Hacking Darwin by Jamie Metzl is an interesting look at the future (that is already partly here) of us hacking our genes (lives and more). Metzl doesn’t shy away from controversial topics. The book ends with a recommendation to start a global conversation; I think it’s a very good suggestion.
One interesting topic is that of genetically engineering our kids. We don’t have a very distinct line to draw in the sand (although we might want to believe so) between bad/ill and good/improvement. In the end, I think we will have a framework of compromises, but still the rich and influential will be able to edit/change their babies. And before you think only of productivity and beauty, some might opt for very different skills/abilities.
The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide by James (Jim) Fadiman gives you an overview of what we know today about using psychedelics for therapy/self-care/self-exploration.
I liked that it gave a good overview and added to my knowledge base around the topic. It was less structured/logical than I expected, but that was ok.
It does feature some very useful links and I think it’s a good stepping-stone to learning more.
– Presents practices for safe and successful psychedelic voyages, including the benefits of having a guide and how to be a guide – Reviews the value of psychedelics for healing and self-discovery as well as how LSD has facilitated scientific and technical problem-solving – Reveals how ultra-low doses improve cognitive functioning, emotional balance, and physical stamina
This year 600,000 people in the U.S. alone will try LSD for the first time, joining the 23 million who have already experimented with this substance.
Called “America’s wisest and most respected authority on psychedelics and their use,” James Fadiman has been involved with psychedelic research since the 1960s. In this guide to the immediate and long-term effects of psychedelic use for spiritual (high dose), therapeutic (moderate dose), and problem-solving (low dose) purposes, Fadiman outlines best practices for safe, sacred entheogenic voyages learned through his more than 40 years of experience–from the benefits of having a sensitive guide during a session (and how to be one) to the importance of the setting and pre-session intention.
Fadiman reviews the newest as well as the neglected research into the psychotherapeutic value of visionary drug use for increased personal awareness and a host of serious medical conditions, including his recent study of the reasons for and results of psychedelic use among hundreds of students and professionals. He reveals new uses for LSD and other psychedelics, including extremely low doses for improved cognitive functioning and emotional balance. Cautioning that psychedelics are not for everyone, he dispels the myths and misperceptions about psychedelics circulating in textbooks and clinics as well as on the internet. Exploring the life-changing experiences of Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, and Huston Smith as well as Francis Crick and Steve Jobs, Fadiman shows how psychedelics, used wisely, can lead not only to healing but also to scientific breakthroughs and spiritual epiphanies.
The Box by Marc Levinson is an interesting history of the shipping container. It’s got nothing to do with what I’m working on, but nonetheless it was very interesting. The story takes place on a global scale, it’s well researched, and shows how unpredictable the future can be.
The book gave me a better understanding of how the global economy operates, it’s history, and gave some more ‘power’ to the tides of history (vs the great man theory). This is because although there are some very important players, the timing should have been right and that is what matters most.
Ohh and that government intervention almost never helps (and hurts in most cases). Yet in the end, Dubai is a very good counterexample. The question there is, how much is that government and not just ‘business’ doing it’s thing (and maybe a lot of luck too?).
This should say it all, right? It’s a fun, lighthearted, book about intergalactic battles, romance (read: sexytime), blood, fighting, being ‘cool’, etc.
It’s just fun. That’s it. Lots of fun. And rage, Max rage.
Eckart’s Notes is a Dutch book by Eckart Wintzen. He was an inspiring entrepreneur to many. His core idea was that you could run a company by having many autonomous cells. I think it could compare to an ant colony, your body, or many other bottom-up systems.
In the book, he argues for independence mixed with strict guidelines from the holding (queen bee, your cognition). This allows for independent and creative thought from the cells, with a uniform representation and way of doing things.
Some things are very strict, like what font to use and the size of plants in the office. But a cell is responsible for its own acquisition, making a profit, etc.
This system prevents many back-office processes from starting/growing. Because the cell has to do it themselves (and of course don’t want to do it, but have to).
There are many more ideas in the book and it reminded me of ReWork quite a bit.
Not everything might apply to your organisation, but I can recommend most entrepreneurs (especially with (the ambition to grow beyond) 20 people or more).
Karl Popper on democracy for The Economist. About democracy and why he thinks the two-party system is the best (of the worst).
“As we have seen, even one small party may wield quite disproportionate power if it is in the position to decide which of the two big parties it will join to form a coalition government.”
What is a tech company? “to classify a company as a tech company because it utilizes software is just as unhelpful today as it would have been decades ago.”
And “It was this economic reality that gave rise to venture capital, which is about providing money ahead of a viable product for the chance at effectively infinite returns should the product and associated company be successful.”
WeWork and Peleton are maybe not really tech companies, as defined by the criteria in the article. Though Peleton can be seen as a disruptive technology (ala The Innovators Dilemma).
“There is a growing sense of inevitability that we will eventually do human germ-line modification and that our only obligation is to wait until it is safe.”
There is no hard line between curing/preventing diseases and enhancing our (future) children. We will be able to select the features of our kids, do we want to do that?
“Surely such control is a long way off, but we are now charting a path toward human enhancement that might ultimately reduce variation in the species or, over a long period of time, lead to subspeciation.”
“How is China able to provide enough food to feed its population of over 1 billion people? Do they import food or are they self-sustainable?”
The explanation shows that China is farming fish at enormous scale. Then it goes on to explain other ecosystems, of which many are sustainable/circular (even before it was cool, but now also incorporate solar panels). Greenhouses are also key to feeding more than a billion people, and IoT devices and smartphones are also used.
“We aren’t anywhere near running out of space for landfill.” and “Properly run landfill doesn’t hurt the environment in itself.”, “Even really well run landfills are a very cheap way to dispose of our waste.”, “The main downside of sending something to landfill is we miss the chance to benefit from recycling it — but recycling is only sometimes cheaper or better for the environment.”, “The problem of rubbish polluting the sea, rivers and land can be most cheaply addressed by improving rubbish collection and making sure everything gets to landfill.” “Incinerating waste and generating electricity from it is an alternative form of rubbish disposal that is good for the environment and resolves the problem permanently, but is expensive to operate up front.”, “Sending things to landfill isn’t as ‘unsustainable’ as you might think.”, “Reusable straws and bags are often more resource intensive than single-use ones.”, “If we don’t use materials in the first place, we save resources and don’t have to worry about any of the above.”
“We’ve Reached Peak Wellness. Most of It Is Nonsense. Here’s what actually works”
“The problem is that so much of what’s sold in the name of modern-day wellness has little to no evidence of working.”
“Wellness—the kind that actually works—is simple: it’s about committing to basic practices, day in and day out, as individuals and communities.”
The advice that follows is, of course, things that work and probably don’t make much money (ala, that is why it isn’t promoted by Goop and the like).
Move your body, eat healthy (but don’t diet), let your emotions out (and seek help if needed), don’t be lonely, follow your interests and do deep-focused work.
Very interesting take (as always), on the Apple Keynote. Services for the win, locking in customers, making revenue each month instead of selling a phone once.
Amazon moving back to ‘Day One’, focus on growth and customers, over profit.
“It is also the opposite of harvesting: it is investing, and it seems more likely than not that Amazon’s upcoming results will look much more like the “Day One” company it was for years, with rapidly growing revenue and costs to match. “
A summary of: Lifespan: Why We Age and Why We Don’t Have To by David Sinclair
” What if there was a single cause of aging upstream of all the hallmarks of aging? Sinclair believes that there is – loss of information. ” ” Rather, the loss is in the epigenome, or the expression of genetic code that instructs newly divided cells what they should be. “
” The basic idea: psychedelics reduce the weight of held beliefs and increase the weight of incoming sensory input, allowing the beliefs to be more readily changed by the new sensory information. “
” Psychedelics “heat up” the brain, increasing plasticity and weakening the influence of prior beliefs. As the psychedelic stops being active, the brain “cools” – the hierarchy re-forms, though perhaps in a different configuration than the pre-psychedelic configuration. “
“Carhart-Harris & Friston place the default mode network at top of the brain’s predictive hierarchy. The default mode network is the network of brain regions that’s most active when the brain isn’t engaged with any specific task. It also appears to be the seat of one’s sense of self. The default mode network is intensely relaxed by strong psychedelic experiences – this is subjectively felt as ego dissolution, and allows for the propagation of bottom-up sense data (which are also boosted by psychedelics).”
“Carhart-Harris & Friston identify two mechanisms by which psychedelics may relax the default mode network – activation of 5-HT2AR serotonin receptors (there are lots of these receptors in the default mode network), and disruption of α and βwave patterns, which seem to propagate top-down expectations through the brain (and are correlated with default mode network activity).”
Very interesting and a great resource (the original article and other links) to take a closer look at the science behind why psychedelics might work.
” The story we have been telling ourselves about our origins is wrong, and perpetuates the idea of inevitable social inequality. David Graeber and David Wengrow ask why the myth of ‘agricultural revolution’ remains so persistent, and argue that there is a whole lot more we can learn from our ancestors. “
“… and in almost no way does it resemble the conventional narrative. Our species did not, in fact, spend most of its history in tiny bands; agriculture did not mark an irreversible threshold in social evolution; the first cities were often robustly egalitarian. “
” That is the real political message conveyed by endless invocations of an imaginary age of innocence, before the invention of inequality: that if we want to get rid of such problems entirely, we’d have to somehow get rid of 99.9% of the Earth’s population and go back to being tiny bands of foragers again. Otherwise, the best we can hope for is to adjust the size of the boot that will be stomping on our faces, forever, or perhaps to wrangle a bit more wiggle room in which some of us can at least temporarily duck out of its way. “
The authors try and argue that the history of men is not what we think it is. And that we don’t need to return to that mythical state to become whole again. If we better understand how it was, maybe we can find a better way forward.
” There is no reason to believe that small-scale groups are especially likely to be egalitarian, or that large ones must necessarily have kings, presidents, or bureaucracies. These are just prejudices stated as facts. ” (arguing again Jared Diamond and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among others).
” The really odd thing about these endless evocations of Rousseau’s innocent State of Nature, and the fall from grace, is that Rousseau himself never claimed the State of Nature really happened. It was all a thought-experiment. ” and “… Rousseau was really trying to explore what he considered the fundamental paradox of human politics: that our innate drive for freedom somehow leads us, time and again, on a ‘spontaneous march to inequality’. In Rousseau’s own words: ‘All ran headlong for their chains in the belief that they were securing their liberty; for although they had enough reason to see the advantages of political institutions, they did not have enough experience to foresee the dangers’. The imaginary State of Nature is just a way of illustrating the point.”
Then they argue why we didn’t live in the blissful egalitarian society of hunter-gatherers: ” To begin with, there is the undisputed existence of rich burials, extending back in time to the depths of the Ice Age. Some of these, such as the 25,000-year-old graves from Sungir, east of Moscow, have been known for many decades and are justly famous. “
They then use historical sites to show that also these were already present 10.000 years ago. They also argue that the growth of society/groups might have been cyclical. ” Why are these seasonal variations important? Because they reveal that from the very beginning, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities. “
The humans of yesteryear experimented and were diverse, it wasn’t paradise (nor hell). A better question to ask (instead of ‘why is it so inequal’?) is to ask ‘why did we get so stuck?’
” The first bombshell on our list concerns the origins and spread of agriculture. There is no longer any support for the view that it marked a major transition in human societies. In those parts of the world where animals and plants were first domesticated, there actually was no discernible ‘switch’ from Palaeolithic Forager to Neolithic Farmer. The ‘transition’ from living mainly on wild resources to a life based on food production typically took something in the order of three thousand years. “
” Another bombshell: ‘civilization’ does not come as a package. The world’s first cities did not just emerge in a handful of locations, together with systems of centralised government and bureaucratic control. ” and “… in the more established heartlands of urbanisation – Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, the Basin of Mexico – there is mounting evidence that the first cities were organised on self-consciously egalitarian lines, municipal councils retaining significant autonomy from central government. “
” The pieces are all there to create an entirely different world history. For the most part, we’re just too blinded by our prejudices to see the implications. For instance, almost everyone nowadays insists that participatory democracy, or social equality, can work in a small community or activist group, but cannot possibly ‘scale up’ to anything like a city, a region, or a nation-state. But the evidence before our eyes, if we choose to look at it, suggests the opposite. Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. “
An overview of what is happening at Wageningen University (in The Netherlands) and surrounding it. How we can feed the world (through new technologies).
” With the right placement and the right light recipes, Marcelis and his team think that their goal of a 50 per cent reduction in greenhouse energy costs is within reach. Or, as the Wageningen motto goes: “two times more with two times less”. “
” According to Van Huis, the new age of entomophagy is beginning. Researchers at WUR are looking to capitalise on bugs’ ability to act as both livestock and miniature waste treatment plants. Insects reared on organic waste serve as both food production and waste reduction – a triumph in circular agriculture, where yield and use of resources are optimised for minimal impact on the environment. “We are at the beginning of an exponential growth,” Van Huis says. “
” but this meat is not made up of cow. It’s a mixture of wheat gluten, soy concentrate, colorants and water. “For us, as food engineers,” Van der Goot explains, “we would like to make a product that resembles meat as much as possible.” “
” Both the energy input and the cost of investment for shear cell are lower than those of any available extrusion technology: respectively, 25-40 per cent less, and 40-60 per cent less. “
” In the near future, Van der Goot believes that every restaurant, grocery store and kitchen can be equipped with a fake-meat machine. “
” Food fraud, like the horsemeat-in-beef scandal of 2013 scandal, costs up to $40 billion (£32 billion) a year – but WUR uses a food product’s biological fingerprint to determine its origin and authenticity. “
” ”What I like the most about micro-algae is that it’s such a simple process that can have a very high impact on our society,” says Maria Barbosa, the director of AlgaePARC, a 15-year research programme at WUR looking to create low-cost, low-energy micro-algae production. “
“… vanilla orchid far above his head. These are part of the greenhouse’s “Nethervanilla” crop: proof that growing and harvesting it can be achieved in Dutch greenhouses. “
Very interesting read and great to know what innovations are happening there.
” Just as much of the world has come to see rapid population growth as normal and expected, the trends are shifting again, this time into reverse. Most parts of the world are witnessing sharp and sudden contractions in either birthrates or absolute population.”
” Capitalism as a system is particularly vulnerable to a world of less population expansion; a significant portion of the economic growth that has driven capitalism over the past several centuries may have been simply a derivative of more people and younger people consuming more stuff. “
” “The UN is employing a faulty model based on assumptions that worked in the past but that may not apply in the future.” ” (there will be less people, because faster than expected, we’re having fewer kids)
” A world of zero to negative population growth is likely to be a world of zero to negative economic growth, because fewer and older people consume less. ” I’m not sure about this, Japan (which they use as an example a lot) didn’t stop running when people got old, and we will keep inventing new things and ways to consume.
Title: Neither, and New: Lessons from Uber and Vision Fund
” Vision Fund is not a venture capital firm, nor is it a public market-focused hedge fund: it is neither, and new, but it very much remains to be seen if “new” is valuable. “
” This is also good news for public market investors: despite all of the press about Uber and WeWork, more companies are up post-IPO than down — and the gains are much larger in percentage terms than are the losses. The tech company formula still works. “
How do we reverse ageing? Young blood looked promising, in practice not so much. But the underlying science did, so we can do it without turning into vampires.
” As people age, tgf-beta accretes in the blood and this leads to problems such as inflammation or fibrosis. ” … ” Her team gave ageing mice a cocktail of oxytocin, a hormone, and alk5 inhibitor, an enzyme. “
The Evolution of Everything is the second book of his that I’ve read (after The Rational Optimist) from Matt Ridley. It takes on many large topics and argues that everything is bottom-up evolution, and not top-down planning (sky-hooks). He makes a convincing argument. Sometimes the topics are a bit too wide/shallow for my taste. Yet I am convinced by his main thesis, that everything organises bottom-up and that top-down planning breaks more things than it helps.
The New York Times bestselling author of The Rational Optimistand Genome returns with a fascinating, brilliant argument for evolution that definitively dispels a dangerous, widespread myth: that we can command and control our world.
The Evolution of Everything is about bottom-up order and its enemy, the top-down twitch—the endless fascination human beings have for design rather than evolution, for direction rather than emergence. Drawing on anecdotes from science, economics, history, politics and philosophy, Matt Ridley’s wide-ranging, highly opinionated opus demolishes conventional assumptions that major scientific and social imperatives are dictated by those on high, whether in government, business, academia, or morality. On the contrary, our most important achievements develop from the bottom up. Patterns emerge, trends evolve. Just as skeins of geese form Vs in the sky without meaning to, and termites build mud cathedrals without architects, so brains take shape without brain-makers, learning can happen without teaching and morality changes without a plan.
Although we neglect, defy and ignore them, bottom-up trends shape the world. The growth of technology, the sanitation-driven health revolution, the quadrupling of farm yields so that more land can be released for nature—these were largely emergent phenomena, as were the Internet, the mobile phone revolution, and the rise of Asia. Ridley demolishes the arguments for design and effectively makes the case for evolution in the universe, morality, genes, the economy, culture, technology, the mind, personality, population, education, history, government, God, money, and the future.
As compelling as it is controversial, authoritative as it is ambitious, Ridley’s stunning perspective will revolutionize the way we think about our world and how it works.
I do also get some of the critique (that he is going way too wide with his theory). ” One major issue is the too broad definition he gives to evolution. It starts off fine, as he discusses actual evolution in the early chapters – Darwin’s theory, and DNA, and the like. He then starts to make a series of analogies later on when discussing modern issues, like economics. There is some similarity there (but I’ll get to my problems with that in a second). But later he keeps going on to anything that’s change. For example, a chapter on education contains a detailed critique of current education systems. OK, fair enough. But how is that evolution? He wants several changes made, and concludes the chapter by stating, “Let education evolve.” OK, so he’s calling for specific, deliberate changes to be made with a clear end result in mind…… And that’s evolution? As this book notes, evolution isn’t steps made toward a clear, deliberate goal. They are just gradual changes over time acting spontaneously. But he’s pushing an agenda here, and hiding behind the theory of evolution to push for specific steps to make. “
Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott explores the mishaps of statebuilding, and more precise ‘high modernism’. It takes multiple deep dives into examples with a focus on forestry, agriculture, city building, and social organisation. These include Tanzanian villages, Russia under Lenin, and Revolutionary France.
My main takeaway from the book is that overconfidence and bad incentives, lead to bad outcomes for the population. Most (if not all) of the high modernist ideas were done with the best intentions. Yet overconfidence in ‘science’, simplification, and the knowledge of experts led to disastrous results.
What is almost always overlooked is the knowledge of the population. Where an economic planner sees chaos (e.g. curvy streets, multiple crops growing in one plot), the locals see an optimal solution to a local problem.
In the end, Scott concludes that the ideas of high modernism are a mixed bag. They have often replaced other systems that were at least as bad as theirs (e.g. hierarchy in the family, child labour, no formal education). Yet they also led to huge famines (China, central Africa), displacement and separation of families, and lost knowledge for generations.
What he also highlights is the ingenuity of the local population. This is the only thing that got many through the bad schemes that were invented from top-down.
The book is long, but the later chapters really do bring together the ideas from earlier. For anyone interested in sociology, antropology, or just how states/governments think, go have a read.
States simplify, abstract away things (like a map does), but sometimes/always you miss and forget things that should be on the map/seen in the landscape itself
The maps themselves also form the environment. This example/mental model was given at the forestry chapter, but also applies to villages in Tanzania where sometimes even a house would be moved 10 metres to be in line with the map
One thing high modernism misses is that there isn’t one(!) goal that people want to achieve. They are complex, many goals are implicit, and interpersonal relationship make things infinitely more complex
Jacobs is mentioned as a thinker who did see (better) how people worked together and that social trust and networks (which you can’t really see on a map) are very important
This is contrasted against La Bourzier who did top-down planning and was one of the thinkers behind Brazilia (capital of Brazil, and you have to read the chapter to really get a feel for how weird it all went down)
One thing that the state wants is to have legibility, to be able to ‘read’ what is happening in the country. The French wanted this 200 years ago, and still today we want this (e.g. with last names, with cadastral maps)
So some things that might be valuable, but not legible, can get lost. One thing that might be interesting is how new technology will let us better read the ‘in-legible’ things and get value from them. One area I think people are working on is to get the implicit knowledge (networks) within organisations working better
Another concept mentioned is ‘metis’ (taken from Aristotle). Here Scott mentions (and dedicates a chapter to it) how implicit knowledge is very valuable in many situations. This goes from the people who ride boats into a harbour to the locals who know how to save a tree from an ant attack
Capitalism (and high modernism) wants efficiency and control. If you have efficiency without control, you still can’t get taxes and the like. This works/worked very well in a factory (Ford), or with weaving wool. But in many other cases, you still need much local knowledge
Another interesting example is the right to work ‘strikes’. In the example used, Parisian taxi drivers followed the rules to the letter, thus grinding all traffic to a halt in Paris (ala, they were breaking many rules to do things more efficiently and arguably better)
“Forming policy and reducing it to a statistic which does not accurately represent the whole. States have had an interest in making society ‘legible’ – that is, making complex patterns easily understood. The results of these plans are chaotic, even with the best of intentions.”
“Now all of these schemes have a broad philosophical outlook in common, which Scott calls ‘High modernism’ – the belief that technology and bureaucratic planning could solve problems, and that desk planners know how to best organize human society. A design which looks simple and pleasing on paper leads to unforeseen side effects.”
“Scott emphasizes the fact that some form of genuine representation must take place in the ordering of society, so that those with practical experience will have a say in how the way society is ordered. A theory can be very pretty, but it must be challenged by questions, facts, and practice.”
