2022
Personal reflections and updates
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes.—G.K. Chesterton
Here are my personal updates for the year 2022.
Personal
I got engaged. This is the most important news of the year.
I’m also moved to work on my own projects full time.
Right now, I’m building Stoa, a tool for people to become more resilient and exemplary through ancient philosophy. Thousands of people have found the key offering, the Stoa app, to be life changing. My core focus right now is growth. To that end, we launched a podcast and YouTube channel this month.
If you’d like to work together, get in touch.
Travel is generally overrated, but I did enjoy going to Chile:
Physical
Ran two marathons. My time for the San Francisco Marathon was 4:05. I will get to sub 4 hours in 2023.
Intellectual
The best book I read was either Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 or G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday.
The best new nonfiction book was probably Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. It’s much better than people who haven’t read the book will tell you.
The Vision of Islam, Limits To Medicine, China in Ten Words were each excellent too. Marshall McLuhan’s Laws of Media was likely the worst. Reality+ was also disappointing. Here’s the follow up post on books from 2022:
My favorite essay I wrote was also the most popular one: Classical Transhumanism.
Runners up are Why is there no Epicurean Movement?, The Meaning of Sacrifice, and Did Ancient Cities Arise from Family Gods?.
How has my mind changed?
I now think there’s a good case for retributivism — understood as the idea that some people deserve to be punished. It’s an idea that is inescapably intuitive, but difficult to justify. I have changed my mind about that.
A key intellectual mistake I made was underrating “continental” philosophy throughout my life. A lot of it is no good, but that is true of most things. 80% of everything is crap. This year I spent time reading more. Hegel, or at least, commentators on Hegel, are insightful. Do not devalue and dismiss!
My worldview has become more classical. The world is fragile and illiberal. My confidence that increased economic progress reliably induces moral progress has gone down. There is a case for moral progress, but it’s not as optimistic as I previously thought.
Generative AI improved slightly faster than I predicted. It’s difficult to know when it will hit a ceiling, but do not sleep on this! I have believed that the 22nd century will look radically different from the 21st for some time, but I’ve been moving towards thinking that transformation will arrive soon.
Next
Next year, I’ll build out Stoa into a first-rate ecosystem, run a faster marathon, regularly use AI, and get married.
Expect a year of more intellectual and economic output.
Thanks for reading,
Caleb
I'd love to see you lay out your reasoning for retributivism in an essay. Or, if as you said, it's hard to justify with logic, to hear what lead you to change your mind about the value of punishment.