2024-12-31
eve
Alethios on reforming the UK Cabinet. I feel like actually the main issue people have with cabinets is the same as the two party system, in that their views on different issues tend to be more complicated than can be expressed by a single binary option, in this case for the executive. Arguably most of drama around Trump is really around his power of appointment. In my opinion, cabinet members should be elected directly in some sort of electoral entrepreneurship where you can create a cabinet position by running for it and getting enough votes (by something like quadratic voting).
Alice Maz on the tension between centralization and decentralization. Actually, the reason I’m fond of crypto despite the shenanigans that occur is because I think the city state is probably the ideal unit for governance. But despite their obvious effectiveness advantages, the nation state and supranational organizations are still preeminent today. This possibly could be due us not having reached the new equilibrium yet, but it’s more likely because the benefits of centralization are still yet more salient. So if we want to localize more, new technologies are required to first replicate those advantages of centralization to more decentralized localities.
Somewhat related, Asterisk Mag on Etawah, a community development project in India. I’ve heard described before that one would expected India to be centralized and China decentralized, but in practice this is more or less reversed. I think most economists agree that the TVE schema and local autonomy were huge for China’s development, so it’s very interesting to hear that something similar almost happened in India. It’s also another datapoint in favor of the idea that “institutions” doesn’t really mean anything, since creation of good ones isn’t really something we actually seem to know how to do in practice.
Also somewhat related, Piotr Pachota on how to grow your Substack. When I was in high school, I think I remember saying that my ideal career was to be a public intellectual, in the vein of Christopher Hitchens. Which is a major misjudgment of my own character, both of how introverted I am, but also how cowardly I am, that I let my uneasiness with the state of discourse in the 2010’s mold me into an inveterate habitual non-speaking lurker. In my first post, I justified this by saying that maybe there is demand for daily linkthreads, but at the same time adopted the contradictory position that this is just a personal blog meant for organizing my thoughts. Probably this is because I want the benefits of fame (more friends), but not the potential drawbacks. Maybe I should become a TPOT poaster.
Here’s an interesting combination of posts from Stella Tsantekidou and Cartoons Hate Her (paywalled). I started social dancing a couple months ago, and something I realized recently is that it doesn’t matter how good you think you are if at the end of the dance your partner apologizes that they are bad at dancing. Because the best feeling is when the dance finishes and you think “wow, I’m so good, I’m a god(dess)”, so that’s what you should be targeting for your partner.
Erik Hoel on beauty in science, which I don’t necessarily agree with, I think it’s more that people who like to rank and grade people have taste, and so like people with taste, like Einstein over von Neumann. Here’s Stephen Hsu talking about science, which includes an anecdote about different kinds of researchers, some of which are intuitive and visual, and others who just shut up and calculate. Also When We Cease to Understand the World includes a vignette comparing Schrodinger’s wave equation and Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics using a similar lens. Although of course, at the end ultimately everything is intuition, if only the intuition of methods and principles like “logical coherence is good”, surrounded circularly by concepts like “testable”, “communicable”, “predictive”, and “useful”.
Niko MCarty on Fermi estimation in biology.
Zvi on o3. Edit: Zhengdong Wang on AI more generally.
