This newsletter goes out to more than 1,000 ambitious frontier people. Please share it with a friend who would like it. And welcome to all the folks who joined this in the past week!
Hey team!
I’ve decided to break out my link posts into a separate monthly email. That email is today. Check out the opportunities, events, satire, and other links below.
OPPORTUNITIES
$10k FTX EA Fellowships to work in Bermuda.
Work with danah boyd! Internship opportunity: Sociotechnical Infrastructures (MSR New York City)
WorldCoin is arguably sketchy and arguably awesome. They’re hiring for Remote, Berlin, and SF.
Protocol Lab has a good RFS for Services for crypto-native Organizations
Roote is hiring a COO and a Founding Developer for Meem.Network, a wrapper on Hive.one to explore Twitter sub-graphs.
EVENTS
RadicalXChange. Denver, CO. Dec 17. Unconference on future political economies. I will be there!
Foresight’s Vision Weekend. SF. Dec 4 + 5. Biotech, AI, longtermism. I will be there!
Effective Altruist Events Calendar (recurring)
Interintellect Salons (recurring)
The Stoa (recurring)
Roote is giving a talk at The Stoa on Building The Wisdom Age Nov 18 at 9am PT.
SATIRE
McSweeney’s: It's Time We Get Back to the Traditional Family Values of Absentee Fathers
The Onion: Ferret Owner Under Impression Any Of Her Other Characteristics Matter
The Onion: City Of Denver Shuts Down Bar For Operating Without A Brewery
Babylon Bee: Verdict Is In: Jury Finds Kyle Rittenhouse 'Based' And 'An Absolute Chad'
Babylon Bee: Checkmate, Libs: Man Declares His Pronouns Are Letsgo/Brandon
Rhys: US Third Booster Shots Livestreamed to Rest of World, Just In Case They Didn't Hate Us Enough
Rhys: Breaking: Taliban Beards Are Gross And A Sign Of The Patriarchy
MUSIC
Tom Cardy is the next Marc Rebellet.
LINKS
-1) Pandora Papers were released and no one cared.
0) From TikTok this month:
1) COVID is moving from pandemic to endemic (just like 1918 flu is now endemic). Experts expect it to infect 25% of the population each year. It’s not a question of if you get COVID, but when. Once every four years.
2) The creator economy is failing to spread the wealth. (Or is it inevitable?)
Top 1% of Twitch streamers earn 50%+ all revenue
Top 1% podcasters earn almost all ad revenue
Top 10 Substacks make $20M
3) Focused-Research Orgs are great and you should start one.
4) My Experience with Leverage Research. Cults are scary. High-openness Bay Area has lots of downsides.
5) Good reframe for me. “GDP measures production growth in the least-revolutionized goods.”
6) Battery electric vehicles have accounted for 95% of personal vehicle unit sales growth in China in 2021.
7) And You Will Know Us by the Company We Keep. Eugene Wei with more brilliance on “graph design.” Funny quote below:
TikTok runs every candidate video through a two-stage screening process. It runs videos through one of the most terrifying, vicious quality filters known to man: a panel of a few hundred largely Gen Z users.
If those test viewers don't show any interest, the video is yeeted into the dustbin of TikTok, never to be seen again except if someone seeks it out directly on someone's profile.
8) Trying to get direct air capture from $500/ton to $50/ton.
9) HelionFusion raises $500M. Trying to demonstrate net electricity from fusion in 2024.
10) Global emissions have not actually decreased over the last 10 years (because land use was actually better than expected). Yay!
Dark line in the graph below shows how we’ve plateaued at 40 GtCO2, not increased to 45.
But a reminder that global temps continue to rise. It just means the acceleration is not accelerating.
11) Wolfram on building out the field of Complex Systems: Charting a Course for “Complexity”: Metamodeling, Ruliology and More.
12) r/place atlas. Understand every piece of r/place.
13) Good 10min Economist vid on how companies are using tech for ESGs.
Carbon pressure coming from norms not regulators
Rare uses contextual recruitment to prioritize students from tough childhoods that still performed relatively well (based on their context).
Tech to surveil and make sure workers aren’t working too much. (Reverse Amazon.)
AppliedDNASciences uses DNA to tag textiles as non-slave labor.
14) Two great new initiatives around self-taxing: High Impact Professionals and High Impact Athletes.
15) #TeamSeas has removed 14M lbs of plastic from the ocean.
16) Women and men have similar internal states (personality and cognition), but different external behaviors (actions and interests):
17) Trying to understand the Great Resignation and Striketober (100k people striking, one of the largest increases of organized labor in the twenty-first century!). Here’s my attempt to understand it.
Main thing is to think of it as the Great Work Transition instead of Great Resignation. Image below shows why we have a labor shortage:
18) In Defence of the Dietary Guidelines
Two great images.
a) Most Americans don’t eat enough veggies, fruits, or whole grains. And eat way too many refined grains.
b) In the end, it’s all about calories. More calories means more body weight.
Plus a related image. Instead of using MyPlate.gov, use the Harvard Healthy Eating Plate! Veggies, fruits, whole grains, and protein.
19) Topol updates to argue for boosters for all 40+.
20) lol. Bright colors!
21) Variant Fund is a great place to receive funding for the Ownership Economy.
22) ‘Likes’ and ‘shares’ teach people to express more outrage online.
23) Yup.
This is the answer for many of our why questions. "Why is X happening?" It's a good meme.
24) DeepMind announces Isomorphic Labs, AI-driven drug development.
Biology can be thought of as an information processing system. Taking this perspective implies there may be a common underlying structure between biology and information science - an isomorphic mapping between the two.
25) All Google searches go through NLP AI, BERT. That’s why we have BERTology.
26) Metaforecast is a good prediction market aggregator.
27) Prioritization Research for Advancing Wisdom and Intelligence
28) Michael Nielsen on Augmenting Long-term Memory. If you’re not doing Anki already, please start and lmk how I can help!
29) Cool SRS program for learning to code.
30) Consumer goods like Nestle are aligned with Paris Climate Agreement, while all energy and industry companies are not. Shell is the only good one. InfluenceMap ftw.
31) ISideWith is a cool way to align your positions with values instead of parties.
32) a16z Crypto’s Four Proposals to the Senate Banking Committee. Create ICANN for crypto!
33) Facebook's own data is not as conclusive as you think about teens and mental health
34) The case for more energy: America has been on a 45-year energy diet, and we ought to try and end it.
35) Estimates of economic capacity have consistently been revised down. Bad!
36) Yes!
37) Great to see Conscilience Project make videos.
38) Oblivion NPC memes are very sad.
39) Amazing thread against anti-wokist extremists.
40) RIP housing.
41) Starling Lab is a good new Web3 & Society lab.
42) TokenSPICE is a cool new release from the #TokenEngineering community to verify design flows.
43) Great new newsletters: Mirror newsletter, Steven Johnson newsletter Adjacent Possible, patio11 Bits About Money.
44) Public Goods Funding!
45) Agree with both takes.
Hope you have a good week! Warmth, Rhys
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