Trevor McKendrick - It's December

Hi everyone,

Have an amazing week.

Trevor

Vitalik’s techno-optimism post (article)

“We need to build, and accelerate. But there is a very real question that needs to be asked: what is the thing that we are accelerating towards? The 21st century may well be the pivotal century for humanity, the century in which our fate for millennia to come gets decided. Do we fall into one of a number of traps from which we cannot escape, or do we find a way toward a future where we retain our freedom and agency? These are challenging problems. But I look forward to watching and participating in our species' grand collective effort to find the answers.”

In defense of Effective Altruism (article)

Scott Alexander doing his usual amazing thing.

My much dumber take is that EA is good in that it’s brought more of an analytical rigor to how people choose to do good in the world. That’s been… astonishingly lacking (and still is) so any effort in changing that is, I think, very good.

I do think the AGI worries are significantly overblown. If you do think they’re overblown, how much of technology would you roll back to prevent us from getting to where we are today?

Fireplace YouTube (video)

12 hours of fireplace sounds & (visual) warmth to put on your TV.

I feel like this is the type of thing that I forget exists 98% of the time but when I see I’m like “this is amazing!!” Etsy also falls into that category of frequently forgotten.

Dwarkesh podcast interviews Dominic Cummings (podcast)

Dwarkesh is quickly becoming my favorite new interviewer. He gets interesting answers from his guests, and Dominic has some of the best/most unique experience of anyone.

The Choice: Escaping the Past and Embracing the Possible (book)

Edith is a holocaust survivor turned therapist. This was my 2nd read of her book. Her book is about many interesting things that are hard to summarize, but maybe the gist I could give is that your life is about the choices you make. That sounds so trite writing it out, but there’s some fundamental & inspiring truth there that goes really far if you let it.

“The world will ask you who you are, and if you do not know, the world will tell you.” - Carl Jung

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