Media Highlights 2022 (July to December)

Published 12 December 2022

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2,395 words • 12 min read

This is me listing things I enjoyed reading / hearing / watching from the first half of 2022. Here are my highlights for the first half of 2022, and for all of 2021.

Ordering remains arbitrary. Let me know if you find something from this list that you end up enjoying.

Books

I keep track of what I read on Goodreads.

Carl Sagan — Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium
Steven Levy — Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
John Green — The Anthropocene Reviewed(sidenote: It’s a YA fiction author making a book-based-on-the-podcast of charming but sometimes schmaltzy essays reviewing various bits of the universe. But actually it was great and the essay on “humanity’s temporal range” made me teary.)
Josh Greene — Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them
Scott Alexander — Slate Star Codex Essays: Volume I, Volume II, and Volume III
William MacAskill - What We Owe the Future(sidenote: Here is my fawning review.)
John Markoff — Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
David Christian — Big History: The Big Bang, Life On Earth, And The Rise Of Humanity
Nick Bilton — American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road(sidenote: So much fun. The soul of a top-tier Netflix true crime drama. The story of Ross Ulbricht’s slide from scruffy libertarian ideologue to fearsome remote-work-era crime lord.)
Tobias Baumann — Avoiding the Worst: How to Prevent a Moral Catastrophe
John Broome - Weighing Goods(sidenote: I basically never hear people talk about this book, but I think it deserves comparison to Parfit. Here’s a short review.)
Chris Miller — Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology
David E. Hoffman — The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy

Music

I log most things on rateyourmusic.com. I also have a Spotify with some playlists.

Favourites

Here are the songs and albums I’m happiest to have discovered:

Arthur Russell - Another Thought (1994)
Palace Music - New Partner (from Viva Last Blues)(sidenote: One of the entries in John Green’s Anthropocene Reviewed book is about this song. You can listen to it here. Also, you should watch this video of Angel Olsen and BPB performing in the back of a taxi.)
Kolinga - Legacy (2022)
Pharaoh Sanders - Love Is Everywhere (from Wisdom Through Music)
Keith Jarrett - The Köln Concert (1975)

Other things

Videos, shorter writing, and podcast episodes.

Videos

Space-Filling Curves - Numberphile
Byrne, Glass, Ginsberg on Arthur Russell ‘Another Thought’ EPK
The Riddle That Seems Impossible Even If You Know The Answer - Veritasium
Why Sugar Always Twists Light To The Right - Optical Rotation - Steve Mould
I Can Twist My Eye Around Its Pupil (And So Can You) - Steve Mould
The Spring Paradox - Steve Mould(sidenote: Related: Braess’ paradox)
Passing A Portal Through Itself - minutephysics

Blogs and shorter writing

Some posts by Paul Christiano
- Risk Arbitrage (why strictly speaking prediction markets don’t directly tell you the probability of things)
- Secure homes for digital people
- Improbable simple hypotheses are unbelievable
- Takeoff speeds
Nick Merrill’s Substack
Some LessWrong posts
- Simulators - janus
- What 2026 looks like - Daniel Kokotajlo
- Coherence arguments do not entail goal-directed behavior - Robin Shah
Slate Star Codex and Astral Codex Ten(sidenote: I only started going through the back-catalogue recently. There is so much to choose from, so this is an incomplete and temperamental list. See Alexey Guzey’s “Most Important Slate Star Codex Posts” for a better list.)
- If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing With Made-Up Statistics “[O]n how sometimes using numbers – even messy, potentially inaccurate numbers – can shed light on a problem”
- What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It? (permalink)
- Meditations On Moloch (permalink)
- It Was You Who Made My Blue Eyes Blue (permalink)
- What Intellectual Progress Did I Make In The 2010s? (permalink)
- SSC Gives A Graduation Speech (permalink)
- I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup (permalink) “[O]n a general framework for thinking about tolerance vs prejudice.”
- The Toxoplasma Of Rage (permalink) “[O]n how the media works and why stupid topics keep coming up again and again.”
- Who By Very Slow Decay (permalink)
- Ethics Offsets (permalink)
- Against Tulip Subsidies (permalink)
- What Developmental Milestones Are You Missing? (permalink)
- Why Were Early Psychedelicists So Weird? (permalink)
- What Developmental Milestones Are You Missing? (permalink)
- The Tails Coming Apart As Metaphor For Life (permalink)
- The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project (permalink)
- Book Review: Surfing Uncertainty (permalink)
- 1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled (permalink)
- Can People Be Honestly Wrong About Their Own Experiences? (permalink)
- Yudkowsky Contra Christiano On AI Takeoff Speeds
- Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism (permalink)(sidenote: Prompted by the criticism contest I helped run.)
Gavin Leech has recently been writing obituaries of extraordinary people. For instance:
- James Lovelock (1919 – 2022)
- Paul Farmer (1959 – 2022)
- Peter Eckersley (1979-2022) (sidenote: Also read the comments and Brian Christian’s eulogy.)

Podcasts

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg - Episode 105: Dealing with our “groupstruckness” and “boundedness” (with Katja Grace)
(Self-plug) Hear This Idea - Michael Aird on how to do Impact-Driven Research
AXRP - 12 - AI Existential Risk with Paul Christiano
80,000 Hours Podcast
- Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications
- Sharon Hewitt Rawlette on why pleasure and pain are the only things that intrinsically matter(sidenote: Made me read The Feeling of Value. I enjoyed that book and the podcast, though they made me feel productively confused rather than persuaded.)
- Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value
Criminal Podcast - He’s Neutral

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