Josh Zlatkus on therapy culture and whether you should care about what other people think about you. There’s the underlying evolutionary reason we care about our reputations, which is to encourage being prosocial, and then there’s the way reputation is built today, which is by participating in questionable status competitions. At the risk of seeming reductive, it occurs to me that this trope in therapy culture occurs because the field has coalesced on the solution that works most of the time, which is giving the correct medicine (stop caring so much) in high dosage (completely) for the problem which afflicts the demographic that typically seeks therapy (anxious women). This generally alleviates the symptoms, but it doesn’t try to actually understand the mechanism behind the unhappiness and comes with some side effects. Instead of blanket not caring or caring, I think a better approach would be to figure out what it is someone wants as their place in society, and designing a system meant to achieve that. That might be a mercenary cost benefit analysis, or it might be creating an internal set of values based on what matters to those who are significant to you. Either way, the goal should be satisfying a set of internal criteria that you've designed, rather than losing control to the selfishness or envy of others.
The idea of the AI Thucydides Trap seems to be gaining ground: see Marginal Revolution, or this tweet by Near.
Joe Walker on state capacity in Australia (research notes). There’s an interesting part where one of the interviewees expresses their interest in a central bank digital currency as a means for AUD to (partially) displace USD, which rather ambitious to me. Assuming there were demand for such a thing, it seems like it would be more the realm of a city-state with an established banking sector, like Singapore (although that would go against their currency board policy), the Swiss, or maybe the UK. Though if you buy his underlying premises, it’s actually not a terrible idea for a country geographically and politically between the US and China.
ChinaTalk translates some Taiwanese comments on the Zelensky meeting. Here’s Sam Kahn on the moral case for supporting Ukraine, where the parallels are pretty clear.
