Longreads + Open Thread

Longreads

• A few years ago, the narrative about online journalism was that the most controversial writers were moving to Substack (often the rightmost writer at a left-leaning publication, or the leftmost/non-Trumpiest writer at a right-leaning one). But now we're at a different point in the cycle, where the new crop includes lots of TV hosts. Both TV personalities and journalists are partly in the business of giving their audience a target for a parasocial relationship, but in general the reader-writer relationship is more about content and the viewer-performer one more about presentation. So it's one of those grim signs of the maturity of the medium. The same thing happened to Twitter: in 2007, the big Twitter accounts were tech people like Robert Scoble and Leo Laporte. But when Twitter went mainstream, the leaderboard shifted to people who were famous elsewhere.
• Matthew Yglesias on the forgotten politics of anti-smoking. This is especially worth reading if you're thirty or younger—it's just hard to imagine what a big deal smoking was, in politics and culture, in the recent past. (The analog for slightly older people—I'm 38—is to discover that until surprisingly recently, drunk driving was widely viewed as a slightly irresponsible but very fun indulgence. These swings happen quite fast.)
• Trevor Klee on the body as a factory. Economic metaphors don't work well for the human body, because they presume a more legible system than what actually exists. But metaphors about the production of physical goods work quite well, because the same concerns—overlapping constraints involving space, time, dispersing heat, removing waste, etc.—actually apply. From this perspective, evolution took billions of years to derive the Toyota Production System, and has perfected it so well that it produced creatures that could figure that out.
• John H. Cochrane has an appreciation for Thomas Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions. This book was very influential for me (it's been two decades since I read it, though, so this review reminded me that at least one idea I thought was original to me—specifically, that nepotism is partly an information source and even a variety of reputational venture capital—was actually something from Sowell. A very good piece about how coordination really works.
• Ed Caesar on the lifestyle of a very wealthy drug lord in Dubai. One of the things I've wondered about prolific criminals is: even if crime is wealth-maximizing, what's the basket of goods that you can consume with its proceeds? There are lots of places you can't go, either to live or vacation, and lots of kinds of live entertainment and events that you're barred from. One answer, according to this piece, is that the utility of illicit wealth is maximized if you'd really enjoy living in Dubai and hanging out with boxers. The Dubai model seems to be similar to the way Russia handles cybercrime: a lot of latitude as long as the victims aren't local. But it also seems like a model that might not last forever.
• In this week's Capital Gains, we look at rational expectations, the economic idea that people react not just to immediate policy changes but to expectations about the future. If everyone's worried about inflation, for example, rate cuts don't juice the economy so much as they pull forward some spending but reduce longer-term economic activity and asset values. But, as it turns out, this theory can be applied to itself in a way that makes things more nuanced but also more confusing.
• One of the questions the Byrne-Bot on ReadHaus got this week was on whether or not AI is a bubble. There's a good-bubble/bad-bubble dichotomy where leverage and linear extrapolation of present trends are bad signs, while equity-funded bubbles that bet on step-function changes tend to have better luck. And one of the tricky things about the current market is that AI increasingly fits the second description—more deals funded with debt, and, not that there are more datapoints on business performance as opposed to model performance, there's also more extrapolation. Of course, that's also a description of a maturing industry: leverage adds some risk to the system, but it only shows up when lenders think enough risk has been removed from the system. We're at a fun point in market history where more investors than ever and more assets than ever reference a single technological trend.

Books

Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples: a very short history of religion in Europe is that at first, everyone was pagan, and from the 300s through the early Middle Ages they mostly converted to Christianity, and that was that. There's plenty of fun history about the early stages of this, like Constantine's vision of the cross or Clovis converting but missing some of the big-picture concepts (when he learned about the crucifixion, he said "If I had been there with my Franks, I would have avenged his wrongs."). If missionaries did the most efficient thing and made a beeline for important authority figures, a country's conversion would start with the people in charge, spread through the court, and immediately make all of the pagans look and feel like bumpkins. But: how long did the bumpkins keep doing their weird backcountry rituals, and why did they finally give it up? There aren't any continuous European pagan traditions; even if someone's out in the woods of Norway today, making an offering to Odin or something, his great-grandparents were probably God-fearing Lutherans.

This book answers all of these questions, and is full of zany anecdotes from the backwoods of early modern Europe (sample section heading: "Latvia: Werewolves and Witches, Jesuits and Lutherans"). One of the reasons monotheism is so effective at conversion is that it's easy for polytheists to syncretize, but it's very hard for things to go in the other direction. If you're a Lithuanian pagan ruler, and you pray and sacrifice to your local war god, and then you have a battle with a nearby Christian monarch and lose, your perspective might well be that whoever this Jesus fellow is, he's clearly a mightier god of war than the one you've been patronizing. But if the Christian side loses, they know to pray to someone who comforts those in distress, tends to the needs of the wounded, etc. Meanwhile, the pagan traditions weren't very stable (the written sources tend to postdate the arrival of Christianity, and, in fact, were often assembled by Christians—they were incredibly dedicated anthropologists because they needed to know exactly which idols to smash and which sacred groves to burn down).

So in many places, there would be a gradual evolution where pagan rituals migrated to Christian feast days, and where priests looked the other way at sacrifices so long as the people doing those sacrifices were diligent about attending mass and baptizing their kids. (Though in some places, there was a habit of baptizing in the name of a specific ancestor in order to get the allegiance of that ancestral spirit, and then re-baptizing the same child under a new name if they didn't seem sufficiently blessed the first time.) Some gods turned into new local saints, or got combined with existing Christian figures.

All of this was actually a reasonably stable system, with idolatry slightly tolerated around the fringes of Christian civilization, until two things happened: first, European countries started colonizing places like Tenerife, where there were nonbelievers who weren't part of one of the existing monotheistic faiths, and these colonizers legitimized their territorial expansion by converting the natives. And second, the Reformation made states more likely to compete on who could be the most pious. If Catholics kings were willing to tolerate rock-worshippers, maybe Luther had a point! And if Lutheran rulers couldn’t be bothered to root out the last pagan harvest festival, maybe the Jesuits would have more luck.

Overall, this book turns out to be a great look at subcultures and memetics. The big monotheistic faiths had been duking things out all around the Mediterranean for centuries, and each had undergone selection pressure to survive. The various polytheistic belief systems just hadn’t been tested by competing missionaries and holy warriors, nor had they reached the point where it made sense to write down comprehensive statements of what they believed. So, once the local monotheistic monoculture started paying attention to them, it was just a matter of time before they’d vanish through attrition.

Open Thread

• Drop in any links or comments of interest to Diff readers.
• Looking back on this week’s posts, there’s a lot of AI content. That’s also true of the wider world, but still: what are some non-AI trends we should be looking at?

Diff Jobs

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• A startup is automating the highest tier of scientific evidence and building the HuggingFace for humans + machines to read/write scientific research to. They’re hiring engineers and academics to help index the world’s scientific corpus, design interfaces at the right level of abstraction for users to verify results, and launch new initiatives to grow into academia and the pharma industry. A background in systematic reviews or medicine/biology is a plus, along with a strong interest in LLMs, EU4, Factorio, and the humanities.
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• YC-backed, ex-prop trader Founder building the travel-agent for frequent-flyers that actually works is looking for a senior engineer to join as CTO. If you have shipped real, working applications and are passionate about using LLMs to solve for the nuanced, idiosyncratic travel preferences that current search tools can't handle, please reach out. (SF)
• Ex-Bridgewater, Worldcoin founders using LLMs to generate investment signals, systematize fundamental analysis, and power the superintelligence for investing are looking for machine learning and full-stack software engineers (Typescript/React + Python) who want to build highly-scalable infrastructure that enables previously impossible machine learning results. Experience with large scale data pipelines, applied machine learning, etc. preferred. If you’re a sharp generalist with strong technical skills, please reach out.
• Fast-growing, General Catalyst backed startup building the platform and primitives that power business transformation, starting with an AI-native ERP, is looking for expert generalists to identify critical directives, parachute into the part of the business that needs help and drive results with scalable processes. If you have exceptional judgement across contexts, a taste for high leverage problems and people, and the agency to drive solutions to completion, this is for you. (SF)

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