> “First: Survival is the primary need of civilization. Second: Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant. One more thing: To derive a basic picture of cosmic sociology from these two axioms, you need two other important concepts: chains of suspicion and the technological explosion.”
1. you can never know the intentions of other entities, and they cannot know yours (chain of suspicion)
As soon as you identify another entity in the forest, even if they cannot annihilate you at present and signal peace, both could change without warning. Therefore, the only rational move is to eradicate the other immediately. (Especially if you believe the other will deduce the same.)
Elimination in the book is basically sending a nuke, not a costly invasion force.
not sure it actually is true, but that's the argument in the book
You can turn to actual experts, e.g. YouTube or books. But yes, I have recently had the misfortune of working with a personal trainer who was using ChatGPT to come up with training programs, and it felt confusing and like I was wasting time and money.
Right, makes sense. I guess going into fitness I expected meat would be important for getting protein and might be worth a premium, but it's both expensive and requires time to cook where most vegetarian products can be eaten without any prep. The only appliance I need is a rice cooker, which has had an extremely high ROI. The only animal product I can't seem to remove is eggs because of choline.
For anyone who hasn't been to the grocery store recently, a rotisserie chicken can be had for about $8. That was wild to me when I stopped to think about it for a second: a chicken born and raised to adulthood, slaughtered, and brought to my local market all for under $8.
As someone arguing against vegetarians in the past, I get the point, but I actually made the switch recently, not because of ethics, but simply because of cost and laziness.
It's a silly story: I recently wrote a program to create my diet from the week based on local grocery store nutrition labels and prices for a couple hundred items, subject to constraints for calories, macronutrients (supporting my goals in the gym) and micronutrients (hit all RDIs for vitamins and minerals plus some speculative stuff). Meat is never included in the generated output because it's too expensive relative to what it offers from a nutrient perspective. All of my daily needs can be met for cheap and with minimal prep on a diet consisting basically of rice, beans, eggs, soy milk, oat milk, pea protein, Brussel sprouts, carrots, and apple juice, which works out to <$15/day for ~3000 calories; <$10/day if I remove some personalized constraints which adds lentils and substitutes cow milk in place of plant milks. Prior to my program, I was spending $20+/day buying groceries mindlessly or on takeout.
I've basically become a vegetarian out of sheer frugality and laziness (I don't like cooking and I don't like solving a puzzle to hit my macros each day). I imagine many people could be convinced to be weekday vegetarians from this angle, but it did take me several months to work through nutrition science books/videos to arrive at this point. (Shout out RP Strength.)
The other issue with my diet is that it is not optimized for taste or variety. I don't mind this (condiments go a long way and I'm pretty focused on my fitness goals), but I think I'm an outlier in this respect.
Anyway, all this to say I see an economic angle for hope, except that all messaging to the public on nutrition science is awful and confusing which leads to consumption decisions not based in any logical framework, and I doubt that behavior will change anytime soon unless we go through another economic shock.
It's not just a reaction to the fashion of the older generation. They occupy different mental spaces. Facebook is broadcast, to everyone you know, permanently. Snapchat is 1:1, and transient. Sending the same text message on different platforms can have significantly different connotations.
> Actually doing something effective about a problem sometimes means not doing anything that sounds like solving that specific problem is your real goal. And that's kind of a tough place to go mentally and emotionally for most people.
Can you give an example? I feel like there is a really key insight here but I'm having trouble parsing it.
Yes! Chaos Theory was my introduction to Tobin as well. As a teenager, I had no interest in music before then, being exposed only to my mom's soft rock CD collections and whatever pop music used to play on the radio. I was surprised to discover later that his music was used for the Toonami intros on Cartoon Network so maybe I was primed to like him before then. [1] That took me down an entire rabbithole of "intelligent dance music" (Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, etc.) and today I mostly enjoy PC Music / Hyperpop which is similarly avant-garde with the way it uses samples or completely synthetic sounds (e.g. SOPHIE, Cashmere Cat, 100 Gecs, AG Cook).
Tobin did a really wonderful interview in 2008 that made me really appreciate electronic music more when I read it regarding how drum and bass is truly avant garde given its manipulative use of samples rather than simply looping beats or lifting long samples because they need a saxophone somewhere: [2]
> Rusty: It seems like now, your more recent music has been more synthetic, more digital and less samples? Is that correct? Or are you just tweaking the samples so much?
> Amon Tobin: It's really just about manipulation now. Like I said, back in the early nineties, it was interesting just to take samples as they were and see what you could do with them. And now, the technology has advanced so much more and there's a lot more room for maneuvers between synthesizers and synthetic processes applied to recorded material and sampled material. So there's much more of a hybrid going on now as far as I'm concerned and so my music is maybe now a little bit less easy to define in terms of is it sampled best or is it synthesized or is it just, you know, I guess, electronic, really.
> ...
> Rusty: I know. I was going back through some of my older CD's from that period, which I hadn't listened to in a while, and I was like "That was really good." I mean, it's super stylistic, so you tend to burn out if you hear a little too much of it.
> Amon Tobin: Well, the interesting thing about drum and bass is that it was, to me it felt like it was a genuinely forward-thinking type of music. People were really trying to do new things. They weren't trying to be nostalgic or relive some golden era of music in the seventies. It was all about 'Let's try and make something truly futuristic and do things with production that had never been possible before.' And that spirit still remains, as small as the genre is. It's influenced a lot of other types of music which are much more in the forefront now. So, you know, I think it's normal. These things go in cycles. Things become, you know, they become very much in the spotlight.
A very modernist take, pushing boundaries for its own sake. Contrast with pop music which is exactly the opposite, being rearrangements of standards.
Somehow I find his music is perfect for working with code. It feels like it really meshes with my mind in a way I've never found with other artists.
Also was sad to see he recently retired from live shows, but am glad I got to see him live several times several times in San Franciso. He shows were always mind-blowing and it's such a pleasure to see a master at work. Plus I respected how humble he was; his talent is far far beyond artists who are more financially successful, and he avoids the spotlight. I wish there was more available about how his mind works, because it must be very unique.
There's usually a team that is directly responsible for the part of the product that generates revenue, and management loves them. Every other team is basically just support and may be necessary but they don't get as much attention.
Not an expert, but if you read any of Keynes, he's basically critiquing classical economics and pointing out some of the ways it fails to explain economic cycles, hence the invention of macroeconomics.
A lot of companies directly go against their users to enrich the owners, see Reddit right now. Just the rational move by companies that have established monopolies/oligopolies. Also companies that exploit negative externalities.
- There is a search cost of finding someone to trade with. Market makers streamline the process by always having a deal available. They might not offer you the best price you could get if you waited, but if you want to buy/sell a commodity right now you now have the option to do so, and probably removing the search costs from society as a whole is economically efficient.
- Special case of the above: They allow people who have want to trade huge amounts of a commodity a way to efficiently do so (no need to talk with multiple people; can do the trade all in one place).
- By making trading more efficient, society can get a better idea of the "true" price of things. Extremely important because prices guide investment. For example, if you're a farmer, and you're thinking about what crops to plant or a research lab thinking about where to focus your research. Having an efficient market with accurate prices ensures the economy grows at max speed.