Category: Uncategorized
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.
California facts of the day
At Berkeley, as recently as 2015, white male hires were 52.7 percent of new tenure-track faculty; in 2023, they were 21.5 percent. UC Irvine has hired 64 tenure-track assistant professors in the humanities and social sciences since 2020. Just three (4.7 percent) are white men. Of the 59 Assistant Professors in Arts, Humanities and Social Science appointed at UC Santa Cruz between 2020-2024, only two were white men (3 percent).
Here is the essay by Jacob Savage that everyone is talking about.
What should I ask Joanne Paul?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her. From the Google internet:
Joanne Paul is a writer, broadcaster, consultant, and Honorary Senior Lecturer in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex. A BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker, her research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of the Renaissance and Early Modern periods…
She has a new book out Thomas More: A Life.
Here is her home page. Here is Joanne on Twitter. She has many videos on the Tudor period, some with over one million views.
So what should I ask her?
How harmful is the decline in long-form reading?
That is the theme of my latest Free Press column, here is one excerpt:
Oral culture, in contrast, tends to be more fluid, harder to evaluate and verify, more prone to rumor, and it has fewer gatekeepers. Those features have their advantages, as a good stand-up comedian will get louder laughs than a witty author. Or an explanation from YouTube, with moving visuals, may stick in our minds more than a turgid passage from a textbook. We also just love talking, and listening, as those modes of communication reach back into human history much further than reading and writing do. Speech is part of how we bond with each other. Still, if any gross generalization can be made, it is that oral culture makes objectivity and analytic thought harder to establish and maintain.
Given this background, both the good and the bad news is that the dominance of print culture has been in decline for a long time. Radio and cinema both became major communications media in the 1920s, and television spread in the 1950s. Those major technological advances have commanded the regular attention of billions, and still do so. Earlier in the 20th century, it suddenly became a question whether you take your ideas from a book or from the radio. And this was not always a welcome development, as Hitler’s radio speeches persuaded more Germans than did his poorly constructed, unreadable Mein Kampf.
The fact that books, newspapers, and reading still are so important reflects just how powerful print has been. How many other institutions can be in relative decline for over a hundred years, and still have such a hold over our hearts and minds?
The optimistic interpretation of our situation is that reading longer works has been in decline for a long time, and overall our civilization has managed the transition fairly well. Across history we have had various balances of written and oral cultures, and if some further rebalancing is required in the direction of the oral, we should be able to make that work, just as we have done in the past. The rise of television, whatever you may think of it, did not do us in.
A second and more pessimistic diagnosis is that print and reading culture has been hanging by a thread, and current and pending technological advances are about to give that thread its final cut. The intellectual and cultural apocalypse is near. Even if your family thinks of itself as well-educated, your kids will grow up unable to work their way through a classic novel. They will watch the Lord of the Rings movies, but never pick up the books. As a result, they are likely to have less scientific and analytic objectivity, and they will embody some of the worst and most volatile aspects of TikTok culture. They will, however, be able to sample large numbers of small bits of information, or sometimes misinformation, in a short period of time.
There is much more at the link.
Podcast with Parker Conley
About “learning, history, and investing in ideas”, and what if there were ten Tyler Cowens?:
Here is the transcript.
Tuesday assorted links
1. The new Brink Lindsey book is out.
2. Markets in everything: “Wasp nests have become a surprisingly sought-after home décor commodity, with some priced at up to $250 per specimen.” (NYT) The shipping fees to get them can be pretty high.
3. New charter city, crypto-based in St. Kitts and Nevis? (FT)
4. “Specifically, TGIF, Nellie Bowles’ witty take on the week’s news, is being censored in the UK.” (TFP, beware Australia…)
5. A case where the Peltzman effect might apply.
6. Glenn Loury in memory of Thomas Schelling.
7. Purdue University Approves New AI Requirement For All Undergrads.
8. Robert J. Samuelson, RIP (NYT).
Two more notable books from 2025
Ken Belson, Every Day is Sunday:
Tom MacTague, Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016.
Both are excellent. I didn’t read the first one right off, because I do not care very much about the topic. The book is good enough to overcome that problem. I did not read the second one right off because I care about the topic a lot, but thought I already knew enough about it. The book is good enough to overcome that problems.
Noah Smith on AI existential risk
Superintelligent AI would be able to use all the water and energy and land and minerals in the world, so why would it let humanity have any for ourselves? Why wouldn’t it just take everything and let the rest of us starve?
But an AI that was able to rewrite its utility function would simply have no use for infinite water, energy, or land. If you can reengineer yourself to reach a bliss point, then local nonsatiation fails; you just don’t want to devour the Universe, because you don’t need to want that.
In fact, we can already see humanity trending in that direction, even without AI-level ability to modify our own desires. As our societies have become richer, our consumption has dematerialized; our consumption of goods has leveled off, and our consumption patterns have shifted toward services. This means we humans place less and less of a burden on Earth’s natural resources as we get richer…
I think one possible technique for alignment would give fairly-smart AI the ability to modify its own utility function — thus allowing it to turn itself into a harmless stoner instead of needing to fulfill more external desires.
And beyond alignment, I think an additional strategy should be to work on modifying the constraints that AI faces, to minimize the degree to which humans and AIs are in actual, real competition over scarce resources.
One potential way to do this is to accelerate the development of outer space. Space is an inherently hostile environment for humans, but far less so for robots, or for the computers that form the physical substrate of AI; in fact, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and others are already trying to put data centers in space.
Here is the full post.
Markets in everything?
If you don’t yet have a REAL ID, you can continue to fly, but it’s going to cost you. Beginning Feb. 1, 2026, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will start collecting a $45 fee from travelers using non-compliant forms of identification at airport security checkpoints.
The agency previously proposed a fee of $18 to cover the administrative and IT costs of ID verification for those traveling without a REAL ID or passport but increased the total to $45 in an announcement released earlier this month.
Here is the full story, via the excellent Samir Varma.
Monday assorted links
Is involuntary hospitalization working?
From Natalia Emanuel, Valentin Bolotnyy, and Pim Welle:
The involuntary hospitalization of people experiencing a mental health crisis is a widespread practice, as common in the US as incarceration in state and federal prisons and 2.4 times as common as death from cancer. The intent of involuntary hospitalization is to prevent individuals from harming themselves or others through incapacitation, stabilization and medical treatment over a short period of time. Does involuntary hospitalization achieve its goals? We leverage quasi-random assignment of the evaluating physician and administrative data from Allegheny County, Pennsylvania to estimate the causal effects of involuntary hospitalization on harm to self (proxied by death by suicide or overdose) and harm to others (proxied by violent crime charges). For individuals whom some physicians would hospitalize but others would not, we find that hospitalization nearly doubles the probability of being charged with a violent crime and more than doubles the probability of dying by suicide or overdose in the three months after evaluation. We provide evidence of housing and earnings disruptions as potential mechanisms. Our results suggest that on the margin, the system we study is not achieving the intended effects of the policy.
Here is the abstract online at the AEA site. I am looking forward to seeing more of this work.
Sunday assorted links
1. What Stanley Kubrick learned from chess.
3. Rob Wiblin and Dean Ball podcast on AI. And ChinaTalk surveys Chinese AI in 2025.
4. Stagnant construction productivity is a worldwide problem.
5. “Announcing Progress in Medicine, a high school summer career exploration program.”