2025-04-01
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Reboot Mag, self-proclaimed progressive techno-optimist magazine, with a conversation on Abundance. There’s an interesting point in that Klein and Thompson are actually pretty unambitious, describing as their end-goal for the public infrastructure in the United States to reach the level which essentially already exists in China. This isn’t totally true, for example, the section on medical advances is something that currently could only be done in the US. But it is an interesting reminder that the answer to energy/housing/medical abundance in each country has to be their own tailored solution, given the diversity of regulatory self-owns everyone has imposed on themselves.
Stella Tsantekidou on how Labour needs a left-wing Dominic Cummings. The funny thing is, I seem to recall that the underlying reasoning he supported the Tories was because they were Leavers, and he supported the Leave campaign as a call for state capacity, with the belief that EU laws and regulations limited the autonomy of the UK government to do more building and research. His turn towards burn-it-all-down seems to have come about (according to him anyway, maybe there are some personal feelings involved) because once in power he found that the source of British tendencies towards self-strangulation tendencies actually came from within, not without.
Alethios reviews different political drama shows, and who they are written for.
Dialectic Podcast interview with Nabeel Qureshi. In my mind, both Tyler Cowen and Nabeel are basically the same type of person as me, as people who have an inbuilt process (see this piece by Ava) oriented around information accumulation. But they just do it better than I do, which is why I enjoy listening to their content, even though it’s often the same sort of things, just rephrased slightly differently. One of Nabeel’s new concerns is around “caring”, the degree to which there is personal attention devoted to all aspects of one’s creation. But this fear that AI will undermine caring in favor of slop production seems overblown to me. Yesterday, I was thinking about how caring about status is arguably higher than ever, even though the actual need for status is lower than ever. It occurs to me that this is because there’s a certain level of striving inherent in everyone, and with everything else having been made easy, that energy needs a place to go. Caring is probably subject to the same sort of dynamics: if anything, I think the problem will go the other way, where people will pour their devotion into some project, but be unable to get anyone else to care about it. There’s a good chance that the inverse of human consumption of AI art tailored to them will be the creation of AI audiences for consumption and curation of man-made art. (Edit: actually, Alexander Wales had this idea before me, with Eager Readers in Your Area).
Chris Lakin on Softmax, the new alignment-focused AI company from Emmet Shear, who seems to be capable of using systems and probabilistic thinking while also being highly open and interested in things like theories of consciousness and other woo-adjacent topics. Very interested in the potential of this company as a means to empirically test theories of consciousness and agency. If it wasn’t apparent that these guys have relatively high p(doom) values, I would actually suspect that this project is actually an attempt to test some of their pet theories, using AI hype for funding purposes (if it is, I’m all for it).
Great piece by Metacelsus on collaboration versus competition in the sciences, using the case described in The Nobel Duel of the race between Andrew Schally and Roger Guillemin to identify the hormones produced by the hypothalamus.
Demystify Sci podcast on the theory of cancer as a metabolic disease (epistemic certainty 50% at least partly true, 1% mostly true). But another example of a low probability big idea that should be better funded. As some more examples: Works in Progress on artificial wombs; Asterisk Mag on simulating the brains of C. elegans.
Minor Dissent with a psychological profile of Luigi Mangione. It’s pretty scary to read profiles like this and see yourself in them. But I’m increasingly starting to think that, contrary to arguments that exposure to Rationalism one-shotted Luigi, that less David Deutsch and more LessWrong might have been a good prescription. I’m increasingly starting to believe that, although there are probably a disproportionate number of amoral sociopaths in EA, that’s because EA actually produces a decent framework by which even otherwise destructive individuals can actually produce benefits for society (I say that as someone who isn’t EA, only adjacent).
Pedro Franco on Embraer, essentially about the necessity of export discipline and implicitly against tariffs. Also in economics, there’s this article by Liya Palagashvili which reminds me of something someone once told me, that the highest form of trolling requires that every word you write be totally true.
Larry Fink thinks private markets are the new public markets.
Sam Enright linkthread. Among the links is this pretty cool blogger Britney, who writes about relatable things like feeling disconnected and too emotionally stable.
