This newsletter is supported by Roote—an audacious path forward for the internet age.
It goes out to more than 1,000 ambitious frontier people: bentoists, sociotechnical researchers, progress studiers, effective altruists, metamodernists, ~gameB players, crypto-anarchosyndicalists, social justice activists, VCs, doughnut economists, systems thinkers, and more. Share it with a friend!
Hi you! You’re looking good today.
1) I’m starting a new company, Roote.
Our mission is to clarify root-level systems to help us find the route. Three notes on it:
A. Please let me know if you have any feedback on the site! You’re seeing v1. I’m especially interested—is it clear what we do? And what would make you join the fellowship?
B. We’re starting with the Roote Fellowship—a cohort of ambitious frontier people who want to build the next paradigm. We’re launching our first cohort on August 1st—please apply here or reach out personally if you’re interested! (We’ll have more specific details on the curriculum soon.)
C. Also, please let me know if you’re interested in helping out. We’re looking for mentors, people who have run online cohorts, general operations, and anything else.
2) My podcast is back! In 2017, it was called Creating a Humanist Blockchain Future 😂. Then at MIT, it was called Grey Mirror. Now, it’s simply called The Rhys Show. Hopefully I won’t change the name again :).
In my first episode back (68th total), I interview Yancey Strickler on Bentoism and Paradigm Change. Please give it a listen/subscribe and let me know what you think!
3) I gave a talk at RadicalXChange about my piece: Marriage Counseling with Capitalism. The recording is here. Check it out to understand how our new 4-part paradigm is manifest in humanity’s responses to COVID and George Floyd.
4) I restarted my Patreon. If you’ve been enjoying my writing, podcasting, or vision, I’d be honored by your support. (And of course, all good if not!)
LINKS
1) 20+ Problem Areas from 80,000 Hours. This piece looks at other possible focus areas for the Effective Altruism (EA) movement. Fwiw, my work mostly focuses on “#9: broadly promoting positive values”.
Related: It’s been interesting to see EA get increasingly interested in Progress Studies—see #17: economic growth. The Long-Term Future Fund and OpenPhil both support Roots Of Progress. Also, OpenPhil recently published research on Modeling the Human Trajectory. It’s a good piece. This is my favorite graph from that piece. It shows how “progress-y” the 1800s were, and how “non-progress-y” we’ve been since 1990.
2) Our collective sensemaking capabilities are still amazingly weak but it’s nice to see new experiments in Coherent Pluralism. Letters.wiki has been around for a bit—it’s a platform for thoughtful conversation in the form of letters. This week I learned about Pairagraph, which seems very similar to Letters.wiki. If you’re interested in learning both sides of a debate, check either of them out. Good to see competition in the “Thoughtful Internet Dialogue” space. Let a Race to the Top begin! (Or, if you’re interested in what debate looks like without a good sensemaking protocol, see this.)
3) I love the simple, ironic humor in r/TheGreyPill. 😂
4) Good market map for crypto. Try to find Gods Unchained, Optimism, and MetaCartel!
JOBS / OPPORTUNITIES
The inaugural Alfred Landecker Democracy Fellowship gives €10,000 to 30 young leaders to explore the intersection of COVID and democracy. The fellowship goes from Oct 2020-Oct 2021. Apply by August 2.
Effective Giving is hiring an operations manager. Great team and good opportunity to advise a billionaire’s giving (+ partnership with OpenPhil).
1517 Fund started Invisible College: $50,000 investments in pre-college R&D-stage teams that don’t want to go to Zoom University. Related: the Altman’s have started Apollo Fund, which invests $3M in R&D-stage businesses.
EVENTS
Weekly Bento (recurring, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays).
Effective Altruist Events Calendar (recurring)
Interintellect Salons (recurring)
The Stoa (recurring)
Foresight Institute (recurring)
MUSIC
Art is an amazing mirror of society. My playlist this week shows how musicians have been processing George Floyd: Justice is the Chorus.
This playlist was derived from (and inspired by) Glenn McDonald, a Spotify data guru and the creator of EveryNoiseAtOnce. Here’s how he created his two “Justice is the Chorus” playlists:
I spent a couple days reading every article I could find about new protest songs, collecting them, and then running a lot of iterative data-analysis over the listening and playlist-making patterns of hundreds of millions of Spotify listeners to find what else the people who know those songs know, and then repeating the process until everything else it gave me was old.
Praise patterns from data!
And here are some of my favorite lyrics from the playlist:
Everybody wanna be an athlete, everybody wanna rap on beats, everybody wanna eat watermelon and fried chicken. Everybody wanna be black, but don't nobody wanna be a n****.
This is for the souls who didn’t get captured on an iPhone. So many names that didn’t get a hashtag.
Mr. Officer: what if that was my brother, what if that was my dad, what if that was my uncle, what if that was all I had.
They don’t want me to win, they don’t want to me to eat, they don’t want to see a young black man succeed, they don’t want to see me take my brothers out of the streets.
Look at me I'm melanated. You probably hate it but I celebrate it. I made it here I wasn’t 'posed to make it. It's the sweet taste of melanin baby.
Moral of the story everybody needs a lil mercy.
And of course, the playlist has Beyonce’s new track. Enjoy it!
Thanks as always for reading. Please share this newsletter if you like it or reply if you have feedback!
Hope you have a good week. Warmth, Rhys