Ben Mann Monthly Jan 2022

EA school, utopian fiction, chromebooks, endurance, cake, checklists

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

Photos

Experiments and experiences

• EA-style reinventing school

  • Effective Altruism tries to find neglected, tractable, high impact problems to work on. Why isn't education one of them? Across the world, education seems like the lever that could most impact the immediate future. My sense is that most people consider it neither tractable nor neglected to work on given the highly entrenched existing interests like public schools in the US and hundreds of years spent on developing pedagogy. When technologists think about education they often suggest a "github for lesson plans", which would create a set of highly polished teach materials for anything you might care to learn. But there are good reasons teachers find these kind of lesson plans hard to use. Jeremy's been in education for over a decade including a stint at Teach for America. He says that the best schools now are not actually soul sucking prisons designed to beat the creativity out of children; rather, students of these institutions love going to school and learn effectively. There's an intense selection effect for both the teachers and the kids at these schools: money. Because of this, it's unlikely that things that work at schools like these will generalize everywhere. Still, I can't believe that a teacher lecturing at the front of a classroom is the best we can do in 2022. We can record the best lectures, students can search the web for anything they might dream of learning, and we could create instant links between professionals anywhere and kids working on projects. I'm a fan of the flipped classroom model. What other tools could we apply? How might we make an effective, generalizable education platform?

• Essay contests

  • The history of science and science fiction are deeply entwined, so how is it that our blockbuster science fiction movies tend to be so bad? Joseph Gordon Levitt puts out a call for positive scifi screenplays. FLI just launched a $100k prize pool for a world building contest. I'd love to see more of this.

• Replacing head unit

  • A head unit is the name of the media console in the front of a car. Diana had an old one that was hard to use with phone and generally low quality, so I bought a Pioneer AVH-W4500NEX. I watched some videos on Youtube to learn how to install it specifically in a 4Runner. They made it look pretty easy, so when I discovered the snake pit of cables behind her existing unit, I lost hope. I've done my share of electrical work, but most of the wires weren't even labeled! I called a bunch of places I found on Yelp to get help installing it, but no luck. Finally, I resorted to Craigslist, and of course found someone who could come the next day for a much lower price. I watched him while he worked. He told me stories about his life growing up as a first generation Russian kid in the bay area, how things had changed, the kinds of people he meets in his business. He'd memorized wiring configs for hundreds of units. "This brown wire is the backup camera," and flips over the label to confirm. He made a mistake here and there, but generally he was fast and efficient, clipping wires seemingly willy-nilly until he'd reattached everything. Everything worked the first time we booted up!

• Chromebooks for software engineering

  • I wanted to trying switching to a Chromebook for security reasons. The best hardware I tried was the Acer Spin 514. Everything in Chrome worked well except for minor stuttering in a video call while I took notes in another window. I thoroughly enjoyed reading a paper using the touchscreen. I used the linux subsystem to install VSCode, then connected to a remote Codespaces environment. It worked flawlessly, but my muscle memory for keyboard shortcuts is all Mac-specific. On a Chromebook, there's only CTRL and ALT, no CMD, so I couldn't just remap the keys. Yes I'm very spoiled, but I'd have to solve this before being willing to switch. Maybe Shortkeys extension?

Life updates

• 🏃 Ran half marathon

• 🚴 Biked Hawk hill/Rodeo beach 30mi

• 🚵 Biked Alpine Dam + Tam loop 65mi

• 🏡 Spent a weekend in Inverness with Michael & kids

• 📚 Started reading Accelerando

• 🦠 Seems like we might finally be turning the corner on COVID

• 🍰 Made the best cheesecake ever with a special pan

Content

• 5 point Likert ratings for “I would recommend this content to a friend”, sorted

  • The Checklist Manifesto 4/5

    • A quick, well written summary of how the airline industry developed checklists to reduce human error rate, and Atul applied it to medicine.

    • Since reading, we applied this to our hiring committee meetings to great effect. Very actionable!

  • Darknet Diaries: Alethe 4/5

    • A fascinating peek into the world of social engineering, where you talk to people to gain access to their or a company's private information

    • Listening to some of the techniques here was scary, eg pretending to be from someone's IT department after using Instagram location search to figure out what hardware/software people from that co usually use.

  • Perhaps the Stars 4/5

    • At 34 hours, the audio version of this book took a very long time to get through. There were a few plot twists I thought could've been left out, but overall I liked the central question that this final book in the series tied up: to what extent should we as a species seek to explore the stars vs our own thoughts. What can one accomplish from the comfort and safety of an armchair?

    • There are more characters crying in this book than all the other books I've read combined.

    • Highlights:

      • The Utopian oath: "I hereby renounce the right to complacency, and vow lifelong to take only what minimum of leisure is necessary to my productivity, viewing health, happiness, rest, and play as means, not ends, and that, while Utopia provides my needs, I will commit the full produce of my labors to our collective effort to redirect the path of human life away from death and toward the stars."

      • Many plausible sides to conflict that all believe theirs is right and best.

      • When I read Homer's Odyssey, I loved the consistent descriptions like "the wily Odysseus", "swift, black ships". Palmer matches this style for her characters, creating strong visual associations.

      • The same excellent world building I loved in the first book.

  • Animal 3/5

    • The marsupial episode was something else. Kangaroos are crazy. They can stand 7 ft tall on their tail, run 30 mph, and are fierce fighters. When they're still embryonic, they somehow manage to climb up into their mother's pouch.

  • The Tragedy of Macbeth 2/5

    • Excellent acting, but wasn't feeling it 🤷