Documenting Life

“But in Silicon Valley, steeped in I.Q. fetishism, an obsession with “agency,” and a moral universe still governed by fantasy high-school resentments, the belief that (heritable) single-vector “intelligence” endows one with full-spectrum authority (and, inversely, that failure to demonstrate this intelligence is delegitimizing), holds sway. “Just put 10 cracked programmers in charge of it” has become the (admittedly at least somewhat trollish) stance of the Tech Right when faced with any sufficiently un-deferential institution, enterprise, or bureaucracy”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-cracked-coder-fetish

“Increasing climate risks will cause home insurance prices to rapidly rise towards unaffordability; homeowners in risky areas unable to afford the (actual) price of home insurance will clamor for relief; policymakers unwilling to confront the underlying problem (climate change) will react with a series of increasingly desperate maneuvers to delay and paper over the issue; increasingly pricey disasters will cause state and local politicians to run to the federal government for bailouts; in time, this will lead to a political confrontation between those who are receiving aid, and those in safer areas who are paying for it. The end of this process will be a retreat from areas that have become untenable to live in due to climate change. Instead of carrying out this necessity in a managed and rational way, our political system and economic system, absent some deep changes, will cause it to unfold in a cutthroat, childish, maximally destructive way”

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/cheap-tricks-for-hard-problems

“The result is a world that is much more unpredictable than it was. The individual whims and collective paranoias of very powerful men (they are nearly all men) play a more important role, and are far less constrained than they used to be. The differences between the extremely rich and ordinary people are greater and much more politically salient than they used to be. As the rich become more isolated from mortal concerns, their weirdness effloresces”

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-rich-are-not-like-you-and-me

“Those are the two factions of Democrats. One group is trying to figure out how to bring down the cost of capital for normal people, the other is seeking a trickle-down approach. If you vote for a Democrat, there’s no telling which faction you’ll get. And that might be why the party polls so terribly”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-war-among-democrats

“Two dashed hopes that seem to rhyme:

The hope that, in human DNA, one gene would correspond to one developmental feature: “size of nose”, “propensity for prostate cancer”: a vast bank of biological switches.

The hope that, in neural networks, one weight would correspond to one informational feature: “Python function”, “malevolent plan”: a perfect intellectual X-ray.

The mapping of the human genome had less of an impact on the world than a person might have predicted back around 2000, because tracing the connection between base pairs and big noses turned out to be — turns out to be — much more difficult than anyone expected”

https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/how-the-universe-stores-information/

“Yes, of course, the politics of billionaires will be economically reactionary and self-serving. More striking, though, is the extent to which even the self-proclaimed humanists in this class of people—who tout themselves as the visionaries of the future, and who have more means to bring about their own preferences than anyone else—suffer from a laughable lack of imagination when they dip their toe into the world of political reforms”

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/visionaries-without-vision

“We should expect those with a privileged socioeconomic position to use that advantage for the common good. We should expect those who are not economically desperate not to take evil, lucrative jobs purely out of greed. They don’t need to. The protesters were living up to the standards we should have for those who went to places like Columbia and NYU. Their classmates who went and got jobs at Blackstone and McKinsey are not. Economically comfortable people who engage in progressive activism are just doing their duty. I firmly believe that the source of the vast well of upper class rage at college-aged protesters is guilt. People who used their own privilege only to improve their own position resent public demonstrations of the fact that they had another choice”

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/when-do-you-need-to-quit-your-job