README

A list of things that I want to be associated with and/or have been influenced by. Not in order of importance!

Progress
Progress is the result of a supportive context (hence politics, economics) for great science and its applications, so we’ll bundle in a few things.

Growing up in Shanghai (until college).
List of Books: Peter A. Hall and David Soskice, Varieties of Capitalism. Jillian Schwedler, Faith in Moderation. Daniel Yergin, The Prize.
Samantha Power, Chasing the Flame. Sérgio Vieira de Mello was a Brazilian/UN diplomat with a long (but not long enough) career contending with evil and suffering in basically every failed state and warzone in the late 20th century. He was the first official to speak to Khmer Rouge; in the Balkans talking to the Serbs, the Albanians, and the Americans; he was in Sergio post-genocide figuring out how to be humanitarian without fueling war; he was in East Timor setting up the pseudo-interim-government…(Apparently someone joked that his autobiography ought to be titled “My Friends, the War Criminals.”) Despite the standard impossibilities of international politics and violent local grievances, it has filled me with hope that a single competent person can do so much, and that there are people who found a way to hold both idealism and pragmatism in one life. He died in the suicide bombing of Canal Hotel in Baghdad, on August 19, 2003.
Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in His Own Words.
Michael Nielsen’s Augmenting Long-term Memory. Spaced repetition flash cards might not seem so related to “progress,” but as gwern says, “It’s a testament to the Enlightenment ideal of improving humanity through reason and overcoming our human flaws…it’s really nice to just have a small example like this in one’s daily life, an example not yet so prosaic and boring as the lightbulb.”
I have really enjoyed reading semi-technical or not-technical-and-pure-philosophical work from Simon Willison, Michael Nielsen, Paul Graham, Ben Thompson, and Emmett Shear. Andrej’s Twitter and recent appearance on Dwarkesh are wonderful.

Beingness

Bhagavad Gita. Easwaran’s introduction is quite clear as well. I also found Siddhartha (from Herman Hesse) and the Dhammapada (also Easwaran) thought-enriching in complementary ways.
Right understanding is seeing life as it is. In the midst of change, where is there a place to stand firm? Where is there anything to have and hold? To know that happiness cannot come from anything outside, and that all things that come into being have to pass away: this is right understanding, the beginning of wisdom.
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
> *5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.* > *6.5 When an answer cannot be stated, neither can the question be stated.* >> *There is no such thing as the riddle.* >> *If a question can be posed at all, then it can also be answered.* > *6.521 The solution to the problem of life is found in the vanishing of the problem.* >> *(Is this not the reason why those to whom the meaning of life became clear after prolonged doubt, could not then say in what this meaning consisted?)* > *6.522 There is, though, the ineffable.* >> *This shows itself, it is the mystical.*
Rob Burbea. Nick Cammarata. Shinzen Young.
Visakan Veerasamy is an Internet writer. I found him on Twitter, where his presence remains the richest. He has since also self-published two books (PDFs you can download), started at least one Substack, and semi-manages some amalgamation of websites. His “elaborate, interwoven [twitter] threads” led me into Internet spaces and hence subcultures that I remain a lurker in, even today. In some ways, he is upstream of a lot of interests in technology, divinity, literature…and more importantly that one ought focus our time and energy on the things we want to see more of! As an example, social media algorithms can serve your needs, if you are honest to yourself about what you want and pursue them in lieu of numbness.

Math
Pure math helped me realize that, before my first proofs class, I had a malformed understanding of “understanding” and hadn’t really learned anything ever. Understanding is unmistakable when it occurs - you feel the undeniable truth, and the new way of seeing forever transforms you.

A Mathematician’s Lament from Paul Lockhart on the terrible way math is usually taught.
Andrew Neitzke’s class notes for Real Analysis.
June Huh is a fun one, although I wish Twitter hadn’t meme-ed it so much.

Literature

A List of Books: Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea. Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and Lolita. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, This Is Water (video here), and “Roger Federer as a Religious Experience”. Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. OSC’s Xenocide. Asimov’s Prelude to Foundation. Frank O’Hara’s Mayakovsky.
A Book: Gabriel García Márquez’ A Hundred Years of Solitude. After this, I was so astonished that I also went on to Pedro Páramo from Juan Rulfo, for which Gabo said, “That night I couldn’t sleep until I had read it twice…I could recite the entire book front to back and vice versa without a single appreciable error, I could tell you on which page of my edition each scene could be found.” Perhaps I am too generationally and culturally removed: A Hundred Years of Solitude is indisputably more wonderful to me.

Before them, surrounded by ferns and palm trees, white and powdery in the silent morning light, was an enormous Spanish galleon. Tilted slightly to the starboard, it had hanging from its intact masts the dirty rags of its sails in the midst of its rigging, which was adorned with orchids. The hull, covered with an armor of petrified barnacles and soft moss, was firmly fastened into a surface of stones. The whole structure seemed to occupy its own space, one of solitude and oblivion, protected from the vices of time and the habits of the birds. Inside, where the expeditionaries explored with careful intent, there was nothing but a thick forest of flowers.

Art

Sound: Radiohead’s album In Rainbows. Chick Corea’s Spain. Blonde Redhead. Massive Attack. Jon Hopkins. Fleetwod Mac. M83. Grimes. Ulrich Schnauss. Sigur Rós. The Smile (Radiohead v2). Ryuichi Sakamoto. The Japanese House. Hikaru Utada. Slowdive. Ling tosite sigure. The War On Drugs. Parannoul. Ichiko Aoba.
Sight: Rothko. Lee Krasner. Kandinsky. Monet. Miró.Gizem Vural. Isabel Quintanilla. Picasso.. 朱耷. 王履.