Greetings from the Last Homely House! The fall semester starts Monday, so this will be the last RWL of the summer from the the LHH. It’s a beautiful day and I am sitting on the porch with my laptop in my lap writing to you. Students are already starting to trickle back into town, and UNH has sent out emails warning of the impending tsunami of minivans this weekend. I’ve said it before but living in a college town adds a nice cycle to our lives. The students come and go like a second set of seasons.
This week’s theme is accidentally work and marriage. Graham’s how to do great work, and divorce attorney’s how to have a great marriage, how AI will make practice perfect, and a few more. I hope you enjoy the links.
Also, I’m doing my second Being in the World podcast interview this Thursday. I plan to do one more, then release the first three interviews simultaneously, hopefully by mid-September. I am super excited about this new project, and I hope you all check it out.
See you Sunday with another essay. As usual, willing good for all of you!
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Read
What: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Number of Jobs, Labor Market Experience, Marital Status, and Health for those Born 1957-1964
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/nlsoy.nr0.htm
Why: An interesting and very skimmable report from the BLS. It touches on the three statistics listed in the title.
Surprising to me is the degree to which education affected whether someone stayed in the labor force or not, with people with a bachelor’s degree or higher having a much higher level of labor force participation than those without, regardless of sex or race, though sex and race had variations. Interestingly, unmarried men spent less time in the labor force than married men. Marriage has a strikingly positive effect on men in so many ways (see Listen below for more on marriage).
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What: Paul Graham, How to Do Great Work
http://www.paulgraham.com/greatwork.html
Why: An interesting essay from a co-founder of Y-Combinator, probably the most famous start-up incubator that exists today. This is a long essay that, to me, reads a bit like a collection of aphorisms. So I think it is ok to skim and dip in. Toward the end he offers this:
The factors in doing great work are factors in the literal, mathematical sense, and they are: ability, interest, effort, and luck. Luck by definition you can't do anything about, so we can ignore that. And we can assume effort, if you do in fact want to do great work. So the problem boils down to ability and interest. Can you find a kind of work where your ability and interest will combine to yield an explosion of new ideas?
Something that concerns me with my undergrads is that they conflate “doing great work” with “making a lot of money.” They are neither two sides of the same coin, nor are they mutually exclusive.
There are many really interesting insights in this piece. Pass it along to a young, ambitious person.
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What:
Why: A lot of the discussion about AI right now is focused on how AI will replace humans - in particular, how humans will be displaced in the workforce. This article highlights a different point - how AI will be critical in training humans. From the article:
In the 26 years since Deep Blue beat Kasparov, elite chess has been revolutionized beyond recognition. A new generation of talented grandmasters has come of age in the computer era, integrating increasingly sophisticated chess engines tightly into their training. Mistakes that might have taken hours or days to ferret out in the old days are spotted by the chess engines within seconds. The resulting training routines are grueling feats of memorization, yes, but they produce human players able to perform at a nearly superhuman level.
AI will revolutionize education because the cost of coached practice for many things is going to plummet. More things like chess will become coachable by AI, and the cost of AI coaching will be cheap. That’s exciting.
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Watch
What: David Christian, The history of our world in 18 minutes (18 min)
Why: This is a history of humanity, starting with the Big Bang. Christian frames it as an emergency of order over entropy, and human beings as part of a collective learning process. He refers to primordial DNA as a collective learning system, and all life as an emergent collective learning system. Emergent in the sense that no one is in control of the process. This video is 12 years old - I’d be interested to see his updates based on AI. Will the machines transcend the biological? It’s an optimistic video.
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Listen
What: The Art of Manliness, Advice on Making Love Last . . . From a Divorce Lawyer (66 in)
Why: James Sexton is a divorce lawyer who has set out to provide insight from his perspective on what kills marriages and from there what to do to maintain a marriage. Having been married over 30 years at this point, I found many of his insights right on. This is well worth a listen if you are in a committed relationship or looking to get into one.