Shane Parrish: “Choosing something once is easy. Choosing it repeatedly makes a difference. Ordinary choices compound into extraordinary results.”
Cody Moser: “Contrary to received wisdom, less connected networks are better than more connected ones. Collective decision-making is, at bottom, a process of consensus-building. In a roundtable of 50 people, the loudest, most charismatic voice will dominate and squeeze the conversation to a single fixed point. But in 10 roundtables of five people, 10 very different conversations will develop, with unique ideas and consensuses.” [via Arnold Kling]
Indian Big Business: An essay byJairus Banaji. “In what follows, I present a precis of the evolution of Indian big business over the last two decades, starting with a fact which is hardly ever foregrounded, namely, that the business families who formed the mainstay of industrial capitalism in the country for a whole three or four decades after Independence have either disintegrated or have been disintegrating and will soon cease to exist as coherent entities, let alone cohesive ones. Next, I shall present the results of an exercise that involves looking at the biggest non-banking companies in the country (both listed and unlisted) in terms of who actually owns them and of the different categories of ownership we can divide them into.
Hayek: “Adam Smith’s decisive contribution was the account of a self-regulating order which formed itself spontaneously if the individuals were restrained by appropriate rules of law. His Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations marks perhaps more than any other single work the beginning of the development of modern liberalism. It made people understand that those restrictions on the powers of government which had originated from sheer distrust of all arbitrary power had become the chief cause of Britain’s economic prosperity.” [via CafeHayek]
Kartik Hosanagar: “The goal of the development of AI is to get machines to match human intelligence. Are we close to that? Not really. But we’re only about 60 years into this and in that short time, we’ve gone from computers doing simple things like solving puzzles to beating the best humans at chess and venturing into creative domains. The ultimate question now is whether you can design ‘artificial general intelligence’. Today, we have ‘artificial narrow intelligence’ or AI being good at very specific tasks. But we could be moving to a stage where AI might match standard human thought processes. However, human consciousness is also more than logical thinking. We have intuition and emotion and exceptional creativity comes from a much deeper place, where an individual can discern feelings and express these perfectly. That could be hard for AI to match…While heavy automation works for the US, India’s model should focus on AI that makes people more productive.”
