studying alocohol, playing games for a living & hanging out
CC#57 - Copenhagen DOX, Deep Talks & the Scaling Potential of Large Language Models
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.
🎮 The AppetiZIRP
Really interesting exploration of the potential implications of increasing automation on our worklives. Will we all play games instead of going to work - or is that in some sense maybe what we are doing already?
We’re still some years away from computers and robots wiping out the subwork of humanity, so the jury is still out, but I think (..), it’s that humans are competitive animals who derive meaning from work. Maybe this, too, will change with time, but until thousands of years of evolution’s hard wiring are re-wired, I assume we’ll want to keep striving towards something.
My guess is that work and games are going to continue to blend.(…)
Many are already engaged in jobs that require an applied version of Asimov’s broad liberal arts program. Learn broadly, and apply the knowledge to games wrapped up as work.
I’ll pick on myself here. I get to spend my days reading, having conversations with really smart people, making “art,” and writing. My days sound a lot like what Asimov predicted they would. But I need to make a living and feel like I’m making some sort of difference, so I send this newsletter to 188k people and try to grow it and find sponsors and compete to invest in companies that have a shot at making life better for humans and try to help them win. It’s a modern aristocratic life, wrapped in a work game.
🥗 My Primal Scream of Rage: The Big Alcohol Study That Didn't Happen.
Scientific evidence about the impact of alcohol on health is inconclusive - some say all alcohol is bad, some say moderate consumption can actually be beneficial. So one might wonder why nobody ever did a big randomized study to figure this out once and for all - this article tells the story of why. Generally, for anybody interested in nutrition, I can highly recommend the newest issue of the Asterisk magazine.
So we don’t know if moderate drinking is bad for you. It almost certainly causes harms like cancer, but it might help heart disease enough to offset those harms. In the US, around 20% of adults drink 1-2 drinks per day. Even if the effects are modest, the collective impact is huge. Second perhaps to caffeine, alcohol is humanity’s favorite drug. We need to know what it does.
This is the story of a trial that came close to answering this question and then exploded. At first, this looks like a simple story of corruption, but when you look closely, it’s a very complicated story of corruption.
🛋️ The Case for Hanging Out
A thoughtful story about why we should put more time aside for, well, simply hanging out with friends and doing nothing in particular. And why we should certainly not feel ‘guilty’ about that.
I can’t be the only one for whom memories of ages 16 to, say, 25 consist mostly of sitting around bedrooms, crappy dorm rooms, and crappier apartments, doing nothing much at all. I had jobs that didn’t pay a lot, so I didn’t have a ton of money to go out to bars or clubs, which is why instead I hung out for hours with groups of friends: telling jokes, venting about life, talking earnestly about politics and sarcastically about art (or vice versa).
Those years, as Liming writes, were “almost effortlessly social.” But nowadays, though hanging out with friends still happens—around living rooms and fire pits, on scheduled and rescheduled college-friend weekends—it’s an effortful pastime that requires coordination of calendars and a flurry of planning texts. I remember once, when I was in college, wandering over to my friend Ehren’s apartment, letting myself in, and watching whatever he had going on the TV. I knew he was there; I could hear him peeing in the bathroom. When he came out, he exhibited zero surprise to find me on the couch. It’s impossible to imagine doing such a thing now, even with my closest friends.
Food for Thought.
✈️ Wondering what this means in relation to climate change? Many people say we need more innovation to enable technologies to mitigate climate change. Thus this justify more international air travel?
🖥️ Informative estimates on the future of scaling large language models. What are the current limitation of existing AI technology and when (and why) should we expect progress to slow down?
🗣️ I am definitely one of ‘most people’ i.e. someone who often shys away from deep talk. And while I feel that this study just confirms something I already ‘knew’ - that deep talk creates better relationships and is less awkward than expected - reading this in black on white definitely reinforces my resolution to ‘push’ conversations to the deep end more often.
Random Stuff.
📃 A list of 137 ‘lifehacks’ - many of them are more like ideas or principles to live by. Not specifically endorsing any of them but I can recommend browsing through the list to get some inspiration on habits/principles to trial in your own life.
you’ll learn 10x more by talking to the paper’s author for 30 minutes versus reading it for 30 minutes
you can’t improve what you can’t measure. if you want to improve on ground-truth, measure ground-truth
never give up
we become the people whose opinion we care about
we become the people we spend the most time (physically and mentally) with
get to the point
who do you want to be more like? write a list
set 5 minute timers and write next steps
set a 5 minute timer and start doing the next step
how do you feel – not think! – about your current top goal?
🔎 Google launched ‘Dataset Search’ last month - a dedicated search engine for datasets.
💭 Another interesting self-experiment. Short but interesting read. Would you be up for it?
Personal Update.
Currently back in Austria for about 2 weeks (let me know if you are around and up for hanging out!)
Spent the last week attending the Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival’s academy class on SCIENCE:NATURE, “exploring the intersection between science, nature and cinema.” Got to watch lots of documentary films, discuss with interesting people and learn more about making movies. Definitely an experience out of my ‘normal bubble’, but happy that I got the chance to do it and venture into the fields of arts & film for a bit.
Big recommendation for ‘Matter out of Place’ - an impressive documentary about waste. To me it ticks all the boxes - its filled with stunning images and holds up a mirror to humanity without being normative. But if you watch it, do so in the cinema, its a whole different experience - I promise.
Picture from our screening of ‘Matter out of Place’
