Links for January

Buddhism, weddings, Park Chan-wook

Here are the most interesting things I read, listened to, and watched in January. But first, some announcements:

1. If you are under the age of 24, applications are open (until February 9th) for Interact.

2. If you are between the ages of 16 and 21 and have some plausible connection with Ireland, applications are open until “early February” for Patch. I will be stopping by the 2026 cohort with some regularity.

3. On March 2nd, I will be speaking at a Works in Progress event in Brussels about academic spinouts and the professor’s privilege system. You can RSVP here.

3. After my listening queue on Spotify hit over 3,000, I have declared podcast bankruptcy. Even were it not for its other issues, Spotify could never recover from the original sin of bundling music and podcasts into one app. My current system is to have long queues across Spotify and Pocket Casts, so that I never need to decide what I’m listening to in the moment. I find that makes it more likely I endorse my listening choices upon reflection. Cultural consumption, like everything else, is a never-ending battle against akrasia and lack of mental clarity.

4. Periodic reminder that, if you find what I do valuable, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

Blogs and short links

Dan Wang’s 2025 letter. I agree that Silicon Valley is the least funny place I’ve ever been in my life.

Dan has done a great deal to popularise the annual letter format. See, for example, Sebastian Garren’s year in review.

We also have Benjamin Parry’s year in review. I once had a humorous interaction with this fellow, in which he was conversing in fluent Chinese with my Brazilian friend. They were standing next to a Chinese-American man who didn’t understand a word they were saying… “Only in Berkeley”?

There is also Tom McCarthy’s end-of-year note. As a former wingman during Tom’s period of chronic singledom, no sweeter words could be read:

How did I learn the above? By finding a wife. 12 months ago I was living in a fairly-stark bachelor pad (I did my best). I got married to Molly in July and traded in the bachelor pad for a cozy, well-decorated home. Being married is great, and a blessing. A friend of ours describes it as having an ‘ultimate teammate’. Molly knows me better than anybody, and we share a deep, mutual hope and commitment for, and to each other. Marriage is making me grow up a bit faster than I would’ve otherwise - I’ve gotten better at doing chores on time, taking the initiative on tasks, and scheduling things that I would’ve previously procrastinated on. Nobody is forcing me to grow up faster, it’s just necessary for me in trying to be a good husband. I also have less solo time - less independence and more responsibility - but I don’t miss anything, except maybe being a bit more carefree with chores and my schedule (it’s harder to disappear for a late-night cycle or leave the dishes dirty). Being busier is not something I looked forward to, but as a whole it is good. I know marriage is not easy for many people, but my experience of it so far is wonderful. I am lucky to have Molly.

And if you’re reading that, you might as well read Molly’s end-of-year review.

The Metropolitan Review on marrying young:

How often do we read such a clear rejection of youthful experience? Eileen and Simon’s [the main characters in Beautiful World, Where Are You?] independent twenties come down to this, a set of boring, lonely, demeaning trials. There’s an incantation that Simon’s youth is lost to him, that he wasted it by picking the wrong person, then feeling miserable alone. Eileen wishes she had been spared the alienation of her crowded flats, her shitty job, and her other long-term romantic relationship by becoming Simon’s wife. To have been simply loved well from the beginning, rather than having had to make her way on her own — in a sense, to have faced no challenging break in the transition between childhood and adulthood — this would, she thinks, not only have saved her a lot of suffering but made her a better person. Does she mean less jaded? More innocent?

I liked this essay a great deal more than I was expecting, not least of which because it is the best commentary on the cultural significance of Sally Rooney I have seen:

I looked around at my friends and acquaintances, especially the married ones, and wondered if there was any truth in the idea that the years they spent as poor captains of their own ships, unmoored and often lonely, were in fact not remotely necessary or enlightening.

Why did no one else find this proposition shocking? It was such a clear transgression against the entire prevailing ethos of young womanhood (at least in liberal contexts). Critics were concerned with whether Eileen’s happy ending with Simon constituted a more regressive romantic ending than we’d seen in Rooney’s prior novels, but there was no preoccupation with this regret on Eileen’s part. Is that because one is liable, in extreme love, to suddenly wish all kinds of self-negating and previously inconceivable things? Did we read this and think we knew better: that when Eileen grows accustomed to her marriage, she’ll be glad that she had the chance to grow up among her friends before she and Simon came together? Or maybe this is the essential quality which separates a romance from a novel: in a romance a woman must be rescued from circumstances which are sad, inadequate, grief-filled, wasteful. Perhaps a romance is less powerful if it acknowledges all those other little placeholders and consolation prizes (friends, work, art) which we pretend can make us balanced and happy.

And while we are on weddings, Rachel Edwards endorses my proposal for our post-AGI careers:

If anyone wants to give me an insane budget to create your extremely specific and bizarre dream wedding…. I’m down

I have this request to share from Conor Igoe, and he thinks that some readers of these linkposts may be able to usefully contribute:

The evals team at Edison [Scientific] is expanding beyond biology research this year, and we are recruiting expert contractors to contribute challenging and broadly valuable tasks. Specifically, we are going to be creating curated Humanity’s Last Exam-style challenge tasks, with a specific focus on economics, psychology, sociology, Earth science, and astronomy. You can read more about our previous eval work for life sciences here and here. This work will almost surely result in an open-source benchmark for the AI community, and at the very least will inform our internal agent development.

These activities may span various aspects of the research process, including literature search, generating hypotheses, designing experiments, and analyzing results. We use both per-task and hourly pay arrangements, depending on project specifics and expertise. In either case we aim for $50 to $100 per hour equivalent.

In the past, our expert contractors have held or are pursuing PhDs in life sciences at a major research university. That said, this is not a hard requirement; we will consider a wide range of expertise, especially for areas of empirical study that primarily occur outside of academic institutions.

My impression from the conversations at the reading group is that there may be several folks in [Sam Enright’s] circles who might be interested in contributing, especially for economics… I would be grateful if you could share this link to apply to be a contributor!

In the “How did you hear about this opportunity?” question, folks can just mention my name so I can keep an eye out and flag them to the team.

Molly Cantillon on the personal panopticon. The Irish Enlightenment strikes again?

Henry Oliver on the literary anniversaries of 2026. Henry is also looking to hire an intern to research John Stuart Mill. I hope that said intern will discuss Mill’s essays on the political economy of Indian land and on ranked choice voting with me, which I find more interesting than On Liberty.¹

In political discourse, high rents and land prices are frequently blamed on ‘speculators’, but the use of that term is so deeply philosophically confused that I can’t help but think that many such arguments are not even wrong. Peter McLaughlin put it nicely:

A fantastically neat insight from Seán that I’d never noticed before: when people blame speculation for high house prices, they often mean two completely distinct practices that would have opposite effects in practice. Sometimes it means land hoarding, refusing to sell and holding out for a better deal; other times it means excessive trading, selling too often because housing has become financialised. Yet people still talk as if ‘speculation’ were a unified thing, with a single effect (upward) on house prices.

Sam Mendelsohn’s introduction to the Mahabharata and Ramayana. It really does seem that reading one of the illustrated editions is the way to go.² A section that got cut from the final draft of Notes on Taiwan contained some speculation about why Eastern classics are so absurdly long compared to Western ones (I still don’t know). I really like this quote from A.K. Ramanujan:

No Indian reads the Mahabharata for the first time

This useful comment on Marginal Revolution gives further context on Indian oral culture.

Everybody knows about the significance of DARPA-style funding organisations, but only real ones know about the importance of BBN-style research contractors to the history of science.³

China fact of the day: In addition to the Great Firewall, some Chinese provinces are competing to put in place additional censorship, above and beyond the censorship required of them by the central government. Henan is a leader in this area.⁴ It’s increasingly common for Chinese websites to block access from any IP address based outside the mainland. A friend who consults for multinationals on business in China says that never in his career did he expect to have to VPN in to China.

​​Apropos of Tyler Cowen’s post about the utilitarian track record of American-backed regime changes, this whole page is insane:

The U.S. Army turned to psychological warfare [to get Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega to leave the Vatican embassy], blaring disturbing chicken noises at “deafening levels”, gunning the engines of armored vehicles against the [Vatican embassy’s] fence, and setting fire to a neighboring field and bulldozing it to create a “helicopter landing zone”. Reportedly the version of the song “I Fought the Law“ performed by The Clash was played repeatedly along with “You Shook Me All Night Long“ by AC/DC and “Welcome to the Jungle“ by Guns N’ Roses; other songs in the line-up were “Too Old To Rock ‘N’ Roll“ by Jethro Tull, “Panama“ by Van Halen, and “Never Gonna Give You Up“ by Rick Astley.

I can certainly think of ways of deposing a dictator more dignified than a Navy SEAL rick-roll.

Congratulations to Jamie Rumbelow for winning a Sidney Award (gated) from David Brooks for his piece in Works in Progress about Manhattan’s elaborate network of steam tunnels.

From YouGov: 32% of Americans have a mostly positive view of the Crusades, while only 9% support the Black Death.

More polls: 12% of Americans claim to have a license to operate a submarine. Is Lizardman’s constant on the rise?⁵

Thomas Nagel, what is it like to be a bat, poetry edition.

The European Union’s ‘single market’ is being allowed to wither and die. I talked about this blog post at a drinks reception recently, and then a Dutchman gave me grief for referring to “self-righteous Europeans” in the third person (as if I wasn’t one). Note that the specific figures in this post – that EU member states have de facto 45% tariffs on goods and 110% on services – are extremely misleading.

The best music that Andrew Batson heard in 2025. This man has excellent taste. Here are also the best books he read in 2025.

I had no idea that hurling has been played continuously since the Iron Age. Remarkable!

I am pleased that Will O’Brien has continued to reign over the Irish in San Francisco like a Tammany boss.

Podcast

Dave Chappelle has a stand-up bit about how, if jobs moved from China to America, the iPhone would cost $9,000. He had the right order of magnitude: the only smartphone made in America uses decade-old technology and costs $2,000. Naturally enough, it’s called the Liberty Phone.⁶

Jasmine Sun on Chinese peptides.

Donald Lopez on Buddhism. Are there good arguments against the view that Buddhism is a highly unintuitive and unappealing philosophy, and that the only reason it ever gained traction in the West was through complete misunderstanding?

Was Michel Foucault a libertarian? As with many of the questions that Rasheed Griffith asks, I suspect that Betteridge’s law of headlines applies.

Epoch AI has started a podcast. So far, I have listened to one of my best buddies from undergrad interview Luis Garicano about the macroeconomics of AI.

The Conversations with Tyler 2025 retrospective.

From the Works in Progress podcast: Anton Howes on how Henry VIII accidentally started the Industrial Revolution. There is a lot of great overlap between the discussion here and Anton’s session at our Adam Smith conference.

Papers

Various, National Development Plan 2021–2030. One of the load-bearing tweets⁷ of our time was about how the French government can get away with waging genuinely colonial-style wars in the modern era while avoiding international outrage through a cunning strategy known as “writing the news in French”. I often wonder whether the same is true of governments putting things in PDFs.

In any case, this is the big document that lays out a decade of Ireland’s capital investment strategy. It is of interest to essentially no one other than people whose full-time job is in Irish politics; many of the topics in this plan have been covered in one place or another by Progress Ireland. This NDP de facto replaced a previous plan that was supposed to go until 2027, which was quietly brushed under the rug.

The NDP, combined with the National Planning Framework, which does something analogous for a decade of land use policy, make up ‘Project Ireland 2040’. I still have been unable to work out why a new name was required for a set containing exactly two elements.

It would be interesting to write something about adult education and how well programmes for mature students have worked. On page 99, this plan has an explicit goal that Ireland should reach an 18% “lifelong learning” rate by 2025, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what this means or how we would even know if we had hit it. Perhaps the authors should imbibe my wisdom on this subject on Matt Teichman’s podcast.

Irish government documents are filled with phrases like the following, describing a deposit that you now have to pay on any plastic or aluminium bottles:

The introduction of a Deposit and Return Scheme (DRS) in 2022 for plastic bottles and aluminium beverage cans will require considerable investment by beverage producers, supporting new and sustainable job creation in recycling.

Don’t you see? Introducing new regulations that distort companies away from maximising profit is actually good for the economy, because they need to hire extra people to comply with the regulations. I’m not even saying that this specific rule is a bad idea. But the idea that job-creation would be a benefit, rather than a cost, of this policy, makes no economic sense to me. Bastiat’s window!

On page 166, I got a chuckle out of the stated intention for Ireland to make a bid to host the 2030 World Cup (which was also quietly dropped). Müller et al finds that the World Cup, on average, loses over $1 billion for the host country, which is equivalentto a negative 47% rate of return, even worse than the Olympics. I would be very intrigued by a proposal to take the money we would otherwise have set on fire spent on the World Cup, and use it to achieve global dominance in a handful of extremely niche sports that benefit from specialised venues and equipment.

In this, as with so many things, the small countries are stuck in a state of Girardian mimesis, when we could be conquerors.

Various, Beyond Reasoning Gains: Mitigating General Capabilities Forgetting in Large Reasoning Models. Read for my AI journal club, which was in an experimental ‘wisdom of crowds’ format. We read this paper in order to come to a collective judgement, before seeing the market rate, on what we should wager on Gavin Leech’s prediction market about whether reinforcement learning harms off-target capabilities. Fair-minded centrist that I am, my answer was 50%.

I think this paper was sufficiently above my level that I am still at the “recognise some terms and talk to Claude and what they mean” phase. But you can still learn a lot from doing that! Reading computer science papers is such a different paradigm from reading philosophy, history, etc., in that “reading” is secondary to actually implementing the techniques yourself. I am still a noob at that, although Claude Code helps a lot.

Reinforcement learning is probably one of the easier areas of computer science for an economist to learn. The basic mathematical machinery (value functions, dynamic programming, fixed point theorems) will be familiar to anyone who has considered doing an econ PhD at a quant-heavy department.

‘Reinforcement learning’ is also one of those terms, like inference, that is now used by the young ’uns in a very confusing way that is contrary to decades of previous usage. Sometimes I hear people use RL as though it were synonymous with the entire post-training stage of an LLM. At least in the Richard Sutton textbook, RL is a set of methods for learning how to maximise cumulative reward in an environment that can be modelled as a Markov decision process. By this definition, it seems to be debatable whether reinforcement learning by human feedback (RLHF) should count as genuine RL. People also sometimes use ‘RL’ when talking about things like supervised fine-tuning, which is definitely not RL. So I suppose my contribution to this group was very much that of a philosopher: arguing that the initial question was confused because of its failure to parse semantic distinctions that most people find annoying and pedantic.

Grace Solomoff, Ray Solomonoff and the Dartmouth Summer Research Project in Artificial Intelligence, 1956. Yes, that is he of Solomonoff induction. I will have much more to say about this soon.

Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, The Logic Theory Machine. A paper that grew out of the Dartmouth summer workshop on AI. The Logic Theorist was an automated theorem-proving program that ran on the JOHNIAC at RAND. In this paper, the Logic Theorist is given 52 theorems from chapter two of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, of which it was able to prove 38.⁸ In one case, the proof is more elegant than Russell and Whitehead’s own. Personally, I find this quite astonishing; AI had made an original contribution to mathematics – at least in the sense of simplifying an existing proof – as early as the 1950s! In any case, having spent an inordinate amount of time reading Bertrand Russell last year has already paid off more than I would have expected.

Music

Some new albums discovered, or listened to properly, for the first time this month:

Mary Halvorson, About Ghosts. Spooky. Andrew Batson describes this as one of the two most significant developments in avant-garde jazz in the last year, but each track has only a few tens of thousands of streams, which I guess tells you something about the popularity of this genre.

Robert Glasper, Canvas. Amazing stuff; Rise and Shine has been my most widely replayed track in recent weeks. Glasper is probably my favourite artist in the jazz rap subgenre, although this album was my first album to listen to from him without lyrics.

Seun Kuti, Egypt 80, Heavier Yet (Lays the Crownless Head). My favourite track is Dey. I also enjoyed Radiolab explaining Fela Kuti’s critical role in the history of Afrobeat. And here is the full 12-part series about Fela excerpted in that episode. Egypt 80 (formerly Africa 70) was Fela’s band, which is now led by his son Seun.

Charles Lloyd, Zakir Hussain, Eric Harland, Sangam. Excellent Indian-inspired jazz fusion, which I have written about before as a criminally underrated subgenre. Dancing on One Foot is the most accessible track. See also Batson’s first explorations in Indian classical music.

Books

Andrew Brown, J.D. Bernal: The Sage of Science. One of the most underrated science books I have ever read. I’m convinced John Desmond Bernal (a Tipperary man) was one of the great scientific polymaths of the 20th century. I have many thousands of words of notes about this book, and hope to get around to profiling his work for Asimov Press at some point.

Gavin Leech, The FABRIC Book. Collected essays from former students and staff of FABRIC, the umbrella term for many of the ‘applied rationality’ camps. You can order a print-on-demand copy with a recursive front cover here. My favourite entries were these:

1. Gytis Daujotas, Expertise makes people weirder, not more alike

2. Claire Wang, I can do more more more

3. Ariel Cheng, Explaining the free energy to my past self⁹

4. Gavin Leech, Cracking codes

I thought this was a lovely tribute, and that more communities should have books to represent the best of their collective output. There could be a Patch book, although I fear my prolixity is such that I would make up 90% of the content, in which case I might as well just write a book.

Films

Park Chan-wook, No Other Choice (어쩔수가없다). From the director of Decision to Leave and Oldboy, two of my favourite Korean films. The Korean Foreign Ministry is adept at funding psyops about how amazing Korea is – in this case, my attendance at the Irish premiere. This film definitely won’t stick with me as much as Park’s other films, but it was light and funny, and we had a great time at the screening. The central comedic tool of making a bizarrely specific industry seem like a much bigger deal than it really is economically works very well.

The Korean embassy in Ireland should run some kind of memorial event for Kevin O’Rourke, the missionary from County Cavan who translated much of the Korean cultural canon into English for the first time. He became a professor at Kyung Hee University, an honorary Korean citizen, and the first foreigner in history to receive a doctorate in Korean literature. A long time ago, I knew some of his family friends from Busan. We truly have people everywhere.

David Lynch, Mulholland Drive. My first David Lynch. I’m not sure what I can say about this without completely spoiling the plot, but I think I need to watch it again to really get it anyway. The Naomi Watts audition scene was A+ superb. Here is the Very Bad Wizards discussion.

From YouTube, we have Amanda Askell on training Claude’s character and why Opus 3 was so well-aligned. Welch Labs also explains the phenomenon of double descent and how it violated conventional wisdom in statistical learning theory. Finally, there is Jacob Collier and Esperanza Spalding on NPR’s Tiny Desk.

1. I saw someone on Twitter recently describe JS Mill’s writing style as “undergraduate with a deadline at midnight”, which is an assessment I probably disagree with less than Henry does.

2. I got the DK illustrated version of the Mahabharata for an old flatmate from Mumebai. Probably my fondest memory in that flat was trading back and forth strangely translated cultural peculiarities: “I see your Gujarati spiderman, and raise you Irish Spongebob.”

3. Eric’s idea is already getting some traction, including in Amodo Design recently being listed as one of ARIA’s activation partners. Eric’s piece also reminded me of Welch Lab’s history of autonomous vehicle research, which draws a lot on the example of the nonprofit BBN at CMU.

4. Shockingly, “The Henan Cyberspace Affairs Commission could not be reached for comment.”

5. Bizarrely, this effect is almost entirely driven by the quarter of Hispanic adults (!) who claim to know how to operate a submarine. Is there a tradition of Latin American pranksterism I was unaware of?

6. I hope this does not come across as snarky; it’s a genuinely amazing engineering accomplishment.

7. I still can’t find it, but I swear it exists. Please send it to me if you find it.

8. See section 3.5 of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on computational philosophy.

9. I wanted to link to this in last month’s discussion of Karl Friston’s free energy principle. However, Ariel says there are some technical errors in the first draft and she is working on an updated one. I think she is almost cetainly exaggerating, and regardless of whether Wolfgang’s critique of free energy is correct, the exposition was an amazing achievement for a high-school student (!).