Part 1 can be seen here.

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Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

During the 2018 election, Americans – candidates, parties, PACs, and small donors like you – spent a combined $5 billion pushing their preferred candidates. Although that sounds like a lot of money, Americans spent $12 billion on almonds that same year. Why the imbalance? The oil industry has strong political opinions, and they make $500 billion per year. Do they really think electing oil-friendly politicians isn’t worth 2% of revenue?

We debated how this could be. Some of the discussion proved prescient – I asked if maybe Elon Musk should buy some kind of social media property. But we never found a good answer, and the implied question remained open: if some billionaire wanted to spend an actually relevant percent of his net worth on politics, could he just take over everything?

I recently talked to some Silicon Valley political consultants who updated me on the status of this issue: Marc Andreessen tried this in 2024 and it basically worked. Now he is trying it a second time, it will probably work again, and Marc Andreessen will probably own every politician twice over.

More here.

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Halstead and Thomson in Works in Progress:

We are naturally a highly violent species with a thin veneer of civilization that masks a brutal proclivity for violence – or so many people think. In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes said that human life without government is ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’. William Golding’s novel, The Lord of the Flies, which helped him win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1983 and many of us read in school, suggests that boys will rapidly descend into mob violence and brutal cruelty without oversight from authority. To know whether this is true, we need to understand the rates of violence among our ancestors.

There is longstanding disagreement on this issue among scholars: many hold the cultural assumption that humans are by nature bellicose, but there is also a ‘noble savage’ camp that believe the opposite. Steven Pinker’s influential 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature tipped the scales by using a data-oriented approach to demonstrate that prehistoric people tended towards extremely high violent death rates, with average rates of violence higher than during the peak years of World War Two.

More here.

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—Note on America’s No Kings Day:
 “Now is the winter of our discontent”
____________________________

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Lily Lynch at Jacobin:

Ypi, a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, is a transgressive “Kantian Marxist” (her own descriptor) in a world in which the Right claims a monopoly on transgression. Although she made her career as a serious interpreter of nineteenth-century German philosophy, she has also published widely on Marxism and political parties. Ypi’s last book, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, released in 2021, held up Hoxha’s Albania as a funhouse mirror, bringing liberalism’s ideological delusions into relief in the process. The book was an international hit: it received near-universal acclaim and was translated into thirty-five languages.

In Albania, however, Free caused an uproar. Some objected to what they viewed as the book’s insufficiently grim portrait of communism. Others were put off by Prime Minister Edi Rama’s presence at its launch. The latter critique led to a heated dust-up in the letters pages of the London Review of Books between Ypi and her reviewer, Granta editor Thomas Meaney. It felt like a throwback to a time when literary culture had higher stakes.

More here.

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John Schwartz in the New York Times:

The sculptor Jim Sanborn opened his email account one day last month expecting the usual messages from people claiming to have solved his famous, decades-old puzzle.

Mr. Sanborn’s best known artwork, Kryptos, sits in a courtyard at the C.I.A. headquarters in Virginia. A sculpture that evokes and incorporates secrets, Kryptos displays four encrypted messages in letters cut through its curving copper sheet. Since the agency dedicated it in 1990, cryptographers both professional and amateur had solved three of the passages, known as K1, K2 and K3.

But the fourth, K4, remained stubbornly uncracked.

Mr. Sanborn, who is 79, was in the final stages of auctioning off the puzzle’s solution. The auction house had estimated that the text of that passage, along with other papers and artifacts related to the sculpture, would bring between $300,000 and $500,000. He has said he intends to use the proceeds to help manage medical expenses for possible health crises, and to fund programs for people with disabilities.

But the email he received on Sept. 3 threatened that plan. Its subject line contained the first words of the final passage of K4. The body of the email showed the rest of the solved text.

More here.

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Randy Stein and Abraham Rutchick in The Conversation:

Our new research, published in the Journal of Social Psychology, suggests that some people consider it a “win” to lean in to known falsehoods.

We are social psychologists who study political psychology and how people reason about reality. During the pandemic, we surveyed 5,535 people across eight countries to investigate why people believed COVID-19 misinformation, like false claims that 5G networks cause the virus.

The strongest predictor of whether someone believed in COVID-19-related misinformation and risks related to the vaccine was whether they viewed COVID-19 prevention efforts in terms of symbolic strength and weakness. In other words, this group focused on whether an action would make them appear to fend off or “give in” to untoward influence.

This factor outweighed how people felt about COVID-19 in general, their thinking style and even their political beliefs.

More here.

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Marleen Rozemond at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

Samuel Kaldas’s book is an extremely welcome addition to the growing literature on the Cambridge Platonists. These philosophers have suffered from significant neglect by historians of philosophy, but as a result of the recent interest in lesser known early modern thinkers, this has been changing. Two questions are central to Kaldas’s book: (1) Is the term “Cambridge Platonists” an apt label for the philosophers in question? And (2) What is their significance in the history of philosophy? Contrary to some scholars (19-20), Kaldas convincingly argues that the label is warranted for Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and the less well-known John Smith and Benjamin Whichcote. They shared a significant commitment to various Platonist ideas, and their contemporary critics sometimes accused them of inappropriately Platonizing tendencies. For Kaldas, their main importance lies in their contribution to the history of the philosophy of religion. He compellingly documents their significance in that context, but as I will explain later, they also have a lot to offer in other areas of philosophy.

Their contribution to the philosophy of religion, Kaldas argues, consists in participation in an intense and prominent debate about the Doctrine of Double Predestination (DDP), a central doctrine in Calvinism in mid-17^th century England. DDP holds that no human beings deserve salvation due to our intrinsically defective nature, the doctrine of “total depravity”.

more here.

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James Barron in The New York Times:

The office where Daniel Ksepka was working was overrun with ants. On the wall above the desk were army ants, bull ants, leaf-cutter ants and turtle ants. On a shelf were two honeypot ants that looked as if they had yellow balloons where their stomachs should have been. Kspeka, the curator of science at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn., did not call an exterminator. There was no need to: None of the ants in the office were real. The ones on the wall were drawings. The honeypot ants were plastic models made on the museum’s 3-D printer in preparation for an exhibition called “Ants: Tiny Creatures, Big Lives” that will open on Nov. 13.

“I love ants,” Ksepka said. “They keep the world running.” Let him count the ways. “They are architects,” he said. “They are farmers.” They construct elaborate nests, stockpile food and tend fungal gardens. Some harvester ants in East Africa even collect bones — the remains of birds, lizards and pygmy mice. Some can snap their jaws shut in one-tenth of a millisecond.

More here.

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Laura Tran in The Scientist:

As time marches on, aging is inevitable. Naturally, a person can accumulate wrinkles, laugh lines, stress, and cellular damage. Of these, damaged cells can take multiple paths: they can undergo programmed death; they can proliferate uncontrollably and become cancer; or they can become senescent cells. They don’t claw their way out of graves, but senescent cells are the body’s biological zombies—damaged, unable to divide, but very much metabolically alive. Instead of dying like normal cells, these “undead” entities can avoid immune system clearance and linger in the brain and other parts of the body. “They are no longer the original cell that they once were,” explained Miranda Orr, a translational neuroscientist at Washington University School of Medicine (WashU Medicine). Orr added that senescent cells not only differ from their initial form but also vary by the cell type within the tissue they came from, the stress triggers, and whether the aging process is healthy or pathological.

Cellular senescence has a complex relationship with the body.¹ These cells have beneficial roles in development, tissue regeneration, and wound healing.

More here.

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Ritchie Robertson at Literary Review:

Goethe’s philosophical coordinates came initially from Rousseau and Spinoza, two thinkers who appealed to and fortified his own disposition. Rousseau’s concept of amour de soi, the urge for self–preservation, appears in Goethe as the need for individual authenticity. The opposing force, Rousseau’s amour propre, becomes the dead weight of social conventions suppressing whatever is distinctive, original and creative. Hence Goethe’s protagonists are powerful, charismatic personalities who experience society as a ‘prison’, the metaphor used by Werther and Faust. For some, such as Werther, the only way out is death. Others, such as Faust, preserve their essential character, but the struggle to do so leaves victims in its wake. Werther himself, unable to conquer his love for the married Lotte, leaves her and her husband devastated by his suicide. Faust’s egotism inflicts tragedy on his lover Gretchen. Goethe is honest about the cost to others of preserving one’s own authenticity.

Disliking the arid Lutheranism of his upbringing, Goethe found a more congenial religious outlook in the Dutch-Jewish philosopher Spinoza, who was often unjustly reviled as an atheist. Spinoza offered him a God who was identical with the world.

more here.

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Cédric Durand in Sidecar:

The neo-Schumpeterian approach of Philippe Aghion – co-author of The Power of Creative Destruction (2021), among many other books – has had a significant influence on European economic policy since the turn of the century. Earlier this week, he was one of three economists to receive the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in memory of Alfred Nobel, the most prestigious award in the discipline, with the committee praising his account of how innovation provides the impetus for growth. What is the nature of this account, and what are its implications? It is perhaps an auspicious moment to reflect on Aghion’s thinking, as France undergoes a political crisis whose origins can be traced to the unpopular economic policies he championed as an adviser to President Macron.

The governing thesis of Aghion’s work, which draws inspiration from Schumpeter who in turn inherited the theme from Marx and Rosa Luxemberg, is that innovation is the engine of capitalism, and that the source of growth is creative destruction. ‘The new replaces the old’, as Aghion puts it. What has set him apart is his attempt to model and measure this phenomenon. According to his findings, this process has two key conditions. The first is flexibility. Markets should be liberalized so that innovations lead to an effective reorganization of the productive forces, resulting in increased economic activity. The second, however, is a limit on competition, too much of which inhibits innovators, who must be encouraged with low capital taxation and strong intellectual property rights. If this generates inequality, it’s a necessary evil. ‘I’ll take it’, Aghion says.

But he has a problem. There may have been growth in patents in recent decades – Aghion’s preferred indicator for measuring innovation – but economic growth as a whole is declining. And so he wonders: why is this acceleration in innovation not reflected in growth and productivity trends?

More here.

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Kaiser Kuo in The Ideas Letter:

The world feels unsettled, as if history itself were changing tempo. The familiar landmarks of the modern age are blurring, slipping away, and the stories we once told ourselves about progress and power no longer map cleanly onto the terrain before us. What we are living through seems, with each new day, less like a passing rearrangement of power, less like a momentary realignment of nations. We sense something deeper and more enduring: a transformation whose outlines we are only beginning to discern. History no longer feels like something unfolding behind us but something rushing toward us, urgent and impossible to ignore.

The economic historian Adam Tooze, reflecting on his recent, intense engagement with China, put it to me in July with characteristic directness: “China isn’t just an analytical problem,” he said. It is “the master key to understanding modernity.” Tooze called China “the biggest laboratory of organized modernizations there has ever been or ever will be at this level [of] organization.” It is a place where the industrial histories of the West now read like prefaces to something larger.

His observation cuts to the heart of what makes this moment so difficult to process. We have witnessed not merely the rise of another great power, but a fundamental challenge to assumptions long embedded in Western thought—about development, political systems, and civilizational achievement itself. We simply haven’t yet found the intellectual courage to face it.

This reckoning touches all of humanity, but it falls especially hard on the developed world and hardest on the United States, where assumptions about exceptionalism and hierarchy are most exposed and most fiercely denied. The familiar framing of China as “rising” or “catching up” no longer holds. China is now shaping the trajectory of development, setting the pace economically, technologically, and institutionally. For Americans especially, the deeper psychic shock lies in the recognition that modernity is no longer something they authored and others merely inherit. That story has outlived its usefulness.

More here.

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Brian J. Chen in Phenomenal World:

In late July, the Trump administration released “America’s AI Action Plan,” its executive strategy to fast-track domestic AI infrastructure and achieve technological supremacy. Like other US policies of any serious ambition, it bears an obvious insistence on bolstering the nation’s security against China. The Plan’s coverpage tagline is bold, if uninspired: “Winning the Race.”

Even so, Washington’s national security experts aren’t entirely satisfied with Donald Trump’s technology policy. Of late, their ire has been directed at the administration’s decision to resume the sale of certain Nvidia chips to China. The chips in question, H20 graphics processing units, were designed to comply with Biden-era export restrictions; Trump’s Commerce Department rescinded those rules but later blocked H20 sales, anyway. They are not class-leading, but their technological edge at the stage of AI inference makes them extremely valuable. Accordingly, their sale to foreign adversaries, especially to the Chinese, has been the centerpiece of recent US geopolitical strategy. It took personal lobbying by Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang to convince the President to drop the ban, arguing that it is better for America’s interests for China to depend on US-designed chips than to not have them at all.

For those that have spent the last half decade or more engaged in sophisticated supply-chain wargaming, the reversal of US semiconductor controls has been received as anathema.

More here.

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Winter’s hubris

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