Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1054
Emotional rebound, dying boomers, a new domestic invention, EA idiocy, Occam's Razor for Techno Optimism, secular pedestrianism as a movement, some more RFK stuff
Good morning! Oh man. What a day, shiny and chrome. Feeling much better. Thank you for all of your kind words. Facebook contingent of GMHHAY readership, as un-measurable as you are from a web analytics POV, really came through yesterday.
Shit yeah get ready for the best GMHHAY ever.
Some follow-ups on other topics from yesterday:
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There was a moment, maybe 20 minutes after finishing GMHHAY, I was right in the middle of my (additional, private) 750 words, and I could feel the whole day standing on a precipice. Like I could just descend into utter misery and non-productivity, or I could rally and get through the day. That moment that, in hindsight, you know you should have done differently and it seems so easy when you’re not in it, but impossible when you’re in it. And boy howdy did I want to mope. But I pulled through. I am very proud of myself.
It is no exaggeration to say that I owe it to that news about a new Mary Chain album. That really was the first push. The fact that it took my wife an additional two hours to get Jane to finally consent to go to school, well, I have sympathy for those two hours spent by my wife, but it sure made me feel better as a parent. I bet I coulda done it too, if I had two more hours before delving into an impossibly stressful work day. Right? Right?
A lot of parenting is thinking of new, impossible, diverse things to say to motivate a kid. Infinite puzzle solving, never the same, Emma told me that one of her friends recently said to her. Really is something.
Anyway, by the end of the day, I was feeling just ducky. And then my (work) lawyer called with some great news, which is exactly what you want to have happen when your lawyer calls you at 8PM. Man. She is awesome. We have been doing business together, along with my equally awesome personal lawyer, for over a decade. Just great peeps. They should all pass the bar in NC and make my life easier.
And then, of course, war criminal Kissinger died. Jimmy Carter has outlived Kissinger. That is nice.
Sad about Rosalyn, though. I watched a few minutes of her funeral when I was chatting with my mom at the other house and seeing Jimmy there really touched me. He was no saint in his presidential youth but he really did become a model citizen, worthy of admiration. Melania was smart to show up alone and her outfit was fine but she is a first lady and she knew she was gonna sit in the front and everyone else in the front was wearing black and it wouldn’t have killed her to go with tradition when you’re gonna sit up front.
And then Charlie Munger died and I suppose we all knew that was coming too, man, we really are on quite the run of elder boomer deaths here do we need to write up a list for someone because I have a few ideas. I am probably vastly more sympathetic to Kissinger’s existence than the average far-leftie, but that dude was still an unrepentant (I assume) war criminal so I’m thinking maybe a tradnews blackout today cuz even I, schooled at a college of international relations in the tank to faux centrism, don’t need to hear someone say he had some really good ideas.
Okay, I made a new invention last night. Well that’s a lie, I thought one up. I want a ceramic cone, two inches high, one inch round, sitting on a found plate, and the plate has a lip. Sorta like a miniature traffic cone sitting on a tea saucer. I want this as an item on which to set my toothpaste cap in the morning, so I do not get toothpaste schmutz all over my counter. I am sick of that. Ideally, this would be made out of marble or stone, super weighty, but I’m thinking probably ceramic would work. Or metal.
Do I really need a toothpaste cap stand? Could I immediately put the toothpaste cap back on the tube after putting the paste on the brush? Well, yes, but then I gotta put my toothbrush down to do it. Waste of time, picking things up and putting them down.
Could I buy toothpaste that comes in one of those infernal, modern stand-up tubes? Clearly you did not have an unresolved Linda Ronstadt crush in your childhood. And Close-up does not come in anything but a traditional tube.
(Side note about the Amish: clearly a toothbrush tube is just as modern and infernal than a toothbrush pump, but it was tech that existed when I was a child, so it is simple and classical and harmless, anyway, why is it that wheels are okay for Amish people? It’s still technology. I should really look into this.)
This toothpaste-cap-holder epiphany last night made me realize I still desperately want the egg cracking plate I thought of before. I can just picture these items so clearly and I wish I could get them made somehow, but I am not really ready to become a stone carver, and I don’t want them 3D printed out of whatever lightweight metal those can work with. I want these things to have substance.
But I bet I’m not the only person out there who would want these if they existed.
Any ideas to further the advancement of these inventions is welcome. Wanna go into business together?
Speaking of being the only person who had these thoughts, I read a long article about the founding of Effective Altruism last night (thank you, Amber). It was written before SBF was exposed as a criminal and he was funding a good chunk of the movement, so it’s fun to have that secret knowledge while reading the article. Dustin Moskowitz seems to be another big funder, which is a big sad because I really love him on Threads these days and that movement has suffered from regulatory capture, the regulators being the hectoring hectors of the movement. Anyway, the early part, the part they call the Bed Net Era or something like that, I could totally see me having gotten wrapped up in, were I, oh, ten to twenty years younger like these people, wrestling with thoughts about maximal impact and morality and numbers. Oh and I was an utter failure at basic logic (fun fact: logic and philosophy are not the same thing and expertise in one does not immediately lend itself to the other). Like I am always thinking about total number of lives saved, regardless of rich or poor black or white etc. That part of the movement seemed all right and I even felt glimmers of excitement while reading the article.
But then the whole thing went off the rails when they started thinking about the future, and they basically stumble into about ten logical failures at once, just utter collapse of any sort of rationality. It is entirely understandable that the critics of the movement think this was all cynicism based since they conveniently arrived at the conclusion that being really rich, personally, was societally good. The flaws in their thinking are so, so stupid, every one of you could see them even on a sick, drunken day. I feel kinda bad for then for their blindness.
Anyway, the world really needs a new, secular, antithetical movement to them, a movement that is really about, surprise, surprise, the mundane and the pedestrian, and the utter denial of great man theory or any sort of encouragement of personal messianic tendencies.
Which, of course, is my whole thing these days. Thank you to Buzz, Abigail, and everyone else who got me set on this path. It really is the best.
Artisinal toothpaste caps, shit yeah.
Oh yeah on that topic I figured out the butter situation, and you know what, really is a great metaphor for EA’s failings. You know what the best spreading-cold-butter-on-toast solution is? It’s not a gadget or a temperature change. You just scrape off only a little bit of butter, only with a single side of your knife. Bob’s your uncle. Problem solved. No technology is needed.
Occam’s Razor of techno futurism: sometimes you should just buy bed nets for malaria rather than found an $80 Billion AI company.
There’s a part, really just an aside, in (EA acolyte) Bostrom’s Superintelligence, where, for all the bluster of the whole book, he says something like “really the best solution I can come up with to save us from AI is to put the AI’s mission in an envelope and lock it in a safe and tell the AI the mission is in the safe, and it can only guess what it says, which will keep the AI from ever knowing exactly the mission, so it will always have to hedge and can’t go too extremely in one direction or another.” And clearly Bostrom doesn’t remember writing it nor do any of the current-variant EA people remember reading it. Because boy have they gone way too far on the — really very valid — “AI could kill us” hypothesis at the expense of other ones when in fact humanity is just as likely to die off, Children of Men-style, by long Covid leading to impotence or something.
Because absolutely everyone has long COVID now, you know that right? You’re not getting old. It is long COVID that’s screwing with your memory and your energy.
Was that saracasm? Truth? Who knows!
Just had to tell my spell checker to learn “Bostrom” and I am resentful of it.
I mean I do think AI could kill us. But it’s just one thing! Lots of things could kill us. I am vastly more sympathetic to the AI-could-kill-us theory than most. I just wrote about it like two days ago!
Speaking of! Matt Levine had a great story yesterday about a new study offering evidence of exactly this. Some people made a trading AI and told it to follow the rules and not insider trade and not lie and then like ten minutes later it was insider trading and lying about it, so, you know, super encouraging! The risk is real!
But these people! C’mon man. Hedge your bets. Listen to that one passage in Bostrom everyone seems to forget about: assume all your knowledge is about something where the true knowledge is in an envelope, locked in a safe. Always assume you could be wrong! Hedge it!
Also all the smart people can’t go become rich people and donate to charities because then only non-smart people will found charities or work at them and you won’t have anything to donate to how is that not obvious oh right I guess all charities should be attached to runaway for-profit enterprises with mercurial, dishonest CEOs who play to public pressure to keep their job when a modicum of oversight is applied cool cool.
If none of this makes any sense to you that is totally cool and I am very jealous.
OH: god. one more thing. Politics. A friend wrote yesterday and said she had recently gone and visited all of her Trumpy relatives and they were all gaga for RFK Jr so maybe he is taking away from Trump. Maybe everyone just wants an outsider to stick it to the man, that is probably 90% of Trump’s polling these days, and maybe they are more or less indifferent to which outsider. This definitely supports my “The Rock should run for president” theory, but maybe it makes RFK okay? I mean, in the sense that maybe he will fuck this for Trump. I am not convinced, and I still dislike the guy, but it is an anecdotal data point.
I don’t have any pithy Jane stories to tell about yesterday because Emma took bedtime for me because I had such a rough day (my wife rules), and we did morning so quickly and perfectly today that there wasn’t a lot of time. We were so early to the school we had to wait to drop her off. Man, that is like heroin to me these days.
Saw a Rivian in the school loop. I’m not the only electric truck there anymore. Annoying.
Oh I did tell Jane this morning I wanted one new song during Daddy Jane Dance Party tonight and she shut that shit down so fast. She did tell me in the car she liked “Just one Fix” by Ministry, though.
Maybe I should show her that video.
Oh shit. Shane MacGowan died. Fuck. He’s not a boomer! C’mon man.
Pour one out.
Justa mix for today. But man, it is a good one. Frickin Live, man. Oh and this Ragana song rules. Total metal ballad style but for the modern era. And there is a new Splashdown song, which is just bonkers. Congrats, Kasson. And “Primitive Painters” came on randomly this morning on the drive home and Cherry Red put a remastered version of the video out this week so clearly it’s having a moment. A classic. I wonder if Liz ever sang it live with them.
Until tomorrow. I do hope this edition lived up to the hype.