Category: links_read

“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/

“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

“Most Americans will never be directly, or even remotely, affected by the additional suffering and death that will come as a result of 86 percent of US AID awards getting the axe. Nor will many residents of Massachusetts, other than a small number of crime victims, find their lives altered by the temporary postponement of criminal prosecutions, even with the new court-ordered release of a trickle of perpetrators held on bail.

The truth is, a lot of what our governments spend money on is unknown to most of the participants in those governments. That’s especially true in this modern age of government bureaucracy, and that makes the Trump/MAGA/Steve Bannon form of populism an easy sell”

https://goodpoliticsbadpolitics.substack.com/p/government-does-that

“The research itself is preposterous, of course. His definition of ‘white British’ is so narrow that it excludes anyone with an immigrant parent. This will be news to the king, who is now apparently an ethnic minority. As Georgina Sturge, a former statistician at the House of Commons Library and the author of Bad Data, pointed out, the report assumes that we will have one hundred years of migration flows which happen to be identical to the ones we’ve had since 2021”

https://iandunt.substack.com/p/they-hate-london-because-it-is-beautiful

“I’m trying to remember who it was that said — the actions and hangups of truly wealthy people make a lot more sense when you realize that the folks they spend the most time around are not their friends or family or coworkers, but their private security detail”

https://maxgladstone.substack.com/p/the-whisper-in-the-ear

“Denying that you said something, when you did, is a sin as old as management itself; it is a core function of being a boss. Lots of leadership styles rely on projecting a level of certainty and commitment which really isn’t consistent with the tendency of the world to change.

I don’t think anyone necessarily paid attention to the possible consequence of making this kind of normal management behaviour so much more difficult, when we moved to a world of largely text-based communication”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-magic-button

“Over the course of the next four years, I was shaken, many times, by a realization that most people already knew, and that David Halberstam wrote in The Best and the Brightest in 1971 on the war in Vietnam. And that realization is that the story that elites tell one another, and believe, well, it’s just not true. We don’t believe in merit. It’s easy enough to understand, but it’s very hard to really accept. If your identity is constructed around the idea that you are where you are because you deserve it, it’s rough to learn this truth”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-best-and-the