2025-07-29
every breath is a bomb
Alethios interviews Steve Hsu on the Dominic Cummings era. Very interesting as a corroboration of claims made by Cummings. It’s notable that he was able to get a lot of things done by working outside the standard system, but by sidelining rather than reforming it, did something equivalent to humiliating someone and then returning them back their original powers. There’s something I’ve been thinking about recently, which is Patrick McKenzie’s idea of the Sort, and it seems to me that there’s a pretty close correlation between the quality of sorting in a country and how well they do on metrics like GDP per capita. In the UK, it seems like something is going wrong with theirs.
Tracing Woodgrains has a thread on the portrayal of Mao Zedong in the English language Wikipedia. Plausibly, this is in an attempt to promote the CEAP’s new article on intentional hamstringing of advanced mathematics placements.
Kyle Chan has a thread on Chinese commentary around self-driving car performance.
Owl Posting has an interview with Alan Tomusiak on DNA protection and longevity more generally. I increasingly believe that, even if you aren’t into the idea of people living forever, everyone should be into longevity research as the best way to maintain health until natural death is to target being able to maintain someone at age 25 equivalent indefinitely.
Asimov Press has a post by Eryney Marrogi on the state of the art for gene delivery vectors.
Matt Wansley on the lack of IPOs post dot com bubble.
Naomi Kanakia on pulp fiction and power fantasies. It’s interesting because the impression you get from this article and its comments is that you can’t find such stories today, but they’re probably the most dominant form of fiction on the internet today in the form of webnovels1.
Derek Neal in Republic of Letters on autofiction, although I think his conclusion is a non sequitur. The thing is, everyone is already sold on Knausgaard and Ferrante, but I suspect there’s something to the decline in socialization which is also making real life stories less compelling these days. Or maybe not, here’s a little bite-sized piece of autofiction by Ava; the personal essay is still doing fine.
Packy McCormick has a really long post on the “meaning crisis”. It’s a little confusing to me that this is a thing, because my feeling is that there’s a reason that postmodernism and existentialism both arose out of the crisis of meaning post WWII. And yet existentialism seems to have been forgotten, while postmodernism is still huge today, even though engineering marvels like semiconductors demonstrate that maybe there is something like base physical reality after all. If anything, this should make existentialism even more important, because if objective reality exists but doesn’t center humans, then radical freedom is all we have left2.
She’ll certainly do it in a much more interesting manner than standard, but the idea she teases at the end of the article about a warrior who will lose his powers if he has sex is actually a very common trope, often used to comedic effect, such as in Who Let Him Cultivate.
Of course, there’s also cosmological natural selection.