Hello Friends,
And happy Friday!
25th edition and already 46 weekly readers - 45 if you exclude my mom who “likes” everything I write even though she can’t speak English. Glad I don’t take it too seriously.
If you do enjoy the reads, please feel free to share: it means a lot to me.
New Essay
I wrote an article on NFTs that I finished on Wednesday: sharing between us before publishing it:
NFTs: Virtual Bubble in Real Numbers
Short story
I happened to read Micromegas by Voltaire again last weekend (I am sure most of you had noticed where I had stolen the name from, barely bothering to change one letter). The story of why I read it again is pure serendipity: I messed with one of my bookshelves, lost, and my old paperback of Voltaire’s philosophical tales was one of the many books that fell on me. Yeah, powerful beginning for a story, I know. It gets better. I was working late when the avalanche happened, and ultimately could not be bothered to pick up the fallen books from the floor, and I went to bed directly. The following morning, someone had found the fallen books and was joyfully carrying them around the flat and pretending to read them. I am obviously talking about our 18-month daughter. It happened that Voltaire had now made it to living-room (along with Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac) - he had passed the second selection step with brio. I tried reading one of my favourite sections of Cyrano to the said daughter, but she was not that into it. I then noticed the Voltaire, and realised that Micromegas was only 20 pages long. I started reading it while our daughter was pouring water on the carpet. It took me about an hour to read the 20 pages, half-a-page after half-a-page, between more water poured onto the carpet, a tentative to draw on the cover on my book, a change of her clothes because of water-pouring collateral damages, more water-pouring… you get the picture. Still, it was a great read. The last time I had read those tales was close to 20 years ago and Micromegas had not been my favourite of Voltaire’s tale at all - I was too much in love with physics, and Voltaire was taking too many poetic liberties with science for my immature taste. Last weekend, it resonated much stronger:
In many respects, the world is indeed on a Pareto scale. Ironic that in my case I had to go through Mandelbrot and Taleb’s theses before being able to appreciate Voltaire’s much older insights.
Philosophy and metaphysics matter on a day-to-day basis. I read a lot of philosophy more or less as a by-product of studying ancient languages (especially stoicism). However, my approach was always theoretical. For some reason, it feels I am now in a phase of life where I am much keener to apply those ancient lessons in a very practical way.
Cognitive biases might be the single most important feature of the human mind to explain how our society works and evolves as a whole. It has always been the foundational idea behind Macromegas but, after reading Micromegas again, it is quite clear I did not invent much.
Beyond quite a few sarcastic jokes on the flaws of his contemporary society, Voltaire also raises several virulent criticisms of mankind that seem very much timeless. I’ll let you (re)read the tale and share your comments.
My best read of the week - focused on AR, VR & the Metaverse:
Mark Zuckerberg on the Future of AR and VR (7min)
Mark Zuckerberg sees Virtual Reality (VR) and Artificial Reality (AR) as the future of social experiences and of computing platforms.
If you can deliver a computing platform that is fundamentally more human and about creating realistic interactions between people, that’s the dream that we’ve been chasing for a long time.
In 2019, Facebook acquired CTRL-Labs to deepen its work on non-invasive neural interfaces.
Facebook is also working on building its own operating system for AR and mobile.
This allows to specifically design the OS with AR in mind.
It will free Facebook from the limitations imposed by the Apple or Google Store.
Mark Zuckerberg says that the main reason for investing in VR and AR is to eventually allow people to “teleport” around.
My thesis is that Facebook wants to build a proprietary VR ecosystem (Metaverse) to leapfrog the mobile revolution. It will work because that ecosystem will score higher on the queen of all human expectations: more realistic interactions.
Thanks for reading, and make this weekend an insightful one,
V