I Didn't Say That #21
Today
Wendell Berry: The Work of Local Culture (Part 1)
Let’s Stop Calling Everything We Don’t Like a Conspiracy Theory
My Flamboyant Grandson
“I Like Tacos”: Russell Brand on Covid
Pfizer Is Raising Drug Prices and Paying for Good PR
The Fifth Wave: Twittermania
ChatGPT's Epic Shortcoming
David Goggins: How To Master Your Life
Wendell Berry: The Work of Local Culture (Part 2)
Wendell Berry: The Work of Local Culture (Part 1)
When a community loses its memory, its members no longer know each other. How can they know each other if they have forgotten or have never learned each other’s stories? If they do not know each other’s stories, how can they know whether or not to trust each other? People who do not trust each other do not help each other, and moreover they fear each other. And this is our predicament now.
Wendell Berry
Let’s Stop Calling Everything We Don’t Like a Conspiracy Theory
The expression is becoming meaningless.
Perhaps we'd be better off removing the expression from our discourse entirely, and collectively accepting more uncertainty. A world where unsavory or ridiculous sounding ideas were engaged, deconstructed, and earnestly evaluated might yield better results than slapping them with a derisive moniker and trying to hide them under the bed. More often than not, we'll be able to separate the truth from the fiction, and have more level-headed and informed conversations along the way.
Isaac Saul, Tangle
My Flamboyant Grandson
What America is, to me, is a guy doesn’t want to buy, you let him not buy, you respect his not buying. A guy has a crazy notion different from your crazy notion, you pat him on the back and say, Hey pal, nice crazy notion, let’s go have a beer. America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamorous reasonable voice.
George Saunders, In Persuasion Nation
“I Like Tacos”: Russell Brand on Covid
Russell Brand
Pfizer Is Raising Drug Prices and Paying for Good PR
Corporate news outlets like Semafor are running sponsored posts from Pfizer bragging about how the pharma manufacturer is altruistically working to expand access to its products overseas—the same month Pfizer raised prices on 99 of its drugs in the US.
Pfizer recently made headlines for hiking prices on roughly a hundred drugs in the United States, shortly after the company announced plans to quadruple the price of its COVID-19 vaccine. Now, the pharmaceutical giant is paying news outlets to tell a different story—a fawning tale about how the company has been altruistically working to expand access to its products overseas.
Andrew Perez, Jacobin
The Fifth Wave: Twittermania
A twisted drama of faith, politics and media, in five acts
By the year 2020, every major institution of American culture had converted to the cult of identity. The virus of performative dogmatism, long incubated at the universities, suddenly spread with alarming rapidity, infecting news media in every format, social media like Facebook and Twitter, search engines like Google, the entertainment world including Hollywood and Broadway, professional sports, the scientific bureaucracy and the finance and investment sector. Even stodgy billion-dollar corporations like Coca-Cola and the supposedly disruptive innovators of Silicon Valley fell in line. Churches and synagogues mutilated their traditional doctrines to make room for the new faith. As with every religious revolution, names were changed and old idols toppled from their pedestals. Nothing like it had transpired since the days of emperor Constantine.
Martin Gurri, Discourse
ChatGPT's Epic Shortcoming
The world needs an AI that's less like a human and more like a machine.
The point is just that there’s no way an AI that emulates human thought by assimilating human discourse will give you an objective view of human affairs. That discourse inevitably reflects human biases—and, moreover, it reflects the biases of some humans (the ones most influential in whatever pool of discourse is being assimilated) more than the biases of others. And if you try to “scrub” those biases, you’ll find that ultimately the scrubbing is directed by humans with biases. No machine that works like ChatGPT is ever going to give you a God’s eye view.
Robert Wright, Nonzero Newsletter
David Goggins: How To Master Your Life
Modern Wisdom Podcast
00:00 Intro
00:33 David's New Career of Smoke Jumping
07:00 The Danger of Success Making You Soft
13:21 Is SEAL Selection Too Harsh?
17:54 Running the Moab 240
23:40 David's One-Second Decision Theory
32:11 When Moab Round #2 Wrecked David’s Ass
36:03 The Most Painful Pursuit Of David's Life
42:52 Why Make a Mixtape of Hate Messages?
53:33 What People Get Wrong about Motivation
57:49 David’s Daily Routine
1:01:31 How to Build Unshakable Confidence
1:07:52 Sharing David’s Mother’s Difficult Experiences
1:17:57 Why David Went Back to See His Tyrannical Father
1:24:53 Speaking Up against Bullying
1:32:56 What It Was Like Being Studied by Andrew Huberman
1:37:45 The Loneliness of Elite Performance
1:44:45 Being Friends with Joe Rogan & The Rock
1:49:31 What’s Next for David?
Wendell Berry: The Work of Local Culture (Part 2)
Two questions, then, remain: Is a change for the better possible? And who has the power to make such a change? I still believe that a change for the better is possible, but I confess that my belief is partly hope and partly faith. No one who hopes for improvement should fail to see and respect the signs that we may be approaching some sort of historical waterfall, past which we will not, by changing our minds, be able to change anything else. We know that at any time an ecological or a technological or a political event that we will have allowed may remove from us the power to make change and leave us with the mere necessity to submit to it. Beyond that, the two questions are one: the possibility of change depends upon the existence of people who have the power to change.
Wendell Berry
Thanks for sharing this, Ben.
I’m very aware that Russell Brand sometimes sounds like a lunatic. His frenetic energy combined with his editing team’s near-constant jump cuts don’t help. But beneath all of that is a smart and switched-on guy whom I agree with a lot. Not always. But often. In an attempt to tone his videographic energy down a bit, I tried slowing down the playback speed of the video. My thinking was that I could maybe suggest doing the same. But I cannot. Do not do that. It does not help. It only hurts.