o3 still makes mistakes (of course?) but they’re increasingly hard to spot. It takes grit to persist in questioning the confident o3, especially if it’s a highly technical topic you’re trying to learn, and you hesitate between your own confidence that something is not adding up

At the next election, and every election after, the entrepreneur and his employees are all part of the concentrated interest group benefitting from the tariffs. They will (understandably!) kick and scream about any reduction. The longer they stay in the harder it is to cut them.

The West, or perhaps only the Anglosphere, is the historically unique idea that individuals exist not for the sake of their ruler, their class, their society, their ancestors, their gods, or any other such superstition, but for their own sake.

Frictions may be needed for character building. But the mistake here is to assume a lump of frictions that, if all lifted, yield characterlessness. Solving problems frees us to solve more problems, indefinitely. No such thing as frictionlessness. Lump of frictions fallacy

AI makes us dumber? I still don't understand the supposed argument that AI makes us dumber. Anyone who has studied at a university will be familiar with the following phenomenon from academic work: You write a paper on a specific topic. To do this, you read literature: books,

Counterpoint from Proust, speaking openmindedly of his character Charlus who is into BDSM: “His desire to be bound in chains and beaten, with all its ugliness, betrayed a dream as poetical as, in other men, the longing to go to Venice or to keep ballet-dancers”

Science Banana If prior knowledge can be shown to have negative transfer (ie somehow impairs your ability to create new knowledge), then one’s pattern of chosen ignorance is an important right, essential for progress, and mandatory curricula are anti-progress

This continual “rearrangement” Romer dully speaks of is the stuff of Moby-Dick like novels. The greatest unending sequence of epics. I think we’re still waiting for the poet-economist we deserve

The pretentious invocation of "product traps" shouldn't distract from the fact that this is yet another instance of the widespread belief in human helplessness and instrumental self-erosion, whereby our tools somehow become our prosthetic governors