Good stuff on the internet

March 2024 edition

I will write another “Gone Readin’” post before too long. In the meantime, here is a roundup of recent good stuff I’ve read, listened to, or watched on the internet.

Short reads

Substack

• Ethan Iverson, Elvin Jones on John Coltrane’s “India”

  Along with his bandmates, Elvin Jones was certainly a fellow revolutionary, but in one crucial way Jones was absolutely unaffected by all these new-fangled musical techniques. Mr. Jones sits on his throne radiating swing. The core of the emotion is the same as Miles Davis, of Charlie Parker, of the big bands, of Kansas City, of New Orleans. While impossible to describe in technical terms, the feeling is nonetheless completely correct. Unimpeachable. The truth.

• Lewis Porter, Lester Young changed his style, part 1, part 2

  But how did Young achieve such strikingly different tone qualities over the course of his career?

• Cate Hall, How to be more agentic?

  Agency is the skill that built the world around you, an all-purpose life intensifier that lets you make your corner of it more like what you want it to be, whether that’s professional, relational, aesthetic, whatever.

• Helen De Cruz, Schopenhauer’s flute and Descartes’s lute

  When we play music, we offload our deliberate intentions onto the world, and into our muscle memory. We no longer need conscious deliberation, or even a reason for why this finger goes that way, we just do it because we practiced it, and practice moves our body to go just in that way. We don't need a reason. We don't need to reflect on our picture of the world when we pick up the flute after dinner.

• Paul Bloom’s Small Potatoes is consistently insightful and funny

  • Life is good (probably; on Benatar’s anti-natalism)

  • Showing and sharing: “my suggestion is that the pleasures of showing and sharing are, in large part, the pleasures of being known, of being understood, and of not being alone.”

  • Productivity tips for the restless (do as he says not as I do, but also, “There are no strategies that work for everyone.”)

• Dan Williams, Should we trust misinformation experts to decide what counts as misinformation? (no)

  For public deliberation and debate about complex social and political issues to promote collective understanding, it must be scaffolded by social norms and institutions of various kinds, and it must be informed by reliable scientific findings and experts. At present, every democracy in the world fails to meet these conditions, and the result is collective epistemic dysfunction.

  However, it is precisely this collective epistemic dysfunction that makes me sceptical about a project in which experts deploy highly expansive definitions of misinformation.

• Peter Singer has a Substack!

• Zvi Mowshowitz, Childhood and education roundup #4 (these and the AI roundups are excellent)

• Lewis Bollard, This is why we can’t have nice laws (on farm animal welfare)

  Farmers are wealthy, but receive lavish government subsidies. They’re few, but two dozen sit in the US Congress. They’re mostly conservatives, but liberal politicians still do their bidding

• And of course, yours truly on Why Philosophy?

  The most important things in my life have little to do with philosophy—family, cats, music, running, reading other books. For the parts that do, I would say it keeps my bullshit detector alive, and there is a lot of detecting to do.

Misc

• How Tyler Cowen listens to music (Marginal Revolution)

• Eric Schliesser and Sandrine Bergès on Sophie de Grouchy (Aeon)

• Interesting discussion of Bas van Fraassen’s comments about science and reality (Leiter Reports)

• Alex Worsnip on incoherence (Aeon)

• Richard Yetter Chappell on philosophy’s digital future (Daily Nous)

• Sabrina Little interview on running, the examined life, and suffering (I’ll have more on her book here soon)

• The long road back: A conversation with François D’Haene (iRunFar)

Good podcast episodes

Sticky Notes

• Beethoven, String Quartet, Op. 59, No. 1

• Ethel Smyth, Serenade in D

• Dvorak, Symphony No. 9, "From the New World" (LIVE)

Mindscape

• Eric Schwitzgebel on the weirdness of the world (he also has a cool Substack)

• Benjamin Breen on Mead, Bateson, psychedelics, and utopia

• Sabine Stanley on what’s inside planets

80,000 Hours

• Bob Fischer on interspecies welfare comparisons

• Hugo Mercier debunking the misinformation hype

• Emily Oster on pregnancy and parenting

Conversations with Tyler

• Masaaki Suzuki on interpreting Bach

• Patrick McKenzie on navigating complex systems (surprisingly interesting)

YouTube

An awesome video interview of Brad Mehldau (Rick Beato)