I mentioned this in my latest Time Well Spent (a recurring feature of my newsletter), but I’ve started a collab with a firm called dry.io. On its website they say they want to “Build tools that let your team and your community work how you want.” For over a decade many of you have been reading me via my Total Content Feed, but I now have a new way to interact with all of my content thanks to dry.io, a landing page that pulls from all the various places that I drop content. They also have a nice search engine.
Thank you again to everyone who has subscribed to my Substack. This is a millionth (and final!) reminder to anyone who was planning to subscribe to Substack that my 2020 rates are the lowest allowable on the platform and will be adjusted upward in the new year.
For anybody who took the healthy approach of being offline for the last couple of weeks, you might like something within among all this content for I cranked out for the Substack. Here are five free blog posts (available whether your subscription is paid or unpaid):
I chose the topics, so of course, I enjoyed writing all of these. But I think the one on the Zhou was the most satisfying for me. Not a surprise that it was the IQ piece that seemed to speak to the most readers.
I pulled 6 favorite past podcasts from my archives too:
I’m working through a long list of favorite thinkers I already know and have enjoyed talking with in the past, and people who are on my radar to chase down for a first podcast, but if there’s anyone you think I’d be remiss not to try and connect with this year, please leave a comment.
def no dino
I had a great Christmas, not least because my youngest became completely obsessed with dinosaurs overnight (thanks, Schleich!). Not going to lie, I was always a little disappointed his older siblings had no love for dinosaurs (one of his siblings had such disdain for all things biology, that for probably a solid year, he would dismiss any quadruped sighting, whether cow, sheep, horse, etc. with an unimpressed “DIE-SAUR”).
But the tail is wagging the dog since Christmas and half of sibling chatter is now debates of omnivore v. carnivore v. herbivore and discussions of the Jurassic and things like what syllable of diplodocus is emphasized. The caliber of illustrated books for kids now, refinements on old hypotheses, and depth of detail known today are leaving me with a lot of updates to perform on my mid-80’s body of dinosaur knowledge. So what should I read? Who should I know? Anyone it would be a shame not to seek out for the podcast?
For all you current paid subscribers and those who grab a subscription today, I can unreservedly recommend my final 2020 podcast: a conversation with Armand Leroi. It drops today. We discussed both Mutants and The Lagoon. Each well worth a read if you missed them. Mutants is a quick read; The Lagoon is a bit encyclopedic (we discuss why it’s so long). Additionally, we revisited his op-ed on race from 2005, his argument in favor of ‘neo-eugenics‘, recent work on cultural evolution, and the impact of wokeness on the academy in Britain.
I tend to assume my long-time readers are the first to find my content in other far-flung forums, but just in case not, I want to alert everyone to a free daily series of five pieces I’ve been releasing this week on Substack. Think of it as a little thank you to everyone who was so quick to subscribe when I launched, and a quick sampler of some of my core themes and obsessions for those still weighing whether to sign on for the Substack paid content stream (a combination of occasional deep dives in a written format + weekly (or more frequent) podcasts, as well as the gated comment community).
Whether I remember to cross-promote here on the blog or not, you’ll get automatically alerted to these occasional free releases if you’re on the free Substack list, so whether paid or free, I hope you’ll take a second to get on my Substack list today.
In the late 2000s Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen made waves arguing that technological progress had declined since the middle of the 20th century. Having spent my adulthood in the period between 2000 and 2020, I was quite open to the idea. I watched the Jetsons. We don’t live in the world of the Jetsons.
Day 2, I made the case that to begin to understand China today, you really need to know your Zhou, a pervasive influence on Chinese society down to the present day that dates back 3000 years:
It’s a meme that China has “5,000 years of history.” This is false. The first historically attested dynasty is the Shang, which emerged approximately 3,600 years ago. And even the Shang are semi-historical, insofar as many of the details of the Shang society and state are known only superficially. The Shang are shadows to us, not flesh and blood narratives.
Day 3, Today, IQ gets its due: I look back over centuries of human achievement and interest in such measurement. And then I examine what history suggests might await us as we pitch out this long-used bulwark against entrenched elite hoarding of prestige opportunities:
Homo sapiens are very smart. They are very smart because they have large brains. This is not controversial. In relation to our body size, humans have bulging craniums housing large brains. About 20% of our caloric intake feeds our brain when we’re resting even though it’s only 2% of our body weight. It’s a calorically expensive organ.
Day 4 and Day 5 remain.
And if you’re one of those still considering whether to sign up for the paidSubstack or whether to give it as a gift this holiday season, now’s a good time to lock in the forum’s lowest allowed pricing. I’ll be adjusting it up after the new year.
Just a quick update. I’ve put up a couple of podcasts at the substack for subscribers. I’ll be “front-loading” the podcasts before getting into a ~1 week groove. I will ungate after a few weeks and port them over to a new podcast that will push to Apple, etc.
The first substack essay I’m planning is a “short history of the world: genetics edition.” Basically, it will be a “core dump.” I think it will be “news you can use” for a lot of people.
Thanks to all the readers who subscribed! Lots of familiar emails.
2020 has sunk the final nail in the coffin of the “End of History” myth. We are witnessing the worst global pandemic since the 1918 Spanish flu, and the West’s response has exposed deep structural weaknesses in our civilization. One symptom of this rot is the fact that the norms of free intellectual inquiry seem to have passed out of fashion. Optimistic Y2K liberalism in America has given way to Right and Left identitarianism. Today, intellectuals can tell you in all seriousness that who you are matters more than what you know or do.
Standing athwart history
In this, I am against the spirit of the age. Though I don’t expect to change the direction the world lurches, I myself cannot change. I am what I am. And for good and for ill, that has always been someone with an almost pathological need for truth and data, the rawer the better. I simply cannot recalculate the value of an idea according to the identity or eminence of its originator.
Ideas which are true, the goal toward which science fitfully stumbles, differ from the ephemeral things of our social existence. Sports and politics, ratios and retweets are the foam of the present. Money so arduously accumulated will be spent without a trace. Individual humans are born, flourish, grow old, and die. Permanence lies elsewhere. Truth binds us across the centuries and spans national borders.
Reality stands apart from our gloss on it. A stone-faced witness to our coming and our passing. To seek truth is to grasp at something eternal, something that will persist long after us. It is neither spent nor dissipated.
This anxious craving for truth, be it in the end ugly or divine, has propelled me for the two decades I’ve been writing on the internet. It motivated me as a voracious and meandering reader during my childhood. My catholic tastes in intellectual inquiry are both a matter of happenstance and disposition. In the 1980’s my immigrant parents adopted the norms of the place and time where they landed. It was still socially acceptable, if slightly odd, to leave an 8-year-old wandering the stacks of the public library for entire weekends. This is where I discovered the world on my own, guided by my own inclinations and caprice.
The dual blessings of a restless mind and an unsupervised childhood though can conspire to leave a man a bewildered stranger in this age. Suddenly ideas are disdained as disposable instruments in political games. For me, they can only ever be the goal of my journey.
Fools Rush In
In the early 2000’s, a lack of concern for shibboleths or taboos wasn’t particularly brave or rare. John Brockman published a book of essays in 2006 titled “What is your dangerous idea?” I suspect such a collection would be unthinkable today, its very premise triggering. Instead of a frisson, it would risk its contributors’ cancellation. If such a book appeared, it would be a sham, the essays timid and cautious out of concern for the contributors’ reputations. A social-media-driven world of ideas metes out strong tribal sanctions against wrongthink. It does not, as it turns out, always “get better.” The pre-social-media world was much more forgiving of deviationism. Information may want to be free, but the masses do not. They want confirmation of what they already know to be true. They want comfort. They want Voxplainers on how they are right.
Perhaps this is being too generous. The internet is a place where “everyone” watches livestreams of the likes of Khloe Khardasian. But who actually has time for the great thinkers of the past, say Xunzi or Schopenhauer? The information superhighway is choking with trash trucks. But if you look, gold glistens right there on the street as the hordes rush past, bound for their must-see outrage du jour.
Some people still read blogs. Though not too many Zoomers apparently. Here is a thread if you want to unlurk…seems like the comments are dominated now by about a dozen individuals.
Perhaps some things to say:
– how long you’ve read – where you live – what you do – why you read
I spent some time trying to lock down the issue with this website. It’s back online again. Apparently, it was getting hit with too many requests and it was taking down the shared host it’s on (CPU problems). I’ve installed a bunch of caching and other features (including blocking bad crawlers).
