August 1, 2020
The new sidelines, ice cream science, grammarians, Mozart
Something of a tough week in the world of content-aggregating newsletters — but never fret, I have still some good things you'll want your eyeballs on.
The Weekend Reccs
Consider the Ice Cream: I was honestly a little disappointed in this article because it had potential. What a great idea! Let’s discuss the science behind a treat that everyone loves. But I felt I was given enough to desperately want more, but nothing past that. I generally have a rule that I don’t send bad articles, or even meh articles, but I thought this one, if nothing else, highlighted something that we undervalue: the science behind our food. At the end of the day, good food is good chemistry. More recently I’ve been thinking that at some point it too is good economics. We’re making tradeoffs in our decisions about taste, calories, fullness, variety, etc.
We already exist in a world that produces enough to feed every person — the problem is that we aren’t allocating it well enough to do so. Someday, though, that allocation problem will be solved, and it will be a great day when it is. Then perhaps the question becomes not a scarcity of food, but a scarcity of available calories with which to extract a diet for each person that we individually find most … interesting? tasty? satisfying? I’m not entirely sure. I haven’t thought deeply about my food past if it is nutritious and/or delicious, and I certainly succumb to many of the biases programmed into my hunter-gatherer brain. I think it is worth us all thinking more about what such a post-scarcity diet would look like: if we had all the money we could wish to spend on food, if we had no restraints on our time or attention or self-control, what would we wish to eat?
Grammar? I hardly know her! I used to be one of the people that got worked up at misuses of grammar. (For those paywalled: “irregardless” is a word according to Merriam-Webster; mass outrage ensued.) However, one sentence completely changed my outlook on the whole enterprise — language is for communication. Grammar is a way by which we can agree on the rules of communication. Yet, if something breaks those rules but still is clearly communicated, then no real breach occurred. The only metric of language that matters is the fidelity of the representation in my brain of what you said relative to the idea intended to be transmitted from your brain. There is no purpose to English or any other language past that fidelity. Any aesthetics that come about are side effects. You can cherish or bemoan side effects, but you can’t make a case that the side effects are the thing that should be preserved for their sake, unrelated to the main purpose.
This exposition on language, though, does have me thinking about the article in the entry above, and what the purpose of journalism is. The article on ice cream is bad in my normative view because it overpromises and under-delivers. But it sparked an interesting line of thought (if I can be so self-indulgent). So maybe it was a good article? I’m not convinced there’s a well-defined objective function on what journalism ought to be, in part because we don’t do a great job of delineating the types of journalism there are.
Counting letters: The other day I came across the blog of Peter Norvig, the head of research at Google. On top of being a generally quirky guy with an interesting blog I found this short analysis he wrote on the frequency of letters worth a read.
Landlines: I really enjoyed this piece on the death of landlines in literature. For a stint there I wrote (very bad) short stories, but found that I would never have cell phones in any of the stories…and even sought ways to actively exclude them. Such behavior by amateur and professional novelists alike can only be to the detriment of the modern story, as we live now in a new time with its new challenges.
Also, see Peter Norvig on a similar topic.
Lagniappe
This week I stumbled upon the Smartless podcast, which is hosted by three of my all-time favorite actors: Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett. I recommend giving it a listen!
Graph of the week
[The Economist]
See you next week!
Your friend,
Harrison