> Links for March 2024

"Life is so long but it passes so fast" by Gena Soh

"Life is so long, I keep thinking to myself. I live to experience the consequences of my every act. Life is so long and so short. One day it will end, I won’t be allowed to see things through."

elegantly but efficiently expresses emotions i feel so often.

"Ye and the Problem of Fascist Art" by Alex Skopic

"The point is not to ignore the author’s life or pretend it doesn’t exist. Even if that were possible, it wouldn’t accomplish anything. Rather, the point is that the author doesn’t get any special authority over the work...Chinatown is as much Dederer’s as it is Polanski’s; classic albums like 808s & Heartbreak are as much mine, or yours, as they are Ye’s. It’s a lovely, anarchistic idea. In practice, though, the idea has limits. There’s a certain category of art that defies any attempt at separation: namely, the cases where the horrible thing about the artist is present in the art itself"

"Killing in Gaza has been supported by Ireland’s ‘good friend’ in the White House" by Sally Rooney

"Strong straightforward criticism is reserved for the relatively small (and increasingly globally isolated) state of Israel. The US, on the other hand – which supplies about 80% of Israel’s weapons imports, as well as billions of dollars in aid – is treated as a kind of neutral third party, and of course as a “very good friend”. This way, our Government can bask in the moral glow of condemning the bombers, while preserving a cosy relationship with those supplying the bombs."

> Links for February 2024

"Our human ancestors often ate each other, and for surprising reasons" by Michael Marshall

"But cannibalism can also be a funerary ritual. Instead of burying or cremating the bodies of loved ones, as is now common in Western society, perhaps in some prehistoric societies they chose to eat them."

> Links for January 2024

"The Troubles: Unravelling Northern Ireland's 30-Year Conflict" by Tieran Freedman [video]

i particularly liked this video because of the interviews conducted with the opposing sides: an ira prisoner, and a former uvf prisoner, presenting the troubles with more personal perspectives, highlighting the impacts on real people, instead of the strange sense of detachment we often experience when consuming information about war and tragedy.

"The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same" By Kyle Chayka

"So-called “Instagram museums” arose, making photo-taking the whole point of the experience. Each failed as compelling visual art because they required the presence of the subject and the taking of a photograph to make sense – outside of digital platforms they were incomplete; the production of the content was all that mattered."

"How plagiarism became the latest weapon in the culture wars" By Constance Grady

"We don’t have precedents to tell us how to think about whether or not it is plagiarism to take every book ever written and use it to teach a neural network how to talk ... Our new tools are available to both good-faith and bad-faith actors, and that means we are at the beginning of a very messy new era indeed."

"Neuroscience is pre-paradigmatic. Consciousness is why" by Erik Hoel

"...if you take stock of the progress in neuroscience since 2000, it’s noticeable that the most popular papers are more aptly described as “cool” rather than fundamental. If you look at, say, Scientific American’s 2022 list of “This year’s most thought-provoking brain discoveries,” the results are firmly in the cool category, not the fundamental. ...What if we get more objective and examine the most-cited articles published since 2021 in the journal Neuroscience? The pattern continues. Cool, you can use micro-RNA to promote spinal cord regeneration in rats! Cool, you can use deep learning to help diagnose cognitive impairment using fMRI! Fundamental? No."

> Links for December 2023

"A Camera, Not an Engine" by Venkatesh Rao

"When we discover scary new things, we try to think of them as inventions first because inventions seem to embody a contingent optionality and afford us more agency than discoveries. It feels like we don’t have to use them if we don’t like them, and that we have some sort of god-like creator-agency over their very existence."

"Politicians Ruined a Brilliant Example of Universal Health Care" by Adam Westbrook [video]

"How rich we are is beginning to determine how quickly and how well we get treated, a violation of the core ideals at the foundation of the NHS."

highlights the effects of austerity on the nhs and the significance of this, and how it's led to the detriment of the system and the extent to which it's already been privatised.

"A Man Plagiarised My Work: Women, Money, and the Nation" by Abigail Thorn / Philosophy Tube [video]

great commentary on heteronormativity, feminism, and the family construct, it links really well to abigail thorn's other videos on social constructs.

> Links for November 2023

"Verdigris: The Color of Oxidation, Statues, and Impermanence" by Katy Kelleher

"To use verdigris was to accept that your lovingly rendered scene would one day sour. The bright cloaks would turn dark, the soft grass would fade, the foliage turn. But such is the nature of cloth and plants and paint. Such is the nature of beauty."

"Lady Liberty isn’t “really” brown. She’s both brown and green and gray and a multitude of other colors. Greek temples aren’t “really” colorful; they were once colorful and now that’s gone and maybe someday they’ll be colorful again, if that’s the will of the people."

"In Praise of the Pointless" by Nathan J. Robinson

"We need places that serve no utilitarian function and exist only to be interesting."

"...interesting things that don't have to justify themselves in terms of profits or even the interest of the public. So that when someone asks, as the reviewer above did, "Not sure what the point is?", the answer can come: "There is no point. And isn't that a beautiful thing?"

puts so many of my feelings into words. (ephemerality.html: "11/11/23 the death of detail will be the death of human warmth; bring back intricate stained glass and patchwork feature tiles and rich mural wallpapers and life")..

"Think Tanks: How Fake Experts Shape the News" by Tom Nicholas [video]

"A video about how billionaire-funded right-wing “think tanks” such as the Heritage Foundation, Adam Smith Institute, Manhattan Institute and Adam Smith Institute manipulate the news to spread their propaganda."

particularly interesting as someone i know recently started an internship at the adam smith institute. said person used to be an anarchist.

"we have reached rabbit hole rock bottom" by maia arson crimew

"an increasingly wild tale of spiritual tiktoks, hyperpop, NFTs, white supremacy, cults and even more NFTs"

i couldn't not include this because i never expected this from the whole brg thing but i'm not even surprised. a fun read that gets more bizzare as you go on. certainly one for the history books.

"How To Watch A Movie" by Charlie Squire

"It is not a cultural inability to seriously engage with complicated art, but a cultural unwillingness to do so that exemplifies the true depths of our unquestioned individualism."

> Links for October 2023

"The Problem With Science Communication" by Veritasium [video]

"The source of the problem is bad incentives. Scientists need to secure funding for their research and increasingly that depends on attracting public attention to their work. ...and to get that attention you have to sell your science."

it touches on the state of academia as a whole and how it kinda sucks now, where to get almost anywhere the only way forwards is to publish. it goes into detail on a few specific cases, eg. LK99, nuclear fusion, and the quantum computer wormhole. i agree with everything said in the video and i think it's an incredibly important thing to spread, but to a certain extent in science communication, i think the information does initially have to be dumbed down, to get people actually interested in the first place.

"‘Techno-Optimism’ is Not Something You Should Believe In" by Jag Bhalla and Nathan J. Robinson

"Techno-optimism is a dangerous philosophy whose adherents espouse the blind faith that market capitalism and technology will solve the world’s problems. In reality, this kind of optimism simply justifies elite power and promotes indifference to human suffering."

"As Voltaire knew, optimism is typically a demon in disguise."

"Watching people die is making us more like ancient Rome" by Erik Hoel

"It turns out sitting in the stands drunk watching people die was popular, and has always been popular, because it really is titillating, thrilling, dramatic, an infinite jest, to watch other people in life and death situations. Left to our own devices, bloodsport is a global minimum we humans fall into unless some specific ideology or religion acts as a barrier for our fall."

> Older Links

"Barbie Has Cellulite (But You Don't Have To)" by Jessica DeFino [Jul 2023]

"You cannot subversively, satirically, or ironically produce and consume things. The idea that you can is solipsistic and conservative. Production and consumption have collective consequences, whether you adopt Barbie-inspired beauty behaviors with a knowing wink or not! The palm oil in the products still contributes to deforestation and potential human rights abuses. The sparkly mica in the eyeshadow palette may still be mined by child laborers. (When asked for comment, a representative for NYX declined to confirm or deny that the mica in the official NYX x Barbie Mini Palettes is obtained through child labor but, in a separate press release, expressed its ongoing dedication to “amplify[ing] the film’s themes of empowerment.” Empowerment for who?"

"Awareness is magic. It's also a clever way for the filmmakers to absolve themselves of responsibility"

"How does a computer/calculator compute logarithms?" by zachartrand [Jul 2023]

requires a base level of uk a-level maths, lots of interesting desmos visualisations that help explain the content well. looking into other ways in which calculators do things is worth it too, eg. how graphing calculators plot trig graphs, find square roots etc.

"Fuck Puritanism" by P.E Moskowitz [Aug 2022]

"And, unfortunately, it has become endemic, infecting every space of discourse, and ensuring that actual progress, actual mutual understanding between people and cultures, never happens. We have sacrificed a focus on material betterment for moral purity."

this reminds me of a forum based website i used to spend a lot of time on, but also the general state of the internet too, perhaps at a lesser scale.

"standing on the shoulders of complex female characters" by Rayne Fisher-Quann [Feb 2022]

"the aesthetics of consumption have, in turn, become a conduit to make the self more easily consumable: your existence as a Type of Girl has almost nothing to do with whether you actually read joan didion or wear miu miu, and everything to do with whether you want to be seen as the type of person who would."

"The Real Reason to End the Death Penalty" by Paul Graham [Apr 2021]

"Whatever it means in theory, in practice capital punishment means killing innocent people."

i think that theory is fun to discuss but this essay does well in providing detailed examples of the flaws of today's justice systems which often gets overlooked as a key reason against capital punishment where people are often caught up in moral arguments. rather, the moral question should be whether or not capital punishment should be allowed under a perfect, bias free justice system.