drugs and human progress, futarchy & working in vr
CC#25 - NASA crashing a spacecraft into an asteriod, a town of millionaires & monte carlo simulation
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.
This guy has spent over 4,500 hours working within his home-office virtual reality setup. Maybe rather buy a pair of VR goggles than an additional monitor?
What’s it like to actually use? In a word: comfortable. Given a few more words, I’d choose productive and effective. I can resize, reposition, add, or remove as much screen space as I need. I never have to squint or lean forward, crane my neck, hunt for an application window I just had open, or struggle to find a place for something. Many trade-offs and compromises from the past no longer apply — I put my apps in convenient locations I can see at a glance, and without getting in my way. I move myself and my gaze enough throughout the day that I’m not stiff at the end of it and experience less eye strain than I ever did with a bunch of desk-bound LCDs.
💊 Higher than the Shoulders of Giants; Or, a Scientist’s History of Drugs
The central claim here is that drugs unleash innovative potential and humanity would be better off if drugs were legal. Not sure if I agree, nonetheless, the history of drugs is a truly thought provoking and entertaining read in its own right.
Right now, we are losing the talent of people in whom drugs would unlock genius. A small number are still rich enough and privileged enough to both take drugs and get away with it. Anyone who has that potential, but who is currently too poor or too marginalized, will never get access to the drugs they need to change the world. Even the rich and well-connected may not be able to get the amount of drugs they need, or get them often enough, to finish their great works. Not everyone is Kary Mullis, able to synthesize their own LSD. Who knows what discoveries we have missed over the last 50 years.
We’ve heard a lot of moral and social arguments for legalizing drugs. Where are the scientific and economic arguments? Drugs are linked with great scientific productivity. Genome sequencing is the last big thing to happen in science, and it happened courtesy of LSD.
📈 Tyler Cowen: Production Function [Podcast/Transcript]
Inspiring Interview with economics professor & writer Tyler Cowen featuring a wide range of topics - productivity, identifying talent, becoming a superb teacher, finding good food, understanding music…
I would stress there’s really not any field where I’m smarter than the people who are really smart in that field or that method of thought. There’s some kind of bridge building I can do that is scarce. But like in any particular area, I’m really backward compared to the very most skilled, talented people. But I recognize that, and I’ve known it for a long time. I’ve built kind of my whole career and modes of doing around knowing these other people are smarter than I am. And again, that’s a kind of smarts too. I get that, if I’m allowed to boast again.
Food for Thought.
💸 What’s the consequence for universal basic income?
👩⚖️👨⚖️ Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin on “Futarchy”, an alternative government form based on the principle of “voting values, but bet believes”.
📴 Who can relate? More detailed coverage in this article.
Random Stuff.
📊 It’s crazy hard to estimate how much time you will need to complete a software project. Why not stop doing estimation in the first place and do some Monte Carlo simulation instead?
⚖The Atlas of Inequality shows you how similar the incomes of visitors to individual coffee shops, movie theaters, stores etc. are.
☄ NASA launched a mission which will consist of deliberately crashing a spacecraft into an asteriod. The goal is to find out whether this method can be used to alter the path of space rocks (so we know when we’ll encounter a potentially dangerous one some day in the future).
My Update.
Not many news. Much rain, much hygge, much coffee, all good. ☕🤗
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