BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-09-17 Su

Isaacson as a Muskrat courtier; Florence + þe Machine; university website designers; very briefly noted; Drezner on interdependence, Yglesias on nice politicians, Mollick on uses of GPT-LLM-ML...

Isaacson as a Muskrat courtier; Florence + þe Machine; university website designers; very briefly noted; Drezner on interdependence, Yglesias on nice politicians, Mollick on uses of GPT-LLM-ML, Lloyd & Lambert & Freedmans on Tories, & Marano on þe need to keep lying liars inside þe discourse tent; & me &Heer on Peretz, Noah & Me on Hexapodia on no Schmittposting, three people looking to þeir left wiþ exasperation, soft inflation landing in progress, & me briefly noting…

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MUST-READ: Nobody Seems to Think Walter Isaacson’s Biography of Elon Musk Is on the Level:

Which means it is not worth reading—but people like Lepore and Swisher trashing it are, at least for the half-laugh half-winces:

Eric Rauchway: ‘Jill Lepore: How Elon Musk Went from Superhero to Supervillian: “Isaacson calls [Musk’s grandfather’s] politics ‘quirky.’ In 1960, [the grandfather] self-published a tract, ‘The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship & the Menace to South Africa,’ that blamed the two World Wars on the machinations of Jewish financiers”…

Kara Swisher: ‘I laughed out loud, because this review from The Guardian was really funny. Such as: “To go from Einstein to Musk in only five volumes is surely an indication that humanity isn’t sending Isaacson its best”…

Candice Ortiz: ‘Idolatry’: Swisher and Galloway Slam New Elon Musk Bio For Not Taking Hard Stance Against Subject…

I have not yet gotten around to <https://overcast.fm/+7_XRoaFL0>.

And yet, and yet: Elon Musk's entrepreneurial pushing forward of Tesla and his giving Tesla engineers a huge number of shots-on-goal has been very valuable for humanity. Perhaps the same thing could be said of SpaceX. But the rest of musks interventions have been dumpster fires of huge magnitude. Is the lesson that in the 2010s it was mobilizing resources to take more shots-on-goal—even very badly set-up ones—was our principal lack?

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ONE VIDEO: Florence + Þe Machine: Silver Springs:

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ONE IMAGE: University Websites:

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Very Briefly Noted:

1. Economics: Tim Duy: ‘I think the Fed is too pessimistic on growth and too optimistic on inflation… [thus] another rate hike, but even if the data supports that view, the Fed won’t come around to my position until later…

2. Chris Anstey: Sticking the Landing…

3. NIMBYism: John Burn-Murdoch: Repeat after me: building any new homes reduces housing costs for all: ‘Building unsubsidised housing pushes down rents and prices while freeing up cheaper properties…

4. Noah Smith: ‘Once you realize that the animating drive of all NIMBYism… is to be able to live in perpetually-appreciating single-family homes with no poor people nearby, everything they say becomes instantly comprehensible…

5. Tech: John Gruber: Thoughts and Observations on This Week’s ‘Wonderlust’ Apple Event: ‘The A17 Pro is the de facto launch of TSMC’s next-generation 3nm fabrication. Informed speculation suggests that Apple has secured 90-95 percent of TSMC’s 3nm output for the next year, and it sounds like TSMC’s production might not be able to keep up with iPhone 15 Pro demand…. So… don’t expect to see M3 Macs or iPads this year, and perhaps not until midway through next...

6. Neofascism: Scott Lemieux: Failed presidential candidate wants more of his constituents to die: ‘Remember when a lot of media people—and not just at Republican shill outlets—used to pretend that DeSantis’s stance on vaccines was some kind of incredibly nuanced mystery? Jesus that was stupid. It remains very telling that the one attack on Trump elite Republican are willing to make target the only good thing accomplished by his administration…

7. Martin Sandbu: Did the dictatorship “at least” fix the economy? The first answer is that the question really ought not to be asked…. [But, second] facts… undermine the simplistic story that the free-market purism of Pinochet’s “Chicago boys”… led to outstanding economic achievements…

NOTES & Substack Posts:

While interdependence can and, right now, is being weaponized, so can many other things. And you know what can really be weaponized? Actual weapons. War-war is worse than jaw-jaw, and jaw-jaw is worse than trade-trade. As long as the weaponized-interdependence pain points are evenly distributed, interdependence not only makes us all much richer but also greatly lowers the net incentives for war-war. And the fact that Norman Angell’s predictions that governments would be smart enough to realize that were wrong does not mean that governments should not be smart enough to realize that:

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I think Matt is 100% right here. A Trump who was semi-competent and not a greedy asshole would have been very popular indeed. A Romney who had run for President as he ran for Governor of Massachusetts would have been unstoppable. “He fights—and that’s good” is the wrong lesson that even the Hater majority of right-wing activists and influencers should draw from Trump, at least it would be if they were interested in anything other than being haters:

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My vision of the GPT – LLM – ML future is still profoundly cloudy. It is not at all clear to me who these tools are going to be good for and how. And it is especially not clear to me how these tools can be usefully mapped onto my mental universe in such a way as to complement, rather than confuse my own varied and uneven intellectual capabilities. “finding out facts that Google search will not easily yield up to me" appears to be a particularly bad thing to attempt to do with GPT – LLM – ML, at least in its current form. And yet that, rather than banging out a serviceable first draft paragraph or coming up with a large number of bad ideas, seems to be what would be useful to me:

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Tories: we wrecked the place because we were too stupid to know how to do our jobs:

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I read Marano, and what I got out of it was this: "The American Political Science Association badly needs to have the Claremont Institute inside the tent. The Claremont Institute supports the idea of making false claims about history and politics in order to back attempts to overthrow the government of the United States by fraud and force."

I must admit I do not find this compelling. People who make false claims by accident out of enthusiasm as they try to figure out what is going on—we should welcome them, and argue with them, for they are convinceable by evidence, at least in theory. People who make false claims by design in order to overthrow democracy—it seems to me that elementary quality control suggests that they would be best filtered out.

Is there an example of a conservative position that does not involve making claims about history a and politics that are false by design that you can point to—one that should be inside, but is currently outside the pale?

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