Favorite things — Andy Masley

A cyborg manifesto
On self respect
Politics and the English language
The housing theory of everything
Thoughts for the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review (turned this one into an AI song)
You and the atom bomb
You and your research

Fiction

In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust
- When I was 17 I hadn't actually bumped into too much truly, deeply relatable media. I got into a lot of books and movies because I wanted to be the type of person who was into them, but I felt a pretty big gulf between my day to day experience and most of what I saw expressed in art. Swann's Way exploded that barrier. I was almost constantly overwhelmed with how Proust was able to describe aspects of day to day experience I had only ever half-articulated myself but seemed so obvious when it was on the page. I came away thinking that most people were actually having much more deeply similar experiences to me than I expected, and maybe we all just didn't have the words for it. The book opened the world for me and made me feel much more at home in it.
Collected Fictions Jorge Luis Borges
- I remember my cousin was reading a Borges story collection when I was around 16 and briefly explained the plot of The Library of Babel, I got obsessed with the idea but forgot the author's name and didn't find it again until a few years later, so it felt like I was unlocking some half-remembered secret when I read it. Loving Borges has been a commonality among most friend groups I've had.
Invisible Cities Italo Calvino
- So simple and nice to read.
The Notebook, the Proof, the Third Lie: Three Novels Ágota Kristóf
- I was completely overwhelmed, though I can't really explain why. Just loved the whole thing.
Ada, or Ardor Vladimir Nabokov
- The most beautiful language in a book.
Little, Big John Crowley
- New England has a deep sense of hidden secrets, magic, and the weight of history, and this book captures that sense so well.
The Book of the New Sun Gene Wolfe
- The book that does the best job of being a book.
My Struggle Karl Ove Knausgård
- Like Proust all over again. I never once got bored in the thousands of pages.

Non-fiction

Word and Object WVO Quine
- A personal Bible. Very useful in the age of LLMs. A great example of thinking well in general.
Basically all books by Joseph Heath, especially Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint, The Machinery of Government, and Philosophical Foundations of Climate Change Policy.
- I come away from basically every Heath book feeling like I have a new real deep understanding of a key part of the world.
Essays Lydia Davis
- One of the most fun interesting books to read about anything
Reasons and Persons Derek Parfit
- Reading this in my junior year of college got me into effective altruism. Was like an ideological nuclear bomb. More than anything else I really admired Parfit's approach to problems where he'd completely exhaust every possibility in some abstract but important question and choose the least terrible option.
The Sources of Normativity Korsgaard
- I'm pretty sympathetic to Kantianism and this is the best book for making deontology seem intuitive rather than arbitrary.
Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West William Cronon
- Beautiful and fun economic history. Good headspace.
Essays George Orwell
- Read when I was 18, I wanted to write and think like him. Think it's unfortunate that people mainly associate Orwell with 1984, his essays are where the good stuff's at.
The Structures of Everyday Life Fernand Braudel
- Real economic history, about flows and patterns. Individuals don't play a role.
Selected Non-Fictions Jorge Luis Borges
- He's the king

Cities

London
- My favorite city to be in. Does so much right. Dynamic yet localist, genuinely diverse with people from all over still participating in this really fun shared culture, so many little details everywhere. The accents. Amazing for vegans. Perfect.
Montreal
- Such a beautiful city so tucked away, like finding a secret utopia deep in the forests where I grew up.
Berlin
- Incredibly vegan friendly and one of the most alive-feeling European cities (most others feel more like museums to me). I enjoy brutalism when I'm not living in it.
Boston
- Feels like home still. I love New England culture. Boston is the most calming city to spend time in for me.
DC
- My dear home. I love the specific ways people seek status in DC, and how it's not especially conducive to radical chic.
Venice
- Spent a wonderful evening getting lost walking around Venice talking about life with a friend. Beautiful and I love its place in commercial history.
Austin
- I love Texas in general. Big open spaces everywhere. So free and open. I gravitate to more lib cities. The last time I was there some friends and I stopped in a convenience store and saw 30 punk kids hanging out outside, turns out the owner was hosting a punk show in the store itself. Kids set up by the energy drinks and start playing somber and loud, the whole place was packed. Was like magic. Couldn't imagine that happening where I grew up.

Restaurants

The Peter Chang restaurants around the DC area
- Sichuan is my favorite cuisine and this is my favorite Sichuan.
Annie's Clark Brunch
- The city near where I'm from, and where I went to college, is where diners were invented. Annie's Clark Brunch is the college's local diner. Sadly not vegan-friendly so I don't go anymore, but I spent a lot of my best mornings in college here.
Eden Center's Dieu Huong Vegetarian Restaurant and Thanh Son Tofu
- Dieu Huong Vegetarian has the best spring rolls I've ever had and is the only place where I can get simulated animal fat. Thanh Son Tofu provides ridiculous piles of fried tofu. Both very fun.
Holyoke Hummus
- A food truck in Pioneer Valley with my favorite falafel sandwiches.

I am not interested in erecting a building but in having the foundations of possible buildings transparently before me. [...] If the place I want to reach could only be climbed up to by a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place to which I really have to go is one that I must actually be at already. Anything that can be reached with a ladder does not interest me. [...] You must climb down to the sources to see them all side by side, the disregarded & the preferred.

Wittgenstein

This capability, seen from the human and animal side, calls for the gradual formation of an interdependent world in which all species will enjoy cooperative and mutually supportive relations with one another. Nature is not that way and has never been. So it calls, in a very general way, for the gradual supplanting of the natural by the just.

Nussbaum

Philosophy is really homesickness. It is the urge to be at home everywhere.

Novalis

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

Italo Calvino

There are only two true things: intelligent religion and youthful love, which is to say the future and the present. The rest is not worth the trouble.

François-René de Chateaubriand

It is, therefore, a great source of virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be possible to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. From boyhood I have dwelt on foreign soil and I know with what grief sometimes the mind takes leave of the narrow hearth of a peasant's hut, and I know too how frankly it afterwards disdains marble firesides and panelled halls.

Hugh of Saint Victor

Familiar words, easy to take for granted; easy to misconstrue . . . This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the civilization to so many outside it or on the periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.

V.S. Naipaul

Each day, you need to do all of the things that are necessary for you to succeed.

When you think like a hermit you forget what you know.

Bonnie Prince Billy

I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.

Wittgenstein

If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

Thomas Pynchon

The laws of physics are not violated.
Mental functionalism is probably true. Human minds aren't magic, and probably aren't operating at the quantum level. What we call minds and intelligence can exist in other systems.
Many animals probably have first-person experiences. Humans are most likely a tiny tiny minority of conscious minds.
A lot of what we do is motivated by social status, and that's okay, because social status is more like a language or currency we use to live together, and can often be positive-sum, and this doesn't mean we're all isolated egoists. In fact...
Psychological and ethical egoism are both incorrect, for hard-nosed realistic reasons rather than wishy washy reasons.
A lot of the ways people get stuck in life is discovering a very local maximum of social status, where after the negative status hit of moving off of that little hill becomes too painful to consider. The people who feel most alive are the ones who can comfortably step off these hills.
Markets communicate complex information and translate that into incentives, even if no one involved is homo economicus. A lot of the "planning" of what society is like is happening outside of human brains.
Free reasonable people will arrive at conflicting visions of the good life. We can either build institutions which allow for and mediate this deep value pluralism, or squash freedom. No third option. The state is important as a tool to mediate the potential for violence that comes from pluralistic values. Giving specific institutions this power to mediate is necessary to preserve pluralism, and does not need to be elitist.
Almost everyone can be getting a big question wrong.
Surprisingly few people are thinking super hard about their careers or doing simple cost-benefit calculations about different decisions.
Surprisingly few people are interested in doing middle school-level math, even if it'd help them a lot. My series on why AI isn't bad for the environment built me a big audience because I was doing the relatively simple calculations that seemed to be missing from the discourse.
Mostly don't do drugs or other addictive stuff. Your entire experience of the whole world, the potential for all future good things to happen from your perspective, in some sense depends on your brain continuing to work well and not becoming brittle to new things.
The two big events in human history were the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. A third might be coming...
Resentment of success and competence is a better explainer for a lot of behavior than I used to think. Malevolence too. A lot more of the world is positive-sum than I used to think too. There's a lot more simple kindness and care than I used to think. There's just a lot more of everything. Reality has a surprising amount of detail.
Almost everyone seems to have this psychological bias where it's hard for them not to think that the 20 closest people to them are representative of the whole world. Everyone has a superego floating around behind them judging social situations and other people as well as themselves, that they believe is representative of the attitudes of the world more broadly. It rarely is.
The market is not pricing in a lot of the very most important things, so government aid and charity to the right places is deathly important.
A lot of people are pretty desperately hungry for real deep conversational company with others where it feels like they're getting their head above water for a bit. Learning to give and get that company is important and hard but is basically one of the single best things that can happen. The world is much more lonely than I used to think. Avoiding that and building a real community where you feel deep company takes lots of diligence and care in how you live. Looking back I'm very very grateful that my younger self chose to be so careful in pursuit of this goal.
The meaning of life is reliably love.
Avoid the naturalistic fallacy.
We have a lot of mental blocks around the idea of extreme suffering and your worldview should probably take it more seriously as a problem.
Condemnation of anyone getting their hands dirty in complex ethical decisions (this comes up a lot in discussions about war) is evil. Extreme pacifism is one bad manifestation of this. There should be no special points for sitting on the sidelines and allowing terrible things to happen. A big reason we're not currently living in a global political hellscape is complex and often fraught decisions made during World War 2, as an example. The world could get really really really bad.
The recent past was probably worse than you think.

The Sopranos
Fleabag
Brideshead Revisited
Twin Peaks
Arrested Development
Serial Experiments Lain

It's very very easy for me to get addicted to things, and life is short, so I mostly don't play video games except with friends, and rarely. My favorites are Factorio, Age of Empires 2, Portal, and Minecraft. All obvious answers.