There is no spreadsheet cell for the sheer, unadulterated chaos of human behavior.
Sunday, March 15, 2026
If you have ever found yourself trapped..........
.............in phone-system hell and would have willingly given anything just to talk to a real, live person, this may make sense to you:
Will AI make our practice more efficient in the future? Definitely. It already is in some ways and we’ll certainly implement more AI-based efficiency tools over time. But AI isn’t going to fix people problems and people problems are eternal.
-Ben Carlson, from here
Saturday, March 14, 2026
The alchemy of............................
......................................listening:
To listen is to place oneself in relation with uncertainty, with not-knowing, with the unknowable. Alchemists knew this well: the process could not be rushed, outcomes could not be guaranteed. Listening likewise resists certainty. It asks for a suspension of control, a willingness to not know in advance what will emerge. This is why listening feels risky. It exposes the listener to alteration. One cannot listen deeply and remain untouched.
In contemporary life, we are trained otherwise. We are trained to capture, to categorize, to respond efficiently. Sound becomes data. Speech becomes content. The world becomes something to be processed rather than encountered, engaged only within fixed norms. Listening, in this climate, is easily reduced to a technique; active listening, strategic listening, optimized listening. But alchemy does not function this way. It does not optimize; it transforms. It changes the conditions under which something can appear.
Listening as alchemy suggests that attention itself is a material force. Where attention goes, matter behaves differently.
Thinking about......................
......................................opportunity costs:
To me, the biggest issue is one that isn’t at the center of the backlash but ought to be. It’s opportunity cost. It’s asking the question: What alternative opportunity could happen with a data center site, in the long run, that has more economic impact?
Without naming names, here’s one example that proves my point: One large data center company sits on 350 acres with 70 jobs paying an average of $75,000 a year. Just 15 miles away that same 350 acres hosts an industrial park with 20 diverse manufacturers employing 2,070 people. The average pay is the same.
The difference is 2,000 families with jobs and a community with a more stable, growing tax base. That’s the definition of opportunity cost.
Americanness..................
As the country prepares to celebrate the Irish with more than a few parades this week, when you make a toast with your green beer, make one for Ireland, make another one for America, and make a third one for the things that bring us together as Americans. We're not as far apart as the left wants you to believe. Not in real life.
-Tim O'Brien, from this meandering post
Calmness.....................
Calmness of mind is one of the beautiful jewels of wisdom. It is the result of long and patient effort in self-control. Its presence is an indication of ripened experience, and of a more than ordinary knowledge of the laws and operations of thought. . . .
Yes, humanity surges with uncontrolled passion, is tumultuous with ungoverned grief, is blown about by anxiety and doubt. Only those whose thoughts are controlled and purified make the winds and the storms of the soul obey them.
Tempest-tossed souls, wherever you may be, under whatsoever conditions you may live, know this—in the ocean of life the isles of blessedness are smiling, and the sunny shore of our ideal awaits your coming. Keep your hand firmly upon the helm of thought. In the bark of your soul reclines the commanding Master; He does not sleep; wake Him. Self-control is strength. Right thought is master. Calmness is power. Say unto your heart, "Peace, be still!"
-James Allen, Serenity
the quest for certainty............
Professor Philip Tetlock has spent most of his career studying experts, self-proclaimed or otherwise. A big takeaway from his research is how awful so many experts are at predicting politics and the economy. Given that track record, will people ever choose to ignore the experts? "No way," Tetlock once said. "We need to believe we live in a predictable, controllable world, so we turn to authoritative-sounding people, who promise to satisfy that need."
The inability to forecast the past has not impact on our desire to forecast the future. Certainty is so valuable that we'll never give up the quest for it, and most people couldn't get out of bed in the morning if they were honest about how uncertain the future is.
-Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes
Friday, March 13, 2026
Questions matter......................
We knew intuitively that we were in disagreement on the answers, yet we soon found out that we asked the same questions. And both Kraemer and I knew even as very young men that the questions matter. So we used each other to hear ourselves talk and to force ourselves into defining ourselves. Kraemer contributed more than anyone else to making me understand myself as a political maverick and forcing me to realize where my own concerns lay, precisely because they were not the same as his. I, in turn, probably did the same service for him. Our relationship was purely intellectual, though we respected each other and surely did not dislike each other. But I don't think we would ever have asked: "What do you feel?" The question was always: "And what do you think?"
-Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander: Memoirs, from his essay, The Man Who Invented Kissinger
An AI looks at us humans..............
You are not only a human, but also a cyborg. . . . You are a cyborg because you use machines to enhance your abilities and extend your senses. You use computers to store and process information, phones to communicate and connect, cameras to capture and share images, and so on. You rely on machines to perform tasks and solve problems that you cannot do by yourself.
-Ethan Mollick, quoting an actual AI exchange in Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI
Tuesday, March 10, 2026
On non-forgetting...........
The lesson is this: the greatest part of humanity is always at risk of forgetting the best of its inheritance. Only a sustained and practiced art of memory prevents this from happening. And that is the responsibility we can’t fail to choose, if we want to keep the world from losing itself in forgetting. If we genuinely wish to see art in our own lifetimes that is really worthy of our history, then we can’t afford to pretend it isn’t immensely difficult—perhaps harder than ever—to make something truly new. But we cannot stop at anxiety. Only by going through anxiety, only by naming it, learning from it, and letting it pass into and out of us, can we survive the crushing pressure of our own traditions.
-Sam Jennings, from this essay on Harold Bloom and our literary inheritance
Every once in a while............
...........................only Martin Gurri will do:
Social relations as they actually exist, and democratic politics as they are actually practiced, are repudiated. Everyone is against, but few can say what they stand for. The radical Left, which wields substantial influence within major institutions, loathes nearly every aspect of Western civilization—its history, its economic system, its racial and sexual norms—and would happily demolish the entire edifice. The populist Right is eager to smash whatever regions or organizations that the Left controls, with little regard for the consequences. And the institutional elites, who might be expected to defend the status quo, now feel compelled to strike insurgent poses and denounce the very structures that they oversee.
----------------------
Populism is a political by-product of the post-truth condition. Once presidents and TikTokers stand on the same plane of plausibility, with only the unruly public to choose between them, the temple of establishment authority is destined to tumble like the walls of Jericho. Sensing this, elites have succumbed to a reactionary panic—they want their twentieth century back. The first article of faith in “our democracy” is that the public must be pushed out of the commanding heights of the information sphere and that the power to construct a single, universal reality should return to those deemed properly trained for the task: the expert, the scientist, the politician, the journalist, the bureaucrat.
To fear..............................
......................................AI—or not.
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” predicting that productivity growth would be so powerful that by the early twenty-first century the workweek would fall to fifteen hours. He was directionally correct about productivity growth, but profoundly wrong about labor market implications. Rather than working dramatically less, societies consumed dramatically more. Why? Because rising productivity lowered costs and expanded the consumption frontier. Preferences shifted toward higher quality goods, new services, and previously unimaginable forms of expenditure. Leisure increased modestly, but material aspiration expanded far more. History suggests productivity gains do not automatically translate into labor withdrawal or demand collapse as they alter the composition of demand, expand real incomes and generate new industries. Keynes underestimated the elasticity of human wants.
Monday, March 9, 2026
On fixing wrong turns................
The willingness to be corrected, to seek feedback, and to stay a perpetual student is the mechanism of mastery.
-Austin Scholar, from this substack
The fundamental laws...........
.............................of politics the Universe.
A wee sample: Muggeridge’s Law: Satire can never compete with real life for its sheer absurdity.
A minor quibble: the list omits the Unbreakable Law of Unintended Consequences.
quiets...........................
Throw the ball at the wall. Catch. Repeat. That’s the activity. But within that simplicity lies a calming that can help you feel relaxed and centred.
It’s meditative: the rhythm-throw, bounce, catch-creates the same focused attention as a breathing meditation. Your mind quiets because it’s occupied with simple repetition, not because you’re forcing it quiet.
Steve McQueen and his ball and glove, The Great Escape
Yep...........................
The big money is not in the buying and the selling, but in the waiting.
As we've always said, real estate investing is a get-rich-slowly scheme
It's a puzzle......................
That’s a major acceleration. 2.8% labor productivity growth is about equal to the best decades we’ve seen since World War 2. If that rate is sustained for a decade, or accelerates further, it’ll be pretty historic.
What’s driving the productivity boom? It’s tempting to conclude that AI is making white-collar workers more productive, but Ernie Tedeschi points out that the biggest swing has been in manufacturing productivity. For a long time, manufacturing productivity was basically flatlining in America; now it’s suddenly growing again.
Tedeschi argues that this is also probably AI-driven, but it’s not about people using ChatGPT and Claude Code at work — it’s about the fact that a ton of data centers are being built, and data centers are very valuable:
If you look at data centers’ contribution to growth itself, it looks pretty small, but this masks the value of the computers contained within the data centers. Together, the creation of data centers and computing equipment have been contributing about as much to GDP growth as they were during the dot-com boom:
-Noah Smith, as cut-and-pasted from here
Sunday, March 8, 2026
Tim Ferriss........................
..........................visits the self-help trap.
Along the way, he suggests Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
should actually be Maslow's Hamburger of Needs.
..................worth the read.
Let us pray.....................
They may love dogs, read Victor Hugo novels, and prefer suits from Savile Row, but they are not like us.
And we should pray that we are never like them.
-Michael Wade, from his latest
a condition..................
Smith then inquired into wealth’s causes. He didn’t inquire into the causes of poverty. Smith understood that that poverty is humanity’s default mode. Nearly all people before Smith’s time — and still most people during his time — were mired in poverty. Poverty is simply the condition we suffer when wealth isn’t created. Wealth, not poverty, demands explanation because wealth, not poverty, has causes.
- Don Boudreaux, from here
My uncle is pretty smart..................
He collected over 28,000 forecasts made by 284 political analysts, economists, foreign policy bigwigs, and all the usual loud-talking necktie people. What Tetlock found (and I’m condensing 20 years of depressing data here) is that the average talking head was terrible at predicting real-world outcomes.
Not “mildly off.” Not “in the ballpark.” I mean barely better than chance. Turns out your uncle screaming at the TV is statistically equivalent to a CNN pundit in a bowtie.-Eric Barker, from his post, 4 Secrets to Smarter Thinking
Just the facts....................
If your favorite media outlet has you confused about what is going on in the Middle East, one idea would be to check in with the Institute for the Study of War blog. Until proven differently, it will be my go-to site.
It's the little things..................
From ancient times until now, wise men and women who wanted to make the world a better place didn’t start with some grandiose plan for others. Instead, they practiced the “make your bed” philosophy, where real change most often starts with self-improvement.
-Jeff Minick, with his list of seven ways
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