Links for November

Indonesia, progress studies, Irish weebs

Here are the most interesting things I read, listened to, and watched in the last month. But first, some announcements:

1: I have been asked to host a salon for InterIntellect. On January 6th at 9pm GMT, I will be having a public conversation with Seeamy Chou, the co-founder of the Astera Institute, The Navigation Fund, and Arcadia Science. We will be discussing: The role of philanthropy in the science funding ecosystem, the shortcomings of peer review as an evaluation process, and the political future of science in the US. By what algorithm a random blogger from Ireland was deemed to be the most qualified person to do this is anybody’s guess. There is a fee to attend, but if you are already a paying subscriber, please email me, and I will add you to the invite. You can RSVP here.

2: I have also been asked to pass on the details of one of the lesser-known efforts to encourage people to donate more of their income to effective charities, namely Raise. They are a network of student groups that encourage a culture of giving through 1-to-1 donation matching for the Against Malaria Foundation and other initiatives. They are currently only in the UK but are open to expanding – I’m sure one of you can get a group going in Dublin. You can email them at raisenational@gmail.com.

3: I am pleased to announce that I am now a “Visiting Researcher” at Trinity College, Dublin. What I am researching is anybody’s guess. I have tried and failed with every strategy to work productively in the barbaric invasive species known as an “open plan office”, and so most significantly for me, I can now study in the Library Formerly Known as Berkeley. Between that and a much shorter commute, the number of worthwhile things I do per day might literally have doubled in the last month. Huzzah!

Blogs and short links

This month in Sam Enright: I wrote about why more academics don’t start companies. Some of my writings are now being reposted by the Library of Economics and Liberty. I also gave an update on our efforts to support Olympiad-level mathematics in Ireland, and turned on paid subscriptions for this blog. Give me money? <3

John Collison on the problems of Ireland. I have been pleased by the warm response to this article, including from the tánaiste (deputy prime minister) Simon Harris and members of the governing coalition. This is particularly significant given that Harris will (barring a change in government) become Taoiseach again in November of 2027. Talk is cheap, of course, but it does seem that the tide has turned on John’s broad diagnosis of the problems. I am also pleased that John gave my think tank a shoutout. Here is what Peter had to say:

Irish readers may have already heard about John Collison’s piece in the Irish Times: ‘Ireland is going backwards. Here’s how to get it moving.’ (Not paywalled.) It’s gotten a lot of pickup in Irish politics, and I can only explain this by saying that it is extremely good, far better than it has any right to be, and far better than you might expect it to be if you’re familiar with the genre—usually this kind of ‘public figure makes rare intervention into politics to call for a “reset”’ is a recipe for meaningless truisms, maybe interspersed with a small number of extremely bitty ideas that are unlikely to help anything but have good vibes (‘is there anything to be said for having another citizens’ assembly?’). But not in this case.

I’ve never seen anyone put the point so clearly about the inability of bureaucratic agencies to make big-picture tradeoffs: it’s not an original idea (it’s quite Weberian!), indeed it’s something I myself have inchoately gestured towards before, but Collison puts it so sharply and exactly that it hit me square in the face. There’s also a line which can be read esoterically as claiming John XXIII as a yimby hero.

I don’t have much else to add to this, other than to highlight @crankynotions’s take that John’s article is unoriginal because it made all the same points as Han Yu’s critique of the role of eunuchs in the Tang Dynasty court.

Before someone takes that out of context, I am not accusing my ideological opponents of being eunuchs. I await the Dublin InQuirer to insinuate that I harbour sympathies with the Emperor Wenzong.

The quote above is from Peter McLaughlin of The Fitzwilliam, reviewing what he’s been reading. Read on for, inter (many) alia, an argument that the doctrine of original sin relies on a Lamarckian understanding of heredity. Elsewhere, Peter does a deep dive into the completely bizarre statistic that most Irish foreign aid is spent entirely in Ireland.

Maintenance: Of Everything, by Stewart Brand, is now available for pre-order. Superb cover!

Casey Handmer’s notes on long-distance relationships. The majority of couples I most admire started out as long-distance, and I’m not sure what to take from that. Casey makes the point that one of the major obstacles is that, even if calls are frequent and high-quality, it’s surprisingly difficult to match someone’s energy at completely different times of day. Has anybody checked whether long-distance couples at similar longitudes have notably higher success rates? I found this endearing:

For several weeks early on the only thing we could do was read to each other from a book we both had handy, because the sound would “glitch out” half the time.

Ctrl+F yields no results for “sex”, which led to a friend texting me in relation to this post:

Is there a word or a term for this kind of article, that earnestly dances around the actual core of the problem being discussed without every mentioning it directly? So many articles are like this.

Another thought: Have I been looking at weird flag cones this entire time?

A coworking space I sometimes work out of is next to a gigantic completely pointless hole in the centre of Dublin, which, for arcane planning law reasons, can only be used for primarily water-based (???) activities. Here is an argument for why we might as well put a really nice swimming pool there.

Climate predictions have been relatively accurate.

“Dating apps want to prevent you from finding true love, because then you’ll stop using them” doesn’t actually make sense as an explanation for why dating apps suck.

Congratulations to the new cohorts of Emergent Ventures winners.

Another Irish L: as a child, I often wondered why there weren’t dinosaur fossil sites that I could visit, but it turns out we just have shit rocks:

Dr Mike Simms, from National Museums Northern Ireland, told BBC News NI that Ireland is an unlikely candidate for dinosaur-related discoveries because “we have the wrong sort of rocks”.

The New Yorker has come out against non-commutative algebraic structures.

Nominative determinism of the month: Iranian chess grandmaster Sina Movahed.

From Noah Smith’s blog: I’m a weeb for Ireland. The pseudonymous author here seems to have missed that the picture she used was of Lafcadio Hearn, “the first weeb”, who… was from Dublin! Truly, weebdom has come full circle. I am familiar with this archetype of American:

It’s not that I only dated Irish guys or even that they were my main type, just that being visibly Irish probably helped them level up by 2 points on the 1-10 scale. This phenomenon possibly explains why Sabrina Carpenter dated Barry Keoghan.

Works in Progress has come out in print in Australia, Canada, and the European Union. A no-brainer purchase.

Something I’m somehow only getting around to reading now: Dario Amodei’s Machines of Loving Grace.

The Erasmus scheme as the European babymaking machine? Some data:

Former Erasmus students are also more likely to have transnational relationships: 33% of former Erasmus students have a partner of a different nationality, compared with 13% of those who stay home during their studies; 27% of Erasmus students meet their long-term partner while on Erasmus. On this basis, the Commission estimates that around one million babies are likely to have been born to Erasmus couples since 1987.

This is absolutely crying out for a regression discontinuity paper comparing outcomes among students on either side of the grade threshold required to be accepted, to figure out how much of this is causal.

One of the prosecutors from the Nuremberg trials was still alive until two years ago, and lived in Florida.

If you are reading this newsletter, you might be a good fit for the new Director of Operations role at the Institute for Progress. If you get the job and I am the person who referred you, they will give me $3,000. I wonder will that make up for all the ElonBucks that Alec has made by tweeting about me?

For the first time, you can now track Irish government spending via a dashboard. Was it really the case that all that was needed to dramatically increase government transparency was to vibecode a website to OCR a bunch of PDFs that were already publicly available…? Say it ain’t so!

The Irish government has now given another part of the government permission to stop preventing a third part of the government from building a metro system. [Edit: In the time taken to copy and paste this text into the Substack editor, local residents have objected, and a fourth part of the government is preventing the project from going ahead.]

Related: Is AI going to supercharge NIMBYism? The initial hope with efforts like Tract was the opposite, and I have no prediction on how these things will shake out.

Why do Kazakhs spend half of their family income on food?

Scott Alexander’s links for October. It seems the religious revival is a myth:

Claims of a revival in American Christianity among the young are not borne out by data. The country is no longer secularizing at the same rate as in the early 2000s, but there is no sign of any reversal.

A friend adds:

Kyla Scanlon puts her finger on the phenomenon with four datapoints:

“Bible sales are up roughly 40% since the pandemic, but church attendance is down to 30% from 42% two decades ago and 38% ten years ago.”

What does it take to put up a bench in Berkeley, California? If I were trying to argue against people who think that zoning and proceduralism are not a major impediment to building, and I kicked this bench and said, “I refute it thus”, would anyone get the joke? Even the people who live in Berkeley don’t seem to realise who it’s named after…

Rest in peace to the cosmologist George Smoot. And: why is there a bridge measured in smoots?

On the game theory of $1 margarita night. As this post describes, it would be great to have a standing social occasion every week at the same time and place that could serve as my friend group’s “office hours”. The changeability of plans makes me feel that more and more of my time is being spent on social coordination.

Rozina Ali on how Islam was erased from the poetry of Rumi. Unfortunately, there is a lot of mood affiliation in this article. See, for example, this highly misleading description of the Naturalization Act:

a law from 1790 curtailed the number of Muslims who could come into the United States

Everything I have read on this topic gives the impression that the US didn’t even have the state capacity to impose immigration restrictions, even if it had wanted to, until the Chinese Exclusion Act. Where are those famous New Yorker fact-checkers?

While we are on the topic of Islamic poetry, in my comments section, Peter McLaughlin speculates about why the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam has not been more often retranslated:

PM: One of the funniest things about the Rubaiyyat was that there was a 20th century translation by Robert Graves and Omar Ali-Shah that was supposed to ‘fix’ all the errors and purely-made-up poems in the [Edward] Fitzgerald... and then it turned out that Ali-Shah had also just made up like half the poems in the new one too

SE: Are there any translations that aren’t largely made up?

PM: I have no idea, though I get the sense (not through any actual substantive knowledge of the Iranian cultural heritage, just vibes) that the Rubaiyat are not actually considered all that good in the original; if you’re an ambitious Persian→English translator who wants to tackle classical poetry, you’ve got so many truly great works to choose from, and perhaps you don’t have much interest in rendering a less-than-great one that’s well-known mostly for Fitzgerald’s take on it.

Is Google search getting worse? The quality of evidence around this is remarkably poor.

Apply for the Wolfram Winter School before December 8th.

Why the Bay Area is cursed. When I was in San Francisco last month, I threw a house party which, although it involved many of my dearest friends, lived up to every stereotype (sexless, shoeless, and over before midnight).

Hiya Jain is joining the linkpost train. I look forward to reading the outcome of her project on Peter Putnam.

Rest in peace to Peter Temin. I enjoyed his paper reviewing the economy of the early Roman Empire. At some point, we should cover the economies of pre-industrial Europe in the reading group.

A helpful post: Fernando Borretti on how to manage ADHD. Many people close to me (including a psychiatrist) have openly speculated about whether I have ADHD, although I often wonder to what extent smartphones were a Pandora’s box, and that this is the new default state of humanity. Borretti says:

The first-line treatment for ADHD is stimulants. Everything else in this post works best as a complement to, rather than as an alternative to, stimulant medication. In fact most of the strategies described here, I was only able to execute after starting stimulants. For me, chemistry is the critical node in the tech tree: the todo list, the pomodoro timers, etc., all of that was unlocked by the medication.

I have started implementing several of the systems he describes in the post, and will report back.

What Rebecca Lowe has been reading. I was in Ghana with Rebecca recently, but I did not go so far as reading any original Kwame Nkrumah.

The year in review from Riley Walz, the internet prankster extraordinaire. Here is the bop spotter. Ord sounds great:

[I] made a novel iOS app that takes advantage of the gyroscopes/accelermeters in AirPods to give you turn-by-turn, spatial walking directions. Instead of hearing “turn left” like you would in Google Maps, you hear an ambient noise on the left side of your head, and the sound changes as you turn. It’s really cool to me because it’s a lot more passive. It feels like following a friend. My train of thought doesn’t get interrupted by the sound. And it’s a lot more precise, especially in the woods when you arrive at a 6-way intersection of unnamed trails. This is 95% done and will launch very soon. I got sidetracked with other stuff at the end of the year.

This also reminds me of Patrick Collision’s tweet about why we don’t yet have an AI product that will give me a customised walking tour through my AirPods, telling me interesting things about the buildings I’m passing, without me needing to get distracted by looking things up.

God help me, I’m considering taking dating advice from the rationalists again.

VAT cuts to create more readers. Do I smell an arbitrage opportunity in the paper market?¹

Stephen Webb on why Britain has too many lifeguards. I’m reminded of the Mitchell and Webb sketch about how much of an outrage it is when a year goes by and zero people drown in Britain:

I’m trying to draw attention to the massive waste of public money that’s led to a situation in where absolutely nobody in a whole year drowns by accident. What that must mean in terms of fencing, warning signs, swimming lessons, people coming into school to tell children to be careful, life belts and the maintenance of waterside paths is just staggering. There has clearly been a massive overspend, because in any conurbation of up to half a million people such as Westerchester that’s run with the proper priorities, at least two or three people should drown every year.

I am familiar with the different methodologies for how to calculate the value of a statistical life, but can anyone explain to me (a) why different countries, even at similar levels of development, chose different methods, and (b) whether the large divergence in these numbers has any practical significance? (After you’re done with that, I have the same confusion about the different methodologies for calculating social discount rates.)

every government has a value for a human life which determines the appropriate level of investment in, say, road safety measures. The UK is typically at the lower end here – at around £2.5m (say $3m) compared to over $12m in the US and about $4.5m in the EU.

Finally, from my email inbox, I have been informed of the mystery of the Scottish lifeguards:

One of my minor obsession is that it seems that ‘lifeguard’ is an extremely common teenage summer job in Scotland but not anywhere else in the UK. I have no idea why.

Every time I speak to a Scottish person now I have to stop myself from asking “did you work as a lifeguard as a teenager?”. But every time teenage jobs come up in conversation, >>65% of Scottish people I’ve met say they were lifeguards, compared to <<5% of English or Welsh or (Northern) Irish people. I’m not randomly sampling, obviously, but that’s crazy.

The BBC even had a lesbian romance drama set in Helensburgh where the whole premise is that ‘lifeguard’ is the default job you take when you’re just looking for something to make money while living with your parents.

I do not get it.

Oisín Morrin is joining me in internet curation. I found many of the links at the bottom here to be useful for my forthcoming essay on how I use spaced repetition. Generally, Oisín is a master of pedagogical subtlety, and his blog and work are hugely underrated.

From Justin Skycak at Math Academy: Self-reports of learning are ridiculously unreliable. I have long been a proponent of teaching to the (well-designed) test…

The conventional wisdom in urban economics is that minimum apartment standards for floor space and other matters of personal preference are a terrible idea. The Irish government’s stated reduction in minimum apartment standards is now being delayed, or possibly cancelled entirely, because of a challenge in the High Court. The court in question is intimating that the European Union may need to get involved. Even if you think that modestly reducing minimum apartment standards is a bad idea, I’m baffled by the worldview in which democratically elected officials had the authority to introduce these regulations in the first place, but not to modestly reduce them. Is this anarchism with respect to the problem of political authority, but only when changes are in the direction of less regulation, rather than more? Is there even a worldview here, or just bitterness and cynicism?

Podcasts

Iain Dale’s book reviewing each of the Irish taoisigh (prime ministers) has finally been released. It is based on a podcast series, which is still my #1 recommendation for people looking for a gentle introduction to Irish political history.

A great episode: Jonny Steinberg on crime and punishment in South Africa. I found the Mr Psmith history of the post-apartheid period to be reactionary and misleading, especially in the way that it described electricity access. Still, I’ve never visited and don’t know much about South Africa, so Winnie and Nelson is next on the reading list.

Podcast of the month: Dean Ball on how he wrote the AI Action Plan. Is “How do you insert sane and intelligent technocrats to be largely left alone in administrations run by lunatics?” going to be the defining political question of the late 2020s?

You’ll Hear It on the most important jazz samples in hip-hop. Here is the associated playlist. You can also listen to a breakdown of the astonishing Keith Jarrett 1975 Köln concert.

Hugh Mellor on Ramsey on truth. I never did get around to reading Truth and Probability, but this is of interest for two reasons. First, I’ve heard philosophers claim that the Cheryl Misak biography completely shoehorns Ramsey into the pragmatist tradition, but I have not waded into this debate. Second is that, because of the breadth and depth of his thought, running the teeny tiny conference on Frank Ramsey would be a dream.

The Marginal Revolutionaries on the Baumol effect. Here is the original book where Baumol proposed the idea with William Bowen.

From the China History Podcast, I enjoyed this ten-part series on Singaporean history. I was most interested in the material in part 8 about Singapore’s ill-fated merger with Malaysia from 1963–65. If you didn’t know, Singapore is perhaps the world’s only example of an involuntary independence movement, in that they were kicked out by Malaysia. I also watched this clip recently of Lee Kuan Yew reacting to that news with a group of journalists, in which he is speechless, cries, and then asks for the cameras to be turned off. Part 9 of this series also pairs nicely with Oliver Kim’s essay about Albert Winsemius.

Andy Matuschak, one of my biggest intellectual influences, interviews Joe Walker about his research process. This works better as a video podcast. I would love to do a video like this with Andy, where he observes and explains to me how I can get better at learning. I would note this is also similar to a podcast Andy did with Dwarkesh Patel, which also resulted in this video of them studying a quantum mechanics textbook together.

Dan Wang and Stephen Kotkin talk about how historians work. This one works better as a video podcast. You can hear more about Kotkin’s time living in Magnitogorsk on the Conversations with Tyler podcast, one of my favourite podcast episodes of all time.

Papers

Matt Clancy, How to Accelerate Technological Progress. One of the many (many!) things I appreciate about Matt is that he allows his webpages to be downloaded as nicely-formatted PDFs. This is an overview of some of the materials on New Things Under the Sun; the most interesting new ones I found out about are reviews on how long it takes to go from science to technology (answer: about 20 years), and how common independent discovery is. I assigned this paper as one of the core readings for an economics class I teach on at the University of Edinburgh (long story, I’ll post about it soon).

Hans Hvide, Benjamin Jones, University Innovation and the Professor’s Privilege. A great paper! I drew on this a lot for my post about spinouts for Progress Ireland.

Various, The Impact of Advanced AI Systems on Democracy. I have now joined not one but two reading groups in which I am the only person who is not a professional political scientist. From the long author list, I only recognise Bruce Schneier and fellow Interact-er Saffron Huang.

Page two reviews some of the literature on political biases in AI: they say LLMs are biased toward “progressive/libertarian” views (aren’t these often opposites? What does this mean?) when presented with multiple choice questions, but are politically neutral when they are able to respond freely. My sense is that it’s been difficult to measure political bias under actual realistic usage conditions.

I generally came away with a pretty low opinion of Nature Perspectives, or editorials associated with Nature in general. One aspect of ‘fake rigour’ this paper excels in is that these 10 pages of relatively vague and milquetoast opinions cite a whopping 141 sources (and I do not get the impression the authors have actually read them all). Can we honestly say this was a greater contribution to human knowledge than a thoughtful Substack post by one of them would have been?

Diving into those sources so you don’t have to, footnote 9 is a nice reminder that I should blog at some point about James Fishkin’s deliberate polling methodology in the context of whether we can ever get Northern Irish people to agree on anything. Nan Ransohoff recently had the misfortune of listening to me talk about this literature in more detail than she could have possibly wanted to explain why my answer to her question of “What can other countries learn from what Ireland has done well in policy?” was not “citizens’ assemblies”.

In footnote 60, Hugo Mercier’s heterodox “argumentative theory of reason” is cited as “evidence” of the following claim:

Organizing large-scale in person events is costly and time-consuming, and face-to-face debate can be susceptible to social desirability biases, where interloutors are motivated by a desire to win the argument, rather than to reach a mutually acceptable outcome.

Does the claim that people sometimes want to win arguments, rather than come to a mutually agreeable outcome, really need a citation? Even if somehow the answer is yes, why would that citation be one extremely specific and highly disputed hypothesis in cognitive science, that is largely irrelevant to the claim as stated in the main text? (Sorry for being mean.)

This also reminded me that I have a 10,000-word absurdly bloated draft of a blog responding to Mercier and Sperber’s argumentative theory of reason, which I never finished on time to submit to the Astral Codex Ten book review contest. It may or may not ever see the light of day; if you want to read a copy and let me know whether it’s salvageable, you can do so here.

This was the second time in the political science group that I was instinctively sympathetic with the idea of a paper, but frustrated with the sloppiness of the execution. One suspects that if I keep coming across as so pedantic, they are going to kick me out.

Books

Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom. The only Friedman book I have read from cover to cover; whatever you think of him, this is an entertaining read. I will have a longer essay about Friedman to share soon.

William Harris, Peter Mackey, How to Change the Future: Lessons from Ireland on Revolutionising Scientific Innovation and Economic Prosperity. The main author here is Bill Harris, a former Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation, who was headhunted by the Irish Minister for Education to become the first Director General of Science Foundation Ireland. (As we know from Lew Kuan Yew, it is especially important for small new countries to open up government roles to international applicants.) See last month’s links for an argument that the backstory of SFI is particularly interesting. Harris was widely seen to have done a very successful job, and was later recruited to establish Science Foundation Arizona along the same model.²

Alas, this is an extremely self-congratulatory and sloppy book that doesn’t contain any of the detail or economic analysis I would have liked. I’m also confused, as I often am, about who the target audience is. In some ways, this is only relevant to people with a particular interest in Irish science policy (niche!), but then it explains some very basic concepts. The tidbits on the history of science in Ireland were very brief, but many of them I would like to write about at some point (e.g. Erwin Schrödinger’s adventures in Dublin.)

It’s also worth noting that Progress Ireland’s infinitely based Senior Fellow Ed Walsh is mentioned on ten occasions, cited as one of the causal factors for the (proportionately radical) increase in science funding in the early 2000s.

Music

Some new albums I discovered, or listened to properly, for the first time this month:

Lauryn Hill, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Realising I should blog more about genres other than jazz and classical. I was prompted to re-listen to this after Apple Music declared it the greatest album of all time. Perhaps my second favourite rapper after André 3000, although it has been a while since I have thought about such things. My favourite track is To Zion, although you should certainly be listening to the whole album in order.

Ahmad Jamal Trio, The Awakening. Pay attention to how the energy is different on Dolphin Dance compared to the Herbie Hancock original (I’ve also been re-listening to that album, one of my favourites). You probably recognise the lick around 0:40 from often being sampled in hip hop.

Stevie Wonder, Innervisions. I had forgotten how superb this album is. My favourite tracks are Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing and Too High. Except for some backup vocals and minor synthesiser, Stevie Wonder plays every instrument on this album – absolutely insane. Here is the associated You’ll Hear It episode.

Beethoven, Symphony No. 3 (Eroica). And the associated Sticky Notes episode. Heard this live for the first time this month, which was a very good night. Any progress I might have made in classical music has slowed since I left the UK and haven’t been close to affordable concerts. This time, I ended up bumping into Cillian Murphy. At the symphony, he just looks like a normal guy, and does not have a haggard face beleagued by hundreds of thousands of Japanese souls.

I have gotten a lot of value out of creating month-specific Spotify playlists, to house the new discoveries for that month. The default state for all but the most musically inclined does seem to be listening to the same songs over and over again. (I should look at data on this…)

Films

Blake Edwards, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I enjoyed this very much, especially the party scenes. Sadly, it seems that Scott Sumner has never blogged about this, except to note it as a “notable non-auteur” film. (I was thinking about how this film compares to the distinctive style of Billy Wilder, but I was surprised to learn he only worked with Audrey Hepburn once.) The Yunioshi character is indeed quite jarring. What more is there to say?

Masaki Kobayashi, Kwaidan (怪談). We are working on a project about the incredible life of Lafcadio Hearn, the original weeb, who played an important role in popularising Japanese culture in the West. This is a 1964 film adaptation of his 1904 collection of ghost stories of the same name. It consists in four unrelated stories, of which my favourite was the one about the blind monk. There was a screening of this as part of the Bram Stoker Festival in Dublin with live music – more of this kind of thing, please!

Ringo Lam, City on Fire (龍虎風雲). Excellent; the soundtrack is A+, and I’ve had the piano riff from the credits stuck in my head for weeks. Here is a side-by-side showing the extent to which Reservoir Dogs was inspired by this film. I watched this with a Cantonese-speaking friend, and she informed me just how different the English translation of the title is. I had also noticed many parallels with the plot and themes of The Departed, but after looking it up afterwards, I was reminded that that film is a remake of a different Hong Kong crime film, namely Internal Affairs.

Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing. This is a documentary about the genocide of alleged communist sympathisers and ethnic Chinese following the 1965 coup by which Suharto came to power in Indonesia. Given that the governments since the transition to democracy have still been sympathetic to Suharto, very minimal archives have been released, and it’s unknown how many were killed, even to the nearest million. To make this film, Joshua Oppenheimer spent several years living in Indonesia and learning to speak fluent Indonesian, for the purposes of filming and partially befriending the perpetrators, who happily volunteered to reenact the executions.

I think The Act of Killing is a great achievement, and deserves its reputation as possibly the greatest documentary of all time. As someone who has watched a fair amount of Ken Burns, this is in a completely different league.

I continue to find it remarkable how little we all know about Indonesia. Next on my reading list about it is Suharto’s Cold War. William Liddle seems to be the closest thing to a William Dalryple for Indonesia, but his books are a tad specialised, and many aren’t available in English.

Finally, from YouTube, we have Bob James and Tame Impala on NPR Tiny Desk. I have also been watching footage from the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Finally, a speculative talk: cosmological natural selection as conceptual infrastructure for AI alignment. That is from the ODYSSEY conference, the second in the ILIAD series of alignment events. Confusingly, the all-caps titles don’t seem to indicate an acronym, although some backronyms have been suggested (“International League of Intelligent Agent Deconfusion”). I will buy dinner for the first person who can come up with a good AI safety backcronym for EPIC OF GILGAMESH.

1. Also a good time to be reminded that value-added tax creates less unnecessary pain than sales tax.

2. That story overlaps with the rising prominence of Arizona State University – previously “a party school for hot people” – which Nadia Asparouhova has written about here.