This is where I save interesting links.
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Anomie
Back in the days of yore, if you did not manage to get a job at Google in 2005 you could still buy its stock. You had at least the option of gaining from its appreciation assuming you thought it inevitable. Over the last decade and a half there have been multiple generations who succeeded from getting a job at one of these giants and working their way up, and equally and more from people who invested in those giants. That’s what brought about the belief that the arc of history trended upwards.
Today, there exists no such option. There only exists short term manic rises even for the longer term theses.
And:
The claim is not that returns vanished, but that access to the tails shifted.
Full post here on Substack by Rohit Vishnan with a great subtitle, “the vibes they are a-changin”.
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When do you know if it’s over?
Trump threatens withholding federal funding if Zohran Mamdani wins the NYC mayoral election.
Truly insane, though very normal, behavior at this point.
I just don’t see how this sort of Central Planning and authoritarianism doesn’t stop now that it’s started.
When I say over, I do think that this experiment, or this chapter of the American experience, could end soon. But, I also think there’s something on the other side of it.
This is incredibly bad on it’s face.
It’s catastrophic played out at scale because it’s open ended Supreme Leadership that respects no norms, institutions, or laws.
I hope we don’t play this out.
Plus, will “the other side” not do this sort of thing if they win the White House (if) in the 2028 election?
“Gavin Newsom tweets he’ll withhold federal funding for Arkansas after it defies ___ presidential executive order.”
Bad stuff.
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Good news out of Mississippi!
“And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam”
– Nina SimoneA massive surge in children’s literacy in my home state!
Perhaps more noticeable than how exciting that is is how grim the numbers look in other states: 41% of public school 4th graders in California cannot read at a basic level. Not good.
This good news doesn’t travel far and wide it seems:
I personally help run a microschool in my community, which means I talk with other people about education issues fairly often. And anecdotally, most parents I speak to have not heard of the Mississippi Miracle at all — or, if they’ve heard of Mississippi’s success, it’s as a one-off rather than the spearhead of a trend.
Why not?
“This is just a politically awkward story,” education policy expert Andy Rotherham told me. “It’s all these red states. This is a very ideological field. People struggle with calling balls and strikes.”
Vaites agreed. “I think the story is going untold for the same reason journalists ignored the successful school reopening stories in Florida and the rest of the Sun Belt in August 2020: The appetite to tell positive stories in red states is low.”
“We have been slow to learn the lessons of successful states when the politics don’t line up,” Weaver told me.
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Welcome to The Continental. We Do Hope You Enjoy Your Stay.
But there is a way to live.
We live as humans with an autonomy of mind.
We step back in order to see the semantic system as puppeteer. And from that vantage point of critical distance, we reapply our disbelief to ALL constructed worlds of declared reality, no matter how appealing to our internal dialogs, no matter how much satisfaction of mind is promised to us.
We celebrate the primacy of lived experience with our family, friends and neighbors. Not just the lived experience of joy and celebration, but the lived experience of pain and loss, too. We share it all and we check in with each other more than we scroll.
We stop arguing truth statements from within any constructed world, no matter how wrong-headed we think it is. We especially stop arguing truth statements with the people we care about the most. Instead, we encourage them to see the system for what it is, and we trust them to reclaim their autonomy of mind on their own, because that’s the only way it can happen.
Our autonomy of mind is our birthright. It is not ladled out to us from some central pot, and it cannot be taken away from us. But we can give it away, sometimes in pieces and sometimes all at once, and that’s what the semantic system encourages us to do.
We see you, system!
And today we begin to reclaim our minds.
I’m quite discouraged about how things are progressing with the state of things in the country. It’s like all of the threads are being pulled at once.
Thankfully, our life day to day with our family and in our time is very counter-cultural to what seems to be happening everywhere else.
I know I sound vague, perhaps a bit dramatic, and a bit doom-y, so perhaps I should just try and reflect coherently about where things are, or at least how I’m thinking about where things are.
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This is the Great Ravine
You are forced to respond in kind if the other side escalates the narrative attacks, like using mustard gas in World War I, until eventually the entire game breaks because the anger you’ve created can’t be contained by the rules of the game. And that’s when you are well and truly in the Great Ravine.
This is from a note from Ben last summer that he continues to anchor to as a way a observing what’s happening right in America. I continue to think that we’re at the “eventually the entire game breaks because the anger you’ve created can’t be contained by the rules of the game” part and are now in The Great Ravine.
If I haven’t articulated it before, I don’t consider myself to be an extremist in the “the sky is falling on my head” kind of way, but I am fairly convinced that we’re in some sort of falling apart.
At the very least, things are weird enough that one or two wrong moves exchange between the administration and the public gets us into serious trouble. I’m no expert on a stable democracy falling into some sort of -ism, and my sense is that it happens over years if not decades, but more momentum has gathered around the anger we all have for one another mixed with the threats of domestic military use, that it all feels off.
I hope Ben is wrong in his assessment of how close we are to The Great Ravine.
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Trump Seizes the Means of Production at Intel
From Tyler Cowen in The Free Press.
If you are a major CEO, the message could not be clearer: Tread very, very carefully. Think again before you criticize this president or this White House.
And
The sad reality is that we are marching down a very dangerous road, the discourse surrounding the issue is an incoherent mess, and there is no improvement in sight. For the time being, the best we can do is to hope that the courts make this particular threat go away.
Bad week of news for rights and norms in America.
- This is a concerning event and whatever comes next will be telling
- The executive order on banning the burning of the America Flag and a year in jail for those who do
I think we are in a bad place.
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AI and the Detection of Gravity Waves
“It takes a lot to think this far outside of the accepted solution,” Adhikari said. “We really needed the AI.”
From a Wired article via an Alex Tabarrok summary.
Really incredible stuff. Move 37 by AlphaGO might still be the most impressive thing to me in AI and this is now there with it.
Not just doing better, but seeing different.
I hope we get there with medicine soon.