Early retirement was always the default. “Even during the commercial efflorescence of the late Republic and Principate, no one argued that accumulation was virtuous in itself. The rich man who kept working when he could afford otium was pitiable or… Read More »Burnout is a Modern Invention
We are currently spending tens of billions to train machines to think and to be honest, the results are not that great still. What if we invested all the money into educating all the people that are living right now?… Read More »Billions on Education
Writing stuff down always helps. It helps clear thoughts, focus, remember later, revisit and edit and much more. I am always surprised how many people are uncapable of taking notes. LLM tools so far still take shitty notes and even… Read More »Taking Notes
Many people, when trying to learn new stuff, read an article or a book, or watch a video or listen to some friend or coach, and start applying the stuff. This is also standard advice. Many people say it is… Read More »Indoctrinating vs. Educating Yourself
It is good to know how stuff breaks. “increasing complexity yields diminishing marginal returns: each new layer of administration, infrastructure, or technology demands ever-greater energy and material inputs for proportionally smaller benefits. When the energy surplus required to sustain this… Read More »Collapse: A Framework for Understanding and Navigating the Decline of Industrial Civilisation
Garbage in Garbage out. [The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast] 556. How Social Media Is Wrecking Kids’ Lives and Stealing Their Childhood | Jonathan Haidt #theJordanBPetersonPodcast https://podcastaddict.com/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast/episode/203893309 via @PodcastAddict
Rome lasted a really long time. “Sallust’s complaints about Roman decadence – which date to the first century B.C. nearly five centuries before its ‘fall‘ – are often quoted as somehow explaining Rome’s eventual demise, but Rome wasn’t even done… Read More »Collections: The Fremen Mirage, Part II: Water Spilled on the Sand
Unfortunately not about Fremen but still great series. “The opposite of Fremenism is almost invariably termed ‘decadence.’ This is the reserve side of this reductive view of history: not only do hard conditions make for superior people, but that ‘soft’… Read More »Collections: The Fremen Mirage, Part I: War at the Dawn of Civilization
Automation cannot solve all science questions. “Yet as neuroscientist Anil Seth keenly observed, AlphaFold relies on the same underlying Transformer architecture as LLMs, and no one confuses AlphaFold with being a mind. Are we supposed to interpret that such an… Read More »The Death Of The Scientist
Knowing a lot of frameworks helps you also outside of history. “Historians learn a lot of different frameworks because each one exposes the gaps in the others: there is no perfect framework (and no way to proceed without a framework… Read More »Collections: What Do Historians Do? – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry