Month: December 2025

“ENTRY LEVEL: A bunch of kids with resumes. Some of them will be creative thinkers, hard workers, good managers, some will be lemons. You are absolutely kidding yourself if you think you can reliably pick winners based on the information available. All you can do is select out people who aren’t even capable of keeping their massively disqualifying personality problems under control for the length of a selection centre. You are going to be selecting based on a bit of nepotism, a bit of PLULPLU (people like us like people like us), quite a bit of “am I in a good mood, did I have a nice lunch” and mostly random chance”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-merit-in-the-managerial

“Democracy is an attempt to create some level of political equality, to mirror the inherent moral equality of all humanity. This is simply not possible in the presence of the level of wealth inequality that America now has. It is not possible. We can have our level of inequality or we can have a democracy but we cannot have both. The numbers, at present, tell us that we have chosen the inequality. We are just playing out the string on the rest right now”

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/abominations-of-capital

“It will also, more insidiously, lead to the introduction of tech reform bills that are reform in name only, written by the industry as a way to head off anything that would be meaningful, introduced by legislators who want the political benefit of being perceived as “doing something” on tech while also accepting tech industry money”

https://boondoggle.substack.com/p/the-battle-over-big-tech-will-be

“The cold-shoulder order was very infrequently used indeed, because people were so terrified of it. It simply involved publishing a notice that a particular person or firm was to be cold-shouldered. And the understanding was that if you worked with or for someone subject to the cold-shoulder, you would be cold-shouldered yourself. Because everyone knew that the big and important banks which formed the backbone of the Panel would always respect the cold-shoulder, it had a sort of viral property; nobody who relied on being able to work with Barclays would touch anyone who was cold-shouldered, so nobody who relied on being able to work with one of those firms would dare to, and so on; basically, anyone who got cold-shouldered would be completely shut out of the financial industry”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-cold-shoulder

“To the extent that their output is pushed into “mid-ness” by economic circumstance, L.L.M.s are not unprecedented. In a real sense, “why A.I. is writing mid” and “why most professional writing is mid” have the same explanation: “Good writing,” whether authored wholly by humans or generated by an L.L.M., requires capacious resources (whether in time and education and editing or in compute and training and fine-tuning) to create an idiosyncratic (and likely polarizing) voice for which there usually isn’t economically sufficient demand”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/will-ai-writing-ever-be-good