Quarterly Roundup for 2023: Books, Podcasts, AI Developments, Prediction Markets, and Previewed Posts
Here's a quick look at what I read, listened to, and tinkered with in the first quarter of 2023. I also give a preview of future Substack posts.
Books
As of the beginning of this month, I have finished 27 books this year, which is roughly a book every 3.5 days. 75% of these have been consumed as audiobooks. Only 3 of these books were fiction: The Moviegoer, The Autograph Man, and The Confidence-Man. I hope to increase the amount of fiction I read in the next quarter. Any recommendations are welcome!
In no particular order, my top five reads from my 2023 reads are…
Innate by Kevin Mitchell
Psych by Paul Bloom
The Big Sort by Bill Bishop
The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall
The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker
Book Reviews
I've reviewed or commented on just over a third of these books. I've collated these reviews listed in descending order by date of reading start:
Podcasts
I'm a podcast fiend, listening to several everyday. I’ve reflected on my love and consumption of podcasts more generally in my prior post “Podcatch-22.” Obviously, there are certain shows that I listen to habitually. I cover some of these in my post “An Aural Diet.” However, I am always looking to mix it up and find new and interesting podcasts. Here is a look at some of the shows that I've been enjoying lately:
The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling - a podcast mini-series on Rowling’s run-ins with transgender activists, featuring interviews with Rowling herself and well-known trans YouTuber ContraPoints.
Moment of Zen - Erik Torenberg, Dan Romero, and Antonio Garcia Martinez discuss trends in technology, start-ups, politics, and culture.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants with David McKay - science and tech podcast interviewing various leading figures across many fields
House of Strauss - former Golden State Warrior beat writer Ethan Strauss interviews new media figures and Substack writers on sports and culture topics.
Institutionalized - two right-of-center journalists, Charles Fain Lehman and Aaron Sibarium, do deep dives on various political topics.
Red Scare - two bohemian layabouts from NYC, Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova, do irreverent cultural commentary. Be warned!
Narrative Control - two guys, Richard Hanania and Rob Henderson, with frequent guest Marc Andreessen discuss the philosophical, psychological, and political themes in prestige entertainment products.
AI
The recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have been making enormous waves in popular media. Plus, they are being feverishly explored for profitable use cases in numerous industries. This technology will almost certainly reshape the daily experiences of our professional and personal lives; we hope for the better! There is even a newly invented job title that's accompanied this technology and already entered the vernacular of many in tech: Prompt Engineer.
Given these exciting developments, I've assembled a list of the basic AI resources that I've toyed with and encourage others to give them a go. There are sometimes waitlists to access these products, and there are both free and paid tiers of access. If you want some guidance on how to get started tinkering around with these, just send me a message.
Large Language Models (LLM) and Chatbots:
Text-to-Image Generators:
Midjourney (access is via a Discord bot)
Prediction Markets
Prediction markets allow you to bet on the outcome of future events, using a proxy or imaginary currency. Prediction markets are a popular tool in rationalist communities that are deployed to improve epistemic hygiene and cut through the nonsense in public discourse. Are they perfect? Definitely not! Nonetheless, they're interesting to play with. They also let you track the accuracy of your predictions. Lately, I've been exploring a prediction market called Manifold Markets. On Manifold, anyone can create their own prediction market about any question they want! Users can trade in a market to change the probability to reflect what they believe is the chance of the correct answer. Ideally, as more users trade, the market converges to reflect the truth. I created a market about asking whether the FDA will approve a TIGIT targeting drug before 2024. If you’re interested, sign up and starting betting!
Upcoming Writing
I understand that the wide variety of topics I write on can be disorienting or frustrating to any given audience member. Hopefully, some appreciate the variety too! At some point, I may have enough work to segment into topic-based channels. For instance, I could broadly cut things in half. A science and tech channel and a humanities and culture channel.
I’m also sure that some of the deeper dives may be too arcane or too long. Almost all of the pieces I write will be free and allow engagement, while archived pieces older than 18 months will go behind the paywall. Hopefully, I have time to do more audio content, including article narration, audio essays, and maybe a podcast.
So in service of keeping my audience in-the-know, I'd like to preview some of the future pieces I have in the works or on deck. I'm also happy to take feedback and even requests.
Posts Under Construction:
An extended commentary on the famous and deceased author David Foster Wallace and his ideas about postmodernism and irony. In this post, I will take a close look at his essay on television, “E Unibus Plurim: Television and U.S. Fiction.”
An analysis of the claim that fiction is an evolved adaptation in humans. I will explore this in conversation with the book The Storytelling Animal, which makes this case.
A measured look at the limitations of left-wing polemics using Responding to the Right as a prototype.
A review of the soon-to-be-published Generations by Jean M. Twenge, which is a portraits of six American generations.