This is where I save interesting links.
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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.
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The Danger from Japan
As I’ve tended, recently, to find liberalism a useful model for my politics, posts like this resonate.
My message to Americans is to double down on America. Double down on immigration, entrepreneurship, innovation, building for tomorrow, free markets, free speech and individualism and America will take all new competitors as it has taken all comers in the past. The world should be more like America not the other way around.
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How AI, Healthcare, and Labubu Became the American Economy
From Kyla Scanlon. More good things on memes and the economy. Always feels very “ear to the ground”.
Something that troubles me is the idea that maybe everything is becoming financialized because financial markets are the last remaining system capable of aggregating distributed information and enabling coordination at scale. Like obviously the above example8 is wild and absurd, but it’s a very efficient form of communication. And when traditional institutions (media, education, political parties, local communities) lose credibility, people turn to markets for economic coordination and for truth discovery.
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Flounder Mode
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From Dollar Dominance to Slop Machine
Pt. 2 on attention and a bunch of topics that are funneling through it these days. I say topics, but really they are the things that impact the every day: trust, social safety, integrity, etc.
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Would live