dropping out, carrying unanswered questions & the knowledge problem
CC#66 - Trying to be a Utility Optimizing Being, Air Pollution and EVs & Flying Green
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.
🗯️ How to Drop Out
From time to time I find myself (as maybe other people too?) drawn to idea of ‘dropping out’ - “leaving behind” the system, refusing to play our societies’ status games and trying to minimize the extent ones life is dependent on institutions. While this sounds romantic at first, reality can look a lot different. Interesting and quite bleak essay by someone who “dropped out”.
When you begin to get free, you will get depressed. It works like this: When you were three years old, if your parents weren't too bad, you knew how to play spontaneously. Then you had to go to school, where everything you did was required. The worst thing is that even the fun activities, like singing songs and playing games, were commanded under threat of punishment. So even play got tied up in your mind with a control structure, and severed from the life inside you. If you were "rebellious", you preserved the life inside you by connecting it to forbidden activities, which are usually forbidden for good reasons, and when your rebellion ended in suffering and failure, you figured the life inside you was not to be trusted. If you were "obedient", you simply crushed the life inside you almost to death.
Freedom means you're not punished for saying no. The most fundamental freedom is the freedom to do nothing. But when you get this freedom, after many years of activities that were forced, nothing is all you want to do. You might start projects that seem like the kind of thing you're supposed to love doing, music or writing or art, and not finish because nobody is forcing you to finish and it's not really what you want to do. It could take months, if you're lucky, or more likely years, before you can build up the life inside you to an intensity where it can drive projects that you actually enjoy and finish, and then it will take more time before you build up enough skill that other people recognize your actions as valuable.
Often we know what would be the rational, ‘correct’ thing to do in a given situation but we don’t do it anyways. Is it still worth striving for more rationality in our daily lives? A personal reflection on this with some worthwhile insights.
Our goal as individuals should probably be to become more rational and rigorous. We shouldn’t jump blindly into major decisions. However, in our desperation to find the perfect choice, we often sacrifice the one that gets us close enough. (…) I wish when I was a missionary I had focused less on converting and more on helping. I wish when I was at my previous startups I had focused more on building and less on winning. Sure, I may not have done exactly what I had thought I wanted, but finding ways to love the process would’ve allowed for better outcomes anyway. What we want is such an abstract idea, built on a foundation of shifting sand, that it is pointless to try to pick the optimal path to achieve it.
🎓 Peter Boettke on Austrian Economics and the Knowledge Problem, Pt. 1
This podcast is going quite a bit into economic theory and history. Nonetheless, I think the part of how AI and compute do/don’t relate to the ‘knowledge problem’ - i.e. how we can know people’s preferences - is quite interesting and something I hadn’t thought about before. And you get a free economic history lesson on Friedrich Hayek on top (which I think is interesting on its own, no matter if you agree/disagree with his thoughts).
On this special crossover episode, Ideas of India podcast host, Shruti Rajagopalan, interviews Peter Boettke on Austrian economics and the knowledge problem. In this, the first half of their conversation, Boettke speaks on the writings of FA Hayek, the knowledge problem, calculation versus coordination, markets and institutions, the marginalists, issues of perfect competition, and much more!
Food for Thought.
✈️ The aviation sector wants to reach net zero by 2050 - empty promises or actually possible? For me, flying is definitely one of the enviromentally damaging things that is hardest for me to abandon - so keeping my fingers crossed!
🛞 While - spoiler alert - the claim turns out to be wrong, its interesting to know that air pollution caused by exhaust is quite non-negligible.
🥕 Some evidence for quite large positive environmental effects of vegan diets - interesting insight: “It turned out that what was eaten was far more important in terms of environmental impacts than where and how it was produced.”
Random Stuff.
❓ I also read Paul Graham’s most recent essay on ‘How to do great work‘. While I think there isn’t much new in their if you read some of his older essays (not to say that it isn’t well written), there was one quote that stood out to me and that I just felt like sharing with you:
Unanswered questions can be uncomfortable things to carry around with you. But the more you're carrying, the greater the chance of noticing a solution — or perhaps even more excitingly, noticing that two unanswered questions are the same.
🍻 Looking at historical (before 1890) beer consumption it seems like people were drunk pretty much all the time before the industrial revolution. Also, 12.5% of people’s salary in 1734 was spent on beer on average…
🎭 Recently a big meta study on personality traits has been released - here are some of the traits that were generally found to be beneficial for a lot of things people usually consider as ‘good’. As found here, full paper here.
Personal Update.
Currently back in CPH and busy getting some actual work done.
Will head back to Austria - more specifically Linz - quite soon though for the three weeks “Ars Electronica Founding Lab Summer School” - really curious what will await me there…
Been tinkering around with some language model based chatbots, autonomous agents and other small applications. Really think there are lots of fun opportunities to explore and extremely excited about what things will happen in this space within the next year….