2025-03-31

cynical

Yascha Mounk interviews Audrey Tang about technology in service of democracy. What Could Bowling Green Be is interesting, but I wonder how well a similar program would work right now over, for example: whether Ko should have been arrested; or what percentages should be required for recalls. As a techno-optimist myself, it troubles me that there wasn’t really a good answer to the question of how we should ultimately handle irreconcilable differences in political decision-making. My usual answer of just devolving political power doesn’t really work in this case: if the north gets integrated, that just provides a staging ground to take the south.

Alex Kaschuta interviews Jacob Falkovich of masculinity and dating culture. Primarily not new information, but it’s always interesting to notice that because conversations have to flow, the way that topics flow into each other reveals (possibly unconscious) links between what the participants believe. In this case, there’s a sort of tension between how power-seeking is a major cause for discourse becoming dysfunctional and unenjoyable, while similar behavior is basically necessary to make your dating experience more fun and enjoyable. Trying to live an unaffected life unsullied by grasping for status means that you don’t have any legible markers of ability, forcing you to take the initiative to prove yourself in each individual case. Therefore, regardless of whether you want power or not, it’s still in your interest to try to take it when you can. It’s strange, because nowadays, power is increasingly unnecessary: no one starves today due to lack of ability, and indeed it’s actually entirely possible to live a pretty good life with no particular talents. Yet because of this atavistic desire, at a time when in the right hands, power is both increasingly useful (due to technology increasing capabilities), and less accessible (due to increased accountability), everyone is scrambling to take it just to performatively set it on fire.

Here’s a relevant episode of Minds Almost Meeting, where Robin and Agnes talk about this through Kafka’s The Castle. The irony of elite overproduction is that we’re in full-blown tragedy-of-the commons-mode zero-sum competition over the most valuable resource that there is, but most bidders in the market don’t actually intend to use it: they just want to sit it in their personal collections to attract others to stare at it, because the supernormal stimulus of this particular shade of blue is just so pretty to look at.

Tina He on being subject to systems. It seems to me that this description is sort of describing the ur-system of scarcity and competition, and in trying to hide this burden from some group of people, you necessarily make it more visible to another group. The example of Japanese and East Asian service comes to mind, in that they’re great for the consumer, but terrible for the worker. I’m not sure if this is a problem you can solve at scale, because if for example you have a system of upvotes and downvotes you can mediate bilateral interactions, but then if you aggregate votes across people you still end up with a percentage rating. You probably need something that works in reverse, that takes all the data points and uses that to generate what’s personally relevant for you. But well, isn’t that what we’ve been trying to do with social media, and how is that going?

Razib Khan on the genetic history of Tibetans (paywalled). I find the best way to maintain interest in some field is to have some big question that you use to calibrate as new information comes in. For Asian genetic history, that’s currently my level of belief in the East Asian Polar Origin theory. In this case, I suppose that the similarity of ancient Tibetans with the Northern Yellow River culture is both evidence against migration via Tibet from Siberia to the Yellow River, and a marginally positive indicator that they may have had some sort of shared ancestry. There’s a somewhat related interesting game on the subject of ethnic migrations that came out recently (my score for the challenge was 1608).

Andrej Karpathy on the best sleep tracker. Although, if I recall correctly, a lot of sleep professionals don’t think much of this category of product.