Ben Mann Monthly Apr 2021: Maui, taxes, BAC, libertarian dream worlds
Purpose
An index for my memory
A menu of topics for my next conversation with you
A faster way to share what I’m excited about without the barrier of writing a complete blog entry on it
A skimmable way to spread content I found valuable
Experiments and experiences
Snorkeling and freediving
I snorkeled almost every day for a week in Maui. Olawalu was heartbreakingly dead, covered in a thick layer of gray dust. While the boat tours suggested Molokini and The Five Graves had the best scenery, we found Honolua Bay was best, hands down. In this one spot, we saw turtles, eels, shiny rainbow parrotfish, the biggest schools of mackarel I've ever seen, and a reef shark. For the first time, I used a snorkel with a wave guard. It made a huge difference to comfort, especially when recovering from a free dive. I used my Garmin 745 to keep track of time, but generally I was nowhere near my limits and didn't need to check. Maximum dive depth was about 10 meters, max time less than 1 minute. Swimming down only a few feet felt like entering a new world. Distortion from the heat of the sun and most of the stirred up silt only affect the top few feet of water, while just below has near-perfect visibility and you can almost always hear the distant singing of cephalopods. Diana had an extra sharkskin for me to wear, which brought the water temperature from slightly too cool to indefinitely sustainable, while being more portable and easy to use than a full wetsuit. To minimize mask leakage, I shaved only my upper lip. I'd call that an "inverse moustache" but the technical term is "chin curtain," famously worn by Abe Lincoln.
Maui food
I overindulged on Maui: banana cream pies, fresh malasadas, tuna poke, fish tacos, fish and chips, acai bowl, hibiscus and ginger kombucha, dole whip, milkshakes, burgers, shave ice, banana bread, pork belly saimin, fresh coconut, and of course our daily papaya. Inspired by Jiajia, I was planning to try 16:8 intermittent fasting, but instead we mostly elimininated ice cream and baked goods for the last 3 weeks and I'm feeling great!
Splinters
On the second day in Maui as I walked along a beach, a little knife plunged into my heel. I didn't notice at the time since it was covered in sand, but the next day it still hurt. When I finally looked at it, there was an obvious black spot. I thought it might be a sea urchin spine. The web suggested dissolving the calcium by soaking in vinegar. After cutting the healed skin over the wound back open, I soaked it for hours to no avail. A few days later, I cut it open again, having determined it must be a normal splinter. I had trouble getting it out. When Diana squeezed it to get a better look, it popped right out! ~3mm long, took 3 more days to heal.
Emotion rating {-3, 3}: mean 1, std .5
Highs: moderna shot, feedback week at work(!), snorkeling, drinking 1 milkshake per day, swimming every day, not getting sunburned, social life regenerating
Lows: splinter, tired despite sleeping more, social pressure to "catch up" now that SF's reopening
Life updates
Moderna shot #1, along with 75% of SF! 💉
80k Hours helped us recruit, great experience on both sides 🙌
Nose recovered from 2nd turbinate ablation 😤
Cod and black cod are completely different fish 🐟 🐡
Booked NYC for early June 🛫
Got a CPA for the first time 💯
Got a yoga ball to "actively" sit on during meetings 🔮
Content
5 point Likert ratings for “I would recommend this content to a friend”, sorted
Gyspy Guide: Road to Hana 5/5 while there
An excellent guided tour of The Road to Hana, offering an insightful, fact-checked look into the history of the area and the island.
Polynesians first sailed from Manasas across the pacific to Hawaii in a few-week voyage. Over hundreds of years they regressed to a primitive society, to be conquered and perhaps enslaved by another wave of Polynesians from Tahiti. Did the original Polynesians get soft living in tropical paradise?
Renowned British explorer Captain James Cook was first treated as a deity on his first visit to Hawaii. On his second visit, he was killed because he tried to kidnap the wrong chief. 🤷♂️
From a peak population of 300-400k Hawaiians in the 1800s, there are now only ~10k + 90k mixed. This roughly mirrors the mass killing of Native Americans through spreading of European disease.
The US basically illegally annexed Hawaii at gunpoint because it proved useful as a military base during the Spanish American War and World War II. It took a while to become a state because feds thought there were too few white people to vote.
Hawaiian culture was polygamous, and as such for a long time was known to traders and sailors as the Sin City of the Pacific. Christian missionaries eradicated most of this culture in the late 19th century.
Good Reasons for Bad Feelings 4/5
An intro to evolutionary psychology from a true believer, who nonetheless gives an even-handed view of what we do and don't know.
Main thesis: evolution's just trying to propagate genes. This may lead to unexpected outcomes in unconstrained variables. Example: race horses are all bred for speed, which weakens their bones in the process of getting longer and lighter weight. This means they're much more likely than wild horses to break bones while running, but all race horses must occasionally overshoot the precipice of a cliff-edged fitness landscape.
Strangely hammered on lack of genetic markers of disease while ignoring the stunningly effective recent results on polygenic traits until nearly the last chapter of the book, and then only glossily.
Whether right or wrong, a thought-provoking exploration of what adaptations go awry to produce various psychoses.
Shifting the impossible to the inevitable 4/5
Why aren't there modern versions of Bell Labs or DARPA? What was it about those that made them such hubs of innovation? Ben explores the history and makes a plausible roadmap for how to apply the lessens of yesterday, tomorrow.
Key ingredients:
Money factory, like deep-pocketed institutional VCs
Promising technology, like AI
Researchers with the right amount of slack
Engineers ready to commercialize new developments quickly
Another Round 4/5
Four friends who teach at a high school are leading but shells of their former lives. To gain more confidence, playfulness, and recklessness, they decide to increase their BAC by 0.05 for a few months.
The film shows the two sides of alcohol: those under its sway can be freed from their anxiety and everyday banality, or fall off the cliff and even die. These characters felt real, complicated, and interesting in a way that few Hollywood ones do these days. Or maybe I've been watching the wrong movies.
To me, the message of the film is not that you should maybe try alcohol. It's that you should try non-addictive, highly targeted anxiolytic and antidepressant drugs! They really work for some people, and they don't cause the same dangerous motor impairment, slurred speech, stinky breath, etc.
Won Best International Film in the 2021 Academy Awards
Prospectus On Próspera 4/5 for (ex?)-libertarians
They're building a charter city in Honduras. Yes, this has been true since 2009, but it's getting real fast now. They've got city building experts from across the world already signed on and expect to have built out siginificant capacity by end of 2022.
As an libertarian-sympathetic techno paternalist, I am super excited about this project. If it's successful, it could do more to lift people out of poverty than Shenzhen, which was already a huge boon.
Some of the most innovative mechanisms:
Construction and businesses operate on the laws of their choice. The more libertarian you get, the more dependent on private insurance contractors you become to be able to operationalize. This means things like personal VTOL aircraft and medical tourism are certain to thrive there, if they can anywhere.
You sign a real social contract and pay a membership fee just to live there.
Sane, minimalist tax code! Plus provisions that prevent it from increasing in the future.
There might be a cryptocurrency backing undeveloped land to let people provide development liquidity
It's amazing that Disney can continue to churn out reasonably good movies about princesses since 1937(?!)
Very standard plot, but excellent world building. I loved the inventiveness of the universe, the different personalities of the different tribes, and of course Awkwafina playing the 5000 year old dragon.
Fearless 3/5
About what you'd expect: son of master fighter is not supposed to fight, but then does because of his big ego. This leads to his father's death, his family's ruin, and his exile. The simple farmers enlighten him, he returns to his village, and sacrifices himself to gain honor for his entire country against The West.
Still, Jet Li knows how to fight on camera.
Risky Business 2/5
Cult classic in which Tom Cruise totals his dad's Porche, then opens a brothel to pay off the debt
Came out 3 years before Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which felt like the PG version of this movie. In fact their posters are almost identical (lead actor looking over wayfarers with red text)
While I like the premise of "to succeed, care less what other people think," this felt both privileged and heavy handed: "rich kids can't go wrong, will get into Princeton regardless of performance"
Stowaway 1/5
They should reserve a special circle of hell for the screenwriters whose entire plots are driven by offscreen engineers who fucked everything up royally beyond repair. What realistic space vessel has a single point of failure IN THE OXYGEN SUPPLY? That's the first thing you'd double check!
This movie was like the opposite of The Martian, where the characters were full of agency, but everytime they tried anything it failed. Felt like a cheap trick to get an emotional response just like the slightly more terrible Midnight Sky.
