2025-11-20
zambra
Cheeky Pint interviews Satya Nadella, which can be viewed as a continuation of his interview with Dwarkesh, specifically for those interested in viewing AI from the lens of B2B SaaS, particularly interesting in light of the Antigravity launch.
Afra Wang hosts a discussion with members of the Chinese diaspora around Breakneck1. Speaking of your brain getting shut down if you stay in China for too long, it really is underappreciated to what extent it feels like in China, information does not feel like wants to be free, and this is both in terms of free beer and free speech. Anyway, On their discussion about economies lying flat, it reminds me of this post by Byrne Hobart describing the taxes regarded as most optimal by economists as the ones which people least enjoy, exactly because they are hardest to avoid2. The ultimate economic desire of humankind, as seen by their hatred of property taxes and competition and their tendency towards things like rental properties, pensions, dividends, and government jobs, is to gain control over some resource which is guaranteed to provide for them indefinitely. That capitalism does not even attempt to make this possible, and explicitly celebrates neverending competition, is why it is so widely hated. In America, laziness is culturally unacceptable, so this is not something which is openly acknowledged. For example, immigration is something which is both attacked and defended on grounds of culture and race, when arguably it’s primarily about not wanting to compete. As Scott Sumner notes, the ultimate result is cognitive dissonance3.
Ozy Brennan with some interesting story ideas with political implications.
Razib Khan interviews Noah Smith about the current state of Japanese and American politics4. Somewhat related, Charles Lehman on perceptions of Jews and Israelis (although it’s unclear to me to what extent fears of antisemitism still exist and cause people to put “slightly unfavorable” rather than their true levels of disfavorment).
Jesse Singal in defense of the rationalists.
Lucent has a piece on how pickup artistry and magic words leads people to believe in the possibility of superpersuasion. This seems like a strange argument to me, because it’s not clear to me that the AI safety researchers and pickup artist populations have much overlap. Anyway, this reminds me the interview Asterisk Mag had recently with Cate Hall for her new book on agency, in which they all agree about their distaste for referring to people lacking agency as NPCs5.
Roger’s Bacon on neoteny and domestication.
Andrew Cutler with a consciousness-accelerationist manifesto.
Edit: this coincides with Charles Yang reviewing the book in American Affairs. I wonder why this book is getting a second wind a couple months after the initial round of interviews.
Edit: Brian Albrecht elaborates on this point.
I suspect that cognitive dissonance is what explains the tendency for people to dislike those who are slightly different from them even more than those who are very different, because anger is a defense mechanism against changing your worldview, which would alienate you from your current social network. With small differences, it is immediately salient where the disagreements are, which means it’s also very clear exactly how easy it would be to update away from your current beliefs. This is why people seem excessively angered by things like the good works and continuing success of liberalism and capitalism, because it’s annoying to have empirical evidence constantly emerging which is discordant with your current model of the world. Anyway, interesting interview in the Republic of Letters with Liza Libes on literature and ideology.
Noah also has an article on how he was right about his prediction on drones as the future of warfare. Speaking of predictions, I previously mentioned that I had attended an AI 2027 tabletop session earlier this summer, but what I didn’t disclose was that the host thought it was quite unrealistic that I (as Japan) would develop nuclear weapons and put Taiwan under my protective umbrella, calling it “disruptive” and the reason that they “would not invite the Japan player back.” I suppose my predictions are too unrealistic for the AI 2027 team, but I wonder if maybe I’m good enough for AI 2033? Joking aside, I didn’t actually predict Takaichi’s comments about Taiwan; what I understood is that the Japanese see this as a card that is available to play, and so within the game it was both a legitimate play, and for the specific game situation we were in, the correct one. In their defense, I couldn’t really be bothered to explain all this to them at the time.
I’m currently rereading HPMOR, and there does seem to be a strain among some rationalists that assumes that dollar bills are everywhere free for the taking. While for most of history and actually to varying degrees throughout most of the world, agency does not work: attempts to circumvent the system are blocked, and the reward for cleverly evading these obstacles and creating value is not praise and acknowledgement, but punishment and the confiscation of your gains with real or implied threats of violence. There’s a definition of agency as that which measures to what extent it’s the person or the environment which is more predictive of the ultimate result, so what does it imply that the Bay Area is populated by unusually agentic people; is it not environmental that that people who like to break the rules all end up in the place where they are rewarded for doing so? Anyway, Tommy Blanchard on improving your social skills; too bad I’m low agency.