2025-03-02
eristic
Tyler Cowen profile in the Economist 1843. It’s interesting because they spend a lot of the article being baffled about why Tyler goes about collecting so much “useless” information (particularly given the existence of LLMs, who can probably do it much better). Meanwhile, I find it completely understandable to want to understand everything, entirely right and proper. As mentioned by the protagonist in Mating, reading widely and having a good memory is probably the best way to greatly increase your perceived intelligence, which is otherwise mostly fixed. Those who feel anxious yet restless under uncertainty or stasis (new personality test via Sarah Constantine, interview with the creator in Demystify Sci), will naturally gravitate to becoming infovores. That’s not to say we are the same, unfortunately. Despite his denials, Tyler’s interests are clearly at least upper-middle class, while mine are lower-middle class at best, insofar as internet-native schizoids have any class. Also, if he can read a page every thirty seconds, even if I accumulate all the way until I’m 60 years old I’ll probably never reach his level, given I can only read half as fast as that.
Kyle Chan on Chinese outsourcing of manufacturing. I recall there was a claim made that for efficiency’s sake, all manufacturing should really be done in one place, then exported globally. Leaving aside the reasons why this isn’t totally true, it does seem like there is some calculation being made about where potential competitors might be for this manufacturing capital. When planning the location of branch factories, such locations do appear to be intentionally avoided.
Richard Hanania (and Trevor Klee) on the Zelensky press conference. It sucks, but focusing on your dignity and self-regard is a luxury that only the hegemon can afford; everyone else needs to view things from what the other party wants. When Trump asked for border security with Canada for example, the correct response is obvious: “yes sir, on it”, taking the role of a scapegoat for your country. Then what should have been reported in the media should not have been “we were going to do that anyway”, but “Trump forced us to do this thing we didn’t want to do, we definitely can’t let that happen again” (in a decade, you can let your memoirs absolve you). Zelensky’s view is that this is a clear battle between good and evil. But that’s not what Trump wanted to hear.
Vitalik Buterin describes a role for AI as implementators of aggregated human opinion. I wonder to what extent it’s true that the currently limited adoption of things like futarchy and civtech is because people who have political power would prefer that public opinion remain illegible, such that they can exercise greater personal discretion and control. It would be ironic if AI actually led to an increase in the median amount of human control as a result of displacing traditional power centers. There is another question I have, which is to what extent the lack of agency current LLMs show is due to intentional redirection of research or if agency is fundamentally limited at the moment. If it’s the former, I think that would be a mistake, because if agenetic AI is problematic, it would be better to figure that out before capabilities reaches the point where we can’t do anything about it.
Jennifer Palhka reviews Why Nothing Works. Although strictly speaking, it does seem like there are some things can work.
New Yorker article on demographic collapse, focusing on Korea. Somewhat related article in Persuasion about the experience of living in Tokyo.
Jacob Falkovich on male-female friendships. I actually had an idea about this recently, which is that there are specific cultural scripts for male-male friendships and female-female friendships, which are either alliances of mutual benefit or mutual admiration societies respectively. If you attempt to use either of these scripts within the context of an opposite-sex relationship, you’ll end up either with friends-with-benefits or “you’re so nice” friend-zoning. The usage of either gender-coded script probably implies some sort of power or desire imbalance, which doesn’t bode well for a mutually satisfactory friendship. That would generally require some more niche script, some combination of the two, or some deeper level of scriptless friendship.
Andy McKenzie neurobiology linkthread.
