Classics education, forecasting instability and why Star Trek slaps
Weekly Ink #2
A new weekly newsletter with findings, practical wisdom, and interesting conversations from across the web, curated by yours truly.
Insights
Curated stories and ideas that shape our world and expand our understanding.
Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative? Putting greater emphasis on “the classics” in educational curricula seems terrific. I don’t recall reading them before my twenties, but I would have tremendously benefited from learning from great thinkers like Plato, Cicero, or Epictetus earlier in my life.
U.S. Must Act Quickly to Avoid Risks From AI, Report Says: This perspective may stem from a lack of subject matter expertise. However, the probability of AGI happening in the next five years seems like overblown speculation. Anytime there is a technological breakthrough, it is combined with tremendous hype. That is, “Five years or less” is more likely, hype-cycle tech speak to drum up interest and open wallets. Remember self-driving cars? Crypto? AI/LLMs will substantially alter and improve our lives (I use it extensively already) and will likely do so on a faster timescale than the abovementioned ones, but AGI in less than five years? Based on what? Seems more like a self-indulgent thought experiment or techno-optimism than a probable reality. $250,000 that could have been better spent as seed money on a climate start-up or, you know— anything that builds something useful other than a 147-page alarmist report. ಠ_ಠ
‘The US is in a much more perilous state than Russia’: I am fascinated by the field, the profession, and the people of (geopolitical) forecasting, and Peter Turchin is no exception. The idea of being able to predict the future at scale accurately seems somewhat absurd on some level. Still, Turchin's hypothesis posits that:” societies exist on a cycle of integration (cohesion) followed by disintegration, ending in crisis. The cycle restarts roughly every 200 years.” It’s a compelling read;1 troubling but compelling. I’ll think about it more.
Contemplations
Meditations, practical philosophy, and the occasional restless thought.
Do you journal? I journal. It’s an activity I wish I had started regularly at a younger age; the quality of my life between when I journal and when I don’t feel as meaningfully different as when I meditate for consecutive days or don’t. One of the challenges I have had as a younger person when it came to journaling is that I wanted to journal by hand. I had this very idealized version of what journaling should be like. But I find writing by hand… Tedious, I guess?
I know there are supposed to be benefits to writing things out by hand, but it’s too slow; I want to get my thoughts out quicker, which I can only do by typing. When I gave myself permission to Journal on my laptop, I removed the friction of making the habit happen, and I have now been journaling (relatively?) consistently for some time. In hindsight, it’s an excellent example of how we create artificial barriers to our growth. I mean gimme a break, why did I give a damn how the journaling is done, isn’t it just better to do it?
Dialogue
Voices, perspectives, and conversations from our community and across the web.
I was chatting with someone on threads recently about Star Trek, and it reminded me of this clip:
And you know what? I genuinely believe we can figure it out, too.
What do you think of bringing a classics-driven education back? Are ‘forecasters’ full of it? What is your journaling practice? Whether an expert or an ordinary guy (like me!) Hit that reply button and let me know! ✍️
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