Henry Farrell
Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.
Henry Farrell did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsIf that doesn’t happen, and the rebels in the Democratic party also prevail, forcing a significant portion of the party’s foreign policy elite into the wilderness, then I think that it will be fair to say that the Blob is dead.
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Our reading
The power of the Blob lies in the belief in its existence rather than its material reality.
Their wordsTheir power is not in their physical existence, but in the fact that people believe that they exist, and that they represent some collective judgment that they need to adjust their behavior towards.
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Their wordsThere is a “Blob” that plays an important role in shaping foreign policy consensus, but it is not likely to show up in the kinds of survey questions that Dan builds his case on. The truth is that the Blob is an egregore, a class of collective psychic predator that is remarkably difficult to dispel.
- 3 days earlier
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Our reading
AI should be thought of as a kind of condensate of human culture that can be deployed in novel ways.
Their wordsInstead, it suggests that we ought think of AI as a kind of condensate of human culture that can be deployed in very novel ways, and even become a self mobilizing myth.
- 9 days earlier
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Their wordsPower maneuvering over chokepoints doesn’t simply corrode the global relationships that make miracles like the semiconductor supply chain possible. It increases the risk of broader confrontation.
↗The chokepoint view has a massive blind spotprogrammablemutter.com
- 7 days earlier
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Their wordsThe point, as the title of this post suggests, is that this is a genuine trilemma. Assuming ordinary human limitations, an individual poaster can’t really do all three at once.
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Their wordsFor better or worse, a certain kind of self assurance seems to attract mass readership.
- 11 days earlier
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Their wordsThis heady concoction of ideas helped inspire the development of the so-called frontier models that have reshaped thinking about AI over the past four years.
↗What AI debates have to do with alchemyprogrammablemutter.com
- 10 days earlier
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Their wordsThe answer is that the metaphor shrinks rather than expands your horizons of the possible, forcing you to focus on the single overwhelming question of what Machine Jesus is going to do as soon as he descends from that gleaming cloud.
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Their wordsMetaphors are the fundamental abstraction layers in modern AI debates.
- 2 days earlier
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Their wordsThe feedback loops that drive system change are both "highly destabilizing and difficult to predict."
↗International relations has a problem with the futureprogrammablemutter.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsthe value of standard social science approaches, which attempt to discover long term regularities, is likely to depreciate in relative terms until the system settles down again.
↗International relations has a problem with the futureprogrammablemutter.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsCreating institutional forms that can incorporate diversity and respond flexibly to a changing environment while maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of citizens is the fundamental project of state capacity that faces us.
↗International relations has a problem with the futureprogrammablemutter.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 5 days earlier
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Their wordsThe European Union is big - the third largest economy in the world, but it has great difficulty in transforming economic strength into geopolitical clout.
↗Canada is cosying up to Europeprogrammablemutter.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsSo long as Canada is irrevocably plugged into the US economy, military and other arrangements, it's liable to get stuck with choices that run counter to its national interests.
↗Canada is cosying up to Europeprogrammablemutter.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsThis means that highly transformative institutions will often look identical to ineffectual talking shops and indeed be identical to ineffectual talking shops.
↗Canada is cosying up to Europeprogrammablemutter.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 3 days earlier
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Their wordsthe best way to think about AI is as another social, political, cultural and economic shock in the series of shocks that have been underway over the long industrial revolution.
↗How should social science think about AI?programmablemutter.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsI suspect that some of the labs' willingness to put money into the social sciences stems from the realization of senior people that the practical build out of AI is highly unpopular in the U.S and their urgent desire to figure out how to sugarcoat the pill so that it will get swallowed
↗How should social science think about AI?programmablemutter.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsa recognition that AI is powerful (and will reshape power relations among humans) but that the consequences will flow messily through multiple complex processes that we really need to start mapping and understanding
↗How should social science think about AI?programmablemutter.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 2 weeks earlier
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Their wordsWhat we do know is that the actual Elon Musk that we have to live with on this here timeline was flagrantly incompetent in government, contrary to Noah's previous predictions.
↗The Acemoglu Wars Are All About AIprogrammablemutter.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsWhat we do know from economics, is that trajectories of technological development are often associated with increasing returns.
↗The Acemoglu Wars Are All About AIprogrammablemutter.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsAI's development is being steered, right now, by a small self-selecting group of business leaders and investors.
↗The Acemoglu Wars Are All About AIprogrammablemutter.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 2 weeks earlier
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Their wordsmuch cultural success is stochastic (the experimental evidence suggests that talent only moderately predicts success in culture markets), and that path dependence shapes chances of success
↗No-One Makes You Shop at Amazonprogrammablemutter.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordswe are systematically likely to overestimate our own individual awesomeness, and to underestimate the external power asymmetries that magnify our voices.
↗No-One Makes You Shop at Amazonprogrammablemutter.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsIf anything, I think that the book has gained very substantially in relevance, as more of our social structures have come to rely on coordination rather than violence.
↗No-One Makes You Shop at Amazonprogrammablemutter.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 4 days earlier
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Our reading
Ireland's colonial wars helped set the template Britain later applied elsewhere in its empire
Their wordsThe brutal war and its aftermath set some of the parameters for what Britain did later in other parts of the world.
↗John Crowley has diedprogrammablemutter.com 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsJohn Dee, who appeared in Flint and Mirror as well as several other Crowley novels, was not just a wizard but an imperial propagandist.
↗John Crowley has diedprogrammablemutter.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 1 day earlier
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optimismSilicon Valleyconsciousness
Their wordsIncreasingly, it is looking much more like the one anticipated by the drugged-up 1960s oeuvre of Philip K Dick, filled with deranged billionaires, machines that claim consciousness, hallucinated worlds and political breakdown.
↗We're stuck in Philip K. Dick's imagined universeprogrammablemutter.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsyou can be a great writer, revealing possibilities that others haven't seen, without always being a good one.
↗We're stuck in Philip K. Dick's imagined universeprogrammablemutter.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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ideas vs executionSilicon Valley
Their wordsAll of these grand visions hide truths that are messier, more sordid and more contingent.
↗We're stuck in Philip K. Dick's imagined universeprogrammablemutter.com 3rd of 3 in this piece