Links
3 stars
How the West was wrought | Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning
14-minute read
One irony of the West’s foundations is that even while a broad consensus holds that the West began with the Greeks and the Jews, with Athens and Jerusalem, later history of these two peoples left both outside of the ambit of the West. The historical headwaters of Western civilization diverged into separate branches, with radically different histories shaping unique and disparate worldviews. After the Greeks and Jews were absorbed into a unified Rome 2,000 years ago, that world shattered into disparate fragments. The East Roman world became Byzantium, a related civilization, but distinct from the Western Roman world. It is from the latter that the West, the Occident in its mature form, evolved. While the nation-states of Western Europe were coalescing after 1500, before their independence in the 19th century, the Greeks lived as dhimmis, second-class citizens, under Turco-Muslim domination, a sad denouement for the heirs of Byzantium. Meanwhile, though the Jews of Europe are indisputably Western today, until the Jewish Enlightenment of the 19th century, Jews and Jewish culture were in the West, but distinctly not of it. Their cultural and religious traditions were tolerated, but for centuries they moved on a parallel and separate track.
The AI Kids Take San Francisco | New York Magazine
17-minute read
I am in San Francisco trying to get away from that kind of mind. The kids I spend a little time with speak with disdain of B2B software and with respect for hard problems. They are accustomed to taking off their shoes and placing them in a pile in the entryway of every living space and every workspace, the division between the two having been completely effaced. They are hiring, or their AI agents are hiring, or they were themselves hired by a computer program simulating human intelligence. They are 18 and 23 and 28, and they arrived last month, or last week, or earlier today. They are raising or have raised or are writing code on which to raise; the percentage chance the tools they are creating will destroy humanity is known, with some ironic distance, as P(doom).
Original link | Archive.is link
2 stars
North Korea is becoming even more repressive and threatening | The Economist
7-minute read
When Mr Kim first came to power, many observers predicted his regime’s swift collapse. Instead he appears to have become more internally secure, more threatening to the world through weapons development, less isolated diplomatically and more resilient economically. A reckoning may yet come: Bashar al-Assad’s recent fall in Syria shows how quickly brutal dictatorships can crumble. But in the meantime North Korea’s regime has become even more menacing both to the world and its own people.
Original link | Archive.is link
OpenAI’s Windows Play | Stratechery
7-minute read
Sora, AI Bicycles, and Meta Disruption | Stratechery
12-minute read
It’s fair to wonder if these app experiences will measure up to these company’s self-built apps or websites, just as there are questions about just how well the company’s Instant Checkout will convert; what is notable, however, is that I disagree that this represents a “push to integrate…with the rest of the web”.
This is the opposite: this is a push to make ChatGPT the operating system of the future. Apps won’t be on your phone or in a browser; they’ll be in ChatGPT, and if they aren’t, they simply will not exist for ChatGPT users. That, by extension, means the burden of making these integrations work — and those conversions performant — will be on third party developers, not OpenAI. This is the power that comes from owning users, and OpenAI is flexing that power in a major way.
This is what was unlocked by Sora: all sorts of people without the time or inclination or skills or equipment to make videos could suddenly do just that — and they absolutely loved it. And why wouldn’t they? To be creative is to be truly human — to actually think of something yourself, instead of simply passively consuming — and AI makes creativity as accessible as a simple prompt.
I think this is pretty remarkable, so much so that I’ve done a complete 180 on Sora: this new app from OpenAI may be the single most exciting manifestation of AI yet, and the most encouraging in terms of AI’s impact on humans. Everyone — including lots of people in my Sora feed — are leaning into the concept of AI slop, which I get: we are looking at a world of infinite machine-generated content, and a lot of it is going to be terrible.
At the same time, how incredible is it to give everyone with an iPhone a creative outlet?
MrBeast on His Quest to Turn YouTube Fame Into an Entertainment Empire | Bloomberg
12-minute read
The master of viral videos now has a CEO to rein in spending on Lambos—and give his “banger content” an even wider reach.
Original link | Archive.is link
In Defense of Dan Brown | The Garden of Forking Paths
7-minute read
Two weeks ago, I grabbed a book from a stack on the table of my local Waterstones (after a suitably defensible peruse of the new nonfiction sections). Looking around for anyone I knew, I slipped the book on the counter, face down.
“Good to see you again,” the bookseller said. “How did your book signing go a few months back? We’ve still got a few copies of Fluke, I think.”
I froze. He had recognized me. There was no socially dignified means of escape: he knew. I, an allegedly serious academic and author, had come, on release day, to buy The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown.
“It’s not Dickens or Austen,” I muttered, “but he’s pretty good at plot.”
“We don’t judge here,” the bookseller replied with a knowing smile. “Would you like a bag?”
I nodded, looking away. Some little secrets of secrets are best kept hidden.
[...]
Whenever a Dan Brown thriller is released, millions of readers get excited. Some are looking forward to a bit of escapism, a fun beach or airplane read. For others, it may be the only book they read this year. Roughly 46 percent of Americans don’t read or listen to any books in a given year; the corresponding figure for Britons is 40 percent. That’s civilizational decline, bottled in one statistic. And yet, Reddit forums are full of user comments about how The Da Vinci Code was the first book that hooked them, beginning a lifetime of reading. That’s more than most authors can boast. And it’s unequivocally good for society when reluctant people get enticed to read.
Economists Should Do More to Fight Misinformation | Richard Hanania’s Newsletter
5-minute read
Yet while climatologists, virologists, and political scientists care a lot about false information regarding topics they study, economists seem to be missing in action. To check my intuitions, I searched for “economic(s) misinformation” on Google Scholar and received 107 results. In comparison I got 1,530 results for “climate misinformation,” 1,650 for “covid misinformation,” and 11,300 for “vaccine misinformation.” I asked ChatGPT if there were other phrases I could search for to get at the same idea, and it recommended a few like “economic misperceptions” and “economic disinformation,” but this didn’t change the results.
[...]
I wish that elites of all types would conceive of themselves less as members of a tribe in red/blue terms and more on the side of reason, and when individuals have relevant expertise, they should use it to defend the knowledge that has been produced by their field. In practical terms, this would mean attacking economic illiteracy no matter where it comes from on the political spectrum. In addition to individuals adopting different attitudes, we could benefit from the creation of institutions devoted to combating economic misinformation. Truth is valuable for its own sake, but the benefits it can bring to the world will always be limited by the degree to which it is drowned in a sea of ignorance.
1 star
She Faked Her Way into Yale. Then Things Unraveled. | Air Mail
4-minute read
Katherina Lynn had only been Katherina Lynn for a month before she was expelled from Yale for admissions fraud.
Lynn, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, says that growing up in a Chinese family in Northern California, she always hated her given name. She says she was bullied so much for it that, halfway through her sophomore year of high school, she decided to become someone new. Someone with a Western name and an Ivy League degree who left her detractors in the dust. That’s how “Katherina Lynn” was born.
Convinced that her chances of success as an Asian kid with average grades were less than ideal in the ultra-competitive Bay Area—for good reason, given the proven anti-Asian bias in Ivy admissions processes, which culminated in a Supreme Court lawsuit penalizing Harvard in 2023—Lynn swapped studying for identity hunting. After careful research, she landed on the 2,000-person town of Tioga, North Dakota, as her escape ticket.
Original link | Archive.is link
Don’t Bet Against Bari Weiss | The Atlantic
3-minute read
Caitlin Flanagan:
Weiss’s hiring at CBS isn’t a reeling-and-digesting story. It’s a business story. Everyone in journalism has known for years that there’s been a huge opportunity for a publication that employs the traditional methods of U.S. journalism—reporting, deep sourcing, fact-checking, fearlessness—to subjects that either don’t get covered enough or get covered only from a certain perspective. If creating such an enterprise seems simple to you, you don’t know the territory. It’s one of the hardest things you can attempt in media: it’s hugely expensive, and it has to fight for space in the attention economy at a time when Americans’ drive for knowledge seems to be powering down.
That she will somehow denigrate the storied CBS News—it has been reported that some staff members have delivered minatory instructions to not “mess with the Golden Goose(s) of ‘60 Minutes’ and ‘CBS News Sunday Morning,’” as though West 57th Street were the O.K. Corral—is a complete misreading of her and her vision, which is to bring the traditional methods of American journalism back to the news, and also to build a culture of ideas. This is exactly what she’s done at The Free Press, which covers a variety of stories, the most popular of which—Uri Berliner’s explanation of NPR’s decline, for example—are those that hold powerful institutions to account.
Original link | Archive.is link
Age and Cognitive Ability | Heretical Insights
15-minute read
The truth, however, is that intelligence actually grows into at least middle adulthood (45-60), irrespective of whether it is measured using subtests categorized as being related to fluid or crystalized intelligence.
[...]
All of the research summaries cited above relied entirely on cross sectional studies for their conclusions—IQ was assessed at the same time for people of various ages, and the age-related pattern was examined. The problem with this approach is that age at a given time is perfectly correlated with year of birth, which itself is correlated negatively with IQ among samples of the same age measured at different times. This is known as the Flynn effect.
The unraveling of Obamacare? | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
Paul Krugman has a recent post defending the exchange subsidies and tax credits that the Republicans wish to cut, talking with Jonathan Cohn about the “premium apocalypse” (and here). Whether or not one agrees with Krugman normatively, the arguments if anything convince me that Obamacare probably is not financially or politically stable.
How AI is shaking up the study of earthquakes | Understanding AI
6-minute read
Over the past seven years, AI tools based on computer imaging have almost completely automated one of the fundamental tasks of seismology: detecting earthquakes. What used to be the task of human analysts and later, simpler computer programs, can now be done automatically and quickly by machine learning tools.
How Immigration is Changing the Black-White Earnings Gap | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
Results reveal remarkable earnings advances among 2nd-generation Black immigrants, opposite to the well-documented widening in overall Black-White earnings gap. Among women, 2nd-generation Black workers have earnings higher than or equal to White women; among men, they earn 10% less at the median, but the gap vanishes at the top decile.