getting back into reading

it's really hard to read when you're busy, and unfortunately the way i read best is through having minimal distractions and locking in. i don't recommend the manic burst approach to reading things, but it's the primary way i operate. the past week has made this nearly impossible to do on any meaningful level; thankfully with things calming down i've been able to actually dedicate some time to it. the "what i'm reading" section will likely become a more fleshed out fixture of these updates, since a lot of what i like to talk about in my posts is related to the stuff i get around to reading. lotta interesting stuff in the world, if only you can set your mind to the tomes people write about it.

incidentally:

what i'm reading

i hate carbon offsets

carbon offsets are completely fake bullshit that are just a way to launder PR for corporations and take the pressure off them to actually end their carbon emissions, but i feel like these two examples from Future of Denial really underscore how fake and nonsense they are. what the hell are we doing here?

A new company called YepYou stretched offsets to the absurd. Billing itself as the “World’s First Human Breath Carbon Offset,” YepYou offers fees starting at seventeen dollars annually to plant trees to offset exhaled breath. Offsetting your whole lifestyle costs sixty dollars. Customers may even pay for their pet’s breath.

Early in 2020 Delta Air Lines announced it would go carbon neutral by March. The company didn’t claim to end emissions but only to “mitigate all emissions,” leaving details to customers’ imagination: “Because we’ve committed to carbon neutrality from March 2020 forward, you can feel confident that when you choose to fly Delta, your flight will be carbon neutral.” Delta claims its flights are already carbon neutral long before alternatives to jet fuel exist.

and even if they weren't mostly fake (most of them are basically acts of fraud), carbon offsets are literally useless for most intents and purposes. the market prices them way too low; as physical entities to be meaningful they pretty much have to exist for the lifetime of the person they're intended to "offset"; and in a lot of cases the intended offsets just die or burn down. this happens routinely in California, for example, because the state is semi-permanently racked by massive fires (and—even ignoring the huge burn deficit that exists because of current firefighting doctrine and the desire to insulate/protect private properties—likely needs to be in perpetuity for the health of its forests). sometimes they also cause knock-on ecological problems because they're monoculture, or they lead to externalities of their own like "privatizing/enclosing indigenous land." all things equal, you might as well invest in carbon capture technology for all the good it does—at least we actually probably "need" carbon capture to eventually begin reversing climate change.

what does it mean to be self-aware?

self-awareness is an interesting concept. to the degree that we can meaningfully quantify it, it's probably true that humans have the most advanced form of it—while we can't really know this, it's just hard to imagine that other animals have the same ability to, say, "introspect and place ourselves in the context of everything" as we do given the gulf in our capabilities versus theirs. (i'm not sure how we'd test for this in any case. there's also the human tendency to analogize or pathologize animal behavior to behaviors of our own.) but a level of significant self-awareness is probably quite common among even the simplest non-human animals:

When one teases apart [self-awareness's] cognitive layers, they’re not so uncommon. Mental time travel is one of them. Another is metacognition, or the ability to reflect upon one’s knowledge: I know. I don’t know. Rats are also metacognitive, as demonstrated in setups that let them choose between getting a small, guaranteed snack now or taking a memory test in which correct answers earn big snacks and wrong answers nothing at all. When the passage of time has blurred their memories, they opt for the guaranteed reward.

Some might argue, though, that rats are uncommonly intelligent, and therefore not representative. Yet consider another component of self-awareness, episodic memory: the what, where, and when qualities that give shape to undifferentiated recollection. Episodic-like memory has been found in zebrafish, a tiny species used as a model organism for investigating the foundations of cognition. Minnows shoaling in the stormwater pond’s shallows almost certainly share this type of memory, with the topographies of their daily lives replacing the experimental setups—familiar and unfamiliar objects, familiar and unfamiliar settings—used to illuminate the memories of their aquarium-bound cousins. Researchers have also demonstrated this type of memory in hummingbirds, mice, and cuttlefish, the latter of whom last shared a common ancestor with vertebrates more than 500 million years ago. That such evolutionarily disparate creatures possess these memories suggests how common they are.