Welcome to Monday Dispatch, a bonus publication with additional notes, deep dives, reading recommendations, and business updates.
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In the past weeks, I’ve been busy with visiting family members, school holiday activities, and trying to re-establish a physical practice that goes beyond walking around the block and using a standing desk.
The results have been a collection of great memories, shared experiences, and sore muscles. But it also killed my writing momentum and put me back in a place where I spend most of my allotted writing time on a rambling first draft.
I hope you’ll bear with me while I get my thoughts in order. In the meantime, here are some interviews I think you’ll find worth listening to.
Gloria Mark’s interview on The Ezra Klein Show. I think it’s great
and her book Attention Span landed on such a popular podcast. The book was one of the most impactful and valuable I read in 2023, and the conversation between Gloria and Ezra is an excellent followup.The Deutsch Files I on Naval’s podcast. Naval Ravikant and
share an open-ended conversation with David Deutsch, touching on sci-fi, AGI and how ChatGPT and LLMs are not a step in that direction, creativity, and more. Long-time readers know how impactful David’s The Beginning of Infinity has been for me. Listening to David is always a source of inspiration and food for thought.Freakonomics Radio: Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia? An engrossing and concerning investigation of data fraud perpetrated by behavioral science superstars. Obviously, one cannot paint a complete and fair picture of the entire field from the actions of a few bad apples and the conversation in a single podcast interview, but what emerges from it is a system of misaligned incentives and lack of rigor, together with a field that tries to measure the complex phenomena in our minds. Once again, The Beginning of Infinity offers a good lens to apply to the issue, particularly chapter 12, A Physicist’s History of Bad Philosophy. The studies discussed in the podcast sound surprisingly similar to David’s fictional “spontaneous-human-creation count” study.
If you end up listening to those podcast, leave a comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts.