On My Mind This Week (OMMTW)

~ Week 3, December 2022 ~

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Erik Hoel’s essay on The banality of ChatGPT: Passing the Turing test turns out to be boring is a genuinely interesting read. If you like this piece, I will say that I don’t agree with everything Hoel discusses. I was disappointed by his article on FTX and the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried.  Effective Altruism (EA) is a subject that is meaningful for me and I get frustrated with positions taken by Hoel that seem to show that, intelligent and well-educated as he is, people all too often miss the bigger picture altogether.

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Another hack doc with another hack hangover cure. Look, we all know the only think that does the body good after a night of taking it too far is good ol’ fashioned Pedialyte (serious). There are multiple theories on how best to ingest your Pedialyte lifesaving techniques. Some will tell you to down a water bottle full of the blend before bed and keep another by your bedside for when you wake up. Others will tell you not to worry about the before bed bottle as that will likely result in interrupted sleep as you’ll have to get up to use the bathroom. Go with what your body tells you is best.

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A rise in gender neutral baby names give children an opportunity to choose their futures. This article in Semafor, a new news source making grand promises, questions if some of these names will eventually either date people to being born during a particular period or if they will fall out of fashion as trending name cycles are common. I personally tend to think that a good idea is to give someone a good “fall back” middle name that that allows flexibility if a person wants to move through the world without a name that ties they to a particular demographic, religion, or cultural heritage.

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We, The People, are struggling. Stats show that Americans savings have plummeted since their peak during pandemic lockdowns. We’re now down to 2.3%, on average, which is the lowest since 2005.

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Another rich white guy is more rich than Elon, presently. Who cares. These guys trade spots all the time. Let’s see them put more of their money into philanthropy and then have a conversation.

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Folks seem very taken with Alex Dimitrov’s Substack in which he features NYC Diary adventures. Lots of Frank O’Hara vibes going on imho. Take a look and determine for yourself.

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I’ve been reflecting on this on and off for about a month now. Sure seems like leaf blowers should simply be illegal.

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TikTok fears feel legit. Serious. (I know I’m a geriatric millennial.)

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The Gray Area with host Sean Illing continues to be the podcast that I’m finding most interesting of late.

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Without Roe, poor states are likely to have a large increase in births and lack of funding to support mothers.

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1/3 children and adolescents experiencing bullying. This results in a cousin of PTSD that is not a clinical diagnosis referred to as “adult post-bullying syndrome” (APBS). What research shows is what we already know to be true—there are long-term effects from bullying that remain with people into adulthood. It’s a big problem that we need to work on as a society.

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CLMP literary journal/press members are sharing their Mastodon accounts. It’s been noted that having different servers is “clunky”. I’m still not 100% on board with this. I love the idea of having a space that is oriented particularly towards the literary and arts communities. I don’t think Twitter is going to remain a terrific space for this in the long term. That being said, I’m personally still on the fence given there are already quite a few socials to keep up with… *sigh*… love the community, hate the time suck.

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Bars are pricing out the concept of “regulars”. This goes for diners in my area as well, which seems sad. Of course, everyone is getting hit by the rising prices of goods and services. The service industry definitely should do much better by their staff. This reminds me to say again, as I’ve written elsewhere, that I’m a big believer that in contemporary times if you’re “going out” then you should expect to pay something of a premium and that includes an intention to tip more than 20%. I outlined suggested % vs. $ in a previous post. I tend to go with 25-30% myself and if you’re at a bar and taking up space having just a couple drinks you should probably hit your bartender up with a real tip and not just $2/drink. More on this in future because it’s a subject that I feel strongly about.

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I love me a cold sandwich. Here is allegedly how you help make a restaurant quality level sandwich at home. If you haven’t already heard elsewhere, it’s almost never going to match up. There’s just something about the concept of it being prepared by someone else that adds a certain je ne sais quoi.

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Not every post by Seth Godin is pure gold. That being said, he has something thoughtful to share more often than not and, increasingly, I appreciate his long-time dedication to sharing a short daily post. Here, I believe Seth is making a truly important point about how we spend our time and energy, our focus and attention.  Getting bogged down in small decisions as opposed to putting in more time in making large decisions is wildly essential and yet all of us struggle to lean in on what really has the most important on our lives and the lives of others. Unfortunately, I’m not finding links to sources at the moment, in any case, there is plenty of data out there about how long people tend to spend on major life trajectory decisions. It's alarming that we tend to spend relatively small amounts of time on these decisions, all in all, and then inevitably double-down on our belief that we have make correct choices (a difficult to avoid pitfall that relates to escalation of commitment as well as sunk cost fallacy). We box ourselves in or, put in the language of longtermism, “lock in” with regards to decisions we make in our lives. I wish I had good advice for how to push back on this challenge. The reality is I think we are hard-wired to struggle in these areas and our ability to rationalize ourselves out of action has deep ties to a sense of inertia and statis that holds us back.

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If you came for data—some metrics comparing countries.

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Shout-out to Aeon’s deep (yet approachable) dives into psychology: “the self, relationships, cognition and neuroscience”.

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Gen Z & The Future of American Politics.

Highly recommend reviewing the survey results. Notable, and not terribly surprising, to see where generations tend to fall in response to these hot button issues.

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Lessons I Learned Submitting My First Book by Maya C. Popa

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