NYTimes: “The transition from war to peace was once thought to proceed according to a series of predictable steps: After one side triumphed over the other — or when both sides were too exhausted to keep fighting — soldiers laid down their arms, diplomats negotiated peace treaties and heads of state proclaimed the end of conflict. In his 1758 work “The Law of Nations,” the philosopher Emmer de Vattel argued that “the effect of the treaty of peace is to put an end to the war, and to abolish the subject of it.” After a treaty was signed, he wrote, its adherents could not “lawfully take up arms again for the same subject.” Any future hostilities could be initiated only over a new and different cause. Today, however, peace processes rarely make it past the first stage, leaving the political disputes that ignited war in the first place largely unresolved. When a cease-fire is broken, another soon follows, until that one is violated in turn.”
FT: “Venture capital firms are using machine learning to replicate early-stage due diligence at scale. Why can’t asset managers encode star portfolio managers into models and rebuild their alpha factories? Passive investing redefined the industry by proving that cost and scale could outperform complexity and conviction. Now, machine learning offers active managers a similar opportunity: to rebuild their value proposition around systematic, scalable and lower-cost alpha. What if the most valuable alpha of the future doesn’t come from a star portfolio manager, but from the adaptive model they trained?”
WSJ: “The traditional picture of the big bang is actually two separate ideas, explain Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper in “Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins.” Researchers continue to endorse the hot big bang, the idea of a primordial explosion of energy, but most do not think it goes back to “a state of infinite density where time stands still and the answers to all our origin questions meet their demise.”…The traditional picture of the big bang is actually two separate ideas, explain Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper in “Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins.” Researchers continue to endorse the hot big bang, the idea of a primordial explosion of energy, but most do not think it goes back to “a state of infinite density where time stands still and the answers to all our origin questions meet their demise.””
David Brooks: “Let’s be clear about what’s happened here: greed. Americans have become so obsessed with economic success that we’ve neglected the social and moral conditions that undergird human flourishing. Schools spend more time teaching professional knowledge than they do social and spiritual knowledge. The prevailing values worship individual choice and undermine the core commitments that precede choice — our love for family, neighborhood, nation and the truth. There’s a lot of cultural work to do.”
