Archive of posts with tag 'Politics'

How the Constitution Can Bring Us Together →

June 12, 2024 • #

A great interview with AEI’s Yuval Levin ahead of the release of his latest book, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified our Nation — And Could Again.

Yuval is one of the greatest minds we have working today. He brings a particular mixture of sanity, seriousness, gravitas, level-headedness, and dare-I-call-it normalcy to political discussions. His explanation of what the Constitution does (and, importantly, doesn’t do) threads right into the idea of comfort with contradiction:

Would the system empower the small states or the large ones? It would empower both and leave them ever struggling for balance. Would the president be a glorified clerk or an elevated head of state? He would be both, and therefore neither. The few and the many, the city and the country, freedom and order, equality and excellence, representation and administrative efficiency–to each of these stark choices the Constitution says yes, both. And as a result, it creates a regime, a democratic republic, that as the very term suggests, lives in constant tension with itself, yet is capable of extraordinary feats.

When there are no options we can all agree on, go with the system that results in perpetual argument and compromise.

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Comfort with Contradiction →

April 2, 2024 • #

From my latest issue of Res Extensa:

One of the most important things we can teach our children as they’re coming of age is to cultivate a comfort with contradiction. Sometimes good things come at the expense of other good things. You can’t always get your way. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

As we grow up, we discover the contradictions of everyday life: one benefit requires giving up another.

In fact, we do teach these things as parents trying to raise well-adjusted kids: Share and help others. Tell the truth, even when there’s a benefit to not doing so. Delay gratification. What’s great for you might not be great for the group. These are all ways of preparing a human for participation in a polite, but complicated, society.

Thinking we can avoid grappling with the inevitable contradictions of everyday life lead us to bad places:

Utopian ideas of the future require one to think in radical terms, and to lose hard-won progress. Radicals want to ignore trade-offs, to start over, to rebuild, to avoid the contradiction in the first place rather than grapple with it, ignoring Chesterton’s fences. If anything, school these days fosters more of this kind of radical thinking than its opposite.

The irony is that a discomfort with contradiction doesn’t get rid of it anyway. Just because we shouldn’t have to live with imperfections doesn’t cause a bulldozed, greenfield solution to actually work. We often end up tearing things down and still have the same negative outcome we had before. It’s George Orwell’s “Where’s the omelet?” every time.

I first heard this idea from Jonah Goldberg, and it’s been bubbling around in my head ever since.

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Will Milei Succeed in Argentina? →

January 24, 2024 • #

Tyler Cowen is hopeful (as am I), but skeptical:

I have two major worries. First, if Milei approaches fiscal success, the opposing parties will think long and hard about whether they wish to enable further success. Or will they instead prefer to see the Milei reforms crash and burn for fiscal reasons? I don’t think they know themselves, but the history of politics in Argentina does not give special reason to be super-optimistic here. You don’t have to believe the opposition will deliberately flush their country down the toilet, they just not might be convinced that further fiscal consolidation is needed, even if it is (surely they gotten this wrong a lot in the past).

For a country to swing so wildly from state-run strangulation to an quasi-populist libertarian economist makes me worried his effect on Argentine bureaucracy will fade in the next 12 months.

But his Davos talk was phenomenal. Should be shown in high school classrooms.

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January 24, 2024 • #

Will Milei succeed in Argentina? - Marginal REVOLUTION →

Tyler Cowen is hopeful (as am I), but skeptical:

For a country to swing so wildly from state-run strangulation to an quasi-populist libertarian economist makes me worried his effect on Argentine bureaucracy will fade in the next 12 months.

But his Davos talk was phenomenal. Should be shown in high school classrooms.

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The Case for Muddling Through →

April 18, 2023 • #

Read any news that intersects with politics, culture, technology, or economics, and you’d believe we’ve come to the end of the road. You find the occasional optimist pointing out how things aren’t so bad, or that they’ve also been real bad in the past (definitely true!).

Brink Lindsey paints his own bleak picture of our current set of crises — of dynamism, inclusion, and politics – but acknowledges a fear of overblowing the threats presented by these issues. In this piece he offers some hope here with confidence that we can muddle through with solutions as we have to past challenges. I think I’d largely conform to this view. Even though we’re cooking a nasty stew of intertwined problems in all of these areas, our culture has been more resistant to destroying itself than doomsayers have predicted every time in the past so far. I think we’ll muddle through like we always have. Crises precipitate change, and change hurts, but we can come out on the other side at least comfortable with a new status quo.

Relatedly, I recently read Brink Lindsey’s excellent book on cronyism, stasism, and regulatory capture, The Captured Economy, which he wrote in 2017 with co-author Steven Teles.

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Brittle Authoritarianism →

May 3, 2022 • #

Jonah Goldberg on the brittleness of authoritarianism:

Authoritarian regimes are often very, very strong. But like marble they’re brittle. They can withstand enormous pressures, from within and without, but there’s no flexibility.

I’d say it’s like Aesop’s Oak and the Reed, except I think that’s a bit inapt as well. America ain’t no stinking reed. But to at least get some use out of the metaphor, authoritarian societies are like stands of oaks. They can withstand all the wind in the world so long as the wind isn’t very strong. A field of reeds can withstand any wind, because reeds bend while oaks rely on their strength and their strength alone.

And in there somewhere is the point. It’s not the bending of the reeds that’s relevant, it’s the oak’s reliance on a single factor that’s the problem with authoritarian societies. The answer to every problem is strength—as manifested in fear, intimidation, etc.

A great analogy for appreciating the resilience of liberalism. Like the reed from Aesop, open societies often feel in flux, moving back and forth trying to work through compromises and challenges, reacting fluidly to feedback. Totalitarian ones feel stable and strong when there’s minimal stress, until suddenly they crack.

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What if Government Paid Better?

October 14, 2020 • #

In his book Political Order and Political Decay, Francis Fukuyama has a section on corruption in political systems and how it impacts economic development:

There are many reasons why corruption impedes economic development. In the first place, it distorts economic incentives by channeling resources not into their most productive uses but rather into the pockets of officials with the political power to extract bribes. Second, corruption acts as a highly regressive tax: while petty corruption on the part of minor, poorly paid officials exists in many countries, the vast bulk of misappropriated funds goes to elites who can use their positions of power to extract wealth from the population.

Today the most famously corrupt regimes lead the least liberal, least free societies. In these unstable environments, government jobs are among the most attractive to ambitious people. In part it’s because those jobs are more reliable than weak, inconsistent private sector jobs (and sometimes easier to get and retain), but the ease with which rents can be extracted in corrupted systems attracts people ambitious to build personal wealth.

You see the inverse of this phenomenon in states with strong free market systems. A certain class of ambitious person is still attracted to government, but more often for reasons of celebrity or power than financial reasons. The potential for personally-enriching rent extraction is much lower. Brain drain happens in the public sector because many of the most ambitious for wealth and status see faster, more lucrative paths in the private market. So paradoxically, the lack of this personally-enriching career path could be impeding potential economic development, just as in poisoned systems, but for different reasons.

It’s unfortunate that we squander our hard-won strong, corruption-resistant¹ government system’s performance because we can’t find the funding to better pay our public servants. Our federal (and state) agencies don’t realize how efficient this allocation of capital would be, compared to the many channels through which we hemorrhage money year after year. What would happen if we paid civil servants better? How many of the ambitious, entrepreneurial class would stick around and increase the state’s capacity if they didn’t become disillusioned with personal stagnation?

Of course we’re far from immune here. But when juxtaposed with the political systems of Liberia or the DRC, we’re doing pretty well. ↩

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The Prophet of the Revolt →

September 30, 2020 • #

Of this year’s reads so far, Martin Gurri still holds the crown on my favorite with his 2014 book The Revolt of the Public.

That book has the best diagnosis of the current state of politics, the culture war, polarization, and the media’s inability to make sense of all of it (while contributing themselves to the chaos).

This is a wide-ranging interview on public trust, social media, and the state of our institutions:

I would not say that our institutions are mired in a period of secular incompetence and decline. That is actually true, but I wouldn’t use those words. I would say that our institutions are structurally (and, I believe, catastrophically) maladapted to the new information environment, and that the people who run them are both unable and unwilling to reform them.

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Weekend Reading: Notes Meta Layer, PG, and the Trump Era

September 5, 2020 • #

📝 A Meta-Layer for Notes

Julian Lehr raises an interesting idea on taking notes: the importance of spatial context.

💬 PR Interviews Paul Graham

Antonio Garcia-Martinez’s newsletter kicks off with an interview with Paul Graham.

🏛 The Trump Era Sucks and Needs to Be Over

Matt Taibbi is always good for cutting to the chase.

Donald Trump is so unlike most people, and so especially unlike anyone raised under a conventional moral framework, that he’s perpetually misdiagnosed. The words we see slapped on him most often, like “fascist” and “authoritarian,” nowhere near describe what he really is, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. It’s been proven across four years that Trump lacks the attention span or ambition required to implement a true dictatorial regime. He might not have a moral problem with the idea, but two minutes into the plan he’d leave the room, phone in hand, to throw on a robe and watch himself on Fox and Friends over a cheeseburger.

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On Legibility

July 31, 2020 • #

I think I probably read three different pieces this week alone that reference James Scott’s Seeing Like a State. It presents an argument about the desire for “legibility” that overthrows and reorders bottom-up, emergent systems that develop naturally.

In this piece, Venkatesh Rao dives into what legibility means and what happens when the pursuit of order and “governability” ignores locally-discovered motivations that could be at work informing why a system works the way that it does.

In classic “high modernist” architecture, design, urban planning — really it’s an ideology that can drive decisions in many areas — a belief that we can design our way to any idealized solution pushes toward this idea of legibility. The ability to clearly understand a system does not always (or maybe even ever) correlate strongly with improvement to the system at a local level:

Complex realities turn this logic on its head; it is easier to comprehend the whole by walking among the trees, absorbing the gestalt, and becoming a holographic/fractal part of the forest, than by hovering above it.

This imposed simplification, in service of legibility to the state’s eye, makes the rich reality brittle, and failure follows. The imagined improvements are not realized. The metaphors of killing the golden goose, and the Procrustean bed come to mind.

Another choice excerpt, confusing legibility and success:

High-modernist (think Bauhaus and Le Corbusier) aesthetics necessarily lead to simplification, since a reality that serves many purposes presents itself as illegible to a vision informed by a singular purpose. Any elements that are non-functional with respect to the singular purpose tend to confuse, and are therefore eliminated during the attempt to “rationalize.” The deep failure in thinking lies is the mistaken assumption that thriving, successful and functional realities must necessarily be legible.

I need to bump this book up the reading queue. I know it’s partially that it triggers all my bottom-up, Hayekian priors, but it’s referenced so frequently it must contain some great first principles insight. A lot of Chesterton fence-type references could be made around this principle of legibility. Looking forward to reading the book.

Weekend Reading: Looking Glass Politics, Enrichment, and OSM Datasets

July 18, 2020 • #

🐇 Looking-Glass Politics

On private emotions being thrown into the public sphere:

People escape the Dunbar world for obvious reasons: life there appears prosaic and uninspiring. They find a digital interface and, like Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, enter a new realm that glitters with infinite possibilities. Suddenly, you can flicker like a spark between the digital and the real. The exhilarating sensation is that you have been taken to a high place and shown all the kingdoms of the world: “These can be yours, if. . . .” If your video goes viral. If you gain millions of followers. If you compose that devastating tweet that will drive Donald Trump from the White House. There is, however, an entrance fee. Personal identity must be discarded.

🏭 The Great Enrichment

Deirdre McCloskey on the boom of progress over the past 200 years:

The Great Enrichment came from human ingenuity emancipated. Ordinary people, emboldened by liberalism, ventured on extraordinary projects—the marine chronometer, the selective breeding of cotton seed, the band saw, a new chemistry—or merely ventured boldly to a new job, the New World, or going west, young man. And, crucially, the bold adventurers, in parallel with liberations in science, music, and geographical exploration, came to be tolerated and even commended by the rest of society, first in Holland in the 17th century and then in Britain in the 18th.

🗺 OSM-ready Data Sets

A partnership between Esri, Facebook, and the OpenStreetMap community to polish up and release datasets readily compatible with OSM (tagging and licensing).

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Weekend Reading: The Hour of the State, Location AI, and Mapillary Acquired

June 20, 2020 • #

💬 The Hour of the State or Explosion From Below?

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 television, we watch, as in a dream, crowds of our fellow citizens thronging into the streets of our cities, raging at the police and the established order generally, with some engaged in arson, looting, and violence.

On one side, a reflexive obedience to authority. On the other, a near-absolute repudiation of the rules of the system—for some, of any restraint whatever. The future will be determined by the uncertain relationship between these two extremes.

🤖 DataRobot Location AI

My friend and former colleague Kevin Stofan wrote the launch post for DataRobot’s latest product additions for spatial AI. Pretty amazing additions to their platform.

🗺 Mapillary Joins Facebook

Good to see the Mapillary team add their computer vision tech and work with OpenStreetMap to Facebook. Big congrats to the team!

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Weekend Reading: Dracones, Calendars, and Science 2.0

June 6, 2020 • #

🐉 Hic Sunt Dracones

Adam Elkus with a great essay on the current moment:

“Is this as bad as 1968?” is an utterly meaningless question precisely for this underlying reason. People do not invoke 1968 because of the objective similarities between 2020 and 1968. They do so because we have crossed a threshold at which basic foundations of social organization we take for granted now seem up for grabs. This is an inherently subjective determination, based on the circumstances of our present much as people in 1968 similarly judged the state of their worlds to be in flux. 1968 is an arbitrary signpost on an unfamiliar road we are driving down at breakneck speeds. You can blast “Gimme Shelter” on the car stereo for the aesthetic, but it’s not worth much more than that.

📆 Contemplating Calendars

Devon Zuegel with ideas on how to better utilize your calendar for things beyond appointments and meetings. A few ideas I’d like to commit to doing, especially with using the calendar as a recall tool for memory.

🔬 Science 2.0

Robin Hanson on experts, prestige, skepticism:

Just as our distant ancestors were too gullible (factually, if not strategically) about their sources of knowledge on the physical world around them, we today are too gullible on how much we can trust the many experts on which we rely. Oh we are quite capable of skepticism about our rivals, such as rival governments and their laws and officials. Or rival professions and their experts. Or rival suppliers within our profession. But without such rivalry, we revert to gullibility, at least regarding “our” prestigious experts who follow proper procedures.

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Weekend Reading: Post-Truth, Knowledge, and Game Graphics

May 30, 2020 • #

⚖️ The Way Out of Post-truth

Another razor sharp analysis from Gurri:

The collapse of trust in our leading institutions has exiled the 21st century to the Siberia of post-truth. I want to be clear about what this means. Reality has not changed. It’s still unyielding. Facts today are partial and contradictory—but that’s always been the case. Post-truth, as I define it, signifies a moment of sharply divergent perspectives on every subject or event, without a trusted authority in the room to settle the matter. A telling symptom is that we no longer care to persuade. We aim to impose our facts and annihilate theirs, a process closer to intellectual holy war than to critical thinking.

🧠 A Simplified “Pretence of Knowledge”

A good summary of Hayek’s famous 1974 address, “A Pretence of Knowledge.” Thinking you can “figure everything out” with expertise is dangerous.

If we truly wish to improve society, we must be humble and realize the bounds of what is possible with social science. Rather than attempting to shape society directly like a sculptor shapes a statue, we must seek instead to understand and to create the right environment for progress, like a gardener in a garden. Overconfidence in the use of science to control society will make a man a tyrant, and will lead to the destruction of a civilization which no brain has designed, but which has instead grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.

🕹 GTA V Graphics Study

An interesting dive into the crazy amount of technique that goes into modern video game graphics.

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Martin Gurri on EconTalk →

May 27, 2020 • #

I’ve been following Gurri’s work closely since I read The Revolt of a Public a couple months back. I think he’s one of the sharpest minds we have right now thinking and writing about what’s going on in politics, media, and public opinion.

He was on this week’s EconTalk talking to Russ Roberts about his book. The show notes for the episode provide excellent additional material on his core ideas.

Weekend Reading: Two Elites, DOS in VR, and Personal Brainstorming

May 23, 2020 • #

🏛️ A Tale of Two Elites

Martin Gurri on the growing similarities between west and east coast elites:

The effect, I suspect, will be the exact opposite of the reactionary dream. In wild and seedy digital gathering-places, far from any pretense of idealism, political discussion will inevitably grow more unfettered, more divisive, more violent. The attempt to impose Victorian standards of propriety on the information sphere will end by converting it into a vicious and unending saloon brawl. No matter how revolting the web appears at present – it can always get worse.

💾 VR-DOS

This is hilarious. Move through your virtual bedroom and sit down at your desk. Your DOS PC is waiting.

Reminds me of the “Virtual Reading” sketch from SNL many years ago¹.

✍🏼 Brainstorming with Myself: Systemic Creativity in Roam

Robert Haisfield walks through some methods he uses in Roam to make sense of the decentralized, scattered information web to get creative work done. I use some similar methods to collect the distributed notes that have collected about a single topic, but queries would allow taking it to the next level.

I can’t find the video anywhere online. We laughed endlessly at this one. ↩

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The Revolt of the Public in 10 Minutes

May 20, 2020 • #

Author Martin Gurri posted this quick 10 minute summary of his book The Revolt of the Public. It was one of my favorite recent reads, and in this video he does an excellent job summarizing his key diagnosis of what’s behind the degradation of authority from institutions and dissolution of public trust in them.

His insights connect information dissemination, institutions, and authority — the public expects unrealistic levels of service and expertise from institutions, while institutions also promise far more than they’re capable of delivering. This divide, happening in a world with instantaneous (over)communication gets us to where we are today.

Previous posts related to Gurri or TROTP:

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President Goop's Ultralight Beam Vaccine →

May 4, 2020 • #

Two of my favorite podcasts collide with Jonah Goldberg visiting the Fifth Column. Lively and hilarious discussion, as expected.

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The Great Reset →

April 30, 2020 • #

Martin Gurri in response to Marc Andreessen’s “It’s Time to Build” essay:

So how do we get from here to build? To demand that our current institutions make that leap would be like asking the Great Pyramid to win the Indianapolis 500. It won’t happen. As a precursor to Andreessen’s building spree, our institutions—certainly government at every level, including the regulatory and scientific agencies—must crack open their industrial-age cocoons and join the rest of us in the digital dispensation. At a minimum, they must be able to move as fast as information does today. This will require different protocols, different technology, a different form: less like the Great Pyramid and more like a race car. They must be flatter and faster.

For more on the problematic status of our institutions, Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public was fantastic. And I just finished Yuval Levin’s A Time to Build, where he presents a clear diagnosis of some of those problems and an optimistic case for improving things.

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The Ideological Turing Test →

April 22, 2020 • #

I recently finished Arnold Kling’s excellent Three Languages of Politics, which attempts to build a model to describe why different political viewpoints are so often not disagreeing as much as they are talking about different things entirely.

At one point Kling references this thought experiment proposed by economist Bryan Caplan — a Turing test for probing a person’s true ideology:

We don’t have to idly speculate about how well adherents of various ideologies understand each other. We can measure the performance of anyone inclined to boast about his superior insight.

How? Here’s just one approach. Put me and five random liberal social science Ph.D.s in a chat room. Let liberal readers ask questions for an hour, then vote on who isn’t really a liberal. Then put Krugman and five random libertarian social science Ph.D.s in a chat room. Let libertarian readers ask questions for an hour, then vote on who isn’t really a libertarian. Simple as that.

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Weekend Reading: The State and the Virus, Future of Work, and Stephen Wolfram's Setup

April 18, 2020 • #

🏛 The Individual, the State, and the Virus

I agree with most of Kling’s takes here on the role the state should play in the coronavirus crisis.

👩🏽‍💻 Mapping the Future of Work

A nice comprehensive list of SaaS products for the workplace, across a ton of different categories. Great work by Pietro Invernizzi putting this database together.

⌨️ Stephen Wolfram’s Personal Infrastructure

Mathematician and computer scientist Stephen Wolfram wrote this epic essay on his personal productivity infrastructure.

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A Failure, But Not of Prediction →

April 17, 2020 • #

This is the best piece I’ve seen on the swirling controversy around the coronavirus pandemic response: on experts, the WHO, government response. The problem is not that experts don’t always have the answer (which they clearly don’t), it’s that the mechanics of many institutions, but also individual reasoning methods, are incompatible with responding to data-poor situations.

People were presented with a new idea: a global pandemic might arise and change everything. They waited for proof. The proof didn’t arise, at least at first. I remember hearing people say things like “there’s no reason for panic, there are currently only ten cases in the US”. This should sound like “there’s no reason to panic, the asteroid heading for Earth is still several weeks away”. The only way I can make sense of it is through a mindset where you are not allowed to entertain an idea until you have proof of it. Nobody had incontrovertible evidence that coronavirus was going to be a disaster, so until someone does, you default to the null hypothesis that it won’t be.

Gallant wouldn’t have waited for proof. He would have checked prediction markets and asked top experts for probabilistic judgments. If he heard numbers like 10 or 20 percent, he would have done a cost-benefit analysis and found that putting some tough measures into place, like quarantine and social distancing, would be worthwhile if they had a 10 or 20 percent chance of averting catastrophe.

When we don’t have the luxury of running randomized control trials and building large experimental datasets, we have to work with what we’ve got more rationally than simply checking out completely if a test, response strategy, or piece of medical advice is “unproven.”

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Three Languages

April 7, 2020 • #

The economist Arnold Kling is a regular on EconTalk.

This interview discussion revisits his 2013 book, The Three Languages of Politics in light of the current political landscape.

In the current media landscape, amplified by the massive expansion of networks and social media, everyone is talking past one another. Not even speaking the same language.

To quote Kling from the interview:

People are not trying to change the minds of the other side, or trying to open the minds of their own side. They’re trying to close the minds of their own side.

I think this motivation to close minds and not seek common ground comes from a lack of fluency in these languages — we don’t understand one another, so its simpler to attempt to damn it, vilify it, and retreat further into your own rhetoric.

As he defines them, the languages are progressive, conservative, and libertarian.

Broadly, the “three languages” try to give a framework around what creates such wide differences in perspective from person to person — what generates the tribalistic “me vs. them” attitudes between folks with differing worldviews. You tend to talk past others if you don’t recognize your own preferred language, and explicitly make an effort to empathize with the other’s perspective. It’s not the specific naming of the categories that’s important, it’s how each filters and prioritizes views along a preferred morality continuum (“political psychology” as Kling refers to it):

Progressive — oppressed vs. oppressor
Conservative — civilization vs. barbarism
Libertarian — liberty vs. coercion

Naturally no person exclusively and cleanly speaks in a single language, but these are guidelines to help position where you’re coming from in relation to another.

Listening to Kling’s concepts, I was reminded of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and his framing of moral foundations theory.

I recently linked to an interview Kling did with author Martin Gurri, the author of the excellent book The Revolt of the Public, which I’m currently enjoying. That book touches on a lot of the same territory as this discussion.

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David Deutsch on Brexit and Error Correction

April 3, 2020 • #

I ran across this interview with physicist David Deutsch, with his thoughts on Brexit. A lot of great stuff here on resilience, error correction, individualism vs. collectivism, Karl Popper, and Britain’s first-past-the-post system.

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Michele Gelfand on Tight and Loose Cultures →

March 20, 2020 • #

This was a fascinating interview with Dr. Michele Gelfand from Jonah Goldberg’s The Remnant podcast. It mostly covers the subject of her book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers, on the differences between “tight” vs. “loose” cultures — think Singapore or China vs. Spain or Italy. It’s a timely subject in this time of global response to a pandemic, seeing how different cultures respond to the crisis.

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How Elite Institutions Lost Their Legitimacy →

February 16, 2020 • #

A discussion between economist Arnold Kling and author Martin Gurri about the erosion of institutions and what that means for polarization and cultural instability.

Martin Gurri doesn’t like to make predictions. But if you were lucky enough to read his groundbreaking 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public, when it was first published, you’d have an excellent guide for understanding much of what subsequently happened in the United States and around the world. Gurri’s thesis—that information technology, particularly social media, has helped to dramatically widen the distance between ordinary people and elites—has proven invaluable in explaining not only the election of Donald Trump, but other recent populist events around the globe.

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Weekend Reading: Soleimani, Prosperous Universe, and Roam

January 11, 2020 • #

🇮🇷 The Shadow Commander

This 2013 piece from Dexter Filkins gives an excellent background on Qasem Soleimani, an important figure now well known after his killing a couple of weeks ago, but prior to that hardly known by anyone other than experts, even with his massive influence in the region.

🌌 Prosperous Universe

I’m always intrigued by complicated simulation games. I remember a few of these “real-time” MMO games being popular in the early days of online gaming. Glad to see the genre still kicking in an era of low-attention-span gaming largely taking over. From the Prosperous Universe website:

At the heart of our vision lies the concept of a closed economic loop. There have been thousands of browser-based sci-fi strategy games before that emphasize military conflict. By contrast, Prosperous Universe is all about the economy and complex player-driven supply chains in which every material has to be either produced or purchased from other player-run companies.

🔗 Roam Research

Roam is an interesting note-taking tool that’s like a hybrid graph database and wiki. I tinkered with it a little bit. Seems attractive as a way to take meeting notes to try it out.

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What Andrew Yang Means →

November 17, 2019 • #

Wesley Yang on the potential staying power of Andrew Yang.

The campaign that Yang is running and the response so far to his candidacy is pleasantly surprising. In a political scene where everything is dire, negative, and “us-versus-them,” he brings a levity and sanity to the discourse. Even though I disagree with a lot of his proposed solution, I don’t disagree on the diagnosis. It’s a relief to see someone in mainstream politics making a dent on a platform of rationalism and open-mindedness.

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Weekend Reading: Darwinian Gastronomy, Humboldt, and Taxes

November 16, 2019 • #

🌶 Darwinian Gastronomy

Turns out cultures from warmer climates evolved a taste for spicy foods to combat the presence of more diverse bacteria:

Alas, nothing in nature turns out to be that simple. Researchers now suggest that a taste for spices served a vital evolutionary purpose: keeping our ancestors alive. Spices, it turns out, can kill poisonous bacteria and fungi that may contaminate our food. In other words, developing a taste for these spices could be good for our health. And since food spoils more quickly in hotter weather, it’s only natural that warmer climates have more bacteria-killing spices.

🌲 The Pioneering Maps of Alexander von Humboldt

The German scientist Alexander von Humboldt is one of the most important figures in conservation and geography. He was one of the first scientists to use maps as a critical tool for communicating his discoveries and ideas:

Another of Humboldt’s groundbreaking illustrations came out of his five-year voyage to Central and South America with the French botanist Aimé Bonpland. In 1802, Humboldt and Bonpland ascended Chimborazo, a volcano just below the equator that was believed at the time to be the highest mountain in the world (at 20,564 feet, it’s more than 8,000 feet shorter than Mount Everest). The pair documented the mountain’s plant life, from the tropical rainforest at its base to the lichen clinging to rocks above the treeline. The image below, which Humboldt called Tableau Physique in the French version of his original publication, organizes these observations in an intuitively visual way, showing Chimborazo in cross-section, with text indicating which species lived at different elevations on the mountain.

💰 Connecting Some Dots on Taxes

There was a roil over a Bill Gates interview from the recent DealBook conference, specifically around his comments on the upcoming election and his uncertainties around the Democratic candidates’ tax policies and consequences they might have. As is usual for Twitter, the rage machine was in full effect around Gates’s comments about “how much he’d have left” if Elizabeth Warren had her way.

The notion commonly tossed around with regard to billionaires is that there’s no way that level of wealth accumulation could happen through non-nefarious (or illegal) means. Kevin Williamson does a good job in this piece picking apart the logic here (or lack thereof) around “wealth transfer” — a disingenuous way to describe a phenomenon where there was no coercion involved.

The idea that there is some big national slop bucket marked “income” and that Gates et al. are grabbing up more than their fair share is breathtakingly primitive. A relatively small number of high-growth firms has accounted for a very large share of economic growth in the United States in the past several decades. That represents wealth creation, not a wealth transfer.

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Weekend Reading: Iceland, the Use of Knowledge, and CLI Search

September 14, 2019 • #

⚖️ The Use of Knowledge in Society

I’ve been reading some of Hayek’s famous articles this week. This one is all about what he probably considered one of the most important concepts, since these basic ideas form a central thesis for most of his works. His argument was for bottoms-up, decentralized systems of decision-making instead of centralized, top-down systems:

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources—if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.

🇮🇸 Islandia

This short film of drone footage showcases the amazing, almost-alien, landscapes of Iceland. This guy’s channel has a lot of interesting quick films like this.

🔎 fzf

A fuzzy finder for the command line. Just install it from Homebrew with brew install fzf and improve your file searching on the shell. No more having to remember find command syntax.

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Weekend Reading: Intellectual Humility, Scoping, and Gboard

August 31, 2019 • #

🛤 Missing the Light at the End of the Tunnel

Honest postmortems are insightful to get the inside backstory on what happened behind the scenes with a company. In this one, Jason Crawford goes into what went wrong with Fieldbook before they shut it down and were acquired by Flexport a couple years ago:

Now, with a year to digest, I think this is true and was a core mistake. I vastly underestimated the resources it was going to take—in time, effort and money—to build a launchable product in the space.

In the 8 years since we launched the first version of Fulcrum, we’ve had (fortunately) smaller versions of this experience over and over. Each new major overhaul, large feature, or product business model change we’ve undertaken has probably cost us twice the time we initially expected it to. Scoping is a science itself that everyone has to learn.

In Jeff Bezos’s 2018 letter to Amazon shareholders, he discusses the topic of high standards: how to have them and how to get your team to have them. (As a side note, if you don’t read Bezos’s shareholder letters, you’re missing out. Even if you’ve already read all the business and startup advice in the world, you will find new and keen insights there.)

Bezos makes a few interesting points, but I’ll focus on one: To have high standards in practice, you need realistic expectations about the scope of effort required.

As a simple example, he mentions learning to do a handstand. Some people think they should be able to learn a handstand in two weeks; in reality, it takes six months. If you go in thinking it will take two weeks, not only do you not learn it in two weeks, you also don’t learn it in six months—you learn it never, because you get discouraged and quit. Bezos says a similar thing applies to the famous six-page memos that substitute for slide decks at Amazon (the ones that are read silently in meetings). Some people expect they can write a good memo the night before the meeting; in reality, you have to start a week before, in order to allow time for drafting, feedback, and editing.

🏛 Ten Ways to Defuse Political Arrogance

David Blankenhorn calls for a return of intellectual humility in public discourse.

At the personal level, intellectual humility counterbalances narcissism, self-centeredness, pridefulness, and the need to dominate others. Conversely, intellectual humility seems to correlate positively with empathy, responsiveness to reasons, the ability to acknowledge what one owes (including intellectually) to others, and the moral capacity for equal regard of others. Arguably its ultimate fruit is a more accurate understanding of oneself and one’s capacities. Intellectual humility also appears frequently to correlate positively with successful leadership (due especially to the link between intellectual humility and trustworthiness) and with rightly earned self-confidence.

⌨️ The Machine Intelligence Behind Gboard

A fun technical overview of how the Google team is using predictive machine learning models to make typing on mobile devices more efficient.

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Jonathan Haidt on the Righteous Mind →

July 9, 2019 • #

Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind was one of my favorite recent nonfiction books I’ve read in the last few years. It’s one of the most objective, deep analyses of a question that’s interested me for years: why do people have such fundamental and deep disagreements on how the world works or should work? Why are political left and right seemingly so far apart from one another on such fundamental levels? Haidt’s perspective as an expert in moral psychology provides insights into the foundations of how we’re different and how we’re the same.

Haidt argues that reason often serves our emotions rather than the mind being in charge. We can be less interested in the truth and more interested in finding facts and stories that fit preconceived narratives and ideology. We are genetically predisposed to work with each other rather than being purely self-interested and our genes influence our morality and ideology as well. Haidt tries to understand why people come to different visions of morality and politics and how we might understand each other despite those differences.

This is an EconTalk interview with Haidt on the book from 2014. It’s a good primer on the ideas and hopefully whets the appetite to read — a highly recommended book, for sure.

I love EconTalk’s show notes. Each episode contains an additional many hours worth of interesting reading material, links, books, and more. Great stuff.

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Weekend Reading: Private DNS, Opportunity, and Millennial Socialism

February 23, 2019 • #

🔌 Announcing 1.1.1.1: Privacy-First DNS

This is an old announcement, but new to me. CloudFlare now hosts privacy-centric DNS at 1.1.1.1, available to all:

We talked to the APNIC team about how we wanted to create a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system. They thought it was a laudable goal. We offered Cloudflare’s network to receive and study the garbage traffic in exchange for being able to offer a DNS resolver on the memorable IPs. And, with that, 1.1.1.1 was born.

🛰 Opportunity is No More

The Mars rover Opportunity is now out of commission. This Twitter thread from Jacob Margolis goes through a timeline of what happened to the rover. It first landed and began exploring the Martian surface in 2004. The system exceeeded its intended planned operational lifespan by “14 years and 46 days”. An incredible feat of engineering.

🏛 Millennial Socialism

I don’t post much about politics here, preferring to keep most of that to myself. I did find this piece an interesting perspective on the rise of a particular flavor of socialist-oriented ideology, and the too-common notion that so much should be guided, directed, or outright owned by government. On the risk of regulatory capture vs the value of the market:

Bureaucracy at any level provides opportunities for special interests to capture influence. The purest delegation of power is to individuals in a free market.

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Progress Report: The Federalist Papers

December 4, 2018 • #

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 Confederation to do the job of maximizing the combined strength of the states (for various reasons outlined in the essays).

One of the biggest takeaways so far, somewhat unexpected to me, is the depth of research done by the authors to make their case. They draw on a rich historical record and present research to identify pros and cons of what’s been tried in past institutions, what’s worked, and what hasn’t. On the history of the Swiss Confederacy:

The connection among the Swiss cantons scarcely amounts to a confederacy; though it is sometimes cited as an instance of the stability of such institutions. They have no common treasury; no common troops even in war; no common coin; no common judicatory; nor any other common mark of sovereignty. They are kept together by the peculiarity of their topographical position; by their individual weakness and insignificancy; by the fear of powerful neighbors, to one of which they were formerly subject; by the few sources of contention among a people of such simple and homogeneous manners; by their joint interest in their dependent possessions; by the mutual aid they stand in need of, for suppressing insurrections and rebellions, an aid expressly stipulated and often required and afforded; and by the necessity of some regular and permanent provision for accommodating disputes among the cantons.

Looking to historical evidence to validate or reject aspects of governing models helped guide us to the right approach for our new government; the record of trial and error is immensely helpful if you respect and understand the context. The varied governance structures of history allowed the Federalists to make a strong case for centralization (but just the right amount of it). The Founders also sought to maximize freedom of individuals and the states they thought crucial to a stable system.

In Federalist No. 20, Madison even references this fact directly:

I make no apology for having dwelt so long on the contemplation of these federal precedents. Experience is the oracle of truth; and where its responses are unequivocal, they ought to be conclusive and sacred.

“Experience is the oracle of truth.” Model new systems around what has previously worked, make adjustments, and ensure the system is an “anti-fragile” one that responds and gets stronger over time.

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Francis Fukuyama on The Origins of Political Order

November 29, 2018 • #

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.

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Elections, 2018

November 6, 2018 • #

Voting is something most Americans take for granted. In our work we cross paths with a lot of folks in other countries where this luxury is rare, corrupt, or non-existent. Humanitarian projects and security work allow us to see firsthand how much less individual freedom and respect citizens have in so many places around the world.

Each year when I walk over to the polls to vote and see all the other people out to cast theirs, I think about how cool it is to get to contribute. Our system is definitely not without its problems, but listening to the average day on Twitter or cable news hour, you’d think we lived in an authoritarian police state. I’ve been to a couple of tame authoritarian countries and I don’t think most Americans could conceive of a place where Twitter could be banned for weeks by a single leader’s decree. We’ve got improvements to make, but at least we get to try and make them ourselves.

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