Hello from Tulum!
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Yesterday, I went for an afternoon swim on a narrow river when I looked to my right and saw a 15-FOOT CROCODILE lounging ten feet away from me. Though the crocodile didn’t flinch, it gave me an insane adrenaline rush, and I’ve lived to deliver another edition of Friday Finds to you this week.

Today’s Finds

​The Gossip Trap: The winner of Slate Star Codex’s essay writing contest, Erik Hoel, tries to answer the 'Sapient Paradox', which asks why human civilization took so long to get started. Our species is ~200,000 years old, but the record of human achievements only really begins at ~15,000 BC. What took so long? Hoel argues that once a human tribe got bigger than 150 people (Dunbar’s number), it suffered from a “Gossip Trap.” Like the high school cafeteria scene in Mean Girls, people in power were taken down by social pressure. Cancel culture was the OG governance system, and prevented meaningful achievement. People at the top devoted their time and energy to reputation management, knowing that others sought to take them down. Civilization has become a tool for avoiding the gossip trap, which is why institutions like America’s Supreme Court appoint people for life. Hoel waits for the end of the piece to offer a harrowing theory: social media has brought back the “Gossip Trap.” Having everybody on the same social platforms increases the risk that humanity will again be governed by raw social power. Yikes. As you read it, know that the first half of the piece is a book review of The Dawn of Everything. The piece is a little slow at times, so if you want to cut to the chase, jump down to the section called: “The Sapient Paradox as an ancient analog to the Fermi Paradox.”

The Making of Disneyland: One of the world’s most popular tourist attractions didn’t seem like a sunny idea at first. People thought Walt Disney was insane for wanting to build an amusement park. At the time, people thought they were squalid, dangerous, and too expensive. Disney projected a $1.5 million cost for the park but ended up spending $17 million. To fund it, Walt hocked his life insurance policy, sold his summer home, and borrowed a bunch of cash. He also landed a sponsorship deal with ABC to screen a television show about the park. He built it quickly, and start to finish it only took 366 days. But day one was a disaster. There’d been a plumber’s strike, so Walt had to choose between installing bathrooms and water fountains. He chose bathrooms, declaring: “People can drink Pepsi-Cola, but they can’t pee in the streets." To learn more about the making of the park, I recommend this book and this podcast episode with David Senra. If you’re looking for a YouTube rabbit hole, there is so much good history about the creation of Disneyland.

​David Cole’s Cannon: More writers should do this. Heck, I should too. A former designer at Quora shares the works of scholarship underlying his worldview. Topics include purpose, process, product, user experience, and craft. If you like design, this page is for you.

​How Aristotle Created the Computer: This essay traces the history of logic from Aristotle to modern computing. It builds upon the early days of Euclidean geometry when mathematics was considered a hopelessly abstract subject with no practical use. Later, it moves into Claude Shannon’s work on information theory, which runs the computer you’re using to read this sentence. Here’s a good summary: “Logic began as a way to understand the laws of thought. It then helped create machines that could reason according to the rules of deductive logic. Today, deductive and inductive logic are being combined to create machines that both reason and learn.”

​Birds and Frogs in Physics: I’ve always liked the Fox vs. Hedgehog distinction between people who know a little bit about many things and people who know a lot about one thing. This essay makes a similar argument that people are either birds or frogs. Birds see things from, well… a bird’s eye view where they have a vast landscape in front of them without a lot of detail. On the other hand, frogs like to get dirty and dive into the nitty-gritty details. But this essay goes beyond that and tells a brief history of physics. Einstein and Feynman were birds, while Fermi and Hubble were frogs.