Ben Mann Monthly Jan 2021: amphetamines, covid forecasting, bad action movies, good sci fi
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
COVID forecasting
I've been following the COVID situation religiously for months now. I predict based on superforecasters I'll get my vaccine in June. Meanwhile from following Bob Wachter it seems there's a chance COVID-19 will end this year, but there'll be new COVID-21, 22, etc spawned by selection pressure from vaccines. We're already starting to see this with the Brazil and South Africa variants (excellent overview). An analogy: the polio vaccine had to target many variants; flu vaccines typically target 4-5. Even off-target vaccines appear to grant partial immunity. Luckily the J&J vaccine will likely be approved by end of February. I'm excited for my shot, even if life can't return to normal for a while. It will at least reduce the risk of serious infection for a while. If I had to get a new vaccine every 6 months I'd do it. What are some ways we can reduce the cabin fever in the meantime?
Churning from Oculus Quest 2
In tech, a user churns when he stops using your service. I was playing beatsaber regularly as exercise for a while. Since January I haven't picked up my headset once. Since discovering that returns are free if you play a game for less than 2 hours, I've tried quite a few VR experiences from the store. To some extent, I am less attracted to video games than I was in my youth because programming is so much more compelling. It has many of the same reward mechanics as games, but when you're done you've built something real, rather than feeling the emptiness of having beaten one more game. And programming is more social, because when you do it for work you have automatic multiplayer. I liked beatsaber because it made me feel like I was dancing, it was good exercise, and it was immersive. I used to have a wide range of songs I liked. In Oculus Quest I find it harder to curate a compelling collection. Or maybe the comfort level on the headset isn't quite where it'd need to be. The lenses are always just a little blurry around the edges, and the pixels give a mild screen-door effect. VR's time will come, but it hasn't yet. Give it 5-10 years.
Emotion rating {-3, 3}: mean 0, std 1
Talking to Misha made me realize these newsletters don't give any information about my emotional state. As an experiment, I'll start including an emotion score from -3 to 3, where -3 is one of the worst months of my life, 3 is one of the best, and 0 is neutral. While I feel like the month went well in retrospect, my day to day experience was balanced ups and downs, there were some high highs and low lows. The low was probably a combination of food poisoning and Diana's stress over getting a dog. High was a small breakthrough at work that I'm looking forward to validating.
Life updates
Started reading To Hold Up The Sky ⛅️
Ran out of fluoxetine for a few days due to delay in COBRA activation -> 😢. All good now -> 😊
New job 💯
Got a hammock for the balcony 🌞
Put down a deposit for a dog; scheduled arrival in June 🐶
Casual half marathon 🏃♂️
Content
5 point Likert ratings for “I would recommend this content to a friend”, sorted
Diaspora 4/5
Far reaching look into humanity's future, when self modification, uploading, and interstellar travel are all normal
Ambitious narratives take place in more than 3-dimensional space, with mind-bending descriptions of the kind of experience and life forms that'd entail
Philosophical gems casually sprinkled throughout the world-building, eg purposely adjusting your own curiosity levels, forking your consciousness, assuming "you" in 300 years will not be compatible with "you" today, intentionally creating cultural translators between vastly differing societies, etc
Host 4/5
David Foster Wallace sheds some light on why conservative talk radio has become so popular: it's about emotion packaged as truth
Covers many of the themes in Network (1976), one of my favorite movies, but in real life
Explains all the major amphetamine-based drugs, including major differences between meth-heads and Desoxyn users (100X dose)
We're not actually giving our children meth! And people who have ADHD seem to respond to these drugs differently than neurotypical people. The drugs really work for some.
Failures in technology forecasting? 4/5
The same few examples of failed technology forecasting show up repeatedly (Fermi, Rutherford, and Wright), but in each case it seems the prediction wasn't as obviously wrong as it seemed at first blush
I first heard about this in the context of Fermi predicting the first nuclear chain reaction was far away, but his reasoning was it was too expensive, not that it was technically impossible. His expertise, however, is in the science, not government expenditure, so I'd give him a pass for his low estimate.
My reading: if an expert says something is unlikely or far away, we may want to be skeptical, especially if there's a large expected value
San Andreas 3/5
Exactly what you'd expect: The Rock running around trying to save people
It bothered me how many resources he commandeered to save his own family. Sure, everyone was dying anyway, but didn't he steal that helicopter?
Still Alive 3/5
Scott Alexander of my beloved SlateStarCodex resurfaces! I love his writing, so looking forward to reading lots of it in the near future
Having a blog can be rough. Maybe I should put my content under a pseudonym? Be more careful about what I write? Or take his route and not worry about it 🤷♂️
Nice overview of currently popular prediction markets, plus a deep dive into pandemic-related bets
Current consensuses: 700k US COVID deaths by 2022; May 19 vaccine availability for any adult; 50% of Americans vaccinated by June 25; 37% chance of COVID-21 with > 10M infections; 60% chance we'll need new COVID vaccines by 2023
Terrible plot and characters, but fun ride and excellent special effects
Contrast Chinese blockbusters with American ones: filial piety, personal sacrifice extra important
The styling for the space station robot was a straight rip-off of 2001: A Space Oddysey's HAL-9000. C'mon, I'm sure we can do a little better than that.
The Personal History of David Copperfield 2/5
Whimsical portrayal of the Dickens classic
The characters felt flat and the protagonist was mean to characters you're supposed to dislike
Mostly felt like a fair portrayal of the past as "everyone was poor and life was hard, but some people made do"
Race swapping was a little jarring but good
The Expanse S1 2/5
I started watching after hearing that the sci-fi elements were relatively realistic (eg 0g maneuvers are hard).
The most unlikely thing is that technology supposedly hundreds of years from now is still terrible.
The crew doesn't seem to have had basic equipment training, and their equipment is poorly designed. For example, anyone who's gone scuba diving knows how to buddy breathe, but to do this with his spacesuit one of the characters had to destroy his suit. The crew also takes a long time to notice their crewmate's obvious hypoxia symptoms. Seems basic!