We learn about “The Enlightenment” as a singular entity, a historical age associated with rationality, scientific inquiry, humanism, and liberty. The Enlightenment and scientific revolution were defining moments that spawned an unprecedented period of progress and human flourishing. But in his book The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch adds useful texture for better understanding the motivations of the Enlightenment’s contributors.
He divides the movement into two broad forms: the “British” and the “Continental”.
Both branches agree on the core principles of rationality, progress, and freedom. Where they disagree is on how to achieve these goals. They pursue the same ends,...
While Hayek regarded some advocates of social justice as cynically aware that they were really engaged in a concentration of power, the greater danger he saw in those sincerely promoting the concept with a zeal which unconsciously prepares the way for others—totalitarians—to step in after the undermining of ideological, political, and legal barriers to government power makes their task easier.
This is one of the key dangers of centralizing power, and why I’m always interested in how people pursue goals versus what specifically...
I’m no fan of TikTok. But I’m with Tyler here that a government-imposed ban is the wrong prescription. Naturally, our government’s approach is to attempt to grant the central government more authority to do things very very not limited to TikTok-banning.
Should it really be possible that you could get 20 years in prison for using a VPN to bypass such a ban? 20 years behind bars is unlikely, but more broadly this is a sign that we are addressing the TikTok problems with very much the wrong policy instruments.
Jason Crawford lays out a theory for why technocracy (the idea that a technical elite can lead a nation to technological progress if given the top-down control of economic and scientific policy) fizzled out around the 1970s:
In the early 1970s, a perfect storm of events conspired to discredit the technocratic idea, including Vietnam, Watergate, and the oil shocks. By 1973 it was clear that our leaders were unfit to govern, in terms of either competence or ethics: they could not handle affairs at home or abroad, neither the economy nor foreign policy, and they were plagued...
Great to see this evolution of Readwise to enter the “read-later” app space. None of the options out there seem to be thriving anymore (Pocket, Instapaper, etc.), but some of us still rely on them as essential parts of our reading experience.
The Readwise team has been moving fast the last couple years with excellent additions to the product, and I can’t believe they were also working on this for most of 2021 along with the other regular updates....
Vannevar Bush’s seminal report to President Truman, making the case for government support for foundational scientific research (and pushing to create the NSF).
Historian Anton Howes on the push/pull dynamics between monarchs and parliaments, and the gradual building of state capacity in 16th century Britain.
It’s easy to imagine that governments were always as bureaucratic as they are today. Certain policies, like the widespread granting of monopolies in the seventeenth century, or the presence of a powerful landed aristocracy, seem like archaic products of a past that was simply more corrupt. The fact that governments rarely got involved with healthcare or education before the mid-nineteenth century seems the product of a lack of imagination, or perhaps yet another product of our ancestors’...
Martin Gurri is one of the best minds we have for the current moment. Make sure to subscribe to his essays on the Mercatus Center’s “The Bridge.”
The American people appear to be caught in the grip of a psychotic episode. Most of us are still sheltering in place, obsessed with the risk of viral infection, primly waiting for someone to give us permission to shake hands with our friends again. Meanwhile, online and on...
In the tumult going on the last few weeks about police power, corruption, brutality, and need for reform, this question has been kicking around. Alex Tabarrok has some interesting comments on the likelihood of separating the arms of state responsible for violent crime and routine rule enforcement, like traffic safety:
Don’t use a hammer if you don’t need to pound a nail. Road safety does not require a hammer. The responsibility for handing out speeding tickets and citations should be handled by a unarmed agency. Put the safety patrol in bright yellow cars and have them carry a bit...
Arnold Kling has been a great follow lately. On the Fed’s stimulus plan for COVID economic shutdown:
I have said all along that the checks being written to households and small businesses were just a fig leaf to cover a massive bailout of large corporations and the financial industry.
If we saw mobs breaking into stores, pulling items from the shelves, and walking out, we would recognize this as looting. But if we define looting as taking property without giving anything of value in return, then it is now widespread.
Tenants are looting landlords by not paying rent...
A project from DeepMind designed to fill in missing text from ancient inscriptions:
Pythia takes a sequence of damaged text as input, and is trained to predict character sequences comprising hypothesised restorations of ancient Greek inscriptions (texts written in the Greek alphabet dating between the seventh century BCE and the fifth century CE). The architecture works at both the character- and word-level, thereby effectively handling long-term context information, and dealing efficiently with incomplete word representations (Figure 2). This...
We’ve spent the last 6 months or so working with the team at the US Census Bureau on something called The Opportunity Project, a recurring initiative quarterbacked by the Census to bring together creators, government, and local communities to collaboratively build tools to tackle various large issues in the nation. Specifically we’ve been testing out the ability for communities in need to deploy Fulcrum Community for collecting address data. While to an outsider it may seem like address data is a “solved problem,” that’s far from the case in...
This piece from Barry Ritholtz does a good job breaking down the real background behind the Amazon NYC HQ issues, how they were attracted and why they bailed:
The heart of the opposition to Amazon was how much the city and state bent the existing rules to offer a very generous package. The arguments are pretty clear: On the one side, net net the deal works to the city’s benefit, and $3 billion is not all that much.
The other side is less pragmatic and more philosophical. It is the same issue I have with taxpayers subsidizing Football stadiums....
This is a fascinating idea, arguing that we should shift our thinking about privacy and data away from “ownership.” Since owning / renting data doesn’t afford the privacy and agency control people actually want, the author argues for a broader set of rights
Clear, broad principles are needed around the world, in ways that fit into the legal systems of individual countries. In the US, existing constitutional provisions—like equal protection under the law and prohibitions against “unreasonable searches and seizures”—are insufficient. It is, for instance, difficult to argue that continuous, persistent tracking of a person’s movements in public is...
I’m making my way through The Federalist, which has been on my reading list forever, and for which I had my interest rekindled last year reading Alexander Hamilton.
For those that don’t know, it’s a collection of essays written by the trio of Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to convince the populace of the need to ratify the then-draft US Constitution.
Up to Federalist No. 25, the focus is on a) the utility and importance of the “union of states” as a concept worth pursuing and cementing and b) the insufficiency of the Articles of...
Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order was one of the most interesting books I’ve read in the last 5 years. It traces the history of human social hierarchy and government from antiquity to the French Revolution. This talk is a great high-level overview of the ground covered in the book. Think of it as a preview and convincing teaser to the full work.
This is a great overview of the importance of CAC in a SaaS business.
One of the enjoyable things about SaaS is how much you can modify and optimize what you’re doing by measuring various parts of your process, especially in SMB-focused SaaS. Marketing, early-stage sales, late-stage sales, customer success — it’s like a machine with separate stages you can tweak separately to make incremental improvements.