contra searching for your life mission, the perfect city & sleep prevents dementia
CC#71 - Why Care About Literature Reviews, the Boston Subway System & Junction
Hey there and welcome to ✨ CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter delivering inspiration from all over the internet to the notoriously curious.
Things I Enjoyed Reading.
🪺 Instead of Your Life's Purpose
Sometimes, I feel like there is some kind of a public consensus that everyone should find ‘that one mission that you truly burn for’ and then vigorously work towards achieving it for the rest of your life - this article very much questions this idea. Maybe living a ‘good’ life means we shouldn’t put all our eggs in one basket?
When there is only one possible source of meaning in our life, we adapt ourselves for efficiency: our goal might be to be a bed-net maximizer, win souls for Jesus, or stop Skynet. We make ourselves machine-like. When the world is full of possibilities for meaning, we adapt ourselves for resiliency, flexibility and maneuverability. Resiliency, because we must survive long enough to take advantage of these latent sources of meaning, and flexibility and maneuverability in order to act quickly and appropriately when they come up. Instead of looking for a cause to devote your life to, you might try to become someone who is useful and level-headed in a crisis, who is well connected and makes friends easily, or who regularly has good ideas.
👣 The Illusion of Choice
Sometimes the way systems are built, we can be left with the thought that we don’t have a choice. However, often we do have more choice than we think on first sight - a call for more agency.
Often, our byzantine systems make us think we have no choice in the matter, when we actually do.
They just don’t want you to know that, much less take action on it. It’s not true for everyone and not in every situation, but the point remains — we can undo most of this bullshit and build something better.
Reputable sources of information and action — cough cough — can expand your horizons and unlock choices you didn’t know you had, and new ones for people who’ve never had any.
We can subsidize healthier foods (for us and the soil) and small, Black, Brown, and Indigenous farmers too.
📚 Literature Reviews and Innovation
What is the merit of literature reviews and meta-studies? This article tries to summarize existing research on the impact of literature reviews for academic field formation and policy advice -> let’s do more meta-science ;)
Academic research isn’t only for academics though. We would presumably like our policymaking to also be based on evidence about what works, and literature reviews can in principle give a more accurate picture of what a scientific field has found. Do literature reviews therefore exert a stronger influence in policy-making than original research articles? As noted above, review articles are cited at about 1.8x the rate of original research by policy documents. But how much do those citations matter?
Food for Thought.
😴 I am a bit hesitant to claim that this is causal (and its just not early stages of dementia causing less sleep). Nonetheless I’d take this as another piece of supporting evidence that, sleep is actually important (for some good counter arguments see here).
🏙️ An experiment to build the perfect city (in the U.S.). I am sceptical whether it will work, but will definitely try to stay updated about it -no matter how things turn out there will for sure be some relevant lessons to be learned…
🌐 In the light of what happened at OpenAI this weekend - was it really just a network error?…
Random Stuff.
🏨 This app allows you to search for hotels based on their light exposure - so if you want to get away from artificial lights for your next holiday ‘dark hotels’ is your go to
🚇 An impressive interactive data visualisation article that ticks all the boxes - fun to play with, well explained and (at least for a person like me who will be spending some time in Boston) insightful.
🔭 The first images from the Euclid space mission (i.e. never reached before levels of space image quality) have been published by ESA - makes one feel small..
Personal Update.
Really having a hard time sticking to my schedule these days…
but I believe I have some good excuses:
I went to Junction in Helsinki (the biggest hackathon in Europe)
+ they had a rooftop sauna at the top
+ its insane - so many people, really cool atmosphere - the Finns seem to be really invested in pushing innovation / tech forward (for more on the Finnish tech ecosystem I can also recommend this recent article by Thomas)
+ I learned a ton of (so far) unnecessary stuff about audio processing & had fun filming workout videos at the hackathon venue (you can watch them here)
- it rained all the time
- probably I have not been the best team member - got reminded that it can be quite challenging to establish a common understanding about how to collaborate with strangers within a short amount of time
- thought I could just go back to business on Monday (after staying up ‘hacking’ until 4am on Saturday) but ended up with a bad migraine…
We recorded some new episodes for the PhD Pod - probably gonna be released early Jan - stay tuned!