[newsletter]
Why do people kill themselves? and other things
16 Aug 2024
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
Why do people kill themselves?
Excerpt: We’ve always had a troubled relationship with suicide. In any given period of history, you can see roughly two perspectives living in tension with one another. The first, that suicide is an affront of some kind, and the second, that suicide is something somehow righteous or noble. What’s interesting about these two competing attitudes around the act of suicide is that they more-or-less capture the reasons people kill themselves, and that those reasons help us understand the rise in rates today. In all cases, it’s very clear that there is a point of failure that seems so, so easy to do something about.
Main idea: Suicide is the interaction between personal despair and the failure of communities to provide reasons to live. We can’t answer Camus’ “one truly serious philosophical problem” for people, only they can. But we can provide an argument to live, by showing people where they fit.
Did a plague ruin the Roman empire? The Antonine Plague could be tied to many of the features of the decline.
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Cats grieve fellow pets. Science. Here’s a Guardian article explainer.
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Politicising on twitter makes you a less credible scientist. A “monotonic” penalty!
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An article on how to do a military draft without panic. The article itself is a little concerning, just by existing.
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How Athletes Get Great. It’s not 10,000 hours (but we already knew that).
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AI is slower, but much much cheaper than people:
several public models (Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o) complete a proportion of tasks similar to what humans can do in ~30 minutes … several public models (Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o) complete a proportion of tasks similar to what humans can do in ~30 minutes
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How to find new spiritual practices. It reminds me of Tara Burton’s thesis, an encouragement of ‘remixed’ spiritualites with an emphasis on a choose-your-own-adventure sort of thing. But I really wonder how fulfilling this ends up being.
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A surprise to no-one, gender-conformity is less good for women. NBER paper.
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Could Rome have had an industrial revolution? The author thinks it was the printing press (or lack thereof). But interesting throughout.
Adam Smith said “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice.” Rome had all of these and more, but yet did not succeed in cultivating an industrial revolution.
Why not? What was the binding constraint on a Roman industrial revolution?
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Ants are very cool. Here is one quote:
the algorithm Harvester ants use to regulate their foraging behavior across the desert is uncannily similar to the Transmission Control Protocol used to regulate data traffic on the internet, for example. Meaning that ants beat us to network design by a hundred million years.
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A touching suicide pact? Scientists Pat and Peter Shaw died in a suicide pact. Here, their daughters reflect on their parents’ plan - and their remarkable lives. Poignant. Inspired me to write about why people kill themselves (usually it is not so poignant).
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,