public personal library

Startups don’t care about marginal features because their success is entirely dominated by finding a single successful feature that anybody wants to pay for.

Why would analogies give genuinely new ideas? Well, intelligence is messy! If everything is so uniform, then there is no way to make a far-flung analogy – everything is pretty much the same already. Besides, just look at all the broken dreams of logical AI – their corpses tell us that no elegant theory of intelligence exists. Programming a genuine AI is a messy job. Messiness is a hideous strength. This is the 4th lesson.

2th lesson: Representation matters a lot. AM worked so well for mathematics, because AM used Lisp code as data. Lisp is the perfect tool if you want to search over the space of interesting mathematical functions.

With what goals do we engage in introspection? There’s always the grand plenitude to come, the promised comedy when everything comes out, but this is just another labyrinthine day in the life, etc., with fence fibers half buried in rain.

Her past is only a receding dim version of the woman who repeatedly steps slightly away from the life she has led, leaving dull fragments of it behind.

In the (loose and close) grip of ambivalence, one is both deep inside the zone of choice and on the fringes of the conditions and circumstances that demand one.

One can’t be a scholar of the future, one can’t learn from it, one can’t even learn about it.

To establish the character and value of something; we negotiate with the future, we barter with what we think we see ahead, what we expect to come.

. We traffic in what we hope for, what we fear, what we can’t finish by ourselves.

You think it’s a man in the distance coming along the country road, but as Husserl remarks, “it might be a tree moving in the wind, which in the gloom of the late afternoon at the edge of the field resembles a man in motion.” We define things by their peripheries, their proximities, the things around them to which they are bound but from which they differ. Trust has little to do with it; we cast out tendrils of interpretation as if with a paranoiac’s perspicacity and lucidity. “You utter fools, you senseless people,” says the Sophocles’s Old Slave in Electra, “do you take no heed any longer for your lives, or have you no inborn sense, that you fail to see that you are not merely close to but are in the midst of the greatest dangers?”

Five city pigeons fly into the air, driven from their perch under the eaves of a gray house by a homeowner bombarding them with tennis balls. A disheveled man goes by pulling a wagon and shouting curses to the curb and then to the corner store. Brotherfuck mothermouth turd-on-a-rock-in-your-face, do you hear me, do you hear me? Definitely—one should nurture one’s private sensibility (one’s “inner life”). One should deploy it in social spaces, pitch in, speak up, participate in “public life.” You can belong where you are for a moment. When everything gets loud enough—which is to say when sounds coalesce into a din—everything achieves synchrony, orchestration, and synonymy.

Characters are necessary to human microhistories, but those histories are of what has happened and is happening and not revelations of intelligent inevitability nor milestones along a road to progress.

Of course one can imagine death as rapacious, greedy, an impatient predator, a scavenger charged with clean-up, or, then again, as a supreme and theatrical deity, over inked or underground. Well, as a skeptic once put it, it’s wisest to follow the principle of the one no more than the other, which is as applicable to interpretations of allegory as to personifications of death.

The thought—a proposition, or perhaps a phantasm drawn from an impression—serves a sentence. There isn’t all that much distance between the prospect of death and the concept of beauty. A ridge, a sunset, a blossoming redbud—all are beautiful and, in their beauty, they assert their distance from us, but even today’s unvarying dull sky maintains distance, as if to make beauty itself inaccessible.

The “so muchness” of modern life has given us commitment anxiety.

The more options surround you, the less likely you are to make long-term commitments. That’s why I can read a book on a Kindle, but not on my iPhone Kindle app.

Instead of thinking about building intergenerational family wealth, people are thinking about their own desires and their own freedom.

Long time horizons change our incentives, usually in good ways. This is one of the core findings of game theory: people treat each other better when they intend to interact repeatedly in the future.

Commitment also has opportunity costs. You can only commit to things that matter to you if you’re discerning about those that don’t. For example, committing to your kids means saying no to other obligations.

When it comes to commitment, I’ve created my own twist: “All young relationships are alike; each committed relationship is deep in its own way.”

Because they have cause and effect backward. In Orthodoxy, G.K Chesterton writes: “Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.”

But if commitment is such a worthy enterprise, why are people so hesitant to commit to things?

The optimist loves their country because it’s on an upward trajectory, while the patriot loves something simply because it’s worthy of their love — and the trajectory is irrelevant. Being an optimist is easy. Being a patriot is hard. But with patriotism comes wisdom. Patriots know things can be worth caring for even when they’re imperfect. Often, their love expands in moments of difficulty.

Long story short, commitment is undervalued.  So here’s how I suggest responding to this trend: whatever your tolerance for commitment is, raise it.

If today you’re comfortable committing to something for two hours, try committing for a weekend. If you’re comfortable committing for two weeks, then raise it to two months; once you’re comfortable with two months, raise it to two years; and once you’re comfortable with two years, raise it to two decades. It’s okay to start small. All big things do. But they have to start somehow and with commitment comes momentum. Commitment happens in stages, and only by embracing it can you stop hugging the X-Axis and climb the compounding curve.

People are more likely to grind for their own success instead of their family name

Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters this message: there are formal limits to myth, there are no 'substantial' ones.

The concept is a constituting element of myth: if I want to decipher myths, I must somehow be able to name concepts. The dictionary supplies me with a few: Goodness, Kindness, Wholeness, Humaneness, etc.

The signifier of myth presents itself in an ambiguous way: it is at the same time meaning and form, full on one side and empty on the other. As meaning, the signifier already postulates a reading, I grasp it through my eyes, it has a sensory reality (unlike the linguistic signifier, which is purely mental), there is a richness in it

What is characteristic of myth? To transform a meaning into form. In other words, myth is always a language-robbery.

Cowen calls himself “hyperlexic”. On a good day, he claims to read four or five books. Secretly, I timed him at 30 seconds per page reading a dense tract by Martin Luther. Later, I sat next to him while he went through an economics paper. He read it at the speed of someone checking that the pages were correctly ordered.

Information used to be the highest form of alpha. Now everyone bends over backwards to leak it.

Through a combination of humanity getting ever-better at reading anything and humans becoming ever-more willing to make themselves legible, information is easier to find and understand than it’s ever been.

How would we get them today? A climb so treacherous as to “do away with any sense of danger”? No of course not. We would send up the drones, equipped with high resolution cameras and maybe some LiDAR, and use photogrammetry and machine learning to stitch the pictures together and make sense of their contents.

The point, I hope, is clear. We are getting better at reading the world, just as a book that is entirely illegible to a two-year-old becomes entirely legible to a ten-year-old through improved skill.

We are game theoretically driven to share more and more of our best ideas, the ones that we might have once exploited in silence.

She noticed that instead of letting us work less, AI actually incentivizes working more. The more you can do in each minute, the higher the opportunity cost from not doing anything.

"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Attention is the scarce resource. Information you can get.

There’s something about the growing relative importance of relationships, of “having a guy,” of agency and the ability to get things done.

I’d never thought of it that way, because I didn’t live it. But by making the world Hyperlegible, we helped create a generation of Hyperlegibility-Native Hyperlexics who take as an input the information we worked to turn into an output. And thus civilization evolves and compounds.

what I’ve heard very consistently from smart college kids is that their smartest friends are all working on biotech, specifically neuro, specifically brain-computer interfaces.

Well, what do you need to do in order to successfully invest against your thesis?

One thing a differentiated view can get you is attention. So you trade a secret for the chance at money.

In the end, the Syntopicon would require over 400,000 man-hours of reading[4] and cost over two million dollars.

The process of cataloging each appearance of one of the “Great Ideas” in all 431 works by 71 authors in the collection was so arduous that the Syntopicon nearly did not make it to print. Before it even came time to print, the budget had topped a million dollars and there was not even “a penny for paper” left.

He worked with a team of over 100 readers who met twice a week for years to discuss the readings and the ideas within them. Among his editorial team was a young Saul Bellow.

Australia’s business R&D intensity grew during the 1990s and peaked in years of the mining boom when it reached 1.38% of industry value-added and 1.28% of GDP. However, the rate then started to fall, and has been declining ever since. It is  now at a meagre 0.93% – is at its lowest level in two decades.

Had Australia maintained our peak rate from the mining boom, business R&D would have been $29.8 billion in last financial year: $9.1 billion or 44% higher than it actually was.

The R&D intensity of the OECD group has grown from 2.3% to 2.7% of GDP since 2008. Particularly large increases occurred in the UK and US, while France, Germany and Japan all maintained high but steady rates.

In 2022-23, the greatest contributions to PNPERD by FoR classification were recorded in: Biomedical and Clinical Sciences at $1,140 million (72%), Health Sciences at $228 million (14%). Compared to 2020-21, the largest dollar increases in FoR were recorded in: Health Sciences up $91 million (67%), Biomedical and Clinical Sciences up $76 million (7%).

In 2022-23, GOVERD included: $4,022 million (93%) in Current expenditure, $322 million (7%) in Capital expenditure.

Compared to 2020-21, GOVERD increased by: 20% in current price terms, 9% in chain volume terms.

Expenditure on R&D performed by Australian government organisations in 2022-23 was $4,344 million, up $726 million compared to 2020-21.

Expenditure on R&D performed by Australian private non-profit (PNP) organisations in 2022-23 was $1,595 million, up $196 million compared to 2020-21.

In 2022-23, the greatest contributions to GOVERD by FoR classification were recorded in: Agricultural, Veterinary and Food Sciences at $636 million (15%),  Biomedical and Clinical Sciences at $551 million (13%),  Engineering at $485 million (11%). Compared to 2020-21, the largest dollar increases in FoR were recorded in: Environmental Sciences up $173 million (73%),  Information and Computing Sciences up $107 million (32%).

In 2022-23, the greatest contributions to GOVERD by SEO classification were recorded in: Health at $806 million (19%), Defence at $753 million (17%). Compared to 2020-21, the largest dollar increases in SEO were recorded in: Defence up $138 million (23%), Health up $136 million (20%).