2025-12-05 21:49:46
A little shameless self promotion: My annual list of things I learned in 2025 is here. Loyal readers of Good Tokens will have already seen most of these, but perhaps a curious person in your life might enjoy them.
Over regulation is hamstringing deep tech innovation. Real specific complaints, not just someone ranting about red tape.
Noah Smith on housing: “The true homeownership rate for Millennials at age 30 is less than 35%; for Gen X it was around 45%, and for Boomers it was almost 50%.” Also Noah on drones and the future of war.
How to get someone to leave a cult. Reminds me of Dr. David Burns’ work on relationships and communication.
There’s less pushback on the building of new housing when it’s beautiful. I definitely see this in Roswell where there is intense, almost blind opposition to building apartments but strong support for mixed use development from the people that are opposing the building of apartments. This paper helps me understand those people better and more graciously.
A long read on what it would take to revitalize the American industrial base.
How penicillin was discovered. It’s more complicated than the story that you’ve heard and yet still somehow increased my belief in the value of unguided experiments (play).
Extinction rates seem to be slowing across plant and animal groups — University of Arizona
New York, LA, Chicago, and Boston have all seen a more than 30% decline in the number of children under 5 living there in the past 20 years — Bobby Fijan
33% of Oregon public school students are chronically absent (missing more than 17 days in a school year) — Oregon Live. What are we doing here people?
Girls are now less likely than boys to say that they want to get married; the percentage of girls who say they want to get married has fallen from 83% to 61% since 1993 — American Storylines. Tons of other interesting information in here about the perceptions and realities of marriage. Also this anecdata:
To start off our conversation, I asked participants to raise their hands if their parents had ever talked with them about the importance of getting a good education and pursuing a rewarding career. Every single hand shot up. The response was identical in both the male and female groups. I then asked whether their families had stressed the importance of finding a partner or starting a family. No one raised their hand.
Nano Banana can make beautiful charts. I can’t wait to have an excuse to use this.
2025-12-03 21:40:32
After my previous Book Thoughts post, I met with a dear friend who said "I read one of the books from your post, it was the one you recommended not-reading." I thought this was really funny but also extremely relatable: somehow hearing someone tell you not to read a book makes it very compelling. I'm not sure what to do with this information.
Winner of the Hugo and Nebula and Arthur C Clarke Awards. I thought it was fine – didn't love it, but appreciate how hard it is to write something that's even-fine.
Afterwards I searched for a podcast episode review to see if anyone had interesting commentary / could explain what I'd missed, which lead me to this podcast called SFF Audio that was 10/10 incredible: they did explain a key thing I missed, and interesting perspectives on some of the details, while also articulating many of my own critiques and disappointments much better than I could, and also just giving a really cogent analysis of what makes different SFF books feel the way they do. Also they wasted ZERO time on small talk and just jumped into discussing the book! True heroes among podcasters.
This book is the first of a trilogy, and I found myself wondering what was in the latter two despite not-really having enjoyed the first one, so I went online and read a summary of them instead, to prevent any future temptation I would have to waste another N hours of my life. I assume some of you will find this strategy viscerally appalling but I personally recommend it, burn the boats and save your future self from bad decisions, make Thomas Schelling proud.
[Disclosure: I have a personal bias towards this book].
It must be crazy to be a guy who goes to an elite university and everyone actually thinks you're the smartest. Statistically most people who go to elite universities think they're hot, but are only-average in their new environment. Wittgenstein barges into Bertrand Russell's life/office, and pretty quickly Bertie is like "this kid is going to change how we do philosophy." How does that feel? (Admittedly Russell also went through phases of thinking Wittgenstein was an idiot, it's not as simple as I'm making out here).
Wittgenstein seems very arrogant/self assured, and willing to argue with his elders and/or betters, and I can't help wondering whether that's because he was a precocious genius or why he was able to be seen as one.
The first Culture novel. I have been meaning to get to this series for a while so I started here (book 1), but struggled to get into it. Then I googled and discovered that many people recommend starting at Book 2, Player of Games. So maybe I'll go do that. [Update: since it was still on my phone I eventually listened to most of it, but I'm not sure I should have. Banks is a very competent writer so the narrative is fun and compelling, but... life is short and you only get so many books, I wish I were more deliberate about what I start. As the monks say: Better not to begin; once begun, better to finish.]
Here's a tangential thought: could we start making more-altered audiobook adaptations of novels that were written for print? First priority is adding Greek-style epithets for characters, because it is far harder in audio (for some reason) to remember who is who. Ideally we'd also rename characters for the audiobook versions to give them far more distinct names, starting with different letters, but I understand that's a bigger ask. (This is all especially salient in science fiction, where you're supposed to differentiate the urK'tang, the X'tami and the Ak'ktan while listening at double speed, it's impossible. But if you at least gave them consistent epithets I would track it better....)
2025-12-01 21:06:51
I'm reading an 1854 edition of Scientific American, which is a thoroughly charming experience, it's got a very Progress Studies vibe full of 1) optimism and 2) specific descriptions of how mechanical things work. Also, the letters page is full of stuff like this:
Half Bricks.
We believe that a benefit would be conferred upon masons, if brickmakers would mould half-sized as well as whole bricks. Half bricks are often wanted for beginning and finishing rows, so as to have every alternate row break joint. To obtain these, the masons have to break whole or trim broken bricks. This occupies considerable time which would all be saved by half mould bricks, of which a certain number might be made for every thousand of whole bricks of the common kind.
This, to me, is a very relatable form of Thing: an idea for how something in the world could be better, that the author doesn't really have anything concrete to do with, so is writing to the newspaper about it to get it off their brain.
I figured the ATVBT readership would be exactly the type who would have these kinds of ideas in spades (complimentary), so please submit yours for publication in a future edition.
If you're very talented at something, much of the advice you get about it will be wrong. At minimum the public advice about the thing is likely to be not-written for you, and specifically to be written for the average person, so it might just not be helpful or relevant. For example, perhaps a lot of the advice is too simple or basic to be helpful to you.
But I think in many situations the ultra-talented should actually do the opposite of what most people should do, so the widely cited advice would be actively harmful for them. For example: most people who enjoy [singing/dancing/acting/sports] should not try to become professionals at those things, and a lot of advice for the average person should rightly advise about "how to get the most out of [thing] as a hobby while also working another job for money, because you will absolutely never make any money from doing [thing]."
But if you're actually truly top 0.1% aptitude at one of these skills, that advice might stop you from putting in the work that would allow you to fully develop your excellence, and therefore be exactly the wrong thing for you to hear.
It's not really clear to me how you figure out correctly whether you're ultra-talented at something vs just being deluded in your own favour, as many people are. But as I age I've seen extremely talented people whither away their aretḗ, which I think is a tragedy, and I wish they'd been given different advice 20 years ago.
One very helpful piece of advice I got is that anytime you do something you've been avoiding, you MUST immediately congratulate yourself on doing it rather than berating yourself for not doing it sooner/better/more.
You can literally give yourself a cookie, or pat yourself on the back, or just rabidly fight the voice in your head that's like "well FINALLY you did it. But if you'd done it three months ago then...." and replace it with a voice that says "You did it! Well done!"
If you berate yourself after doing a thing you've avoided, you're training your brain to associate completing this kind of task with being berated, and therefore increasing the likelihood you will avoid it even more in future. Bad, don't! (But if you've done this in the past, don't feel too bad about it, just congratulate yourself on not-doing it in future).
2025-11-26 21:12:12
Recently I've been getting into Gratitude Patrols. People talk about gratitude journals as being one of the few provably impactful psychological interventions [citation needed], but I think there's a benefit to physically embodying it by walking around your space each morning and thanking things.
If you have a larger space then making a goal of "go into every room and thank something" might make sense, or in a smaller space something like "walk around the entire perimeter and thank 6 objects along the way."
I find that the physical space presents great embodiments of a lot of the things I'm grateful for, and reminders of lots of small things I should be grateful for but usually forget to be. I thank my cooking appliances for the food I eat, I thank my pointless expensive items for the fact I'm rich enough to have some pointless expensive items, I thank my slippers for being slippers because I really really love slippers. I genuinely believe this improves my baseline happiness.
Sometimes I fall asleep while listening to an audiobook. I know I fell asleep because other people in the room tell me I was snoring. But I swear I heard the book the entire time, I didn't skip any of the story (though admittedly haven't tested this with a plot quiz afterwards). What is going on there?!?
A great way to sound authoritative is to say your opinion and then casually add "I'm speaking in a private capacity here, not on behalf of the President". This is factually accurate even (especially!) when there's no actual reason you might be speaking on behalf of the President.
2025-11-24 20:59:07
Thanks to everyone who participated in our Book Rec Survey, where I tried to gauge which books you were planning to read so I could rank my recommendations according to likeliness of being useful or relevant.
I found the survey results surprising and interesting: specifically, most of the books got ~80-90% responses of "never heard of it", which feels obvious in retrospect, but was not what I expected. There are so many books in the world that it's impossible for any of us to keep up; sometimes I walk into bookstores and have a nameless feeling of futile inadequacy, staring at the rows of shelves and knowing there are already more books than anyone could read in multiple lifetimes. (I believe some people feel this while gazing at the stars). So even with an audience of people who are (presumably) self-selected to share my interests and proclivities, most of our favourite books are just completely unknown to each other, which is (depending on your positivity) either tragic or an incredible opportunity.
I included two dummy recs in the survey to tease out how likely it was that people were actually reading the questions – I think all surveys should do this, despite the fact that there is 0 incentive or motivation to fake your answers on an unpaid book-thoughts survey. The results:
So, well done ATVBT readers for your honesty and accuracy in survey-responding.
Onwards! Here are the books I most-recommend for ATVBT readers, given my existing tastes and yours. You'll note that these books were published various numbers of years in the past; my general feeling is that I read too many new books because they're new, and I should spend more of my tragically limited reading-slots on books that are someone's all-time favourite already, regardless of when they were published.
A romance novel with surprisingly good psychological insights, 97% not-heard-of.
Many years ago I was working on a short story about two strangers who can't afford to live in New York, and so alternate space in a studio – he works nights and she works days, so they never meet, but soon they start leaving each other notes on the bedside table, until (of course! of course!) they fall in love. I wrote the beginning of this and showed it to a friend, and he didn't like it, so I quit, as I too-often do. I have thought occasionally about that story, and how nice it would be to finish it, because gosh-darn I love the premise and the book would be super cute. But, alas, I never got back to it.
To my surprise, many years later, Audible recommended me Beth O'Leary's Flatshare, a novel that tackles this exact premise, and does it infinitely better than I ever would have.
I mainly recommend this if you're 1) a nerdy, literary person, who 2) has never read a modern romance novel. I'm not sure you'll enjoy it; presumably there's a reason you've never read a romance novel, and perhaps that reason is that you know they're not for you. But I think this one manages to be a "true" representative of the genre (not a deconstructed upmarket reimagining) while also being an intelligent, well-constructed novel with good psychological depth.
A weird philosophical thought experiment novel, 87% not-heard-of.
The goddess Athene collects Plato-enthusiasts from throughout time and space and sends them back to Atlantis to try to build Plato's Republic.
If you want to be persuaded about this book it's more efficient for you to read this Ada Palmer review (some spoilers). Some people I've recommended it to didn't love it because they found it too thought-experimenty – I'm maybe ill-qualified to assess this because I tend to like philosofiction, but I thought the plot was pretty good as well.
Overall this is one of the novels I think of most often, and I simultaneously enjoyed it and felt like it changed how I thought: it has a genuinely new-to-me lens on how you might think about the human experience, and I think that's hard to convey and worth a lot.
76% heard-of, but only 1% planning-to-read.
This book is so good as a description of the decision whether to have kids or not. Perhaps it feels more like a series of meditations or aphorisms than a traditional novel, and I can imagine that it will be high variance and some of you would hate it, but surely it's better to read a high-variance book than a low-variance one? There were so many thoughts in this book that I've had and never discussed with anyone, and I do think one of the greatest things about novels is the James Baldwin quote:
You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone.
(The other great thing, of course, is when you read things that have never happened to you, things that happened to people in-some-way opposite to you, and come a little closer to understanding them).
Sally Rooney reviewed Motherhood in the LRB and wrote that she was reminded of the great Camus quote that
‘To decide whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy.’ Camus meant that the only serious philosophical problem was that of suicide; it seems to me that the most serious philosophical problem could equally be that of parenthood: to decide whether or not life is worth bringing into existence.
I am not making this book sound fun, exactly, but it was fun and profound, both.
Many of you had heard of this, but were not planning to read it, so let me pitch you: this book gave me the most succinct understanding of pride (in the sinful sense) I have ever gotten, and came as close as any novel has (though not quite managing) to make me fundamentally change my life. It felt more like an artwork or a theater performance, it stabbed me right between ribs, because 1) the people in it are their own worst enemies and making their own lives worse entirely unnecessarily, and 2) I could see so clearly how I was doing the same thing.
First and Last Men, by Olaf Stapledon – many of you were planning to read already. The only novel I know where the main characters are civilizations rather than individuals, very mind-expanding.
Golden Hill, by Francis Spufford – many of you planning to read already. Incredibly immersive explorations of 1700s New York. I have one big critique of this book which makes me reluctant to recommend it, despite otherwise thinking it's 110% excellent, but I can't tell you what it is without spoilering, a tricky one.
Time's Arrow, by Martin Amis and Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Great great novels but already wide name-rec, you don't need me to tell you whether to read or not.
Rivers of London, by Ben Aaronovitch. Magical detective series. TV show coming out soon and I would mildly bet that this will become a true global phenomenon (it has already sold 8 million copies, but 87% of you haven't heard of it, so).
Ghana Must Go, by Taiye Selasi. A novel about Ghana and Nigeria but also about the American elite. Breathtaking. For a long time this was one of my unambiguously favourite novels and I have some deep personal lore with it, but I realised it's now been long enough since I read it that I don't feel like I2025 can recommend it. Have queued it for re-reading so I can fully recommend it again next year.
2025-11-21 20:58:36
The number of Americans taking GLP-1 drugs continues to grow substantially. There’s no official tally, but Circana believes that 23% of US households — about 30 million — had at least one GLP-1 user in September, suggesting there are tens of millions of users. By 2030, five years from now, it expects GLP-1 households to purchase 35% of food sold in the US (measured by units), up from 24% today.
ChinaTalk on acquisition reform.
Children need independent peer cultures. The Montessori-pilled in the audience will not be surprised.
Filed under “age as the next political battle ground”.
Thoughts on the future of autonomous vehicles.
Blake Scholl’s conversation with Tyler.
Japan now produces more nappies for incontinent adults than for infants. Also, the top ten states for fertility are all red states; the bottom ten are all blue states (Vermont is last, chased by Oregon — London Review of Books.
The US mint estimates that there are 300 billion pennies in circulation, more than 3x as many stars as there are in the Milky Way — Pennies Are Trash Now
60% of SF Unified School District 8th graders are not proficient in math.
I can’t remember where I saw this, but it resonated: “You’re not avoiding failure, you’re avoiding the feeling of failure”
Gemini File Search API. I’ll be trying this one out.
Thoughts about code sandboxes.