2026-05-26
sign of ruin
RSJ has an interesting view into how India can find its niche in the AI ecosystem, acknowledging its inability to compete in hardware infrastructure, but noting the possibility of adapting quickly in applications by making use of its existing infrastructure in coordinating organizational processes: “The best way to understand most AI application companies is not to think of them as software firms in the conventional sense. They were attempting to solve problems that I refer to as the coordination problem inside enterprises … Instead of merely digitising workflows, these systems are trying to orchestrate workflows dynamically”. Henry Farrell has an article arguing against the idea that AI can be used to remove middle managers from the organizational hierarchy, given that “the role of the manager is not to plan what others do, or merely to implement the plans of others, but to exercise human judgment within a moral setting to integrate social activity”. But it’s unclear to me that this is actually the case, given how it brings to mind the endless debates about the relative merits of central planning and decentralized decision-making. If AI can be used as a platform for shared informational context, such that individuals are now able to coordinate independently between themselves, then it seems to me that whether managed guidance adds or detracts to overall outcomes depends on the specific situation, as to how clearly the specific of the company (or the KPI defining a subgoal) can be defined. It’s not the case that every company or project will be able to do this well, but it does seem plausible that the ones which can will have significant advantages over competitors who cannot.
Samuel Thorpe review of The Economic Government of the World and commentary on the end of the Bretton Wood agreement and conditions that would be required for the creation of a successor1.
Sebastian Jensen with a review of The Mind is Flat, differentiating between the position expressed by the author that the conscious mind is all there is, the unconscious “mind” being inconsistent and irrational, and his own view that the chaos is still nevertheless sometimes useful2. Related, a discussion between Tommy Blanchard and Ishmael Hodges on functionalism, both as an actual belief, and as the most useful framework for raising falsifiable questions which allow one to determine what is actually the case.
Abhishaike Mahajan on the inability of pharmaceutical companies to figure out how to treat cancer by blocking TIGIT.
Richard Hanania theorycrafting on desire for solitude as an evolutionary mismatch, given that opportunities for being alone were uncommon prior to modernity3.
Lyman Stone (partial paywall) arguing that the cause of declining fertility in Turkey, far from being mysterious, is also a result of decreasing and delayed marriages.
Zhu Yutao translation of commentary by Minhee Chae and Dandan Zhang on rising bride prices in China, a frequent source of content for Chinese Doomscroll.
Thomas Pueyo with an ongoing series on European and Muslim immigration. It seems rather unfortunate to me that the best answer to statistical differences, that we should treat people as individuals and not based on groups, requires institutions to operate at a level which they are apparently currently unable to.
Ueaj career advice, as well as some thoughts about ideas guys which is also discussed by Defender.
Sam Enright linkthread (includes me!)
Lauren Gilbert linkthread.
This idea that hegemony is required in order to keep any agreement like Bretton Woods running is quite intriguing; it’s interesting to consider what might have happened, if the interest provisions existed, incentivizing Japan and Germany to invest their surpluses into buying US assets, with any protectionist measures by the United States against foreign ownership prompting them to leave the agreement. On that note, I want to take the opportunity to bring up my old idea that China should create a state-run index fund for their citizens to invest in the US total market, something which would produce many beneficial effects for them, including providing better investments than housing for their citizens, decreasing the country’s trade surplus, and redirecting and controlling capital flight; in the long run it would result in a situation where a country’s ownership of global financial assets exactly matches their productive capabilities, which would be greatly in their favor. Of course, neither side would allow such a thing: China because they want to be able to invade Taiwan and America because of wariness of foreign control over domestic assets. But if the US dollar ever goes bust and China takes the mantle of global hegemony, presumably this is how they would be able to maintain an export surplus even in the face of interest penalties under something like Bancor.
There’s of course also the SlimeMoldTimeMold theory that the unconscious, while not a mind in any colloquial sense, still operates as a collection of rational systems.
Although he doesn’t say so explicitly, apparently the solution he is in favor of is something like dosing the water with enactogens? On that note, Desmolysium with some thoughts on dosages while running biohacking experiments.