Finished two excellent books this week.
The first is Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical World by my colleagues Aubrey Fox and Greg Berman.* A really great, fast, read arguing essentially that we overrate how much we can get done in the short term, and underrate what we can get done in the long term. Radical change is exciting, but it’s also rare, and often leads to blow back. Incremental change is boring, full of compromises and set backs, but often leads to more long lasting and substantive change. Aubrey and Greg know of what they speak. They have spent decades trying to slowing make the criminal justice system in New York more humane and equitable, and they know how hard that is. I’m obviously biased, but I think this one makes a strong case for the importance of chipping away at the problems we face. Marginal progress towards a much better world, as they say. Recommended.
Also finished the delightful book Wanderlust: An Eccentric Explorer, an Epic Journey, a Lost Age about the artic explorer, actor, writer, Nazi resistance activist, and civil rights proponent Peter Freuchen. What a hell of a life this man led. Starting off as a young white man exploring the artic, he married an Inuit woman, fathered two children, (including one disabled by the starvation conditions in which they lived), lost his wife, moved back to Europe, went back to the Artic, lost a LEG, then moved to Hollywood, where he wrote and starred in early “talkies”, married again, became a waystation for Jews fleeing the Nazi’s, assisted the Danish resistance during WWII, married AGAIN, and ended up winning the 64 thousand dollar question. Quite the ride. This one is dad lit through and through but has great insights into the relations between local people and explorers in the Artic and is frankly inspiring in it’s story of Freuchen always tried to be on the right side of history. Recommended.
In the works now are the beast, of course, also this insane book about the Hanafi siege of Washington D.C. and the next in the Expanse series. When will I finish the Beast? Someday.
It feels like the news and accompanying think pieces about AI hit a bit of a lag this week, and I didn’t read any other articles worth focusing on here. I will say I listened to Dwarkesh’s interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky (the doom-iest doomer of AI risk) and found it… annoying. Yudkowsky is certainly smart, but like many auto-didacts, not as smart or as rigorous in his thinking as he thinks he is. Much of what appears to him to be slam dunk arguments are really just analogies taken to their absurd conclusions. I fear no one in the AI risk world is blunt enough to acknowledge this.
What about you? What did you read this week?
*(Aubrey is my boss at the New York City Criminal Agency, Greg is a board member and mentor to me)