate the ruts that diners are stuck in.

Senior songs

You're so engaging, but we're both aging

At age 99 Alan Tripp wrote a poem called “Best Old Friends” to celebrate the many new friends he made at Beaumont at Bryn Mawr, the Pennsylvania retirement community where he lives. As a gift for Alan’s 100th birthday, his younger friend and neighbor, 88 year-old Marvin Weisbord, set the poem to music. That was the spark that launched Senior Song Book with this dynamic songwriting duo, and inspired a whole community to sing, dance and perform along with them

Post-Christian culture wars

Republicans control the White House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. They have 27 governorships and governing trifectas in 21 states. But many conservatives — particularly Christian conservatives — believe they’re being routed in the war that matters most: the post-Christian culture war. They see a diverse, secular left winning the future and preparing to eviscerate both Christian practice and traditional mores. And they see themselves as woefully unprepared to respond with the ruthlessness that the moment requires.

Omurice

Omurice is a cross between an omelette and Japanese fried rice. The eggs are cooked until they’ve thickened, draped over rice, and then covered with a filling, which can vary from chicken to onions or anything at all, really. The scramble is wholesome, creamy, cooked until it’s not quite set. It is nearly as thin as a crêpe and is served with savory sauce to give it flair. You can ladle some tomato sauce over the eggs, or you can set it on the side. Or, if you’d like something heartier, a demi-glace works. Or a creamy mushroom gravy. Or, if you’re lucky, the chef will blanket your omurice with sliced yellow cheese.

What’s Left of Condé Nast

“It’s dreadful,” Anna Wintour said in early October, looking out the south-facing windows of her 25th-floor office in 1 World Trade Center, which has been home to Vogue and its publisher, Condé Nast, since 2014. It’s the neighborhood she hates — corporate, sterile, and encumbered by security. She preferred the previous headquarters, in Times Square, which offered the ability to pop out for afternoon matinees on Broadway and, more important, the feeling that Condé Nast was at the center of it all. But the landlord had given the world’s glitziest publishing company a deal to move downtown, and Condé built out 23 sleek, futuristic floors as though magazines were thriving. This proved overly optimistic. 3 years later, in 2017, Condé lost more than $120M; Graydon Carter, who relished his life among the moguls and stars, a player among players, announced his departure after 25 years running Vanity Fair; and Si Newhouse, the company’s Medici-like benefactor, died at 89. Members of the old guard couldn’t help but look around the room during Si’s memorial, at Jazz at Lincoln Center, and see that it was also a funeral for the glory days of the company. As David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, put it to a fellow media executive in 2017, Condé was facing the same daunting challenges as the rest of the media business and seemed to be in “a dignified state of panic” as it belatedly adapted to low-margin, constantly pivoting digital realities, closed and sold titles, and underwent a “restacking” — the chosen euphemism for squeezing everyone onto fewer floors so Condé could sublet some of the fancy real estate it now realized it could no longer afford.