The Deep Dish: All Life is an Experiment
Richard Meadows' blog on optionality, financial freedom, and lifestyle design.| Deep Dish
Richard Meadows' blog on optionality, financial freedom, and lifestyle design.| Deep Dish
If you think you're a decent speaker of a second language, try spending a full hour narrating a simple suburban environment to a small child. You will very quickly discover gaping holes in your vocabulary that the average three year old would absolutely school you on. What the hell is a slug called? How about a digger? How do you say I'm stomping my feet? So this solves two problems at once: it has greatly improved my spanish, despite the fact that I'm often just talking to myself, and it has...| Deep Dish
My coming-out post on why I'm no longer an AI doomer seems to have struck a nerve. Hundreds of people responded across reddit, substack, twitter, email, podcasts, etc, which I'd like to say is just another day at the office for a Very Successful Blogger like me, but is in fact fairly unusual. There are too many threads to reply to individually, so I thought I'd condense the general thrust of the criticisms and respond to the best comments here. And they were (mostly) very good! I've ended up ...| Deep Dish
Maybe you have a voice in your head that whispers ‘jump!’ every time you lean over a balcony. I have recurring fantasies of deleting my presence from the Internet and going off the grid.| Deep Dish
At the exact same time we're seeing an actual, real-life, non-theoretical explosion in AI capabilities, I've become much less worried about the prospect of a silicon god converting the universe into paperclips. My p(doom), as the kids say, has dropped off a cliff. The idea behind this post is to lay out these underrated arguments in one convenient place, and document exactly why I changed my mind.| Deep Dish
IT'S BEEN A COUPLE YEARS since I did one of these roundups, during which time book club has really lifted my reading game, and so the pool of contenders has a lot of depth this year. After much agonising I've winnowed my favourite reads down to a top 10. The list ended up heavy on classics and big names, with fewer underrated or self-published authors—wow, Hemingway is a great read, no kidding—but I think that also tells you something. I've also read quite a bit of contemporary fiction—...| Deep Dish
A time-tested strategy for not only becoming resilient to future shocks, but positioning yourself to profit from an unpredictable world.| Deep Dish
A bold new theory of behavioural economics.| Deep Dish
One year ago my daughter was born. This is the single most monumental thing to ever happen to me. Obviously it's given me plenty of great fodder for writing insightful blog posts! ... *crickets* ... It's surprisingly hard to write anything interesting about having a baby, because you've already heard all the clichés, and they're all true. In the last post I talked about how there's a type of knowledge that can only be acquired by direct experience: it's like when you're tripping on mushrooms...| Deep Dish
Almost all my adult life I've been an infovore obsessed with hoovering up all the knowledge. Then a year ago I joined a book club in which non-fiction was strictly prohibited. This is the second-best thing to happen to me in recent memory. I'll say why, and why I don't regret my initial fixation on non-fiction, but first: an invitation to get involved with the book club! It started when my friends Cam, Benny and I discovered we'd all had David Foster Wallace's monstrous Infinite Jest on our r...| Deep Dish
What makes humans special? How is it that we are able to unleash the energy of the atom, transmute handfuls of sand into powerful djinn, and generally manipulate matter in any way not strictly forbidden by the laws of physics, while our hominid ancestors gather dust in the natural history museum? What tectonic forces have torn such a chasm between us and our surviving cousins, still banging rocks together in the animal kingdom? For most of history this was no great mystery: only humans have a...| Deep Dish
Pound-for-pound The Beginning of Infinity has to be the densest collection of batshit-crazy ideas I've ever come across. Never mind the bit about how there are trillions of copies of you constantly branching throughout the multiverse. Deutsch also claims there is nothing in principle stopping us from colonising the stars, transmuting matter like the alchemists of old, bringing an end to death, reversing global warming, and solving any other problem that arises. But that's not ambitious enough...| Deep Dish
We don’t talk much these days but we go way back. We started out in the same generic scene, but then we found our groove out in the weirder and under-explored fringes. Over the years we grew and developed together. We have a rapport. So I’m feeling kinda bummed about how I permanently and irrevocably lost any way of contacting […] The post I Miss You appeared first on Deep Dish.| Deep Dish
