Links, January 2023

A quiet month, beginning new projects, getting back into a routine, ruminating. I have managed to read zero books this month, which isn’t great. I’ll do better in February.

A couple of good best-of-2022 threads: one on economics of growth/firms papers, Davis Kedrosky’s favourite books, and Erik Thorenberg’s favourite podcast episodes.

Zvi on Patrick Mackenzie on VaccinateCA. And the original.

This was interesting: people who are born poor and become rich tend to be less sympathetic to the poor than those who are born rich. See also Nadia Asparouhova on, inter alia, aristocratic social norms.

Dwarkesh has enabled paid subscriptions, a tribe of which you should become a member.

Aella wrote something smart on statistics and Twitter polling.

Francis Galton tried to perform arithemetic by smell. Reminds me somewhat of Chapter 2 of Strawson’s Individuals, where Strawson manages to derive spaciotemporal concepts from auditory input alone. (In fact, it’s a useful mental trick for idea generation: does some context C’ have the resources to support some activity X that is normally performed in context C?)

More Zvi, this time on bullshit jobs and AI.

Fantastic thread on the Korean Jeonse system. (File this under the category of ‘social/legal systems very different from our own’)

I’m really enjoying using the Arc Browser, so much so that it’s now my default browser. It’s one of those rare pieces of software that rethinks, successfully, something basic to the computing experience. There just aren’t many people innovating at the Browser level, and Arc are doing an amazing job.

Black Holes was an excellent audiobook. So was House of Cards.