The confession is doing structural work. If you admit the danger, you establish yourself as the one honest actor. And if you are the one honest actor, your safety claims do not require external verification. You have pre-certified yourself through the performance of self-doubt. The confession is not transparency. It is inoculation against scrutiny. Behavioral experts call this manufactured credibility. You spend credibility on cheap admissions, theoretical risk, solemn commitments, to accumulate it for claims that would cost far more to verify. The valuation, capability assertions and alignment progress.
In 1969, after a proposal to abolish the Electoral College by constitutional amendment passed in the House, it was only very narrowly defeated in the Senate, mostly due to the surprising opposition of strange bedfellows: the NAACP and Southern segregationists.
China takes energy security seriously. The enormous effort it has made to build low-carbon capacity—solar, wind, and nuclear—has to be understood as part of a broader motivation to make the country dependent on energy sources within its borders. Beijing is trying to mitigate the pain if it ever loses access to sea-lanes that deliver its oil. That is also why, in 2023, China added twenty times more coal-burning capacity than the rest of the world put together. It is serious about addressing issues in climate change, yes. But Beijing is not turning its back on its rich coal reserves. That also explains why China is so enthusiastic about electrifying the auto fleet: It would rather burn domestic coal than Middle East oil to power its cars.
in reality, prediction markets produce the opposite of accurate, unbiased information. They encourage anyone with an informational edge to use their knowledge for personal financial gain. In this way, prediction markets are the perfect technology for a low-trust society, simultaneously exploiting and reifying an environment in which believing the motives behind any person or action becomes harder.
The most valuable tools in this new world won’t be the ones that generate the most code fastest. They’ll be the ones that help us think more clearly, plan more carefully, and keep the quality bar high while everything accelerates around us.
What impressed Churchill during his trip was a quality of resilience, an “unshakeable faith in a golden future,” that he did not see at home. Unlike the English, Americans were not deathly afraid of making mistakes with their money because they believed that even if they were wiped out, opportunities to make it all back, and more, would continue to present themselves. “Before disparaging American methods,” he wrote, “the English critic would do well to acquaint himself with the inherent probity and strength of the American speculative machine. It is not built to prevent crises, but to survive them.”
The man who runs naked across a football field certainly disrupts, but he does not change the rules of the game. The whole notion of disruption is adolescent: It assumes that after the teenagers make a mess, the adults will come and clean it up. But there are no adults. We own this mess.
Sometimes institutions are deprived of vitality and function, turned into a simulacrum of what they once were, so that they gird the new order rather than resisting it.
