absolutely LOVED this article
i track both sleep, rhr, etc... and social activities -- phone chats, parties, meals with friends, concerts, etc. it really helps. i think human will always prioritize tasks that have easily achievable and observable outcomes. measuring can be good.
Today’s essay—it's a big one, maybe my favorite thing I’ve written all year: AMERICA'S CULT OF SELF ENHANCEMENT
I think we can all see it. Something vast and significant has changed with how Americans think about their health in the last few years after the pandemic.
It’s not just the surge in fitness trackers and biomarker dashboards and diagnostics ...
or the GLP-1 micro-dosing and peptide stacks and supplements ...
or the boom in testosterone therapy and hormone replacement therapy and preventative cosmetics and Botox ...
or the record high gym memberships and running clubs and annual all-time records in exercise time...
or even the celebrity status of 2020s health influencers and the commensurate rise of a Nietzschean ubermensch mentality among the business and tech elite.
It’s all of it, all at once. And it’s changing our relationship to our health, to our bodies, to the way we think about socialization, mortality, and what really matters in life.
Diet, exercise, and discipline are virtues—period. Longer lives are better—period. But if we're honest with ourselves, America’s new health craze is not entirely healthy. At the extreme—and the extreme is awfully common here—it verges on a cult of not only self enhancement but selfish enhancement, which pulls us into ourselves and away from other people.
Healthy living is good. But the cult of the enhanced self can easily slip into antisocial delusions of immortality, a futile attempt to outrun death that saps the life out of life.
https://t.co/bdKMTz1kii
Hoje minha irmã Bethânia faz 80 anos. Ela estava com menos de 18 quando vim trazê-la pra fazer o Opinião. Meu pai exigira que eu viesse tomar conta dela. Eu já tinha 21 e compunha canções. Mas soube o tempo todo que estava trazendo comigo uma personalidade genial para o mundo da cultura brasileira. Parabéns a todos nós pelo dia dela.
My talk at MIT, on "Agentic AI systems: from scruffy to neat", is now available. I cover 3 examples of agentic systems - Bayesian linguistic forecaster, autoharness, and code world models - which combine LLMs, code and planners in different ways. Links below.
This is so essential American.
"I don't know a single thing about Algeria, I cannot find it on a map, but you showed me a modicum of kindness and I am now ride or die for every single Algerian for the rest of my natural life."
Somewhere between Jevons Paradox and Sturgeons Law (90% of everything is crap) there is maybe something like:
Technology that makes X more efficient increases demand for X, but crap scales linearly with the production of X, stimulating demand for jobs in the category of [cleaning up X’s mess]