Hi, I’m Gavin. This is my experimental newsletter that explores thinking - how we might think better and learn together as we do so.
I explore several key topics through the lens of several core themes: systems thinking, scenario planning, trends, and cross-disciplinary innovation. These often relate to key issues: climate change, pandemics, astronomy, physics, health, history, philosophy, culture, rocketry, conflict, the impact of technology on society and more (lol!). With a larger question behind it all: how do we progress and how do we progress better?
I hope you like where we go. (605 - nope - 613 of us now!)
Gavin
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Reading list - the best stuff to read
🌏 Climate change
Humanity must solve both biodiversity loss and climate change simultaneously, or we will solve neither. (4 mins by Damian Carrington)
The scientists also warned against actions that tackled one crisis but worsened the other. “When I went for a walk in a plantation forest in England, it was sterile. It was a single, non-native species of tree,” said Prof Camille Parmesan, of the University of Plymouth. “There was nothing else there, no insects, no birds, no undergrowth. You might as well have built a concrete building.”
🦠 COVID-19
Ed Yong is back after winning the Pulitzer so as always he is required reading. (15 mins by Ed Yong)
“My biggest concern is that those who are unvaccinated will have a false sense of safety and security as cases drop this summer,” says Joseph Allen, who directs Harvard’s Healthy Buildings program. “It might feel like the threat has fully diminished if this is in the news less often, but if you’re unvaccinated and you catch this virus, your risk is still high.” Or perhaps higher: In the U.S., unvaccinated people might be less likely to encounter someone infectious. But on each such encounter, their odds of catching COVID-19 are now greater than they were last year.
How has the pandemic changes us? Neuroscientist Karl Deisseroth takes a look in this interview, but explores many other concepts. Optogenetics is also a new enough concept for me. (7 mins by Richard Godwin)
“Feelings are responses to information in the world – but as we all know, they follow their own trajectory,” Deisseroth says. “They coalesce and disappear with time. Sometimes we’re not even conscious of them.” While we are still far from even a sketchy understanding of the physical nature of feelings, optogenetics is beginning to give us a handle on how and why they arise. “We can not only record from the activity of tens of thousands of neurons while the processes that correspond to feelings are happening – we can directly turn up and turn down the representation of these feelings with great precision. We can make an animal more or less anxious or aggressive or maternal or hungry or thirsty. And all of that neurobiology maps on to this fundamental question of what a feeling is.”
How should Stanford handle Michael Levitt (and he’s repeated nonsense about the virus)? (5 mins by Eric Boodman)
By his own account, in March 2020, he’d spoken directly with the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and said he’d be surprised if the country saw more than 10 coronavirus deaths. (According to STAT’s Covid Tracker, the count is now over 6,400.)
🌳 Nature - forests
We’ve looked at the amazing work of Suzanne Simard in previous editions and here is an excerpt from her new book about forests. (13 mins by Suzanne Simard)
Mycorrhizal fungi are generalists — they colonize plant root tissue, sometimes even intracellularly. They might invest in many tree species to hedge their bets for survival, and the off chance that some carbon would move to a stranger was simply part of the cost of moving it to relatives.
But this was not what my trees were showing. They were offering me evidence that the pattern of carbon movement was not just by chance, an unfortunate consequence of the moveable feast. No, my trees were demonstrating that they had a lot of skin in the game. Over and over, the experiments showed that carbon moved from a source tree to a sink tree — from a rich to a poor one — and that the trees had some control over where and how much carbon moved.
🧐 Philosophy - solutions
This essay explores why philosophy does not really explore solutions. (13 mins by Nigel Warburton)
A third diagnosis says that philosophical problems are just much harder than science problems – that’s why no one has solved them yet. But the claim that philosophical problems are hard would be a poor explanation of why none of these problems have been solved. The degree to which a problem is hard just means the degree to which it resists solution. I don’t see by what other measure every philosophical problem should be rated as harder than any scientific one.
This is a really thoughtful essay on how to think thoroughly and carefully (from his new book How To Think). I like this bit on pausing first. (14 mins by Tom Chatfield)
Inviting people to pause is among the easiest advice in the world to give, and the hardest to take. Yet it’s foundational to clarifying your thinking, because this is where it all begins: with a moment of self-reflection. Without pauses, there can be no second thoughts and no self-interrogations. There is no process until you take the time to embark upon it.
You might think that this point is too obvious to be worth making. Yet, in my experience, it’s where most of us fall down. We all carry around countless unclear, confused, contradictory thoughts and feelings. And precisely because we have neither the time nor the tools to sort them out, they mostly stay this way.
🧬 Biology - gene transfer between species
I’m still getting my head around this. And the possibilities of finding past gene transfers are very exciting. (11 mins by Christie Wilcox)
The disbelief in their findings was understandable because the barriers to horizontal transfer in eukaryotes looked insurmountable. Horizontal transfers are common and easy in bacteria, whose DNA is just within their cytoplasm. If a DNA fragment can make its way through a bacterium’s cell wall and membrane, there’s not much to bar its integration into the genome. But eukaryotes keep their genome cloistered inside a second barrier, the nucleus, and most of the time, their DNA is tightly condensed into chromosomes that limit the opportunities for splicing into the genome. Moreover, for a horizontal transfer to establish itself in a eukaryotic species, it can’t integrate into just any cell’s DNA; it needs to end up in a germ cell, be passed on to offspring and persist in the general population. That chain of events seemed wildly unlikely to many scientists.
🏛 Society - racism
This piece from last year won a Pulitzer in the awards this week. Worth reading. (23 mins by Mitchell S Jackson)
Maud, fleeing now for no less than six minutes, runs toward a red-faced Travis McMichael who stands inside the door of his truck with his shotgun aimed, toward Gregory McMichael perched in the truck bed with his gun in hand, runs into what must feel like a trap, but perhaps feels like another time his courage has been tested. Maud zags one way and the other. He darts around the right side of the truck and crosses in front of the hood. Travis McMichael heads him off at the nose of the truck and shoots Maud in no more than a heartbeat. The blast cracks over Bryan’s cell footage. “Travis!” screams Gregory McMichael and he drops his phone in the truck bed.
✈️ Aircraft - electric
This video is from last year and I hadn’t seen it. An interesting approach to aircraft design. The plane parachute feature is not new - but is cool.
⏰ Humans - perception
A very much enjoyed this essay on time and the role clocks play in our lives - a relatively recent phenomenon. (14 mins by Joe Zadeh)
Clock time may have colonized the planet, but it did not completely destroy alternative traditions of timekeeping. Certain religions maintain a connection to time that is rooted in nature, like salat in Islam and zmanim in Judaism, in which prayer times are defined by natural phenomena like dawn, dusk and the positioning of stars. The timing of these events may be converted into clock time, but they are not determined by clocks.
In places where globally standardized time is enforced, some still rebel, like in China, where the entire country is under one time zone, BST (Beijing Standard Time). In Xinjiang, nearly 2,000 miles west of Beijing, where the sun sometimes sets at midnight according to BST, many Uighur communities use their own form of local solar time.
And indigenous communities around the world still use ecological calendars, which keep time through observations of seasonal changes. Native American tribes around Lake Oneida, for example, recognize a certain flower blooming as the time to start plowing and setting traps for animals emerging from hibernation. As opposed to a standardized clock and calendar format, these ecological calendars, by their very nature, reflect and respond to an ever-changing climate.
Philosophy Corner (a journey through thinking about thinking every week)
This is probably one of the most famous concepts in philosophy and here’s a good overview of it. (57 mins)
Documentary
Excellent as ever.
Podcast(s)
An interview with Sam Altman about Open AI, GPT-3 and intelligence generally. Animal rights come up again. It’s a good look at possible ethical implications - though I’m not much of a fan of Altman’s politics. (70 mins)
On a similar theme but from the regulatory perspective is Kara Swisher’s interview with EU Commissioner Margrethe Vestager. (32 mins)
Also on a similar theme Azeem interviews Bruce Schneier. But the focus is instead on how AI could (or will) be used for hacking, and how vulnerable legal systems may become and how they might keep up. (37 mins)
Still in my tabs
Neuroscientists Have Discovered a Phenomenon That They Can’t Explain