During our Zoom chat I was greeted by a cartoon image of a large green chicken and the digitally modified voice of Doomberg’s head writer. I wondered how to keep appropriately composed without someone’s reactions to mirror, and I really wondered who could be behind the poultry picture, as anyone might. But as soon as it started speaking it really didn’t matter. The large green chicken came off as being around three standard deviations above mean intelligence, at a minimum, and wildly more magnanimous and passionate than most people I knew personally. Super smart, but very down to earth and extraordinarily conscientious.

I thought to myself that this was why the chicken was so successful, no one on earth can be this passionate about something and fail. We talked about this passion in our chat and I found it to be one of the most valuable bits of information Neonarrative has squeezed out of someone. And that’s only one small part of a tremendous body of ideas, which I would consider essential reading for anyone wanting to build something of their own. 

The following is an editing and distilled version of our conversation. It’s my favorite that I’ve done so far. To read more from Doomberg subscribe to their Substack here.

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> On the success of Doomberg

Sotonye: You run the best finance publication online, and you do it anonymously. It’s an incredible feat.

Doomberg: That’s very kind of you to say. We're a small team, and certainly we're very proud of the work that we do. We put a lot of passion into our product, and we believe it’s what we were meant to do, which is really a wonderful thing. It certainly doesn't feel like work. It’s the “work of our lives,” which ironically is the opposite of work. If you can discover what it is that you were meant to do in life, Lord knows that you should just keep doing it.

I personally get out of bed every morning and attack each day with “an enthusiasm unknown to mankind,” to quote Jim Harbaugh, one of my heroes. To be in a position to do that is truly a special thing. It's a blessing. It’s a blessing that we don't take for granted. It's one that we have to pinch ourselves every day to remind ourselves that it’s real. We add a unique offering to the market: we bring the industrial lens to the energy discussion, and wrap it all in a finance package. It's been a good run that’s gone well beyond our wildest dreams, and we're super grateful for it.

> On Labor vs. Capital and attaining true security 

Sotonye: This reminds me a lot of a lecture given by Peter Thiel where he describes working in finance for a while, at Credit Suisse I believe. The air inside his firm was filled with a desire to break out and escape the world of finance and do something more artistic, more authentic, and all the while the general public just wanted to break in. Most people on the inside never left, maybe because of security guarantees, or maybe because of the status benefits, these things are important. So it's a very interesting thing when someone has enough initiative and risk tolerance to go and pursue something independently. And that's what this sounds like here.

Doomberg: We’ve often pondered this internally when our friends in different industries, who often feel like beaten corporate puppies, come and see us and marvel at what we've built. They have this very real and visceral desire to join us on our journey, but can't ever quite make the leap. There’s this deep addiction to certainty that I believe holds them back.

If you're in a shitty job, everyday means waking up to do something you hate doing, you're miserable. But the digits in your bank account keep going up, and so you feel like this is the thing you should be doing when, ironically, the digits would explode higher if you only did what you love all day. If you find whatever it is you were meant to do, the market rewards you handsomely. Here at Doomberg we are so far beyond what we could have achieved if we continued “successfully'' climbing the corporate ladder that it's ridiculous. And ultimately it's so much sweeter when you do it on your own that the monetary measure is the least important measure of them all. The analogy that we use with our friends who are stuck is the idea of “Labor versus Capital.” You could be very well compensated on the side of Labor, but you're still Labor. Somebody above you decides whether you have a job and how big your bonus is, and so on. If you go on the hunt as Labor and you take down a bison, Capital gets to decide which piece of the bison you get to eat. 

But if you're your own Capital and you go on the hunt for yourself, when you happen upon a bison, you get it all. Nobody gets to tell you how to portion it, how much you get to eat and how much to put aside. The decisions are yours to make as your own Capital, as your own boss. And I can tell you, having hunted big game in the corporate world, that the first small successes we snared as entrepreneurs were so much sweeter, so much more satisfying for the soul than any reward in the previous life. Once you’ve experienced it you can never go back to a job, I could never be somebody's Labor ever again. I just couldn't. 

Many really talented people are trapped by the fixation on an illusory security. In fact, they’re not very secure at all, their employers would cut them in a moment. As soon as it becomes worth two more cents a share to fire you, you're gone. There is no security, it's only perceived. The only true security is building a business on your own that you own and control. This means in part that you have to try and fail, and we failed a lot.  What seems like overnight success is really just the integral of years of trial and error and failure. But we eat, drink, breathe, sleep, live the Doomberg brand. We love what we do and I think that comes through in our product and explains why we're successful. You have to fail, and when you finally do succeed, it's life altering. So many talented people trapped in a prison of Labor could be successful entrepreneurs if only they had the courage to try finding and doing what they love.

> On the climate change debate

Sotonye: So there's a cultural furor around climate change. The most widely cited understanding of the problem is that it's anthropocentric, that our use of oil is doing unjustified, irreparable harm to nature. Alex Epstein, the author of the pro-fossil fuel work Fossil Future, rejects that framing entirely and says any value standard that places non-human life over fuel dependent human flourishing is untenable. And that makes a lot of sense to me. Is that the best framing for the environmental impacts of fossil fuels, and is there any argument to be made that they're actually good for our ecological concerns?

Doomberg: I’m a big fan of Alex Epstein's work and agree with most of it. I think a large part of the value he brings to the debate is highlighting the complete lack of interest in measuring tradeoffs as they pertain to energy policy. And he is correct in his assertion that human flourishing is left out of the equation altogether when calculating the net benefits of fossil fuels. I think it’s simply undeniable that billions of people have been lifted out of poverty because of fossil fuels. This is a benefit you can't just ignore when speculating about the negative externalities that fossil fuels may or may not bring in the decades ahead. 

Of course I don't think anybody could deny that humans impact both the environment and climate in relatively meaningful ways. We should be mindful of those negative impacts and spend some part of our energy budget to abate them if we have collectively decided that this is a problem worth solving. But, since our standard of living is defined by the amount of energy each individual personally gets to harness to impose order on his local environment, the grand equation to apply to the problem is: total amount of primary energy we produce as a society divided by the sum of our pollution and climate impacts, and the part of the fraction we need to optimize is the numerator. If you ignore the numerator entirely you’ll come up with all manner of crazy things that would be devastating for billions of people. 

Late last year we put together a presentation for our Doomberg subscribers called King Doomberg, which was about what we’d do if we were the Xi Jinping of the Western World. We think it’s reasonable to demand from industry the minimization of pollution like co2, because we would optimize the numerator in the standard of living/environmental impact equation. In this scenario developing nuclear energy makes an enormous amount of sense, utilizing natural gas with carbon capture makes an enormous amount of sense. Alex would probably argue that increasing present coal use without carbon capture makes an enormous amount of sense, because the numerator is far more important than the size of the denominator, and because negative consequences that may arise could be met with innovation and greater energy expenditure in the future used to clean up the environment, which is one of his most compelling arguments. The numerator is a focal point: How much energy you get to harness defines your standard of living, and every human being everywhere wants a higher standard of living no matter where they are on the totem pole. Getting this tradeoff equation into the discourse is an unbelievable service that Alex has done, and we applaud him for it, and in general we would downrate climate alarmism. 

> On nuclear energy

Sotonye: The comment about nuclear makes me wonder about something I was thinking about recently while reading a book called Stalin's War by Sean Mcmeekin, about Stalin’s, and ultimately Communism’s, victory over large portions of Asia and of Europe. Communist eschatology with Marx was the expectation that rising inequality in capitalist countries would become so severe that the proletariat overthrow the system, and Lenin expected the capitalist states to end by mutual destruction in bellicose competitions for land, resources, and money. But it turned out that capitalism is a much more rational order of business than anything we’ve ever seen, one that maximizes minimum gains and minimizes maximum losses even in the fog of zero sum geopolitics. But the nuclear question makes the rationality of capitalism seem a little more shaky. We would expect that Capital would want to see the staggering economic growth that a more efficient energy like nuclear would allow, but it’s been staunchly avoided. What explains this?

Doomberg: I would turn this on its head and say it actually proves that we are operating in anything but a capitalist system today, since the thing constraining nuclear energy is a communistic tendency toward over-regulation. There is a kind of death by 1000 cuts in energy policy delivered by radical environmentalists and malthusians who have infected the regulatory bodies like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the US with fear. They’ve made it incredibly expensive and time consuming for Capital to pursue nuclear energy. This is anything but a capitalist system. This is in fact a communist system, a socialist system, where unelected bureaucrats are proactively making something that should be incredibly cheap, abundant, and life nourishing, into something prohibitively expensive, scarce, and outside the bounds of optionality for society. 

Our simple counterfactual to all of the fearful and restrictive policy nonsense is: if France could safely build-out an entire fleet of nuclear reactors 50 years ago that are still safely supplying over half the nation’s power now, while generating large energy surfeits, surely we could do the same thing today here. Another example is China, which has managed to cut through its own communist tendencies to build-out reactors on a quick timeline and at a very reasonable price. The United States is one of many nations burdened by anti-capitalistic decision-making that has artificially stagnated nuclear as an option. The Hinkley Point C reactor in Somerset, England encapsulates this nonsense perfectly. Regulatory bodies and anti-nuclear environmental groups have stalled progress on this crucial infrastructure project, which has now gone years over the completion deadline and billions of dollars over budget. These are not accidents, these are proactive political choices that interfere with the function of the market. But fortunately, as in the case with China, self-imposed anti-market constraints can be wiped away rather quickly. If France could do it decades ago, if Canada could do it decades ago, and so on, the United States of America can do it, too. 

> On grifters and the green energy lobby

Sotonye: This segues really well into my next question, which is: why is the green energy lobby winning so thoroughly on the public relations and policy front? Solar panel barons, wind turbine bourgeoisie, hydroelectric aristos, how are they exerting such extensive influence over global government energy policy and international energy perspectives despite their comparatively limited capital resources? I live in California for example and my state government is totally committed to fully transitioning away from fossil fuels in only a few years time. They also want to ban the sale of new gas cars by 2035, and it's hard to believe that there isn't much pushback from Big Oil. What's behind this?

Doomberg: Before I get to the question I want to say that I’d put the three energy sources you mentioned in different buckets. For hydro, if you put aside the one time environmental damage and economic cost I think It’s actually pretty interesting and decent. For solar, I think it makes sense in some areas more than others, it’s not perfect. And wind I’d categorize as an abomination that needs to go away. If solar and wind were economically viable, their markets would grow naturally without the government subsidization you describe. I think the reason these forms of energy take the outsized spot in government energy policy and spending that they do is because of self-selection involving grifters, who often enter fields where there’s little work or value creation and high pay, and who are often much more vocal and insistent than the straight-laced, pencil-in-pocket people who tend to occupy the nuclear and fossil fuel spaces. The latter types just want to do their jobs and do good by society, but tend to get run over by grifters. 

But it’s amazing what can happen when the grifters get out of the way as in the case of Texas, where oil and natural gas are being drilled for at record amounts and driving far superior economic performance than expected. 

> On the electric vehicle market and its future

Sotonye: Going into the consumer market level of the green energy revolution, my next question is about whether electric vehicles are in or out. General Motors recently announced slowing down its EV production due to limited demand. But I'm unsure whether that's due to their cars being aesthetically unappealing to consumers, or if an EV is still just alien and inconvenient to most people, or if it’s something else entirely. What is the Doomberg take on this market and its future?

Doomberg: Our general view is that there's a real shortage of battery materials and real scientific hurdles around achieving economies of scale in the battery manufacturing process. We will never be able to displace much of the automobile market with pure EVs, and a strong confirmation signal for this position comes from the copper market, which we’ve been watching for a very long time. If the copper market believed in the electric vehicle revolution, this critical manufacturing material would not be trading where it has been for the last ten years. If we were on the verge of electrifying the fleet of tens of millions of cars built every year, certainly we would see the copper market lead with some indication, but that isn’t happening. This allows us to discount the idea that sizable automobile market-share will ever be captured by pure EVs. 

The counterargument usually involves the success of Tesla, in particular Tesla stock, and this is a controversial topic, but we believe 1) Tesla is largely an artifact of the era of cheap money and 2) that, again, the copper market never bought the dream Tesla was selling. (We try to stay out of the debate around how the company achieved the trillion dollar valuation it did, but we are very interested to see how history judges what we consider to be an enormous malinvestment in the auto sector). A more promising area for this market’s future, as we see it, lies in the middle road.  We have a far greater chance of increasing the fuel efficiency of the fleet by proliferating some hybrids and plug-in hybrids. I think plug-in hybrids in particular are a very interesting solution for many people, where you don't have to worry about range anxiety, but you get the first 30 or 40 or 50 miles of driving on the battery, which you can recharge in your garage. Cars that can abate a significant amount of gasoline usage with a relatively small battery like the Toyota Prius are pretty good when you do the analysis, they resolve the material constraint problem in a big way. We believe there’s more possibility here. 

> On capital misallocation 

Sotonye: I think the idea of capital misallocation is really interesting, it’s not something that gets mentioned often. But the era of cheap money you described seems to have displaced Capital’s interest in and need for value creation. It’s a strange situation, it’s almost surprising that value gets created at all. 

Doomberg: As Warren Buffett says, you know, when the tide goes out, you find out who's been swimming naked. When the era of cheap money draws to a close the market will unveil all the companies that never created sufficient value to earn their cost of capital-- the companies that subsisted on poor outside capital investment strategy and consistent government support. Organizations like these are present in every market cycle and represent a certain inertial paradox in innovation: progress in consumer technology is uncommon, difficult to make, and hard to predict, which is partly why these bad investments happen to begin with and why some subsidies exist. 

But these bad investments and government subsidies also make innovation less necessary by uncoupling it from future financial reward, thereby making progress again more uncommon and more difficult to make. So it is surprising when revolutionary consumer items like the iPhone and iPhone alternatives like the Android are created, they buck the inertia and totally reshape society. ChatGPT more recently is another surprising example, I use it a lot now for our work. I use it even more than I use Google, which I now use only to verify what ChatGPT is telling me. Certain innovations like these are what I call category killers, they completely reinvent product typologies; in the case of what Openai is doing, “Search” is being reinvented from the ground up around natural language. There are products that come along that make you pause and go, “I really want to own that thing or use that thing,” and it’s almost miraculous when it happens. No one needs to give you a tax break to use items like these.

> On Doomberg’s BS detecting process

Sotonye: Can you talk a bit about the straightforward five question framework you use to quickly assess whether news of major science or market advances are nothing or really something? I like the model you’ve made to appraise truth, and I think that having an epistemological standard is a sign of a serious thinker. 

Doomberg: When a claimed scientific breakthrough goes viral we usually get at least a dozen subscriber emails asking whether it’s something or nothing, and so we have a truth assessment model we apply in order to write the inevitable article addressing the question. It’s not a perfect model, but it has worked quite well for us, and it arose from our time in corporate America. Typically, C-suite executives get their major business and science updates from mainstream papers like the Wall Street Journal and wonder to themselves if they need to act on the over-hyped headlines. Our CEO would do the same, send us some story from the Financial Times that seemed important to him but was usually not worth the ink. After having been harassed by these poorly informed CEOs over a period of several years we decided to come up with a good information parsing framework of our own which we now use to respond to those emails and write those articles with a more authoritative voice. And so the five questions in the framework are actually quite simple, I’ll list them and then we’ll walk through them individually. 

1. Who is involved?

2. Where was the information published?

3. Where are we in the respective scientific process?

4. What is the scientific and commercial consensus?

5. What should we expect to see next?

So, first step, who’s involved. This is hugely important. If folks working at some major industry leader like Google or a renowned research university like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announce a breakthrough in computing you should definitely pay attention. Whereas, if a quantitative hedge fund run by someone thrice indicted by the SEC is making the same or similar claims, you can confidently view the news with a healthy amount of skepticism. The first step is understanding that pedigree matters. Pedigree isn’t an infallible tool of course, there are decorated research department staff at Harvard who have faked studies. But it is a great tool for gauging likelihood. For example, even despite the fact that some Harvard staff have been outed for various forms of academic and scientific misconduct, if a Harvard chemistry Nobel Laureate publishes a breakthrough finding on the catalysis of methane into some other essential molecule, you still pay attention. 

Second step, where was the information published? If a breakthrough cure for cancer is announced via press release on social media with no supporting links to research, that’s of course less impressive than publication in a peer-reviewed journal like the New England Journal of Medicine. Again these are just indicators of credibility, but they are very helpful. 

Third, where are we in the scientific (or even commercial) process? If a team of scientists reports a novel finding on room temperature superconductivity in a new material, but the finding has not yet been replicated and room temperature superconductivity has been outside the bounds of scientific viability for 50 years, the current scientific process tells us unfortunately that the new finding is unlikely to replicate. It would be different if four separate laboratories demonstrate room temperature superconductivity and a new fifth one adds to the chorus of confirmation, but that’s another story. 

And following that, in the commercial process you can have a high profile team of brilliant agricultural technology founders who just received a first round of funding for their revolutionary startup idea, but they don’t yet have any products or services, only a vision and capital. They announce a plan to change the way we eat by synthesizing meat-like proteins from bacteria and so on, but the market demand that would need to exist for them to succeed is at that point unheard of. Both where they are in the commercial process and where the market stands gives us a less than strong confidence signal about their claims. The further scientific and commercial claims are in their respective journeys the higher they’re rated on the credence scale. 

Fourth, what is the scientific and commercial consensus? This asks whether or not some claimed scientific discovery or new disruptive commercial technology turns either science or market dynamics on their heads. If a discovery in science is an incremental improvement on pre-existing models, the discovery is more believable; if a new consumer vehicle or phone or plane or laptop is a marginal but significant improvement on what respective consumers are already familiar with, claims of impactfulness are again believable. If a discovery is completely orthogonal to existing scientific consensus, or if a new, highly promoted product would need radically different and hitherto unseen consumer and social behavior for its adoption and impact, the bar of evidence would need to be raised to believe any value claims.  

Fifth and final point, what should we expect next? This tells us whether or not it makes sense to act on a new claim or get excited about it, it also tells us what a claim would need to be more compelling. Altogether this is a very powerful information analysis framework. 

> On the existential risk of strong AI

Sotonye: My next question is inspired by an interesting idea from another interview I'm conducting with blogger Scott Alexander. There's a burgeoning sense across domains--from government to academia to tech to finance--that artificial intelligence presents a non-trivial risk to humanity. Scott thinks that there's only a small chance of things blowing up,  though one worth taking seriously. But others like the godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, and Elon Musk for example, think the risk is existential. So what is the Doombergian take on the risk of AI? Will it blow up in our faces? Or will it create something like Robin Hanson's vision in his book The Age of Em, where high-powered brain emulations overseeing economic decisions cause GDP to double every week, leading to boundless prosperity and a kind of socialized utopia? What’s your take!

Doomberg: We would fall firmly into the camp of techno-optimists. I do understand however that it is always and forever thus: truly transformative technologies represent a threat to every existing order. And so, therefore, the instinctive response is to try to stifle radical innovation in the name of protecting what we already have. But you can’t stifle the human endeavor to grow and expand, which is a constant, unrelenting struggle against the forces of entropy. And you shouldn’t try.  In general the risks we take to fight death and decay are ironically almost always life nourishing in the end. For this reason we would unabashedly embrace the consequences of building strong artificial intelligence and proliferating its use to humans worldwide. This is how we view the existential risk-camp. 

There’s another camp that sees AI as having the potential to create a matrix-style outcome where humans become functionally obsolete, and this is also not a camp we’re in. Perhaps it’s naive, but being up at night worrying about such things is also no way to live; life and risk go hand and hand. And there’s some evidence already that the human-redundancy angle of AI alarmism is wrong, it’s the same angle that was proffered by pedagogues fearing for the math ability of the youth after the invention of the calculator, the same ostensibly dissolutive angle insisted on by painters during the rise of the camera, and so on. But new technologies don’t make human actions useless, they sharpen them and make them better, and even more interesting. A great example where AI is concerned is chess. 

We’re huge observers of the game of chess, it interests us for a variety of reasons. The best chess player in the world today, Magnus Carlsen, is the Mozart of chess. He’s hardly engaged in the game at all anymore but still better than everybody by a pretty significant margin. Magnus Carlsen could play a mediocre chess engine 100 times and never get a draw, but his game has been augmented by these engines in a way that wasn’t possible before them. These computers didn’t make humans obsolete, and they didn’t take away the love of the game, quite the opposite. The game has never been more popular-- one of the top players in the world, and actually the highest rated player in the United States, Hikaru Nakamura, has built an empire around chess content. New technologies improve human action and make it even more riveting in more ways than I could count. 

The things we love to do will always be done because we love to do them. Computers can’t take that away or make us redundant, our imperfections are what open the gate of creativity and beauty. We will never lose the ability to do the things we enjoy, it’s only going to get easier and cheaper as more things are powered by transformative technologies. I've embraced this, the totality of the future and the twilight of the past. It means we all get to have a better life. I get to be on the internet all day and shoot the shit with someone smart like you and get content and give you content, and so on. This is all the product of successive economic disruptions in the wake of some new technology. Innovation is not something we should ever fear. 

> On the Work of Doomberg’s Life

Sotonye: Let's talk about the personal side of Doomberg. You guys are deeply inspired by passionate content creators like Hikaru Nakamura and have built a series of great articles around these inspiring folks called The work of My Life. Can you talk a bit about the kind of creators that move you and why they do?

Doomberg: The Work of My Life was a series of pieces we wrote when we were nobody and nothing, but wanted to become something great. We were fascinated by people who made that transition from Labor to CCapital successfully, and when you find someone who is doing what they were meant to be doing it’s always deeply inspiring. We used these people’s stories as a roadmap and would document our journey in the form of these pieces.

One person we profiled, for example, has an account called Camping With Steve on Youtube. Before Youtube I believe he was living out of his camper and working as a natural gas pipe fitter. Later on in his life he found his niche making videos where he “stealth camps” in non-traditional camping locations, like a manned parking garage or the back of a Home Depot. He’s into it, he’s being totally authentic, he’s funny and has a dry sense of humor, and he’s now making more money than he ever could’ve doing obligatory work in Western Canada where he’s from. The authenticity of someone without corporate polish wholeheartedly pursuing a personal idea or interest or goal over time resonates with those watching. It’s unfiltered, it’s something you can instantly connect with on a human level because there are no gimmicks. There’s no sense that you’re being sold something that the person doesn’t fully believe in. 

So The Work of My Life pieces were a collation of profiles on these people who’ve displayed authenticity at the highest level, but they were also an effort to embrace and display authenticity ourselves. At the end of these profiles on people like Camping With Steve we would give a totally honest update to our readers on the progress being made running and growing our publication, and we would also clearly state the mission and intention of doing so. We’d share directly and openly everything we wanted to do and accomplish: that the Doomberg project is what we were meant to be doing, and we attack it everyday with enthusiasm. That our objective is for more people to have more energy and a higher standard of living. That the information we analyze and share is an effort to make that future happen, and that we will do it through three key brand approaches that we never forget to mention--we will be provocative without being polarizing, funny without being silly, and we will teach without being self-indulgent. 

The fact of the matter is that people are wanting to read authentic human analysis on day to day news from someone they’ve grown to trust over time, and we want to deliver that product in a way that totally delights our readers. It’s what we were meant to do. I do all the writing and editing for this publication, but as far as I can tell, all of our articles appear spontaneously, they’re not work. I get up and go upstairs every night between 2 and 4 am when my brain is firing on all cylinders, have a cup of coffee at my desk, and watch the next article magically appear. It’s what I was meant to do and I’m going to keep doing it, and The Work of My life pieces were our way of transmitting our guileless enthusiasm.   

> On surfing the sea of abundance 

Sotonye: You have a great line from a Work of My Life post about using positive-sum thinking and open handedness to grow your publication. Here’s the quote: 

“We believe a key part of our success is our willingness to promote other aspiring independent writers and content creators. We do this by highlighting, building on, and linking to great work in our own pieces, retweeting material on Twitter, and freely exchanging tips and best practices for growing an audience in private conversations and direct messages. Our belief is that the rising tide lifts all boats, and the exponential growth in demand for good content means there’s more than enough audience for everybody who puts serious effort behind their work. We’re playing a positive-sum game.” 

Can you go a bit more into detail about this? You’ve cracked the code for explosive growth, how big a part did this openhandedness play? 

Doomberg: So we characterize the idea presented in that quote as “Surfing the sea of abundance,” and “resisting the temptation to give into the disease of More.” If you have more than enough, what could the increment of excess possibly bring you, and how much negativity are you willing to invite into your life to achieve it?

A great example of what I mean comes from what’s probably one my top five favorite pieces of ours where we describe the “disease of More.” It’s titled after a song from one of our favorite musicians, David Berman, called Strange Victory, Strange Defeat. In the article we profile Tom Brady’s involvement in the FTX scandal. Here we have a seven-time Super Bowl winner and five-time Super Bowl MVP married to a supermodel and worth north of a quarter billion dollars, who somehow saw it fit to sell his reputation to become what amounts to a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme operator. In another Berman song he has a quote that goes, “How much fun is a lot more fun? Not much fun at all.” After a certain threshold of success and abundance adding more would likely mean stooping beneath your own value as a human being. At a certain point the goal metric needs to shift away from what more you can gain and toward what more you can give. 

As another illustration, the Doomberg team and I used to run a consulting firm, we know how to do that well. We are no longer in that line of work now that we have several hundred thousand Doomberg subscribers, but many of our subscribers, a great proportion of whom are in the finance sector, will reach out to us from time to time asking to hire us for consulting work. If we were victims of the disease of More we would gladly accept these opportunities to raise our bank account balances a little higher. But surfing the sea of abundance is part of our business ethos and lifestyle. So instead of indulging an unquenchable greed, we reply to each and every one of these requests saying we are more than happy to jump on a zoom call and help for free. I’m not going to be a contract employee —which is one of the perks of surfing the sea of abundance, you get to set the parameters of your participation according to your comfort and conscience—but I’m happy to be a sounding board and help without any expectation of a return of the favor. 

A farmer reached out to us to ask whether or not they should lease or sell their land to a solar developer and we jumped on a call with them. What are your true objectives, we asked? What are you trying to figure out? Following these inquiries, we then gave them some of the risks of leasing versus outright selling, and offered our advice. They took it and it worked out well. And guess what we didn't do? We didn't send them an invoice. I’m already wealthy beyond any monetary measure. I have friends, beautiful children, a wonderful family, the best business partners in the world, and I make enough to live a life I dreamed of by doing what I love everyday. What more do I need? The saddest people I know are millionaires and billionaires who would never give their time outside of satiating their own greed. And it sounds like hokey altruistic woowoo stuff but really if you give generously and contribute toward the happiness of other people, all the money you could want will find its way to you. This also includes doing what you were meant to be doing, since providing authentic value for people is also an amazing form of giving. This is how you lead a fulfilling life. At the end of the day, on my tombstone it will say “That MF lived well.”

> On the role marketing played in building the Doomberg brand

Sotonye: Can you describe the importance of marketing for your brand? It's a big issue. A lot of writers, including myself, have trouble focusing on ideas and material beyond the core product. It’s hard to see branding material as something consumers demand, and maybe it isn’t entirely. What role has marketing played for your brand so far? 

Doomberg: Totally authentic or totally open answer for you.

Up until the end of 2023, we have spent less than $10,000 developing the entire Doomberg Project. In the three years since starting this publication all of our growth has been achieved through sweat equity, thousands of hours of work have been spent on this. We have spent zero money on customer acquisition. But objectively zero is the wrong number. We’re proud of what we’ve built through sweat equity, but Facebook and Google exist because advertising works if done correctly, and the addressable market for Doomberg is several orders of magnitude larger than what we’ve been able to capture thus far. 

So we are in the beginning stages of experimenting with this exact question. There’s some possibility that we won’t be able to acquire customers within a short payback period in a way that’s consistent with our brand, and if that’s true we’re more than happy to stay where we are, since we have an internal commitment to never deviate from the brand. But we’d be foolish not to try and crack the code for exposing more eyeballs to our work. We’re going to invest some time and resources to explore this thoroughly. Our approach will be systematic and data driven, and we’re currently engaging with a few firms to see what the possibilities look like and it’s very exciting. So far one of the only financial investments we’ve made on marketing is the green chicken we use as our logo. So yes, we think this is an essential intellectual question that we’re working on right now. 

> On Doomberg’s departure from Twitter

Sotonye: Next question for you is about your departure from Twitter last year. The app was a big part of the initial traction of Doomberg until the sale of the company to Musk resulted in new vague and adverse rules against posting Substack links. Can you talk a bit about the role Twitter played at the start of Doomberg and what the future looks like with greater content investment into other mediums? 

Doomberg: I would say Twitter served its purpose for us, and if there’s anybody currently starting out with nothing, I would encourage them to consider using Twitter. But for us, just as the ownership changed, the app began to pay out diminishing returns on our time. In large part that’s because of what you described, the new owner began punishing Substack links, and so we’ve switched over to Substack’s alternative to Twitter called Notes. This has likely hurt our business a little, but we’ve been fortunate enough to bring a lot of our followers over to the new platform with us, and when you’ve achieved enough success you should draw lines in the sand and make sacrifices for your principles. 

The other side of why Twitter reached diminishing returns for us is that there really isn’t a significant difference between 100,000 followers and a million insofar as other important business growth mediums like podcast invites are concerned. The real growth effector for us has been podcast appearances and at a certain follower number these stream in continuously; growing a Twitter itself becomes less important or pressing than now growing your business with the connections you’ve already made. For a content creator the most powerful user engagement tool is going on someone else’s podcast, so a text-based platform like Twitter can only really be a stepping stone toward this much more valuable resource. 

During our peak on Twitter we would average roughly 45 million impressions a month, and hardly any would convert to paid subscribers. The same can’t be said any time a podcast we’ve appeared on publishes--within hours paid subscribers roll in. So the future is focusing more on these kinds of content opportunities, and also working with Substack since we believe in their team and what they’re doing. Time will tell about Twitter. If the platform ever decides to stop punishing Substack and other outside content platforms we would certainly return.

> On podcasts being a primary engine of business growth 

Sotonye: Ok so the idea that podcasts are a primary engine of growth for non-podcast content is probably the most novel idea about content creation I've ever heard. How big of a role did podcast appearances play in the early traction of Doomberg?

Doomberg: Well, 100%. Our motto is, “If you can measure it you can optimize it,” so this is all empirical. We’re very data driven, and we could see the growth in the data. In the early months of turning on paid subscriptions for our publication we measured around 45 data points a day, and the people who arrived on our platform after listening to us on an hour long podcast were extremely likely to pay for a subscription. People who arrive from an engagement as strong as the listening to you for an extended period of time are far more likely to say they want to support you as a creator. For us the engagement at the time was more valuable than an impression from a paid ad. 

One thing that Substack has done which is brilliant is allow new subscribers to explain why they subscribed in the first place, and the sheer volume of people who say they found us through a podcast appearance is astounding. The other side of exposing ourselves to our ideal audience through audio and video content is that we get to help the creators we speak to, who in turn help us; they’ll talk and write and post about us, share our work with those they think might be interested, even on places we don’t engage with anymore like Twitter. We surf the sea of abundance, to go back to what we spoke about before. If there’s one principle I could convey to anyone reading this, it’s this: give without the thought of getting in return and watch the sea of kindness that returns to sweep you up and carry you forward. 

To read more from Doomberg subscribe to their Substack here.

Tomas Pueyo is the former VP of growth at both Course Hero and Sigfig, author of The Star Wars Rings: The Hidden Structure Behind the Star Wars Story, a TEDx speaker, and creator of Uncharted Territories, a powerhouse publication that covers topics ranging from the Israel/Palestine conflict to OpenAI and Artificial Intelligence to much, much more. Tomas holds a masters in engineering from Ecole Centrale Paris, a masters in engineering from ICAI in Madrid, and an MBA from Stanford.

This was one of my favorite interviews I’ve ever done. Here’s a story that might illustrate why: Four years ago epidemiologists and virologists and immunologists alike were baffled by Tomas after he wrote an article on the need to take COVID seriously with an expert level of detail and precision, and without any prior medical training. Lockdowns weren’t yet in place at the time, the mainstream narrative on the virus still waffled back and forth between dismissal and real concern, and public sentiment remained unformed, lying in wait for expert consensus to turn the situation into something legible. Tomas was ahead of pretty much everyone by a mile.

He has a quality that I don’t think we have a word for, maybe we did in the past but not anymore. There’s a scene in my favorite show where a main character, living in a medieval-esque period, tells his brother that too many books have been written about great men and not enough about morons. Here in the future we’ve totally reversed that trend, with seemingly every book and paper on human psychology being about anxiety and insanity, and now we have no taxonomy of mental completeness and perfection to categorize Tomas Pueyo.

We’re left in the lurch, we’re on our own in defining something really cool that we rarely see. Maybe it’s genius as defined by Schopenhauer in The World As Will And Representation, maybe it’s genius as described by Goethe in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, as something beyond an individual that lifts him up, maybe it’s something else. When you’re done reading this you’ll see what I mean, maybe you can help me define it. It’s a very unique experience, and we need to write more books about it.

I hope you enjoy the following conversation. And to read more from Tomas, subscribe to his Substack and follow him on X.

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Sotonye: On why men don’t need or want talk therapy

On a recent re-watch of the Sopranos I couldn’t help but think about how the show is partly anchored around the tension between typical gendered-behaviors around mental health, which see women seek out care on average more often than men and with more treatment period retention, and Tony’s break from these expectations as a mob boss who goes to talk therapy. It’s striking and unusual for a man to put his mental world on a clinical platter, but I wondered—why? You have the best series on sex differences online so when I had this thought I immediately wanted to ask you: what are the evolutionary explanations for sex-based differences in  internal problem resolution? What do men need if it isn’t talking? 

Tomas:

People don't realize all the ramifications of one simple thing: How expensive eggs are.

Why do women have all the eggs they'll ever have at birth? Why don't they produce more through life? Because they're extremely biologically taxing. Eggs are orders of magnitude more expensive to make than sperm. 

This difference is so huge that it's the basis of the differences between sexes. Females are literally defined as the individuals who produce the more expensive gametes—the eggs.

In most species, the egg carrier is also the gestator, which is yet another huge biological cost. And for all animals who rear their offspring, they're the primary caregiver because they are the ones who have the baby. Yet another huge source of biological cost. 

What this means is that females are more biologically valuable than males, because they incur the most cost in having offspring.

Which means females have their reproductive success more or less biologically guaranteed unless something goes awry.

But not males. They must compete with other males to access females. Females get to be choosy, because they are the ones carrying the cost if they get the wrong guy. And what do they choose?

Biologically, we've evolved to survive and reproduce. So the woman will select the man who will give her as many children who will then survive and reproduce. That creates a lot of genetic requirements, like strong immunity, a great ability to gather resources, to defend them and the offspring, and commitment to stick around.

And since humans are very social, you have a shortcut to assess a lot of this: Who is the most dominant man? The dominant man shows intelligence and strength. If you're a physically weak man, a stronger man will overpower you. If you're not intelligent, a more cunning man will create an alliance to depose you. So a good mental shortcut for females is: "Let's let them battle it out. Whoever emerges as more dominant is the guy I like."

Of course, it's not the only mental shortcut. For one thing, dominance gives more opportunities to men, which then reduces their potential commitment. There are many other such mental factors when choosing a partner. But the attraction for dominance is strong, so much so that the most common (and unfulfilled) sexual kink in women* is to be dominated according to Aella.

A dominant man can't be weak.

This is the source of all the literature around honor and strength and not showing weaknesses and so on.

This is why men don't default to seeking help for mental health—I need help, therefore I am weak, and hence not dominant.

It's why Tony going to therapy is so surprising. It's not just a mobster. He's the head mobster. The most dominant, the one who is not supposed to show weakness.

Of course, many people might react to this as "But this is stupid! Going to therapy shows a man is mature! It's like going to the doctor!"

This is where most analysis on sex and therapy stops. How do you square that circle?

A decade ago, in grad school, I was in a leadership class where we were told to be vulnerable. A student asked: "If we're vulnerable, aren't we going to be seen as weak?"

The professor replied: "There is a fine line between vulnerability and weakness. The key is to be vulnerable on things that don't challenge your leadership."

Which for a man means: on things that don't challenge your dominance.

Imagine a CEO crying on TV. Which ones of the following statements are acceptable, and which ones aren't?

My child just died.

I have cancer.

The new law is killing our company and we will fight it to death.

My strategy failed and I couldn't manage the executive team.

The first 3 are acceptable ways to show vulnerability, because they don't challenge the CEO's leadership skills. The last one does, and so it wouldn't be acceptable.

I haven't seen more than 3 or 4 episodes of the Sopranos, but I assume this edge between vulnerability and weakness would be an interesting one to explore for a mafia boss, so I wouldn't be surprised if you told me they played with that boundary through the seasons. Maybe Tony explores the differences, learns to be vulnerable without appearing weak, and when the two are conflated, he reasserts his dominance with brutality?

*There's self-selection in her sample but I think it probably stands in the broader population.

Sotonye: On the true evolutionary underpinnings of creative production

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone predict the course of a story from first principles until now. You’re exactly right, that’s exactly what happens in the Sopranos. Tony slowly learns to accept the difference between admitting a problem or the need for help and being weak, but when the lines eventually blur he puts on an almost psychopathic, vicious display. This is super interesting and gets me to my next question about status and how it makes us do what we do.

Robin Hanson has this great idea called the Kings and Queens Theory of fertility, a pretty elegant model that predicts modern status seeking behavior and fertility decline. He says as a rule that as absolute wealth rises so does personal sense of relative status, and people with higher relative status make greater investments in accruing more status by engaging in things like poetry, sports, music, better education, and so on, and either delay or avoid having children outright due to opportunity costs to status. The theory says this explains the cultural and fertility trends subsequent to the wealth gains of the Industrial Revolution. But I’ve felt sort of off about this, I think a lot of culture can be explained as status seeking, but I’m not confident that evolution instilled such a general status seeking motive. Do we write poetry and make shows like the sopranos and invest more into going to good schools just for status, and If not, what are the actual evolutionary drives? And is status seeking really what’s really driving down fertility? 

Tomas:

Ha! You should watch my TEDx! Stories, when well done, are engineered, so they can be reverse engineered. A mob boss going to therapy sounds like the result of a brainstorm: "How can we make a story about vulnerability? OK let's take the least vulnerable guy and force him to expose his vulnerability. What's the least vulnerable guy? The guy that has to appear the toughest? A head of the military? An MMA boxer? A head mobster! And how can he explore his vulnerability? This is usually in his internal voice. How can we make it explicit? Let's have him talk to a therapist!". 

Note that with the same structure you could have an MMA champion have to develop his vulnerability to regain an emotional connection with his estranged daughter, and that would probably make a good story too.

I've touched on fertility, but I have taken a pause because it's one of the most complex social engineering problems I've faced, since we just don't know the cause of the fertility drop.

What makes it so complex is that it seems to be an inescapable trend that comes as economies develop, which means there's probably a strong underlying trend. Yet the obvious culprits all have counter-examples. For example, here are a few standard theories:

1. A stable, rural life enables lots of children because they are assets (working hands) rather than costs (raising them properly and educating them well is very expensive), so the ROI of child-making has turned from positive to negative. 

2. People just want at least a couple of surviving children on average, but when mortality was so high, they had to overshoot and had plenty of children. This is not needed anymore, now that healthcare and sanitation eliminate this need

These theories sound true and probably are part of the solution. They explain many things, including some outliers like why Muslim countries have more children than their GDP/capita would suggest—because women are more home so the opportunity cost is lower. But they don't explain some other things, like why the Baby Boom existed, why people in developed economies still want more children than they actually have, why Georgia was able to revert the trend based on a cultural initiative, why France went through the fertility transition before the industrial revolution, why the UK (the most developed country in the 19th C) was among the latest European countries to go through the transition, or why there's been a recent inversion where rich people used to have fewer children than poor people but that's not the case anymore.

When you break down the pbm from first principles, the complexity becomes even more obvious. Fertility is the result of:

• Average life expectancy of a mother up to menopause

• Share of them that get into a long-term monogamous relationship (let's call it marriage)

• Age at which they get into the relationship

• Desire for children

• Time between marriage and 1st child

• Pregnancy frequency thereafter

• Young children's mortality rate

• Then do the same for women that don't get into a long-term monogamous relationship, either because they are serially monogamous or non-monogamous

Across each one of these bullet points, you have:

• Biology issues (eg if marriage is too late and / or the 1st child is not conceived fast thereafter, fertility drops like a stone and we get infertility issues)

• Economic issues (eg, the need for 2 breadwinners given the stagnant incomes of the middle class means fewer resources to raise children)

• Logistical issues (eg, cars can only easily fit 2 car seats, current life demands many activities for children that don't scale, etc.)

• Social issues (eg, expectation of having a career for women, expectation of not being a stay-at-home mum, expectation of living life to the fullest, etc.)

• Technological issues (eg, contraception)

What makes this into a puzzle is that all these variables somehow must be at least partially interconnected, because otherwise you wouldn't have all the countries undergoing the same transition as soon as they start developing economically. 

And that's why I haven't written much more about it. Processing all this information sounds my like a book-length endeavor where you dive into hundreds of papers and build your own datasets. 

Short of that, you end up coming with theories that can only be partial at best. I assume that's why Robin Hanson's theory doesn't feel complete.

I highly respect Robin and he's right more often than not. I don't think he's wrong on this: Status is a very important game that's played all over the world. But the evolutionary point of status is making babies, not the other way around. It sounds to me like evolution would have tweaked that. It sounds highly unlikely that the major culprit for childlessness is that "somehow 80% of the population now is in this sweet spot where they have just the right level of wealth that they don't have children, gathering resources to try to get into the elite mode of making lots of children". Among other things, that sounds like an optimal strategy for some *men*, but less so for women

So I just think his theory is incomplete—like those of most other people I've talked with on the topic. And hence my hesitance to discuss it further.

Sotonye: On the future of the AI consumer market

Let’s shift gears a bit and talk about artificial intelligence. You’ve written comprehensively about the subject and present a compelling case about its dangers, the most compelling case I’ve read so far. I’ve been pretty interested in but still largely unconvinced by the perspectives of the most vocal opponents of strong general AI like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Geoffrey Hinton, but you’ve been able to bring a tempered clarity here that’s squared some circles around the matter for me. And so I’ve been wanting to ask something further:

Before we get AGI we’re likely to see more progress in the areas with the most commercial potential, but what this progress could and should look like is a hugely important but still unanswered question. What are your perspectives on the way the AI market will shape up in the near term? Will we see vertical integration with companies like OpenAi making fully AI powered phones? Or will sex bots become common? And what kind of products would you expect or like to see as a high-level creator? 

Tomas:

I don't have fully formed opinions on the topic, so this might be a good time to think out loud.

It's not clear to me that there will be huge companies like Facebook or Google in AI.

These companies were the result of network effects, where the more users you had, the better the service became. This is true of all marketplaces, but I don't see it in AI. I see a big cost of entry to train the models, but it doesn't look like it's big enough to eliminate competition. There's already half a dozen competitors close to the cutting edge, with OpenAI, Mistral, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Meta... And odds are the training will get cheaper with better algorithms and training techniques. It also looks like Gemini Advanced is close to ChatGPT 4 in terms of performance, which suggests intelligence is an emerging quality of neural networks rather than something unique OpenAI did.

If you think about it, that makes sense. There are very few differences in our genetic code between other primates and humans. Odds our the differences are mostly just more layers of neurons, and maybe a few tweaks on how they work. But the basis is the same, so it looks like we live in a universe where intelligence is an emerging property of neural networks. I'm simplifying tremendously here, but all of this seems consistent.

If this is true, it will have lots of consequences we can foresee.

One is that we will reach AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) soon enough. Just looking at computing power, we should reach AGI in one to three decades. 

It might be that we already have the necessary components, but we just didn't connect them properly. ChatGPT is extremely powerful, but it's just one module that takes words in and spits words out. It doesn't have modules for things like deciding its own goals or acting on them. So of course the intelligence it will show will appear limited! That's why I believe exploring AI agents is a heavily underestimated approach to reach AGI.

If it's true that AGI will be reached in our lifetimes, odds are the singularity will come around that time, and we'll get a superintellgence. We can't see beyond the singularity, so it's impossible to predict anything. But we can speculate what might happen afterwards, assuming the AGI is aligned and doesn't try to kill us all.

First, nothing else really matters. 

The fertility issue? Solved by the singularity, since a superintelligence (let's call it ASI) can understand the problem (and solve it), design devices to make babies, educate them better than humans would do, build robots to take care of their needs...

Wars? Most of them are due to resource scarcity, but most of it disappears after ASI. Not enough food? Increase productivity. Not enough energy? Do nuclear fission or fusion or beam solar energy from space. Not enough raw materials? Mine them from space or transmute them.

Humans tend to focus on what mattered in the past, but that is becoming obsolete pretty fast.

Then there's the question of the interim. What will happen between now and ASI? I think productivity will explode, but it might not be seen in GDP data, because a lot of the explosion will be deflationary: Things that used to take lots of resources to make will suddenly take substantially less. In the short term, it will increase demand, but supply (productivity improvements) will be driven by AI while demand is mostly driven by human decisions, so odds are supply will outstrip demand and prices will shrink and industries will shrink.

The counterbalance will be that now it's much cheaper to create new companies and new markets, but those won't require as much resources to be built. We will see the first billionaire solopreneurs and many unemployed people. Of course, this means inequality will increase. But wealth will be geographically spread unlike in the past, and yet billionaires will be extremely mobile. The world has never seen this before. Odds are tax bases will crumble, there will be tax competition for these people, and they will be able to coordinate to influence politics in an advantageous way. I wonder if new city-states won't be built on the basis of catering to them.

Another thing that I assume will happen is that the fight for attention will increase several notches, so we will need AIs to buffer us. We already have AIs that protect us from spam. Soon, our personal AIs will filter the content we get exposed to, to only show what's most relevant. At the same time, we will be able to reach more people at a scale never seen before, so we will need filters for that. The cost of litigation might drop, so we might develop AIs that sue, countersue, and protect us from litigation without us even realizing it. Our AIs might crawl the Internet to learn about people we might be interested in meeting, contact them, or filter these contacts. In other words, the information overload will only be manageable with AI buffers between us and the world of information.

This is, assuming AIs can't build great robots. Odds are they will be able to, at which points humans won't be much different from AIs, and we'll get into a Blade Runner world where we won't know whether a person is human or robot. In such a world, most of our social needs will have an option to be solved by robots, and human experiences will just be a special version of that—special because it will remain scarce, not because it will be better.

An interesting analogy might be art. Up until the mid-1800s, paintings became more and more realistic. Then we invented photography, realism became completely devalued, and suddenly we have impressionism, cubism, and the like. A lot of their value is not as much the creativity, as the fact that a human did that art and not a machine. Something similar might happen with relationships, with the added complexity that impressionism might be creative, but odds are AIs will be more creative than humans.

Put in another way, we're entering a strange world.

Sotonye: On whether gains in business efficiency means a loss of creativity

So this is pretty huge. This has clarified a lot or the ambiguity over what AI “is” for me. If I’m understanding this the right way, the simplest way to think about AI is as a tool for adding gains to general efficiency. The past is a good leading indicator here and I think pretty much confirms this, we’ve seen the use-case of  “dumb ai” follow this exact sort of efficiency promoting pattern. That pattern rarely gets mapped onto the future when we normally think about AI interestingly, maybe because current AI is so seamlessly diffused throughout the business process it’s sort of the air we breathe, no one sees it!  But this future makes a lot of sense to me.

I’m wondering now about whether our future efficiency gains spell boon or bust for creative innovation and progress, and I’m trying to sort of reason about it through analogy: For example there’s a case to be made that the reason we get 1,000 Batman remakes everyday before sunrise and a new Apple tablet mini everyday after sunset may be less about a spiritual or other kind of Spenglerian decline, and more about businesses just working better, becoming extremely efficient.  90s Hollywood and 2000s Apple, without big efficient databases, may have left industry executives with only vague insight into the day to day of internal operations and finer details of outward markets, and product ideas may have been greenlit that would otherwise seem too risky. Does efficiency create a stagnant culture, or is Spengler right about a dearth of transcendent vision creating such conditions? I am seriously desperate for good new movies and I’m worried that the age of quality is behind us! 

Tomas:

I fear your analogy might be misleading, and I'll tell you why in a moment. Instead, I would use the analogy of what you and I are doing now.

30 years ago, it would have been impossible, because creators like us were extremely rare. Why? Because bringing insights to the market had high production, transaction, and distribution costs.

To get distribution, you needed to physically print a paper and distribute it with vans, or emit a radio or TV signal. Since that's expensive, only a few did it, and they controlled the content.

The content itself was expensive too, because the production values required equipment and humans supporting the shows, or research and trips and phone calls from journalists and producers.

You needed agreements with payment processors, rev share agreements with different partners in the stack...

The result was that there was little content. Supply was lower than demand.

But now all these costs have been eliminated. Creating an article just takes one person's time with Substack. Creating a video takes one person's time with Tiktok or Youtube. And they can live off of that.

The result has been an explosion of supply. That's what reducing the marginal cost of production does.

With the explosion in supply, a few things have happened:

1. Now supply outstrips demand, and we're hitting a limiting factor that we had never hit before as a species: our attention. It's now precious. It's scarce. We have to be very cautious about how to use it, and this is not something we've evolved naturally to do.

2. When you create so much supply, the vast majority will be shit. But some will be amazing. It's the wild west, with lots of bad things happening but also gold rushes. In other words, the distribution of content quality will change, from something narrow but reasonably high quality, to a much broader distribution that includes lots of duds and a few pieces of gold. This is how you get people like Ben Thompson or Veritasium.

3. Social media fulfills a double function of crushing distribution costs but also as a filter for content quality

AI is going to follow this trend further. We are going to drown on supply, and most of it will be bad, but some of it will be exceptional.

This means we will need means to filter content quality. Social Media already fulfills that, but it's about to get attacked by this AI-generated content. Will we need other tools?

It also means we're about to enter a world full of weird content, where most of it is trash, but some of it will be the best content ever.

This is why my intuition tells me your analogy might be misleading. The reason why studios make 1000 Batman movies is because movie costs are so high. The stars, the filming crews, the editing, the CGI, the marketing, the distribution deals... Most Hollywood movies cost between tens and hundreds of millions. You can't get that wrong. So movie studios don't take risks, and they use things that are more likely to succeed. Superheroes have been doing that lately, simply because they have high household name recognition and people like that type of movie. More generally, that's why we have so many sequels. Lower risk is important. Making a new Apple device is extremely expensive, so they need to get it right. Adding one iPhone is a no brainer, it's a cow to milk.

AI will reduce production costs, and that will enable more risks, not fewer. Across content, but also across other parts of the economy.

A weird world beckons.

Sotonye: Final Questions

My final two questions for you are: 

1—

You think and write at an insanely high level, how can we do the same? When someone is really good at thinking about things I always assume a Bayesian reason for it, I assume that they’ve just read all the right books on questions that come as natural concerns to most people, spoke to all the right people in those domains, and had the right real-world experiences, and as a result came to the conclusions they’re known for. Is that how we improve our reasoning, or should we skip the research and just try to acquire better broad intuitions? For example, I think about the former world chess champion Emmanuel Lasker often. He deviated pretty far from the way chess orthodoxy understood the game. Instead of it being something positional or strategic, he held it to be almost purely psychological, and this is a broad intuition I’ve ran with that has improved my game a lot more than the dozen chess books I’ve bought on Amazon. How can we raise our thinking to a higher level? 

And 

2—

My last question is about being Tomas Pueyo:

Your background is as far reaching as it gets. You’ve studied in three different countries, you’ve worked in tech on building out huge projects, you run the equally far reaching eponymous Substack. I want to know what the engine looks like under the hood of this here rocketship. What are your health, diet, and work habits like? And what pulled you toward writing after your time in tech? I’d like to end by going back to the beginning and learning about your origin story. 

Tomas:

Thank you!

I have a realistic and an optimistic answer for you. Let's start with the realistic one.

I´m a firm believer in the fundamental attribution error: People think their wins are theirs and their failures due to bad luck, and tend to think the opposite for other people. 

A lot of what I do well is due to luck. In my case, I'm really not very special. I had a boringly optimal upbringing, in an upper-middle stable family that loved me and helped me study and travel. 

My daily habits today are not that special. I wake up, prep the kids for school, eat something healthy (egg whites with tuna usually), work for 5-6h on my computer, go to the gym, eat (again, healthy: normally salad, protein, and a bit of carbs), work 4-6h more, have dinner, take care of the kids, go to sleep, where I sleep 7-8h when I don't have anxiety, and 5-7h when I do. I am not biography material. 

The weird thing my brain does is that it's in constant analytical mode. It is always trying to understand why things are the way they are. It never stops, I never tire of it, I enjoy it, and I quickly get bored when I can't do it—for example, when enough of my attention is caught on something I can't deconstruct. This is not really something I've chosen. It just is.

The consequence is that, you're right, I am constantly reading. Not just books. In fact I read many more scientific papers than books. Maybe 3-10 abstracts a day on average. I also consume content on Twitter or newsletters. I avoid newspapers as they focus on the short term, shallow, narrative-driven explanations rather than long-term, deep, systems-driven ones.

So most of the time, when I tell you something, I'm channeling other people I have happened to read. In our exchange I've channeled people like Robin Hanson, Rob Henderson, Aella, Ben Thompson, Guillaume Blanc, Joseph Campbell, John Yorke, Tim Urban, and dozens more. A lot of creation is recombination anyways, so by reading a lot, you can create a lot.

The desire to be constantly analyzing drives my curiosity, and this might be the one aspect that can be replicable: I really lean into it. So when something interests me, I drop everything else and I just focus on it. If I don't sleep for days, if I fail at other commitments, or if I'll be late on all my other deliverables, so be it. That makes me unreliable, which is bad. The good side is that it helps me compound my interests over the long term.

Note that this is exactly what happened during COVID: Something weird started happening, and I just dived into it. After 3 weeks of studying non-stop in February 2020, I was in a good position to write about it in a way that resonated.

So what are things that I do that are more or less replicable by others?

• I am constantly thinking about why everything is the way it is. I don't just take the shallow answer for granted, but wonder what mechanism, what system brought that thing to life.

• I follow my curiosity hard. If something is interesting, I'm going to dive into it at the cost of everything else. I always prioritize important over urgent.

• This leads me to be interested in the systems underpinning many different topics. That's what Scott Adams (and now I) call skill stacking. Since most people specialize, you end up having quite a unique combination of areas of expertise. 

• I focus on both the content and the delivery. Many people dive deep in the content and become world-wide experts on their thing that nobody understands. Others focus on communicating (think some journalists or  youtubers), and end up shallow. But if you focus on learning some discipline and also how to communicate it (whether on instagram, writing, videos, tiktoks, tweets, whatever) then you can stand out.

• If you focus on communication, you need to be good at both writing and visuals. Writing helps you think. Visuals help you convey the idea. 

• Quantity beats quality. If you don't produce and publish, you can't learn quality. So you have to start by putting stuff out there fast and frequently. In the beginning, you're going to put out trash anyways, so just accept it and publish it. Nobody cares anyway, and if they do and you fear that, just use a pseudonym

• When you hit on something that works, mine that gold mine. I didn't do it on COVID because I just wanted to help and I didn't find it too intellectually stimulating, so once I wrote the pieces I wanted to write, I stopped. If I were to go back, I'd write much more, to gather a bigger audience. I'd do the same with geography, which works well, but I only wrote every now and then about it in the past. So try many things, but if you find your niche and you want to live off of that, focus on that.

I'm sure there's more but I can't think of anything!

Thank you for your kind words and your insightful questions! It is very, very difficult to ask good questions. It is an underestimated skill, and you have it. And it's not just skill, it's also a lot of work. So congrats!

Scott Alexander is a practicing psychiatrist at Lorien Psychiatry, and the creator of Slate Star Codex and its successor blog, Astral Codex Ten.

His blogs are a fluid-like-substance that make the entire solid world porous, they rush into every noetic nook and crevice and cranny and leave no idea untouched and unpolished by their movement. Or they’re like a pair of borrowed eyes from a friendly tetrachromat, a person with an extra color-perceiving cone in the retina. Before, you only saw a few shades here and there, but you always managed to be a person of great taste and aesthetic sensibility and knowledge, you’ve always appreciated your own vision. But suddenly, now, you see what’s right above you, you’re in a world of novel incandescence, new light, you’ve hit peak blogosphere, you’re truly online now.

This is what the internet was always meant to be. A resource for learning. It’s so simple, but we forget! Scott Alexander reminds us with his writing, which covers everything from artificial intelligence to abolishing the FDA to fixing science to his presidential platform, and it’s something that hundreds of thousands of people (probably way, way more) are thankful for. If you’re one of those hundreds of thousands of people you’ll probably like the conversation that follows. And if you’re new to the party I’m very happy you’re here and interested to know what you think.

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Sotonye: On disambiguating AI

I haven’t seen anyone clearly detail a way to think about what current AI’s actually are on a level of category beyond comparison with other current AI’s or hypothetical future AI’s of vaguely similar types.

The closest thing I’ve seen to some kind of categorization is early gpt being compared to a kind of google if it gave answers in natural language, and this helped disambiguate the whole matter a bit for a little while. Until a new, bigger, badder version of the language model was announced.  Nearly every announcement of a new version of a large language model follows with an added layer of ambiguity over what AI actually is, even though in every case the AI is still just a language model.

People (myself included) freak out in the same way they freak out when the moon reaches its perigee or takes on a deeper shade of red during a lunar eclipse, even though it’s still just the moon. It’s sort of surprising no one has outlined what type of thing LLM’s are even though we have a pretty good grasp of their ethology.

My question is: what kind of things are they? What is the best way to think about their categorization? The most common ways categorization of new digital technologies seem to develop are through their impacts on or relationship with human cognition, like we rarely separate Twitter from the idea that it’s an insanity/rage/political bifurcation-mill for example, and through their utility in consumer markets, like I think smartphones now sit pretty snugly between the entertainment and shopping system categories and the tech investment ecosystem there seems to track with this idea. But what is the best way to categorize LLMS? What categories can we actually put them in to dispel some of their “otherness”?

Scott:

A big blob of undifferentiated cerebral cortex, ripped away from all of the brain's specific structures and stuck in a vat.

According to the predictive coding (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/) model, the brain is trying to do what LLMs do - we predict (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/28/meaningful/) the next piece of sense-data in the same way it predicts the next token. It's using a structure a lot like LLMs - a neural network, although of course this is a vague term and there are lots of specific differences. I think they're basically the same type of thing doing the same kind of work.

There's some evidence that the average blob of cortex is generic and doesn't really care what it's doing. Blind people can use what are usually visual areas of the brain for other things. Some people who get strokes that affect their language centers learn to use other parts of the brain for language. If during development some mad scientist attached the ears to the visual cortex and the eyes to the auditory cortex, it probably wouldn't work exactly equally well, but it would probably work a little, because aside from some specific optimizations, each bit of cortex is just a generic blob of cognition which sets itself to predicting whatever input gets fed into it.

(Neuroscientists are probably screaming right now. Sorry, I mean "in the big picture".)

If you ripped a random blob of cortex out of the brain, you would separate it from the hypothalamus and basal ganglia and all the other structures that give it desires and planning ability and goal-directed action. You would separate it from the hippocampus and all the other structures that give it long-term memory and stable selfhood. You'd separate it from the sensory and motor cortices that embody it and connect it to the world. And you would break the circuit that goes through the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and helps it stay consistent and world-model-y and "awake". You'd just have a sort of diffuse generalized cognitive tool where you'd feed data into one end and get patterns and predictions about the data out of the other.

(If you really want to know what it's like to be a blob of cognition detached from higher brain tissues, fall asleep and dream. AI makes some of the same mistakes as dreaming humans - if you look at the lucid dreaming community, they've been saying forever that the two easiest ways to realize you're in a dream are mangled hands and mangled text. AI also mangles these things, because they require some of the most processing and top-down modulation from higher-level world-models, and that seems to involve either a higher-scale connected network or something special about the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/somewhat-contra-marcus-on-ai-scaling).)

AI is like one of these detached blobs of brain tissue. This is why I was arguing (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/19/gpt-2-as-step-toward-general-intelligence/) as early as 2019 that the GPTs were a big step towards general intelligence. We call them "language models", but as we've seen, with slight tweaks they can learn to generate images / video / music, play games, and possibly (I'm not really up to date on this research) handle movement for embodied robots. The exact structure of LLMs is optimized for language but the same general class of things is going to be able to do whatever human brain tissue does, because it's overall a similar type of thing. You just need to find a way to plug the right input in and reinforce success (I say "just", but obviously this will take billions of dollars, and work by thousands of people who are much smarter than I am).

This is why I expect AI to become human-level or beyond pretty fast. Making a cerebral cortex at all is the hard part. After that, you just need to scale up, and hack together equivalents for other useful brain structures (I say "just", but see above).

Disclaimer that I'm not an AI expert, and all of this is speculation.

Sotonye:

This is by far the best disambiguation of the matter I’ve seen. What AIs are are self-contained slices of digital brain regions. This category sounds very much right to me. Chatgpt is like the left fusiform gyrus disconnected from everything else, dedicating all its electric pulses and sparks to translating symbols into meaning, Midjourney is like a lateral prefrontal cortex floating in a server farm, dreaming up vivid new worlds, and so on. This feels right and it also flows well into my next question! I’ve always assumed that whenever we think about an extremely advanced AI we’re thinking of a really high-fidelity brain emulation, and you’ve confirmed for me that this assumption is probably right. We’ll get goal-directed AI when we connect LLMs to large basal ganglia models, and AI will dream when digital prefrontal and posterior parietal cortices are linked with something like diffusion. Full-scale high-fidelity brain emulations are where the terms of category for current AIs seem to take us, and I think this makes the total risk profile of AI a little more clear. 

We don’t have to worry about powerful language models like gpt-n, we have to worry about digital people who can think a million times faster than von Neumann. I imagine that when something like this speaks to you all information flow would basically be from the future. It could beat any market with relative ease, could know thousands of years of future events before breakfast. But could it really go rogue in any way harmful to most people if its core intelligence fits inside general human evolutionary boundaries? This is something I’ve never seen anyone describe. If we modeled an AI on myself for example and scale its reasoning parameters up by an order of magnitude, it would probably still just want to interview you and walk my dog Hazel. Would all the goals worked into the brain by evolution and inheritance make their way into simulated brains, or would scale relegate them? What’s the best way to think about the future risk of full brain emulations? 

Scott:

Thanks. You take this a different direction than I do, though. I don't think AI is emulating the brain on purpose. I think a chunk of cortex is just the best metaphor we have for abstract purposeless cognition. Although all of AI owes something to brain imitation, I think mostly the inventors of LLMs weren't doing that on purpose, the inventors of the next advance probably won't be doing that on purpose, and the next advance won't necessarily resemble the brain except insofar as the brain is still the best metaphor we have for cognitive processes.

We have very weakly, partially goal-directed AI already, in the form of RLHF. I don't know how this fits with what I just said about the brain. The brain does a lot of reinforcement learning, but the exact way that LLMs do reinforcement learning seems almost on a different level.

I would separate "goal directed AI" from "agentic AI". ChatGPT is "goal-directed" in that it has a goal of giving you a helpful answer, but it lacks some features of agency like generality and time-binding.

The closest thing I've seen to agentic AI so far is AutoGPT, which is just GPT plus a wrapper that prompts it with things like "Make a list of ways to create a successful business", "Okay, how would you do Step 1 on your list", "Okay, now try doing that thing", and so on. Connect this to some sort of output channel (like a GMail client that sends an email whenever GPT says the word [SEND]) and you can sort of imagine a hacked-together super-dumb agent. My guess is that we get agent-like AIs from starting with something like this and gradually making it more elegant and integrated, not by deliberately setting out to replicate the basal ganglia (which we only half-understand anyway). I don't expect high-fidelity brain emulations, because we don't understand the brain well enough on any level, it will be decades before we do, and it's much easier to just take the transformer we got through "divine benevolence", scale it up a bit, and add stupid hacks to it until it works.

The other possibility is that we don't have to do any of this, because the basic AI training process - where you stick data in one end, something you want in the other end, and do gradient descent - will automatically produce all these structures and functions for us if we get the input and output channels right and have a big enough parameter count. We didn't design image AIs by studying the occipital lobe, or LLMs by studying Broca's area. If we can figure out how to do some task-based form of AI training, the relevant structures will automatically arise inside the AI. I don't know how to do this, because there isn't obviously a corpus with a petabyte of agentic tasks in the same way there's a corpus with a petabyte of text. Maybe something something simulations? DeepMind has some older work on this, although they've pivoted to LLMs like everyone else. I don't know, if I was any good at predicting this kind of stuff I'd be at OpenAI making $800,000 a year. I just think there are plenty of options.

In terms of AIs going rogue, I don't have strong reason to think that they will, and my concerns are more than this seems hard to predict and even a small chance would be bad. But you could tell two stories. 

In one, AI really is very different from humans. Humans evolved their desires piecemeal, first by creating a lizard brain, then by creating a monkey brain that tweaks the lizard machinery, then by creating a human brain that tweaks the monkey machinery. We don't optimize for goals like reproduction directly (eg donate to sperm banks in order to reproduce) because you couldn't run that kind of algorithm on a lizard brain, and the human brain is built on top of the legacy hardware. So instead you get all of these instincts and desires, and sometimes you can weakly and inconsistently use Reason to interrogate them. But if you're training an AI on one of these agency tasks, you might have human-level cognition before you even start adding in agency, and then maybe you do get some novel motivational architecture that just optimizes the goal directly. I'm not sure about this - even gradient descent might start from the simplest thing it can get and build up - it just seems like a different process. Or maybe it's not gradient descent at all, but it's something else where the AI is just really different than you thought it would be - alien hardware beaten into a human form, like the shoggoth-smiley-face meme - and at some point the real architecture comes out and does something you're not expecting.

In the second story, AI works exactly like we think it does and is very human. I believe you when you say that you're a nice person who just wants to walk dogs. But the history of multiracial countries where one race has much more power than the other isn't consistently great. If we think of AI as a new race - a race much more different than humans than any human race is from another, such that all of the racist tropes about how Race A is always X but Race B is always Y are totally true - then maybe somewhere along the line that leads to conflict. If I were those Sentinel Islanders who had never contacted the rest of the world, and the Indian Navy came knocking on my door and said "Hello we have nuclear bombs and a GDP of $3.7 trillion, we've decided to integrate our two societies", then I won't say for sure that this would end with every Sentinelese person dead. But I would think they would have reason to be nervous, especially if they like their current lifestyle or having some form of self-determination. I think it's plausible that over the course of just a few years, we get hundreds of millions of agentic AIs who are smarter than we are. If they want to keep writing our high school history essays for us, great. Otherwise - well, I prefer not to think about the otherwise; I'd rather just work on ensuring we live in the world where they want to keep helping us.

And this is mostly unrelated, but I just learned it and I think it's interesting - it's not clear that AI will think a million times faster than we do. Current AIs think at rates that are pretty close to humans, and future ones might invest processor gains into being more intelligent and continue thinking at near-human rate. 

Sotonye: On having good priors

Your priors for thinking about this sort of thing float a head and shoulders above a huge number of experts I’ve seen over the years. It reminds me of a quote from Hanania in an interview he did with Harvard. He described how making sure you have good priors is more important than domain expertise for general problem-appraisal because. for the most part, it’s just not possible to read widely on every subject, and it’s also possible to read widely, acquire domain expertise, and still draw short inference straws with the wrong initial assumptions. Here’s the quote, I think you’ll like it:

“When it comes down to it, we’re all operating off a few priors. There’s a few priors that we all have that are really doing the heavy lifting. To the extent that we’re aware of that and we’re questioning those priors and thinking about whether they make sense, I think that has the most return to your time and mental energy.

So, for example, in economics, my prior is that markets are better than central planning. If I want to know about some new stimulus bill that comes up, I could go read the 1000 pages and try to track down every claim that every researcher makes, but that’s not a good use of my time. The good use of my time is figuring out why I have this prior that markets are better than central planning, seeing if it’s correct, and looking at the alternative evidence. If it is correct, I think I can have a pretty good view on the bullet points of the stimulus package, and then it’s going to be broader, and it’s going to help you think about other things, too.

. . . acknowledging priors and questioning them—and making sure you have the right ones—is an important thing.”

How do you make sure you have good priors for things like existential and personal risk, and other broad, important, daily thoughts like career choices and romantic partners? 

Scott:

The best answer I've found to this question is the one in Eliezer Yudkowsky's Intuitive Explanation Of Bayes' Theorem, which I reproduce below:

I think the reason people are so cagey around this issue is that - well, in one sense it's easy to answer your question, and the answer is exactly the kind of things you talk about. You look at the lessons of history, at problems that have already been solved, and at the things that the people you trust believe - and you try to learn general cases. I have no secret method beyond these.

But in another sense, all of this is terrible. There's no clear distinction between a prior and a bias. I too have a prior that markets are better than central planning. Does this mean anything different from the accusation "you're biased in favor of markets"? I get my priors from historical lessons and the people I trust - but what lessons I draw from history, and which people I trust, are themselves the end result of biases. It's all a ratchet.

I think the solution is that each step of the ratchet can either improve or worsen the information:bias ratio. If each step gives you a little more real information, you end up with a lens that successfully sees its flaws and overcomes the original bias. If each step gives you a little more bias, you eventually end up with a trapped prior.

There's no royal road here, except to try your best to expose yourself to unusual sources of information, to read arguments for sides you don't like, to make predictions to keep yourself honest, and to be genuinely puzzled by awkward little flaws in your story. I also sometimes find it helpful to occasionally put a ridiculous amount of effort into some important question, such that you're trying as hard as you can not to rely on priors and just to get as much of the unfiltered evidence as possible. I think this can work better than spending the same amount of time to investigate ten questions shallowly.

Sotonye: On Scott’s writing process

That last bit you just said reminds me of something that just happened today. Are you familiar with the Doomberg Substack? I just interviewed him a few hours ago and mentioned you and your work in our conversation. He reminds me a bit of yourself, and something he said about his workflow as the editor in chief of Doomberg made me wonder about your own. He said that he writes every night usually between 2-4am when his brain tends to fire on all cylinders. What pattern has your research/professional work as a psychiatrist/writing workflow taken over time? How do you decide what to write, when to write it, and muster the motivation to make your digital pen dance to the drum of your ideas?  

Scott:

I'm afraid I haven't read Doomberg yet. I'll have to check out the interview when you publish it.

Judging from X/Twitter, from comment sections, and from personal conversations, the average person has no shortage of ideas they're excited to talk about. I'm the same, but I get nervous that a short comment wouldn't present my case clearly, so I end up having to expand it into a long essay. Usually I have some point I want to make, I fret a lot about how to say it, and by the time I actually write it down I can mostly copy the form it's settled into in my head, filling in the gaps as I go. When that doesn't happen - when I'm trying to write the sentences for the first time as I type, instead of putting on paper what I've already been thinking - then it goes slower and comes out less well. But sometimes it can't be helped.

It sounds like you're collecting anecdotes about the quirks of different writers in the hope of finding out something interesting about the writing process. The main quirk I can contribute is that I can only work in a completely perfect environment. A nice ergonomic desktop, a big block of time when I won't be interrupted, and zero noise - even street noise is enough to scramble my thought processes. If I didn't have a loud fan and a good white noise machine, I'd have to switch to some other career. I'm afraid that most of the times I act like a jerk and snap at people unfairly happen when they interrupt me in the middle of writing.

And yeah, night is pretty good for this. You'll notice I'm sending you this email around 4:30 AM. My wife and I are splitting childcare - she takes day, I take the night. So far it's going well. The kids wake and need something once every few hours. Otherwise it's nice and quiet. And I have a great excuse for turning down all my social invitations.

Sotonye: On Scott’s newborns

I don’t have the awesome duties of having children yet even though I really want to, but I also end up writing very late everyday, too. I’m not sure how anyone who writes writes without a world of perfect order, which is what I get here in Los Angeles when everyone besides the creepy barn owl in my neighborhood is motionless in sleep. I miss covid sometimes because of the huge blanket of quiet draped across these roads and skies!  

But I really want to know more about your brand new life as a dad. What books, tools, strategies, are you employing toward life with newborns?  I’m almost 29 and I’m hoping to start my own family soon, but I’m not sure why I fear the newborn stage so much. It’s shocking to me that there’s no instruction manual inside the placenta.

Scott:

I don't know how much useful advice I have to give. My twins are two months old. All I can say is that I've successfully kept them alive so far. And even there most of the credit goes to my wife, who has  helpfully explained how all my innovative parenting ideas "are insane"  or "would obviously kill the kids".

I really don't know. Right now it's all a blur. Still, they're good babies.

There's a strain of pronatalist argument that goes that people should be less  worried about having kids, less stressed over picking the perfect  partner, less neurotic about waiting until they've achieved exactly the  right amount of career success. I understand it's well intentioned. But I  did the opposite - waited until everything was perfect before having  kids - and I can't imagine trying to raise them with fewer resources  than I have right now. My wife is the perfect partner, and she's willing  to be a stay-at-home mom at least for the first few years, and I work  from home and set my own hours, and we make good money, and we have  amazing support from family and friends and neighbors - and there still  are nowhere near enough hours in the day. I read Bryan Caplan, so I know  you just have to do the bare minimum to keep kids alive and happy, and  you don't need to fret about the Baby Mozart Einstein Lessons stuff. But  it turns out that the bare minimum to keep babies alive and happy is a  lot! God only knows how the actual tiger mothers manage!

Fine, actual useful advice. If you have twins, force them onto the same  schedule for feeding/changing/etc, otherwise you'll never get a moment  off (this is harder than it sounds; they look so peaceful when they're  asleep). Just as you should assume all guns are loaded, you should  assume all babies are about to vomit on you. Get very good at swaddling.  There is a Baby Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs with nursing / burping /  changing at the bottom, rocking in the middle, and if anyone ever  figures out what's at the top they should let me know. You will need  more burp rags and bibs than you think. No, even more than that. The Uppababy modular carseat/stroller system is expensive but very good; it  removes one tiny source of friction from your life, and oh God will you  be grateful for slightly fewer tiny sources of friction.

I don't regret anything. But I don't have much coherent advice. Ask me again in five years.

Sotonye: On depression and modernization

I’ve wanted to ask you for a while about the rising rates of depression in advanced countries and some possible causes. It’s a really interesting problem and there are a few theories I really like about why it happens, like the predictive processing model you’ve written about. Maybe modern environments expose us to something that throws off our top-down higher order confidence in predictions about bottom-up sense perceptions, sort of in the way that the shift to agriculture 10,000 years ago exposed us to something that caused the rise of homosexuality. Maybe modern environments have an unusual chemical or social factor that makes us worse off. 

Maybe modernization and the rise of the mental health profession primes people with unusually strong higher-order predictive processing to overrate the importance of mental disorders in their own self-assessments, like when anorexia becomes more common in places it never was after the concept is introduced. 

Or maybe it all has very little to do with modernization at all, which is what I was thinking the other day after reading about the effect of religious participation on depression and suicide. The literature reviews I read found no relation between religious involvement and major depression or suicidal ideation, but they did find that involvement was protective against suicide attempts. Which makes it sound like modern life erasing “third-places” and communities doesn’t really drive despair, but that low-level depression and suicidality might actually just be normal in human beings. What are your thoughts these days about why we’re increasingly depressed? What can we do for the depressed people in our lives?

Scott:

These kinds of questions are tough because we're not good at measuring the true underlying rates of mental illness. Depression diagnoses have gone up, but this could be because people are more likely to go to the doctor for mild cases. I got a strong sense of this when I did my training in Ireland, which at the time was about 25 years "behind" the US culturally. People there thought of depression as something that would probably land you in the psychiatric hospital - an extreme, life-ruining condition that made you totally different from normal people. As time goes on, opinions change, and pharma companies produce better commercials, we shift our diagnostic line closer and closer to ordinary unhappiness. We've seen something similar with autism.

So have underlying depressive symptoms really gone up? Studies are, of course, mixed - you can find an overview in the paragraph beginning with "the increased availability" at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272735821001549#bb0525 . Without giving a full justification, I'm going to say I mostly believe some of the findings in https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/abn-abn0000410.pdf, which show that:

The two things I notice here are that increasing depression is almost entirely concentrated among young people, and that it's going up really fast. I don't think this supports theories around modernization, social decay, changing attitudes to mental health, etc, which have all been happening a long time and affect everyone equally. The only answer that really fits is social media. Studies are really mixed about this - see  https://inews.co.uk/news/technology/dont-panic-about-social-media-harming-your-childs-mental-health-the-evidence-is-weak-2230571 - but I can't think of what else has been changing that quickly. Probably there are ideas about identity politics and global warming apocalyptism and fetishization of mental health issues that are contributing, but I don't know why those would all be coming up now and hitting young people so hard all of a sudden if not for the Internet.

Sotonye: Final question

I’d like to know more about who Scott Alexander is, I feel no one has really asked. There are huge gurgling waves of assumptions about you crashing and swirling around online, they’ve washed out anything reasonable about the question. But I really want to know. Before typing out this question I spent some time reading your novel “Unsong” to get a better image of things, and on reading it I felt maybe you’re just like me. There seems to be a deep spiritual passion, and an interest in Jewish mysticism and philosophy. It reminded me a lot of myself. I’m not Jewish but I converted to Judaism a long time ago after trying every religious and mystical system you could name. At one point I was probably the best meditator for my age in North America, I poked and prodded reality where I could, things got paranormal and scary but I was really looking for something more, I had to. I feel that you’re the same way. I want to know about this side of Scott Alexander because I think it’s a very deep part, and if you can, I’d also just like to know more about your personal thoughts and habits around health, diet, and maybe a little about your interest in writing fiction. Tell me about being Scott Alexander. 

Scott:

You're Karaite, aren't you? I've been thinking about them a lot recently. I'd like to be more observant, but the prospect of following Jewish law in its entirety feels overwhelming, and picking and choosing feels too unprincipled. I was hoping there was some option to start with Torah law and worry about the rabbinical prohibitions later, but apparently that's "heretical", plus the Karaites have complex traditions of their own and aren't just Judaism lite. I'm not sure; good work figuring out something that works for you.

I went through a spiritual/paranormal phase in college, but was never able to get anywhere. At some point I talked to a friend who was doing ritual magick and seeing some really freaky stuff. I tried exactly what he tried and got nothing, probably because even when I bang on my brain really hard and shout "HALLUCINATE, GOSHDARNIT!" I just don't have enough trait psychoticism to make it work. I've experimented with meditation, Alexander technique, yoga, hypnosis, etc, and dropped out of all of them through some combination of too-low-willpower-to-stick-with-it-long-enough and too-low-openness-to-get-anything-from-it. Guess I'm doomed to be a perfectly normal person with no connection to the spiritual world, and I accept that. Luckily I feel like life is pretty good and meaningful even so.

(I also tried drugs briefly, but had the opposite problem: I have such extreme reactions to them that it's probably not a good idea to push that door too hard)

I can't really speak to fiction. I'd love to write more, but it's like everyone says - you take whatever the Muse gives you and you're grateful for it. Totally different from nonfiction where you can occasionally write things yourself even if the Muse isn't around that day. I have some projects, but I'm supersitious about revealing anything before it's done. If the Muse comes through for me, you'll see eventually.

As for who I am, I'm afraid I'm pretty boring. I'm introverted and will take any excuse not to leave my house (babies are great for this, by the way - "sorry, I'd love to hang out, but you know how hard it is to find childcare"). If I hadn't found a community I really vibe with - and gotten a popular blog as an alternative to having social skills - I'd probably be a total shut-in. I once proposed the gravity model of friendship: the amount of time I see someone decreases with the square of the distance between our houses. Luckily there's a big rationalist group house four houses down from me, full of some of my oldest and dearest friends. They're always doing things and having people over, so I use them as a prosthetic add-on social life. 

Otherwise I can't stress enough how boring I am. I wake up at 6 PM every evening, have an impossible meat burrito at about 10, cereal at 5, then go to sleep at 8 AM. If it's a workday, I wake around noon to videoconference with a few patients, then go back to sleep. I bake a loaf of bread every Friday. I'm technically poly, but never get around to arranging dates with my other partners, except for one who comes over 7:30 PM every Monday night to help with the babies. Aside from that, anyone who reads my blog already knows everything I spend my time doing and thinking about.

More than two hundred and forty years later, Vice President Dan Quayle asked if the United States, making up 5 per cent of the world’s population, must have 70 per cent of all its lawyers. The numbers he gave were wrong. Nevertheless, this marked the first instance in post-war American history, or perhaps in the history of the post-war West, where the overproduction of lawyers became a topic of public debate.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t until the 1980s that economists began to explore the impact of lawyers on economic growth. Stephen J. Magee first raised the question in 1984, inspired by the work of Mancur Olson. The growing interest in this matter was likely triggered by the fact the number of lawyers doubled from the 1970s to the 1990s (and quadrupled in Washington alone).

Quayle’s statement stemmed from the debate sparked by Magee’s theses presented at the White House. The latter argued, based on studies comparing the number of lawyers in various global economies to their growth rates, that achieving optimal number of lawyers in the U.S. – one that does not depress productivity – would require reducing their pool by 40 per cent. Some highlighted weaknesses of these claims, such as the validity of comparing countries where education systems vary significantly. Setting aside quarrels over definitions, even critics admitted that so far no serious research has been done on the question: what price is the United States paying for such a large number of lawyers?

In 2023, two economists sought to avoid the charges made against Magee and limited themselves to America alone. The conclusion of their study, which examined data from 2005 to 2018 across 50 states, indicates that the number of lawyers was negatively correlated with the growth rate.

The sum effect of the overload of lawyers and their growing influence isn’t easy to calculate, as it is difficult to figure the exact losses that result from rent-seeking, talent misallocation and proliferating lobbies.

Keep in mind, however, that talent misallocation was, according to historian David Landes, the main reason why the Industrial Revolution began in England rather than in France.

Critics portray lawyers as the main agents of rent-seeking tendencies in society. Their role amounts largely to the transfer of wealth; they do not contribute to its creation, acting as a seedbed for what Jonathan Rauch called the ‘parasite economy.’ Every regulatory battle, every new lawsuit, every struggle for redistribution results in profit for them. The transfers they enforce, along with subsidies and court awards, are quantifiable. In contrast, the magnitude of wasted material and human resources they entail, not to mention systemic inefficiencies they induce, is difficult to measure.

One can only try to imagine the extent of these losses to the economy and society. Surveys like the one conducted in 2003 by the Reinsurance Association of America (as cited here) can help: according to the poll, 87 per cent of manufacturers will defend themselves at least once in a product liability lawsuit. The high costs associated with such a lawsuit are bound to have a negative impact on U.S. manufacturing output: fear of a possible lawsuit caused 39 per cent of manufacturers to abandon new product lines, and 25 per cent to end product research. Additionally, there’s little doubt that maintaining large legal staffs and refraining from entering business due to fear of lawsuits negatively impacts innovation and growth.

But do other activities of lawyers compensate for the fact that many talented people choose predatory legal activity over becoming engineers, that instead of building in the world of atoms, they create excessive litigation and inefficient laws?

Rule of law certainly has a positive effect on the economic environment. However, it would be difficult to argue that an increase in the number of lawyers is reflected in greater rule of law.

Perhaps the beneficial influence of lawyers is to be found in the realm of politics. For a long time, the legal profession in the U.S. – unlike in France, where lawyers mostly supported revolutions – has served as a bulwark of conservatism, upholding the foundations of the republic amidst changing ideological attitudes. Since the 1960s, however, it is no longer the case. As John O. McGinnis notes, both the American Bar Association and law schools are monolithically left-wing, often espousing outlandish ideas like prison abolition. Moreover, their interest lies not in preserving a transparent and stable legal order, but rather in “dynamic forms of legal transformation and the uncertainty they bring. Far from supporting a sound, established social order, they are likely to seek to undermine it,” since by doing so they increase their own income from rising compliance costs and transfer payments. The remarks from Dickens’s Bleak House remain accurate: “the one great principle of law is to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings.”

***

To claim that law is a line of code of the Republic would be too simplistic. The reality is more complex. This does not mean, however, that AI will not address the problem of overproduction of lawyers.

Critics are calling our attention to first problems with the use of AI in legal practice. In New York, two lawyers cited cases that turned out to be hallucinations. Some judges now mandate that documents submitted to them have a certificate that they were not generated by LLMs, or if they were, that they have been thoroughly checked.

It seems reasonable to believe that sooner or later, AI used in legal practices will, if not eliminate, then significantly reduce the occurrence of hallucinations. Importantly, AI seems to be ideally suited for digging through large databases in a process of so-called discovery, which until now has been particularly labor intensive. Sifting through these documents has been the preoccupation of junior litigation teams – AI will reduce their numbers and make the process itself both faster and easier. A similar development will happen with the search for precedents and analogies. Fatigue and inattention will no longer be factors, and search engines will eventually suggest the cases most relevant to the one under consideration.

AI may never be flawless, but it simply needs to be better than most attorneys. As McGinnis writes, AI is not overconfident and guided by emotions, so it will be better at assessing whether it makes sense to go to court or not. The number of cases will potentially decrease and they will be settled faster.

AI will also revolutionize another aspect of legal services, that is forms. In the future, when we want to draw up a will or set up a trust, we will not have to go to a lawyer. Instead AI will generate these documents, contributing to the democratization of legal services.

The development of AI will also push the best lawyers to become even better. The new technology will favor those who constitute its ‘scarce complement,’ superstar performers whose collaboration with AI will allow them to significantly reduce the number of associates they need.

Some point out that LLMs, due to the limitation of their datasets, will stall the development of the law and won’t invent novel arguments. But does the average lawyer often come up with new arguments? It seems that creativity, where it is truly necessary, is the work of a capable minority, whose skills will only be augmented by technology.

Except for the most gifted, AI will not displace, for the time being, the category of narrowly specialized lawyers, as it will need time to absorb new data. Perhaps in the near future, we will see a dwindling class of lawyers racing to create new regulations just to maintain an edge over AI.

AI is already opening up new opportunities for non-legal talent. It is probable that many of these individuals will be engineers, who will create legal value through technological innovation. Here, however, we are already seeing resistance from the industry itself. An analysis of job postings shows that there is a clear difference between US law firms and their UK counterparts: the former want to hire lawyers with digital skills, while the latter are open to people with digital skills even without a legal training. What is perhaps even more striking is that lawyer jobs requiring digital skills were associated with better pay in the UK than those not requiring them, while in the US it was the other way around.

Some speculate that AI will shift the law more toward ‘legal formalism,’ that is, the perspective holding that every case has a correct or incorrect answer. The opposing view, legal realism, contends that there is no correct answer; instead, it must be determined based on the political values prevalent at the time. It seems, however, that if, in the current era of hyperpartisanship, AI were to align the US legal system more toward formalism and further away from political debates, this would not be such a bad outcome.

***

By squeezing out average lawyers who draw up contracts or handle simple cases, and empowering superstar performers, AI will exacerbate already high income inequality among the profession (while simultaneously decreasing inequality in consumption).

As Peter Turchin rightly observes, degrees make good proxies for interelite competition. The traditional entrance ticket to the elite is an MBA or a JD. However, considering that the income distribution among newly minted lawyers is bimodal, and taking into account student debt as well as the potential for technological progress to aggravate inequalities even further, we must conclude that most aspirants aiming to join the elite will likely never achieve this goal.

According to the author of The Age of Discord, it is these failed aspirants to the elite who will present a serious threat to America’s sociopolitical stability. Keep in mind that Robespierre, Lenin and Castro were all lawyers.

Turchin points to Goldman Sachs estimates that 44 per cent of legal jobs will disappear because of technology (that’s more than Magee demanded to revive American growth). Smart, desperate to get ahead, with their path to upward mobility cut off and “nothing to lose but their crushing student loans,” they could trigger a civil unrest or worse.

If Martin Gurri is right, then modern democracies are full of revolutionary impulses, yet it is futile to expect that they will ignite real revolutions. However, this threat to America’s sociopolitical stability should not be underestimated. In view of the numerous benefits that will come from AI’s revolutionizing lawyer jobs – reducing the parasite economy, improving talent allocation and democratizing the consumption of legal services – both populists and dynamists should join forces to mitigate the upheaval that Turchin predicts. As the late populist Kevin Phillips wrote in Arrogant Capital, “reversing the situation faces a slight technical hitch: the lawyers in the White House, Congress, the courts, and the state legislatures are the people who make the laws.” Perhaps the renewal of the American Republic depends on those who will defend technology from both entrenched elites and those who dream of joining them.

The author of the only biography of Revel states that “with his profile of a 19th century publicist, Revel was perhaps the last great French liberal of the 20th century.” He considered the market to be a fundamental sphere of human relations and creativity and saw it as a protection from arbitrary government actions. The French writer once gave the following definition of liberalism: “confused set of resistances of humanity to the persistent idées fixes that attempt to purify it by enslaving it.”

For Revel, liberalism should be inseparable from democracy, the most pragmatic of all regimes, as it uses the method of trial and error, exercising constant self-correction. He wrote that democracy was so mercilessly attacked by intellectuals, precisely because it was the only regime where they had the right to speak freely.

Many of them, he warned, willingly choose fanaticism over careful observation and empirical restraint. “Man’s capacity to construct in his mind almost any theory, to ‘prove’ it to himself, and to believe it, is unlimited. It is only equalled by his capacity to resist what refutes it,” wrote Revel in La Connaissance inutile.

Like Tocqueville, he drew comparisons between the American system and the French one. In the Fifth Republic, the president is much more powerful, his authority does not encounter the same barriers as in the U.S., leading to “presidential hypertrophy” and “ineffective absolutism.”

For Revel,  however, the U.S. wasn’t just a backdrop for exposing the flaws of French political system. In his eyes, America is a civilization that, in contrast with Europe, still has “the ability to formulate cultural prototypes and prototypes of political societies.”

***

In Without Marx or Jesus, Revel intended to avoid both the pitfalls of pro-Americanism and anti-Americanism, labeling them as “irrational attitudes.” Following his time in the United States, the French writer concludes that America – like Italy, France and England in the past – represents now a “society-laboratory.” It is there, he believes, that the revolution can take place and nowhere else.

The first reason why the revolution can only happen in America is that the U.S. “enjoys continuing economic prosperity and rate of growth, without which no revolutionary project can succeed.” Second, it is where the frontier of innovation is constantly being pushed forward. Third, it is a country that is oriented toward the future, not mesmerized by the past. Fourth, it is a hotbed of rebellion against authoritarian control – Revel writes this having in mind the student revolts of the 1960s – where different lifestyles and ways of life proliferate. The American revolution is supposed to be the first modern revolution in which differences over values are more important than differences over means of existence.

The revolution that is to take place in America is destined to be an absolutely novel event in history, “not a settling of accounts with the past, but with the future.” The French writer imagines it as a burst of innovations and new economic solutions, without which it would not be able to keep its promises. Here Revel invokes the economists of the 18th century, for whom the feudal system of the ancien régime was not only unjust, but also unproductive. A true revolution means increasing productivity and efficiency relative to the regime it overcomes.

The new revolution is supposed to have nothing in common “with the revolutions dreamed of in the nineteenth century.” Thus, it will not come, contrary to the expectations of the European left at the time, either from the Soviets or from Maoist China. Revel notes that this is a hard truth to swallow for the left, which is ready to consider any eventuality, except that the U.S. – the country of exploitation, imperialism and Joe McCarthy – could be the source of a genuine upheaval. It views America as either a target or the greatest obstacle to revolution, not as its starting point.

Soviet Russia is no longer a source of revolutionary impulses, China, too, remarks Revel, offers no new radical vision for the world. Mao’s aphorisms from the Little Red Book have little to do with conditions in the industrialized countries of the West. They represent “emotional abstractions,” not visions capable of transforming the First World.

The Western left in the 1960s and 1970s argued that the revolution could come from yet another direction – the Third World. According to Revel, this belief is a manifestation of nostalgia for the pre-industrial era. He adds that there is no more counter-revolutionary combination than synthesis found in the Third World, namely that “of socialism with the past. Taken together, they have the effect of perpetuating economic stagnation while justifying political dictatorships.”

Nor is there any chance that the revolution will start in Europe. On the Old Continent the prevailing mood is that nothing new can really happen and every effort toward innovation is immediately suppressed. Before the Second World War, French essayist and poet Paul Valéry noted that Europe entered its Ptolemaic era: it had become a civilization of quotations and compilations, fixated on the past and devoid of creativity. Revel writes in a similar vein about the Old World, where everyone feels the need to return to the past, even if they intend to do something new, slave to the compulsion of invoking Bakunin or Marx, the 1789 Revolution, the Paris Commune or the Bolsheviks, Mao, Castro or pre-industrial society. During May 1968 revolt, Parisian students painted the famous slogan “imagination has come to power” on university walls. It meant nothing, according to Revel, as their imagination is confined to old doctrines and events of the past. For them the revolution becomes “a pale imitation of an earlier fiasco. And, since there is a multitude of historic failures from which to choose, it should come as no surprise that there are a correspondingly large number of ‘revolutionary’ movements’.”

One may ask whether nostalgia is always counter-revolutionary? After all, the revolutionaries of 1789 were largely inspired by the virtue of Roman Republicans, and the Bolsheviks imagined they were reenacting the feats of Robespierre and his companions. Today in America, many of the most future-oriented thinkers feel nostalgic for the technological optimism of the 1950s.

Back to Revel. In his eyes not only is Europe not future-oriented, but it also lacks the technological and economic preconditions to set a new course for the world. According to Without Marx or Jesus, among European countries only the UK can sustain the technological initiative. This observation remains partially accurate to this day: DeepMind, after all, was developed in the UK, not in France or Italy. In any case, Revel’s remark that Europe’s prosperity is based on research and technological breakthroughs made on the other side of the Atlantic is still pertinent.

***

In Civilization: How We All Became American, Régis Debray argues that, even Europe has fallen into decadence, it should not be a reason to despair. Decadence can be full of creative impulses, as illustrated by the example of Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was during the period of its decline that a remarkable creative flourishing occurred. In painting, figures like Kokoschka, Schiele, and Klimt emerged; in music, there were Schoenberg, Webern, and Mahler; in literature, notable names included Musil, Zweig, and Broch; and in the realm of ideas, one could mention Wittgenstein, Schumpeter, or Freud. Hollywood would be different without Fritz Lang, Sternberg or von Stroheim. Positivism, expressionism, Zionism, and Marxism – all originated in decadent Austria-Hungary.

However, Revel would not be convinced by this argument. In the absence of technological and economic dynamism, he questioned whether Europe can innovate in the field of culture and sensibility. He blames this inertia on the dominance of a certain type of intellectuals who not only focus excessively on the past, constantly rehashing old paradigms, but also harbor antipathy toward scientific thinking, using ideas with only one goal in mind: gaining status. The greatest ambition they can muster is to create their own local variant of what will appear elsewhere. “Certainly, Western Europe will undergo changes in mentality,” writes Revel, “but these changes will be dictated not from within, but from abroad.” Europe has ceased to be a spearhead culture.

According to Revel, Europeans cannot forgive America for making them aware of their cultural sterility. This entails a biased criticism of every phenomenon from across the Atlantic. When automation increases productivity, Europeans label Americans as slaves of technology, when they succeed in reducing poverty, the Old Continent scorns their consumer society, and so on.

Without Marx or Jesus makes the claim that “it is highly significant that the movement of dissent – the only original contribution to the technique of sedition to appear in the past decade, and perhaps since World War II – has originated in the United States.” Revel has in mind the protest movements from Berkeley and other campuses. He insists that information is the most important factor sustaining democracy, and the only way to resist manipulation by state institutions and the media is to make as much information available to the public as possible. The revolutionary dynamic was awakened precisely by information abundance. It led to an unique historical event: opposition to the foreign war arose in the country that led the war. Never before, argues Revel, had anything like this happened, never had the public rebelled against military expeditions or interventions that were intended to advance the national interest. At the same time, the French thinker notes that broad access to information has not always had the desired consequences, leading to “widespread and strong feelings of guilt, and a passion for self-accusation which, on occasion, tends to go to almost unbearable extremes.”

One could ask whether this particular type of rebellion – which Revel calls “dissent” – undermines the technological base, which itself forms a precondition for revolution. Bruce Gibney notes in The Generation of Sociopaths that “Studies in 1972 and 1974 by the National Science Board showed that of all age groups, those under thirty (at the time, a survey group composed entirely of Boomers) held the most negative views about science and technology, including that S&T changed the world too quickly and produced outcomes that tended toward the worse.” He goes on to say that Boomers, at best, failed to sustain the pace of technological progress, and, at worst, simply stunted it. Gibney accuses them of pulling away from an empirical mentality and shifting towards one based on feelings, a change that seems to be confirmed by examination of language. Since the 1970s – as hippie/dissent culture goes mainstream – the vocabulary associated with expressing emotions has supplanted the language of cool, empirical description.

Revel mentions three additional aspects of the American revolution that distinguish it from revolutions of the past. The first is the American aesthetic imagination, which is more vivid, in his opinion, than anywhere else in the world. It is easier to assimilate than European culture, pretentious and wrapped in an aristocratic mythology. Another distinguishing feature is that it leads to “cultural polycentrism”. “Technological plenty, in fact, opens the door to the formation of unexpected cultural minorities,” Revel argues, and there is supposed to be no end to the process of discovering new cultural variants. In the past, cultures created individuals; today, individuals will create cultures, increasingly liberated from national traditions and customs. Looking back, these remarks seem particularly pertinent. In the age of the Internet, more and more people are choosing the culture they want to live in, breaking away from the one they were born into, fashioning a world where, as Gwern explains, everyone has a “niche of his own, on respectful (if uncomprehending) terms with all the other subcultures.”

Revel maintains that the new American revolution will bring yet another great change: the end of national sovereignty, in which the French writer sees the source of all the problems of the modern world. In later years he would abandon this view, but in Without Marx or Jesus he contends that for the revolution to really happen, it must sweep the whole globe. In The Totalitarian Temptation, published a few years later, this conviction is still present, as he sees the nation-states as the greatest hindrance to imposing a global order, in which the economy will be governed by some overarching political authority and individuals will be free to make their own choices within a framework of “cultural polymorphism”.

This is the least convincing argument of Revel’s book. This shortcoming has been singled out by reviewers, as they pointed out that he pays too little attention to foreign relations, treating them in a manner that is not only reductionist, but simply utopian. Another weakness is the insufficient and superficial handling of the religious component, which the title itself announces. The French thinker mentions the vaguely religious nature of the dissent on the one hand, on the other argues that the appeal to God means clinging to the past, while the new revolution has to be completely detached from the old systems of beliefs. However, the scattered reflections throughout the book do not provide a satisfying treatment of the subject.

***

While not all of Without Marx or Jesus’ observations are still pertinent, it addressed a number of issues in a fresh tone, previously rarely heard in Europe. Two important books on the U.S., namely America by Jean Baudrillard and History Has Begun: Birth of a New America by Bruno Maçaes, seem to develop Revel’s insights.

Both articulate the thesis that America is a society-laboratory. According to Baudrillard, the U.S. represents the original modernity, while Europe is the “dubbed or subtitled version,” condemned to imitate whatever appears on the other side of the Atlantic. America is no longer under the influence of Europe, as Maçaes emphasizes when he argues that a new kind of culture, never before known to the West, is being born in the States. He insists that Tocqueville’s thesis of continuity between the Old Continent and the U.S. has turned out to be wrong. What is unfolding overseas is not the culmination of the European experience but a rupture and genuine transformation.

When the Portuguese diplomat suggests that America could abandon its current political or civilizational form in order to preserve its international position and thus appear in some entirely new, unknown shape to the West, he seems to align with Revel’s vision. Baudrillard, too, recognizes its distinguishing feature in the “unprecedented materialization of models.” Both, however, unlike Revel, seem to identify America’s distinct path with the creation of stories and fictions, with an “orgy of images” as Baudrillard puts it, or what Maçaes calls virtualism.

In his review of History Has Begun, John Gray highlights that Maçaes’ analysis “focuses on shifts in human consciousness, but it is changes in the material world that will be decisive in shaping the next stage in history.” In a world that has unmistakably acknowledged – first during the pandemic, then following the Russian invasion of Ukraine – how crucial the world of atoms is, the thesis of the future era of virtualism appears to rest on dubious foundations. In today’s context of resource nationalism, export controls and industrial policy, it is important to ask whether America’s transformation into what Maçaes describes as a “society of stories” could be seen as decadent. Ross Douthat concludes that virtualism, considered by Portuguese writer as the essence of the new American civilization and a manifestation of its vitality, is merely a transitional period.

On this particular point, there is a key difference between Maçaes’ thinking and Without Marx or Jesus. For the French writer, economic growth and technological development constitute necessary conditions for America’s revolutionary dynamism. Without them, the problems plaguing the U.S. cannot be solved, and without the ability to overcome them – America, in Revel’s interpretation, will cease to be itself, that is, a society-laboratory. History has Begun tries to convince us that this period of technological slowdown, deceleration of productivity and flight towards what Maçaes describes as “artificiality” – and what the Chinese perceive as “spiritual opium” – is the beginning of America’s highest period.

The proliferation of fictions that fascinates the Portuguese thinker means for the U.S., to steal a phrase from Cowen’s The Complacent Class, “essentially a low-innovation mode of existence.” For all its diversity and mind-boggling variety, virtualism represents the force of stasis. It is difficult to consider it as anything other than the exhaustion of the revolutionary dynamism that made America, according to Revel, a society capable of creating cultural and political prototypes. Maçaes is correct in suggesting that the intoxication with virtualism may be particularly strong in the U.S. However, it cannot be denied that it could lead the country down the path of decline. Keep in mind that for China, as Dan Wang notes, “hard tech is more valuable than products that take us more deeply into the digital world.”

After the publication of Revel's book, The Anti-American Obsession, the renowned Belgian sinologist Simon Leys wrote a letter to the author. He confessed that, while his arguments convince him, he cannot shake off some doubts: “How not to be afraid of America, he asks, and above all not to be afraid for America?” While many fear that America is sliding deeper into decadence during this period of transition, others worry about the shape it will assume when it emerges out of it. Of the many questions that the 21st century will answer, this is one of the most fascinating.

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• Israeli military has stormed Al Shifa hospital where Hamas’ underground base is reportedly headquartered

  

  

• The IDF has stated the operation will be confined to a limited area of the hospital 

• 650 patients, 650 medical staff, and between 5000-7000 civilians are reportedly inside the hospital

• UN says premature babies and other patients have died at Shifa due to power outages that began on November 11th

• Israeli military has stated, “We can confirm that incubators, baby food and medical supplies brought by IDF tanks from Israel have successfully reached the Shifa hospital. Our medical teams and Arabic speaking soldiers are on the ground to ensure that these supplies reach those in need,”

• The IDF has reported finding weapons in the Shifa hospital’s MRI center. The Palestinian Foreign Ministry calls these claims fabricated. 

• The IDF releases footage of weapons found at Shifa

• White House National Security Council Spox John Kirby says headquartering inside a hospital is violation of the law of war 

• The IDF reports Hamas military uniforms were found in the hospital, suggesting that members changed into civilian clothes to evade detection 

• Saudi Arabia condemns IDF’s Shifa operation 

• World Health Organization chief says storming of Shifa “totally unacceptable”

• Belize suspends diplomatic relations with Israel, adding to the growing list of Central and South American nations cutting ties with Israel

• CNN publishes inside look at one of many hospitals used by Hamas 

• U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says “From the river to the sea” chant is genocidal 

• Nearly 300,000 people march in support of Israel in DC

• Turkey’s Erdogan accuses Israel of “fascism.” Germany’s Chancellor calls Erdogan’s accusation absurd 

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• UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese says Israel has no right to self-defense under international law

• Netanyahu has stated about the future of Gaza, “What we have to see is Gaza demilitarized, deradicalized and rebuilt,” saying further, “We don’t seek to conquer Gaza. We don’t seek to occupy Gaza. And we don’t seek to govern Gaza.” 

• The IDF gains control of Gaza’s police headquarters, parliamentary building in Gaza City, and port:

• The IDF gains control over Shati refugee camp in northern Gaza, reports finding weapons and explosives 

• Gaza death toll has passed 11,100

• 52 attacks on U.S. Middle Eastern forces have occurred since October 17th, at least 56 soldiers have been injured:

  

• Three Palestinian terrorists open fire on civilians in area south of Jerusalem, with five people wounded and at least one in critical condition. The gunmen have now been killed by Israeli police 

• Hamas says the organization is willing to release at least 50 Israeli hostages in exchange for a 3-5 day ceasefire and humanitarian aid

• Israeli finance minister says voluntary relocation of Gaza’s citizens is “the humanitarian solution” 

• Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez demands immediate ceasefire in Gaza, says he’s working in Spain and Europe to recognize the Palestinian state 

• Iran’s supreme leader reportedly told Hamas that they gave no warning of the October 7th attack and will not enter the war on their behalf 

• UK parliament votes against calling for a ceasefire in Gaza

• 68% of American respondents in Reuters/Ipsos poll say Israel should call for a ceasefire, indicating steep loss of support from American public

• The House offices in DC locked down and lawmakers evacuated due to intense pro-Palestinian demonstrations

• Pentagon quietly increases military aid to Israel 

• Pro-Palestinian rioters clash with metro police outside of DNC headquarters in Washington, with multiple officers injured 

• UN Security Council approves draft resolution for a humanitarian pause in Gaza   

• IDF death toll has risen to 50 soldiers 

• The IDF continues to strike Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, Hezbollah says more than 70 soldiers killed

• Israel’s Channel 13 reports the IDF believes war with Hezbollah is inevitable 

• October 7th death toll revised down to 1,200 from 1,400, with dead Hamas members dressed as civilians inflating the numbers 

• Nearly 200,000 people in France march in support of Israel 

  

• Hamas forbade Shifa hospital from accepting fuel from IDF for PR reasons 

• Germany’s Interior Minister announces multiple raids on pro-Hezbollah group within country, saying Germany will not tolerate sentiments hostile to Jews and Israel 

• IDF reports over 200,000 Gazans have been safely evacuated south through humanitarian corridor

• Pro-Palestinian rally on Armistice Day in London saw turnout of 300,000 people 

• Ireland’s Sinn Fein leader says the Irish government must take Israel to international criminal court over actions in Gaza

Perspectives 

• Anti-semitism on university campuses is still going strong. We’ve recently seen MIT students chant “globalize the intifada,” an Arabic word meaning a violent uprising against Israel. We’ve seen dozens of student organizations at Columbia form a coalition to prompt the university to divest “all economic and academic stakes in Israeli apartheid.” And now the Harvard faculty has written a letter to Harvard’s president saying that characterizing Israel as an apartheid state is not anti-semitic, that the “from the river to the sea” pro-palestinian chant is not actually eliminationist, and more. There’s a certain thought I’ve been sitting on today, which is that maybe somewhere around half to three-quarters of all people are shit-testers. They’ll prod you and poke you and see what you’re made of, the same way a hungry bear in the woods would. Like the hungry bear, these people want to devour you. The bear doesn’t want to just survive, at least that’s not all it wants. It wants to know that it sits atop all ladders of life it finds on its perambulations across the forest floor. If you’re encountered by such a creature, the usual advice takes this motive into consideration. He’ll begin to test you, and we’re told to make ourselves very big, like an apex predator, and very loud, like a clap of thunder or a roaring torrent. We pretend to be bigger and badder than we are, and the bear reasons out that a horrible monster like ourselves, arms waving, voice raised to heaven, is probably a much worse monster than himself, higher on the monster hierarchy than himself. The bear is a shit-tester. A lot of people are the same way. If you let them, they’ll prod you and poke you until they feel they have license to pull your skin right off. American Jews are facing enormous pressure from these people, and they’ll continue to escalate the situation until the Jewish community either caves or shows its glinting teeth. Of course the Jewish community isn’t the only community facing the same situation as Jonah, who also found himself before a yawning maw. Wokism is a civilization-wide shit-test that targets almost all successful groups of people. But today, Jews have become a special target, partly because the United States has imported decades-old ethnic conflicts from the Middle East to its own shores, and partly because a lot of people are resentful of the overwhelming success of this community. If the Jewish community stands up and simply says enough, with a shout, I’m sure these people would run away with a whimper. 

• Gaza’s support for terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens has had between 60-70% of public support for years. Calls for a two-state solution aren’t serious if they don’t account for this, they’re fantasy. Everyone’s ultimate goal should be peace. We can all agree that it’s an end that should be pursued by any means. The means to this end is not keeping Gaza’s civilians next to a civilization that they want to destroy, a civilization with the capacity to destroy them in turn, no less. The situation is complex and I can appreciate the grievances of Gazans. But a decent future can’t take shape for them without some political realism. 

• Last update I mentioned that Iran might do the smart thing and try to build its relationship with the U.S. since embroiling itself in a war with a superpower would offer very little gain. Iran’s now public statements telling Hamas that they’re basically on their own settles the question. More questions do arise in its place however, such as: If Iran really had no warning of the attack, then which state is responsible for funding it? If Qatar turns out to be solely responsible for funding the attack, how would Saudi Arabia respond given their extremely strained relations? How would Israel respond? Would Hamas have attacked Israel so flagrantly if it didn’t think it had Iran’s backing? Was iran’s statement made public to obfuscate its real intentions? Much to think about. 

• The extent of Hamas’ use of civilian infrastructure like houses and hospitals for military purposes gives under-appreciated insight into the psychology of the group. Americans supporting Hamas seem to be mapping their own psychology or the service-oriented frame of mind that dominates most of our institutions onto an organization which couldn’t be more alien; and “alien,” I think, really is the best word to describe it. From Ancient Greece to advanced modern states like the U.S., the legitimacy of a state has always been assumed to rest on whether it protects the people it obligates, “protego ergo obligo.” A state that slaughters its people, taxes them to death, or otherwise neglects their basic subsistence, is rarely ever lamented once overthrown. States that actively harm the people they rule over are illegitimate. But Hamas takes illegitimacy to an all-star level. Using human shields is just bizarre. When you imagine a small armed force facing a military circumstance with extremely poor odds, you feel that they’ve arrived at a moment of unalloyed meaning, a time to display all the martial virtues of war, those virtues which give the question of the purpose of life its clearest explanation. You imagine that they’ll seize all the dignity that the field of battle has to offer. Every war movie is this way, partly because it makes for a great story, and partly because it just makes the most sense. What Hamas is doing makes no sense at all. The western world is seeing a truly alien psychology at work and most don’t seem to know it. 

• Despite all of the above Israel is still losing the PR battle big time, and in the long run this battle might turn out to be one of the most important. The entire world is always watching now thanks to social media, and losing friends comes easier than ever before. The sheer number of South American nations that have cut ties with Israel has been astounding and it’s probably just the beginning. The best approach might be what I mentioned in the first point. Israel might achieve better control over the narrative frame by showing its teeth. Most people deeply respect displays of power. For example, I couldn’t tell you how many opponents of Gavin Newsom I’ve seen flip after he answered criticism over San Francisco clearing homeless encampments for Xi Jinping by basically saying, “Yeah, and? Of course we did that. What of it?” Israel is a powerful, highly innovative state with deep ties to the most important stories and symbolism in the world. It should own that. 

Predictions 

• No predictions today. Events are beginning to unfold more slowly at this point of the war, so enough isn’t  changing to change our predictions or make new ones. We watch and wait! 

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• South Africa, Chad, Turkey, Honduras, Jordan, Chile, Colombia, recall their diplomats from Israel. Israel criticizes South American nations for cutting ties.

• China’s ambassador to the UN calls for an urgent humanitarian ceasefire

• Netanyahu makes comment about the future of Gaza, saying that after the war with Hamas is over Israel will need to indefinitely govern the area.

• 63 Hezbollah fighters killed by Israel so far 

• IDF claims 130 Hamas tunnel shafts have been destroyed since the start of its ground operation

• Hamas health ministry claims civilian death toll has passed 10,000

• IDF has advanced through the middle of Gaza and has now reached the coastline, effectively dividing the region into two halves and encircling Gaza City, where Hamas is reportedly headquartered deep beneath a hospital.

• The IDF has opened an evacuation corridor in northern Gaza for the past 5 days, allowing thousands of civilians to safely move south.

• IDF says 34 of its men have been killed since the start of the war. Over 300 soldiers were initially killed in the October 7th attack 

• Hamas spokesperson claims 136 Israeli military vehicles have been either completely or partially destroyed. The statement is unconfirmed by Israeli military 

• U.S. strongly opposes Israeli governance of Gaza after the war. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken says, “No reoccupation of Gaza after the conflict ends. No attempt to blockade or besiege Gaza. No reduction in the territory of Gaza.”

• Egypt objects to helping govern Gaza after the end of the war

• Anthony Blinken says the US does not support a ceasefire at this time, saying, “Those calling for an immediate ceasefire have an obligation to explain how to address the unacceptable result that would likely bring.”

• U.S. pledges $320 million worth of precision bombs to Israel, in the hope that enhanced accuracy will limit civilian causalities

• U.S. deploys Ohio-class nuclear powered submarine to the region, one of the most powerful pieces of equipment in the U.S. arsenal, sending a strong message to potential belligerents

• Belgium’s Deputy Prime Minister calls for Belgian government to impose sanctions on Israel for its actions in Gaza

• Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert calls current PM Netanyahu a “danger to Israel,” says the plan to govern Gaza is wrong direction for Israel

• Netanyahu says Israel is open to short humanitarian pause to the war but not a ceasefire

• Israeli Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu says dropping an atom bomb on Gaza is an option. Israeli Opposition leader Yair Lapid calls the remarks “horrifying and insane.” Netanyahu suspends him until further notice.

• IDF has continued to bombard Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, destroyed a large weapons depot and several rocket launching positions over the last several days  

• Iran’s defense minister warns that the U.S. will be “hit hard” if a ceasefire does not take place in Gaza 

• Large-scale protests staged in front of Netanyahu's residence, with protests calling for the Israeli PM to resign 

• Houthis shoot down U.S. reaper drone 

• More U.S. soldiers injured in attacks against Middle East military bases than was previously disclosed. More than twice the number officially reported have suffered traumatic brain injuries

Perspectives

• Hamas has roughly 40,000 fighters but so far its military prowess has seemed lackluster even with the strategic advantage of its complex, miles-long tunnel system—these two things seem to be in contradiction. I’m guessing Hamas’ plan going forward centers around the military strategy of Defense in Depth, or intentionally ceding ground in an attempt only to delay enemy advances with small, successive attacks that degrade momentum and eventually gain an advantageous position over a thinned-out enemy. The Russians, with the brilliant Kutuzov at the head of their army, handed Napoleon his defeat and crushed the same army whose efficiency and skill he witnessed at the Battle of Austerlitz, partly through this strategy. 

• A public opinion poll of Palestinians conducted in spring of this year found that 2/3rds of Palestinians do not believe Israel will survive beyond 2048. Another small majority of Palestinians believe they will recover lost territories. Both results make it clear that there is very little possibility for a two-state solution when one state wants the other gone completely.

• Iran and Hezbollah have issued grave threats to both the U.S. and Israel if the war in Gaza continues but so far these threats have been idle. It seems that either these enemies were paper tigers all along, or perhaps fear of U.S. power runs deeper through the Middle East than many American onlookers figured, or maybe Iran recognizes that it stands to gain more from the closer relationship with U.S. that began to take shape under Biden than from strife and war. There’s a counterintuitive perspective about crime that analogizes well with the last point. The bulk of major U.S. businesses make more money every year than almost all organized crime syndicates in the U.S. combined. A small example: the entire illicit drug trade in the U.S. generates somewhere north of $100 billion a year, which is less than a third of Apple’s annual revenue as of 2021. A trend reversal in the early 20th century made the same true for war, it stopped paying. No longer could armies be like Napoleon’s, sending back millions to the Directory of France during his campaign against the Austrians in Italy. Only a few years ago did Britain finally pay off its debt from the First World War. War stopped paying. Global industry, built on a foundation of peace, has saturated nations in unprecedented wealth and power. Fortunes greater than the spoils of all wars combined are won through trade, innovation, and relationships. Maybe Iran is smart and wants a piece of the pie. It stands to gain very little in a war with a major power. 

• So far several videos have been released by Hamas showing Al Qassam fighters shooting RPG-7VR’s at Israeli Merkava tanks (this sounds like a lot of jargon, and as it turns out, per my recent descent into military Twitter to learn more about war, the language of war is just pure, unalloyed jargon). The low number of IDF casualties so far tells us that despite these close-range attacks, the new “trophy system” on Israel’s Merkava tanks is highly effective. The trophy system detects anti-tank fire and destroys oncoming projectiles before they reach the armored vehicle. This is pretty cool honestly, almost as cool as the esoteric Merkava name.

• In younger generations support for Hamas, or at least vague opposition to Israel, is  nearly universal, which serves as a fairly dire warning for the future of Israel if it continues to depend on the U.S. for military and economic support. In 30 years or less it seems the U.S. will hang Israel out to dry as the older stewards of the nation hand off the helm to new blood. I don’t know enough about Israeli leadership to know whether they’re likely to shake off their star and stripe fetters, but smart folks on the ground I follow don’t seem to think so. Israel can be the greatest success story in the Middle East, but it may take new leaders with a bold vision. 

  

• It’s interesting that the international community does not expect Egypt or Jordan or any of Israel’s other neighbors to take Palestinian refugees or absorb the entire population to end a conflict that would otherwise be permanent. I agree with Richard Hanania that this would be the best road to peace, but something in the air has filled the minds of foreign ministers with thoughts of political idealism, there’s no realpolitik anymore. There’s nothing pragmatic about the way European leaders view states—states are almost non-existent as a consideration. There’s only humanitarian concerns now; the needs of everyone are equally valid and need to be treated exactly the same. This is going to lead to a lot of suffering, and it already has, as with lax stances on immigration from tough to assimilate regions of the world. A two-state solution is probably the most likely outcome, the global community will not accept anything more practical. Maybe phones have something to do with this. Maybe realpolitik can only happen when foreign ministers don’t have 24/7 access to babies fleeing with their mothers on foot away from Boeing bunker busters. The post tv-world is not just hyperreal, it's now hyper-close. 

Predictions 

• Defense in Depth turns out to be Hamas’ short-term strategy leading to a half-effective counteroffensive, the IDF begins taking more personnel losses, stalling the effort to eradicate Hamas control over Gaza. IDF resorts to more artillery and aircraft bombardment with limited results. The international community reaches critical opposition to Israel’s very justified war against a terrorist organization. Israel agrees to a ceasefire and some mixture of Hamas and Israeli leadership takes over governance of Gaza. 

• Otherwise no real updates here, not until we know more about what’s going on. 

Leave thoughts in the comments, and share updates with friends to bring them up to date!

Let me know in the comments if you like this additional approach to our content and if you have any other thoughts at all.

I’ve been reading a lot about warfare lately ever since the war began in Israel. It’s an interesting topic for a number of reasons. For example, the development of war over time highlights the generally overlooked but altogether central role of engineers and tinkerers in history. Before the outbreak of the First World War, besides the gentlemanly and limited field conflagrations involving infantry, calvary, artillery, and the like, warfare in Europe was mostly waged as sieges, with one force trying to break down the walls of a castle, and the castled force either waiting out its attacker or launching attacks of its own from the safety of its strong and high walls.

Lighter, more efficient, and more powerful artillery developed between the 15th and 18th centuries made sieges that would normally take months to years last only days to weeks, and traditional castles like the ones seen in Game of Thrones and other popular period media became obsolete, for a time. Until the development of the trace italienne, a star-shaped fort with a large number of angled walls that could deflect oncoming cannon fire. Some of these bastion forts are very beautiful: 

Tech Tom and Jerry, A Story Of Entrenched Equilibrium

Artillery made forts obsolete, and in response engineers of the trace italienne made forts great again, quickly reviving the need for longterm sieges. But innovators, of course, never sleep, and the world soon saw the development of new and vastly more destructive artillery that was used to flatten the battlefield in the first Great War. Engineers of the time responded in kind with the brilliant development of trench warfare, which cut down artillery losses significantly, continuing the perennial game of cat and mouse.

Subsequent conflicts saw the rise of armored warfare to breach the deadly rain of artillery fire, and combined arms warfare as well as aerial combat came to dominate the battlefield. For a time the equilibrium of war turned into Total War, with each side of the conflict absorbing terrible losses. Hitler destroyed London in The Blitz, killing at least 40,000 civilians, the allied forces destroyed 60 cities in Germany and killed tens of thousands more; war achieved an until then unknown level of death and destruction.

Innovators, of course, never sleep. Today they’ve erected forts in the sky like the Iron Dome used to destroy missiles fired at Israel, they’ve built eyes above the firmament that can see you, your enemies, and their mothers. They’ve done a lot since the Second World War to mitigate disaster. The game of cat and mouse continues.

Builders Are Gonna Build

War has almost always been an existential theater of hide and seek played between the best builders of opposing forces, hiding their friends away from violent threats, and exposing enemies wherever they are to violent greetings. For this reason wars have not always been decisive, and one of the most interesting problems we face today is the same problem faced throughout most of post-Roman history: how to change this reality, how to create decisive asymmetries. 

It’s the problem that Israel faces against the tunnel threat presented by Hamas, it’s the problem Ukraine faces against the seemingly equal defensive capabilities of Russia. The problem of war boils down to being smart enough to figure out how to upend extremely fixed and annoying equilibriums. 

Here’s the top general in Ukraine on the stalemate he faces and the similarities to the First World War: 

“FIVE MONTHS into its counter-offensive, Ukraine has managed to advance by just 17 kilometres. Russia fought for ten months around Bakhmut in the east ‘to take a town six by six kilometres.’ Sharing his first comprehensive assessment of the campaign with The Economist in an interview this week, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, says the battlefield reminds him of the great conflict of a century ago. ‘Just like in the first world war we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate,’ he says. The general concludes that it would take a massive technological leap to break the deadlock. ‘There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.’

The course of the counter-offensive has undermined Western hopes that Ukraine could use it to demonstrate that the war is unwinnable–and thus change Vladimir Putin’s calculations, forcing the Russian president to negotiate. It has also undercut General Zaluzhny’s assumption that he could stop Russia by bleeding its troops. ‘That was my mistake. Russia has lost at least 150,000 dead. In any other country such casualties would have stopped the war.’ But not in Russia, where life is cheap and where Mr Putin’s reference points are in the first and second world wars in which Russia lost tens of millions.

An army of Ukraine’s standard ought to have been able to move at a speed of 30km a day as it breached Russian defensive lines. ‘If you look at NATO’s text books and at the maths which we did [in planning the counter-offensive], four months should have been enough time for us to have reached Crimea, to have fought in Crimea, to return from Crimea and to have gone back in and out again,’ General Zaluzhny says sardonically. Instead he watched his troops and equipment get stuck in minefields on the approaches to Bakhmut in the east, his Western-supplied equipment getting pummelled by Russian artillery and drones. The same story unfolded on the offensive’s main thrust, in the south, where newly formed and inexperienced brigades, despite being equipped with modern Western kit, immediately ran into trouble.

‘First I thought there was something wrong with our commanders, so I changed some of them. Then I thought maybe our soldiers are not fit for purpose, so I moved soldiers in some brigades,’ says General Zaluzhny. When those changes failed to make a difference, the commander told his staff to dig out a book he once saw as a student in a military academy in Ukraine. Its title was ‘Breaching Fortified Defence Lines,’ It was published in 1941 by a Soviet major-general, P. S. Smirnov, who analysed the battles of the first world war. ‘And before I got even halfway through it, I realised that is exactly where we are because just like then, the level of our technological development today has put both us and our enemies in a stupor.’”

I said it in a recent update on the war in Gaza: one of the most important things to know for the future is how to win wars. The world is becoming increasingly unstable, and it’s not clear to me that the west can win another Great War if one breaks out in the near future. This is a problem we all need to face sooner or later. 

Side thoughts about science fiction  

As a side note, I realized after reading the above account of the Ukraine war that the same problem has always been at the crux of making science fiction interesting. The further technology advances the more frequently war is waged at a distance and the faster munitions delivery becomes (hypersonic missiles are the challenge of tomorrow, apparently), and the cheaper it gets to mount highly effective defenses, and the more detailed and precise operational reconnaissance gets.

Warfare in 1,000 years or less may become entirely pointless, or entirely impossible. Frank Herbert recognized this possibility and made high tech warfare basically obsolete in the Dune universe, with high energy laser weapons being canceled out by high energy force-fields, and thus depicted a world where knives were a primary weapon of combat. Which is both smart and really cool. George Lucas recognized this possibility and surmounted it via the Jedi Order, who have precognition and a bunch of  other cool Force Abilities they can use outside of technology. 

Science fiction doesn’t have a solution to the war equilibrium problem, but it does understand it really well, and the fictional ways around it are why I think the genre has been so successful. Technology makes a lot of things that involve your body obsolete, I mean it seems like bodies are becoming less important every second of every day. I think this drives us crazy.

You can date someone without ever being in person, you can work at one of the largest, most important tech companies in the world without ever going inside an office. I think this causes low level stress in most healthy people. We like using our bodies, it makes things interesting. Science fiction tends to create high tech worlds where bodies still matter. This is why I think the genre will always be one of the most interesting, it’s inherently optimistic. That’s what I hope for this world, and most people in tech today seem to want the same. 

In warfare, in business, in dating, in science fiction writing, all humans have the same under-discussed goal: to make bodies great again. 

Opening up comments section to everyone to hear your thoughts and opinions. 

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• Iran, Turkey, Qatar, Lebanon, Yemen, Russia have expressed either support for Hamas or condemnation of Israel 

• Rockets launched from Gaza continue to bombard Israel 

  

• Rumors of US desire to delay IDF ground operation in Gaza are now confirmed.

  

• Biden wanted more time to position U.S. forces. 

• Multiple nations call for aid to be sent to Gaza 

• IDF air and artillery strikes in Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon continue against converted civilian infrastructure and other military targets  

• Hamas claims 29,000 buildings have been destroyed in Gaza

• Turkey’s Erdogen calls Hamas a “liberation group”

• Limited IDF ground operation occurred in northern Gaza, the most significant ground offensive since the start of the conflict

• Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has said that the operation in Gaza will take months

• IDF has begun using armored vehicles and bulldozers in Gaza ostensibly to clear paths for an imminent ground invasion

• Israel’s finance minister says current direct costs of the war stand at nearly a quarter billion per day, with indirect costs not yet accounted for

• Saudi Arabia has intercepted missiles fired at Israel from Yemen 

• Various US bases in the Middle East have been attacked now for the 9th consecutive day. Several US servicemen suffered traumatic brain injuries.

• Islamic Resistance in Iraq continues to claim responsibility for attacks on U.S. bases 

• U.S. has carried out airstrikes against “Iranian proxies” in Syria. U.S. says the strikes were retaliation for recent attacks against U.S. bases in the region 

• Palestinian health ministry claims death toll in Gaza is over 7,000. Biden expresses doubt about these numbers 

• Hamas claims 50 of its hostages have been killed by IDF airstrikes 

• Hamas delegation has met with Moscow 

• IDF claims to have killed Shadi Barud, deputy head of the Hamas Intelligence Directorate and key participant in the planning of the Oct. 7th attack. Several other Hamas leaders have been killed. 

• Israeli President Herzog says the Oct. 7th attack does not represent Islam in a message to the Arab world 

• Iran’s foreign minister warns that the U.S. will “not be spared from this fire,” if conflict in Gaza continues. 

• Biden shifts public stance on Israeli conflict, calls for a two-state solution 

• Additional U.S. forces to be sent to the region

Perspectives 

War

• It’s unbelievably difficult to find any information about what the offensive capabilities of Hamas actually look like, how Israel would go about achieving its goal of dismantling these capabilities on the ground, and how difficult that might be. It would be helpful if we could see a comparison with some analogous past warfront examples. It’s easy to imagine war today as weapons flying through the air—mortars, artillery, fighter jets, drones, RPGs, MANPADS, whatever. But what exactly does a modern ground war look like? Where is the modern ground war set? How is it won? What are its challenges?

• The answers to these questions are probably some of the most important things to know for the future. The world is becoming increasingly unstable as the balance of power begins to shift away from the U.S. Hegemon. To retain dominance we have to know how to win wars—how to capture and hold large swaths of land, how to install governments that are effective, anti-fragile, enduring, and friendly to western interests. A few thoughts after spending some time trying to answer these questions: 

• Setting—The domain of conflict here (and most likely all hot, ground-based conflicts going forward) is highly urban, with the Gaza strip being one of the densest areas on the planet. Population stands at 2 million people living in an area of 140 square miles. To illustrate the density, Phoenix, AZ, which is pretty dense if you’ve been there, is about 520 square miles with a population of 4.6 million people. Gaza has a little less than half the population of Phoenix in an area about a 1/4th its size. The largest city in the region is Gaza City. Population stands at about 600,000 in a space of about 17 square miles; 35,000 people per square mile. A war in Gaza presents significant risk of high civilian casualties. The war of the future presents this risk. You’re fighting in a dense city.

• A close example of urban warfare in a densely populated environment is the battle of Mosul, Iraq. 2 million people in an area around 70 square miles. The objective was to unseat Islamic state control over the area.

• From a practical analysis I’ve been reading about the battle:

  “Mosul presented U.S., coalition, and partner forces with the particularly challenging problem of conducting decisive action in a dense urban environment that restricted maneuver, command and control, and the effectiveness of fires and range of weapons. The city’s narrow streets and corridors, rubble, power lines, and unforeseen environmental hazards negatively impacted mobility and the ability to maneuver. Dense urban terrain aids in the conduct of the defense against a superior force.”

• Both sides of the war took heavy losses, civilian casualties were severe, over a million people were displaced. Urban warfare is brutal.

• The difference in setting between Gaza, Gaza City, and Mosul, is that Mosul had almost no tall buildings, while Gaza City apparently has sixty buildings around 6 floors or taller. 

• Along with tall buildings that offer significant visual advantage for Hamas, the setting in Gaza also includes an elaborate tunnel network that has been developed for over a decade. 

• Even if civilian infrastructure is toppled, the battlefield remains complex due to these tunnels, and “deep” and “rear” targets, key weapons manufacturing and deployment infrastructure and key logistical bases, may be totally out of the reach of the IDF. In Mosul these key operational targets were wiped out by artillery and other long-range weaponry. Hamas has a significant advantage with these tunnels. 

• The battlefield became a clearer image to me after learning this, and it also became confusing to consider the purpose of the IDF airstrikes in the Gaza Strip. It seems like a huge waste of time and money. From Luttwak:

  

And one more:

• The only option for the IDF is a “close” operation. An operation that centers around close-quarters combat, which I’m assuming Hamas is more than ready for. 

• I’ve heard it said that conventional “bunker busters” can disrupt the tunnel network, but this soldier’s account of fighting with foreign militias who hid out in similar tunnels which faced similar aerial attacks makes me downrate the effectiveness of bunker busters by quite a lot. I don’t think they’ll work. 

• There are two takeaways here. First is that the situation the IDF faces is probably a lot worse than any public official in the US or Israel is willing to say openly, and as much has been confirmed by Seymour Hersh’s sources. One of them, commenting on the talk of using bunker busters to destroy underground Hamas targets, said, “The talk of JDAMS [bunker busters] is the talk of people who don’t know what to do.” 

Seymour Hersh

THE PLAN TO WIPE OUT HAMAS

It’s been one week since the horrific Hamas attacks on Israel took place, and the shape of what is to come from the Israeli armed forces is clear, and uncompromising. Over the past week Israeli jets have conducted around-the-clock bombing of non-military targets in Gaza City. Apartment buildings, hospitals, and mosques were torn apart, with no prior warning and no effort to minimize civilian casualties…

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3 years ago · 1039 likes · Seymour Hersh

• The second takeaway is that, if you want to win a modern war, dig. The tunnel situation is instructive. The usefulness of tall buildings is also instructive but, those tunnels, I can’t see how the IDF manages to surmount this. 

Miscellaneous perspectives 

• The White House has expressed concern that the IDF does not have a clear way to achieve its military objective of removing Hamas, showing a likely concern over the situation laid out above.

• Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett calls Qatar, “The enemy itself,” calling the gulf nation the chief sponsor of Hamas. Qatar seems like an underrated player in this conflict. This may change as the situation unfolds.

• For some reason the city of Melbourne is flying Palestinian flags:

  

• Hamas claimed days ago that an IDF rocket destroyed a hospital in Gaza, killing 500 people. The NYT and other major news organizations ran with the story. The NYT has now retracted the story and apologized, since it turned out that Hamas lied and one of its own rockets hit a hospital parking lot. This story is instructive as it shows disinformation is not an issue inherent to free flowing online discourse, it’s mostly a feature of having overwhelmingly powerful biases. I’ve only ever seen disinformation spread by people who are outstandingly competent, competent enough to convince themselves of just about anything, and competent enough to disregard epistemic caution. 

• There’s apparently an off-the-cuff signal that precedes direct U.S. involvement in a war. Right before war starts the Domino's Pizza near the Pentagon sees a dramatic uptick in orders to its offices. Wolf Blitzer has allegedly said to always follow the pizza (I need to confirm that). Dear reader, the pizzas are being ordered en masse. We are going to war. 

  

• The situation for Jews on U.S. campuses has grown more worrisome over the last few weeks. NYU’s Student Bar Association president was filmed defacing posters of civilians kidnapped by Hamas. Jewish students at Cooper Union had to barricade themselves from pro-Palestinian protestors.

  Students projected words saying “Glory To Our Martyrs” on a building at George Washington University.

• I might sound like I’m exaggerating here but I don’t think the level of anti-semitism in the world has been this high in any of our lifetimes, and the situation seems to be turning critical quickly. Ironically the danger isn’t coming from the expected suspects. It’s not white, bucolic, middle or southern Americans. The hate seems fundamental to the Islamic worldview, which brings up another interesting perspective

• Almost all hard-nosed leftists seem to have this unusual affinity for Islam and actions done in the name of Islam. Lukewarm leftist countries like Britain also seem to have a natural affinity with Islam. No one has ever pointed it out as far as I know, and I don’t think anyone has explained why this is the case, either. I think Islam might end up being the ascendant form of “wokeism,” even if only by way of mass immigration. I think that this will endanger the Jewish community worldwide. 

• It may be necessary to build some sort of insoluble emergency fund to protect Jewish life and property through rapid relocation. This all sounds ridiculous now but keep an open mind. The end of history was yesterday, today is a brand new horizon. 

Predictions 

• How serious is Iran about an attack against the US? I don’t think it would be very difficult if it really wanted to. With a porous southern border allowing in 500,000 people a month, a large-scale insurgency could easily be mounted here. And with everything we know about urban warfare, I’m not sure the US would be capable of stopping it. I fear that something of this nature may happen in the near future

• The IDF’s ground war is definitely going to happen. The only question is when. And when it does happen, I still think efforts will prove mostly unsuccessful. I’m not confident that the IDF has effective, legal means to deal with the tunnel threat. And we have to wonder about the effectiveness of their intelligence gathering if the initial attack happened to begin with. So I still think Israel will end up agreeing to peace in the end, and that the end will come relatively quickly. If it ends up being more protracted by way of U.S. involvement, we have the next point-

• I’m expecting a broader war to break out with Iran directly joining the fray if U.S. really pushes into the conflict, but how far will the conflagration spread? Why is Russia testing its nuclear retaliation capabilities? I don’t see any clear way this war can directly involve Russia (or China), but maybe Iran has more pull than we think, and maybe a direct war with Iran really does trigger a larger fight. We’ll see.

End Thoughts 

I hope I’m wrong about most of what I’ve said here. I hope the world just proceeds on as normal and that all this turns out to be a speed bump on an otherwise smooth road. But we’ll see over the course of the next few weeks. Until then, we wait for more news.

• Side notes before today’s post: spent 24hrs in the ER last week and was unable to make some posts I was excited about. Hopefully we can make up for that this week!

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A few bullet point thoughts, high-level perspectives, and predictions

What we know so far:

• Over 900 Israelis have been killed in a highly coordinated surprise attack by Hamas, mostly civilians including women and children, with some military casualties.

• The attack came a day after the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur attack on Israel.

• Over 100 civilians have been kidnapped by Hamas and taken back to Gaza. Many were foreign nationals from countries including the U.S., Brazil, Mexico, Italy, Nepal, Thailand, and Britain. 

• At least 14 Americans have been killed by Hamas. 

• Some hostages have been killed, but it’s assumed at this time that the majority will be kept alive to complicate Israel’s military response, to trade prisoners, and to potentially draw other nations into the conflict. 

• Many Israeli soldiers have allegedly been kidnapped by Hamas, and dozens more have been killed. 

• Israel has declared war for the first time since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and has promised a ground invasion of Gaza. Air strikes against infrastructure in the Gaza Strip have been carried out over the last several days.

• Israel’s ground invasion is expected to begin this week 

• The U.S. pledged military aid to Israel 

• The EU withdrew aid from Palestine but quickly rescinded the withdrawal after backlash from several member nations.

• Major actors in the region including Saudi Arabia and the UAE have called for peace. Saudi Arabia blames Israel for the situation.

• U.S. aircraft carriers have entered the region. 

• Palestinian communities in Sydney, London, New York, and in various other regions of the world have been celebrating the attacks by Hamas.  

Perspectives

• It’s been noted that the United States recently freed $6 billion dollar’s worth of Iranian assets, and that this likely helped fund this month’s attack on Israel. 

• Rumors are circulating that Israel was warned about the possibility of an attack by Egypt but ignored the warnings.

• It’s a significant point that Gaza, the most surveilled settlement on earth besides the Las Vegas strip, was able to organize a large-scale attack without anyone knowing in advance, and was able to execute the attack without drawing a full Israeli response until hours later. Many find this suspicious, rightfully invoking the Gulf of Tonkin and other false flag operations in the past used as Casus Belli when some state wanted war. But I’m not confident that Israel allowed an attack on itself because I don’t believe a ground operation against Hamas and (maybe) Hezbollah can be successful, and I’m sure Israeli military leadership knows this after the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War and the 2014 assault on Gaza.

• It’s very much the case that Elon’s purchase of Twitter has dramatically altered the narrative landscape that forms after political events. A neutral algorithm seems to be guiding the platform that doesn’t boost accounts from one side or the other, leaving judgments up to the viewer. It’s too soon to say which side of the war this situation will favor. Unfiltered footage of Hamas terror has whipped up support for Israel. But unfiltered footage of even greater Israeli retaliation may create tremendous international blowback.

  

• Regime change in the Middle East and North Africa has been a mainstay of US foreign policy since the 80s. Iran and Syria have been major targets of this policy, and the current conflict between Israel and Hamas opens the door for Middle East hawks again. 

• Many have noted that the boldness of Hamas’ attack tells us that the United States is no longer feared as global Hegemon, and Iran may believe it has a good chance of undermining American power if we enter the conflict. I think this is all pretty reasonable, seeing the recent conflict between Russia and Ukraine shifts my optimism of American power downward. Russian military might has been unable to overwhelm a much smaller nation as everyone expected, even with all the resources in the world and the latest military technology. A new age of warfare seems to be emerging, it’s not yet clear how any advanced nation can actually win. The recent conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the contested Nagorno-Karabakh territory may offer some insight though, and it’s essential for us to understand how exactly Azerbaijan was able to win. 

• The promise of liberal democracy to dissolve old cultural enmities functions mainly through trade, and falls to materialize between states that don’t have complex industry because of low human capital or enormous natural resources like the large oil nations of the Middle East. Chinese cultural differences are mostly overlooked by the European and North American powers, for example, because of complex, mutually beneficial trade relationships. Liberal democracy and attendant peace will only ever take hold in the Middle East when the oil runs dry. Until then, war. 

• The invasion of Ukraine and now the attack on Israel are both the result of bad U.S. foreign policy. We had opportunities to meet Russian fears of Ukrainian entry into NATO half way, we didn’t, and now U.S. and European energy integrity has been hampered by Russian oil sanctions. We could have simply not given $6 billion to Iran, an action that must have made Netanyahu’s head spin, but we did it anyway. And now U.S. and European military readiness will likely be hampered by exhausting weapons stockpiles in support of another major war. 

• A significant and maybe irreversible political shift is happening in the wake of the attacks as many good liberal’s eyes are opening to the amount of abject Jewish hatred on their side. BLM chapters around the U.S., elite university student bodies, and even some celebrities are throwing their support behind Palestine. Taking a stand for the Jewish people now means parting ways with left-leaning institutions and people who’ve claimed to care about compassion but really don’t. 

• Jewish people around the world have had to avoid major areas where Palestinian marches were happening for fear of attacks. New York Police Department has bolstered security for synagogues to prevent attacks. One side of this conflict is not like the other. Rising anti-semitism presents a great risk to the global Jewish community.

  

Predictions

It’s hard to predict anything in a war so these will be short. 

• I’m expecting a broader conflict to break out with Iran and Syria against Israel and the U.S., potentially with U.S. boots on the ground. 

• Oil markets make all time highs, gas prices make all time highs, all amounting to deepening U.S. and European inflation 

• Ground war in Gaza against Hamas and in Lebanon against Hezbollah ends in less than a year with some unfavorable agreement for Israel as a result of U.S. media and international blowback and limited war progress. Netanyahu resigns. 

• Hamas attempts some small scale attacks on the U.S.. I really hope this doesn’t happen but I’m taking Iranian warnings against U.S. intervention seriously. 

• Tensions rise between U.S. and Saudi Arabia and other gulf states. Unclear what this would amount to beyond worsening inflation.

• Other nations begin to contest territory as U.S. power flags. China stops playing footsie with Taiwan.

There are a few other major predictions I’m sure I’m missing, but we’ll have to come back to this later.

For now, we wait and see which direction the wind blows. My high level opinion on all of this is that I’m pro-civilization and anti-barbarism. Random rape and murder and kidnapping are just not things I’ve ever been able to get into despite all my best efforts. My more gut-level opinion is that I would probably do anything to see the Jewish community prosper, and that there’s no other community I’d rather throw my hand in with. 

I hope Israel succeeds. I hope nothing like the Hamas attack ever happens again. For now, we wait and see which direction the wind blows. 

• Side notes before today’s short post: check out this related post on Elon Musk if you missed it (it’s a subscriber post). The co-founder of Substack seemed to like it and I appreciate him quoting it in the notes app. Thanks Chris! Please subscribe to check it out.

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You look at the digital clock in the corner of your screen. The numbers are relentless. They never ever stop, they keep egging you onward.

They remind you that you’re the only thing in the world that’s stationary. Everything else in the universe grinds forward without end, the sun and moon and stars never tire. There's an invisible engine beneath it all that runs on some divine energy, the secret names of God serve as a cosmic lubricant that ensures the pistons of the world sing while they oscillate. You’re the only thing that wants to stop working. You have to work. There are projects, goals, needs, responsibilities. There are women, cars, places, people you want. There’s time, you only have a small window to make life count. You can’t stop. 

But you can’t go on either. Going on is difficult. Going on means pencil-pushing, emails, efforts with wider reward cycles than anything your ancestors did in the past, and the things they did were more difficult. You were made to go to war. 

You were made to solve unsolvable coordination problems between young men who lived near you, who wanted what little you had. You were made to solve the problem of violence presented by the young men who didn’t live near you, on the other side of the hill, who solved the coordination problem before you did, who also wanted what little you had. You were made to solve the unsolvable problem of nature trying to hurt you everyday, trying to starve you everyday, throw bears and wolves and impetuous weather at you everyday. You were made to stop them all from taking what’s yours. You were made to best all men and put all creatures on earth to heel. 

You like the idea of a homestead a few miles from the city because it reminds you of that life, of the essential battle of the before-times. You want to build a barn, you want to build a beautiful garden, you want to get a lot of sheep and German shepherds to guard them. But that life is difficult, we left all that behind for a reason. Pencil pushing is easier. You have to do it, you see other people do it everyday. You see how good life can be when you grind out those emails, when you network like a psychopath, when you endure the endless tedium required to get the right credentials. But how do they do it? Other people seem to chug along and plow through the tedium the way the sun plows through the sky without delay. 

There must be something right with them and wrong with you. There are only a few days’ worth of that kind of energy stored in your body every month. You’re not the same kind of animal. But neither are they, not most of them. Some of them have just the right combination of obsessive mental illness, intelligence, and profitable interests to do great things. All the rest of them though, they’re like you, they’re made for war. They weren’t made to be a cloistered courtier in some ancient Chinese empire. They were made to battle against the sea, all of its roaring waves trying to stop them from some new and glorious land. They were made for hostile shores in far away places whose painted-faced inhabitants guard the promise of those lands like a great roving dragon, like the cherub preceding Eden. 

They’re on drugs, they’re on lots of drugs, there’s no other way for them to do what they do. The entire world of men grinds on because of enormous chemical manufacturing. They don’t have the energy to plow through exalted mountains of tedium either, they buy it from the energy store, where psychiatrists work. They are something more than human. They won’t tell you this, but their life depends on prescription medication. The global economy depends on prescription medication. The premises of student loans and college education and careerism depend on medical interventions. Even the prolific artists we love from early modern history, the effulgent thinkers whose volumes have influenced us all, they were all on drugs. Proust? Opium addict. Nietzsche? Opium addict. Ayn Rand? Amphetamine addict. You’re living in a world populated by highly enhanced individuals. Transhumanism arrived a while ago, you and I? We’re late to the party.

• Side notes before today’s post: a big thanks to Kurt Overley for inspiring this post, your comment got me thinking about the topic! Much appreciated.

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Dogs are one of those topics where a lot of people’s instincts just sort of fall off a cliff, their ability to make causal inferences just sort of stops working. 

I don’t think there’s a good word for the kind of topic I’m describing. Some ideas in the same ballpark are the terms “mental contagion,” which is a harmful trait that inspires mimicry via knowledge of the trait, and the term “info hazard,” a nice phrase coined by the philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2011 which means information that may empower dangerous actors if disseminated. 

An interesting example of mental contagion is the spoonie community. An online group of mostly young, able-bodied women who construct identities around being ill, and whose illnesses improve after separation from this community. (I think we underrate how amenable to outside influence our experience of the world can be. I think you can meme pretty much anyone into states of anxiety and depression with the right ideas).

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• Side notes before today’s post: I think this is one of the most inspiring topics we’ve discussed here, so I’m actually pretty excited to know what you guys think.

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This is a sort of review of a review.

I couldn’t help but write something about it after reading Scott Alexander’s breakdown of Ashlee Vance’s 2015 biography of Musk. It was riveting, inspiring, and offered a much fairer perspective than what American chattering-media has been willing to grant Mr. Musk.

I think Scott’s review made high cresting waves, being shared widely across the inter-webs, for this reason—most of what’s pawned off as expert analysis of industries, especially tech, is preemptive schadenfreude, smug insistence on the future failure of some hopeful innovation, like in 1998 when Economics Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman predicted that, by 2005, the internet would have an impact on the economy “no greater than the fax machine’s.” How did that turn out, Mr. Krugman? 

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• Side notes before today’s post: Check out last week’s subscriber post if you missed it. It’s short but important.

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Another day, another bill that makes its way through the CA legislature that wants to address crime by tackling it backward. Lots of thoughts came up while reading through the bill here.

Instead of doing the Right Thing and de-incentivizing criminals by punishing crimes small and large with a healthy helping of severity, SB-553, a new CA senate bill, wants to add to the increasing list of incentives to commit crimes by:

1. Creating a bureaucracy to oversee that every business with more than ten employees has an escape plan and reporting system for workplace violence. 

2. Forcing every business in the state to collect and disaggregate reports of workplace violence 

3. Use reports of violence to file temporary restraining orders against offenders.

Drops in an overflowing bucket 

I was driving through downtown LA yesterday with my fiancé and the scene was striking, I try to avoid driving downtown if I can help it. Squalor as far as the eye can see and as stark and as gray as anyone can bear—tents, trash, drugs, bodies strewn invariably beneath every bridge and lamppost and tree. For some reason people are standing in the street and without going anywhere. 

I practically step over a man on my way to get donuts. I tell my fiancé to get to the other side of me so I’m in between her and everything I’d like to abolish from her world. The only other people who are out are middle-aged runners, which makes me think a comic thought, “Well that makes sense, everything is going wrong and they’re running away.” And also, “They look confident in the fact that if crime strikes they’ll have a head start.” 

Funny thoughts are interposed between thoughts of crime and money. Gas is the highest I think it’s ever been in the state’s history, I’m worried about filling up. Every gas station has several people standing around and staring at the people trying to get back to work or get home. I think back to the time I went to a Jack-In-The-Box nearby and had to place my order through the same bulletproof glass they use at my bank. I think about leaving the state, but then I think about how easy all these problems are to solve.

Solve for X

After pharmaceutical interventions for schizoaffective disorders became more advanced in the 60s they closed almost all the asylums. Cops have to deal with guys who belong in Arkham. But there are fewer than 10,000 cops in a city of 4 million. Even if there were more cops, retail theft is still practically legal. Felony gun charges were dismissed at historic rates in San Francisco under its former district attorney. 

These are all reversible. None of it is inevitable. Social decay is someone’s decision, it’s not a rip current or a solar flare. You can stop it, you can put it back in the filthy bottle it came from and ship it to Sheol where it belongs. 

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• Side notes before today’s post: Check out my recent interviews with Zero Hp Lovecraft and Simon Sarris in case you missed them, they cover the general ideas that we’ve been getting at and I think you’d really like them!

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The other day, dear reader, we talked about the reams of high quality entertainment that became instantly available since the inception of the smart phone, and how this has had the overall effect of making time much more valuable for younger generations especially.

Together all the beautiful Israeli women on instagram, all the bearded, fast-talking burger critics of TikTok, and all the semi-ironic anonymous sex-pest accounts on Twitter (X), raised the quality standard of free time by a huge margin, and now we’re all busy being entertained. A little too busy for one another.

Kids suffer most from our inattention

I mentioned a study which found that children are now getting the short end of the attention stick by parents who are spending too much time on their phones. I’ve thought about the study at least once a week since I’ve read it, and I found it again last night after some digging. It’s both a bit different and much worse than I remembered.

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How it goes

You see an attractive person at Whole Foods, their phone is in hand, their eyes adroitly avoid ogling other people, unlike you, dear reader. And unlike me.

You think to yourself, “I wonder what they’re like?” Or, if you’re a girl, like my fiancé, looking at another girl, you think, “I wonder what it’s like to be them?”

But the idea of just going up with a “Hey, just wanted to say. . .,” is out of the question, at least if you were born after Gen X. Gen Xers and older folks have no such issue, they’re different, you can see it on their faces. You hear it in their voices when they speak.

Boomers and Gen X have a strong agnosticism about the character of other people, and a nontrivial subset of these age groups have a huge amount of optimism about the average person on the street. They assume other people are approachable, and they tend to force the shy, human turtles out of their shells just by being more extroverted themselves.

Younger generations are more suspicious, I’m suspicious. I have reason to be. We’re all competing for each other’s attention and losing the battle at a scale unimaginable to most older people. We’re competing against effulgent streams of infinite media, a never ending flow of breasts and butts and dumb podcast clips following calamities in Maui following videos of rank ordered burgers in New York following more and more and more.

We don’t talk about “ghosting” anymore, likely because it’s the default social assumption among millennials and zoomers. We all know everyone is busy being entertained, that any potential interaction with a peer would mean a fight between us and all of Silicon Valley for their attention. This makes us much less approachable and much less likely to approach.

Our time is more valuable than ever, this undergirds a new social contract.

Things are getting weird because of this new contract. One example of how weird things are getting is a study I read not too long ago about how the rise in teen depression is explained largely by the increasing amount of time parents spend on their phones. (I’ll have to find the study later today or early tomorrow and make a separate post for paid subscribers). Children are losing the battle, too.

Solutions anyone?

A lot of solutions to this problem that I see come straight out of Dune. Well-meaning people want to see a grand abandonment of technology and a return to living in something like early 19th century Appalachia. But that’s hard living, which no one wants to admit. Modern life is wonderful and we shouldn’t just give up on it. It’s beautiful to live at the latest point in history, I don’t want to go back, I want to go forward.

There’s no other option.

It’s all doable

I think the problems we’re facing are all workable, and that the phone problem specifically is not really much different from problems like junk food or smoking. Once you know it’s bad for you it’s a bit easier to regulate behavior. Campaigns to raise awareness about harmful behaviors and substances have seen outsized success over the last few decades. More Americans smoked than the French in the mid 20th century, everyone smoked. You don’t really see folks smoking much anymore.

There’s also been an (less pronounced) effort to cut out caffeine:

Awareness

Consider this the start of an awareness campaign, dear reader. It’s for you as much as it is for me. I need to read more, you need to read more, we need to be reading together. We need to find things to do that aren’t online. We need to spend as much time with others as possible and resist the pull of the breasts and butts and the rank ordered burgers in New York. I think we’ll be happier and more normal.

Reparations are a consistently unpopular political question—a Gallup poll from 2019 found that 67% of Americans oppose cash handouts as redress for slavery, which is not what I would have guessed considering the meteoric rise of Schmittian identity politics since Trump took office. Even Democrats are nearly evenly split on the matter:

Trust The Plan

The plan cites slavery as its meta-justification for reparations, which finds its relevant expression in Urban Renewal policies ushered in by FDR’s 1937 Housing Act. Urban Renewal was a large-scale effort to rehabilitate slums across the nation and improve living standards for poor Americans, one of FDR’s many reforms that profoundly reshaped the country.

The SF Reparations Committee acknowledges that California never actually had slavery, but describes the efforts of Urban Renewal to improve the slums in San Francisco as following in the same vein as the practice:

As the plan acknowledges, chattel slavery did not exist in San Francisco or California. The plan therefore tries to make the case that the “tenets of segregation, white supremacy, separatism, and the systematic repression and exclusion of Black people from the city’s economy” were codified in San Francisco’s urban renewal policies of 1948. Those policies included the creation of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency(SFRA), California’s first redevelopment agency, which sought the rehabilitation of slums across the city. The agency was formed under California’s Community Redevelopment Act of 1945, California’s response to the Housing Act of 1937 passed by FDR. The Housing Act provided subsidies to municipal housing agencies with the goal of improving living conditions for poor Americans nationwide.

This is how the reparations committee describes the alleged harms of 20th-century urban renewal projects:

Of particular focus in this plan is the era of Urban Renewal, perhaps the most significant example of how the City and County of San Francisco as an institution played a role in undermining Black wealth opportunities and actively displacing the city’s Black population. As San Francisco’s African American population grew between 1940 and 1963, public and private entities facilitated the conditions that created near-exclusive Black communities within the city, while simultaneously limiting political participation and representation, disinvesting from academic and cultural institutions, and intentionally displacing Black communities from San Francisco through targeted, sometimes violent actions.

But the plan’s characterization of this history is incomplete and inaccurate, leaving out crucial details about the causes of these problems and the ways they have been addressed. The plan also privileges Black displacement while rendering the forced removal of the city’s Japanese and poor white residents invisible.

San Francisco’s urban renewal concentrated most of its efforts in the Western Addition district of the city—an area that many African Americans moved to following World War II. The Western Addition had previously been home to a large population of Japanese residents since the early 20th century—with nearly 600 Japanese businesses operating between South Park and the Western Addition by 1909.

The Western Addition’s Japantown, established in 1906 after the destructive San Francisco earthquake, had the world’s largest and oldest Japanese population living outside of Japan by 1940. But over 5,000 of those residents were forcibly removed after FDR’s executive order to intern Japanese families on the West Coast. This paved the way for Black San Franciscans to move in and turn the neighborhood into a cultural base. The Western Addition’s famous Fillmore district subsequently became known as the Harlem of the West, famous for its jazz and other clubs.

Following the internment of Japanese residents, urban renewal displaced nearly 5,000 more families in the 1950s and 1960s, around 40% of whom were white. The Reparations Committee does not call for reparations for these white families displaced by urban renewal, nor mention them in its plan. The plan also does not mention the displacement of Japanese families which made the historic Fillmore district possible, or call for reparations for these families. The plan does deign to mention that San Francisco compensated the small number of Japanese city employees for income losses during internment, as a supporting example of what the city could and should do for its Black residents.

Eligibility and benefits of the plan

Here we get into the requirements and the benefits of the plan, this is where things get wild.

According to the committee’s latest report, these are the main requirements for receipt of reparations:

• Being an African American descendent of an enslaved person or a descendant of a free Black person prior to the beginning of the 20th century, or who has “identified as Black/African American on public documents for at least 10 years”

• 18 years or older

• Born in SF or moved to the city before 2006

The plan goes on to state that, in addition to providing proof of the above eligibility requirements, proof of being harmed by the city of San Francisco must be provided. An example of the kinds of possible harm one could have experienced include being charged for a drug-related offense. “An individual, or direct descendant of someone, who was arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and/or sentenced in San Francisco for a drug-related crime and/or served a jail or probation sentence for a drug-related crime in San Francisco during the failed War on Drugs (June 1971 to present), including individuals who received offenses, or served, as juveniles.”

In addition to the $5 million lump sum payment the plan proposes for each eligible Black resident, the plan presents a host of other ideas in its “Economic Empowerment” section:

• Pay lower-income Black families the equivalent of San Francisco’s median income, currently $97,000, annually for the next 250 years

• Create a publicly funded banking institution to grant loans, credit, and financing to those who fall outside the requirements of private banking

• Create a publicly funded and comprehensive debt forgiveness program that clears all Black residents of student loans, personal loans, credit card debt, and all other debts

• Grant Black individuals tax abatement on sales taxes for the next 250 years

• Publicly funded home, rental, and commercial insurance guaranteed for eligible Black residents

• Remove credit score ratings from public banking institutions

• All government buildings being leased or sold in the city must pay a minimum 50% of their gross receipts into an SF Reparations Fund

• Reparations are exempt from all state and municipal taxation

• Convert public housing units into condos to sell to Black residents for $1

• Make all residential properties vacant for over three months “immediately available” to all Section 8 voucher holders and reparations recipients

While it is currently unknown what the total cost of a full implementation of the committee’s recommendations might be, an economist is not needed to figure out that the city would likely face immediate insolvency with the implementation of these proposals. Some estimates of the cost of the Committee’s recommendations for $5 million payouts sit north of $100 billion—which is more than a third of the state’s entire tax budget. San Francisco’s $14 billion budget, meanwhile, is around seven times less than the price tag of the $5 million payout goal of the reparations agenda.

Are San Francisco administrators crazy enough to do it? Part of me says no way, but anything is possible.