Anna Gát: What to Read This Week #62
Founder mode. AI, wokes, hostages, God, fun, taxes, theatre. Claire Lehmann on my podcast The Hope Axis. I talked to Reason Magazine about discourse and hope. A good week!
What to read this long weekend, you ask? Good things abound! Before we dive in, let’s start with some excellent Interintellect events coming up that you might be interested in:
Julia Sonnevend, her book Charm, and authoritarian populism (tickets)
- , his book We Have Never Been Woke, and social justice (tickets)
Agnes Callard, Irina Dumitrescu and myself on the philosophy of mentors and lovers (tickets)
- , Nadya Williams, on Cultural Christianity (tickets)
- and (one-off and the whole series)
Online Single Mingle! (tickets)
- on utopian world-building (tickets)
Austin offline social (tickets)
Get your membership here ✨
In podcast news, the great
, founding editor of Quillette and one of the most fair-minded thinkers on free thought and Classical Liberalism came on my new series, The Hope Axis. We talked about the importance of a balanced media, free and factual inquiry, cancel culture and public intellectuals, polemic and sincerity, how technology solves social problems, why... Listen to the audio on Spotify. Subscribe to my Youtube channel here. Watch the video below:I also went on a podcast myself, namely
’s on Reason. We talked about and The Hope Axis, intellectual orphans and the politically hopeless, and why Millennials need to get out of the pessimism trap:And now let’s read!
Will AI Change Art History Forever?
Some eight months after Brooke and Ugail’s announcement, a Swiss AI company called Art Recognition used its own model to determine, with 85 percent certainty, that the de Brécy Tondo was not made by the Renaissance master. In an op-ed, Art Recognition’s founder, Carina Popovici, defended her company’s findings, pointing to the many art historians on her staff and the sophistication of her model, which was trained on images of real and forged Raphael paintings. Notably, she stopped short of discrediting Brooke and Ugail.
Taylor Dafoe; ARTnews
Founder Mode
One theme I noticed both in Brian's talk and when talking to founders afterward was the idea of being gaslit. Founders feel like they're being gaslit from both sides — by the people telling them they have to run their companies like managers, and by the people working for them when they do. Usually when everyone around you disagrees with you, your default assumption should be that you're mistaken. But this is one of the rare exceptions. VCs who haven't been founders themselves don't know how founders should run companies, and C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world. Whatever founder mode consists of, it's pretty clear that it's going to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company only via his or her direct reports. "Skip-level" meetings will become the norm instead of a practice so unusual that there's a name for it. And once you abandon that constraint there are a huge number of permutations to choose from.
Paul Graham
The Asteroid-in-Spring Hypothesis: Two paleontologists have turned on each other, each claiming to have found new evidence about the worst day on Earth
After the asteroid, surviving birds would carry on the genetic legacy of giant reptiles and the continent would enter the strange age of mammals. There would be a superfast 12-foot-tall bear and a muscular, strong-jawed giant pig. There would be a dog-size horse and beavers six feet long. Camels would evolve right here on the plains, and American lions bigger than African ones. The species that took it upon itself to figure it all out, to make a story of the past, would largely overlook these creatures in favor of T. rex and triceratops. The species would construct elaborate rules that govern who may and may not tread on particular pieces of land. It would evolve a complex economy of prestige to accompany the discovery of truths about all that had come before — a shadowy interplay of gatekeeping, mentorship, and recognition. There would be reason for everyone, on every side of a small discovery of a single fact, to feel overlooked and underappreciated, awake to the vastness of time and vulnerable to the smallest slight.
Kerry Howley; New York Magazine
Measuring the Black Death
Finally, the plague itself disrupted historical record-keeping, taxation, and burials, and caused demographic shifts, which affected records from the time. Given such limitations, how can we accurately estimate the Black Death’s toll?
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PJ Harvey’s songs of England
Harvey’s is a very English shadowland, a place where a young girl wanders through “beech and aller, woak and birch” trees – beech, elder, oak and birch – on Maundy day, where we are instructed to worship nature above all: “Hail the hedge as it grows/Ask the hedge all it knows.”
Ellen Peirson-Hagger; New Statesman
Secular Stagnation
To view religion as primarily social—as something that comes alive when it is done in the company of others or that springs from the knowledge that one is doing the same thing that others are doing—allows a shift away from a preoccupation with the interiority of individual belief… It takes a leap of faith for people to believe in the unseen in a world that tells them that everything must be “rational.” To be Christian, one must presumably believe in Christ. To be Muslim, one must—again, presumably—believe in the divinity of the Koran and the prophethood of Muhammad.
Shadi Hamid; Foreign Affairs
Israel recovers bodies of six Gaza hostages
The IDF named the hostages as Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi and Master Sgt Ori Danino. Spokesman Rear Adm Daniel Hagari said an initial assessment was they were "brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists shortly before we reached them".
Jaroslav Lukiv & Adam Durbin; BBC
Perplexing the Web, One Probability Puzzle at a Time
[Daniel Litt’s] posts have prompted lively online discussions among research mathematicians, computer scientists and economists — as well as philosophers, financiers, sports analysts and anonymous fans. Some joked(opens a new tab) that the puzzles were distracting them from their real work — “actively slowing down economic research,” as one economist put it(opens a new tab). Others(opens a new tab) have(opens a new tab) posted(opens a new tab) papers(opens a new tab) exploring the puzzles’ mathematical ramifications.
Erica Klarreich; Quanta
A summer defined by men killing women and girls. This can’t go on
When I read the Guardian’s report on the 50 women allegedly killed by men in the UK so far this year, I was struck not only by the devastation of lives cut short but by how few of them I had heard about before. These women met brutal ends, and most barely got a few paragraphs on their local paper’s website. In an age of breaking news banners, stories are more sensationalised yet we are more able to scroll by – a dead woman’s face next to the popup ads for online casinos.
Frances Ryan; The Guardian
Why Open Source is So Hard to Defend
It's everywhere, an invisible bedrock beneath our entire digital ecosystem, underpinning all the applications we take for granted every day. It seems impossible that something that important would be under attack. But that's exactly what's happening right now. Or rather, it's happening again. It's not the first time.
Succumbing to Spectacle
Although it’s difficult to know what museumgoers are thinking, my impression when I visited the Guggenheim on a weekday afternoon was that they weren’t having it. People looked nonplussed as they wandered up and down the ramp, reading combinations of words ranging from the romantic or erotic (“I WAIT FOR YOU,” “I TICKLE YOU”) to the political (“PEOPLE WHO DON’T WORK WITH THEIR HANDS ARE PARASITES”). Aside from the verbiage, there’s nothing much to engage you.
Jed Pearl; The New York Review
Elbow Room
Americans have one of life’s finest luxuries in our protected and ample open spaces. Our cities are bustling economic hubs of opportunity, but unlike in many other countries American has an incredible heritage of publicly owned wilderness.
Julie Fredrickson
Comic of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot
Julian Peters (the artist); Poetry Foundation
What School Didn’t Teach Us: You Need to Lose Control
This fact may be held up as evidence that the species is evolving: Behold the Zoomers in their glorious sobriety, so much smarter, healthier, and more sensible than the sloppy, barfing generations that preceded them! But scratch the surface of Gen Z’s sobriety, and what you find isn’t wisdom so much as fear—of vulnerability, of failure, of being out of control. This is a generation that is both highly conflict-averse and virtually allergic to risk, particularly when it comes to markers of autonomous adulthood like driving, working, or sex.
; The Free Press
Taxing unrealized capital gains is a terrible idea
In a world with reasonable capital markets, the best way to protect the liquidity of the wealthy is to maintain or boost their net wealth.
Tyler Cowen
‘My Brilliant Friend’ Trailer: The Fourth and Final Season of Elena Ferrante’s Saga Returns to Naples
The first episodes find Lenù and Lila reunited after years apart, and everyone once again telling Lenù that Nino, whom Lila also had an affair with years prior, is very bad news.
Ryan Lattanzio; IndieWire
The Firebird's Nest (1997)
The combustibility of women is a source of resigned wonder to the men.
Salman Rushdie (fiction); The New Yorker
Max Wolf Friedlich’s Tech-Bro Friendly ‘Theater for the Boys’
But [‘Job’ playwright Max Wolf Friedlich is] not, he insists, trying to moralize about big tech. “I really don’t think in the digital age that theater has the power to, like, change hearts and minds,” he says. “What’s more interesting to me is the base act of getting a bunch of people together.”
Brock Colyar; Vulture
Alex Karp Has Money and Power. So What Does He Want?
“I think a lot of the issues come back to ‘Are we in a dangerous world where you have to invest in these things?’” Mr. Karp told me, as he moved around his living room in a tai chi rhythm, wearing his house shoes, jeans and a tight white T-shirt. “And I come down to yes. All these technologies are dangerous.” He adds: “The only solution to stop A.I. abuse is to use A.I.”
Maureen Dowd; The New York Times