2025-02-28
beff
Jeff Bezos is setting a new editorial direction at the Washington Post. I sort of agree with Richard Hanania in that this is promising given the lack of “elite human capital” voices in the right. But my hope is more that with the entry of more publications, market forces will result in increased differentiation that offsets the tendency towards homogenization as various factions go along to get along. On that note, here’s Patrick Farley with the idea that people who belong to the “gray tribe” are those who prefer to act as individuals rather than within coordinated groups, which seems to me to be a claim that the term is not particularly useful.
Alex Chalmers trying to figure out why Europe doesn’t produce as many tech companies as the United States. I don’t really buy this argument, since it’s not just Europe that can’t compete with the US with tech. I’m actually leaning towards a variation of Steve Waldman’s theory on Elon Musk, which is that the formation of unicorns (which is what makes VC worthwhile) often requires founders being able to get away with breaking rules (eg. Fairchild, Uber, and Coinbase), something which is very hard to do in most developed countries. Possibly because if people are able to get away with breaking rules in a developing country, typically that country won’t be able to become developed.
SlimeMold on personality differences. It seems pretty compelling to me that you should be able to derive someone’s personality by measuring the concentration distributions of neurotransmitters and hormones and correlating it to baseline and variances in different external behaviors (to derive sensitivity).
Moral Mayhem with Bryan Caplan on contemporary feminism. It’s interesting how much of the discussion explicitly parallels feminism and religious doctrine, insofar as much of the discussion is about nailing down the specific nuances of disagreement while agreeing about basically everything. It occurs to me that in the absence of a synchronous debate partner, “edginess” is actually useful: so long as you are able to keep things civil, walking along the edge is actually a faster way to find out specific points where you favor one side or another.
DYEL podcast on The Odyssey, with the majority of the discussion being focused on the nature of translation.
Naomi Kanakia on the Metropolitan Review.
John Last on psychedelics in early human civilization (via The Browser). If you believe Andrew Cutler, there plausibly could have been a shift from snakes to mushrooms as we transitioned from hunter-gatherers to agricultural societies.
Erik Hoel (paywalled) on Claude Plays Pokemon (Manifold Markets on topic).
Eryney Marrogi on potential avenues in drug discovery for requiring less sleep.
Aether Mug with tweets by Matsuri Takahashi, who died of karoshi.
