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Hello,
Things are feeling forced in the last stretch of work before the holiday. Several final projects left me drained, more in the mood for silent circumspection than screen-staring.
Burnout isn’t quite the right word, but it’s close. ‘I want to take a long break but I need to keep pushing’ and ‘I’m running on the reserves of my motivation’.
I just saw a friend’s post asking about how to structure her life so she can live ambitiously, but without the possibility of burnout. I was reminded of a prior time where I listened keenly to podcasts about productivity, obsessed about ‘optimizing’ my life, and dreamt of all the ways I could do more, if I only adopted {GTD, Zettelkasten, Smart Notes, some other note taking system}.
Now I flinch every time time I hear someone say ‘optimize’ for a nontechnical task. Especially “optimize my life”. I want to hold them by the shoulders, and look them in the eye. “Optimize for what, my friend? Do you not see that the whole of the problem is in the description of a good life? That the process of realizing what you truly want is a dance that never ends? That the fastest path towards ‘getting there’ is hardly the most difficult part?”
I don’t think burnout is inevitable, but I do think a rich life, even in principle, lies outside of most structures that are presented to us. Some of us may be lucky enough to fulfilled within the academy or the corporation. However, I suspect that for most of us, a grand life is found by erecting, dismantling, moving between structures that we attempt to build anyways.
I want to say more but I will stop here.
(Relevant books: Greatness Cannot Be Planned, Meaningness, Finite and Infinite Games)
Writing
The last two weeks were mainly spent writing.
Pruning in Brains and Machines. Featuring microglia eating synapses, Amdahl’s Law, and the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis.
“At one point, you and I were just a fertilized egg cell inside our mother’s womb. Over the next eight months, we grew a brain. When our mother gave birth to us, we were wet and confused.” This was a group essay for the class Tissue vs Silicon in Machine Learning.
Governing the Decentralized Commons. Introducing one of my recent projects — understanding governance in Web3. Featuring the Tokugawa Shogunate.
External Links
Some miscellany I found fascinating.
A Chemical Hunger — Part II: Current Theories of Obesity are Inadequate. From a collective that calls themselves Time Mold Slime Mold.
“Studies of controlled overfeeding — you take a group of people and get them to eat way more than they normally would — reliably find two things. First, a person at a healthy weight has to eat huge amounts of calories to gain even a couple pounds. Second, after the overfeeding stops, people go right back to the weight they were before the experiment.
The great-grandaddy of these studies is the Vermont prison experiment, published in 1971. Researchers recruited inmates from the Vermont State Prison, all at a healthy weight, and assigned some of them to eat enormous amounts of food every day for a little over three months. How big were these meals? The original paper doesn’t say, but later reports state that some of the prisoners were eating 10,000 calories per day.”
Advice for the vestigial shamans among us, from Drew Schorno.
“The shaman potentiate has some sort of near-death experience and enters the spirit world…
Once in the underworld, they learn about the specifics of the different disease spirits and topology of the characters there. They are torn apart by hellish forces, but they are reassembled into something new, and through their wit they are able to negotiate their own release. They ascend to the upperworld of gods to obtain special healing powers. Then, finally, they return to the human realm transformed.”
Essays
The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work, Phillip Rogaway. Dare I say a modern classic. Touching upon everything from the technological pessimism of Jacques Ellul to the promise of Bigkey cryptography. I want to give this to every scientist and engineer I know.
Planning
Review
Articulate AI as Institution with example to DH (done - more work to follow up)
Determine methodology for ‘Assessing Value in OSML’ and articulate different types of value (done - this was a big one)
Collect potential methodologies for ‘how do institutions shape ML’ (not done)
Next Two Weeks
I’ll be taking a break until January so you won’t get this newsletter until midway through Jan. If you’ve read this far and enjoyed my writing, it would bring me joy to hear from you. (It can be an introduction, something you read that you liked — anything, really!)