Links from February 2025
What I've been reading
UK & Ireland
Civic Future applications are now open — you should apply! There are two really great programmes, one for those at the start of their career and one for more experienced people.
Saunderson on how to make Britain fun again. Relatedly, don’t forget how Games Workshop IP was squandered.
Sam McBride on how a failure to apply rates (property taxes) in Belfast means the city is crumbling. We should have beautiful streets instead!
Aris Rousinoss on how Britain is lost in Trumpland.
Neal Stephenson goes down a rabbit hole on Thomas More. I did not know he was a hero of the Russian Revolution!
AI & tech
OpenAI released o3 Deep Research; here is one use case. Tyler is impressed with OpenAI’s o1 pro. I suspect all of this reveals that we don’t need PhD level answers most of the time. Here is a good response from the MR comments.
Ben Thompson thinks a lot of knowledge is going to become secret.
Rohit and Dwarkesh each speculate on what the AGI future might look like.
One of the most interesting things about writing these links posts (and I’m only on my second) is that it underlines just how rapid innovation is in AI, even month to month.
ChinaTalk explains the transformer shortage, which is relevant for AI too.
Asia
Dwarkesh posted a great series of lectures with Sarah Paine. I have a couple of questions about what she said:
What’s her stance on international law? She often treats it as a binding constraint on state behaviour, but many states flout it. And it’s not a single thing.
Should we really consider German a great ally? It’s pretty penetrated by Russian intelligence for a start.
BBC News visits Myanmar's Shwe Kokko, a city 'built on scams'. One rarely hears about the war in Karen state.
Religion
Ross Douthat responded to my post about his CWT appearance.
The co-founder of Wikipedia has become a Christian. Many such cases!
David Brooks on how faith is nothing like he thought it would be.
Glen Scrivener responded to JD Vance and Rory Stewart on ordo amoris:
Sport
Profile of Northern Ireland sporting great Michael Dunlop.
This is a really great segment on how rugby union coaching has changed in the past few years. Points of interest: training used to be brutal but now the games are so physical training can’t be as tough. Feedback used to be extremely direct, but now players don’t want that. Similarly, in football, former Manchester United boss Erik ten Hag says modern players struggle to deal with criticism.
This seems to be a point in favour of those who argue that young people are mollycoddled. Or maybe things were just ridiculously brutal in the past? Has anyone observed this in other sports or areas of life?
Miscellaneous
Ross Douthat on the narrow path for humanity between extinction and stagnation.
Mark Koyama on the history’s f-word: feudalism.
M. Nolan Gray on the late Donald Shoup, the prophet of parking. Here is Donald Shoup on EconTalk, an excellent episode.
Incentives as selection effects. When I first read this I wanted to say it isn't true for national level public policy, but two examples came to mind:
Some (not all) of the huge increase in disability-related welfare spending in the UK is due to people learning how to report and/or inflate their symptoms better, thus selecting into the group who receives welfare.
The UK government is driving millionaires out of the country with tax changes, thus selecting out of the tax base.