politics 4
- The foreign policy "Blob" exists as an egregore.
- The foreign policy Blob may die if certain political outcomes occur in upcoming fights.
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.
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What Henry Farrell says most about
behavioural science 3
- People tend to overestimate their own talent and underestimate the structural advantages that amplify their success.
- As societies rely more on coordination than coercion, the power to shape beliefs and knowledge grows in importance.
government 3
- Building institutions that can incorporate diverse perspectives, adapt flexibly to change, and keep public legitimacy is the central challenge of state capacity today.
- Elon Musk was flagrantly incompetent when he took on a government role, contradicting predictions that his business talent would translate there.
ideas vs execution 3
- Highly transformative institutions are often indistinguishable from ineffectual talking shops at the moment they are created.
- Success in cultural and professional fields is driven more by chance and path dependence than by talent.
Silicon Valley 3
- Ideas forming the 'ideology of technological salvation' helped inspire the development of so-called frontier AI models.
- Silicon Valley's actual trajectory increasingly resembles Philip K. Dick's paranoid, hallucinatory fiction rather than the optimistic space-age visions of Asimov and Clarke.
war 3
- A country whose economy and military are deeply entangled with a dominant neighbor will keep getting stuck with choices that run counter to its own national interests.
- Ireland's colonial wars helped set the template Britain later applied elsewhere in its empire
Europe 2
- The EU's large economic size does not translate into geopolitical clout.
- John Dee functioned as an imperial propagandist, not merely a wizard figure
innovation 2
- Technological development trajectories often display increasing returns, which entrench early paths and crowd out alternatives.
- AI is best understood as another shock in the long series of disruptions from the industrial revolution, not a wholly novel phenomenon.
LLMs 2
- AI should be thought of as a kind of condensate of human culture that can be deployed in novel ways.
- AI labs fund social science partly to manage the fact that the AI buildout is unpopular, seeking ways to make it more acceptable to the public.
writing 2
- A writer can be artistically important for revealing new possibilities without being technically skilled at prose.
- A certain kind of self assurance seems to attract mass readership.