David Brooks: “A core challenge in life is how do you motivate people to do things — to vote in a certain way, to take a certain kind of action. Good leaders motivate people through what you might call the bright passions — hope, aspiration, an inspiring vision of a better life. But these days, and maybe through all days, leaders across the political spectrum have found that dark passions are much easier to arouse. Evolution has wired us to be extremely sensitive to threat, which psychologists call negativity bias.”
FT: ” In his new book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . ., Pinker explores “common knowledge” — a concept deriving from game theory that describes the state in which not only does everyone know something, but everyone knows that everyone else knows it, and everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows. And so on. This idea, Pinker argues, “illuminates many enigmas of our public affairs and personal lives” and constitutes “a keystone in understanding the social world”.”
NYTimes: “Almost 20 years in the making, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” by Kiran Desai, is not so much a novel as a marvel. In an era of hot takes and chilly optimized productivity, here is sweet validation of the idea that to create something truly transcendent — a work of art depicting love, family, nature and culture in all their fullness — might take time…Crowded but never claustrophobic, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” is among those most rarefied books: better company than real-life people. Feel the tingle.”
Colossus: “Fortunes are made by entrepreneurs and investors when revolutionary technologies enable waves of innovative, investable companies. Think of the railroad, the Bessemer process, electric power, the internal combustion engine, or the microprocessor—each of which, like a stray spark in a fireworks factory, set off decades of follow-on innovations, permeated every part of society, and catapulted a new set of inventors and investors into power, influence, and wealth. Yet some technological innovations, though societally transformative, generate little in the way of new wealth; instead, they reinforce the status quo. Fifteen years before the microprocessor, another revolutionary idea, shipping containerization, arrived at a less propitious time, when technological advancement was a Red Queen’s race, and inventors and investors were left no better off for non-stop running. Anyone who invests in the new new thing must answer two questions: First, how much value will this innovation create? And second, who will capture it?…The way to invest in AI is to think through the implications of knowledge workers becoming more efficient, to imagine what markets this efficiency unlocks, and to invest in those. For decades, the way to make money was to bet on what the new thing was. Now, you have to bet on the opportunities it opens up.”
