Scott Sumner responds to Marginal Revolution podcast on New Monetary Theory. Sounds like another one of those models where the details get erased through the abstraction, so whether it’s “true” or not depends on what you consider relevant.
Clearer Thinking with Dwarkesh on human evolution, an interesting podcast because it’s an insider discussion between two rationalist podcasters with different approaches (Dwarkesh more a big idea guy, Spencer more about zooming in), about a shared interest.
Seeds of Science on mechanism design of social and political structures. Interesting that people are starting to take this seriously, but I feel like a lot of the stuff like quadratic voting is premature optimization. Surely there’s lower hanging fruit around very basic things like accountability and information aggregation? On the other hand, you can understand why they take this approach because these little tweaks are the only ones you can actually get implemented.
Ozy Brennan on long firm fraud. Reading her articles is even more interesting now that I’ve realized there’s always an underlying subtext. This one is about antisocial “super predators” probably prompted by the ACX post on prison reform.
Josh Zlatkus on psychological change and stagnation. Notably, the places where this is solved is usually in “quitting”, not doing something you no longer want to do. It’s much harder when continuous positive action is required to get out of a situation you aren’t satisfied with, because the fact you are stuck means you also don’t like any of the options necessary to get out of it.
Wood From Eden argues that the numerical systems of personality should also be used for general psychiatric phenomena. I think it’s not a coincidence that psychologists in general look down on personality tests as “pop science”; a similar phenomena is discussed by Scott in regards to ornamentation in architecture. But it’s obviously correct that we should measure all the phenotypes numerically, and then match them to genotypes with LLMs.
The Ick on ghosting etiquette. Appreciate that someone is distilling the new social norms for us socially oblivious.
Kevin Xu on the CATL CEO. This reminds me of the drama Like a Flowing River, which in my opinion suffers from the Chinese prejudice against merchants and totally miscasts which main character belongs in which role.
Trevor Klee on Enrico Fermi (paywalled).
