David Brooks: “I sometimes hear people say that you have to love yourself before you can love others. But this is backward. You have to observe yourself loving others before you can see yourself as lovable and before you genuinely are lovable.”
WSJ: “In the past three years, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, $120 billion of venture capital has flowed into the once-neglected defense sector. Silicon Valley has gotten over its woke resistance to the U.S. military. Anduril Industries is leading the way on autonomous warfare; Shield AI is delivering decision-making help to combat pilots and drones; Saronic Technologies is focused on naval warfare. They’re fixing a problem that began during the Cold War, the estrangement of an ever-shrinking defense oligopoly from the fast-moving civilian economy. As recently as the 1980s, Mr. Sankar estimates, 6% of procurement dollars went to companies whose sole business was with the Pentagon. Now it’s 86%. Chrysler once built tanks and missiles. Ford built satellite equipment. General Mills—the cereal company—was in the artillery and guidance-system business. Not anymore. The government became too difficult a customer—too many rules, too little opportunity to scale up. It stopped being open to the kind of innovation and learning that drives the rapidly evolving commercial marketplace.”
Mantic: “Good decision-making is the ultimate meta-skill that lets humanity prosper. However, our decision-making is severely bottlenecked by our prediction capabilities. Imagine if Western governments had proactively allocated the appropriate level of attention and resources to coronavirus pandemics, deterrence of Russian aggression in Ukraine, the rise of generative AI, and supply chains for rare earths. At Mantic, our goal is to solve judgemental forecasting. An example question: Will Iran close the Strait of Hormuz before 2027? To answer this question, the forecaster must understand the state of the world and reason about how things will play out. These are uncertain, so – rather than selecting a single outcome – the forecaster assigns probabilities over the set of possible outcomes. To measure their performance, you must ask the forecaster hundreds of questions, wait to see what happens, and apply a scoring function that penalizes the discrepancy between each prediction and the observed outcome. Human “superforecasters” are the best judgmental forecasters.”
FT: “[Amul’s] co-operative model has propelled it to a 75 per cent market share of the country’s milk market and helped India become the world’s largest milk producer — contributing 25 per cent of global production…Amit Vyas, Amul’s managing director, said the business model, which involves more than 18,000 village co-operative societies, over 3.6mn farmers and a network of more than 1mn retailers, works because “the production, processing and marketing is all owned by the farmers”. Another factor in Amul’s success, according to Vyas, is its procurement system, which secures 35mn litres of milk a day from cows, buffaloes and even camels. Since it was set up in 1946, Amul has bought everything each of its members produces “every day of the year, rain or shine”, he said. “Be it one litre or 500, we’ll buy it and pay it on the day,” he explained.”
