Links #11
Here are some more links to things that I keep thinking about. I shared a bit more detail on these ones than I usually do—there were so many good quotes to include. Enjoy!
Earlier this year, there was a post in the New York Times called “Sometimes, Forgiveness is Overrated”. Selfishness & Therapy Culture is a brilliant critique, both of the NYT post and of the culture that produced it.
“Who in the world could possibly look out at contemporary society and think that the message ‘put yourself before other people’ isn’t loud enough? Every women’s site on the internet preaches this message. Every hustle bro on Threads preaches this message. Every therapist between San Diego and Sacramento preaches this message. Every eight-word meme in overly elaboratee cursive font on Pinterest preaches this message. … There’s the girlboss version and the Joe Rogan bro version and horoscope obsessive version and the Wall Street grindset version and the fitness guru on trenbolone version…. Justification for selfishness is not in short supply. It is the water in which we swim.”
My opinion: the celebration of selfishness is a form of societal sickness that we have, and it isn’t new. Faith practices that center on forgiveness and selflessness are part of the social infrastructure our forefathers erected to fight the sickness, and when we erode them, we do so at our own peril.
The Morality of Having Kids in a Magical, Maybe Simulated World
This post is a reaction to the recurring sentiment that perhaps it is immoral to have children in a world threatened by climate change. The “evidence for a simulated world” part is a bit farfetched, but what interested me the most was the idea of framing human progress in the terms of “ENERGY: The Game.” It gave me this feeling like, oh, we’re all collectively playing this game1, and it’s going somewhere, so what is my role? Instead of playing for myself, or my family, or my country, I could be playing for humanity, in its fight against the elemental foe. In this game, is there anything more noble then working to push technology forward, creating value out of nothingness, helping to create abundance for all humanity?
You should be working on Hardware
I work in software but I studied mechanical engineering, so I have a deep respect for those who work in hardware (like Casey Handmer, the author). I love how this post calls out the needs in the world and raises your aspirations to work on them:
“You only get a few chances to work on really big projects, to build the future, to move humanity forward.”
“Most hardware concepts will never even be dreamed, let alone designed, built, and brought to market. There are many, many more important, good businesses to build than there are people building them. When you build something, you can accelerate the future by decades!”
The whole post is inspiring, not to mention the follow-up post How to learn Hardware, which included this wisdom:
“It is always easier to learn things you enjoy doing. The art lies in finding ways to enjoy the things that are necessary…. and finding ways to avoid enjoying to excess things that are counterproductive to your mission in life.”
Another one from Casey Handmer (I’ve been reading through his archives). In this one, he explains that all nontrivial engineering efforts eventually encounter “the coordination problem.” It is very common for engineers to be oblivious of it, which manifests itself in things like complaints about management being inept, or resentment that their work was “thrown away.” Here, Casey argues that elite engineers should understand the coordination problem, what causes it, and ways to resolve it. I’ve historically avoided the management track because I enjoy creating things and people are messy. That said, management exists to help solve the coordination problem and this post helped me see that I ought to develop a working understanding of management if I ever want to create something nontrivial (and I do!). Casey’s blog has quickly become one of my favorites.
You Don’t Have Time to Read Books That Won’t Change Your Life
We’ve all read a book that changed our life, right? Given that there’s 50 million+ books in existence, there are likely hundreds of thousands of other life-changing books out there that we only haven’t read because we haven’t found them yet. This post pushed me to imagine what my life might look like if I read twice as many “life-changing books” as I currently do, and how I might do that. I’ve been on a reading kick recently (a book a week for the past six weeks!) and I feel like it’s added a richness to my life that I don’t get from podcasts or music.
1 "It's like we got handed a save file of a game, where others put in millions of hours of work, and we can decide what game we want to play in the future." - Kurzgesagt