February Update

Running, Reading, and More Newsletters

This is my February update – a brief salvo on what I’m doing, thinking, and reading.

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Stoa: I launched another newsletter: The Stoa Letter. The first two letters are already out. It’s my third newsletter, but already the most popular. It covers Stoic theory and practice. It’s shorter and more practical than this newsletter.

This Newsletter: I'm considering moving this substack to paid. There are good arguments against accepting $ for writing, but in my view, they aren't compelling. Subscribers will get essays and previews from "books" I'm working on concerning things like:

• Stoic Politics

• Modern Stoicism

There will be deeper, newer, and more controversial ideas. Likely more typos too.

Twitter:

Jakeup in the Bay 3/1-3/5 @yashkaf

Jacob's law of equal sexual oppression/privilege: in societies where hetero-monogamy is the norm dating/sex/marriage will be equally difficult and equally rewarding for men and women as a whole I will offer 3 arguments to support this belief: empirical, theoretical, and moral

Matt Bateman 🍅 @mbateman

The 90s were awesome. The US balanced it’s budget, the EU was established, the internet was beginning its ascendency, and the Peloponnesian War finally came to an end

Jonah Davids @jonahdavids1

It's possible that the recent rise in teen mental health issues is due to social media, while the previous rise is due to something else. But I am wondering if there might be one factor that explains both.

Benoit Mandelbrot @BigMandelbrot

Teen suicide rate since the 60s. Does that support the "social media is making teens depressed" hypothesis? We are roughly at the 1990 level now. And what about the rise and decline before? (Graph from Lyman Stone. Has good stuff.) https://t.co/yZT9IfI8zd

Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb

If you engage a fool, you are an optimistic, pathologically optimistic, fool. https://t.co/P1Zu6VjLeC

Samuel Hammond 🌐🏛 @hamandcheese

Rand's underrated. Her dialogues always felt over-the-top to me, until one day people started talking exactly like her least believable characters.

Caleb Ontiveros @calebmontiveros

Ayn Rand is justly criticized, but she understood why so many "altruists" resent those who heal the blind. https://t.co/RNtO7j9S5P

Stefan Schubert @StefanFSchubert

Good point, and good example of the fact that signalling explanations are not as detachedly scientific as they purport to be. More often than not, they have a strongly political thrust - more so than many other social scientific explanations.

Christoph Breuer @chribreuer

People who obsess about "signaling" only do so for elites/upper class. Everything those people do is cause of "signaling" They don't apply signaling to the middle- and lower class. They just want to lower the status of upper class people by attributing negative motives to them

Time: I love this quote from Paul Graham: "Counterintuitive as it feels, it's better most of the time not to defend yourself. Otherwise these people are literally taking your life." From the essay Life Is Short.

Running: Ran a half marathon. New record with 1:35.

Stoa Conversations: I enjoyed speaking with Jimmy Soni about Cato the Younger. Cato is a role model for the ancient Stoics. He was incredibly principled, preferring to die over receiving clemency from Caesar. Jimmy was kind enough to send me a copy of his most recent book, The Founders. I read it last year. Recommended as a profile of many Silicon Valley legend’s early days:

Minds Almost Meeting: Met Agnes Callard and Robin Hanson. Both must be in the list of the top 100 public intellectuals today. Robin's newest work on the sacred is excellent, even if too reductive. 

Reddit AMA: Michael and I did an AMA. Many good questions.

Rhodesia: read a number of memoirs on Rhodesia. Peter Godwin’s Mukiwa was the best. Rhodesia and Zimbabwe make for a tragic political problem – the fact that it’s not clear what to do if you were Ian Smith in 1965 does not bode well for human politics. Yes, there are better things he could have done, and Zimbabwe didn’t need to collapse to the extent it did, but what’s a satisfying political solution that doesn’t just delay inevitable decline?

Stoicism: reread parts of Pierre Hadot’s The Inner Citadel. Recommended.

Abandon yourself willingly to Clotho; let her weave you together with whatever event she pleases.

Marcus Aurelius

Movies: Unlike last month, I didn't watch any movies at all. 

Moral Progress: Listened to Christopher Brown on the history of slavery abolition. Brown argues that slavery abolition was seriously contingent. My theory of moral progress is that people do the right thing when it's easy to do so or at least expensive not to. This is an unfortunate conclusion for many issues, but it also makes room for contingency.

Patriarchy: saw Alice Evans give a talk on 10,000 years of Patriarchy. It was excellent. Who else is doing work on gender at the same scale?

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This is an experiment – I may share these less frequently in the future. I enjoy reading others’ updates, so if you’re on the fence, go for it.