Alan Jacobs on your lies, and mine:
In any given community, there will be a profound divide between those who believe that the most dangerous lies are the ones told by our enemies and those who believe that the most dangerous lies are the ones we tell ourselves.
Here. 🔗
Despite EA & crypto, we're still living in the Victorians' world 🔗💰📚
Derek Thompson’s short, pensive essay on his own entanglement with effective altruism (EA) and Sam Bankman-Fried leaves off before getting to a problem that enabled both, a problem with the Internet in general: we humans just seem to be at our best when operating locally, in-person.
Just as crypto’s promise of “trust in a trustless world” struck many as ridiculous, so too EA has been ridiculed for its impersonal approach to altruism. George Eliot in Middlemarch; Dickens in Bleak House; Trollope in The Way We Live Now: each of these novelists understood & satirized the ways in which, aided by finance, we are always tempted to abstract ourselves away from our local communities and traditions.
Heeding their warning may make our altruism less “efficient,” but perhaps that’s ok—perhaps less altruism is required when our communities are healthy, robust, and based on trust, rather than writing it off as an impossibility in a “global age”?
In other words, perhaps the problem isn’t that Thompson was taken in by two major Internet-based movements that both just happened to be off in ways that permitted someone like SBF to trick his way through. Perhaps it’s simply that the SBFs in our society who are most perfectly situated to exploiting the “trustless” (impersonal, inscrutable) frameworks we inhabit. After all, SBF seems not to have flourished in the more traditional institutions he inhabited.
Excited for 🇧🇪-🇨🇦. I spent 90 terrifying minutes several years ago watching Alphonso Davies tear apart #MNUFC at TCF Bank Stadium. I’d love to see Canada get a victory today. ⚽️
So far, this World Cup suggests that it might not be quite the disaster I expected to expand to 48 teams. Many of these smaller and lower-ranked teams can more than keep up—and their fans are showing up in a big way. ⚽️
Jacqui Oakley and Warren Barton are hands-down the best commentators in this Fox squad for the World Cup. They’re, you know, insightful on each team’s players & tactics. They were great yesterday for 🇩🇰 – 🇹🇳 & they are equally good this morning for 🇲🇦 – 🇭🇷. ⚽️
I’ve loved Argentina since I studied abroad there in 2005. That’s a crushing defeat. But huge credit to Saudi Arabia—they were excellent. Terrible passing in the final third for Argentina; incredible performance defensively by the Saudis. ⚽️
¡Vamos Argentina! 🇦🇷⚽️
Halfway through 🇺🇸- 🏴, I’m thrilled. We’re playing great; creating some good chances. I’m especially impressed by Musah, Sargent, Jedi, and Ream. Beautifully taken goal by Weah. Let’s go! ⚽️
My heart-over-head bracket. Really had to get speculative to get the final I wanted… 🇧🇷- 🇦🇷 ⚽️
Everyone can’t look away from the story of the spectacular failure of crypto wunderkind/slacker dude SBF. Massive wealth, massive hubris, all gone in an instant. It’s a story made for Michael Lewis.
Somehow, amazingly, Lewis has already been embedded with SBF for 6 months.
All of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a deer stand alone.
~ Pascal, I think
Currently reading: The Nature of Oaks by Douglas W. Tallamy 📚
Decided recently to start a newsletter about Jesus' teachings. It won’t be religious, or even really very spiritual. I’ll simply consider how Jesus' teaching might help us live well in our troubled times.
Tomorrow, the Premier League starts a six-week mad dash prior to the World Cup; some teams will play more than twice a week during this stretch. There are going to be more injuries than ever before, during, & after the World Cup. But at least FIFA gets its way! ⚽️
D.C. Schindler on beauty and hospitality 📚
Instead, beauty effects a completeness that strengthens our capacity to be open and hospitable. It is fitting, in this respect, that we tend to think of giving the quality of beauty, more directly than the quality of truth or goodness, to our background surroundings, the encompassing atmosphere inside of which our existence unfolds.
~from Love and the Postmodern Predicament
Is there any better illustration of Iain McGilchrist’s theory of the left brain’s colonization of our thinking than this post (& the paper it cites), about why philosophers spend too much time studying their dead predecessors. Surely they’re both joking, right? Right? 🔗
Sure, I’d love to be your start-up’s Chief Metaverse Officer. Here’s my cover letter:
I solemnly swear that I will do everything in my power to foil your ambitions to create a metaverse. Please call or email if you have any questions or you’d like to discuss the position further.
Saddened to learn of Hilary Mantel’s sudden and untimely death at the age of 70. Her Wolf Hall novels are brilliant; what vivid historical imagination. R.I.P. 📚
So, apparently there are 20 quadrillion ants in the world.
That’s a cool 1.5 million per person. 🐜 🔗
Current listening: Brian Blade & the Fellowship Band, Season of Changes 🎶