Atanu Dey: “Economists have understood for a couple of centuries the secret to our extraordinary success. We call it division of labor and specialization. As the stock of knowledge has grown, humans are forced to specialize. One is not just a physicist; one is a theoretical condensed matter physicist. One is not just a surgeon but one who specializes in cardiac surgery. There’s too much to learn for one person to know any particular domain of knowledge…We cannot be generalists any more than a person can be both a champion sumo wrestler and a champion tennis player. Trying to gain world-class proficiency in any domain requires a lifetime of effort and therefore rules out the possibility of excelling in other domains. The future of humanity and human prosperity depends on specialization. Without division of labor and specialization, we would be condemned to eke out an existence in a very primitive, subsistence economy.”
2023 Enterprise Tech 30. One of the trends: “PLG dominates (again).The product-led growth model’s steady takeover continued this year. 75% (30 of 40) of 2023 ET30 companies employ a significant product-led growth model, and the trend has marched steadily upward since 2019.”
WSJ: “As warnings about the menace to human existence get louder, and calls for action on a global scale more urgent, it seems increasingly likely that whatever else it may be, the AI menace, like every other supposed extinction-level threat man has faced in the past century or so, will prove a wonderful opportunity for the big-bureaucracy, global-government, all-knowing-regulator crowd to demand more authority over our freedoms, to transfer more sovereignty from individuals and nations to supranational experts and technocrats. If I were cynical I’d speculate that these threats are, if not manufactured, at least hyped precisely so that the world can be made to fit with the technocratic mindset of those who believe they should rule over us, lest the ignorant whims of people acting without supervision destroy the planet. Nuclear weapons, climate change, pandemics, and now AI—the remedies are always, strikingly, the same: more government; more control over free markets and private decisions, more borderless bureaucracy.”
Andy Kessler on climate change: “What if the entire premise is wrong? What if the Earth is self-healing? Before you hurl the “climate denier” invective at me, let’s think this through. Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years—living organisms for 3.7 billion. Surely, an enlightened engineer might think, the planet’s creator built in a mechanism to regulate heat, or we wouldn’t still be here to worry about it. The theory of climate change is that excess carbon dioxide and methane trap the sun’s radiation in the atmosphere, and these man-made greenhouse gases reflect more of that heat back to Earth, warming the planet. Pretty simple. Eventually, we reach a tipping point when positive feedback loops form—less ice to reflect sunlight, warm oceans that can no longer absorb carbon dioxide—and then we fry, existentially. So lose those gas stoves and carbon-spewing Suburbans. But nothing is simple. What about negative feedback loops? Examples: human sweat and its cooling condensation or our irises dilating or constricting based on the amount of light coming in. Clouds, which can block the sun or trap its radiation, are rarely mentioned in climate talk.”
N. S. Lyons: “The emerging Gulf State model is a liberal system that is authoritarian but not totalitarian (that is, the state is not interested in intruding into and micromanaging absolutely every aspect of private life or trying to manipulate thought and collective reality by enforcing wholesale vocal conformity to an ideology or other shifting edifice of lies). You can’t oppose the government, but otherwise you can pretty much do what you want.” [via Arnold Kling]
