WSJ: “When Brandon Mancine was in his 20s, he competed in an amateur boxing competition. That’s where he learned how to block out all distractions and focus on his goal. Walking into the ring after months of training, he was hit by an assault of noise: The “Rocky” theme song blasted and the crowd roared. His friends and family cheered. And his opponent’s fans yelled obscenities at him. He ignored it all, stayed focused on his goal–and won the fight. Afterwards, when a local reporter asked him what it felt like to enter the ring, he replied: “You can’t allow yourself to hear the noise. You have to go in with a purpose.””
Mint: “At an individual level, Indians remain behind. Per capita GDP—the real deal—is estimated at $2,818 for 2025-26, and puts India among the 50 poorest countries. The climb up the individual prosperity ladder is steeper than what national-level figures suggest. “Faster (growth) for longer is the only mantra left,” said N.R. Bhanumurthy, director of Madras School of Economics. India’s greatest asset is its crucial demographic dividend window, the stage when, by one definition, the working-age population exceeds two-thirds of the total. India entered this phase in 2019 and will be there until the early 2050s. It’s during this window that several countries made the greatest progress, so the urgency to make it count is also growing stronger for India. The red flag is that Indian youth have yet to reach their full potential; many of the most educated ones are unemployed. This largely speaks to the mismatch between skills and available high-value roles in the labour market.”
Zhengdong Wang: “In Zeynep’s Law, second-order effects are dwarfed by the first-order ones in magnitude until there is substantial and repeated evidence otherwise. I’ve done my best to give substantial and repeated evidence that AI will be a big deal. But there is far to go in making that concrete. So far, second-order thinking about AI has mostly been done by AI people venturing far afield. It needs development from experts in politics, economics, and culture who take it seriously. This is what thinking it through looks like.”
Noah Smith: ““Social media” is shifting toward a combination of A) passive television-like consumption, and B) private conversations in DM groups, private messages, and small-group forums like Discord. The trend where people post things for everyone else to see, and then other people criticize them for what they post, may have been a transient, self-limiting, unhealthy fad…The main dating apps have lost tens of millions of monthly active users since 2022. And surveys suggest that young people, in particular, are abandoning the apps in favor of more real-world connections…This might be another example of how a new technology created temporary disruptions, but over time, people learned how to use it responsibly.” [via Arnold Kling]
