2026-07-29
fractales
Sam Matey interview with Abi Olvera on the Abundance Agenda.
Yaw Boadu has an interesting article arguing that special economic zones are not necessarily guaranteed to be worthwhile investments for their host countries. Personally, it’s not clear to me that this is the correct framing to take, because in my view, the reason that SEZs need to be set up in the first place is an indication that the economic policies of the host country are problematic, in which case the SEZ’s primary purpose should be as a testing ground for reforms which can generate political capital for broader generalization. The view of SEZ’s as mere investments seems to me to be rather self-defeating, because this sort of mindset is actually exactly what tends to lead to the aforementioned problems involving conflicts between host and zone which produce enclavism and attempts at short-term extraction.
Yiyang Xu with a translation of a piece by Xu Gao speculating on the future of the post-dollar global economy1.
David Chapman arguing for pragmatism in interpreting and applying probability theory in practice2.
Scott Aaronson speech on the underexplored philosophical implications of theoretical computer science, “unusually rich with facts that are true for silly or absurd or ironic reasons”, as a field where self-reference is not merely a theoretical problem, but an unavoidable daily occurrence.
Vitalik Buterin introductory explainer on indistinguishability obfuscation, the theoretical crown jewel primitive of cryptography and how it can in practice be constructed from a tower of its supposed constructions.
BDM with a review of Ghost in the Shell, perhaps preparing for the upcoming release of Cyberpunk Edgerunners 23.
Delicious Tacos entertaining account of gender relations for the Mars and Venus school (Edit: Magdalene Taylor against generation and analysis of romantic narratives).
SlimeMoldTimeMold linkthread.
Andy McKenzie neurobiology linkthread.
It’s not clear to me that the solution being described as most likely is actually feasible, since if it was we would probably already have it, but otherwise this article provides a useful overview for what China sees as the benefits and drawbacks of the current global monetary system.
Personally, I regard his description of the rationalist position of probability theory as a formal representation of reality to be a strawman, in the same sense that although there are some Effective Altruists who are too willing to bite the bullet on various implications of naive utilitarianism, I don’t consider either to be a majority position. It seems to me that the problem of priors is actually quite well understood, one which is both theoretically and in practice solved by use of intuition on what is “most useful”.
Regarding a different kind of cyborgism, Kevin Kelly on what he calls the exoself, speculating about possible implementations of futures where people are constantly accompanied by personal agents. Edit: relevant tweet by viemmcoy.