Here is my annual roundup of some of the most interesting things I came across in 2019. Having already written about some of the topics that drew my attention throughout the year, here I have included only the things that I haven’t previously talked about.

Nassim Taleb’s Principia Politica

This is one of the things that the author of the Incerto series (including the seminal Black Swan) has been working on. In fact, it is considered a part of the series. It’s a treatise on how Taleb sees that his more ideas in Incerto can be applied to politics and governance. It was still in draft stage when I first read it (it still is at the time of this writing), but already there are many things in it that I found very interesting.

Scale is something I have been thinking about this year, and Taleb in this paper echos many of the same ideas that I’ve had. He describes how political systems are scale-sensitive, and so one should never discuss the effectiveness of different systems without mentioning scale. I found that he is able to articulate some of my own thoughts much more clearly than I had been able to, which is an amazing thing to encounter whenever it happens.

The Hidden Tribes of America Report

This is the resulting report from an effort into researching the extent and nature of political polarization in the United States. It confirms, with data, the optimistic view that the country as a whole is actually not very polarized. It is only the two vocal extreme wings (on both the left and right) that are creating the perception of extreme nation-wide polarization. Most people, more than 2/3 of the total population, are what they call the “exhausted majority”, and hold relatively moderate views.

This data is good to see, though it’s still a bit concerning. Staying silent and being disengaged from politics do not make this exhausted majority immune from the influences of the extreme vocal minority. It is entirely possible for these people in the middle to be gradually pulled apart to the extreme ends of the political spectrum. It will be very interesting to see a follow up to this report in a few years, to see if and how these group compositions change over time.

George Hotz on the Artificial Intelligence Podcast

I had known George Hotz as “geohot”, the young hacker that created the first carrier-unlock for an iPhone, and hacked the PS3. His more recent foray into the field of autonomous cars was surprising, but I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. This podcast came as an unexpected surprise for me. George is obviously very opinionated on what the best approach to creating fully autonomous vehicles is, but he articulates his ideas very well, and the arguments are quite convincing. I was previously more in the “Waymo camp”, believing in the more cautious way of developing autonomous cars, but after this podcast, I’m a bit more bullish on the Tesla approach.

The gap between simple cruise control and full self-driving is large and difficult to close. The intermediate stages of vehicle autonomy are very dangerous, because even though the autonomous system is not yet capable of dealing with all road situations, it is capable enough to lull the driver into a false sense of security and stops paying attention. In this podcast George gives a very clear picture of what he thinks we need to get through these middle stages of autonomy, step by step, to reach full autonomy. Things like more intuitive, smoother transitions between autonomous and manual driving modes, as well as more intelligent driver monitoring systems to make sure that the driver is paying attention when needed.

Transformative Tools For Thought

I have been following Michael Nielsen for a while, and knew that he’s a big proponent of the spaced repetition learning technique. So when he co-authored a paper examining the ways that we can develop transformative tools for thought and learning, I jumped on it right away, only to be somewhat disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, the paper is still very much worth reading, and is clearly the result of arduous work by two extremely intelligent people. But given the sheer difficulty of the problem that they are trying to tackle, the result was not as transformative as I had expected.

So why am I including it in this list? Because I think (and the authors had pointed out also) that this is something that doesn’t receive enough explicit attention from people. Of course, we do not need to explicitly pay attention to problems in order to tackle them. In fact many solutions are not found this way, but instead are found by accident or some serendipitous encounters. But I do think that this is an important enough problem to discuss and work on explicitly. In a way, I think it is similar to people’s explicit effort to measure and stimulate progress (such as Patrick Collison’s attempt here). Actually, finding a truly transformative tool to learn and think may be a key component in how we can accelerate progress. Steve Jobs famously said in an interview that he wants to “build the bicycle for the mind” with technology, and I respect Michael and Andy for carrying on that wish. Even though the result leaves a lot to be desired.

Catching a Single Transistor (Part 2, Part 3)

This is an unusual series from the German extreme-overclocker “der8auer”. His videos are almost always about exotic cooling based overclocking and high end PC building. But this year, he filmed a 3-part series on catching a glimpse of a single transistor from an Intel i9-9900K CPU, with electron microscopes. Using both an SEM (scanning electron microscope) and a TEM (transmission electron microscope) at the Technical University of Berlin, he takes a peak at a Tri-Gate transistor built with Intel’s 14nm++ process node. It provides a very interesting look at how electron microscopes are operated, and the technology involved to simply see the tiny transistors that make up our computers today.

What a “Second-Person” Video Game Would Look Like

I’ve watched a lot more video essays this year compared to previous years, perhaps owing to the rise in popularity of this medium. Many of these are about video games, and this is quite an interesting one. The author attempts to answer the question of what a “second-person” perspective game would look like. While all three perspectives are commonly used in literature (“I”, “you”, “him/her/they” respectively), only the first and third perspectives are used in video games. Did the author provide a satisfactory answer? I don’t think he got it quite right. I hesitate to call what is shown in the video “second-person perspective”, even though it is definitely not exactly first nor third person. You’d have to watch it yourself to decide.