Interesting Things I've Read (or Watched) /

Some Interesting Things I’ve Read/Watched: Link Dump #4

I am currently doing what I am going to call “spring cleaning” on my blog. What this means is that I want to get rid of a huge backlog of articles and things I started writing about in the past because I have lots of ideas for new things I want to do here (how shocking), and I’m honestly not super happy with the direction this blog has been taking. I don’t think I write enough about my own ideas, or about the things I spend hours learning about. In fact, I don’t think I write enough at all.

For the next little while, I will be posting a lot of linkdump-type posts on this blog. This is because there are lots of links to articles and videos I’ve been wanting to review more fully, and I just have to accept that this isn’t going to happen. I also really want to increase the quality of what I’m reading overall this year, as well as the depth at which I think about what I’ve read, so I’m hoping to start to write more about broader ideas in general rather than just talking about random articles I found online, and I’d like to read a lot more books and serious articles as well. I also really want to bring back the longform “Some Interesting Things I’ve Read Lately” posts, rather than just writing the linkdumps. Moving forwards, maybe I’ll just do some roundups of links with minimal context, which seems to be what normal people do.

But anyway, in the meantime, here is another linkdump. This one contains stuff I read recently (within the last month or so); others will follow that link to much less recent stuff.

Mark J. Perry, The Shocking Story Behind Richard Nixon’s ‘War on Drugs’ That Targeted Blacks and Anti-war Activists (2018) [link]

For those of you who didn’t know this already, the “War on Drugs” has always been a pretext for the US government to criminalize racial groups it doesn’t like. A book I’ve read that talks about this in more detail is Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography by Dominic Streatfeild.1

Josh Hendrickson, What Price Theory Is And Is Not (2025) [link]

An article about price theory in economics, and about how the author believes that the critiques that behavioural economists make about it are wrong.

Honestly, this went over my head and I should probably re-read it. I seriously don’t know much about economics, and it makes me very uncomfortable.

The same author also wrote a different article about how he believes that economists assume rational frameworks, not rational people. I think that article was somewhat less confusing to me than this one.

Quote:

Price theory is based on the following idea. The world has finite resources. Not everyone can have everything that they want all of the time. There are real world resource constraints. If I understand your constraints, then I have a general idea about what options are available to you and what tradeoffs that you face. Resource constraints necessitate tradeoffs. If I understand your objective, I can predict which of the available options you are likely to choose.

In fact, I do not need to make radical assumptions about your objectives for this framework to provide a lot of useful insights. Simply assuming that you prefer more stuff to less stuff will generate many useful predictions.

Adrian Piper, On Wearing Three Hats (1996) [link]

An essay by Adrian Piper, who was a professor of philosophy, a conceptual artist, and a yoga practitioner, about the professional perils of being multidisciplinary. (She was also a white-passing Black woman, which made things, uh, significantly more complicated.)

Here are the questions she answers within the essay:

  1. “Do you keep your different selves separate, or do you integrate them?”
  2. “How do other people react to your different selves?”
  3. “How do you deal with other people’s reactions?”
  4. “How do the members of each field differ from the others?”
  5. “Does your involvement in more than one field influence your perception of each? If so, how?”
  6. “Does being difficult to categorize make it difficult to be recognized? If so, in what ways?”
  7. “What are the costs and benefits of being multi- talented?”
  8. “How has being multi-talented affected your life?”
  9. “Does being multi-talented cause hostility in others? If so, what do you do about it?”
  10. “How does the strengths you develop in each field affect the others?”
  11. What do you personally get out of pursuing such a variety of interests?
  12. “These fields are very different from one another. What are the constants?”
  13. “Where in your life history do these multiple talents and interests come from?
  14. “Does one role or talent take priority over the others?”

Quotes:

I have survived in each of these respective fields through camouflage. Since I am committed fully and in equal measure to all of them, I am familiar enough with the language and practices of each to present myself as an authentic “native speaker” in whichever one I happen to be in at the moment. And I have learned to blend in professionally with each, by temporarily suppressing my interests and involvement in the others.

There’s an edgy, sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach you get when you are riding with a garrulous cab driver and you both wander too close to the limits of safe conversation. You know that beyond those limits, your friendly repartee will freeze into stony silence, turn ugly, or deteriorate into a shouting match. As he nears the danger zone, your heart sinks, your pulse races, and your hackles rise simultane ously. I get that feeling a lot, with many of my colleagues, in each field. Greater conversational depth, breadth, and self revelation set off warning signals. As my colleague innocently wanders too near the border, I have to decide whether to change the subject, lie, leave, or say what is true and thereby destroy our connection. Only the avoidance of connection succeeds in avoiding the danger.

These manoeuvres, particularly between art and philosophy, make me feel like an adulterous spouse. Each field demands my full energy, attention, and commit ment; each resents my involvement with the other; each suspects such involvement when I am absent; each feels personally betrayed when this suspicion is confirmed; and each is absolutely and uncondition ally unwilling to concede any legitimacy to that involvement, much less make any accommodation to it. Each field is morally outraged by the suggestion that I am a resource that might be shared with the other, to the ultimate advantage of both. It is almost as though I had suggested group sex.

The Darwin Awards: sex differences in idiotic behaviour (2014)2 [link]

An article published in the British Medical Journal that analyzes the set of past winners of the Darwin Awards and concludes that men are more likely to make really dumb decisions than women. I can’t believe this article is a real thing.

Like, what the hell is “male idiot theory”?? You cannot tell me that is not a made up thing.

Whimsi,3 My Review of The World as a Whole (2025) [link]

In this article, someone reviews the world, as understood through their experience of living in five different countries, and concludes that it sucks.

But this article is more than that, I think. The author has a very interesting voice, even if I don’t always like it, and I do think they have some interesting thoughts and insights and perspectives on things, even if I don’t always agree with them. I also found the way they described their time in other countries, especially Japan, to be quite compelling, because they attempt to look under the surface of their life and interactions and understand what’s really going on. For example, here is the bit of the article that forever burned it into my brain:

The best and most concise analogy I can come up with is this: in Japan, everyone is your girlfriend. You are responsible for understanding that when your boss asks about pastries, it means he wants you to buy the pastries for next week’s meeting. It means that when someone says yes to the thing you’ve been requesting for months, you should expect that tomorrow they’re going to ask you for something you don’t want to give, but if you don’t give the same yes back, they’re going to resent you forever and regret the ‘yes’ they gave you for the rest of their lives.

Japanese social interactions exist at a much higher resolution than American ones, and at times I felt that living in Japan as an allistic person gave me a reasonable understanding of what it might be like to be autistic in America. At all times there were subtle games being played, and things being communicated by other people to which I was not privy at all. This created a background radiation of stress that made social interaction much more stressful than fun. Japanese people get around this by leaning into role assignment; basically, your boss is just your boss, and must play the role of boss rather than ‘being himself’ because if everyone was particularly ‘himself’ at this high resolution of social interaction, everyone’s minds would collapse under the information overload, and life would be impossible, even for those born into the culture.

This is an extremely long piece, but I do think it’s worth reading.

Eugene Wei, Remove the legend to become one (2017) [link]

On doing corporate data analytics at Amazon in the late 90s, plus some thoughts on data visualization and how to correctly label line graphs. At the time, nothing was really distributed digitally, and the author ended up having to print over a hundred copies of the 100-page “Analytics Package” every single month. Hugely interesting read.

Brian J. Lucas, Loran F. Nordgren, Lay people’s beliefs about creativity: evidence for an insight bias (2022) [link]

The key idea of this paper (well, academic magazine article, really) is that there are two paths to creativity: insight, which is when an idea comes to you in a flash of inspiration, and persistence, which is when you arrive at an idea through explicitly focusing on a problem very hard. The research finding is that most people overestimate the value of insight in the creative process and underestimate the value of persistence.

This is a very short and readable article. I recommend you read it for yourself.

Zoe Scaman, A New Creative Intelligence (2025) [link]

Article about how to use AI in the creative process - tl;dr is to use it to critique your ideas from viewpoints you don’t hold, rather than using it to help you generate ideas. I can really get behind this, but I’m a huge fan.

It also linked to this useful article about why it’s hard for LLMs to be good at creative ideas: You can’t ask an LLM to be “more random”

Adam Mastroianni, 28 slightly rude notes on writing (2025) [link]

This is probably my favourite article I’ve read on why writing is still relevant, even now that we have AI tools. Unlike most articles I’ve read on the subject (including mine), it doesn’t market itself as an argument for writing in the age of AI, and it doesn’t present a linear argument, either. Instead, it is a series of vignettes, and quotes, and thoughts, all linked together with a loose throughline. I think this experimental essay format really works here, and I really want to try this myself, especially for some of the topics that I’m finding it really hard to talk about directly. I find that some topics are much better approached sideways.

And here, have a quote:

The internet is full of smart people writing beautiful prose about how bad everything is, how it all sucks, how it’s embarrassing to like anything, how anything that appears good is, in fact, secretly bad. I find this confusing and tragic, like watching Olympic high-jumpers catapult themselves into a pit of tarantulas.

I like that he said this. We are allowed to like things.

Marc Andreessen, Pmarca Guide to Career Planning (2007) [link]

Marc Andreessen is an influential venture capitalist in the tech industry, and boy, did he have some thoughts on education and career advice. I definitely disagree with some of this but think it’s an interesting read anyway.

Kevin Baker, Context Widows (2025) [link]

This article essentially claims that the foundations of the scientific enterprise were irreparably harmed once citations and publication count were made more important than the actual content or quality of the publications. The author’s argument is that LLMs are bad for science not because they’re inherently bad, but because science was already broken, and scientists are simply using these tools to increase their ability to game the citation metrics.

These are not, primarily, stories about artificial intelligence. They are stories about institutions optimized for volume. A study of elite Chinese universities documented what the authors called the decoupling of daily research practice from ethical norms: national policymakers set vague aspirations for “world-class” status, university administrators translated these into ranking targets, deans passed them down as publication quotas, and junior researchers—facing a gap between what was demanded and what was possible—reported they had “no choice” but to falsify data or purchase authorship from paper mills. A separate survey found that more than half of Chinese medical residents admitted to some form of research misconduct. LLMs did not create what economists, with their penchant for meaning-destroying dimensionality reduction, would call science’s incentive “structure.” Rather this technology arrived into this context, offering a faster way to produce the artifacts the system rewards.

  1. By the way, the author has one of the most fun voices I’ve ever read in a nonfiction book and this book is worth reading purely for that reason, if nothing else. ↩︎

  2. Too many authors to put them in the heading, so here they are: Ben Alexander Daniel Lendrem, Dennis William Lendrem, Andy Gray, John Dudley Isaacs. ↩︎

  3. I presume this is the author’s pseudonym. ↩︎

 Interesting Things I've Read (or Watched)