2025-04-02
lonely people with power
Sherry Ning with a relatable article on wanting to do everything. There’s a popular genre of webnovel where the protagonist “returns” across multiple worlds or lives, and typically they are power fantasies (it occurs to me that within lowbrow literature, the readers of power fantasies and romances are entirely disjoint, as one simulates control and the other submission; unfortunately these two groups too anxious to talk to each other, and so will never realize how suited they are for each other), speaking of the desire to max out along some particular dimension. For the particularly egotistical, that vector goes in all directions, for breadth and well as depth. Sometimes I wonder, if parallel universes exist, what I would be doing in them: if I knew they existed, I could max out along a different dimension in each one; as it is, my current strategy of doing many things, merely slightly better than average, means I’m probably doing the exact same things in each one.
Metropolitan Review article on the lack of books by lower-class and/or black authors. I wonder if there’s some sort of publishing politics that I’m not aware of, because I can’t really model why the disparate impact argument is being wielded against a left-wing industry. It’s not clear to me if this is primarily intellectual gamesmanship, or if there is some intentional theory of change behind this and similar articles.
Naomi Kanakia on Ted Chiang. Americans are really just fundamentally unable to understand East Asian inexpressiveness. The moon is beautiful tonight.
Paul Musgrave on Ramadan from a sociological lens. It’s interesting that people who claim that religion is necessary for its social benefits rarely consider debundling religion (the Collinses being a notable exception), instead just calling for wholesale retvrn. It’s strange, because it should be a quintessentially American phenomena, land of Mormonism and the Jefferson Bible.
Sam Freedman on Morgan McSweeney, and comparing him to Dominic Cummings. Interesting in light of Stella Tsantekidou’s article from yesterday on Cummings. There is something which I just don’t understand, which is the complaint that voters want more services but also want to pay less tax. This is something that many people state incredulously, as if it’s a mathematical impossibility. But since the dawn of time, every consumer has wanted more for less, and for the most part that’s what they have got.
Venkatesh Rao asks what makes for a good teacher. This is probably another area where it’s better to focus on outcomes rather than procedures. If the capabilities of the student improves, then you are a good teacher: having determined that, then you can look into means like setting ambitious targets, encouraging curiosity and interest, and being able to accurately assess the state of the student.
Andrew Miller on applying Abundance to Canada. I think this is an example of how abundance should be a global message, but each country has to implement it their own way. The key for Canada is figuring out energy abundance, a difficult proposition given that it isn’t well suited for solar energy.
ChinaTalk interview with Sergey Radchenko about the Cold War from the Soviet and Chinese perspectives. Great talk that exemplifies one of the ideas that Sarah Paine mentions a lot, which is that great powers will typically view the politics of other countries from their own perspective, which is often inaccurate. This is probably why the best predictors of foreign policy are typically Jewish or Singaporean.
Robert Long on cooperation with AI. Also, linkthread.
Scott Alexander on Ghiblification and AI art. More good stuff is good.
Ozy Brennan covers Angel of Death, on smallpox eradication, noting modern parallels.
Astera Institute residents announced.
