2026-01-29
moonlight
Silver Linings Project on the economic benefits of various forms of anti-aging research, particularly for preventing cognitive decline and extending the female reproductive system1, both clearly speaking towards our current demographic trends.
Kai Williams on the OpenFold project. Given the controversy around access to AlphaFold’s weights, it’s interesting that the recent release of AlphaGenome includes open weights, though also only for non-commercial use-cases.
Matt Yglesias has a piece on the nebulousness of the term “corporate power”. It seems to me that a lot of people are operating under a sort of naturalistic fallacy where all corporations are doing is monopolizing access and extracting rents from natural resources, which means that if a corporation could be broken, then we would be able to retain access to everything that it provided while bypassing all of its annoying downsides. On that note, Henrik Karlson writes about the model of power that Robert Caro describes in his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, via control of jobs as a means to access money and relationships2. It increasingly seems to me that actually much of what is perceived as corporate dysfunction arises out of individuals in organizations subverting their institutions’ public goals in order to accumulate various forms of personal power. For example, the current unfortunate state of formal hiring might be downstream of the implicit benefits of keeping jobs in network and through personal referral, which reduces the incentive of individual actors to improve things even as overt fights damage the credibility of the formal and impersonal system3.
ChinaTalk has a fun episode with Jon Czin where they speculate over recent changes in the Central Military Commission, which are provoking entertaining arguments over rumor and speculation.
Snowden Todd comparison of Korean and Japanese café chains. It seems to me that most of the differences are because in Japan coffee is seen as a niche and somewhat highbrow interest, which puts their chains in a rather awkward position.
Croissanthology on catastrophic risks being less likely than originally believed, which seems plausible to me based on the fact of our current existence.
Somewhat related, there’s a profile of Aella in Playboy Magazine by Magdalene Taylor, commenting on the politics of sexual liberation and noting that “we fixed the part where men die in wars, and we didn’t fix the part where women have to go through childbirth”.
On that note, Celine Nguyen has another piece on the inability of artists to make money from their art. It’s a little confusing to me because she seems to understand that artists were for the most part never able to make money from their art, except in rare cases which were mostly gated by personal relationships, and that it was the internet which actually allowed everyone to access the public, democratizing production4. One of Nguyen’s suggestions is to unionize and advocate for higher pay, but as Ben Landau-Taylor notes, the success of protests depends on their ability to affect change in physical reality; strikes do not succeed when they remove labor from the market, but in the threat of violence against strikebreakers which takes physical assets hostage. The most inconvenient issue in the business of artistic production is that not only are there not enough people willing to pay for art, but it’s something which anyone can do, and among those there are some who are even willing to pay to play. In some sense, people who demand to be paid to create art believe capitalism is even more important for human flourishing than I do, taking being paid to create art is taken the ultimate proof of one’s own value: if being paid for your artistic creations is a validation of your extrinsic value, then being supported merely for being an artist becomes recognition of one’s intrinsic value. Naturally, this makes being an artist but not making any money from it a most depressing prospect. But actually, these are both various forms of external validation, and recognition of your intrinsic value is something that you can do for yourself. Whether one receives external validation later is not really the point then, though it seems plausible such a mindset does actually make it more likely that external validation will come in the end. Unfortunately, at the moment the world is unwilling to pay people for the service of their own self-actualization.
Somewhat related, Sahaj Sankaran has an interesting article on the history of the Indian civil service examination and the relationship between the health of the economy and the appeal of government jobs.
Actually, I suspect there are more full-time artists today than there were at any other point in history, as a result of the global decline in poverty and increase in wealth which has drastically increased the population wealthy enough to support their own artistic ambitions. Very tangentially related, Subject to Change podcast with Lyndal Roper on the German Peasant’s War.