Newsletter
Mechanical success vs nepotism and luck and other things
November 1, 2024
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
Mechanical success vs nepotism and luck
Excerpt: People will often say something along the lines of: “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” Largely this is true. Nepotism is a very greasy grease. But I want to talk about some under-rated alternatives. An alternative that often looks a little like luck. Bad luck, to be specific. But we can flip it.
Main idea: We usually complain about systems ‘getting in our way’, with arbitrary criteria that determine success. But this goes the other way too. Much of my success and that of those around me is similarly mechanical. Not luck, effort, or nepotism.
The uneven effects of AI on the economy. Paywalled so try a paywall remover like archive.ph. Tyler Cowan reflects on AI in the American economy, but seems fairly portable:
Which leads me to a prediction: Companies and institutions in the more fluid and competitive sectors of the economy will face heavy pressure to adopt AI. Those not in such sectors, will not.
So, e.g. programming or design will. Govt, education, and non-profits won’t. Individuals will, institutions won’t.
The most interesting prediction:
As AI-using sectors become cheap, they will be a smaller part of GDP. The remaining parts of GDP will be “AI hesitant,” which in turn will make it harder for AI to keep on boosting GDP growth.
So on this account AI has a peak approaching. Let’s see.
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Character Amnesia In China.
I could not recall how to write the Chinese characters for the word ‘sneeze’. I asked my three friends to write the characters for me and, to my surprise, all three simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the characters. I thought to myself: Peking University is usually considered the ‘Harvard of China’. Can one imagine three PhD students in the English Literature Department at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word ‘sneeze’? Yet, this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China.
An exploration of why is mildly interesting, but I’m sharing mostly for the context—very diverting.
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What happens if Americans claim asylum from a Trump regime? Heartening, it is not.
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Will Africa become China’s Middle-East? Reflections on whether growing unrest will prompt China to intervene in African states as the US has in South America/the Middle East.
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The End of the NFL’s Concussion Crisis. Interesting account of the silence:
Fans, it seems, have chosen to believe the NFL has largely done what it can. “They addressed the majority of the ethical issues — the stuff that made them look bad — and now suddenly the story is ‘It’s just sad,’” Nowinski said. “What people are missing is that football has gotten more ethical, but it’s not necessarily safer.”
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Interesting history of the Rorschach
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Unsupervised AI creates religion, memecoin, is now millionaire:
Somehow, an AI promoting its own religion and memecoin feels like a warning shot from the future. When I first started digging into what makes Truth Terminal tick, I had no idea how deep the rabbit holes would go.
Bizarre, concerning in a hard to place manner, very informative. Excellent read. Good for anyone against my argument that AI is not that scary.
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,