Newsletter 2020 Review
Happy New Year Everyone!!
As per tradition, I complied a list of the top books and movies and then focused on key themes that emerged from the most impactful content in the Newsletter
And before you ask, the most read article of the year is Your Life is Driven by Network Effects, which makes total sense ahah
Also don't forget to answer the survey if you haven't! Ima do the user purge at the end of January and not answering the survey will be a major factor in my decision to keep you on ahah
Top Books of 2020
I read 52 books this year, which is ~50% of what I read last year, but I'm not that bummed about it bc you know Covid but also I'm done trying to aim for 100 books bc I want to focus on deeper stuff
The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left by Yuval Levin: favorite book of the year because it elegantly captures the dialectic between liberalism and conservatism as it emerged in response to the American and French Revolution. A great companion to Hannah Arendt's "On Revolution", it's a great book that helps you understanding the exceptional nature of the American Revolution and its significance for human history.
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl: nothing better than a memoir from someone who survived a concentration camp to put your own pain in 2020 into perspective. The founder of logotherapy had a breakthrough while being brutalized by the Nazis in the camps: "He who knows why can handle any what". Meaning will gives you the strength to persist against disaster and tragedy without relying on self-deception.
The True Believer by Eric Hoffer: religions, ideologies and mob behavior all operate under the same forces. It even applies to crypto and financial bubbles. It's also so well written it shouldn't even be described as a work of social theory bc it would do it a disservice.
Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything by BJ Fogg: this is THE framework for habit formation, created by the behavioral psychologist whose work inspired the cofounders of Instagram (they worked in his lab). If you improve by 1% every day, you'll be 37x better by the end of the year, which is why you should start by flossing one tooth for a week, then 2 for the next, 4 for the one after, until you do the top half of your mouth and eventually snowball into a full-blown habit change. It has not only helped me tremendously, but it's also the basis of so much of the work I do with the debate kids and @VenezeulanDaniel
Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault: I am not someone who appreciates Foucault's writing, but this is by far the easier one to read. I will forever cherish the memory of listening to @Qwelian's recordings of @Todd's seminar on Foucault at Clemson this year. Everything came together about Foucault in this book, his views on power, identity, control.
Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner: shoutout to @Jacob for getting me to read this! This book is foundation for crypto bc it deals with mechanism design IE the branch of game theory where economists and computer scientists work together to design incentives that lead to the most productive outcomes. Honestly, at times it feels like a work of science fiction because of how visionary some of the concepts are, and yet crypto is materializing so many of the ideas from the book!
Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals by Saul Alinsky: @Todd recommended this to me bc I wanted to better understand effective community organizing. What I did not expect is to gain a deeper understanding of Obama, who was heavily inspired by Alinsky, as a way to bring about sustainable progress. I don't agree with everything about Alinsky's approach, but his perspective def had a huge impact on my view of community organization and revolutionary movements.
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk M.D: thank you @Kenny for recommending such a great book summarizing the strengths and weaknesses of different forms of therapy. It helped me become a lot more patient with different people in my life as well as having a more optimistic outlook towards mental illness. I was especially blown away by just how much research supports Yoga as a key practice to help people overcome PTSD, so one of my 2021 goals is to learn how to be a Yoga instructor.
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman: he called it even though at the time he was worried about television. If democracy barely survived television, will our political system survive social media? Neil Postman is someone who deserves to be textually resurrected through GPT-3
Get the Guy by Matthew Hussey: y'all I know this may seem random but actually Matthew Hussey is such a wonderful example of healthy masculinity. I totally went into this to learn how as a guy I could be more helpful in giving advice to my female friends, but I walked away with such an inspiring perspective on manhood that deserves to be shared. Matthew Hussey is the antidote the Red Pill shit.
Top Movies/TV of 2020
I watched 143 movies this year, and ~10 TV shows (can't count them bc damn Letterboxd sucks for TV series). I think it's 2x what I watched last year but I'm not sure bc I wasn't tracking it. I am pretty satisfied with how I was able to focus on watching movies as opposed to TV through a better habit system this year.
1917 by Sam Mendes: simply one of the greatest cinematic experiences I've ever had. I will never let the Academy off the hook for awarding Parasite over this masterpiece.
The Wire S1 on HBO: thank you @Orrod for watching this with me. We are only though S1 but wow I didn't know television was capable of this kind of storytelling, but it makes sense that HBO could pull it off.
Mrs America on FX/Hulu: a wonderful example of how the future is miniseries bc they are the only way to get the talent in place to elevate the story to the next level. And feminist history makes for fantastic storytelling!
The Marvelous Mrs Maisel S2 & S3: I could probably rewatch this any day, I like it this much. I find everything about it so relaxing and yet so mesmerizing. When I watch it I feel like I'm surrendering to someone else's point of view.
Do the Right Thing by Spike Lee: perfect movie to watch this summer and arguably one of the best America movies of all time according to the AFI. Black cinema is a treasure and this is Spike Lee's best work.
Tenet by Christopher Nolan: I had some problem with the sound mixing, but if I'm honest I actually was not disappointed despite my extremely high expectations going into it. It's def not the best Nolan film to date, but it's also hard to gage bc if this had come out prior to his other work it would be have been heralded as groundbreaking. Such an intense cinematic experience that only Nolan's imagination can produce!
Anna Karenina by Joe Wright: I didn't even realize I watched this 3 times this year! I basically read Tolstoy's novel to prepare to watch one of Keira Knightley's best performances. Gosh Joe Wright is a master of theatrical production, and this movie is him unleashing his full creativity on one of the greatest stories of all time.
War & Peace on BBC: what can I say, Tolstoy is that great! I personally enjoyed War & Peace more than Anna Karenina but that's just my personal taste. It also makes vastly more sense to adapt Tolstoy's work into a miniseries than in a movie bc there is just so much going on because we are navigating an entire society through turning points in history as it unfolds. War & Peace is my argument against Dickens in the Dickens vs Tolstoy debate.
My Brilliant Friend S2 on HBO: I was so worried they couldn't top the first season but the did it, and I guess it speaks to the quality of the original novels by Elena Ferrante. My Brilliant Friend proves that Italian cinema is not dead, it's just drowning in a sea of pretentious bull shit.
Boycott by Clark Johnson: #381days
District 9 by Neill Blomkamp: stranded aliens as an allegory for apartheid, with fantastic VFX that make the aliens not look campy despite the movie's small budget. What a triumph of independent cinema!
Prisoners by Denis Villenueve: this is what the man is capable of. Simply one of the best in the biz. Can't wait for Dune, which I will try to watch in the theatres out of respect.
Queen's Gambit by Scott Frank: Anya Taylor-Joy has basically ushered in a new era of Chess thanks to this great miniseries. Very much the biggest surprise of the year because there was no marketing on the ramp up to the release.
Top Takeaways and Lessons from 2020
Chinese Totalitarianism is a Menace to the World
Covid is leading to a paradigm shift in epidemiology because an epidemic emerging from a developed country used to be considered impossible until China proved everyone wrong this year for like the third time.
The CCP's Orwellian surveillance system did nothing but turn Wuhan into Chernobyl: a natural disaster whose impact gets magnified by the distorted incentives of a totalitarian state as political repression impairs the flow of information
"The Century of Humiliation" (IE The Taiping Rebellion + the Pingnan Rebellion + the Dungan Revolt + the Yaqub Beg Rebelliion) is the historical backdrop to anxieties about external threats (Japan, Russia) as well as internal instability (rebellions, separatism) that have culminated in authoritarianism emerging in China under the promise of stability.
This is the major framework driving Xi Jinping and the CCP's concentration camps of the Uighurs, where millions of people are being tortured, brainwashed and organ-harvested
Furthermore, the recent debacle between Jack Ma and the CCP of the Ant Financial IPO shows how markets and internet entrepreneurship won't be allowed to grow outside of the control of the political oligarchy
And it's only going to get crazier as the economic insecurity brought about China's banking problems and population implosion is going to threaten the CCP's dominance which will in turn force them to get stricter.
Intersectionality is the New Marxism
Coleman Hughes called it: intersectionality has morphed into an autonomous ideology that infecting every level of our socio-political discourse
The Marxist view of the world is that people with different material circumstances inevitably form groups to gain political power which is how the wealthy turn the state into an instrument for economic exploitation and oppression. Thus, the only way to deconstruct this exploitation is through a revolution against the ruling class through the use of force.
In some ways that's why Marxism is a threat to liberal democracies: it's core beliefs assume that any inequality is the result of exploitation that must be opposed with violence against an oppressor, and thus consistently appeals to marginalized groups all over the planet.
Only a superficial reading of Foucault could possibly make you believe that we should make everything about race, gender or class. Indeed, much of what Foucault criticizes in his work is a maniacal drive to categorize all knowledge through a single framework bc he idnetifies taht as the source of the power centralization that leads to horrors.
This is why Foucault would very likely be against identity politics, and yet he will go down in history as one of the pivotal intellectuals behind identity politics, white fragility, critical race theory and all that jazz
#UnbundleThePolice > #DefundThePolice
There is no other way to say it: both sides of the BLM debate are wrong, bc that's what polarization does: it progressively makes both sides lose touch with reality!
A fraction of the police officers accounts for the bulk of the brutality. 12.8% of the LAPD officers accounted for ~45% of the complaints, 4% of Chicago PD officers account for ~25% of police shootings,
Even though African Americans are ~14% population and yet 35% of victims of police brutality, the evidence suggests that racism is not the cause, but rather that AAs are excessively exposed to the risk bc of higher levels of encounters with police officers
However, even though the narrative animating BLM might be broken, the data shows us that both sides of the "is BLM peaceful debate" were wrong: >90% of BLM protests were peaceful. That's far less than what Fox News would have you believe, but also admittedly far more than the "liberal media" would have us believe. Personally, I thought the rate of violence was going to be 30% so don't feel bad if you got it wrong lol
The source of the problem is a) police unions closing ranks to prevent the "bad apples" from being purged from the system and b) the out of control expansion of a militarized police
We can tackle both problems through the Libertarian solution of unbundling the police I.E. decoupling highway patrol/traffic violations, homelessness/mental health response, drug/gang enforcement, from regular police activity it becomes harder for the police to unionize and close ranks to corrupt the accountability process
The counter-intuitive reality is that we are actually under-policed but over-prisoned. We employ 35% fewer police per-capita than the world average and yet lead the world in incarceration. And yet we have managed to make huge progress on both fronts: we've halved the incarceration rate for young AA men since 2001, and the poorest Americans today are victimized at about the same rate as the richest Americans were at the start of the 1990s
Oh and just as a fun addendum, New Jersey thanks to Cory Booker almost went ahead with a Baby Bonds program I.E. the UBI alternative to reperations which can reduce the racial gap from 1600% to just 40%
Coleman Hughes is a Prophet for my Generation
Hands down the most impactful Deep Dive I did this year. He embodies so many of the qualities we value in Speech and Debate: clarity of thought, clarity of communication, original and independent thought
"Progressive anti-whiteness more closely resembles communist hatred of the bourgeoisie. It is a conspiratorial bigotry that ascribes to white people a mercenary nature, a high level of competence, and an innate desire for dominance.”
"If you can be gender fluid, then you should be able to be politically fluid”
"In the midst of this breakdown in civil discourse, we must ask ourselves if we are on a path towards a thriving multi-ethnic democracy or a balkanized hotbed of racial and political tribalism.”
"If the challenge for the Left is to accept that the real problem with the police is not racism, the challenge for the Right is to accept that there are real problems with the police.”
"It’s not an accident that progressives tend to be pessimists. Pessimism is a necessary feature of their political prescriptions”
"But the logic of color blindness doesn’t depend on the absence of racism. It depends only on our desire not to needlessly racialize the pursuit of justice.
"MLK stood on this perch from which he could look at the divisiveness of the black power movement and white racists as petty and terrestrial relative to the unity that he could say is true of our world in virtue of him being a christian. He had a meta-narrative that dissolved all the divisive narratives below”
AI will usher in a Bioinformatics Revolution
AI can now accelerate scientific discoveries by analyzing the citation network of scientific papers and thus elevate the most promising ideas buried in the noise
It can analyze the data from drug trials and find alternative uses for and repurpose antibiotics and pharmaceuticals that we completely missed from the original trials
Protein folding I.E. the problem of figuring out the shape-function of proteins fro their genetic sequence is now basically solved by DeepMind's AlphaFold
The real game changer is not CRISPR or the Moore's-Law-like costs of genome sequencers (although they are both very important), it will be AI. AI's implications for biotech are the single biggest argument against "AI is over-hyped" narratives
Without a Neurodiversity Bioethic, Gene Editing is going to Trigger a Wave of Eugenics
If history is any guide, we are already screwed
Whether it's Planned Parenthood's origins in Eugenics, Buck v. Bell permitting the compulsory sterilization of the "unfit", the selective abortion of female fetuses in China and India, or the selective erasure of Down Syndrome in Easter European countries, the social pressures will be too strong to prevent an evolutionary arms race brought about gene editing
Silicon Valley has a terrible history with eugenics as well (Shockley's "disgenics" thesis and IBM's role in sterilization in Jamaica) so no one's going to save us
Blood Transfusion is the next Frontier for Longevity
Let's take a moment to celebrate how our collective intelligence zeroed in on what has turned out to be the only real treatment for covid: plasma transfusion from recovered patients!
The FDA initially halted it bc...bureaucracy is the death of all hope. Eventually they approved it, and who knows how many lives we've lost while waiting, but let's try to look ahead of all the lives that are being saved right now.
The magic of transfusions however is far from limited to only Covid, and is slowly becoming the new stage for longevity.
This year scientists showed how connecting a human organ to a pig's circulatory system enabled even organs that were considered dead to recover and be usable for transplants. This is how we can solve organ waste (remember how only 2% of lungs actually get transplanted bc all others get too damaged in the process?)
Beyond that, the big breakthrough for longevity was the realization that you don't even need young blood to rejuvinate the old: all you need is water and protein to dilute the toxins in old blood. This literally REVERSES AGING in mice!
Have a great weekend!
Want to read something together? Here is my Goodreads list. See if anything interests you!
Better yet, want to watch a movie together? Here is my Letterboxd watchlist. Not limited to this list of course XD
Check out the collection of all of the past newsletters. Also, if you just got this from a friend and want to sign up, here is the link to do that.