Byrne Hobart
Longreads
- Ross Douthat has a lengthy interview with Marc Andreessen on how Andreessen and a large number of his peers suddenly switched to supporting Trump. Looking at the evolution of Big Tech's politics over the last five years certainly induces some whiplash, and makes me long for simple Occam's Razor-style explanations like "Vladimir Putin finally managed to steal George Sorors' mind control ray." But one thing Andreessen says provides some helpful perspective: tech was never uniformly left, and had a small active cohort and a majority of people who went along with what the majority view seemed to be. Now, the winning small cohort is on the right, and the go-along view is now support for Trump. But that explains the big swings. (Another explanation for how vocal they are is that Trump is clearly a man who enjoys effusive compliments. When dealing with someone that braggadocious, it's not enough to say that he's good, which is why many people are saying he's the best President they've ever seen.) The interview closes by noting that as soon as the Trump coalition won, the infighting started; politics is not something that happens only on a Tuesday in November.
- If you want a look at the latest cohort of political activists, Mana Afsari has a great piece in The Point about meeting young Trump supporters. There's a bit of cult-of-personality stuff in this piece ("In human history, has there been, mathematically speaking, an assassination attempt that was so narrowly avoided? The sheer geometry of it—nothing like it has ever happened in the history of the world. And nothing like him has ever happened in the history of the world.") But also, there's plenty of intellectual sophistication—the author alludes to people quoting Kierkegaard at parties and sending one another Jacobin articles, or doing Ayahuasca between reading chapters of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. There's an element of LARPing to all of this, but LARPing is underrated, at least as a way to bootstrap towards something real. This may be a bit try-hard, but that at least involves trying. And it's a reminder of another easily-forgotten demographic fact: whenever there's turnover in the executive branch, a bunch of energetic young people will suddenly end up implementing the details of policies that are broadly decided by older and more established politicians. It's very helpful to think about what their formative experiences were like—we're switching from a time when policy was implemented by people whose early adulthood was defined by the slow recovery from the financial crisis to people for whom the pandemic and its consequences are a much bigger deal. (Extending this in the other direction works, too; the transition from Clinton to Bush was also a transition from twentysomethings whose formative political memory was the fall of the Berlin Wall to twentysomethings whose formative memory was 9/11.)
- Jieyu Zheng and Markus Meister have a good contender for best academic paper I'll read all year: The Unbearable Slowness of Being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?. It starts by gathering data from an admirable range of sources, from competitive memorization to average reading speed to the memorization skills of autistic savants who can draw realistic recreations of entire cities in order to ballpark the pace of human learning at around 10 bits/second. (If you'r preferred method of learning is reading, you'll be happy to know that in their table of different information acquisition methods, reading comes out on top.) This is roughly one hundred-millionth of how much sensory information we get in a single sentence&dmash;or, as they note, roughly the ratio between the normal speed at which people drink water and the volume of water that flows through the Hoover Dam over the same period. At an average life expectancy of 77 years, and assuming you spend two thirds of your time awake, the sum of all the knowledge you'll ever consciously learn is a little over two gigabytes. Make sure they're the bits you'll want to remember!
- A fun business disaster story: Walgreens' nightmarish relationship with a "smart screen" fridge door vendor. This story has everything: corporate chicanery, vengeful executives, price discrimination, and ubiquitous ads. As the cost of displays declines and the availability of data goes up, you should assume that over time every surface you can look at will slowly be covered in ads, especially if that surface is located in a store. But even if that's the long-term trend, it's possible to be a bit ahead of the curve.
- Rohit Krishnan has some napkin math on future AI deployment and power use. A very interesting near possible world is one where large amounts of labor can be replaced, but only at a capital cost that's actually quite comparable to the cost of labor. Of course, the nature of that labor is different, and the silicon-based members of the workforce will spend more of their time figuring out how to make AI scale faster. There are plenty of potential walls ahead, and no doubt we'll encounter new ones as we go, but this is a good starting point.
- In this week's Capital Gains, we look at where investing intersects with gambling, and why it's hard to have one without the other.
- And in The Riff: how technology changes markets, what makes a stock a meme stock, ESG, and industrial policy. Listen with Spotify/Apple/YouTube.
Books
Monday Starts on Saturday: Do you happen to like Russian novels? Do you also like fantasy novels? And do you also enjoy stories where the protagonist is a computer programmer? If so, I have the very, very specific book for you. Monday Starts on Saturday is a love letter to the heyday of Soviet science, when it was an open question as to which economic system would ultimately triumph (and a time when, in the USSR itself, it was taken as a given that would be one obvious winner).
It’s a fun book, though less of a story and more of a series of vignettes, which usually take the form of mashing up myths and science. What kinds of experiments would you run to understand the nature of a magical five-kopek coin that always returned to your pocket after you’d spent it? What would it be like to work with literal Maxwell’s Demons? Which branches of physics would you need to master in order to use a magic wand? How would HR be different if some workers were ghosts? (From a section where our hero is tasked with closing up the labs for a holiday: “Not a living soul in the entire Institute. All those other souls and spirits—that’s all right, but not a single living one.”)
Reading the book, it’s sometimes easy to forget that it’s not just set in the USSR, but was actually published there, in 1965. One of the few hints of that is when the author describes the residence of Koshchei, whose wall is decorated with portraits of Genghis Khan, Himmler, “and either Goldwater or McCarthy.”
The book isn’t really about science, or about myth. It’s about the fun of working hard at open-ended intellectual tasks. And that gives it another Soviet-era feeling: it would be a bit politically-incorrect to either describe scientists working on weapons, which the USSR would insist it hoped never to use, or to describe them working on civilian applications—which might make readers wonder when they would have access to such wonderful things. And it’s a tricky business to add dramatic tension through the possibility of failure. But if your story involves a research institute that’s powered by harnessing the mechanical energy of the Wheel of Fortune, it’s enough of a fantasy to admit some realism about human failings. The book is a celebration of effort, with uncertain outcomes, solely for the sake of doing a good job and learning something new—you can have a Stakhanovite work ethic even if you don’t have stock options.
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