We Are Not Saved

I decide to take the end of the year off. But I didn't want to leave my loyal listeners without the normally scheduled episode. So here you go the first ever "We Are Not Saved" Classic!!

It's my review and discussion of Neil Postman's classic "Amusing Ourselves to Death". One of the best books of the last 50 years!

The ninth book and sixth season of The Expanse were both just released. I haven't watched much of the TV show, but I did just finish reading the final book and as I did so it occurred to me that the way it handled Fermi's paradox might provide a useful way of understanding my own fixation on it. And why I think it presents a huge challenge to anyone who thinks that humanity is on an unending upward slope that will eventually take us to the stars.

1. The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery by: Ross Douthat
2. Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration's Response to the Pandemic That Changed History by: Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damien Paletta
3. The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by: Michael Lewis
4. Morning Star by: Pierce Brown
5. Star Trek: The City on the Edge of Forever Teleplay by: Harlan Ellison
6. The Economics of Violence by: Gary M. M. Shiffman
7. The Hobbit, or There and Back Again by: J. R. R. Tolkien
8. Chorazin: (The Weird of Hali #1) by: John Michael Greer
9. The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia by: Peter Hopkirk

Lately people have been using the idea that something is a black swan as excuse for being powerless. as an excuse. But this is not only a massive abdication of responsibility, it's also an equally massive misunderstanding of the moment. Because preparedness has no meaning if it's not directed towards preparing for black swans. There is nothing else worth preparing for.

The future is the product of the black swans we have yet to encounter.

A couple of months ago Gwern published a list of improvements since 1990. I thought it gave short shrift to the many changes which have been wrought upon society by technological progress. He does include a section on "Society" but it's woefully inadequate, and despite having a further theme to the list of identifying "unseen" changes he overlooks many of the intangible harms which progress might or might not have inflicted on us. To illustrate this I bring in the story of my great-grandmother, which I don't want to cheapen with a summary.

I got some pushback on the episodes I did about Afghanistan. Some of it was directed at the idea that "we are no longer a serious people". But this pushback, rather than talking me out of the position made me explore it even more deeply. This episode is the result of that exploration. As part of it I bring in recent difficulties experienced by the CIA, the Vietnam War, and the differences between right and left brained processing.

1. Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? by: Michael J. Sandel
2. Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills by: Jesse Singal
3. Kingsport: (The Weird of Hali #2) by: John Michael Greer
4. The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War by: H. W. Brands
5. Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by: Norm Macdonald
6. Silmarillion by: J. R. R. Tolkien
7. The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by: Carlo M. Cipolla
8. The Last Place on Earth: Scott and Amundsen's Race to the South Pole by: Roland Huntford
9. How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion by: David DeSteno

There are at least two kinds of randomness in the world: normal, as in a normal distribution or a bell curve, and extreme. As humans we're used to the normal distribution. That's the kind of thing we dealt with a lot over the thousands of years of our existence. It's only recently that the extreme distribution has come to predominate. Nassim Taleb has labeled the first mediocristan and the second extremistan. In this podcast we explore the difference between the two and how the tools of mediocristan are inadequate to the disasters of extremistan.

As I record this Congress is debating whether they should pass a $3.5 trillion bill or only a $1.5 trillion one. The former would equal $27,000 per household, while the latter would only be $12,000 per household. And yet when people are asked whether they would pay more to deal with problems like climate change only 34% are willing to pay more than $10 a month. People have no skin in the game on the former and they can at least imagine they have skin in the game on the latter, and in this episode I argue that this makes all the difference.

Risk comes in lots of different forms. In Skin in the Game, Taleb's last, underrated book. He breaks risk down into ensemble probabilities and time probabilities. On top of that he demonstrates that risk operates differently at different scales. And that if we want to avoid large scale ruin—ruin at the level of nations or all of humanity—that we should be trying to push risk down the scale.