Links

• A nice quote from Robin Hanson’s post “Our Uphill Battle”:

  …the modern world has widely adopted the views (a) that morality is a whole separate realm where the usual adult knowledge and experience are less relevant, (b) that moral opinions should from come authentically from within us, and (c) that youthful opinions on morals tend to be less corrupted by habit and self-interest.

  I agree (a) and (b) are problematic. I’d expect (c) to be true, but it’s worth remembering kids’ opinions are still subject to corrupting incentives—and likely a different set of corrupting incentives than adults due to their different place in society.

• Hans Schönberg’s post “Why we need to resist the idea of net negative lives in insects” is a good caution against too glibly spreading a radical idea.

• “In Defense of Future Tuesday Indifference” is such a great title for a paper.

A very short and inconclusive story about bespoke software

Recently I asked Claude to write me a little macOS background app to set up a global keyboard shortcut for something (i.e. a shortcut that would trigger regardless of what app I was in). It had no trouble producing an app that successfully intercepted the key combination. One minor problem: it also intercepted all other key presses in all apps and swallowed them, making it impossible to type anything. I had to ssh into the machine from another device to kill the process. Oops!

Configurable global keyboard shortcuts seems like something that should just be a built-in OS feature. And it sort of is via the Shortcuts app, but I don’t love how it works. There are also third-party apps for this—I was a happy Hammerspoon user for a while—but you usually have to grant them strong permissions, which means taking on more security risk than I’d prefer, especially since I’m usually only interested in a small subset of the features they offer. For this sort of thing, LLMs really change the dynamics of the “should I roll my own or should I use an off-the-shelf solution” decision. It’s so much easier than it used to be to create new software targeting just your precise personal use case. Just… not always quite as easy as one might hope. (Claude eventually got the keyboard shortcut app right, after a fair amount of back and forth.)

re: Psych: The Story of the Human Mind

This won’t be a review so much as a collection of random tidbits that stood out to me:

• “…there is some evidence that drugs like Tylenol, designed to work on physical aches and pains, can also diminish the hurt of loneliness.” (p. 32)
• I was a little surprised that chapter 2 mentioned “bystander apathy”, because I was under the impression it had been debunked. Wikipedia encouragingly says that “A 2011 meta-analysis found that the bystander effect was most likely to occur in non-dangerous emergencies but did not occur in dangerous emergencies.”
• Partial reinforcement can create stronger habits than consistent reinforcement. I knew this, but every time I’m reminded of it I wonder if I’m not taking sufficient advantage—or being sufficiently cautious—of it in my life.
• Bad news for Embassytown fans: “As far as I know, there is no support for a strong version of the Whorfian hypothesis, in which profoundly different modes of thought arise through exposure to different languages.” (p. 156)
• Number of chunks you can hold in short-term memory: maybe just four? On the bright side, “one estimate is that long-term memory is 2.5 petabytes, about a million gigabytes. If you had a computer with that much memory, you could hold three million hours of video.” (p. 179) (So why don’t I have eidetic recall of all the cute animal videos I’ve seen over my lifetime? C’mon, brain, put that space to use.)
• “We tend to fall in love with people who are physically close to us and personally familiar, and we tend to be drawn to people who are similar to ourselves in every conceivable way. (The worst bit of folk wisdom ever is “opposites attract”; it’s true only in rom-coms.)” (p. 234)
• “Numerous laboratory studies find that we automatically encode three pieces of information when we meet a new person…”: “age and gender” and “race or ethnicity.” (p. 284)
• “Maximizers tend to do better at life in objective ways [compared to Satisficers], such as getting better jobs, though there is some evidence that they are overall less happy…” (p. 308)
• “Studies of over a million people looking at dozens of different countries find that, from early to middle adulthood, we get more agreeable, more conscientious, and less neurotic.” (p. 318)
• “It’s hard to find anything valuable that doesn’t correlate with IQ. … As best anyone knows, there is only one bad trait associated with high IQ—bad eyesight.” (p. 325)
• “It turns out that for just about every trait, a large proportion of the variation across individuals—often in the neighborhood of 50 percent—is due to genes. This is true for intelligence, for the Big Five of personality, for religiosity, for many types of mental illness, for happiness, and much else.” (p. 330)

A passage worth keeping in mind when consuming psychology books/articles/podcasts:

We are fascinated by weird effects. These are what get into the journals, go viral, and excite all of us. It’s interesting to find that how you position your body influences your confidence, that what you’re smelling influences your attitudes, and so on. Such findings are particularly interesting when it comes to biases, a topic we’ll turn to in the next chapter. I think it’s worth knowing that bidders on eBay offer less money for a baseball card held by a Black hand than by a white one, or that mock juries are influenced by the physical attractiveness of the defendant.

The problem arises when people forget about the more mundane and rational considerations that are far more important, but that are too obvious to get into journals. Nobody would publish an article reporting that the bidding for baseball cards on eBay is influenced by how valuable people think the cards are, or that juries will give a harsher punishment to a murderer than to a shoplifter. But it’s these more commonsensical (and more boring) influences that really make a difference in our lives.

Now, things would be different if these unconscious effects were powerful and robust. One can imagine a world where the very best way to predict a person’s loneliness was to ask about how warm they are; where the best determinant of how one judges a job candidate is the physical weight of their résumé. Such discoveries really would challenge the notion that we are rational and deliberative beings.

We don’t live in this bizarro world. For the sake of argument, I’ve been assuming that these effects are real. But social priming effects are the most controversial in psychology. We talked about the replication crisis just before this chapter, describing how certain research practices have led to false positives—findings in the literature that are not true. This crisis has hit hardest in the domain of social priming… (pp. 280-281)

re: physics-fiction Schild’s Ladder

Of the Greg Egan novels I’ve read, this one is the most Greg Egan: the plot is physics and the setting is math. OK, that’s an exaggeration, but you’ve got to a love an author who has the guts to use this as his opening paragraph:

In the beginning was a graph, more like diamond than graphite. Every node in this graph was tetravalent: connected by four edges to four other nodes. By a count of edges, the shortest path from any node back to itself was a loop six edges long. Every node belonged to twenty-four such loops, as well as forty-eight loops eight edges long, and four hundred and eighty that were ten edges long. The edges had no length or shape, the nodes no position; the graph consisted only of the fact that some nodes were connected to others. This pattern of connections, repeated endlessly, was all there was. (p. 3)

Due to my woefully inadequate understanding of quantum physics (and the rest of physics, for that matter), I was often unsure to what extent the science here was supposed to make sense vs just be an impressionistic take on some high-level ideas. So my experience of it, at least, was very impressionistic. But there are some cool ideas here. Few novels venture into universes as deeply alien as the one featured in Schild’s Ladder. And having the protagonist take a stand against destroying the sphere that’s annihilating everything in its path while growing at half the speed of light is a surprising and interesting choice. I like Disapora and Permutation City better, but I enjoyed this one too.

A couple nice quotes:

…every kind of happiness bore some imprint in the shape of the pain it had assuaged. (p. 160)

I think everyone lives in at least two time scales: one of them fast and immediate, and too detailed to retain in anything but outline; the other slow enough to be absorbed completely. We think our memory has no gaps, we think we carry our entire past inside us, because we’re accustomed to looking back and seeing only sketches and highlights. But we all experience more than we remember. (p. 34)

re: qntm’s short story collection Valuable Humans in Transit

your Google Person is exactly like you except it’s made of incomplete data and it can’t die (“cripes does anybody remember Google People”, p. 65)

Ten short stories, no duds. Highly recommend. Two I’d read before without realizing they were by the same author—“Lena” and “I Don’t Know, Timmy, Being God Is a Big Responsibility”—are my favorites.

I appreciate the comments section on “If You Are Reading This” helping me feel at least a little less mystified by that story’s final line.

re: Slay the Princess: The Pristine Cut

A metaphysical dialogue-tree game where the goal seems to be not so much finding the right path as exploring all the paths. It’s worth at least a couple playthroughs, though my interest waned after that.

re: Portal 2

I really enjoyed Portal back in the day but never felt much appetite to try the sequel… until this month. A coworker making a “cake is a lie” reference put the series on my mind, and I figured enough time had passed since I played the first one that the mechanics wouldn’t feel stale. Unsurprisingly, it’s very good and I’m glad I finally got around to it.

re: Creaks

A nice little puzzle game with a charming art style. It does a lot with a little: your character’s movements are discrete, there aren’t all that many places to stand in any given scene, and there are very few actions you can take, yet the solutions are sometimes quite elusive.

re: Öoo

This is another good puzzle game that gets a lot of mileage out of very simple mechanics. I like the ways it uses the fast-travel doors and arrangement of the world map as part of the puzzles. I’m also a fan of games with no exposition or dialogue… such minimalism makes it a lot easier to listen to podcasts/audiobooks while I play.

re: 2026 Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts

My favorite on account of quirkiness was probably “Two People Exchanging Saliva”, set in a world where the titular act is inexplicably punishable by death. And “Jane Austen’s Period Drama” was pretty funny. I liked all three of the others (“A Friend of Dorothy”, “Butcher’s Stain”, “The Singers”) too—they rely on familiar tropes, but they’re done well.

re: the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie

Grand Illlusion Cinema was showing this outdoors at Dirty Couch Brewing. I was expecting to enjoy this as a ‘bad’ movie but I can’t decide if that’s the right adjective or not. It’s certainly goofy, bizarre, absurd, unhinged… but it’s fun, and maybe it’s exactly what it meant to be?

Anyway the main ridiculous moment I’m going to remember from this is Dennis Hopper leaning in to say “goom-ba! join the goom-bas!” (Whose idea was it to make the goombas, which are basically just giant heads with shoes in the games, have tiny heads?)