Jordan Peterson Plays in the Left’s Cultural Sandbox
I'm low-key fascinated by Jordan Peterson. I bought and skimmed his book 12 Rules for Life and found it to contain interesting if standard self-help fare ("Make Your Bed"). I listened to a few of his podcasts / speeches and found him an independent thinker who clings tenaciously to what he thinks is correct no matter the social consequences. When so much of human interaction is lubricated by bending to each other what do you make of someone who does not bend?
Probably as a result of this stiffness and the insatiable desire of our tribes for in group contrarians (IGC) to cast out and denounce, Peterson has become an absolute lightning rod for the St. Elmo's fire of tribal conflict. The link above contains David French's comments on JP from 2018 when 12 Rules first came out. David French has recently become an IGC on the right as his Christian faith and conscience led him to publicly support Biden. So there are some interesting ouroboros IGC layers here. -B
Who Really Runs The Drudge Report?
Fascinating. -Brian
A next-level rabbit hole of reporting. And highlights the fact that misinformation and copyright infringement isn't just a social media problem (at least in the section detailing the almost-funny relationship with the site's ad broker and a random Armenian website). -C
How Trigger Warnings Are Hurting Mental Health on Campus
From 2015 comes the groundbreaking Atlantic article and associated book publication from Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. If you ever want to go down a cerebral youtube rabbit hole I cannot reccomend more strongly the Haidt hole. Greg is involved with a free speech group called FIRE and Jonathan started the Heterodox Academy. Their critique of modern dialogue comes from a classical liberal perspective and is excellent. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" is more true in 2020 than we could possibly have imagined in 2015. -Brian
The Welding Shut of the American Mind
Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Antonin Scalia were extremely good friends. I love that. Give me more of that. -Brian
Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?
What if part of the solution didn't mean building and automating the entire process, but instead left it to people who actually have the right context for moderating their online experience of your product? Also, this is either in direct conflict with my hot take about YouTube's like/dislike buttons or is reinforcing that hot take. I can't tell at the moment. -C
The Scholar's Stage: We Were Builders Once, and Strong
I know very little about Tanner Greer (it even took me 5 minutes of searching on his blog to find his name!) so I'm not recommending his whole body of work. But I find this reminiscing on how we've been changed by technology to be extremely well written and interesting. -B
Why 'Civilization' is a political masterpiece
I need to play this game right now. I can't imagine building something like this and all the thought and historical knowledge that was poured into its design. - C
Just one. More. Turn. Also how is it 3am? I just started playing... -B
Photoreal Roman Emperor Project
My take: Caligula looks like the freak he probably was, and Commodus looks like the moronic bro he probably was. - C
Why the Future Doesn't Need Us
I'll be honest, this may be one of the longest articles we've ever shared. It was written twenty years ago by an OG computer engineer. In it he waxes eloquently about his concerns over AI, nanotech, and lets us follow along as his mind wanders. I enjoy reading pieces like this, where the writer is being candid despite knowing that the words they are writing may become outmoded worries that seem silly to a future reader, but writes them down anyway. Plus, bonus points for referencing the Borg. -C
The Great Video Game Crash of 1983
I'm guessing that Brian saved this link since I didn't exist in 1983, but consider he's had his turn at editing this issue and didn't add any commentary here I'm going to make up some stuff to say about it. There's something extra silly about digging up a blog post about obsolete video game consoles using the Way Back Machine, but I can't figure out a quippy joke to write about that. I read this post and am in total disbelief at the detail with which the writer captures the minutiae of this moment in time before widespread use of the Internet, where the video game industry was in complete disarray in the US and paved the way for Nintendo. - C
My plan has worked perfectly. Also the greatest game ever made (Super Mario Bro 2) was a direct result of this narrative so all’s well that ends well. -B