1. Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Podcast with Yuval Noah Harari for Wired Magazine. Yuval argues for the importance of science fiction in shaping public knowledge around technological changes. “If you want to raise public awareness of such issues, a good science fiction movie could be worth not one, but a hundred articles in Science or Nature, or even a hundred articles in the New York Times.”
  2. AI adoption is limited by incurred risk, not potential benefit by Ivy Nguyen and Ash Fontana for VentureBeat. A useful categorisation of AI into “AI in the consumer space”, “AI-enhanced workflow solutions”, “AI-centric applications”, and “AI-enabled applications”.
  3. The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds by Nicky Case is so spot on with his gamified explanations of complex subjects that i make sure to interact with his work every few months. This game visualizes information networks.
  4. Eschewing the typical reading list format for a quote by Bertrand Russell, taken from A History of Western Philosophy. “To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.” Especially so in a time where we can expect to be confronted with drastic changes within our lifetime.
  5. The Tower by Hotel Concierge is without doubt one of the most important articles I have ever read. A longread worth its time.“Contrary to the pop-ethical consensus, discrimination is not caused by having too many stereotypes but too few. If you wake to find a lithe man dressed in all black standing over your bed and holding a katana, it may be quite reasonable to infer that he is a hired ninja and that you are in grave danger. If, however, you assume this about every East Asian man that you encounter, you lack nuance of stereotypes.”
  6. MIT taught a Neural Network How to Show its Work by Tristan Greene for The Next Web. MIT has created a neural network that can explain its results while keeping high prediction accuracy. “A 98.7 percent accuracy rating – with the ability to show its work – is incredible for an image recognition AI. But, even more astounding, is the fact that the researchers were able to use feedback from the network’s explanations of its reasoning to tweak the system and achieve a near-perfect 99.1 percent accuracy.”
  7. Bo Burnham and the Illusion of Meritocracy by Brian Gallagher for Nautilus. “The whole process of constructing life narratives is biased in ways that almost guarantee that people won’t recognize the role of chance events adequately.”
  8. We Need the Singular “They” and it Won’t Seem Wrong for Long by Stephanie Golden for Aeon. “Enforcing language norms is a way of enforcing power structures.”
  9. Lifestyle for One by Colin Wright “Building a life that’s you-shaped can feel like putting on clothes that fit, after years of walking around wearing a sleeping bag. But it’s important to maintain malleability, and to keep experimenting: with yourself, your life, and with others.”
  10. Scott Alexander book review of Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan. While I have mixed feelings about Taleb, this is definitely a concoction of two brilliant minds. “Going after nerds in your book contrasting Gaussian to power law distributions, with references to the works of Poincaré and Popper, is a bold choice.”