Just some madnesses from the interwebs before I head back to Paris

The - sigh - shortcomings of the Kate Middleton hoo-ha, EVs, bonkers pro-natalists and Lex Friedman

🚨💥Podcast just up : An interview with neuroscientist Prof. Joel Pearson about intuition. I’ve been busting to get a scientific explainer of how it works, and how best to use it. Joel is the founder and Director of Future Minds Lab and he’s the guy who proved back in 2016 that intuition actually exists in the brain.

In this chat we cover how intuition is hijacked by anxiety and depression, whether AI will ever have intuition, and the Hard Problem of Consciousness - and I tell my story (again) of how I studied under David Chalmers (black hole theory at University of Santa Cruz) the year he published his seminal thesis.

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Morning. I’m in transit. Again. And have had thoughts.

Sometimes I scan my feeds, as I am now, and I see insanities expressed in every headline on the page, and I think: What would the aliens make of us?

I thought this, once again, this week, while reading this take on the Fermi paradox by

Liv Boeree

(and why aliens will never make anything of us because aliens will never find us). Wonderfully, Liana and I managed to hunt down Liv (as I promised to do a couple of weeks ago to discuss an antidote to “moloch”) and I interviewed her this morning for Wild. So you know…

EVs + solar factories are spiking fossil fuels FFS

And they’re spiking for the first time in a decade. The horrible ironies of the energy transition promise are killing me.

“Over the past year, electric utilities have nearly doubled their forecasts of how much additional power they’ll need by 2028 as they confront an unexpected explosion in the number of data centers, an abrupt resurgence in manufacturing driven by new federal laws, and millions of electric vehicles being plugged in.” (The New York Times)

The truth about Kate Middleton thruthers!

Helen Lewis writes about how her friends, overnight, became “QAnon Wine Moms”, hellbent on there being a Kate conspiracy.

“Everyone seems mystified by the simple fact of not knowing. We have become so used to smartphone surveillance, oversharing on social media, and the commercial harvesting of life events for content that the prospect of remaining uninformed about the state of a stranger’s intestines now seems like a personal affront.”

We don’t like not knowing. We’re not used to it. We will fill the vacuum of knowing, or the vacuum of understanding or fathoming, bullshit (or rage or “enemy creation”) rather than sit in the discomfort. This applies to viruses, wars…

The pro-natalists legit want to start a cult

As if they weren’t already one.

You might recall my writing about pro-natalism some time back. I flagged a couple in the US - the Collinses - breeding with eugenic intent, serving humanity by increasing the birth rate and optimizing the sort of new humans being born. According to the Collinses.

Say it isn’t so: Hipster Eugenics

Well, we have an update. This week, I came across a post written by the father, Malcom Collins, in

Aporia

, a Substack that’s fully dedicated to a Darwinian revolution (I’m really not sure why I’m subscribed to it). The post argues that we must create a new and fortified religion to get the humans breeding again.

The Collinses.

Here are a few highlights from the article, that give you the vibe of what he is gunning at, and which, admittedly I have pulled from context (although I’m not sure it needs said context):

“The great thing about being an American and exploring the problem of crashing fertility rates is that most of the developed world is further along the path to demographic collapse than we are, which allows us to see what has and hasn’t worked.”

Indeed.

Malcolm goes on to, in full-throttle earnestness, to consider various authoritarian measures to force people (women) to have kids - buying fertility, imposing Mormonism on people, and having a situation where a religious group feels sufficiently like a threatened minority (as per in Israel, where fertility rates are highest in the world).

“The only groups that seem to show durable resistance to fertility collapse are those that either ban their members from engaging with technology.”

He’s referring to religious groups here. But poor Mal sees problems.

“With all this being the case, sending our kids into an extant religious community seems like tossing them into a genetic death spiral. It would be unwise in the extreme if I want my genetic line to be among those humans who colonize the stars.”

Alas, he has a moment of self-consciousness:

“Oh, that seems harsh, does it? In the words of one of my favourite movies, ‘You disapprove? Well, too bad. We're in this for the species, boys and girls. It's simple numbers. They have more.’.”

And just to tip us to his side:

“The pronatalist movement is a beacon for those few humans left who are willing to do what makes us human: innovate, improve, and band together so we can mount a real defense. God willing, once the wave passes, this movement will be the seed that grows into a vast interstellar human empire…. 

“…In short, we teach our kids that whatever man becomes in a million or so years will be conceptually closer to what humans today would think of as a God than to a human.”

What do you all make of this?

I think I’ll do a deeper dive into fertility collapse shortly. It’s a nuanced issue. And one that leave me wondering a bunch of broad things. As with so much today, I feel that if The Sensible (Not Necessarily Genetically Superior) People don’t wade into these kinds of topics, they get hijacked by the evangelists, eugenicists, the conservatives (who have taken to telling progressive women to marry right-wingers, already):

Left women should *not* marry Right men

Some other Points of Discussion and Updates:

• Did I already mention? I found the fathers from the book Apeirogon by Colum McCann. I interviewed the Israeli dad, Rami, last night. The Palestinian dad, Bassam, didn’t show up to the call. Rami, who calls Bassam “my brother” said, deadpan, he’s either sleeping from hunger and Ramadan, or he’s dead. I couldn’t laugh. Rami did. (Bassam did contact me in the morning, apologising). I told Rami that I go to bed thinking about Gaza and I wake in the night crying, then wake in the morning still thinking about Gaza. You’ll have to wait for the interview to hear what he responded with. TK: I’ll round out the story with the truly bizarre way I came to “meet” Rami, Bassam and Colum in the podcast. The story started here:

Gaza: an "observably infinite number of sides".

• Speaking of Gaza, has anyone listened to the day-long interviews Lex Fridman has done discussing Gaza the past few months? One was with Elon Musk who helpfully suggested Israel should kill Hamas with kindness by way of solution. When the Ukraine conflict broke out Lex went to Russia on a mission to bring Putin and Zalensky together in a room, claiming he would personally be able to get them to talk things out. He didn’t. So I’m skeptical.

• What I’ve been listening to and watching:

  • Helen Lewis guest-hosting Blocked and Reported podcast. She and Katie Herzog have brains to behold. Also listen via

    Blocked and Reported
    .

  • This needs to be read…the executive director of the World Peace Foundation writes I Said the Era of Famines Might Be Ending. I Was Wrong.

  • Baby videos on Instagram. Preferably featuring a pet. They seem the only antidote to the Gazan horrors I feel compelled to watch daily. That said, I’m also watching videos of Gazan children. Somehow, I’m finding a hard, beautiful truth in both.

  • I’ve been thinking about this image, in the context of marvelling at humanity’s ability to…keep going. I think we often fear we won’t cope with so much devastation around us. But we do.

    

I have five days left in Australia before I head back to Paris. I’ve done four podcast interviews this week (one was with Liv, another with Rami), and have another two to go. I’m in Byron Bay today and the meet-up is this evening, if you missed the various memos. I’m feeling what I always feel when I’m stepping back into the frightening unknown…a free-falling melancholy that exposes to me all the choices I’ve made in my life - good, bad and inevitable.

That is all,

Sarah xx