2021-12-18
Readings
- Interesting interview with Bradley Tusk on how venture capital, corporations, and regulations relate.
- Interesting debate on whether Amazon is bad for small business. I thought “yes” both before and after. Although I think Amazon is fixable; if Amazon were barred from offering products themselves, or had its marketplace side split off at least, most of my reasons for a “yes” would disappear.
- Interesting thought experiment about elementary particles and singularities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_electron
- Good on India for reducing its population growth to more sustainable levels; this should reduce poverty, probably. https://www.science.org/content/article/india-defuses-its-population-bomb-fertility-falls-two-children-woman
- Methodological improvement in understanding the process of bone growth: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-12-bone-growth-transparent.html
- More understanding of some of the processes involved in cognitive decline as humans age (with some treatments and mitigation strategies hinted): https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-12-vulnerable-brain-areas-lesions-linked.html
Unprompted Thoughts
- I’ve often thought about a superset of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis - the broad question of does having frameworks of understanding make creativity harder? I think it could, depending on the field and the theory. And for certain understandings of that “make creativity harder” ; the idea is that perhaps certain kinds of creative output may be alien enough from existing theory that if the theory captures one’s mindset enough, reaching those kinds of output becomes far less likely. I think it’s plausibly yes, and that some really strange stuff may also be good. Perhaps knowing tonality well might draw one’s attention away from semitones or atonality. Rick Bento has an exploration of this idea in music, although it’s a broad question and concern.
- I’ve been thinking about the centralisation of culture and its relation to misinformation; in certain areas of society, centralisation is broadly negative; entertainment should be reasonably decentralised, because it encourages people to do art, sing, compose, and otherwise be creative, and it prevents monetary interests from choosing what will be popular next month. It’s not that we’re better off without record labels, but we should want them to be reasonably weak and not decide “this decade is the time for this kind of sound” (or look, for fashion and other entities). This “I will do it” mentality is more nuanced for journalism, in that while citizen journalists may collectively have better coverage than news networks, they don’t have journalistic ethics and won’t suffer a reputation hit for lying because they have no reputation to speak of (usually) and may be niche enough that their followers won’t care otherwise. It’s worse in science, where the autodidacts and fringe scientists are running the show for the attention of the flatterable, rather than organisations taking the long view and embracing practices that reduce prominence of untruths. I hope that we can develop separate knobs for these diverse topics, rather than have a single more centralised knob for centrality of culture.
- Evaluation of work performance is one of those things I usually see done wrong; my preferred route is simply “write as long as you like to justify your existence and your positive evaluation”. The possible failings are many; the McNamara fallacy usually is at play with excessively metrics-driven approaches. Things that adhere too strongly to job descriptions lean on that kind of “employment fallacy”; good teams collect or build a variety of useful skills, and job descriptions that are not vague are usually a mistake. I recognise the need for some kind of evaluation of this kind, but the freer the form, the better an employer can be at recognising the variety of things someone can bring to a team.
- One of the things that writing a Substack gives me is a reason to make sure I get my regular inputs and growth in, rather than put off perpetually for some future me that never shows up. This practice ensures I actually look for new (or at least reflect on old) music every week, and that interesting articles don’t rest forever in a browser tab (at least some of them are read, fed into here, and discarded). I recommend writing a newsletter for people with this problem; it’s an added bonus, of course, if others might get some value out of it (either at the time, or looking back in time years later).
Current Events
- The Sachlers, now being fairly heavily disgraced, are having their names expunged from the places they funded. It’s fairly common for big donors to be honored (or for it to be a direct “pay for this thing”) with having something named after them. This might be a branch of a museum, a meeting room, whatever. I think this is generally a bad practice; names should either reflect purpose or some great achievement, not a transfer of funds. I don’t think naming rights should ever be for sale. But I also don’t think things should be renamed based on modern distastes; such renaming rarely serves a valid purpose, and the instinct to remove words and reminders of the distasteful is not one we should indulge. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/09/new-york-met-art-museum-to-remove-sackler-family-name-from-galleries
- We’re now in the aftermath period of the end of the Smolett trial. I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time, both because I think usually important facts turn up awhile after an event is in the spotlight, and because I think it’s better to focus on policy and events that impact more than one person. At this point, I can probably safely say that Smolett was both really stupid and vile, and that it discredits the parts of the (distributed) BLM movements that still stand by him.
- It is disappointing how much it looks like Russia is set to engage in attempts to occupy more land of its neighbours, and how unwilling anyone seems to be to do anything about it. We should be preparing for war and signalling strongly to him that he should end the occupation of Crimea, stop funding insurgency, and keep his military within (and ideally far from) Russia’s borders. We’re courting trouble by signalling weakness.
- The spread of Omicron is leading to rapid policy shifts in a lot of countries; apparently many countries are struggling with hospital capacity again, and the variant may be more infectious (most other features of it are, as far as I can tell, not entirely certain although a picture is emerging). It’s strange and sad to be back here, but ignoring the spread is not really an option. I wish more people were better at understanding threats they can’t see, and reasoning about them.
Reviewlets
- The Lincoln Center’s Chamber Music Society put on a production of the Brandenburg Concertos; it was excellent. The harpsichordist was amazing (I’m not used to hearing much of that instrument, and it’s interesting how it seems more suited to playing fast, complex tones than the piano), and the musicians moved around a lot more (almost seemed to be dancing at times) while playing. They swapped which violinist led between pieces. BWV was and remains my favourite among them, but the evening made a strong case for BWV1051. The only minus in the production is, if I remember correctly, a Viol da Gamba was supposed to be in one of the pieces and I was looking forward to seeing one; they substituted in a Cello instead. I can’t fault them much for that; such instruments tend to be rare and it’s probably difficult to find expert players of the same calibre for them. I had a good time.
- I’m about a third of the way through Robert Webb’s “Come Again” (book); I still haven’t figured out where the story’s going, but it’s been an interesting (if jarring - the genre twist was very surprising) journey so far. I shouldn’t be surprised anymore when comedians end up being good authors (see also Eric Idle)
- 211 New Taco Grill (NYC restaurant) - Ordered a bean burrito and some quesadillas; it wasn’t bad, but was also not much different from my occasional low-effort making of the same dishes. I was hoping for something a little more interesting. It was really affordable at least.
Amusements
- Highland cows look adorable.
- I’ve been watching and enjoying this old MST3k clip a few times; Mike Nelson as Captain Janeway is weird but good.
- Mathematicians playing around with ideas relating to prime numbers, which dips into the strange idea of using statistics to predict features of static things.
- Very funny jerk moment on Jeopardy:
Recent Music
- Bad Astronaut’s “Good Morning Night” is a bit formulaic for one of the kinds of music I like; it’s safe and on the first listen sounds like I’ve heard it dozens of times, but that’s okay.
- Eddie Perfect’s “The Hole”, a cut opening song from the recent Beetlejuice musical, is witty and dark; I’ve been trying to figure out why it was cut; I think it might be that the shifts in musical style are jarring in places, and the lyrics are a little too on-the-nose in terms of criticising religion, which might limit reception. I like it anyhow, and wonder what it would’ve looked like had it developed into a final form for performance
- AaronChipa’s “Rave in the Rave” is a fun song with a captivating music video; I wonder if, for songs where I first saw them attached to such a video, whether I’d bother with them otherwise. The song in all its form tends to stick together in my head. Perhaps related to songs that we learn to associate with emotionally important times of our lives.
- Rifftones’ “Ballad of Rufus Amos Adams” is part song, part parody, part deconstruction of how narratives shape meaning out of reasonably random elements. The first mention of “Todd” in the song still reliably gives me giggles.