Longreads + Open Thread

Longreads 

• Katy Herzog has a personal essay reflecting on her efforts to delete older, embarrassing personal essays she wrote. There's an interesting selection effect here: people who have an online presence get defined by the things they've written (I tend to get introduced to people as either "He writes a newsletter called The Diff" or "He wrote a good essay about..."). If the essays in question are personal essays, then the most memorable ones will probably be the most unique ones, but plenty of the unique experiences that people write up get written up because they're so improbable! So the more of an impact any one personal essay have on how other people perceive the writer, the less representative that essay is. There are a few people who have pulled off a big evolution in their public persona, but it's usually in the direction of being more of an Internet character rather than less of one (when Mike Cernovich first started writing online, he was mostly commenting on the nuances of Supreme Court decisions. But it's very hard to go from Cernovich-circa-2025 back to writing posts with titles like "Attorney error not grounds for equitable tolling").
• From the archives: Buzz Bissinger in Vanity Fair on fabulist Stephen Glass. A truly great story about fraud, and about how shameless and articulate some fraudsters can be even after they know they've been caught. (If you've recently watched any Tucker Carlson interviews with a fellow who lives in government-subsidized housing, it's worth studying the techniques especially closely.) This piece is also a good perspective-setter. Here's how it describes the information environment of the late 1990s: "[A]n era is cresting in Washington; it is a time when fact and fiction are blurred not only by writers eager to score but also by presidents and their attorneys, spinmeisters and special prosecutors." Also on the topic of different people existing in completely different realities, the article casually alludes to a Wall Street Journal writer joking that Glass was obviously making things up, the year before he was officially caught and censured. Via this fun Bits About Money piece on money, class, and fraud, featuring a cameo from me.
• No Dumb Ideas on the history of gambling on the papacy. Not only are prediction markets older than they look, but there were 16th-century analogs to Politico and 538: "newsletters sprang up promising insider information on the Vatican’s current thinking." This was some combination of tasteless and disruptive enough that it was punished by excommunication from 1591 to 1918.
• Zvi Mowshowitz reviews GPT-4.5. This piece is also one long reflection on how the hard it is to design a good test for measuring skill at the extremes. It's hard enough to make a standardized test for a process you yourself know how to do (just look at how much hiring processes for the same role vary across companies, even similarly successful ones), and writing a test for a skill beyond yours is much harder—you have no idea if there's a shortcut just out of your reach or if you've accidentally paraphrased a description of an unsolvable problem. Having tested GPT-4.5 out a bit, it does seem better, but in a way that's hard to describe. Not just that it's producing better writing, but that it feels more like interacting with someone who has a specific writerly persona.
• Steven Kelly and Jonathan Rose take a second look at the regional banking crisis of 2023, and argue that the conventional story is distorted. Piecing together causation in a case like this is tricky: it's true that unrealized losses don't fully explain how these banks collapsed, and plenty of other financial institutions were mark-to-market insolvent and still survived. On the other hand, the paper under-emphasizes the role of social media: ". The mobile banking and social media apps blamed in the standard account of the crisis are phenomena that apply to retail depositors. Most of the withdrawals took place through wire transfers, which have been lightning fast for institutional depositors for several decades." These are generally true, and it would be unlikely for, say, a bank in Houston to experience a run because all of the local oil company are in WhatsApp groups together and tweeting a lot (though there is more of the latter than there used to be). But VCs and founders spend a lot of time online: this NYT story mentions "a private WhatsApp group of more than 100 chief executives of Silicon Valley companies, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Dropbox’s Drew Houston." And that changes both the speed at which information moves and the game theory of reacting to it. If you're in a chat group and you do the mental math and realize that a material share of your bank's deposit base is there, you might be quick on the draw. Social media was a bit slower, but it still provides some social proof. Aside from that, though, it's a solid piece, and it's always a good idea to look back at events like this from a calmer, post-panic perspective.
• In this week's Capital Gains: Buy-and-Hold is More Active than it Looks. Buying a stock and holding it for a long time doesn't mean making one decision, but making the repeated decision not to sell, a decision that gets harder as the price goes up.
• Andrew Walker and I did another episode of FinTwit Book Club, on Guiseppe Paleologo's Advanced Portfolio Management. We're in agreement: we don't manage money that way, but we have a lot to learn from people who do. Plus, thoughts on what kinds of financial analysis get automated when, and how many times you have to be right in order to maximize the value of the one time you're really, really right. (In percentage terms, Roaring Kitty's one big trade outperformed John Paulson's. But Paulson had been compounding his money, and his reputation, and his assets under management, for long enough to put billions to work on his highest-conviction trade.)

Books

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World: If you really like The Diff, you will really like this book. Specifically, if you have high tolerance for tangents that don't directly contribute to the central point but are independently fascinating, this is your book. A quick sampling of things that I learned that are related to the core argument for the book:

• Ancient Egypt may have traded with India, importing, among other things, "precious metals, peacocks, ivory, and apes."
• Genoese merchants traveled about as far as Venetian ones, but didn't leave behind records like Marco Polo's, so today they're not nearly as synonymous with trade in that period. (As noted in a Diff review of another work, the actually-dominant institution in some historical field is often less memorable than the one that spent the most on public relations.)
• Malacca became a center of trade by charging low tariffs on imports and none on exports.
• Europe paid for its spices deficit with Asia by exporting slaves, but mostly slaves from what is now Russia and the Balkans who served in Middle Eastern militaries.
• In the late 19th century, copper ore and coal smelted into copper and shipped to Europe would have traveled a total of 32,000 miles.
• In the mid-19th century, Boston's biggest export was ice.
• Connecting India to global food supply chains made different cereal crops' prices more correlated, because India was a uniquely large country where people ate both wheat and rice.

And now a sample of things completely unrelated to the book's thesis, but still fascinating:

• Vienna's first café was founded with coffee looted from the retreating Ottoman army in 1683.
• One of the first weapons made specifically for use against humans was the mace; animal skulls are harder to crack with it, but it handles human skulls just fine.
• Until the 6th century BC, Greeks consumed wheat only on feast days.
• Islam first spread to China during Muhammed's lifetime.
• The city of Caffa was sold by the Mongols to the Genoese.
• The Black Death was present in rats in Mongolia, but locals could recognize the symptoms in rats and knew to stay away.
• The first recorded protest against cheap immigrant labor in the Americas occurred in Mexico City in 1635, when Spanish barbers complained that Chinese immigrants were undercharging for the same services.
• Coffee was first adopted by Sufi mystics who had day jobs and practiced their rituals at night.
• Modern cotton is the result of hybridization between Old and New World varieties that happened roughly ten million years ago.

The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West: Of all living people, Alex Karp probably has the best case for carrying around business cards that call him a "Philosopher King." Palantir isn't quite a kingdom, but it is a large and powerful institution that has dealings with nation-states. His status as monarch isn't absolute, but there's at least a highly restricted electorate (Palantir has an elaborate voting structure with two different classes of super-voting shares, one of which, closely held by the founders, has de facto control). And he counts as a philosopher, too, with a PhD and everything. You can [read a translation of his dissertation if you're into some combination of Adorno and extremely deep due diligence on growth stocks.

This book feels a bit like a punched-up dissertation, perhaps one whose scope is ambitious enough that his advisor would suggest that he tone it down a bit and perhaps focus on a more digestible 0.1% of the subject matter. Because the broad set of questions he's asking is something like this: What is America for? Why doesn't it deliver that? Who should be in charge of it in order to make that happen? And why haven't those people risen to the occasion? This operates in an elitist (in the non-derogatory sense) tradition, of which Karp is surely aware. You can't write a book about the very big picture, operationalize that question by asking who should run society and how, and give it a title like "The... Republic" without inviting comparisons to Plato.

("Is there a problem with your order, sir? I believe you had requested the Tech Bro who has Studied the Humanities? It's our most in-demand dish!")

What Karp wants is more noblesse oblige from tech elites: they've done an incredible job of supplying us with short-form video, on-demand poké bowls, and an infinite supply of dashboards that help leadership teams pursue data-driven strategies in order to achieve key objectives. They haven't built as many weapons of war, or cheaper sources of energy, etc., though there are promising moves in that direction. He wants a return to the earlier model of the tech industry, where companies worked more closely with the government, and focused on accomplishing national aims. Karp has a lot of, well, carping for fellow progressives (he identifies as a socialist, but it's a big tent) over their implicit nihilism: a sufficiently powerful critique of nationhood, faith, or a shared value system leaves a vacuum that gets filled by the market, and not necessarily in helpful ways.

It's a high-risk project, because he's basically asking for more power for a particular set of elites, and asking that elite to be worthy of such power. It's easy for that to go wrong in two ways: you could imagine a government completely captive to mercenary tech companies, who are still in the bread-and-circuses business but who now have government backing. Or you could have a frustrated tech sector that genuinely tries to articulate and advance the national interest, and gets a persistent national veto in response. But it's at least worth consideration: the most ambitious and effective people tend to select into jobs where they make things people want, and that's a lucrative thing to do. But it implicitly leaves the question of what we all ought to want unanswered.

Open Thread

• Drop in any links or comments of interest to Diff readers.
• This publication has complained before that “tech bros need to study the humanities” is an empty criticism, and that nobody is stopping humanities bros from studying tech. But it’s also true that this annoying rhetoric points to a real problem—it is hard to articulate a telos of tech, and it’s not something anyone is really asked to do. What are everyone’s thoughts on the question of tech and the humanities?

Diff Jobs

Companies in the Diff network are actively looking for talent. See a sampling of current open roles below:

• Well-funded, fast-moving team is looking for a strong willed full-stack engineer to build the best video editor for marketers. Tackle advanced media pipelines, LLM applications, and more. TypeScript/React expertise required. (Austin, Remote)
• A Google Ventures-backed startup founded by SpaceX engineers that’s building data infrastructure and tooling for hardware companies is looking for full-stack and front-end focused software engineers with 3+ years experience, ideally with data intensive products. (LA, Hybrid)
• A company building better analytics for pricing insurance is looking for a senior software engineer who likes turning messy data into clear answers. (NYC or Boston)
• An OpenAI backed startup that’s applying advanced reasoning techniques to reinvent investment analysis from first principles and build the IDE for financial research is looking for a data engineer with experience building robust data infrastructure and performant ETL pipelines that support intense analytical workloads. (NYC)
• A company building the new pension of the 21st century and enabling universal basic capital is looking for a mobile-focused engineer who has experience building wonderful iOS experiences. (NYC)

Even if you don't see an exact match for your skills and interests right now, we're happy to talk early so we can let you know if a good opportunity comes up.

If you’re at a company that's looking for talent, we should talk! Diff Jobs works with companies across fintech, hard tech, consumer software, enterprise software, and other areas—any company where finding unusually effective people is a top priority.