Documenting Life

“What makes a belief enticing, in turn, seems to be some mixture of comprehensiveness (does it provide a lot of answers), intuitiveness (does it feel correct based on what you already know), flattery (does it make you feel superior for knowing), and relevance (does it allow you to do something in the real world). Beliefs and belief systems that check these boxes are very attractive when we’re young, because they can provide a shortcut to many of the things we crave in early adulthood — certainty, confidence, authority, independence”

https://jjmccullough.substack.com/p/on-political-naivete

“I’m sorry to constantly repeat this point, but politics is a game of tug-of-war, and the center is nothing but where the middle of the rope ends up. The extremes pull the middle. So if you’re someone with milquetoast liberal squish politics, you should hate Democratic triangulation and timidity as much as I do. Because Republicans relentlessly pulling the rope to the right, while Democrats refuse to pull the rope to the left, has gotten us to a place where conservative policy wins even as conservative candidates lose”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/on-the-occasion-of-this-election

“Theoretically, the mysterious “Algorithm” (which is nigh-on worshipped, despite the fact that it’s just a glorified ratings system that attempts to predict the future by looking at the past) can tell us what will be a hit and what won’t.

Hence the industry now spends hundred of millions of dollars on action movies that were apparently written in crayon, starring people called Chris, directed by project managers”

https://developmenthell.substack.com/p/dont-give-them-what-they-want

“The idea of a billionaire sugar daddy buying and “stewarding” your institution as a charitable legacy project sounds kind of nice compared with alternative ownership structures (private equity, Macanese gambling syndicate, the GRU). But it’s fatally condescending to those newspapers and magazines. A good rule of thumb is: If the billionaire that owns you is not trying to influence you to hurt his political enemies, it’s because you don’t matter very much”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/what-does-jeff-bezos-non-endorsement

“The political “lessons” are more or less insurmountable – in this unfortunate world, we have to live with the fact that big projects are going to be led by people who come across well at interview, and that this is very much less than perfectly correlated with ability to do the job.

But the really crucial lesson would be “if something is going wrong, review whether it is viable and don’t hesitate to reverse course; abandoning a failed idea early is a good thing which should be to your credit”. Instead, the UK policy structure seemed to learn “don’t attempt anything big, because if it fails you will be blamed”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/shadow-of-the-groundnut