Short things, kept in the open. A commonplace book, formerly rabbitholes.garden.

Thoughtful essay on the role of colleges in the age of AI:

The Question We Can No Longer Dodge

If AI can already produce an A– college essay in 30 seconds — on demand, at scale — then what exactly is college for?

Is it certification? Content delivery? A rite of passage? Social sorting?

Because if a machine can now flawlessly mimic the outputs we’ve long treated as evidence of learning, then the value of higher education can no longer rest on product. It must rest on the formation of actual human capability — judgment, originality, ethical reasoning, collaborative intelligence, and the ability to think in public under pressure.

Unless universities can actually do that— with conviction, not nostalgia; through redesign, not rhetoric — they will lose not only the public’s confidence, but something even more fatal: the employers’ trust that a degree still signals real human competence.

If LLMs aren’t making you feel like shit, you’re not thinking hard enough: During the Q and A after his talk, Cowen said that LLMs are already “kicking our butt” at many things, including poetry. In fact, Cowen insisted, LLMs already write poems that are as good as the median poem by Chilean Nobel Prize-winner, Pablo…

A few thoughts on people doing dumb shit with money.

Thinking about this passage: Everyone agrees that fun is good. Yet I’m sure we can all agree that most people do not seem to be having fun the majority of the time. This is because having fun, or at least having a balanced fun portfolio, is a skill. Most people tend to default to easy dopamine: scrolling Tiktok, online…

The world to come:

Amazon’s U.S. work force has more than tripled since 2018 to almost 1.2 million. But Amazon’s automation team expects the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the United States it would otherwise need by 2027. That would save about 30 cents on each item that Amazon picks, packs and delivers to customers.

Executives told Amazon’s board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to continue to avoid adding to its U.S. work force in the coming years, even though they expect to sell twice as many products by 2033. That would translate to more than 600,000 people whom Amazon didn’t need to hire.

At facilities designed for superfast deliveries, Amazon is trying to create warehouses that employ few humans at all. And documents show that Amazon’s robotics team has an ultimate goal to automate 75 percent of its operations.

This is funny:

A century later Jean-Jacques Rousseau urged a different approach, one of trust in feelings and intuition, and of looking to the inner self for answers: “All the evil I ever did in my life was the result of reflection,” he wrote. “And the little good I have been able to do was the result of impulse.”

From the book Framers

Interesting thoughts by Jesús Fernández-Villaverde: Mokyr has long argued that Europe’s Republic of Letters encouraged broad scientific and technological innovation by providing a setting where new ideas could be evaluated and disseminated. For him, Europe occupied the ideal midpoint between political fragmentation and…

The scale at which China is operating and the foresight they have is amazing: Beijing also is building a national innovation system — linking academia, industry and defense — designed to bolster China’s military and technological strength. In recent years, dozens of China’s top 60 universities have established an…

I read this thought-provoking essay by Kaushik Basu, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It puts its finger on many of the causes that have led to our age of degeneration—an era where things aren’t imploding but slowly decaying, thanks to our collective ignorance, apathy, and, perhaps most importantly, a…

From this post that’s overflowing with potential rabbit holes. Also pay attention to the beautiful framing of things-brilliant writing:

Han Byung-Chul says that ritual is repetition without purpose, a way of founding community through shared uselessness. Performance seeks applause; ritual seeks duration. In the performance culture of the West, even grief must be productive, posted, monetised. In the ritual culture of the East, continuity is its own defence: the temple rebuilt, the porcelain recast, the festival repeated until memory becomes weather. Between them stands the modern remainder—too connected to vanish, too surplus to command.

This is good financial advice from Ross Barkan: One complication of the n+1 listing is not so much the salary itself but the sheer number of responsibilities. A managing editor must oversee all three print issues, supervise fact-checking and proofreading, serve as “product manager” for n+1 Books, plan and execute…

Wonderful article by Jared Henderson: There are many reasons to be a Doomer, to be blackpilled, to decide that nothing matters or, even worse, that things do matter but that there is nothing to be done about it. On top of that, it is cool to be a Doomer. You feel like you are above it all. You understand the magnitude…

Interesting polemic on billionaires and the ultra-wealthy: The Hollow King, wired for insatiability, cannot pause. Acceleration itself has become a drug. Sufficiency is inconceivable. Each breakthrough is only a threshold toward the next. Competition becomes an arms race: if I don’t do it, someone else will. This logic…

Banger. The ‘Instagram Generation’ now experiences the present as an anticipated memory. - Daniel Kahneman This wonderful article touches on several themes close to my heart — living an intellectual life, what it means to pursue knowledge, the value of solitude and silence, the culture of optimization, and more. I kept…

The Sagan Standard: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (sometimes shortened to ECREE),\[1\] also known as the Sagan standard, is an aphorism popularized by science communicator Carl Sagan. He used the phrase in his 1979 book Broca’s Brain and the 1980 television program Cosmos. It has been described…

Brutal but true. Dying from adulterated or fake drugs is quite common in India. Only when you have a high number of cases from a single cluster does it catch the attention of the media or of the authorities. Otherwise, it is just another statistic of dying unnecessarily in India. Human life is cheap in India. Almost 70…

From Letters to a Young poet by Rainer Maria Rilke: There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most…

A few good rabbit holes:

1. The illusion of knowledge

2. AI capex boom

3. China and weaponized interdependence

What a beautiful line from Albert Camus In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. This line is from his essay Return to Tipasa: At noon on the half-sandy slopes covered with heliotropes like a foam left by the furious waves of the last few days as they withdrew, I watched…

I’ve been unable to think about this line by Tolstoy: There can be only one permanent revolution—a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man. How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of…

Henry Oliver on how to have good taste: When we prioritise our own reaction to art, we assume that those reactions are about the art. But if you are misreading a piece of writing, without knowing it, your feelings will be more to do with you than with the writing, and thus not a response to the writing at all. When we…

Here’s how the great Terrence Tao uses AI. Lot’s of takeaways here for us lesser mortals. I was able to use an extended conversation with an AI to help answer a MathOverflow question . I had already conducted a theoretical analysis suggesting that the answer to this question was negative, but needed some numerical…

Beautiful perspective. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already…

I was reading this beautiful post by Mark Clavier and this passage reminded of a quote that Steven Pinker often says:

Nostalgia has long been progressivism’s favourite straw man. To dismiss something as “just nostalgic” is to pass sentence without hearing the case. Architects do it when they wave away Neoclassical or Gothic revivals as unserious. Politicians do it when they cast anyone who remembers “the good old days” as fearful, backward, or selfish. And to be fair, there is a shallow kind of nostalgia abroad on the Right—a yearning for 1950s America, for Britain’s imperial splendour, or for some hazy cultural coherence that likely never existed outside of memory’s wishful retouching.

The quote:

The best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory (Franklin Pierce Adams).

For the origins of the quote, see quote investigator.

By Venkatesh Rao:

You’re more likely to get what you vaguely and subconsciously want than things you try to pursue with explicit targeting and pumped-up motivation. Focus inevitably wavers. Motivation eventually slumps. But subconscious, barely acknowledged dispositions and tendencies tend to drive steady compounding effort over years, through peaks and troughs, and automatically account for energy constraints and take advantage of defocused peripheral vision.

Of course, this is no real guarantee that you’ll like what you get. Whether you pursue explicitly or vaguely, be careful what you wish for.

From Insurance Catastrophe Resilience Report 2023-24: The cost of extreme weather in Australia is rising. Three new graphs show just how much the cost of extreme weather is increasing, the growth of extreme weather costs as a proportion of the economy, and the impact on insurer sustaina The cost of extreme weather is…

As always, another thoughtful article by Ethan Mollick on what AI can and cannot do: Agents are here. They can do real work, and while that work is still limited, it is valuable and increasing. But the same technology that can replicate academic papers in minutes can also generate 17 versions of a PowerPoint deck that…

A few links for your consideration.