HT has a history of charts. “For the general public, charts encapsulate important takeaways, without forcing them to navigate underlying complexity and nitty-gritty. But just as a map is not the territory, a chart is not the full story. It’s a point from which a deep dive may begin.”
The Atlantic: “The internet is changing, and nobody outside these corporations has any say in it. And the biggest, most useful, and most frightening change may come from AI search engines working flawlessly. With AI, the goal is to keep you in one tech company’s ecosystem—to keep you using the AI interface, and getting the information that the AI deems relevant and necessary. The best searches are goal-oriented; the best responses are brief. Which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising coming from Silicon Valley behemoths that care, above all, about optimizing their businesses, products, and users’ lives. A little, or even a lot, of inefficiency in search has long been the norm; AI will snuff it out. Our lives will be more convenient and streamlined, but perhaps a bit less wonderful and wonder-filled, a bit less illuminated. A process once geared toward exploration will shift to extraction. Less meandering, more hunting. No more unknown unknowns. If these companies really have their way, no more hyperlinks—and thus, no actual web.”
Alberto Mingardi: “If technology and communication magnify our cognitive limits, then the case for limited government is stronger than ever. Limited government means it is not only the voters’ cognitive abilities that are limited, but their governors too. It is an exercise in building trust through rules.” [via Arnold Kling]
TIME: The 200 Best Inventions of 2024
Vitalik: “Prediction markets are about betting on elections, and betting on elections is gambling – nice if it helps people enjoy themselves, but fundamentally not more interesting than buying random coins on pump.fun. From this perspective, my interest in prediction markets may seem confusing. And so in this post I aim to explain what it is about the concept that excites me. In short, I believe that (i) prediction markets even as they exist today are a very useful tool for the world, but furthermore (ii) prediction markets are only one example of a much larger incredibly powerful category, with potential to create better implementations of social media, science, news, governance, and other fields. I shall label this category “info finance”.”
