Each Sunday I compose a list containing the most thought-provoking and interesting content I’ve consumed during the past week. Primarily as a way to keep inventory of material that influenced me and my way of thinking.
Writings/Essays
Why Everything Is Becoming a Game by Gurwinder.
Respect is so important to humans that it’s a key reason we evolved to play games. Will Storr, in his book The Status Game, charted the rise of game-playing in different cultures, and found that games have historically functioned to organize societies into hierarchies of competence, with score acting as a conditioned reinforcer of status. In other words, all games descend from status games. The association between score and status has grown so strong in our minds that, like pigeons pecking the button long after the food dispenser has stopped dispensing, we’ll chase scores long after everyone else has stopped watching.
Kaczynski’s theories eerily prophesize the capture of society by gamification. While he overlooked the benefits of technology, he diligently noted its dangers, recognizing its role in depriving us of purpose and meaning. Today the evidence is everywhere: religion is dying out, Western nations are culturally confused, people are getting married less and having fewer children, and many jobs are threatened by automation, so the traditional pillars of life — God, nation, family, and work — are weakening, and people are losing their value systems. Amid such uncertainty, games, with their well-defined rules and goals, provide a semblance of order and purpose that may otherwise be lacking in people’s lives. Gamification is thus no accident, but an attempt to plug a widening hole in society. Unfortunately, it seems to be only a band-aid. Kaczynski observed that surrogate activities rarely kept people contented for long. There were always more stamps to collect, a better car to buy, a higher score to achieve. He believed artificial goals were too divorced from our actual needs to truly satisfy us, so they merely served to keep us busy enough not to notice our dissatisfaction. Instead of a fulfilled life, a life filled full. Today, people increasingly live inside their phones, bossed around by notifications, diligently collecting badges and filling progress bars, even though it doesn’t make them happy. On the contrary, substantial research comprising over a hundred studies finds that prioritizing extrinsic goals over intrinsic goals — in other words doing things to win prizes and achieve high scores rather than for the inherent love of doing them — leads to lower well-being.
While Kaczynski wanted to demolish industrial society and return humanity to an agrarian life, US defense secretary Robert McNamara wanted the opposite: to use American industrial might to crush the agrarian society of Vietnam. McNamara was a statistician who believed what couldn’t be measured didn’t matter. He charted progress in the Vietnam war by body count, because it was simple to measure. It was his way of keeping score. But his focus on what could be easily measured led him to overlook what couldn’t: negative public opinion of the US Army both at home and in Vietnam, which deflated US morale while boosting enemy conscription. In the end, the US was forced to withdraw from the war, despite winning the battle of bodies, because it had lost the battle of hearts and minds. Thus, the McNamara fallacy, as it came to be known, refers to our tendency to focus on the most quantifiable measures, even if doing so leads us from our actual goals. Put simply, we try to measure what we value, but end up valuing what we measure.
What makes pathological gameplaying so dangerous is that the more harm it does, the more alluring it becomes. If your baby is dead, why not raise a virtual one? If your life of playing video games has stopped you finding a girlfriend, why not play the AI girlfriend game? Thus, bad games form a feedback loop: they distract us from pursuing the things that will bring us lasting contentment, and without this lasting contentment, we become ever more dependent on false, transient metrics like scores and leaderboards to imbue our lives with meaning. All the things a gamified world promises in the short term — pride, purpose, meaning, control, motivation, and happiness — it threatens in the long term. It has the power to detach people from life itself, rewriting their value systems so they favor the recreational over the real, and the next moment over the rest of their lives.
The Dangers of Imitation – The Impropriety of Imitating Spenser by Samuel Johnson.
In science, which, being fixed and limited, admits of no other variety than such as arises from new methods of distribution, or new arts of illustration, the necessity of following the traces of our predecessors is indisputably evident; but there appears no reason, why imagination should be subject to the same restraint. It might be conceived, that of those who profess to forsake the narrow paths of truth, every one may deviate towards a different point, since, though rectitude is uniform and fixed, obliquity may be infinitely diversified. The roads of science are narrow, so that they who travel them, must either follow or meet one another; but in the boundless regions of possibility, which fiction claims for her dominion, there are surely a thousand recesses unexplored, a thousand flowers unplucked, a thousand fountains unexhausted, combinations of imagery yet unobserved, and races of ideal inhabitants not hitherto described.
Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love by Kyle Chayka.
At first, I would rewatch “In the Mood for Love” just to luxuriate in its ambience: the vibe is compelling enough. But my reading of the film’s details changed as I got older. I returned to it in the giddy swing of crushes and then in the hungover aftermath of breakups—it serves equally well for both—including an almost-relationship that bore some resemblance to Wong’s story. With experience, an edge of irony crept into my interpretation. It is the belief of a teen-ager that love is wholly grand and tragic, that the barrier to happiness is the circumstance keeping fated lovers apart. If only Chow and Su could meet outside their deceitful partners and watchful neighbors! But we have a tendency to cause our own problems in love, sometimes by accident and sometimes out of a subconscious desire for the problem itself. In the course of the film, Chow and Su chase and miss each other so frequently that the pursuit becomes an existential joke. Su declines to flee with Chow to Singapore, then appears there, steals into his apartment (a Wong Kar Wai trope), and calls him at his office, only to hang up without a word. Chow returns to the building where they met but doesn’t inquire deeply enough to learn that Su has moved back in. Rather than seeking to dispel ambiguity, they embrace it.
How I Think about Debt by Morgan Housel.
I think this is the most practical way to think about debt: As debt increases, you narrow the range of outcomes you can endure in life.
Podcasts/Conversations
The Postmodern Subject and ”Ideology without Ideology” (Zizek, Byung Chul Han, Marx), Philosophize This!
What I Learned This Week with Kiril Sokoloff, Library of Mistakes.
Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity, Conversations with Tyler.
Brent Johnson: Dollar Milkshake Update In a World of Global Uncertainty, MacroVoices.
Lowering the Cost of being Long Commodities with Hari Krishnan, Top Traders Unplugged.
Long vol, short prediction models 