May 18, 2025

Daily Log Digest – Week 19, 2025

2025-05-11

The Cult of Doing Business

The Cult of Doing Business | Commonwealth Magazine #business #entrepreneurship #cult

One of the strangest features of American work culture is the constant pressure to treat one’s job as something more than a job: a calling, a means of expressing oneself, a vehicle for personal growth. This pressure comes from bosses, of course, who would rather foster intrinsic motivation than pay higher wages. But it also comes from popular psychology. As every self-help reader knows, the most successful careerists leverage their own unique personalities to achieve results and add value. They work for themselves. They love what they do. They are radiant with a higher purpose. In a word, they are “entrepreneurial.”

In his new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, historian Erik Baker calls this self-help ideology “the rot festering at the core” of our national obsession with work. A comprehensive and sharply written intellectual history, the book traces the origins of several reputedly twenty-first-century maladies to an earlier age. Gig work, as it turns out, didn’t begin with Uber but with Avon direct-sales reps. The wacky metaphysics of today’s tech billionaires have their analogues in the “mind-cures” of nineteenth-century spiritualists. And the celebration of “charismatic” executives has its origins in German social science, with disturbingly fascist undertones. Baker also demonstrates how a fetish for entrepreneurs shaped both modernization theory during the Cold War and now-discredited market-based solutions to global poverty, especially microfinance. But the “marriage of positive psychology and the entrepreneurial ethic” is the book’s primary target. It’s a rotten worldview because it “enjoins us to work more intensely than we need to,” and more importantly, it “leaves us feeling devoid of purpose when we don’t have work.”

In the fifties, Norman Vincent Peale, a preacher, New Thought evangelist, and eventual officiant of Donald Trump’s first wedding, produced one of the most popular self-help books of all time, The Power of Positive Thinking. “The more you lose yourself in something bigger than yourself,” Peale writes, “the more energy you will have.” Strangely, for Peale, that “something bigger” didn’t include unions or the social infrastructure built by Roosevelt’s New Deal, which he fumed against at every turn. The book has never been out of print, and Baker is good at explaining why. For people afraid of falling behind in the wake of the Great Depression (or, in our own time, the Great Recession) the entrepreneurial ethic that arose from New Thought literature “functioned as a sort of insurance policy—not just a failsafe strategy in case of unemployment, but a preemptive ward against redundancy and obsolescence.”

Just as Dale Carnegie was right to say that people love to hear the sound of their own name, it is probably true that “autoletic” workers (those who discover intrinsic motivation and achieve “flow”) will feel more satisfied at work. But Baker is calling attention to the fact that these ideas become popular among managers for ignoble reasons: they make it cheaper and easier to burden employees with the task of preserving their own well-being. “Autoletic” workers are more easily exploited, as are those who treat their jobs as extension of themselves. The basic career advice one gets from positive psychology is that throwing yourself into your work is the best way to achieve success and personal fulfillment. And since Americans, as Baker suggests, “prize psychological health as highly as a religious duty,” to fail to be entrepreneurial is a kind of mortal sin.

The Christian language of “duty” and “calling” comes from Max Weber, the German sociologist who studied the problem of how to encourage Arbeitsfreude, or “joy in work.” Weber’s 1904 visit to the United States helped convince him of his famous thesis that the main driver of worker motivation was the Protestant ethic. His colleague Joseph Schumpeter, building upon the supposed link between economic and personal growth, celebrated the entrepreneur as the innovative, heroic force behind “creative destruction”—the kind of leader who inspires joy, meaning, and purpose. The problem, Baker argues, as he combs through the legacy of German social science, is that for some, the only purpose of life is to win at any cost. “The entrepreneur became a Nietzschean conqueror,” he writes, “setting the world ablaze with his energy and virility.” This holds true even when proponents of “creative destruction” adopt a sunnier idiom in Northern California. Baker describes Steve Jobs, who encouraged “an almost cult-like esprit de corps” in his Macintosh unit, as “the most ruthless entrepreneur to emerge from the counterculture.” In Silicon Valley, charismatic leadership of the kind that aroused the Austrian economists was given a friendly, New Age twist. Baker’s genealogy helps explain why American startup culture is so deeply weird.

But it’s not weird, of course, to seek work that is meaningful and satisfying. Hence the universal appeal of the entrepreneurial ethic: it offers the founder, the franchisee, the gig worker, and the influencer the same promise of freedom, and it offers those with W-2s a reason to clock in every day. Employees, no matter what their job, crave recognition, autonomy, and a personal connection to work, which is why they often contribute more than they’re paid for. Baker’s point is that celebrating workers’ “proactivity” disguises an essentially exploitative relationship. That’s especially true when the ethic becomes a management philosophy, as it did during the consulting boom of the seventies and eighties, when “value creation” and “innovation” served as important alibis for cost-cutting and deregulation. “The ultimate function of the entrepreneurial ethic,” he writes, “is to reconcile workers to precarity.” It also creates the illusion that the tech billionaire and the gig worker (who receives no benefits and cannot join a union) are aligned against the wet blanket of government regulation.

There is nothing wrong with finding spiritual value in one’s career—provided that value doesn’t exist to be exploited by a billionaire. And of course it’s fine to love what you do. But it’s even better to treat love itself as the most important work.

LegoGPT

New Lego-building AI creates models that actually stand up in real life - Ars Technica

Lovely heartwarming article about a bunch of CMU researchers training an LLM-style model for Lego bricks.

On Thursday, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University unveiled LegoGPT, an AI model that creates physically stable Lego structures from text prompts. The new system not only designs Lego models that match text descriptions (prompts) but also ensures they can be built brick by brick in the real world, either by hand or with robotic assistance.

To build LegoGPT, the Carnegie Mellon team repurposed the technology behind large language models (LLMs), similar to the kind that run ChatGPT, for "next-brick prediction" instead of next-word prediction. To do so, the team fine-tuned LLaMA-3.2-1B-Instruct, an instruction-following language model from Meta.

The team then augmented the brick-predicting model with a separate software tool that can verify physical stability using mathematical models that simulate gravity and structural forces.

To train the model, the team assembled a new dataset called "StableText2Lego," which contained over 47,000 stable Lego structures paired with descriptive captions generated by a separate AI model, OpenAI's GPT-4o. Each structure underwent physics analysis to ensure it could be built in the real world.

The Rise of Normanticisation

Basic as the new punk: The rise of normanticisation | Dazed

Good to know that the style I prefer has an actual name. Having said that this is quite a nuanced article.

The recent embrace of ‘being basic’ isn’t simply a recession indicator, it’s part of a bigger shift away from extreme personalisation towards a more normie ideal

Then, last year, there was a shift: people started making fun of the ‘micro-trend final bosses’ who took personal style inspiration from the internet. Somewhat ironically, in seeking hyper-individuality through a revolving door of micro trends, we lost true personal style along the way. The antithesis of this, it seems, is to look, dress and act so “basic” that it’s clear you’re not trying to differentiate yourself at all. Now, being a “normie” is becoming romanticised – or normanticised, rather.|

Panzoni says the rise of normanticisation signals a readjustment. “It’s a response to the overconceptualization of style,” she says. “Right now, we’re seeing a widespread elevation of essentials: denim, button-ups, blazers, suits, uniforms and a broader surge of interest in minimalist fashion that has been growing during the past couple of years.” This is hardly surprising, considering that fashion often becomes an early barometer of shifting consumer priorities during periods of economic uncertainty, but Panzoni believes something deeper is at play. She calls the quiet retreat to basics and basic dressing in fashion the “dark forest theory of fashion”. This means: “Dressing in consciously ‘basic’ ways’ (like essentials) laced with subtle cues of insider knowledge, as a strategy for safeguarding personal subjectivities from the overexposure and aesthetic extraction that’s become so common online.” In other words, the growing yearning to be “basic” can't simply be boiled down to being a “recession indicator”.

Learn from the skeptics

These lessons in scepticism could make the world a better place | Psyche Ideas #skepticism #philosophy

We live in a paradoxical time: despite the proliferation of critical thinking courses in schools and universities, our public discourse has never been more dominated by inflexible certainties, tribal allegiances to dubious ‘facts’, and a profound aversion to questioning our own beliefs. In an age where certainty is currency, doubt has become a radical act.

Our social media ecosystems reward conviction, not contemplation. Politicians trumpet certainties rather than explore complexities. Even our educational institutions often teach critical thinking as a weapon to dismantle others’ arguments rather than a tool for examining our own. The skill we most desperately need is the very one we’ve neglected to cultivate: the ability to hold our own certainties in suspension.

What if doubt isn’t weakness but wisdom? What if the most intellectually courageous stance isn’t to plant your flag in the ground of conviction, but to embrace the productive discomfort of uncertainty? The ancient Greco-Romans, facing their own societal upheavals, developed sophisticated approaches to scepticism that might serve us better than our modern pretences to critical discourse.

The article concludes by summarizing the four sceptical lessons: Socrates teaches humility about knowledge; Protagoras reminds us of cultural perspectives and limits; Cicero encourages evidence-based provisional beliefs; and Pyrrho shows that suspending judgment leads to peace of mind.

The artefacts of work vs actual work

Dan Dean: "The management class is used to experiencing the …" - Indieweb.Social

Loved the distinction between the concept of artifacts of work and actual work, and how LLMs exacerbate the gap between the two. #llm #software #work #management

The client is not on a journey

Ad Aged: A Journey. #naricissm #journey

In the newsletter, Bruni quotes an Australian reader, Michael Hogan, who writes, “It feels like every damn thing I do is labeled a journey. I don’t buy a drill. I’m on a home improvement journey. I don’t see my doctor. I’m on a wellness journey. I don’t deposit money into my bank account. I’m on a wealth journey. Make it stop.” 

Bruni comments on this linguistic-tic this way:

"Maybe it’s a byproduct of the era’s narcissism, a companion to all the selfies and Instagram stories and a social media landscape in which people are always positioning themselves in the foreground, where they pose just so. It’s semantic self-aggrandizement, turning an errand into an adventure, a routine into a religion...And so humdrum activities become heroic acts."

If you use words for a living, and almost everyone does, don't use words you're used to seeing. Don't just repeat things. Don't play into the dominant complacency. Which is a obfuscator's way of saying don't be boring. 

Don't be a "story-teller." Don't promise "robust," or "agile," or "nimble." Don't look like everyone else. As Orwell told us in "Politics and the English Lanuage," "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."

Software Engineering and Entropy

The Curse of Knowing How, or; Fixing Everything | Blog #programming #entropy #sisyphus

Now that I’ve learned to notice, my perception of software has changed in its entirety.

Every piece of software becomes a TODO list.
Every system becomes a scaffolding for a better one.
Every inconvenience becomes an indictment of inaction.

So relatable

I’ve lost count of how many projects I have started that began with some variation of “Yeah, I could build this but better.”

• A static site generator because the existing ones had too many opinions.
• A note-taking tool because I didn’t like the way others structured metadata.
• A CLI task runner because Make is cryptic and Taskfile is YAML hell.
• A personal wiki engine in Rust, then in Go, then in Nim, then back to Markdown.
• A homelab dashboard because I don’t like webslop.

The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction

The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction #friction #digital #economy #infrastructure

Friction has become a defining feature across the economy, with huge consequences for everything from education to infrastructure. And it's created three distinct worlds that operate by entirely different rules:

• The digital world has almost no friction.
• The physical world is full of it.
• And in certain curated spaces - like the West Village, or your AI companion -friction has been turned into something you can pay to remove.

Tanner Greer has a beautiful breakdown of American loneliness, drawing from Tocqueville and Wang Huning. “The American,” he writes, “was an individual first, nothing second.” The result is a culture of deep, systemic isolation. Not just emotional, but economic. Americans work alone, consume alone, get rewarded alone. Even our policies, as Tocqueville feared, are structured around that loneliness.

“When you analyze many government policies [in America] it is not difficult to see that their fundamental motivation [is in fact] the complex and persistent role played by widespread loneliness.”

Loneliness isn’t just personal. It’s institutional. It’s fiscal. It’s a bit engineered. It’s purposeful.

This is the economic story: friction has become a class experience. Wealth has always helped smooth over bumps - but when the physical world is such a mess and the digital world is so easy, it’s simple to curate the digital into the physical if you have money.

…

It’s the same logic that powers Erewhon, or Soho House, or influencer-run startups. You’re not paying for the thing. You’re paying for the removal of difficulty. The filtered lighting. The social cachet. The sense that this world still makes sense!

2025-05-12

The Evolution of Psychiatry

The evolution of psychiatry - by Adam Hunt #evo-psych #evolution #psychology #psychiatry

Why do psychiatric conditions exist?

…The framework in question is evolutionary psychiatry, and its principle thinking is simple: if we use evolutionary theory to explain biology, then we should be using evolutionary theory to explain psychiatric disorder. If evolution was given proper attention and integrated into mainstream psychiatry, we would usher in a new era of understanding and treatment of psychiatric conditions.

Psychiatric therapies have never been atheoretical – psychiatrists have always justified their treatments with some school of thought: Freudian psychodynamic theories placed blame on early childhood and subconscious urges; behaviorism justified the application of pain to try and train people out of wrongthink; and more recently, chemical imbalance theories were used to advertise pharmaceuticals, despite the narrative of simple dopamine and serotonin dysfunctions having been long dismissed in academic circles. Recent advances in genetics and neuroscience have provided more evidence and complexity, but no promising new theories. Psychiatry today can be considered a discipline in crisis, surviving only because psychological and pharmaceutical treatments are effective for some people, some of the time, and so we still need them. The way is open for a new paradigm in psychiatric theorizing.

Darwin’s prophecy manifested itself in psychology around 100 years after his writing. Now, evolutionary psychology has become a common reference point for public discussion and academic research. Evolutionary psychiatry is a late follower, arising in the last years of the twentieth century alongside evolutionary medicine, its foundational work owing to Randolph Nesse, George Williams, John Price, and others.

This unique theoretical strength has been followed up by work in evolutionary medicine and psychiatry identifying six reasons why conditions we define as disorder or disease (of body or mind) persist in evolved creatures:

1. Constraints on biological design, because evolution can only make alterations within a certain range.
2. Pathogens evolve, so we cannot evolve perfect immunity against them.
3. Design trade-offs and byproducts make perfection impossible.
4. Evolved defenses against disease and danger often induce harmful symptoms.
5. Selection is for reproductive success, not health, so we can evolve in ways which are debilitating if they allow us to reproduce more successfully.
6. Mismatch between evolved systems and modern environments lead to novel, harmful, reactions.

Of these six reasons, it’s important to note that the last four are the modern result of functioning rather than dysfunctioning processes. The idea that natural selection would only encourage perfect health is mistaken. It’s entirely possible for evolution to lead our bodies and minds into states which we now diagnose and treat as disorders or diseases.

For instance, some are mismatched psychological systems which are exposed to over-stimulation in the modern environment, becoming the biggest causes of abuse, ruination and early death in developed countries. Alcoholism and drug abuse manipulate natural chemical pathways which exist for evolutionarily advantageous reasons; obesity by overeating is caused by natural desires for sweet and fatty foods; and gambling addiction is likely linked to a history of continuously searching for scarce high-calorie food and other risky but rewarding endeavors.

This bit on autism is really insightful.

Investigating the most severely disabled autistic individuals you almost always discover damaging genetic mutations or early life trauma, such as foetal alcohol syndrome. These are clear cases of biological dysfunction. On the other hand, the less severely disabled individuals (who would once have been called Asperger’s or “high-functioning”) show none of those biological signs of dysfunction, instead showing evidence we expect from functional adaptations: the associated genes are common and complex, brain differences are subtle, the characteristics appear early in life when they are guaranteed to affect reproduction, and the prevalence is high enough that at least one person per Dunbar-sized hunter-gatherer social group of one hundred and fifty would show the same traits – in which case, every one of our ancestors would have known an autistic person. These biological signs are those we expect to see from adaptations, not dysfunction. The question we are led to ask is what autism’s function could have been.

Psychologically, autistics often show unusual abilities in intelligence, memory, and perception, especially in their areas of special interest or obsession. An anthropologist once stumbled upon a reindeer herder in Siberia who camped alone, ate alone and chose to keep away from the rest of their small nomadic group, but who could list the names, medical history, parentage and more of a group of 2,600 reindeer. Researchers have identified this as a possible case of an autistic mind playing a crucial role in a group’s survival. Technologies which played crucial roles in human civilization’s birth such as oil lamps, multi-component tools, star maps, grinding stones and fire hearths have also all been suggested as the sorts of things which autistic people gravitate towards. Social oddities could be forgiven when your mind is spectacularly useful, so this ability profile explains why these cases of autism evolved. Autistic minds sacrificed social nuance as trade-offs in becoming the object and system specialists amongst our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Those same individuals can excel in technological and scientific endeavors in the modern world.

“the alteration of stigma”

Theoretical clarity does not necessarily make for treatment improvements, but one way in which explanations from evolutionary psychiatry could instantly improve lives, essentially free of financial cost, is through the alteration of stigma. The causal explanation of a disorder affects its stigmatization. People believing chemical imbalance theories of depression feel more hopeless when diagnosed as depressed; people believing in genetic and neurological causes of psychosis are more stigmatizing of psychotic individuals than people who believe psychosis results from stress. In turn, an evolutionary explanation of a disorder inevitably changes that disorder’s perception. The full effects of this shift in perception are yet to be seen, and will of course depend on the condition and specific explanation. Psychopathy, for example, may not be destigmatized by an explanation as a cheating strategy which is game theoretically optimal for some portion of a group.

René Girard's influence on the US far right

How a little-known French literary critic became a bellwether for the US right #girard #memetic

on memetic desire

Girard is best known for his theory of “mimetic desire”, the idea that humans don’t desire things in and of themselves, but out of a wish to imitate and compete with others. On the back of this insight, the writer built a distinctive anthropology, borrowing from and contest-ing the theories of Nietzsche and Freud. He also came up with a set of ideas about scapegoating that have been taken up by rightwing readers in recent years in their critiques of so-called cancel culture. While Girard described himself as a centrist, his ideas are now celebrated by a movement that, while not unilaterally rightwing, incubated the policies of the Trump administration.

The idea is set out in Girard’s first book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel (published in French in 1961), which describes how Don Quixote, Madame Bovary and characters from Stendhal, Proust and Dostoyevsky come to desire things because others already want them. “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind,” he wrote. The fact that desires are borrowed means they are necessarily competitive. If you desire your neighbour’s husband, you have to contend with your neighbour in order to get what you want — or what you think you want. Mimetic desire leads to fruitless competition, unhappiness and even violence.

on Girard's role in the shift from structuralism to post-modernism, thanks to Derrida

Girard’s early work was informed by “structuralism” — the study of language and society as a closed system of interrelated signs, which was then dominant in French universities. But he was present at the birth of a new movement. In 1966, Johns Hopkins hosted a conference devoted to structuralism with the unprepossessing title, “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man”, that didn’t hint at the controversy it would cause. Girard and his colleagues invited a group of pre-eminent French thinkers, including the philosopher Michel Foucault, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss to attend. It was the last speaker to be invited who proved the most disruptive. After Lévi-Strauss and Foucault dropped out, Girard extended an invitation to a young Algerian-born philosopher, still little known in France: Jacques Derrida. In the final paper of the conference, Derrida attacked the basic assumptions of structuralism. This was the point of departure for his philosophical method, deconstruction, which sought to undo binary distinctions — raw/cooked, light/dark, sane/insane etc — in order to reveal the social forces that upheld them. Some conservatives today consider Derrida’s thought (or “postmodernism”, as they usually call it) to be the source of modern society’s ills. Girard later joked that, by inviting Derrida, he and his fellow conference organisers had let the plague into America.

on scapegoat theory

As post-structuralism spread through American universities, Girard pursued the implications of mimetic desire. His second book, Violence and the Sacred, published in 1972 and perhaps the most influential of all his work, describes how human societies enter into periods of crisis in which competition becomes unbearable. The solution, Girard claimed, is a violent act of scapegoating. The scapegoat has certain recurrent features: they are a foreigner, someone with a disability or a person in a position of authority. Such acts are then commemorated in the founding myths of cultures, myths in which the scapegoat becomes deified.

on Vance being influenced by scapegoat theory

Reading the French thinker prompted Vance to reconsider his faith, but it was the scapegoat mechanism that really struck a chord. “It captured so well the psychology of my generation, especially its most privileged inhabitants,” Vance writes. “Mired in the swamp of social media, we identified a scapegoat and digitally pounced. We were keyboard warriors, unloading on people via Facebook and Twitter, blind to our own problems.”

The truth is more complicated. In his 1999 book, I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard describes how globalisation had led to “the rise of victim power”. He praised this development, referring to international aid and universal healthcare as expressions of a genuine concern for the most vulnerable. But it could be taken too far. “This concern sometimes is so exaggerated and in a fashion so subject to caricature that it arouses laughter, but we should guard against seeing it as only one thing.”

What would Girard say about the politics of today, America’s new immigration policies or the escalating trade war between the US and China? I asked his friend and biographer, Cynthia Haven. “I think he would enjoin us to turn to powers even higher than Trump, even more powerful than Xi Jinping. When he urged us to desist from escalation, he meant it for peace. When he beseeched us to forgive one another, his position was absolute.”

Many of Girard’s new interpreters seem strangely indifferent to this injunction, ignoring the scapegoats of today’s world, unless they are the victims of leftwing cancel culture — a phenomenon that has largely disappeared since Musk’s purchase of Twitter. In September 2024, Vance made the false claim that Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbours’ pets. He later claimed that such stories were necessary so that “the media pays attention to the suffering of the American people”. In an article shortly afterwards for Politico, journalist Ian Ward claimed Vance had used Girard as his scapegoating playbook. More likely, the anti-political thinker had been abandoned altogether, sacrificed at the very moment he’d been deified.

2025-05-13

Passport Nation

Citizenship as a Service #passport #citizenship

But there’s something special about Saint Kitts. Its government relies on passport sales as a primary contributor to revenue; in a way, passports are the country’s largest export. Between 2015 and 2022, the Saint Kitts government naturalized some 35,000 citizens through its investment program—meaning in a matter of years, their nation will likely have more economic citizens abroad than it does residents at home. Saint Kitts is a passport island: its prosperity is now intricately linked with the precarious marketplace of global mobility.

The Economy: A User's Guide No. 1

I have decided to watch one of this every day and summarise it here with the help of ChatGPT.

Introduction

• Host: Brett Scott, author of Cloud Money and The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance.
• Series: This is part 1 of a 7-part series exploring the structure of the global economy.
• Goal: To guide listeners from ground-level realities up to global corporate capitalism.

1. Challenging Economic Complexity

• Common belief: The economy is too complex for non-experts.
• Reality: The economic system is messy, human-made, and deeply politicized.
• Most people are conditioned from childhood to enter this system through jobs and money.
• While some thrive, many experience oppression, inequality, and environmental destruction.
• There's a growing sense of meaninglessness due to consumerist culture.
• To change the system, we must first understand and orient ourselves within it.

2. Five Fundamental Anchors of Economic Reality

Scott introduces five “anchors” that help ground our understanding of the economy:

Anchor 1: The Foundation

• We live on Earth, powered by the sun—these are the ultimate sources of economic life.
• Sunlight and air are free, foundational resources; without them, no economy could exist.

Anchor 2: Human Energy Applied to Earth

• Economic value originates from humans using energy to interact with natural resources.
• Applies equally to ancient hunter-gatherers and modern professionals (e.g., software engineers).

Anchor 3: Interdependence, Not Independence

• Humans are born into social networks and shaped by others.
• No one survives or develops entirely alone; society is a mesh of mutual dependence.

Anchor 4: Economy as Interdependent Provisioning

• The economy is the process of people working together to meet needs/desires.
• Forms range from small hunter-gatherer groups to global supply chains.
• Modern capitalism often obscures these interdependencies and inflates perceived needs.

Anchor 5: Economic Life is Embedded in Broader Life

• Economic activity is interconnected with cultural, political, spiritual, and familial life.
• Without non-economic aspects (e.g., love, community), economic activity has no real purpose.
• Mainstream economics often ignores this, presenting the environment and people as external or isolated units.

3. Metaphor: The Economy as a Superorganism

• Just as the body’s cells form a coordinated system, so too do individuals in society.
• No cell can survive alone—same with people in an economy.
• The economy consists of these invisible collaborations among individuals and groups.
• E.g., the production of breakfast cereal involves countless unseen contributors globally.

4. Economic Superorganisms and Power Structures

• Different economic systems (e.g., hunter-gatherers vs. modern market economies) have different structures and power dynamics.
• Removing an individual from these structures (e.g., poverty) is akin to removing a cell from the body—survival becomes difficult.

5. Four Modes of Economic Interdependence

Scott describes four overlapping forms of interdependence:

1. Reproduction

• Creating and nurturing people (e.g., parenting, caregiving).

2. Production

• Collaboratively creating goods/services using physical, mental, and emotional labor.

3. Distribution

• Moving goods/labor through methods like gifting, patronage, trade, or money.

4. Consumption

• Using what others have produced; often overlaps with production.

• Example: A man drawing with a pencil is participating in all four modes:

  • The pencil (production & distribution).
  • His upbringing (reproduction).
  • The drawing process (consumption and production).

• Everyone, even retail workers, operates within these interconnected flows of economic activity.

• Tracing any object (like a pencil) reveals networks involving millions or billions of people—including the listener.

Conclusion

• The economy is a deeply interconnected superorganism, not a collection of isolated individuals.
• Understanding this reality challenges mainstream economic narratives.
• Next episode will explore human nature within this interconnected system.

2025-05-15

The Economy A User's Guide No 2

The Economy: A User's Guide | No.2: Human Natures - YouTube

Here's a comprehensive, section-by-section summary of Part 2 of Brett Scott’s podcast series (co-produced with Lanley Chase). This installment examines human nature and its influence on economic ideologies, contrasting the narrow economic conception of humans with a broader, multifaceted perspective. It also introduces key frameworks from economic anthropology.

1. Introduction

• Host: Brett Scott, author of Cloud Money and The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance.
• Series overview: A 7-part exploration of the modern economy and capitalism.
• This episode (Part 2): Focuses on human nature and how narrow views of it shape economic systems.

2. The Debate Around Human Nature

• Philosophers and economists have long debated whether humans are selfish, altruistic, rational, etc.
• Economics' dominant model: Homo economicus — a portrayal of humans as rational, self-interested, optimization-driven agents.

• Critics argue this model is:

  • Inaccurate.
  • Self-fulfilling: people may begin acting selfishly if they’re told that’s “human nature.”
  • Used to justify exploitation.

Quote: “Rather than us trying to disprove homo economicus, it's actually much more effective to... argue that we as human beings are in fact multifaceted.”

3. A Spectrum of Human Natures

Scott introduces a spectrum of human archetypes to challenge the singular focus on homo economicus. These represent different facets of the human experience:

• Homo economicus – Maximizes, optimizes, accumulates.
• Homo adventurous – Seeks adventure and thrill.
• Homo comunus – Desires connection and love.
• Homo cogitans – Reflects, analyzes.
• Homo absurdum – Enjoys playfulness and absurdity.
• Homo reverens – Approaches life with seriousness and awe.
• Homo meditari – Craves emptiness and simplicity.
• Homo ecologicus – Feels connected to nature.
• Homo expressio – Desires creative expression.
• Homo shamanicus – Yearns for mystical, non-rational experiences.
• Homo eroticus – Explores intimacy and relational dynamics.
• Homo fusion – Wants to dissolve into group identity.
• Homo inandi – Seeks dominance and control.
• Homo protectorus – Protects others from harm or domination.
• Homo activusmos – Feels injustice and seeks to right it.

Quote: “We are a whole spectrum of human natures at once... but we're seldom ever taught to think of ourselves like this.”

4. How Ideologies Cherry-Pick Human Traits

Different political and economic ideologies isolate one facet of human nature and treat it as the whole truth:

• Hippie culture → Love-centered human nature → Eco-villages, communes.
• Far-right culture → Domination and fear → Nationalism, protectionism, libertarianism.
• Communism → Cooperative nature → Collective ownership and central planning.

These simplified identities shape corresponding economic visions.

5. Neoliberalism and Homo Economicus

• Neoliberalism (post-1980s) elevates homo economicus through deregulation, free markets, and corporate capitalism.
• Common cultural imagery: Thatcher, Reagan, Wall Street, and the ethos of “greed is good.”
• While economists acknowledge competitive traits, they wrongly treat them as definitive.
• Even cooperation is sometimes re-explained through self-interest.

Quote: “Much like we have five senses... economic life has multiple different logics that coexist.”

6. Economic Anthropology: A Broader Lens

Scott introduces anthropologist David Graeber’s work (Debt: The First 5000 Years) to explain that real economies operate under multiple moral principles simultaneously, not just market exchange.

The Three Moral Principles in Economies:

1. Everyday Communism

   • Helping others based on need and capacity, without expecting anything in return.
   • Examples: Giving directions, helping someone in distress.

2. Reciprocity

   • Equal relationships balanced through mutual exchange.
   • Examples: Trading goods, friends cooking for each other.

3. Hierarchy

   • Power/status determines who gives and receives, without expectation of reciprocity.
   • Examples: Kings distributing gifts, bosses treating employees to dinner.

These principles often intersect in complex ways.

7. Real-Life Examples of Moral Principles Intersecting

• Narco gangs: Distribute groceries (everyday communism), build loyalty and status (hierarchy), funded by exchange-based drug trade (reciprocity).
• Helping a homeless person with food: Everyday communism.
• Friend makes you dinner: Reciprocity.
• Boss buys team dinner: Hierarchy.

• Airport queue scenarios:

  • If you're not in a rush, you might let a late passenger go ahead → Everyday communism.
  • If you’re equally stressed, their cutting ahead feels unjust → Reciprocity.
  • If a guard tells everyone to let a disabled person pass → Hierarchy + Communism.

Quote: “Capitalist economies foreground reciprocal exchange... but hierarchy and everyday communism abound in the cracks.”

8. Conclusion and Transition

• Modern capitalism is complex and mixes these moral principles.
• Most people struggle to define capitalism clearly because they are immersed in it.
• Economic anthropology helps us understand what came before capitalism and how alternatives once operated.
• Next episode: A look at pre-capitalist systems and how capitalism emerged by displacing them.

Quote: “Much like a fish cannot get enough distance from water to see it clearly... we often can't get enough distance from our system to observe it properly.”

Actionable Takeaways

• Question singular views of human nature in economics and politics.
• Reflect on your own interactions: Are they governed by exchange, generosity, or hierarchy?
• Explore anthropological works (e.g., Graeber’s Debt) to understand diverse economic systems.
• Be cautious of ideologies that simplify humanity to one trait or motive.

Let me know if you'd like a visual reference sheet of the different "homo" archetypes or the three economic moral principles.

The Best Advice I’ve Ever Heard for How to Be Happy

The Best Advice I’ve Ever Heard for How to Be Happy - The New York Times #happiness #self-help

• Start a weird ritual
• Hang out with younger people
• Spread “positive gossip.”
• Do a “mini version” of your favorite vacation activity.
• Cherish the everyday.
• Set up an “emotional first-aid kit.”
• Savor life like an astronaut.
• Listen to Cher.

Database School: Cloudflare Durable Objects

How Durable Objects and D1 Work: A Deep Dive with Cloudflare’s Josh Howard - YouTube #cloudflare #storage #durable

I have been coming across Durable Objects a lot, especially in the context of AI agents. They do seem like great primitives to design a storage abstraction around. It's also great that they integrate with a Typescript API, which makes sense because Typescript (or more precisely Javascript) is a first class citizen in the V8-Isolate system that Durable Objects run inside of. I really wish the abstraction was as clean in other programming languages. Maybe WASM will solve that in the future.

I asked Claude to generate a visualization from the podcast and I thought it did a pretty good job: Durable Objects Visualization

2025-05-16

Navigating by aliveness

The Imperfectionist: Navigating by aliveness

from Oliver Burkeman's latest

The concept that sits right at the heart of a sane and meaningful life, I’m increasingly convinced, is something like aliveness. It goes by other names, too, none of which quite nail it – but it’s the one thing that, so long as you navigate by it, you’ll never go too far wrong. Sometimes it feels like a subtle electrical charge behind what’s happening, or a mildly heightened sense of clarity, or sometimes like nothing I can put into words at all. I freely concede it’s a hopelessly unscientific idea. But I’m pretty sure it’s what Joseph Campbell meant when he said that most of us aren’t really seeking the meaning of life, but rather “an experience of being alive… so that we actually feel the rapture” – although personally I don’t think it’s always rapturous, per se – “of being alive.”

feeling better vs feeling better.

Crucially, aliveness isn’t the same as happiness. As the Zen teacher Christian Dillo explains in his engrossing book The Path of Aliveness, you can absolutely feel alive in the midst of intense sadness. Aliveness, he writes, “isn’t about feeling better; it’s about feeling better.” When I feel aliveness in my work, it’s not because every task is an unadulterated pleasure; and when I feel it in my close relationships, it’s not because I’ve transcended the capacity to get annoyed by other people – because believe me, I haven’t.

I love how this newsletter managed to squeeze in commentary about large language models

Most obviously, aliveness is what generally feels absent from the written and visual outputs of ChatGPT and its ilk, even when they’re otherwise of high quality. I’m not claiming I couldn’t be fooled into thinking AI writing or art was made by a human (I’m sure I already have been); but that when I realise something’s AI, either because it’s blindingly obvious or when I find out, it no longer feels so alive to me. And that this change in my feelings about it isn’t irrelevant: that it means something.

Meanwhile, aliveness is certainly missing from the future envisioned recently by Mark Zuckerberg, in which the loneliness epidemic will be somehow alleviated by artificial friends – a gang of pals who are always there for you, in every respect, except for the fact that they lack the capacity to know that you even exist.

More subtly, it feels like our own aliveness is what’s at stake when we’re urged to get better at prompting LLMs to provide the most useful responses. Maybe that’s a necessary modern skill; but still, the fact is that we’re being asked to think less like ourselves and more like our tools. It makes you wonder if Wendell Berry had it right when he wrote: “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”

The Global Matcha Boom

Matcha TikTok Craze Has Japan Facing Tea Shortage, Raising Prices - Bloomberg #matcha #economics

Matcha’s delicate supply chain is partly culpable for the shortage. The powder is made from ground-up shade-grown tea leaves, known as tencha, that are usually harvested once a year. Although tencha production is on the rise, Japan's tea industry as a whole is grappling with an aging population and a lack of successors willing to take over. To meet global demand, the government is considering measures to encourage more farmers to shift production toward tencha away from other forms of green tea.

Also form this podcast transcript: Japan Matcha Shortage: TikTok Craze, Tourism Boom Drive Demand - Bloomberg

Ha: While Japanese have been drinking less green tea over the years – outside of Japan, the appetite for matcha is expanding. Cafes and tea stores as far as Sydney in Australia, have seen sales skyrocket, forcing owners to limit customer purchases because they’re unable to source more of the tea powder from Japan. After the break, why can’t Japanese tea producers just… make more matcha?

Ha: Growing fine quality matcha has a lot to do with the land and the climate. The plant needs to be shaded. The soil needs to drain well, but also retain a decent amount of water. And while matcha is produced in a variety of regions in Japan, there’s one particular place renowned for this highly-prized tea.

Glass: So the most famous region is Uji, which is on the southeast border of Kyoto. And that's where matcha farmers have mastered techniques of growing and harvesting the best matcha, and they've been doing this for centuries.

Ha: So that does sound like a long and arduous process – but certainly not impossible, right? Why can’t supply just keep up with the demand?

Glass: Yeah, so the whole process that I just described, it only happens once a year for the most premium types of matcha, so farmers can't harvest more on demand. The annual supply is usually determined well in advance. And it's obviously a really slow, precise process as well. So the traditional stone mills only grind about 40 grams of matcha per hour. And specialized matcha processing machines are super limited in number. So increasing production speed would definitely compromise the quality of the matcha. And also a lot of these types of produce are pretty much made by family-run businesses in Japan, and obviously Japan has a declining population, it's aging, and there's not enough people to take over those farms in the future, so there's really just a decline in supply for that reason as well.

Levered 401(k)

Mortgage Your 401(k) - Bloomberg #finance #investment

From the latest Money Stuff newsletter by Matt Levine

A levered 401(k) is 👨🏽‍🍳😘

What percentage of her net worth should a 30-year-old professional have in the stock market? I am not going to give you investment advice, and there is a wide range of plausible answers. “Zero, put it all in Bitcoin” is I guess on the list. A popular rule of thumb would say 70% in stocks, with the other 30% in bonds and cash. There is, however, a good theoretical case that the right answer is really 200%, or 500%: Most of a young professional’s economic wealth is the present value of her future employment income, and borrowing money to buy more stocks is a good way to diversify away from that one risky asset. Also many 30-year-old professionals buy houses for considerably more than 200% of their net worth, and putting 200% of their net worth into the stock market could again be useful diversification.

But it is not easy to put 200% of your net worth into the stock market, because where will you get the money? A mortgage on a house is a pretty standard product in the US, but a mortgage on a retirement account is not. Bloomberg’s Suzanne Woolley reports on someone trying to change that:

The Biggest Dating App Faux Pas for Gen Z? Being Cringe

The Biggest Dating App Faux Pas for Gen Z? Being Cringe | WIRED

When it comes to online dating, Giovanni Wolfram, a 25-year-old living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, isn’t all too worried about whether his fellow dating app users will find him attractive. Rather, his biggest fear is that he might come off as “cringey.”

“You can get away with being ugly,” Wolfram says. “But being cringey is just like—that's a character that's imprinted on you.” Since he first joined Hinge at 18, he has worked hard to scrub his profile of sincerity. He’s kept his responses to Hinge’s prompts sarcastic and ironic, sort of as a litmus test. Some people take his snark seriously, but those people don’t get a response from him.

“Intellectually, I’m really all about sincerity and earnestness,” says Wolfram, but he worries about “being perceived as one of those guys who is too earnest and too sincere.”

Sincerity, earnestness, irony-free declarations of contentment—these are all things many young adults edit out of their online personas. Much of what Gen Z considers “cringe” might strike others simply as directness and honesty, but one generation’s authenticity is another’s red flag. Young adults’ tendencies toward lightheartedness and jokes in their online self-presentation may point to the way many of them are dealing with feelings of vulnerability and disillusionment.

Wolfram finds millennials’ sincerity “revolting.” He points to how they respond to dating app prompts in the way they’re intended to be responded to. If the prompt asks the user to share their likes, for example, he often sees millennials “write two paragraphs of lists of everything that they actually like,” he says. “It’s very confusing.”