Category: Uncategorized
*38 Londres Street*
The author is Philippe Sands and the subtitle is
So recommended, and added to my own list. And yes I did buy another book by Philippe Sands, the acid test of whether I really liked something.
Monday assorted links
Harvey Mansfield on Rousseau and the dilemma of our age
Thus, it would seem that Rousseau compels us to choose either science or morality. If we choose morality ,we must enforce ignorance by maintaining political control over the sciences and the arts. We must believe in something like creationism because it says that nature was created for our good, and not believe in technology that exploits nature by exposing its disadvantages and hardships, such as cloning human beings to avoid the troubles of natural birth. But if we choose science, we run the risk of an explosion as human morals worsen as human power grows…There is hardly any issue today more fateful than the questison of whether modern science is the friend of politics and morality, as Hume says, or the enemy, as Rousseau says.
That is from Mansfield’s forthcoming book The Rise and Fall of Rational Control.
What I’ve been reading
1. I have been reading in the history of archaeology, and have profited from Eric H. Cline, Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology, which is a very good introduction to what the subtitle claims. There is also Toby Wilkinson, A World Beneath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology, and Jason Thompson, Wonderful Things: A History of Egyptology, volume 2, The Golden Age: 1881-1914.
2. Elizabeth Alker, Everything We Do is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop. A very good and readable book on this interaction, with excellent discussions of Donna Summer, Stevie Wonder, La Monte Young, and Penderecki, among many others.
3. Arindrajit Dube, The Wage Standard: What’s Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It. Dube notes his main theme is that employers have discretion in setting the real wage. A good overview of his work in labor economics. I would stress that if you think “tight labor markets” are good for workers, you should be obsessed with doing lots to favor capital.
4. Richard H. Davis, Religions of Early India: A Cultural History. A very useful background read for understanding later Indian history and religions, as well as the more general spread of religion throughout the southern regions of Asia. Avoids the common mistake of becoming too obscure on these topics.
For those interested in the longer term, there is Hilary Greaves, Jacob Barrett, and David Thorstad, editors, Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future.
There is Kevin Kelly, Colors of Asia: A Visual Journey, Photos and Design.
Alvaro Rivas, Marx in the Age of AI: How Artificial Intelligence Reshapes Value, Class, and Ideology is a short but serious look as to how Marxian concepts might apply to AI, for instance whether surplus value will be earned on the AIs, or for that matter on non-human animals.
You will find a different intersection of topic areas in Dominic Roser, David Zhang, and J.D. Bauman, All the Lives You Can Change: Effective Altruism for Christians.
Sunday assorted links
2. Some new estimates of tariff pass-through rates. I do not in fact find near-full pass through over such a short time horizon intuitive? Especially since SCOTUS may strike down the tariffs.
3. Are immigration researchers biased?
4. Are insurers retreating from Obamacare?
5. Alex Honnold will be free soloing 1700-foot Taipei 101 in Taiwan, no ropes of course. To be televised live on Netflix.
6. “Global suicide rates have declined by 29% from 2000 to 2021“
How to rise to the very top?
From athletes like Simone Biles and Michael Phelps to scientists like Marie Curie and Albert Einstein, identifying exceptional talent is essential in the science of innovation. But how does talent originate? Did the most talented athletes, scientists, and musicians reach peak performance relatively early or late in their career? Did they forgo mastering multiple sports, academic subjects, and musical instruments to reach world-class performance in only one? In an Analytical Review, Güllich et al. looked at published research in science, music, chess, and sports and found two patterns: Exceptional young performers reached their peak quickly but narrowly mastered only one interest (e.g., one sport). By contrast, exceptional adults reached peak performance gradually with broader, multidisciplinary practice. However, elite programs are designed to nurture younger talent.
That is from a new article in Science by Arne Güllich, Michael Barth, David Z. Hambrick, and Brooke N. Macnamara. Via Atta Tarki. But are they conditioning on a collider? Short players seem to do pretty well in today’s NBA…
Séb Krier, continued
Or more specifically Nenad Tomašev, Matija Franklin, Julian Jacobs, Sébastien Krier, and Simon Osindero:
AI safety and alignment research has predominantly been focused on methods for safeguarding individual AI systems, resting on the assumption of an eventual emergence of a monolithic Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The alternative AGI emergence hypothesis, where general capability levels are first manifested through coordination in groups of sub-AGI individual agents with complementary skills and affordances, has received far less attention. Here we argue that this patchwork AGI hypothesis needs to be given serious consideration, and should inform the development of corresponding safeguards and mitigations. The rapid deployment of advanced AI agents with tool-use capabilities and the ability to communicate and coordinate makes this an urgent safety consideration. We therefore propose a framework for distributional AGI safety that moves beyond evaluating and aligning individual agents. This framework centers on the design and implementation of virtual agentic sandbox economies (impermeable or semi-permeable), where agent-to-agent transactions are governed by robust market mechanisms, coupled with appropriate auditability, reputation management, and oversight to mitigate collective risks.
Here is the link, this is some of the most important work of our time. Here is the previous MR post on Krier.
Saturday assorted links
1. Henry Oliver’s year in reading.
2. What is the greatest artwork of the century so far? One man’s view.
3. LLMs specific to a historical time period.
4. So is it actually Austro-Japanese business cycle theory?
Does the conflict between cardinal utility and ordinal preferences just keep on getting worse?
This argument is not necessarily a critique of capitalism, but it could be. At the very least, it is an observation about advanced capitalism.
As you will know from philosophy, there is a difference between what makes you happy, in the felicific sense, and what you want. Some of this difference may be due to addictions, but most of it is not. You may want to be a person of a particular kind, whether or not that makes you happier. You may wish to do things to help the world, without believing you will be personally happier as a result. You might have mixed feelings as to whether having children will make you happier (stress!), but still you might have a deep preference for raising a family. And so on. These distinctions are part of the mainsprings of human life, they are not minor exceptions standing in the corner.
The more capitalism develops, the more the gap between cardinal utility and preference satisfaction is likely to grow. Consider the polar case of a very primitive economy where the only commodity is rice. Eating rice is what makes you happy, and eating rice is also how you wish to spend your money. After all, what else is there? Given the feasible set, cardinal utility and preference satisfaction will coincide perfectly.
But as product choice grows and incomes rise, you will have more and more chances to deviate from maxing out on cardinal utility. Furthermore, your immediate “needs” likely are taken care of, so most of your income spending is discretionary rather than “I need to buy this food to avoid the miseries of starvation.”
More and more, you will be led away from cardinal utility maximization. But additional preferences will be satisfied.
Is this good or bad?
It is not quite right to say that people are becoming less happy, as they are getting what they want. That could be a central component of the good life, and of individual well-being, broadly construed. That said, some of your ordinal preferences might be harmful addictions, or you might prefer things that stress you out, either proximately or in the longer run.
Let’s say you keep on checking your phone for texts. Do you do this because you think it will make you happier? Maybe not. You simply might have a preference for wanting to know the information in those texts as soon as possible. Should we think that preference is bad? Maybe it is a mother wanting to know that her daughter got home safely, and so she checks her texts every three minutes. That might not make her happier, but I am reluctant to conclude that is a worse state of affairs. And it does not have to be an addiction, a much overused concept by intelligent people who do not define it very carefully.
I too have plenty of preferences that do not make me happier, though I consider them quite legitimate. I am keen to see as much of the world as I can, yet I am not convinced this makes me happier than say simply going back to Mexico again and again and eating the street food. I just want to know what else is out there.
If you side solely with cardinal utility, yes you condemn capitalism. Or if you think all of these ordinal preferences are addictions, again you can condemn the status quo. Your meta-preferences in that case presumably would wish to have different preferences. In any case, many books will be written about how capitalism makes us miserable. Most of them will have the incorrect framing, though most of them will have ” a point,” one way or another. Furthermore, while some of these books may be correct, in the aggregate they will push us away from viewing individual human beings as agentic. That is a negative social consequence.
I do not think those critical perspectives are, by and large, the primary correct views. Instead, I think of capitalism and markets as an unparalleled engine for making us…weirder? And for moving us into different worlds (NYT)?
YMMV.
*Central Asia*, by Adeeb Khalid
An excellent book, the best I know of on this region. Here is one bit:
The first printing press in Central Asia was established in Tashkent in 1870…
I had not understood how much Xinjiang (“East Turkestan”), prior to its absorption into newly communist China, fell under the sway of Soviet influence.
I had not known how much the central Asian republics had explicit “let’s slow down rural migration into the cities” policies during Soviet times.
The book is interesting throughout, recommended.
Friday assorted links
1. The negativity crisis of AI ethics.
2. Vitalik and governance experiments and culture.
3. Stripe runs an RCT on capital markets and lending.
4. “For the first time, an AI model (GPT-5) autonomously solved an open math problem submitted to our benchmarking project IMProofBench, with a complete, correct proof, without human hints or intervention.” Link here, it is amazing how many smart or accomplished people will deny this is possible.
5. Developments in cognitive dissonance (New Yorker).
Nabeel on reading Proust
Yet not a word is wasted. It sounds paradoxical, but Proust is economical with his prose. He is simply trying to describe things that are extremely fine-grained and high-dimensional, and that takes many words. He is trying to pin down things that have never been pinned down before. And it turns out you can, indeed, write 100 pages about the experience of falling asleep, and find all kinds of richness in that experience.
And this:
…, a clear-sightedness on human vanity and a total willingness to embarrass himself. There are passages in the Albertine sections which are shocking – such as the extended stretch, around 50 pages long, in which he describes watching her sleep — and, reading them, you start to understand that this was written by a dying man who did not care about anything apart from telling the whole truth in as merciless way as possible.
Third, hypotaxis in sentences. The opposite of hypotaxis is parataxis, which you often find in Hemingway, as in: “The rain stopped and the crowd went away and the square was empty.” Each item here is side by side, simple, clean. The Bible often uses such types of sentences: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”.
Hypotaxis, by contrast, describes sentences with many subordinate clauses, like nesting dolls.
Nabeel says In Search of Lost Time is now his favorite novel.
Thursday assorted links
1. Andrew Batson best books he read in 2025.
2. Demis on AI.
3. Dean Ball on AGI and the programmer’s mentality.
4. New data on long-term warming trends.
5. A possible Netflix adaptation of Caro’s The Power Broker? And maybe just maybe a Villaneuve film of Rendezvous with Rama?
6. Do lower mortgage rates in fact benefit first-time home buyers?
7. Henry Oliver on Kiran Desai.
8. Australia to “crack down” on hate speech (NYT).
9. Amanda Taub at the NYT covers dogs, babies, and Taiwan.
10. That was then, this is now: “As much as a quarter of the active US navy is now in the Caribbean, according to one estimate.” (FT)
An RCT on AI and mental health
Young adults today face unprecedented mental health challenges, yet many hesitate to seek support due to barriers such as accessibility, stigma, and time constraints. Bite-sized well-being interventions offer a promising solution to preventing mental distress before it escalates to clinical levels, but have not yet been delivered through personalized, interactive, and scalable technology. We conducted the first multi-institutional, longitudinal, preregistered randomized controlled trial of a generative AI-powered mobile app (“Flourish”) designed to address this gap. Over six weeks in Fall 2024, 486 undergraduate students from three U.S. institutions were randomized to receive app access or waitlist control. Participants in the treatment condition reported significantly greater positive affect, resilience, and social well-being (i.e., increased belonging, closeness to community, and reduced loneliness) and were buffered against declines in mindfulness and flourishing. These findings suggest that, with purposeful and ethical design, generative AI can deliver proactive, population-level well-being interventions that produce measurable benefits.
That is from a new paper by Julie Y.A. Cachia, et.al. A single paper or study is hardly dispositive, even when it is an RCT. But you should beware of those, such as Jon Haidt and Jean Twenge, who are conducting an evidence-less jihad against AI for younger people.
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Wednesday assorted links
1. A listener ranks CWT episodes from this year.
2. A game-theoretic model of AI arms races.
5. The economics of Jeffrey Epstein (NYT).
6. “The US Tech Force is recruiting an elite corps of engineers to build the next generation of government technology.” Here is the web site.