Here is my annual roundup of some of the most interesting things I came across in 2022.

Zvi’s Review of The Three-Body Problem Trilogy

This book series review is from 2019, but I came across it this year. It’s quite long, but it stands out among all the reviews of the Liu Cixin trilogy as one that most matches my experience with the series. In some ways, this is the book review I would have liked to write, but now don’t have to. Zvi finds the underlying worldview espoused by the books more alien than the actual aliens depicted in the story. He is shocked and at times appalled by the sheer depth of the cynicism and nihilism that flow out of the pages.

Being an American, he sees that this is probably reflecting some fundamental difference between Chinese and American cultures, and I think I agree. As a Chinese-born person who came to North America just before the teen years, I feel that I can see and understand both value systems, as well as Zvi’s jarring experience with the Chinese perspective. Like Zvi, I did not find the series worthy of the immense hype and glowing reception that it has received. Sure, many of the scientific and philosophical ideas presented are quite interesting, and I would still recommend it to science fiction fans. But the absolute bleak pessimism and inhumanity that permeates throughout prevent it from being one of the greats.

Bartosz Ciechanowski’s Piece on Mechanical Watch

This isn’t the first time that a Bartosz Ciechanowski piece has landed on my annual highlight, and this is probably my favorite one by him. I don’t think more needs to be said about the quality of the interactive animations of his works, but this one stands out because of the beautifully laid out narrative sequence that perfectly and naturally explains how mechanical watches work.

It begins with the simplest idea, that a coiled up metal strip can act like a kind of spring, able to store and release rotational energy. The goal of building a watch then, is to bring this release of rotational energy - which naturally occurs rapidly like a normal spring’s bounce - to a slower pace, one that precisely coincides with the passage of time. Step by step we get closer to this goal. Centuries of discoveries, innovations, and engineering ingenuity are condensed into a 30-minute interactive read, while leaving their essences intact. I’ve said enough, just go see it if you haven’t!

A Chemical Hunger Series By SMTM

Written by Slime Mold Time Mold, a trio of consultants on research study process and design. They apparently do reviews on other people’s research, to find flaws in their methodology, and help others design better studies. This series is from last year, and apparently made some waves in the rational-nutritionist circle back then. But I only came across it this year, hence its appearance here.

The main hypothesis which the series attempts to justify is that the obesity epidemic, which began some time in the 1970s (and most severely in the US), is mainly caused by the introduction of some contaminant in our food or water supply. The main suspects examined are: livestock antibiotics, PFAS (the main chemical in non-stick pan coatings), and lithium (in the water supply). According to SMTM, out of the three, lithium is by far the most likely culprit, and they present a series of evidence to support it. But I have serious doubts about this conclusion (as do many others), and this isn’t why I’ve included this series here.

Regardless of the conclusions drawn, the background information presented by SMTM is quite interesting. Many experiments on nutrition and diet were referenced, many of which I have read about in other sources, such as The Hungry Brain (which the authors have also read and referenced). The classic “calories in calories out” (CICO) model of weight management is examined and its issues discussed. Even more fundamentally, our ability to accurately measure the caloric content of food (i.e. the number on the nutritional labels) is called into serious question, as it depends on so many things, a lot of which are individual-specific. I already knew that we know very little about diet and nutrition, but this series made me realize that even the little I thought we knew is suspect at best.

Why We Stopped Making Einsteins

This is the first piece in a series by Erik Hoel, on the way we do education and how modern institutionalized education is vastly inferior to personal tutoring in producing geniuses. The series is quite interesting, and I agree with most of it. But here I want to point to just the opening paragraph:

I think the most depressing fact about humanity is that during the 2000s most of the world was handed essentially free access to the entirety of knowledge and that didn’t trigger a golden age.

I think about this a lot, about what it implies. Where is the true bottleneck of innovation? Where is the source of human creativeness? What’s the real essence of knowledge? Are most people even driven by curiosity to seek new discoveries about the universe, like I previously thought? But also I wonder about the nature of golden ages and the truthfulness of the statement itself - maybe we are in a golden age, we just can’t tell because we are in it?

It has made me a bit more skeptical when thinking about technologies that seems transformative. Technologies like the various generative AI systems that have been getting massive amounts of hype this year - DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT - to name a few. Their imagined impact, which is driving all the hype around them, may turn out to be misguided wishful thinking.