I had two very strange reading experiences this month.
First, there's this book I learned about two months ago, which I really wanted to read because of its glowing recommendations. I started reading it, and I had to agree it is very good, but it's also a more condensed version of many things I knew already / learned from other books before (and life experience). So I forced myself to continue reading it for... no good reason really? The entire time, I was telling myself “I want to read this, it's well written, I want to be able to say I read it afterwards” but my eyes were glazing over the pages and I needed to re-read chapters multiple times before I could move on. I was so bored!
And it pains me to write about it this way, because it is really a good book and I do want to recommend reading it to friends! Anyway...
- The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt
In a nutshell, this book cross-references modern results in psychology, anthropology and sociology, with folk wisdom and historical references, in search of a deeper understanding of the various things that make people more happy.
Again, I will re-state that this book is very good. It does an excellent job at what it's set to do, and the arguments are strong. The author spells out grounded ideas about why people do what they do, and what we need to do to overcome to balance the slog of existence with a more content mindset.
I would likely recommend this book in two situations. One would be as an introductory read for a young person who does not have a philosophical education yet. The other case would be to a person of any age who feels a bit overwhelmed by the noise of modern life, and wants to regain some mental and emotional (and spiritual) clarity.
I was so tired of reading after I powered through the above that I was not ready to advance my planned reading list, so I picked up something random next. And ooooh boy! That one was a doozy.
- Radical Honesty : How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth by Brad Blanton
Overall, this book is about the author's experience as a therapist and his recollection of techniques that he has used that have worked with his patients. That said, the framing he uses is that there is a central theme to his techniques: telling the truth in every situation. (Hence the title)
The reason why I felt strange while reading this is that on the one hand I cannot deny that he has obtained results with his patients and I even recognize some of the techniques that he has used as being very valid and useful. On the other hand the justification he uses for many of his situations is complete b.s.!
However, I cannot be mad because he also says so in the beginning of the book. Like, literally, his introduction is all about the publisher sayings the book was b.s., the author agreeing and then deciding to publish it anyway.
Thus, every chapter, I was starting to read with the mindset “what is the interesting thing that is happening here and what is the b.s. excuse he is going to use to explain it.”
This dynamic reminds me of the character Rincewind in the Discworld series from Terry Pratchett. That character is a wizard who is a coward and kinda stupid but also very good at experiencing stuff and doing very interesting things through which we learn a lot about his world and a lot about philosophy.
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On the topic of AI science, I found two very serious bits that made me chuckle.
In Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models, the authors Piercosma Bisconti et al. teach us that you can use poetry to work around the censorship baked into system prompts.
Meanwhile, Udari Madhushani Sehwag et al. from ScaleAI published a new benchmark called PropensityBench; in its introductory article, they explain that the benchmark reveals how most current LLMs have a tendency to take major ethical shortcuts (i.e. they do more bad things) when given an input that suggests they are under pressure to perform, e.g. when under tight deadline or high penalty for failure.
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Shifting gears. I loved reading this study: Optimism is associated with exceptional longevity in 2 epidemiologic cohorts of men and women by Lewina O. Lee et al.. As the title suggests, after other factors are factored in, optimism alone seems to incur a 15% additional lifespan for both men and women.
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I also loved this analysis made by the animation artist Marik ‘Mik’ Roeder:
In this 15-min video, the artist explains how there is currently a movement to fragment the LGBT community into factions that oppose each other. They also point out that this happened before with feminism. They also point out that this is part of a well-documented, public plan by conservative thought leaders to reduce the influence of queer people in politics (a literal use of “divide and conquer”). The call to action, of course, is to unite in action despite differences in life directions.
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Also, in a scientific report that surprises absolutely no-one, we now have hard evidence that banning cell phone use in schools results in better education outcomes. See The Impact of Cellphone Bans in Schools on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Florida by David N. Figlio & Umut Özek.
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Finally, the thing that I wish you will appreciate as much as I did is this article by Adam Mastroianni: Why aren't smart people happier?.
In this delightful writeup, the author explores why it seems that on the one hand, “intelligence” seems to correlate across many domains (i.e. a good result on a test in one area is predictive of good results in many other areas), yet on the other hand we have ample evidence that intelligence and happiness do not correlate at all.
The main contribution of the article is a new theory: that the “intelligence” we often reward (the one related to IQ, scientific skills etc) corresponds to a higher ability to solve well-defined problems; whereas “how to be happy” (and incidentally, “how to be good parent” and “how to be a good person,” also named in the article) are questions of a different kind, that the author calls poorly-defined problems, and the theory is that these are independent skills. People who are good at the one kind of intelligence are not necessarily good at the other (and vice versa).
Incidentally, the author also laments our social norms, where we over-celebrate people good at well-defined problems (professors, doctors, high-IQ society members) and under-celebrate people skilled at poorly defined life problems. For example, his grandmother can't operate the TV input button but is excellent at raising a loving family, enduring tragedy, and making meaningful traditions: classic poorly defined problem-solving.
Because there's no test or number for this kind of intelligence, society often dismisses it as “folksy” rather than treating it as a core form of human competence. Ignoring and undervaluing this ability leads us to overuse smart-but-narrow problem-solving where we actually need wisdom, leaving us successful on paper but unsatisfied in life. (There is also a bit in there about our current AI systems being over-optimized in one direction, but I don't think it's the main point.)
His closing advice: seek out wise people (like your grandma), listen, and maybe help them with their tech afterwards.