Friday Fodder #27
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
Guys, really, not much happened this week. It was mostly just the reverberations from past news. Ok, tariffs happened. But then they didn’t. Then they did. Maybe in 30 days. But also tax cuts! And USAID is not looking so hot right now, which is a change. But that’s it.
Wait, OpenAI released their own DeepResearch too (vs. Google Gemini DeepResearch), reminding us how horribly bad AI companies are at naming products. And the DNC had a big meeting, reminding us all they know the winning message. Girls sports are once again just for girls, not boys. Netanyahu visits the White House. Elon does more Elon things. Marco Rubio visits Panama and has them pull out of China’s Belt and Road initiative. Andrej Karpathy introduces “vibe coding”.
So maybe there’s a lot happening. To use the parlance of the current zeitgeist..
You can just do things.
So go do them. Get off your phone. Get off Twitter/X. Stop slathering over what Trump or Sanders or Musk or Warren or Altman or anyone else did and go do things. Even if it’s just take a walk. Yes, I’m talking to myself.
On to the reading!
Timely
Trumpian Policy as Cultural Policy - A year or two ago, Tyler Cowen was one of the first to say that it was the vibes that mattered most. He was right, and here he’s saying the same thing: you shouldn’t think of any of this as real policy; it’s all just culture and vibes.
Compute In America: A Policy Playbook - An exceptional overview of the US energy situation within the context of cutting-edge AI. It’s not just the problems either, this one comes with a big set of policy ideas to actually solve the problems we’ll face.
What Is Going Wrong With The Anti-Woke? - A lot of people are feeling like the Aella quote right now: “I feel like i got friendly with the anti-woke coalition over the past few years, but now it feels like they're walking off a plank into extremism and I feel frustrated about it. Being anti a bad thing doesn't make you right by default; righteous revenge is not compassion.” A reminder that real answers are usually not found in pendulum swings.
Trump 2.0: A Survival Guide For Democrats - We desperately need a coherent opposition party right now, and the DNC still seems stuck in the same tired language of 2020, unwilling to change and unable to move past the same transparent politics. They’re under a shock & awe campaign right now and some pragmatism would go a long way.
Timeless
Science Is A Strong Link Problem - One of my favorite substack articles ever, and the one that made me start reading everything Adam Mastroianni wrote. Ever since, I’ve become convinced that most policy differences end up being a perspective difference between strong link folks and weak link folks.
This Is The Best Career Life Advice I Ever Got - Ryan Holiday with timeless advice on what matters when thinking about what really matters in your career.
The True Meaning of Verso l’Alto - “To the heights!” is more than just the motto of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati. It is a beautiful reminder that “there is adventure greater than mountains can offer.”
Tell Me About Yourself: LLMs Are Aware Of Their Learned Behaviors - You know all those studies that say if you tell a kid they’re smart, they might me inclined to be more lazy. Or if someone hears they’re ugly all the time, they’ll be more inclined to believe it. This is that but for LLMs. A very weird, very deep dive into the anthropomorphic mess that is model awareness.
Books
Galileo’s Middle Finger by Alice Dreger - There’s a line in the movie K-PAX where Kevin Spacey’s character (supposedly an alien) eats a banana whole - with the peel on - and then remarks, “Your produce alone has been worth the trip.” That’s how I feel about this book’s title; the metaphor alone was worth it. Galileo was reburied a few decades after his death and the Catholic Church had time to simmer down a bit. When this happened someone - in a fit of hagiography - cut off Galileo’s middle finger so that it could be venerated. Why his middle finger? Well, this is the finger that 16th century Italians used to point, so it’s what Galileo used to point towards the heavens. In the modern world, his middle finger has a new and delicious dimension of irony and rejection of arguments from authority. The rest of the book holds up to the metaphor. Dreger explores the relationship between science and activism through some of the most hot-button issues of today: the reasons behind trans women’s desire to transition, studies of ethnic peoples in Brazil, and intersex people’s place in the LGBTQ world. It ends up being a study about things that you can’t say out loud. You can still visit Galileo’s finger in Florence, by the way.
Tweets
Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!
🤣
The world is amazing. Cheers!