Hi All!
Here is your weekly dose of “Five Bullet Friday,” a list of what I’m enjoying or pondering. I was inspired by Tim Ferriss's Five Bullet Friday and this will be my 6th one in the series.
Announcement
Pay very close attention to
What I'm reading
I'm reading Probability as Logic by Professor E. T. Jaynes of Washington University, St. Louis. http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/prob.as.logic.pdf
This is an academic paper that dives deep into epistemology, the study of knowledge itself. Professor Jaynes used rigorous mathematical reasoning to explain how we could more accurately understand reality. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it, but once I have a clearer understanding, I may end up writing a summary post to explain it in laymen's terms.
Podcast I Enjoyed
MartyrMade Podcast by Darryl Cooper is the best history podcast I've heard, even better than Hardcore History by Dan Carlin and History on Fire by Daniele Bolleli.
This podcast was recommended to me by Jocko Willink, who also hosts an absolutely amazing podcast about how to apply practical lessons from the military and jujitsu to everyday life. Like Jocko, Darryl is a veteran and brings a very unique perspective to history. Both of them are very open-minded and consider issues from multiple perspectives. A key take away is that Patriotism is the opposite of Tribalism. Throughout history, it has always been natural for people to identify with their families and by extension, their tribes who share DNA. However, the United States was a completely new civilization where ideology mattered more than family ties. World War 1 was fought to determine if national identity is stronger than the economic identity of communism. Even today, the war on terror and the conflicts between Israel and Palestine are conflicts between people who base their identities on different things. Both sides have arguments that you can sympathize with, but the ideologies cannot coexist. Darryl gives an absolutely fascinating in-depth look at the founding of Israel in the first episode of this series. Highly recommended if you want to obliterate some of your biases that you may have about the world.
You can follow Darryl Cooper at https://twitter.com/Martyrmade
Quote I'm pondering
" The non-aggression principle doesn't really contend with the fact that billions of years of evolution has shown the ROI of aggression. Libertarian philosophy is often insightful on incentives, except when it comes to the huge incentive for initiating aggression." - Balaji S. Srinivasan
Srinivansan is a board partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the founder of https://21.co/
He got into a fascinating debate about this topic with Vitalik Buterin, found of Ethereum, on Twitter. You can view it in detail here: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/759616934916698112
Funny dream I had
I dreamed that I was an event watching a series of scientific research presentations, then suddenly one of the presenters on stage started to make fun of the animes I watch in a bizarrely scientific way.
Thanks for reading! Have a wonderful weekend,
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