Monday assorted links
1. I find this illustrative, and also very, very naive. Here is a related query. I think this crowd is bad at modeling social systems and macro systems more generally. That is an intrinsically thing to do, but I would keep that in mind when reading “rationalist” analyses.
2. Yale sells $6 billion of its portfolio.
3. Strawberries in Senegal (NYT). And maybe the Straussians won’t like the new Maimonides translation?
4. The nuclear-powered flying hotel?
5. “Texas schools nix lesson over Virginia state flag’s exposed breast. The Roman goddess Virtus has been on the state flag since 1861, but the banner has only featured her bare breast since the early 20th century.” And: “A case of early 20th-century gender confusion led to the breast baring in the first place. In 1901, Secretary of the Commonwealth D.Q. Eggleston complained that Virtus “looked more like a man than a woman and wanted to correct it. He instructed designers to add the breast to clarify her sex,” the Virginian-Pilot reported in a 2023 deep dive into how Virginia wound up with the only state flag boasting an exposed nipple.”
6. Ethan Mollick on AGI. And resistance to the term AGI and its attainment. A good piece, with a cameo by Duchamp.