• Oliver Burkeman: Interest is everything. The argument for living a life that is interesting to yourself, with which I agree. I have also learned about type 2 burnout in which “you’re not overworked, you’re just working against your own grain.” That too is interesting.
• Casey Handmer: Antimatter Development Program. A ridiculously (to my untrained in physics mind) detailed writeup of what could be the next generation of rocket fuel. To the above point: Handmer’s interest in the topic is contagious.
• Sacha Fast: One (and another) Gear in the Zettelkasten Machine: A Deep Dive into a Key Mechanism. Another person writing about a topic they love, which is slip-boxes. These kinds of posts are dangerous because this interest too is contagious but unlike Handmer’s is also immediately actionable at home. Caveat lector!
• Tanner Greer: The Making of a Techno-Nationalist Elite. Nominally a book review, actually an essay that surpasses the said book in its coverage of the topic.
• Ben Hunt: World War AI and Nick Maggiulli: Is This How the AI Bubble Pops? with two angles converging on the same conclusion, which is that our interesting times are about to become even more interesting.

Happy Thanksgiving, dear reader!

It is infrastructure day on the blog today, with two updates:

1. The Blogroll is now a fresh export from my feed reader and an accurate representation of what I am actually reading. I still need to figure out how to make the very detailed “About” field for each entry actually show up, so stay tuned for that one.
2. The Now page had its biannual refresh. I will at some point make it a more frequent ritual but best not to expect real-time reading/watching/listening lists.

And then there were six (parents inclusive). Pardon any potential interruptions to our scheduled programing.

🎮 Our 6-year-old has completed both Astro Bot and Astro’s Playroom, mostly by himself, with minimal help from older sisters, and when I say “complete” I mean digging into every nook and cranny and getting all of the trophies. Quite the soundtrack, too (Crash Site is the favorite).

• Rusty Guinn: Conjuring Consent. Is ignorance, malice or cynicism behind ICE’s attempts to co-opt Lord of the Rings into their anti-immigration narrative? I would say it’s their propensity to bullshit, which matches Guinn’s cynicism take. See also: Guinn on the “woke right”.
• Neil Armstrong for the BBC: Slow Horses: The anti-James Bond that gets to the heart of Britishness. Written last year just after Season 4 started, but seeing as Season 5 was even better it is truer than ever.
• Tanner Garity: Kurt Vonnegut’s Advice for Making the Most of Your Day. Read this only for the exceptionally relevant story from Vonnegut’s 1995 interview with Inc., which isn’t the primary link because it lies behind a paywall. A Vonnegut quote from that interview: “The information superhighway will be two lanes loaded with tollgates, and it’s going to tell you what to look for.”
• Oliver Burkeman: You have to do the living yourself. In which Burkeman answers the question of “Isn’t there something I could do, some rule I could follow, such that if I obediently followed the rule, I wouldn’t have to show up for life, in all its uncertainty and riskiness and intensity, in quite such a full-on way? So I could sort of hang back, hide out, and take things a bit easier instead?” and of course the answer is no.

As a not-so-recent graduate of a medical fellowship program, I often get spammy job offers via email, text, LinkedIn messages, etc, some of them with promises of eye-popping income. A memorable add mentioned over $800,000 annual compensation for a position in Caribou, Maine. It was telling that I was getting it for at least a year before it stopped, and if you were the brave soul who took up the job then please get in touch, I would like to hear how it’s been!

Often, the number is not mentioned at all. Those jobs have a clear advantage in terms of the institution, geographic location and time commitment. All others fall into two categories: “up to” and “guaranteed”. A decade-plus of reading Nassim Taleb’s writing has taught me to avoid the up-to and value the guaranteed.

Many people focus on “benefiting from disorder”, but this is in fact the basic asymmetry behind Antifragile, which Taleb touched on even earlier in his books. Cap the losses and yes, stay open for high — ideally unlimited — upside, but avoiding ruin takes precedence.

The up-to/at-least dichotomy is broader than job postings. “Up-to” precedes many numbers and sometimes, fair enough, it is important to mention and valid in the conversation. But sometimes — often? — it is uttered under the breath and while clearing throat to yell out a large number that is meant to impress, change minds, open up hearts… and wallets.

“You could earn up to $900,000 per year”, if you see 40 patients per day five days a week with 10 days off for the entire year. Extrapolate to other areas of life as need.

Drywalls weren’t a thing when I was growing up in Serbia and I don’t think they are used even now. I avoided putting up shelves as the whole stud-finding procedure was a bit of a dark art that could go very wrong in my inattentive hands, never mind that the placement was just too constraining — I didn’t want the placement of a towel rod to be decided by a home builder from 30 years ago. Then I discovered toggle bolts (also known as butterfly anchors), and I have been putting up shelves, hooks, screen mounts and other bits of hardware with wild abandon.

Now, using toggle bolts will leave behind a comically large holes if you ever change your mind about wall placement. This hasn’t happened to me yet, but when it does I will know to go to YouTube, which has become a living encyclopedia of crafts. Just in the last two months it has helped me with replacing a microwave circuit board and fixing a pair of broken shades, and I am no handyman. This is why I would never lump in YouTube together with TikTok, Instagram and other soul-sucking services, though it is always good to turn off the recommendations.

My third bit of advice is also wall-related: for anything you wanted to hang that’s too light to warrant a toggle bolt, use 3M’s Command strips. Yes they are just a tiny bit wasteful since you can’t reuse the one that’s stuck on a wall, but unlike nails or pieces of colored sticky rubber, they will not leave any trace once removed. They are a renter’s best friend.

And if you are renting, do not be afraid to change things around if you are in a managed property and don’t have the owner acting as landlord. Each time I moved out they person doing the walk-through was surprised by how unchanged everything was, and each time I thought to myself that I should have hung up that towel rod, or anchored that Kallax shelf to the wall.

When moving, the ideal is to hire someone to do everything for you, from packing to load to driving and the unloading. If you don’t have the means for it (and I haven’t), at least hire someone for the loading/unloading part, preferably someone with experience. Either way, if you pack yourself, packing everything save for large pieces of furniture into boxes — there should be nothing irregularly shaped that’s not in a box. And yes, I truly mean everything, even (especially!) the groceries.

So whenever you come by a trinket and wonder to yourself whether you should get it, for yourself or as a present for your children or significant other, picture yourself coming across it while packing for another move and try to imagine how would you feel: glad that you got to keep the memento, or resentful that it became just another piece of detritus that you have to stuff in a box.

If I had to name people who have influenced my life the most — not counting parents, teachers and other usual suspects whose very job is to influence you — the most surprising person on the list would probably be Mike Judge, the creator of Beavis and Butt-Head, Office Space, etc. Now, I was too young for Beavis and Butt-Head, never really got into King of the Hill and even though I appreciated the humor of Office Space I was merficuflly never exposed to that kind of office culture. No, Judge’s influence stems from a single movie, and in fact it was only the first five minutes of that movie that made a difference. I am of course talking about the introduction to Idiocracy (2006), in which a crude thought experiment pitted a WASP-ish couple of intellectuals against three trailers worth of rednecks and wondered which would result in more progeny.

No, the hereditary case for intelligence doesn’t make much sense, and the intro’s reliance on the pseudoscientific concept of IQ now seems quaint. But the fate of the two WASPs, ever waiting for better times to have children — or, more likely, the one-and-done — until it was far too late, this rang true. It was a good warning for someone just about to graduate from medical school (2008) and start what can be a never-ending journey of post-graduate medical education in the US (2010–2017).

More importantly, my then-medical student colleague, now-wife saw the same movie and had the same thoughts. If all goes well — and this late in the game, it better — we will welcome our fourth child into the world next month.

It is therefore with great interest that I read Scott Sumner’s most recent article which for once had a good and descriptive headline: Billionaire baby boom. And he has some interesting observations:

Fertility rates seem to follow a sort of U-shape. People in central Africa are too poor to afford very many luxuries, so children become the focus of their lives. Upper middle-class professionals have enough wealth to provide themselves with all sorts of fun activities, but not enough to provide full time caregivers for their children. Billionaires have so much money that they can farm out the difficult parts of raising children to servants, and just do the fun stuff like playing with their kids.

Note that it goes without saying that the upper middle-class professionals would want to outsource care for their children, and pay for it handsomely. Also left unspoken is the secret wish of every upper middle-class parent for their children to go to an elite university, which means a certain high school, and middle school, and… no wonder you would want to stick to just the one.

Thankfully, Nassim Taleb’s Incerto innoculated me against that kind of thinking, and frequent exposure to products of the above system acts as a booster of sorts. Limiting how many children you have so that you could raise one certified IYI would be a very IYI thing to do.

Living in DC, we are very much the outliers in any social circle you can imagine. “You must be really disappointed” is what a (single child) friend said to our 13-year-old. And everyone assumes the baby was a complete surprise (it wasn’t). We do hear a lot of “I don’t have children so that I can have a glass of wine in a restaurant at 6pm”. That’s fine. From my experience in health care those kinds of lives tend not to be as fullfilled in old age, but that could just be selection bias.

Anyway, you can definitely have more than one or two children without being a billionaire, and have a reasonably good lifestyle at that. In fact, better lifestyle than anyone ever in the history of humanity including royalty, other than in the last ~100 years. Factor that in when you make your own decisions.

Last year, writer Robin Sloan published a brief essay in his newsletter, and one part in particular has stuck with me since:

“You could extinguish a star,” but you never will, because that power is occupied by the task of living.

I was reminded of it talking to a colleague a few days ago who was of a similar (which is to say, middle) age as myself. She noted that we are getting into that not-so-pleasant space in between the hammer of having young children and the anvil of parents who are starting to need some extra care themselves. But of course, I commented, our parents had the same issues and we as children were protected from feeling any effects.

Except now I am having second thoughts, as I do think we have it significantly worse than our parents.

To start with, children require more maintenance than we ever did. Toddler age onward, we act as our progeny’s administrative assistants-slash-social secretaries, scheduling playdates, RSVP’ing to birthday invitations, filling out the afterschool activity calendar. School are no longer send-them-and-forget-them affairs. Parental participation is strongly encouraged and often required. Every day brings a new newsletter from the school district, the school itself, one or more teachers, the PTO, the separately-arranged (and paid for) aftercare, each with a new set of dates to track, tasks to complete, ideas to consider. This is all good! But also exhausting.

Parents live longer, with more chronic conditions and with an ever-growing list of medications. Even those who are healthy have to contend with the modern digital services that have supplanted a 30-minute queuing session at the post office, for which they need technical support. The only apps they can use seemingly without support are those for social media, which they use to spam us with the latest pixelated meme or — if you are not as lucky — AI slop that was reshared in their group.

And then there are our own administrative tasks: separate logins for all utilities, each now requiring 2-factor authentication; mortgage and car payments to keep track of; the ever-growing number of things to repair in the household; all those incantations to chant to get the AV system working (or is that just me?)

So yes, our lives have gotten more complex and if it weren’t for them we’d be busting lots of stars.

Quote of the week, from Adam Mastroianni:

People say “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” and they’re right, because you’ll get bored and go home. If you find the job, the cause, and the partner that annoy you in exactly the right way, you’ll never know peace again.

If this weren’t true, few people would choose medicine as a calling.