The bigger picture and the long game
Postcard #20
Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.
Thoughts, tools, and treats
In uncomfortable times, it's wise to zoom out from the current moment and look at things from a broader perspective.
A pale blue dot
What do we learn about human significance when seeing planet Earth from afar? Starting from Pascal’s Pensées, philosopher Tim Bayne asks: „Does it really teach us something profound about ourselves and our place in the cosmic order?“
The reality test
Any criticism should ask itself what implementing its demands in practice would mean. Michelle Goldberg: „When liberalism was firmly entrenched, its discontents could treat authoritarian ideas as interesting avant-garde provocations. Authoritarianism in power, however, was always going to be crude and stupid.“
A sense of rebellion
Evegny Morozov and Brian Eno teamed up to explore a 1960s hippie lab that dreamed of a different, more humane AI: „A decade in the making, this podcast unravels their captivating and often tragic tale. It's all here: Cold War psychiatry, Maoism, LSD, the Rockefellers, Scientology, CIA’s forays into extrasensory perception, and even the advent of tech libertarianism.“
Fifteen reasons to love Europe
Boulevards, grand hotels, and wanderlust are among them. If you don't want to guess the other twelve, click here.
Perseverance
Want to write? Dan Williams offers sound advice on how to blog successfully. Number three: persevere.
Noteworthy
„What did influence me was hearing and meeting Madsen Pirie, who of course is still around. Here was an actual logical positivist! That shocked me. At age seventeen, logical positivists were to me boogeymen who had been refuted by Karl Popper and Brand Blanshard. But all of a sudden, there was one right in front of me, bowtie and all. The biggest thing I learned from Madsen is that behind each view is a human being who has counterarguments. That may sound deeply stupid, but so many of our most important learnings take that form, namely emotionally internalizing something that ought to be obvious, and thus developing better habits of thought.“
—Tyler Cowen on his 1979 trip to Oxford
A mystery link leading into the unknown
What is at stake?
As always,
Dirk
P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.