Richard Meadows's Blog

YEAH SAME QUESTION AS OP. The mere existence of running as a 'hobby' has always seemed to me an affront to the dignity of mankind. Its practitioners somehow manage to make it look even worse than it feels: flailing around in their big marshmallow shoes, arms and legs and elbows spilling out in every direction, trailing strings of spit and sweat. You have to assume there's some big payoff for all that effort, but even after years of diligent pavement-pounding, you still end up with the physique o...

IMAGINE THE TREPIDATION when you’ve read pretty much an author’s entire body of work, trying to pace yourself like a child with a gobstopper to make it last as long as possible, but inevitably all too soon you find clutched in your sticky fingers the very last words he will ever write: The Passenger and Stella Maris, companion novels published when the cancer inside his body was only months away from concluding its black business.

Fans have been waiting 16 years for this. Talk about pressure.

No...

If you think you're a decent speaker of a second language, try spending a full hour narrating a simple suburban environment to a small child. You will very quickly discover gaping holes in your vocabulary that the average three year old would absolutely school you on. What the hell is a slug called? How about a digger? How do you say I'm stomping my feet?

So this solves two problems at once: it has greatly improved my spanish, despite the fact that I'm often just talking to myself, and it has ma...

My coming-out post on why I'm no longer an AI doomer seems to have struck a nerve. Hundreds of people responded across reddit, substack, twitter, email, podcasts, etc, which I'd like to say is just another day at the office for a Very Successful Blogger like me, but is in fact fairly unusual.

There are too many threads to reply to individually, so I thought I'd condense the general thrust of the criticisms and respond to the best comments here. And they were (mostly) very good!

I've ended up cha...

At the exact same time we're seeing an actual, real-life, non-theoretical explosion in AI capabilities, I've become much less worried about the prospect of a silicon god converting the universe into paperclips. My p(doom), as the kids say, has dropped off a cliff.

The idea behind this post is to lay out these underrated arguments in one convenient place, and document exactly why I changed my mind.

The post Why I am No Longer an AI Doomer appeared first on Deep Dish.

IT'S BEEN A COUPLE YEARS since I did one of these roundups, during which time book club has really lifted my reading game, and so the pool of contenders has a lot of depth this year.

After much agonising I've winnowed my favourite reads down to a top 10. The list ended up heavy on classics and big names, with fewer underrated or self-published authors—wow, Hemingway is a great read, no kidding—but I think that also tells you something.

I've also read quite a bit of contemporary fiction—perhaps m...

When I grew out of my annoying teenage atheist phase I needed a new way to feel superior to other people. In a stroke of luck, this was around the peak ascendancy of behavioural economics, a field devoted to pointing out how everyone was going around being WRONG!!! all the time.

From 2012-2018ish, I was obsessed with this stuff. And I wasn't alone: Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow was a phenomenon, selling millions of copies. I discovered an online community of 'rationalists' devoted to ...

One year ago my daughter was born. This is the single most monumental thing to ever happen to me. Obviously it's given me plenty of great fodder for writing insightful blog posts!

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*crickets*

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It's surprisingly hard to write anything interesting about having a baby, because you've already heard all the clichés, and they're all true. In the last post I talked about how there's a type of knowledge that can only be acquired by direct experience: it's like when you're tripping on mushrooms or ...

Almost all my adult life I've been an infovore obsessed with hoovering up all the knowledge. Then a year ago I joined a book club in which non-fiction was strictly prohibited.

This is the second-best thing to happen to me in recent memory.

I'll say why, and why I don't regret my initial fixation on non-fiction, but first: an invitation to get involved with the book club!

It started when my friends Cam, Benny and I discovered we'd all had David Foster Wallace's monstrous Infinite Jest on our read...

Almost all my adult life I've been an infovore obsessed with hoovering up all the knowledge. Then a year ago I joined a book club in which non-fiction was strictly prohibited.

This is the second-best thing to happen to me in recent memory.

I'll say why, and why I don't regret my initial fixation on non-fiction, but first: an invitation to get involved with the book club!

It started when my friends Cam, Benny and I discovered we'd all had David Foster Wallace's monstrous Infinite Jest on our read...