Ben Mann Monthly June 2024

Kalosyni, real and fake food, Texas, Japan, Situational Awareness, talking spiders

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

• New baby

  • Kalosyni, or Syni for short, rhymes with teeny, was born on June 21. When we got to the hospital, Diana immediately got an epidural. Then, around 12 hours later, she was fully dilated. They asked her to do a test push while the doctor got his gloves on, and half way through the 8 second push, Syni was all the way out, caught by the nurse! Compared to Euda, she's been an exceedingly easy baby. She was 6lbs 15oz. She basically never cries unless something's wrong like dirty diaper or very hungry. Mostly she sleeps. She lost some weight in the first two days while milk came in, but now she's gaining steadily. This time we got a night doula through Golden Gate Doulas for the first 6 weeks since we realized it's fully covered by our Carrot benefit and it's been great. I get to sleep all night, and Diana just wakes up to feed her and immediately goes back to sleep. Now that we know how great it is, we'd sign up even if it weren't covered. When Euda was born, it was the end of COVID times, so we were pretty nervous about visitors and even going out to restaurants. Now, we get to live pretty normally. We put in a second car seat, and my mom can just barely squeeze in between them if she crawls in through the front passenger side. Might be time to get a bigger car. If I could have a guarantee #3 would be this easy, I'd be more excited about it. Of course, it's only been two weeks. Things could change fast! Fingers crossed it'll keep going as is. I'm taking 8 weeks of leave; Diana's taking 22.

• Chinese postpartum meal service

  • We ordered a meal service for the first month after Syni was born. They deliver 3 meals once a day in about 20 separate plastic containers. It's purposely bland and contains lots of Chinese medicine style ingredients like goji berries, jujubes, ginger, ginseng, etc; no hot peppers, no strong flavors, light seasoning only. It's been a luxury not having to think about food, and there's a fair amount of variety, but it sure gets boring fast. I'd rather we have only ordered 2 weeks instead of a month, but here we are. I expected there to only be enough for Diana, but it turns out there's enough to feed both of us and probably another person pretty comfortably.

• Getting back in the soylent game

  • I expected to need to feed myself while Diana was eating her postpartum meals. Way back in the day, before Soylent started selling their stuff, I was making my own homebrew in 20,000 calorie batches and eating only that for most of my meals. It was pretty good. Since then, I've tried many of the mainstream options, both dry and "ready to drink". While they've improved massively in taste and texture over the years, they've started adding more ingredients that I can't digest well like sucralose, allulose, etc. Owyn is pretty good, but it didn't seem set up to be a full meal replacement. After reading a lot of reddit posts, I decided to try Basically Food (previously Super Athlete Fuel) and the new ready to drink Huel Black Edition. The vanilla Huel tastes pretty bad. It has a nice smooth texture but it's too sweet and you can really taste the artifice in the flavoring overall, and not in a good way like ice cream sandwiches. Each bottle is 400 calories. Very satisfying at least, and didn't make me feel bad. The Basically Food was completely inedible and tasted like mold. Like, I really think it was moldy, not an ingredient. I'm guessing it was a bad batch, which seems fairly common these days based on Reddit. Same problem with both "burn" and "balance" in cinnamon. Normal food it is for now!

• Restarting SSRIs

  • After the ketamine therapy wore off, my mood returned to its usual baseline. I decided to go all the way back to the start to my first SSRI, escitalopram, but I'm trying a lower dose to see if the side effects might be less. I started at 2.5mg but it wasn't enough after a week. I'm on 5mg now and it seems okay so far. I'm aware of the pattern here, but I do feel like I'm learning more about how I handle these things, and how I need to keep up my healthy habits like exercise and sleep instead of just depending on the drug.

• Pausing newsletter

  • In Aug 2018 I published the first installment of this newsletter, so that makes this one almost 6 years! While I've enjoyed the process and the outcomes, it's time to try something new, or maybe old. I used to write regularly on Medium. When I transitioned to Substack, I switched from full length posts to mini-posts in this section. But I felt like I learned more and thought more deeply writing long-form, and more frequently referenced those posts in conversation.

  • In practice, I rarely look up what I thought of some piece of content I consumed, though forcing myself to think critically about what it meant to me has been valuable. Maybe I'll try Scott Alexander's link post format, or maybe I'll just drop the content sharing. Don't we have enough content?

  • My inspiration Gwern also stopped publishing his newsletter, but still publishes a mix of long form content, updates to megaprojects like this one, and notes on things he finds particularly interesting.

Life updates

• 🚀 Launched Steering API preview

• ❤️‍🩹 Sprained my neck and recovered

• 🧘 Getting back into yoga after long hiatus

Content

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

• Perfect blueberry muffin loaf 5/5

  • We went blueberry picking with my parents and Euda, then used the proceeds to make this loaf. It might be the best blueberry muffin-like thing I've ever had. Incredibly moist, easy to make, A+.

• God Save Texas 4/5

  • I picked this up on the recommendation of a friend/coworker. It's a collection of essays about Texas by a native Texan. I didn't know much about Texas before reading it, and now I know a little more. The author is something of a figure in Texas, so he's able to weave a lot of personal stories through the history of the state. It's well written, and I found it to be enlightening as the tip of the spear for American politics. A phenomenon I'd thought about but hadn't quite crystallized: Americans generally create a sort of mythos around what it means to be American, and what key events in the history of the country, styles of dress, manner of speaking, etc mean to our identity. Texas takes that one step further with the Alamo, cowboy boots/hats, Davey Crockett symbolism, big powerful trucks, etc. It all takes on a life of its own and becomes a sort of merchandise to their own people, even if now people aren't wearing cowboy boots because they need to be able to ride a horse and step in cow pies.

  • I particularly enjoyed the chapter on oil drilling. There were some stories about how some entrepreneurs said things like "dig to 3000 feet and we'll hit oil!" based on pretty much nothing, bet the farm on one of the deepest wells at the time, and ended up being right within a few feet. Survivorship bias probably explains that pretty well, but it's still a fun story. Sometimes you have to commit all the way to the end. And since oil and the technologies that enabled it are so high variance, it created a strong boom/bust cycle in Texas that seems bound up in the cowboy high-risk/high-reward bias.

  • I listened to the audiobook, which was read by the author. Excellent delivery, and love the accent!

• Hit man 4/5

  • Fun story, good characters. Richard Linklater is always dependable, and mentioned a few times in God Save Texas (above)!

• The Fall Guy 4/5

  • Ryan Gosling at his best: goofy, romantic, fighting against the odds. A nice toast to stuntmen everywhere.

• Your Book Review: Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa 4/5

  • I'd studied Japanese history a bit but this really drove home how anti-foreigner the culture was when the Dutch and then the British and Americans came in in the 1800s. And yet this one guy was able to do so much by bucking the cultural norms of the day, becoming one of the few Japanese to speak dutch and one of the very first Japanese to speak English, which put him in the middle of many of the most important events.

  • Some interesting ideas around raising kids: never ask them to read books or study anything until they want to do it. Just make sure they run around outside. Apparently he never studied until he was high school age and was still brilliant? Especially today with the world's information at everyone's fingertips, seems better to optimize for the kids' health and happiness.

• Dwarkesh interviews Tony Blair 4/5

  • Struck by how reasonable Tony Blair seems in this interview. I wish we could have competent politicians in this country at the highest levels.

  • Made an interesting analogy between being Prime Minister and CEO. To be a great PM you need to have both the political skill and the execution skills. But when he first got to office he mostly only had experience being political, and it took until his second term to really nail down execution and start working on the things that mattered. But if he'd been a CEO, he wouldn't have known how to play the political game well enough to make the execution happen either, since in government you can't just fire people who don't do what you want the way you can in a private company.

  • "When I met Lee Kwan Yew, he said 'Why'd you come here? Your party hates me.' I said 'I'm not here to talk about that, I'm here to learn from you.'" Yes!

• Dwarkesh interviews Leopold Aschenbrenner 3/5

  • I mostly agree with Leopold's forecasts, and mostly agree that society as a whole has not reckoned properly with the intensity of the changes coming to society in the next decade.

  • Even companies like TSMC and Nvidia have published forecasts suggesting that 2024 will be something like the peak of our capabilities and demand. This is laughably wrong. Time to buy some stocks.

  • At dinner a friend asked me if I really believe this is what's coming, have I done anything to put my money where my mouth is like build a bunker? I haven't done anything outside my choice of job mostly because the forces at play seem so powerful that in most scenarios trying to prepare for it won't yield much help. For example if everything's great or terrible, then building a bunker won't make a difference. There's only a narrow band in the middle where such preparation would matter. In the meantime I'll keep trying to push the world towards good outcomes through my work.

• How to be both 3/5

  • I listened to this as an audiobook. While I enjoyed it, I think it's not the kind of book that lends itself well to audio. I'll try again on Kindle.

  • This is one of those books that doesn't lend itself well to summarization because it's not about the plot. It's about a way of looking at and describing the world, time, history, and identity.

• Children of Time 3/5

  • Fun and engaging read, but I thought the sentient spider bit was a bit over-played just like A Deepness in the Sky, which predates this one by 16 years. Maybe another case of fantasy writers using science fiction as a mechanic to get talking animals and an alternate history of civilization?

• Dwarkesh interviews Mark Zuckerberg 3/5

  • Woof, this was hard to listen to. Zuck says some really crazy things like "If AI is open, it'll help defenders more than attackers." This struck me as both motivated reasoning and totally wrong. I can't say I'm a cybersecurity expert, but I did run security for Anthropic for a year, and I think it's fairly uncontroversial among cybersecurity experts that the attackers have the advantage. To attack, you only need a couple of flaws to exploit to gain access. To defend, you need to find and fix every flaw. That's a huge asymmetry. As a tiny example, some teenagers were able to hack major companies and leak their IP in 2023. These companies should have good security! The fact that Zuck leads one of the biggest tech companies in the world and doesn't understand this is pretty scary. I guess we'll just have to wait for a bigger incident to happen and then people will start to understand the problem.