The Diff - Longreads + Open Thread

Longreads

• Rohit Krishnan wonders why utopian communities got popular in the 19th century and then less common after. There are older examples, also in bursts; the Essenes and the early Christian community described in Acts fits the model, and there was another burst in the 1960s and early 70s (the Manson Family, Jim Jones' People's Temple, and presumably some less violent groups). But there does seem to be a lot more of this in the 19th century. One possibility Krishnan talks about is that the idea of radically improving humanity was very much in the air at the time—and a useful addition to that is that there weren't many big, established ideas that monopolized it. You could view the success of big ideologies in the twentieth century as an inoculation against wilder early ones—when the space of ideas is open, they're selected for virality, but as things mature they're selected for sustainability instead.
• Here's a fun collaborative piece in the O'Reilly blog on using LLMs in production. A non-deterministic process will have lots of trial and error, and, moreover, there will be trial and error in determining how much error-detection is worthwhile. One of the most useful heuristics they have is "the intern test": are you asking the LLM to do something that you'd expect an intern to do reliably without further instruction?
• Giuseppe Paleologo on his summer as an intern at Enron, a year before its collapse. When a company falls apart in a scandalous way, people like to ask who knew what and when. But this piece raises another question: who assumed what, and when? As he describes it, everyone in the money-losing parts of Enron knew they were losing money, but apparently assumed that some other part of the business was doing fine. (And the natural gas and electricity trading businesses did print money sometimes—overall, Enron was hiding losses, but in some cases in that business they were hiding profits instead.) Perhaps the lesson here is that if people are certain about the problems and vague about solutions, there's a good chance the institution's problems are bigger than anyone recognizes.
• Tyler Cowen talks to Michael Nielsen about aesthetics, progress, memorization, and more. Among other things, this piece has some great thoughts on age and accomplishment: newer fields are dominated by younger people not just because there's a lower barrier to entry (if we know less about a topic, there's less to learn before you're at the frontier of knowledge) but also because older researchers have a sunk cost. Later on, he adds: "The problem in some ways in physics has been that the fundamental theories have been just too successful for the last 50 years. Yes, you're right again, it’s very attractive for a few years, but over 50 or 60 years, it's terrible"—the Innovator's Dilemma strikes again. Still later, he offers a partial solution: older researchers should try to have younger mentors. That works best if they're ignoring the sunk cost problem above and habitually diving into new fields, a habit which contributes to long-term productivity on its own.
• Evan Osnos on the largest ponzi scheme in Hollywood history. This raises two variants on the same question: if Hollywood business is so opaque, and if the culture is so fake-it-'til-you-make it, why aren't there many more such schemes? Or is this just the biggest one to get caught? The trouble with that model is that ponzi schemers have a low cost of capital initially and an infinite cost of capital once they get caught; in this case, it was a pure scheme with no underlying business activity, but in cases where there's a partial ponzi—someone paying 200% of their profits to investors so they can raise 3x more next time, repeating until they run out of investors—you'd expect it to be hard for anyone to make money legitimately there.
• In this week's Capital Gains, we look at the economics of extremely long workweeks, particularly for industries that treat them as a mandatory rite of passage for new entrants. The downsides to this approach are obvious, sometimes tragically so, but there's a reason it's the equilibrium.
• On this week's episode of The Riff, we discussed Buzzfeed and Vivek Ramaswamy, why xAI could raise so much, and why customer-facing AI will be monetized mostly with ads. Listen with Twitter/Spotify/Apple/YouTube.

Books

One delightful subgenres is very nerdy people reverse-engineering conventional behaviors. There are just a lot of people out there who broaden their horizons until those horizons can encompass living in the suburbs and driving a minivan, or who conclude that in light of game theory and Darwinian evolution, grandma made some very good points about the nature of the good life. Another entry in this is Why Honor Matters, a philosophy professor's full-throated defense of the concept of honor and prudently spotty defense of all that it entails.

A lot of the energy from this argument arises from the Chestertonian observation that many cultures believe in honor as a concept, and they presumably outcompeted the ones that didn't. Honor works especially in places where law enforcement is uncertain and where property is mobile: it's hard to steal a farm but relatively easier to steal a cow, or a herd of them, so modern groups descended from agrarian ones tend to use dignity culture rather than honor culture, i.e. if there's a personal dispute, it gets settled by an impartial authority figure rather than a one-on-one or clan-on-clan dispute. If that dispute doesn't happen to violate specific rules, it doesn't get resolved. (Or, in practice, someone finds a way to turn an honor culture-style problem, i.e. that they've been personally insulted, into a legal dispute.)

There is a lot to be said for dignity culture. For one thing, it's led to both richer and safer countries; call the cops on your neighbor for playing loud music, and the odds that this will lead to a multi-generational blood feud are pretty low. We don't have to personally enforce every single behavioral norm. And if we let something slide, it doesn't permanently impair our expectation for future fair treatment. But honor culture resonates with people in a way that dignity culture doesn't. A story about honor is a story with a protagonist, even if the plot is sometimes pretty stupid, while a story about dignity culture is ultimately about being beholden to powerful abstract forces. The John Wick franchise would be less popular if it followed Keanu Reeves through the arduous process of taking Russian mobsters to small claims court to get back the cost of his dog plus $5k for emotional distress. And the completely unfair sense in which honor culture forces people to atone for problems that are not of their doing also means that it binds people to their past and the context in which they were born, while dignity culture separates them from it. The latter is, again, a much more straightforward way to organize society, but it does leave something behind.

This book explained some other features of honor culture. One thing I'd wondered about it was: even if everyone's more willing to fight, why do they end up in situations that call for violence so often? But there's a good theory for this: if you exist in such a culture, you want to constantly evaluate members of your ingroup to see if they'd have your back in a fight, while you'd constantly probe members of the outgroup to see if they're vulnerable. So an honor culture will have more trash-talking and more antagonizing strangers—it's the only way for participants to situate themselves in the hierarchy.

Honor cultures are vulnerable to aggressive bullies. Dignity cultures are vulnerable to passive-aggressive bullies. A sociopath who has memorized the rulebook can get away with a lot of unethical behavior that nominally follows the rules, and many of them seem to delight in doing such things. D&D players call this "Munchkining," and they frown on it. Like Jonathan Haidt, this book is defending a set of rules partly on the grounds that, deep down, we still believe in them, and ought to preach more of what we practice.

Open Thread

• Drop in any links or comments of interest to Diff readers.

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