## Your P2K Articles-20 ### Your P2K Articles  #### Metadata * Author: [[P2K]] * Full Title: Your P2K Articles * Category: #books #### Highlights * Instead, TSMC is now one of only two fabs (including Samsung) able to keep up with Moore's Law. (For what it's worth, they also manufactured the Apple M1 chip.) (Location 64) * The recent trend of rhetoric against stagnation is not founded in evidence or driven by data. It is pure mood affiliation. You bought into the stagnation hypothesis when it was hip and contrarian, and now buy into the optimism hypothesis to be even more hip and counter-contrarian. At no point did you stop to look at the data or actually think for yourself. (Location 127) ^3104d0 * science is not slowing down… I think that the perception of stagnation in science – and in biology specifically – is basically fake news, driven by technological hedonic treadmill and nostalgia. (Location 134) ^08f3ba * This is not a coincidence. A company dependent on a single person's work has a single point of failure. In tech jargon, they have low Bus Factor, the number of people who would have to get hit by a bus for the project to fail. The higher your Bus Factor, the greater your institutional resilience. (Location 182) * It's easy to understand why an organization might want this kind of redundancy. Sure, it's wasteful and inefficient, but it prevents the greatest threat to any company: giving employees leverage. (Location 186) * you write a great post and it goes viral, everyone on the internet thinks you're a genius. Since content is shared organically, your best work gets way more exposure than your worst. The incentive in these situations is to ramp up variance and do the most interesting writing you can muster. (Location 327) * The problem is that like pop-music, pop-science and all other pop-culture, pop-writing can only appeal to the largest common denominator. Even if the author and readers are interesting people in isolation, aggregation forces this blob of individuals into a milquetoast morass. (Location 337) * A Substack newsletter can have an About page, but that's it. There will never be anything like Nadia's notes which are a regularly updated half-baked stream of consciousness, or Guzey's list of Tweets or even Nintil's categories. And they certainly won't have Gwern's link preview on hover, or sidenotes. (Location 366) * But on Substack, you're paid monthly, creating pressure to churn out regular updates. Since it's impossible to have interesting novel thoughts twice a week every week, this also means writers skew heavily towards summarizing the news, pumping out quick takes, or riffing on whatever they read on Twitter. (Location 383) * In the past, you might have spent 10 hours reading a book that took 4 years to research and write, a 3500x multiple on time! Today, a newsletter that publishes M-F and takes 30 minutes to read only provides a 67x multiple. (Location 390) * They tell the founding mythology as: "Chris, who was taking time off after leaving Kik, had built a prototype in the spare room of his Kitchener, Ontario, apartment, by lashing together Stripe, an enterprise email delivery tool, and some quickly-built web publishing software." (Location 435) * It would be a prototypically cool and scrappy founding story, except that 2 (now 3) years later, that's still all Substack is. (Location 438) * Behavioral Econ is the love child of economics and psychology, early AI researchers maintained a serious interest in cognitive science. What exactly are your cursory interests in space exploration, meta-science and bayesian statistics preparing you for? (Location 497) * Of course the inflation of his mathematical and engineering ability makes sense when you consider that the judges in question are predominantly art historians. Rather than as a Renaissance Man, Leonardo would be better regarded as an exceptional painter with various hobbies. (Location 532) * To be clear, there are still good reasons to learn a variety of skills. As Marc Andreessen put it: All successful CEO's [sic] are like this. They are almost never the best product visionaries, or the best salespeople, or the best marketing people, or the best finance people, or even the best managers, but they are top 25% in some set of those skills, and then all of a sudden they're (Location 546) * So go read your SaaS/Meta-Science/Aerospace blog and revel in the genuine joy of intellectual curiosity. As Tyler Cowen would say, I'm just here to lower the status of polymaths. (Location 557) * [1] Richard Feynman is honored for his Nobel Prize in Physics, but he's famous for Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! As fellow Nobel winner Murray Gell-Mann repeatedly grumbled, the stories were only interesting because Feynman "spent a huge amount of energy generating anecdotes about himself." (Location 679) * Again, we'll focus on the NYT's suggestion that the financially ambitious pursue AI-driven tech companies. In that case, you might get paid below market for a few years while your startup gets off  the ground, but the degree of financial risk is really not that great. Let's say your income drops down to $80,000. That's a halving, which loses you 0.45 points, but it's only a momentary occurrence. (Location 728) * Or to continue abusing the Marxist jargon: We live in an unprecedented time where more people than ever have access to the means of production. What does it really take to start an AI startup? A laptop, free wifi, access to some open coursewhere and some AWS credits? (Location 739) * But that's unreasonably pessimistic. We can do much better. Surveying the top Y Combinator companies, I find that around the top 50 are valued at over $1,000,000,000. They won't all exit successfully, and the founders won't all own enough equity to emerge with tres commas to their net worth, but this already gets us to a much more practical and optimistic heuristic to life: Try very hard to get into YC Conditional on acceptance, try very hard to become a billionaire (Location 744) * Actually, if you care about helping others, the case for becoming a billionaire is dramatically stronger. An egoist is stuck with shitty log returns, but a truly empathetic person can always give to the poor and thus models (aggregate) utility as a linear function of wealth. Barring really extreme cases, there are no diminishing returns. Or taking the GiveWell analysis literally [2], a billion dollars could save 200,000 lives! It's very hard to argue that your time could be better spent on any other cause. (Location 770) * But what if you're running a company that "exploits" wealthy tech workers, and the donate the proceeds to stop human trafficking? In some sense you are still guilty of capitalist exploitation, but it's not a sense that matters. (Location 785) * Practically speaking, there are plenty of tech companies that de facto, albeit through several layers of abstraction, do exploit very poor people. They might be behind an API, but the poor are still exploited for mining your rare earth minerals, categorizing gore for your content filter, and getting disproportionately exposed to the impacts of climate change from your energy consumption. (Location 786) * Thus far, I've mostly considered historical factors, assuming the future looks like the present. But the future could be very different! How does this strategy perform in different scenarios? I'd like to suggest it's at least a reasonable hedge: If income inequality continues to increase, it's even more important to make sure you're part of the oligarchical class On the other hand, if inequality decreases and we move towards a socialist or UBI world, the opportunity cost goes down as the social safety net improves That's just the domestic version. A similar argument applies internationally as well: If some countries remain very poor, you'll always be able to retire with relatively modest savings and still have a very high quality of life If all currently poor countries become rich, such an enormous amount of global wealth will be generated that it's an even better bet to become a oligarch (Location 811) * I understand that being a founder carriers a high risk of being failure, but it carries a low risk of actually ruining your life and personal finances (Location 824) * As for the conditional goods, I'll add: no one should start a company just because they want to get rich, but it doesn't hurt to be well positioned in the first place. (Location 841) * Yesterday's leaders were charismatic strongmen who could dominate a room. Tomorrow's leaders may be introverts better at writing than they are at speaking. Yesterday's crypto billionaires were libertarians who flouted fiat and hated the FED. Tomorrow's may be whoever has the closest ties to the SEC, or whoever best understands the shifting regulatory environment. I'm (Location 861) * The biggest obstacle Facebook has to overcome to make Reels successful is that the type of content that makes TikTok amazing is the stuff people don't want to post in an environment connected to their real-life friends. (Location 972) * TikTok will bypass your real life connections to find people who'll love the real, weird you. It is, in many ways, the anti-social-graph. An odd fit within Instagram, to be sure. (Location 982) * Inevitably, he said, we compare ourselves (outsiders) to members of the Inner Ring (insiders.) We want to be inside the ring. Anyone who has eaten in a high school cafeteria knows the feeling: "Everything would be so much better if I were just sitting over there." An Inner Ring exists in every office, university, church, and bingo hall. (Location 1054) * This is the price of chasing the Inner Ring. The desire to be likeable—to win entrance into the upper echelons of the attention marketplace, to be noteworthy and taken note of, to make a hit movie or write a best-selling book—provokes the same reaction from anyone who harbors it: inescapable mediocrity. (Location 1099) * The artist and the machine by Michael Nielsen, michaelnielsen.org (link to article) (Location 1121) * This image is known as the Hubble Extreme Deep Field. It contains 5,500 galaxies, each of which, in turn, contains billions of stars. This region of sky ordinarily looks empty because these galaxies are far too dim to be seen with the naked eye. Some of the galaxies are more than 13 billion light years away. We are seeing them as they were just a few hundred million years after the big bang, near the dawn of time. If you have the eyes to see, this is what deep space and the early history of the universe looks like. (Location 1133) * Water in Suspense reveals a hidden world. We discover a rich structure immanent in the water droplet, a structure not ordinarily accessible to our senses. In this way it's similar to the Hubble Extreme Deep Field, which also reveals a hidden world. Both are examples of what I call Super-realist art, art which doesn't just capture what we can see directly with our eyes or hear with our ears, but which uses new sensors and methods of visualization to reveal a world that we cannot directly perceive. It's art being used to reveal science. Although I'm not an artist or an art critic, I find Super-realist art fascinating. (Location 1146) * But even the most talented Realist artists capture only a tiny slice of reality. Rembrandt's self-portraits, as real as they appear, omit nearly all the biological and mental processes going on in Rembrandt's body and mind. Suppose, for example, we could zoom in on his face, seeing it at 10 times magnification, then 100, then 1,000, and so on. At each level of magnification a new world would be revealed, of pores and cells and microbes. And there is so much structure to understand in each of these worlds, from the incredibly complex ecology of microbes on the skin, to the inner workings of cells. Consider this video simulating the inside of a cell: (Location 1169) * Unfortunately, when viewed on a computer screen or as a small print, this tryptych looks washed out and insipid, a poor imitation of the Realists. But when you see the original — 6 and a half feet high, and 42 feet long — the effect is jaw-dropping. Monet's genius, and what made his painting so overwhelming, was a deep understanding of how humans see. He was a master illusionist who understood how to trick the viewer's brain into seeing something much, much better than a realistic rendition. This only works at scale. When "Water Lillies" is shrunk to print size, the psychology of perception changes, and the illusion vanishes. I don't understand why this is. I've read something of the theory of Monet and his fellow Impressionists, and don't find those explanations convincing. What I do know is that Monet's shimmering pond loses its glory. It looks fake, less than a literal rendition, merely a washed out print. But somehow, in the original, Monet was able to use his understanding of human perception to evoke water lillies in a fashion more spectacular than a Realist painting could ever have achieved. (Location 1180) * These works gradually shift away from representing reality, and toward exploring the relationship between art piece and viewer. Escher, for example, used quirks in the human visual system to evoke impossible realities. Abstract artists such as Kandinsky take this idea still further, and it is developed to an extreme in the work of abstract minimalists such as John McLaughlin, a pioneer in what is known as Hard-edge painting: (Location 1196) * Super-realism changes art again. Virtuosity becomes about revealing hidden worlds and discovering new aesthetics. Take a look at the following video, which shows — in extreme slow motion! — a packet of light passing through a bottle. Ordinarily that passage takes less than a nanosecond, but the video slows the passage down by a factor of 10 billion, so we can see it: (Location 1208) * In a similar vein, in 1665 Robert Hooke published a bestselling book entitled Micrographia, which used the newly-invented microscope to reveal the world of the very small. Hooke's book included the first ever drawings of biological cells, as well as drawings showing animals such as fleas in unprecedented detail: (Location 1220) * Story-tellers say that reality is often stranger and more interesting than fiction. I believe this is true for all art. The reason is that nature is more imaginative than we, and as we probe deeper into nature, we will continue to discover new aesthetics and new forms of beauty. (Location 1248) # Your P2K Articles  ## Metadata - Author: [[P2K]] - Full Title: Your P2K Articles - Category: #books ## Highlights - Instead, TSMC is now one of only two fabs (including Samsung) able to keep up with Moore’s Law. (For what it’s worth, they also manufactured the Apple M1 chip.) (Location 64) - The recent trend of rhetoric against stagnation is not founded in evidence or driven by data. It is pure mood affiliation. You bought into the stagnation hypothesis when it was hip and contrarian, and now buy into the optimism hypothesis to be even more hip and counter-contrarian. At no point did you stop to look at the data or actually think for yourself. (Location 127) - science is not slowing down… I think that the perception of stagnation in science – and in biology specifically – is basically fake news, driven by technological hedonic treadmill and nostalgia. (Location 134) - This is not a coincidence. A company dependent on a single person’s work has a single point of failure. In tech jargon, they have low Bus Factor, the number of people who would have to get hit by a bus for the project to fail. The higher your Bus Factor, the greater your institutional resilience. (Location 182) - It’s easy to understand why an organization might want this kind of redundancy. Sure, it’s wasteful and inefficient, but it prevents the greatest threat to any company: giving employees leverage. (Location 186) - you write a great post and it goes viral, everyone on the internet thinks you’re a genius. Since content is shared organically, your best work gets way more exposure than your worst. The incentive in these situations is to ramp up variance and do the most interesting writing you can muster. (Location 327) - The problem is that like pop-music, pop-science and all other pop-culture, pop-writing can only appeal to the largest common denominator. Even if the author and readers are interesting people in isolation, aggregation forces this blob of individuals into a milquetoast morass. (Location 337) - A Substack newsletter can have an About page, but that’s it. There will never be anything like Nadia’s notes which are a regularly updated half-baked stream of consciousness, or Guzey’s list of Tweets or even Nintil’s categories. And they certainly won’t have Gwern’s link preview on hover, or sidenotes. (Location 366) - But on Substack, you’re paid monthly, creating pressure to churn out regular updates. Since it’s impossible to have interesting novel thoughts twice a week every week, this also means writers skew heavily towards summarizing the news, pumping out quick takes, or riffing on whatever they read on Twitter. (Location 383) - In the past, you might have spent 10 hours reading a book that took 4 years to research and write, a 3500x multiple on time! Today, a newsletter that publishes M-F and takes 30 minutes to read only provides a 67x multiple. (Location 390) - They tell the founding mythology as: “Chris, who was taking time off after leaving Kik, had built a prototype in the spare room of his Kitchener, Ontario, apartment, by lashing together Stripe, an enterprise email delivery tool, and some quickly-built web publishing software.” (Location 435) - It would be a prototypically cool and scrappy founding story, except that 2 (now 3) years later, that’s still all Substack is. (Location 438) - Behavioral Econ is the love child of economics and psychology, early AI researchers maintained a serious interest in cognitive science. What exactly are your cursory interests in space exploration, meta-science and bayesian statistics preparing you for? (Location 497) - Of course the inflation of his mathematical and engineering ability makes sense when you consider that the judges in question are predominantly art historians. Rather than as a Renaissance Man, Leonardo would be better regarded as an exceptional painter with various hobbies. (Location 532) - To be clear, there are still good reasons to learn a variety of skills. As Marc Andreessen put it: All successful CEO’s [sic] are like this. They are almost never the best product visionaries, or the best salespeople, or the best marketing people, or the best finance people, or even the best managers, but they are top 25% in some set of those skills, and then all of a sudden they’re (Location 546) - So go read your SaaS/Meta-Science/Aerospace blog and revel in the genuine joy of intellectual curiosity. As Tyler Cowen would say, I’m just here to lower the status of polymaths. (Location 557) - [1] Richard Feynman is honored for his Nobel Prize in Physics, but he’s famous for Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! As fellow Nobel winner Murray Gell-Mann repeatedly grumbled, the stories were only interesting because Feynman “spent a huge amount of energy generating anecdotes about himself.” (Location 679) - Again, we’ll focus on the NYT’s suggestion that the financially ambitious pursue AI-driven tech companies. In that case, you might get paid below market for a few years while your startup gets off  the ground, but the degree of financial risk is really not that great. Let’s say your income drops down to $80,000. That’s a halving, which loses you 0.45 points, but it’s only a momentary occurrence. (Location 728) - Or to continue abusing the Marxist jargon: We live in an unprecedented time where more people than ever have access to the means of production. What does it really take to start an AI startup? A laptop, free wifi, access to some open coursewhere and some AWS credits? (Location 739) - But that’s unreasonably pessimistic. We can do much better. Surveying the top Y Combinator companies, I find that around the top 50 are valued at over $1,000,000,000. They won’t all exit successfully, and the founders won’t all own enough equity to emerge with tres commas to their net worth, but this already gets us to a much more practical and optimistic heuristic to life: Try very hard to get into YC Conditional on acceptance, try very hard to become a billionaire (Location 744) - Actually, if you care about helping others, the case for becoming a billionaire is dramatically stronger. An egoist is stuck with shitty log returns, but a truly empathetic person can always give to the poor and thus models (aggregate) utility as a linear function of wealth. Barring really extreme cases, there are no diminishing returns. Or taking the GiveWell analysis literally [2], a billion dollars could save 200,000 lives! It’s very hard to argue that your time could be better spent on any other cause. (Location 770) - But what if you’re running a company that “exploits” wealthy tech workers, and the donate the proceeds to stop human trafficking? In some sense you are still guilty of capitalist exploitation, but it’s not a sense that matters. (Location 785) - Practically speaking, there are plenty of tech companies that de facto, albeit through several layers of abstraction, do exploit very poor people. They might be behind an API, but the poor are still exploited for mining your rare earth minerals, categorizing gore for your content filter, and getting disproportionately exposed to the impacts of climate change from your energy consumption. (Location 786) - Thus far, I’ve mostly considered historical factors, assuming the future looks like the present. But the future could be very different! How does this strategy perform in different scenarios? I’d like to suggest it’s at least a reasonable hedge: If income inequality continues to increase, it’s even more important to make sure you’re part of the oligarchical class On the other hand, if inequality decreases and we move towards a socialist or UBI world, the opportunity cost goes down as the social safety net improves That’s just the domestic version. A similar argument applies internationally as well: If some countries remain very poor, you’ll always be able to retire with relatively modest savings and still have a very high quality of life If all currently poor countries become rich, such an enormous amount of global wealth will be generated that it’s an even better bet to become a oligarch (Location 811) - I understand that being a founder carriers a high risk of being failure, but it carries a low risk of actually ruining your life and personal finances (Location 824) - As for the conditional goods, I’ll add: no one should start a company just because they want to get rich, but it doesn’t hurt to be well positioned in the first place. (Location 841) - Yesterday’s leaders were charismatic strongmen who could dominate a room. Tomorrow’s leaders may be introverts better at writing than they are at speaking. Yesterday’s crypto billionaires were libertarians who flouted fiat and hated the FED. Tomorrow’s may be whoever has the closest ties to the SEC, or whoever best understands the shifting regulatory environment. I’m (Location 861) - The biggest obstacle Facebook has to overcome to make Reels successful is that the type of content that makes TikTok amazing is the stuff people don’t want to post in an environment connected to their real-life friends. (Location 972) - TikTok will bypass your real life connections to find people who’ll love the real, weird you. It is, in many ways, the anti-social-graph. An odd fit within Instagram, to be sure. (Location 982) - Inevitably, he said, we compare ourselves (outsiders) to members of the Inner Ring (insiders.) We want to be inside the ring. Anyone who has eaten in a high school cafeteria knows the feeling: “Everything would be so much better if I were just sitting over there.” An Inner Ring exists in every office, university, church, and bingo hall. (Location 1054) - This is the price of chasing the Inner Ring. The desire to be likeable—to win entrance into the upper echelons of the attention marketplace, to be noteworthy and taken note of, to make a hit movie or write a best-selling book—provokes the same reaction from anyone who harbors it: inescapable mediocrity. (Location 1099) - The artist and the machine by Michael Nielsen, michaelnielsen.org (link to article) (Location 1121) - This image is known as the Hubble Extreme Deep Field. It contains 5,500 galaxies, each of which, in turn, contains billions of stars. This region of sky ordinarily looks empty because these galaxies are far too dim to be seen with the naked eye. Some of the galaxies are more than 13 billion light years away. We are seeing them as they were just a few hundred million years after the big bang, near the dawn of time. If you have the eyes to see, this is what deep space and the early history of the universe looks like. (Location 1133) - Water in Suspense reveals a hidden world. We discover a rich structure immanent in the water droplet, a structure not ordinarily accessible to our senses. In this way it’s similar to the Hubble Extreme Deep Field, which also reveals a hidden world. Both are examples of what I call Super-realist art, art which doesn’t just capture what we can see directly with our eyes or hear with our ears, but which uses new sensors and methods of visualization to reveal a world that we cannot directly perceive. It’s art being used to reveal science. Although I’m not an artist or an art critic, I find Super-realist art fascinating. (Location 1146) - But even the most talented Realist artists capture only a tiny slice of reality. Rembrandt’s self-portraits, as real as they appear, omit nearly all the biological and mental processes going on in Rembrandt’s body and mind. Suppose, for example, we could zoom in on his face, seeing it at 10 times magnification, then 100, then 1,000, and so on. At each level of magnification a new world would be revealed, of pores and cells and microbes. And there is so much structure to understand in each of these worlds, from the incredibly complex ecology of microbes on the skin, to the inner workings of cells. Consider this video simulating the inside of a cell: (Location 1169) - Unfortunately, when viewed on a computer screen or as a small print, this tryptych looks washed out and insipid, a poor imitation of the Realists. But when you see the original — 6 and a half feet high, and 42 feet long — the effect is jaw-dropping. Monet’s genius, and what made his painting so overwhelming, was a deep understanding of how humans see. He was a master illusionist who understood how to trick the viewer’s brain into seeing something much, much better than a realistic rendition. This only works at scale. When "Water Lillies" is shrunk to print size, the psychology of perception changes, and the illusion vanishes. I don’t understand why this is. I’ve read something of the theory of Monet and his fellow Impressionists, and don’t find those explanations convincing. What I do know is that Monet’s shimmering pond loses its glory. It looks fake, less than a literal rendition, merely a washed out print. But somehow, in the original, Monet was able to use his understanding of human perception to evoke water lillies in a fashion more spectacular than a Realist painting could ever have achieved. (Location 1180) - These works gradually shift away from representing reality, and toward exploring the relationship between art piece and viewer. Escher, for example, used quirks in the human visual system to evoke impossible realities. Abstract artists such as Kandinsky take this idea still further, and it is developed to an extreme in the work of abstract minimalists such as John McLaughlin, a pioneer in what is known as Hard-edge painting: (Location 1196) - Super-realism changes art again. Virtuosity becomes about revealing hidden worlds and discovering new aesthetics. Take a look at the following video, which shows — in extreme slow motion! — a packet of light passing through a bottle. Ordinarily that passage takes less than a nanosecond, but the video slows the passage down by a factor of 10 billion, so we can see it: (Location 1208) - In a similar vein, in 1665 Robert Hooke published a bestselling book entitled Micrographia, which used the newly-invented microscope to reveal the world of the very small. Hooke’s book included the first ever drawings of biological cells, as well as drawings showing animals such as fleas in unprecedented detail: (Location 1220) - Story-tellers say that reality is often stranger and more interesting than fiction. I believe this is true for all art. The reason is that nature is more imaginative than we, and as we probe deeper into nature, we will continue to discover new aesthetics and new forms of beauty. (Location 1248)