Janan Ganesh: “No other major democracy in the world is anything like as consistently deadlocked. Nor was the US itself in the last century. Its mutation into a 50-50 country (or really a 30-30-40 one, as four in 10 voters often abstain) has been a civic disaster. Why? Because there is no incentive to moderate. If you are guaranteed to be competitive in every national election, even if you nominate a twice-impeached felon, why mend your ways? A major party in 21st-century America is never truly out of power. It will tend to have a chamber of Congress, 20-plus governorships and a good chance of the White House next time, almost regardless of its candidate. Throw in a vast and lucrative media ecosystem, which affords politicos a nice life outside office, and there exists little express reason to behave well. When the state underwrites a financial institution, we fret about “moral hazard”. Here the electorate is the backstop and the parties are the banks.”
Anurag Wadehra: “AI is transforming industries across the board, but merely adopting AI doesn’t automatically set you apart from competitors. In fact, AI will soon become a baseline capability for many businesses. The companies that thrive will be those that can position themselves effectively by showcasing how their AI solutions deliver unique, tangible value. For example, in industries like SaaS, AI-driven features such as predictive analytics or workflow automation are becoming common. To differentiate, your positioning needs to focus on what specific problems your AI solves and how it creates value in a way that competitors can’t replicate.”
Ismar Volic: “Ranked choice collects more information, so math can do more with it. If nobody has won more than 50 percent of the vote, you eliminate the person with the least number of first-place votes — and the votes for that person are transferred down the ballot to the next candidate. This is like saying to the voter, Look, your top choice didn’t make it, but who would you like to give your vote to now, knowing that your person is out? So your ballot still contributes. In this iterative process, math can do a much better job of understanding the collective preferences of the voters. Showing the improvement with a different method is powerful and disarming precisely because it is steeped in logic and reason.”
Steve Huffman: “Reddit is communities and conversation, and we have communities for literally anything that you’re into or going through. So if you have questions, there’s just a high likelihood that Reddit, where people have been talking about everything for almost two decades, has an answer or perspectives on whatever it is. Whether you’re 17 or 70, a nerd or a normie, a man or a woman or anything in between, Reddit has a home for you. I think that’s unique on the Internet…The source of artificial intelligence is actual intelligence, which is what you find on Reddit. And indeed, the Reddit corpus is a significant part of the training of the major foundation models. I think your observation is true, that it does seem like there’s a general lowering of quality on the internet because more content is written by AI. But I think that actually makes Reddit stand out more as the place where there’s all of this human content. What people want is to hear from other people.”
Vinod Khosla: ” I call any technology as important if it’ll eventually get to the Chi-India price, where it will be adapted in India or China, irrespective of climate or not. Solar has reached that and India is deploying solar very heavily, and that’s a great thing. But could India afford technologies today that cost more than their fossil competitors or afford to subsidize them? No. And I do think the West, and West won’t transfer billions of dollars or hundreds of billions of dollars a year to the developing world, but they can get technologies going in their own countries and win the manufacturing battles so they get benefit from these new climate technologies when they get to unsubsidized competitiveness and then deploy them all over the world.”
