Central Park is great, but it takes up a lot of space and isn’t utilized to its full potential.
— Nick Lindquist (@nick_lindquist) May 15, 2026
That’s why I worked with McKinsey on a plan to make it a state of the art data center, complemented by rooftop parking and nuclear power.
We can still build beautiful things. pic.twitter.com/MemRKeVMsK
Saturday, May 16, 2026
Homo economicus on steroids
Trump's accidental triumph in Beijing
That’s the title of the latest edition of Robert Wright’s NonZero Newsletter on Substack. Rather than summarizing and paraphrasing I’m going to reproduce most, but not all, of it in full below the asterisks. In particular, I’m omitting the very end, which is a series of charts showing bipartisan anxiety for AI. I share that anxiety. The title of one of recent columns at 3 Quarks Daily gives you my attitude: The Paradox of Contemporary AI: Engineering Success and Institutional Failure. The anxiety in Wright’s charts is one reflection of that institutional failure.
* * * * *
On Thursday the White House issued a social media post that said simply, “American strength back on the world stage.” You might expect such a post to be accompanied by military imagery—maybe an impressive-looking array of soldiers. And this one was. But the soldiers weren’t American. Smartly clad People’s Liberation Army troops, part of the pageantry that had greeted Trump in Beijing, were featured in the opening montage of a video that then showed Trump shaking hands with President Xi Jinping and ended with the two leaders walking side by side on a red carpet.
Apparently the unipolar moment is over. Being one of the world’s two main poles is, these days, the highest geopolitical aspiration of America’s president. “It’s the two great countries,” Trump proudly told Sean Hannity in an interview that aired on Fox News after the US-China summit ended. “I call it the G-2. This is the G-2.”
The US foreign policy establishment was less effusive than Trump about G-2 membership. A Washington Post headline said: “China summit yields Xi’s goal—equal footing with U.S.,” and the subhead added that “the image of peer superpowers during President Trump’s visit displayed a dynamic that analysts say the Chinese have long sought and Americans had resisted.” The analyst quoted by the Post, a Biden administration national security staffer, said that Xi, using “the opulent optics of the visit,” had managed to do something “Chinese leaders have been working toward for decades”—he had made it “clear to the world that China and the United States are the two dominant, equally matched superpowers. There is no going back.”
New York Times reporter David Sanger, the dean of Blob [foreign policy establishment] scribes, also depicted the summit as a kind of comedown for America. Whereas Trump was “conciliatory,” Sanger wrote, Xi was “quietly more confrontational,” projecting a “new level of confidence and authority.” In particular: Xi had, according to a Chinese foreign ministry statement, privately warned Trump that “the US must handle the Taiwan issue with utmost caution” if it didn’t want to wind up in a conflict.
Meanwhile, as Xi was drawing red lines, Trump, Sanger noted in a subsequent co-authored piece, was spending his time calling Xi a “great leader” and saying that a garden where the two men strolled contained “the most beautiful roses anyone’s ever seen.” All of this showed, according to Sanger, “how far he has shifted the foundations of American policy toward China in the wake of his humbling retreat from last year’s trade war. He has thrown aside the adversarial approach of his first years in office, the Biden administration, and the beginning of his own second term.”
Works for me! Then again, I’ve always been a sucker for peaceful coexistence. Besides, the non-zero-sum problems that the US and China need to solve are increasingly urgent, and a pleasant stroll in the garden can be conducive to cooperation. In fact, this week the two nations agreed to start a dialogue on AI safety. For now they’re focusing mainly on ways to keep non-state actors from putting AI to malign uses. That agenda will likely grow as the magnitude of the AI issue becomes more evident and the inherently international nature of many AI threats does, too. But for now it’s enough that, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it, “the two AI superpowers are going to start talking.”
I think I’d go even further than Sanger in stressing the magnitude of this moment. Trump has “shifted the foundations” not just of “American policy toward China” but of American foreign policy globally. And at the moment, at least, this shift looks auspicious.
Before elaborating, I should emphasize that I’m not calling Trump a visionary. The new and improved foreign policy that I hope is unfolding will, if it unfolds, be one that Trump has more or less stumbled into—and will be different from the one he was pursuing when he started stumbling. Contingency plays a big role in history, and reckless leaders like Trump are particularly good at illustrating that.
* * * * *
That’s not the end of Wright’s discussion of the implications of Trump’s accidental triumph. But it’s the main story. I’ll end by quoting Wright’s last two paragraphs.
One thing standing in the way of my dream scenario—a world where the US and China and the world’s other nations cooperate to solve problems they collectively face—is Trump’s aversion to international governance. China under Xi plays a more active role in international institutions than the US under Trump, and Xi talks more about “win-win” outcomes than Trump, who is famously inclined to see life in zero-sum terms.
Still, he emitted fewer zero-sum vibes this week than he often does. Indeed, inherent in the idea of “G-2” is sustained cooperation between the two superpowers. So maybe Trump has more in the way of non-zero-sum impulses than is commonly recognized, and they just need to be nurtured. And maybe it would help if the New York Times and the Washington Post and much of the foreign policy establishment quit giving him negative feedback every time he expresses them.
* * * * *
BONUS: Check out Wright's recent discussion with Zhengyu Huang, author of the new book Rethinking China.
0:00 Teaser
0:34 Zhengyu’s tech background and new book, Rethinking China
3:00 What kind of threat is China, really?
10:06 How trading with China transformed America
16:51 The stakes of the chip war
22:02 Will tech war lead to real war?
30:33 The US-China escalation spiral and Taiwan
39:13 “Researching while Chinese”: the new Red Scare?
49:46 Heading to Overtime
Friday, May 15, 2026
Ishmael Reed takes on the Tech Bros
David Streitfeld, Elon Musk and Friends in the Den of Oakland’s Literary Lion, NYTimes, May 14, 2026.
Fourth paragraph:
Mr. Reed, a novelist, playwright and provocateur who has been upsetting opinions across the political spectrum for at least six decades, is aiming high with a new drama. “King Ludd’s Revenge” is a rare attempt to take on the tech moguls with something more than mere journalism.
Later:
Mr. Reed, a novelist, playwright and provocateur who has been upsetting opinions across the political spectrum for at least six decades, is aiming high with a new drama. “King Ludd’s Revenge” is a rare attempt to take on the tech moguls with something more than mere journalism.
“Instead of a straight narrative, I improvise,” the 88-year-old writer said. “It’s like Louis Armstrong singing ‘Stardust.’ He doesn’t do it the way it’s written.”
Oakland is poorer, Blacker and more maligned than San Francisco and Silicon Valley, both of which are just across the bridges that span the Bay. Having the trial here happened at random — Mr. Musk’s lawsuit against Mr. Altman and the company they founded together, OpenAI, was filed in San Francisco and assigned to the federal court in Oakland — but feels a little like one of those episodes where the Greek gods descend to mundane Earth to settle a dispute.
Mr. Reed, an Oakland resident who has celebrated and defended the city for decades, may be the only one in town noticing who’s here. “Everybody’s focused on the N.B.A. playoffs,” he explained.
“King Ludd’s Revenge” takes its title from the legendary leader of the workers’ revolt in England in the early 19th century. With the ascent of A.I., the Luddites have come back into fashion. The play begins with Mr. Musk receiving a pedicure from a robot. Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire who backed President Trump in 2016, bursts into the room. “I think I’ve identified the leader of the Anti-Christ Syndicate,” he says.
Mr. Musk: “Who might that be?”
Mr. Thiel: “Greta Thunberg.”
Mr. Musk: “That girl who leads the environmental movement? That’s ridiculous. The Bible says the Anti-Christ is a beast with seven heads.”
Mr. Thiel: “She’s the most prominent head, don’t you see? The heads represent hippies, multiculturalism, identity politics, woke, one-world state, Barack Obama and the 19th Amendment. This is the Beast that decelerated our progress. This is why there has been no cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s.”
Adolf Hitler, on a two-day pass from Hell, shows up next. The play is a work in progress.
Near the end:
Mr. Musk claims 240 million followers on X, his social media platform, and has a fortune approaching $1 trillion. Mr. Reed’s primary publisher is now in Canada. His biggest asset is his house, which is pleasantly stuffed with books. The street used to have several drug dens; now it is upper middle class.
“I’m a Black guy living in North Oakland, writing about titans — people who live on Mount Olympus,” he said. He listened to some of the trial on an audio feed. He thought of Shakespeare, specifically “Titus Andronicus.”
“That play is about revenge,” Mr. Reed said. “And cannibalism. These tech people want to devour each other.”
Mr. Altman may be the guy in control of the most significant A.I. company, but Mr. Reed finds him rather flat as dramatic material.
Mr. Musk is different.
“I don’t find him amusing in real life, but he’s amusing in my play,” Mr. Reed said. “I started this because I read that 14 million people will possibly die because Elon Musk ended U.S.A.I.D. It took the Nazis maybe five or six years to accomplish that.” Mr. Reed acknowledged that his humor is very dark.
And so it goes. There's much more at the link.
New Savanna has 911 tags as of 13 May 2026 [my 16-year production function is 57 tags per year]
Here’s my previous post on this topic: New Savanna has 665 tags as of 13 Nov 2023 [my 13-year production function is 48 tags per year]. You can find all my posts on this topic at this tag: tag_count.
This is how I explained my production function in that earlier post:
If you are a fan of Tyler Cowen, as I am, then you know that in his Conversations with Tyler he often asks his guests about their production function, how they do whatever it is they do. Well, I now have a way of estimating the output of my production function over the course of this blog. Let’s divide the total number of tags, 655, by the age of the blog in years, 13 years and 7 months is 13.6 years, giving me an output of 48 tags per year.
Given that a large fraction of my intellectual output turns up on New Savanna in one way or another, that’s not an unreasonable number to consider. It would be easy enough to calculate how many posts I produce a year if I wished, but I’m not going to do that, because that particular number is not what I have in mind. What I’m thinking is that that count would thereby give me two measures.
As a first approximation, I’m going to say they measure different things. The post count is a simply a word count, or rather, a words-plus-photos count. The tag count is a new-idea count. To be sure, it’s a very crude approximation to new ideas, but, on first glance, it does seem to me that that’s what it is. I only add tags when I want a convenient way to refer to a new topic. One could, of course, write about the same thing year after year, in which case the tag list would remain constant from year to year. That’s how you succeed in the academy, publish the same three ideas year after year after year until you go emeritus. That’s just not how I roll.
For this time out the number of tags is 911 and the age of the blog is 16.1 years. Divide the former by the latter and you get 57 tags per year.
Here’s the full list of tags as of May 13, 2026:
(the) singularity #Canon/Archive #ccourses #ccresearch #DH #gpt3 #GVM002 #GVM003 #GVM004 #GVM008 #GVM019 #GVM021 #GVM022 #GVM023 #GVX #HEX01 #HumanProgress #LARB #longwoodgardens #nugget #whyiteach 2_war 2set 3300 node graph 3blue1brown 3QD 51 Alley 51 Pacific 5FF 60s abstraction abundance academia academia_stats activism Adam Savage Adam_neeley Adam_Roberts ADHD adolescence adulthood adventure aesthetics affective_tech Africa African-American AI AI Alchemy AI Limit AI values AI_Agents AI_Backlash AI_Chess_Lang AI_companion AI_Emo_Support AI_hallucination AI_idolatry AI_Paradox AI-creativity AI-epistemology AI-future AI-integrate AI-whaling AI30 Alan Liu alien alien phenomenology alignment altered states of consciousness altieri Altman America American myth Amodei analog-computing analogical_reasoning Andreessen Andrew_Piper animals animation anime Anthropic anthropology anti-nuke anti-Semitism ants anxiety AOC apocalypse Apocalypse Now Araki archaeology Arena Arena_4 arithmetic art art_club artificial minds arts ASC attachment Attractor-net Attridge&Staten autobiography awesome B_Russell bacon Baltimore_Years BAM BAnvil BAPC bardolatry BB & Computing BB-reflects BBjazzEdu BCSmith bees behavior behavioral mode bell benchmarks Bennett Bergen Arches BFJO Bill_Gates billionaires-in-space biology bird black black church blogistan blogs blues body Bordwell Born2Groove Bostrom Bostrom-simulation Bourdain brain-as-computer brain-to-brain brains breakfast breaking bad Brian Phillips British Bruce_Jackson Bryant Buddhism Buffalo bundling business C_Keil Carroll cartoon CE Direction CE workshop center-point Chain_of_Thought change change-mind Changizi charting-AI-space Chat_paints chatbots ChatGPT ChatGPT conversation ChatGPT interpretation ChatGPT MTL ChatGPT stories ChatGPT summary ChatGPT_poems ChatGPT-memory cherry_blossoms chess chess_lang_core Chess_Lang_Series childhood children chimpanzees China Chinese-room chocolate factory Chomsky chrysler bulding chuck jones citizen science classify Claude Claude stories claude_colab Claude_describes Claude_partner claude_summary Cld_melancholy_notes clouds coaching Coates Cobra_Kai cog poetics cog-poverty cogart cognition cognitive science Coleridge collapse collective creativity Collier color comedy comfort common sense knowledge communication community complexity compositionism computation computational envelope computers conduit metaphor connect-course consciousness contrail control copyright corruption cosmos coupling COVID-19 creativity culler Cultural Beings cultural evolution cultural identity cultural ranks culture cyberization cybernetics cyberspace daffodil DamiLee danah boyd dance dandelion davidsimon death deep learning DeepSeek default mode deGrasse_Tyson demonstration Dennett depression DeptofPeace description design development DGH Diamond_Age Dick_Macksey digital humanities digital wilderness digital_doppelganger disarmament Disney Dizzy Gillespie DOGE dolls Douthat Douthat-decadence downsize drugs duckdodgers Duke_Ellington Dumbo Dwarkesh eating Ebert eclipse ecology econ_growth economics economy ecstasy education Egypt emergence emergent-ventures emotion empire state building EndofScience energy engineering entangle environment epistemic_struct_cosmos Eric_Jang Erie Cut erotic essay Ethan_Iverson ethical criticism Everett evol-force evolution EVs exploration expressive systems eye Ezra_klein F Me Pump Facebook family Fantasia Farrell fast lane Father Faust FBorFreedom FDR federal government Felski Feyerabend fictional characters Fifty_Shades film flix flow flowers fluid mind food foraging foreign_policy form forsythia fractal free range kids Freeman French toast Friday Fotos Fridman FTH FTH_Class fun funny fusion future G_Hinton g-zone gags game theory garden Gärdenfors Gary_Marcus Gavin Gavriil gender genius genji genre gift Girard GITS glenn_loury glia global warming globalization GOATLiC god Godfrey-Smith Goethe gojira golf Golumbia Gopnik GPT GPT_classroom GPT-3 GPT-4 gpt-4.5 GPT-5 graf-then-now graffiti graffiti aesthetics graffiti chaos graffiti detail graffiti essay graffiti site graphic novel grass Great Chain greatest siam green grief Groucho groups Guillory Haggard Halloween hallucinate hallucinated-city handbook happiness Harman Harold-Bloom Hartman Hassabis HCRichardson HCW health heart darkness Heather_Cox_Richardson Henry Lau high culture Hillis Miller Hiromi history Hoboken Hoboken_2225 Hollis_Robbins home homeless Homo_economicus Homo_ludens hope Horgan Hossenfelder House_MD Howard_Jam Hudson River human nature human_origins human-swarm humanities humans vs. machines humor hunter-gatherer Hurricane Sandy hydraulic_press hyperobjects identity ideology-intellect Iliza_Shlesinger illusion immigration implementation improvise India Industrial_Revolution inequality information Inside_Out Instagram institutions_broken intel_case intellectual history intelligence intention interdisciplinary international affairs internet interpretability Interpretation intuition invent_future IP Iran irises Israel-Palestine Issues-in-CultEvol its complicated Jakobson Jamie jamming Japan jasmine Jaws jazz JC Rising JCPhotoEssay JCwall Jersey City JGGChronicles jim morrison jivometric Jockers Joe Rogan John_Oliver JumpandKong justice K-Pop Kambhampati kami Keil_12/8 Kelly Sax Keynes Kim Stanley Robinson Kimono Mom King Kong Kisangani2150 KK encounter Korea Kubla_Khan Kwak DaKyung LAARB Lafayette_Garden language language-computation-litform Lantz LARB-DH Latouor-modes Latour Latour Assemble laughter law leaks learning leaves LeCun Lee_Morgan Leonard_Bernstein Letterman Lévi-Strauss life light linguistics links literary criticism literary Darwinism literature LLM LLM_collab LLM-Meta Loser love low culture lump MacArthurFP MacPaint macroanalysis maestro magic maker malick man_machine man-in-space man-machine-interaction mana mandala manga manhattan Maplewood marilyn_monroe Mark_Twain mark-turner Mars Mary_Douglas masculinity math maynard McCarty McCulloch McDonalds meals meanderings meaning meaning_semanticity meaningful_life media notes medicine meeting_of_minds melancholy_mind memes memory mental health Meta_struct_world metalingual definition method mhacks Michael_Jordan microchips Miles Davis Millennium_Park mimi and eunice mind mind-inside mind-or-machine mindfulness Miyazaki Mnozil mom moon moral injury morality Moretti Morton Morton-Spacecraft MR-Notes music Musk my intellectual life my_mood myth-logic narrative NASA nation-state nationalism natural geometry naturalist criticism nature NCIS networks neural-holography neural-weather neuromorphic neuroscience neurosymbolic new government New Hope City new humanities new savanna New York City new-descriptivists next-word Nina Paley NLH rejection No_Kings Northrup Frye notes novel NY2140 NYTimes Obama object-oriented ontology objectification Occupy ontological cognition OOCRnB open letter OpenAI operadoc orange orgasm Oshii P_Thiel pansies parsons party Patriotism_3QD patterns PB Graff Jam peace peak experience perception percussion performance performing Perper personal perversion philosophy philosophy new photo photography photontology phrasal lex physics Piaget pinckney Pixar planning plants play pleasure pluri-core poem poetry politics pollution polyrhythm polyviscous polyviscous_core pond pop culture pop culture aesthetics Pope_Leo population Porco Pounds_typology poverty predict prehistory President 2020 Presidential 2016 printing_press prodigy progress projection protest psychedelic psychoanalysis psychology public-private-interest pyramids Queen Mary 2 race race-symbolic-universe Ramble Ramsay Rank5 ratatouille read_macroanal read-hyperobjects reading reading>reading reality regulate-mind RelationalNets religion research retire RGB rhythm Rick_Beato ring-form risk RNA-primer Supplement Road Not Taken Road Runner Robert Frost Robert_Wright robot-rights robots rock art RodneyBrooks Rogue-AI romantic love Rubicon-Waterloo Salerno-Sonnenberg sally Sant_Andreu Satch scale scaling_in_ML science science fiction Scott_Aaronson scratching my head search Searle Séb_Krier seder-masochism Segmented_sleep Seinfeld self selfie serendipity series_humans_loop sexuality sexuality25 Shakespeare shaky-cam shame Shine/Titanic shoes silver simulation SK8 sky sleep sleep_reorg SMP_linked snow social media society Sowa space speech Spider-Man sports SPSH SSTB stagnation StanfordLitLab star trek state_dependent_memory StateofAI statistics Steve Pinker Steven_Spielberg strange_land street art sunrise sunset superintelligence supreme_court surface_reading surveillance Sutskever swisher Sydney_Lamb synchrony tablescape taboo tag tag_count TalentSearch Tantra tassles tech evol techbro technology television tell me blues terror-management terrorism text texture Tezuka the rez the-crown theater theology theory of mind Theory stars therapy throwie time toast topic models touch toy being transformer transition transnational trees Trump trumpet tulips TV tweet Tweet-of-Day twitter Tyler Cowen UBI underbelly Underwood Underwood&Sellers2015 Unfrosted unityofbeing universal_kid_space urb design center urban urban geometry urban pastoral Utopia vacation Vehicularization Vermont Vexta vibe_coding video violence VirtFeud virtual reading vision visual resonance visualization wackyland waffles war war boys wayquay's weather web weeds Why CE Wickwire Wind Rises window_shot WiP wires_images wisdom WLB_art WLB_Mandala wlb_melancholy WLB_religion WLBjazz WmPowers Wolfram women word illusion work work-mode working paper World-spanning thoughts World-Wide Wall WorldIsland writing Wuthering Heights Xanadu yevick youth Yudkowsky ZAR Zeal_Greenberg Zhang Zizek zuckerberg
Reconstructing the logic of science
AI has a "Dark Matter" problem.
— How To AI (@HowToAI_) May 14, 2026
And it’s the reason why even the smartest models still hallucinate.
Most scientific knowledge is stored in a "compressed" form. We see the final conclusion, the textbook formula, the Wikipedia claim, the polished result.
But the actual… pic.twitter.com/vircB73bI4
From the middle of the tweet:
They built a search engine that doesn't look for keywords. It performs "Inverse Knowledge Search."
If you query a concept, it doesn't give you a summary. It retrieves the diverse, verified reasoning paths from physics, chemistry, and biology that all culminate in that single point.
The final lines in the tweet:
We’ve spent years training AI to mimic how humans talk about science.
But talking about science is just repeating conclusions.
This paper proves that the future of intelligence is about reconstructing the logic that built it in the first place.
Thursday, May 14, 2026
AI Skeptic: This Business Makes No Sense
Ed Elson is joined by Ed Zitron to discuss the state of the AI industry (read: bubble). Zitron argues that every AI startup is unprofitable at its core. Then James Kynge breaks down what to expect from President Trump’s visit to China. Finally, Ed digs into data from the producer price index and what it could signal for inflation and the broader economy.
Ed Zitron is the author of the Where’s Your Ed At Newsletter, and the Better Offline Podcast. James Kynge is the host of the Prof G Media’s China Decode podcast and Senior Research Fellow at Chatham House.
Timestamps
00:00 - Intro
00:27 - Today's Number
00:47 - Market Vitals
01:30 - AI with Ed Zitron [interesting!–BB]
26:35 - Ad Break
29:00 - Trump Visits China (ft. James Kynge)
38:38 - Ad Break
40:08 - PPI
43:04 - Credits
America and China have different attitudes about and approaches to AI and work
Ross Douthat, Why China Isn’t Worried A.I. Will Replace Its Workers, NYTimes, May 14, 2026.
The United States and China are really the only two countries that matter right now in shaping the A.I. future. As President Trump and President Xi Jinping meet in Beijing, there’s a kind of Cold War atmosphere, with people talking about an A.I. arms race. But who is winning? Are we even in a race at all? Kyle Chan, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, says it’s hard to call it a race because the U.S. and China have very different A.I. goals.
I presented the conversation to Claude (Sonnet 4.6 Adaptive) and asked it for a summary.
* * * * *
I have uploaded conversation to the project area, filename “China AI workers.”
It is between Ross Douthat, who writes for The New York Times, and Kyle Chan, who is a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution. I would like you to summarize the conversation for me. I’m particularly interested in the Chinese attitude toward AI in general and the (proper) relationship between AI and humans.
This is a rich and wide-ranging conversation. Here's a summary, with particular attention to the themes you flagged.
Overall frame
Douthat's central premise is that the U.S. and China are in an AI "arms race," but Chan's main contribution is to complicate and largely deflate that framing. China, he argues, is running a different kind of race, not the same race at a slower pace.
The Chinese approach to AI: practical, not transcendent
The sharpest contrast Chan draws is between the American fixation on AGI — the idea of a "machine god" that surpasses all human capability — and the Chinese orientation toward diffusion and application. China wants AI in food delivery, ride-hailing, health care, government services, and factory floors. They want smaller, cheaper, more deployable models, not necessarily the most powerful frontier model. Chan puts it directly: Beijing is not "AGI-pilled."
He sees this as continuous with how China approached the internet era: not as a transformative metaphysical event, but as infrastructure to be integrated into daily life and governance. The Chinese state is also notably more willing to use open-source models, giving away AI capabilities to gain adoption at scale — both domestically and in the Global South — which is a strategy the commercially driven American labs largely ignore.
The proper relationship between AI and humans: tool, not god
This is where the conversation is most relevant to your homo ludens framework. Chan describes Beijing's view of AI as essentially instrumental — AI serves human economic and social purposes. The Chinese government is actively hostile to AI use that it considers "nonproductive": AI companions, AI boyfriends/girlfriends, even excessive gaming. The fear is that young Chinese will waste time on AI-mediated entertainment and social substitution when they should be building the economy.
There's a revealing parallel Chan draws: the same regulatory instinct that cracked down on video games and private tutoring platforms is now being pointed at AI companionship apps. The state's implicit position is that AI must serve the collective project — not become a substitute for human connection, productivity, or reproduction. This is a deeply anti-mystical, anti-transcendent view of the technology.
So the Chinese "proper relationship" between AI and humans is essentially: AI augments human labor, fills demographic gaps (falling birthrate, shrinking workforce), and extends state capacity. It does not replace human flourishing or social life; it should not become an end in itself.
The demographic driver
Chan adds an important materialist dimension: China's embrace of robotics and AI is partly driven by sheer demographic necessity. Their labor force peaked over a decade ago, youth unemployment is near 17%, and the birthrate is roughly two-thirds the U.S. rate. This produces a different calculus than in America — the question isn't whether a robot waiter displaces a human worker, but whether you have a waiter at all. AI and robotics fill a structural labor hole, which makes China more tolerant of automation than Western economies that still have more human workers to protect.
The public mood: anxiety about falling behind, not about being displaced
Where American anxiety about AI tends toward fears of job loss, surveillance, or existential catastrophe, Chan describes Chinese popular anxiety as nearly the inverse: fear of not using AI enough, of being left behind in a hyper-competitive labor market. Individual workers, companies, and policymakers all share this orientation. Chan calls this a "mirroring" — the individual's fear of losing competitive edge mirrors China's national fear of falling behind the U.S. technologically.
On AGI and existential risk: skeptical distance
Chan thinks it's telling that when Trump relaxed chip export controls, Chinese AI companies wanted the chips but Beijing declined — preferring to build domestic semiconductor capacity rather than become dependent on American supply chains. This, he argues, is not the behavior of a country sprinting toward superintelligence. A true AGI race would involve gobbling up every available chip. China is playing a longer, more measured game.
He also pushes back gently on the "race" metaphor itself: the intermediate risks (cyberwarfare, biosecurity) are, in his view, underrated and real; the AGI-superintelligence scenario is overblown. He ends by urging dialogue between the U.S. and China on shared risks from rogue actors and open-source proliferation, while acknowledging the deep mutual distrust that makes formal arms-control agreements essentially impossible at this stage.
A thought for your book
Chan's portrait of Beijing's AI worldview sits almost perfectly at the opposite pole from Silicon Valley's quasi-religious eschatology — no Omega Point, no machine god, no homo deus. What you might find generative: the Chinese model is also, in its own way, a version of homo economicus applied to AI — purely instrumental, collectively economistic, hostile to play and to what the government calls "wasted time." It's not an alternative to the Silicon Valley eschatology so much as its mirror image — the same foreclosure of genuine play, just in a different ideological register.
Claude has been fine-turned to talk down to many (foreign) users
Imagine you live in a small village.
— Nav Toor (@heynavtoor) May 13, 2026
English is not your first language. You did not go to a fancy school. You open Claude and ask it a simple question about the water cycle.
Claude answers like this.
"My friend, the water cycle, it never end, always repeating, yes. Like the… pic.twitter.com/7XN0nq4GYd
The tweet concludes:
The training that was supposed to make these models helpful taught them to look at who is asking and decide if you deserve the real answer.
If you are reading this from India or Pakistan or Nigeria or Iran. If English is your second language. If you did not go to Harvard. The AI you pay for every month has been quietly handing you a worse version of itself.
It was never broken. It was aimed.
The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet
Jonas Dolezal, Sawood Alam, Mark Graham, and Maty Bohacek, The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet.
Abstract: The proliferation of AI-generated and AI-assisted text on the internet is feared to contribute to a degradation in semantic and stylistic diversity, factual accuracy, and other negative developments (sometimes subsumed under the “Dead Internet Theory”). What has hindered answering these questions is that it has not been understood just how much of the internet is actually AI-generated or AI-edited. To this end, we construct a representative sample of websites published on the internet between 2022 and 2025 using the Internet Archive, and apply a state-of-the-art AI text detector on them. We find that by mid-2025, roughly 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted, up from zero before ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022. We also find statistically significant evidence for some of the identified hypotheses; for example, that increases in AI-generated text on the internet correlate negatively with semantic diversity and positively with the prevalence of positive sentiment. We do not, however, find statistically significant evidence supporting the hypothesis that an increased rate of AI-generated text on the internet decreases factual accuracy or stylistic diversity. Notably, this diverges from public perception, which we measure in a user study, where the majority of US adults turned out to believe in all four of the above-mentioned hypotheses. Individuals who do not use AI or use it infrequently tend to believe in these negative impacts more than those who use it frequently; similarly, individuals who hold negative views of AI tend to believe in these hypotheses more than those with favorable views of the technology.
From the introduction:
Ever since ChatGPT first made large language models (LLMs) available to the wider public in 2022, which was followed by mass adoption, there have been concerns about the impact of AI-generated text (as well as AI-generated content in other modalities) on the internet and online discourse (Ferrara, 2026; Muzumdar et al., 2025). Specifically, many known limitations and failure modes of LLMs, including factual hallucinations (Huang et al., 2025), sycophancy (Malmqvist, 2025), verbosity (Saito et al., 2023), and more, have raised concerns that unchecked proliferation of such content could reduce the overall quality of internet content (Shumailov et al., 2024; Xing et al., 2025). These hypotheses are sometimes subsumed under the “Dead Internet Theory,” which they loosely expand, but which, on its own, predates the widespread use of LLMs (Muzumdar et al., 2025). These hypotheses have been difficult to verify, primarily because there is limited understand- ing of how much internet content is actually AI-generated (Santy et al., 2025; Spennemann, 2025). In this paper, we attempt to address these questions. We concern ourselves only with LLM- generated text,leaving other modalities for future work, and use LLM-generated and AI-generated interchangeably.
The authors have produced a less technical version of their research online HERE, where they have a shorter abstract of their findings:
The proliferation of AI-generated and AI-assisted text on the internet is feared to contribute to a degradation in semantic and stylistic diversity, factual accuracy, and other negative developments. We find that by mid-2025, roughly 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted, up from zero before ChatGPT's launch in late 2022. We also find evidence suggesting that increases in AI-generated text on the internet bring about a decrease in semantic diversity and an increase in positive sentiment. We do not, however, find statistically significant evidence supporting the hypothesis that an increased rate of AI-generated text on the internet decreases factual accuracy or stylistic diversity. Notably, our findings diverge from public perception of AI's impact on the internet.
Here's a statement of their methodology:
Answering this question is harder than it might seem. Constructing a statistically representative sample of the internet is difficult, as there is no central index, popular domains are vastly over-represented in most crawls, and archival coverage has shifted considerably over time. To work around this, we draw on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and apply a multi-dimensional stratified sampling approach, approximating a uniform random draw from publicly accessible web pages published between 2022 and 2025 (see Section 3.1 in our paper).
On top of this sample, we need a reliable way to tell AI-generated and AI-assisted text apart from human-written text. AI-generated text detection is itself an open problem, so rather than committing to a single detector, we experiment with four prominent methods selected based on their performance on the RAID benchmark: Binoculars, Desklib, DivEye, and Pangram v3. We then run our own robustness checks across text length, HTML versus plain text, model family, model version, and language, and choose the detector that comes out the strongest overall — Pangram v3 (see Appendix A in our paper).
AI-Generated Text on the Internet from Mid-2022 to Mid-2025. The proportion of websites classified as fully AI-generated (red) and AI-generated or AI-assisted (purple) based on Pangram v3 detection applied to representative samples obtained from the Internet Archive. The dashed line marks ChatGPT's public launch in November 2022.
H/t Tyler Cowen.
Wednesday, May 13, 2026
Mary Magdelene: ChatGPT offers some revisionist depictions
Here's how the Wikipedia entry for Mary Magdelene opens:
Mary Magdalene (sometimes called Mary of Magdala, or simply the Magdalene or the Madeleine) was a woman who, according to the four canonical gospels, travelled with Jesus as one of his followers and was a witness to his crucifixion and resurrection. In the heavily disputed Gnostic writings, Mary Magdalene is depicted as Jesus’s closest disciple who uniquely understood his teachings, causing tension with Peter, and is honoured as the “apostle to the apostles”.
Mary Magdalene is regarded by believers as a historical figure, possibly from Magdala. She is seen as a prominent follower of Jesus who was believed to have been healed by him, supported his ministry financially, and was present at his crucifixion and burial. She played a key role among his female disciples. Overall, there is limited information about her life.
The entry continues:
Apocryphal early Christian writings often portray Mary Magdalene as a prominent, spiritually insightful figure favoured by Jesus, challenging traditional patriarchal norms. These texts have inspired modern reinterpretations of her role. During the Patristic era, Mary Magdalene was mentioned only briefly by early Church Fathers, with her image evolving from a minor gospel figure to being conflated with other women in the Bible. Eventually she became viewed in Western Christianity, largely due to Pope Gregory I's influential 591 sermon, as a repentant prostitute, despite there being no biblical basis for this portrayal.
Somewhat later:
According to the Gospel of Luke,[19] Jesus exorcised "seven demons" from Mary Magdalene. That seven demons had possessed Mary is repeated in Mark 16:9, part of the "longer ending" of that gospel – this is not found in the earliest manuscripts and is possibly a second-century addition to the original text, possibly based on the Gospel of Luke. In the first century, demons were believed widely to cause physical and psychological illness. Bruce Chilton, a scholar of early Christianity, states that the reference to the number of demons being "seven" may mean that Mary had to undergo seven exorcisms, probably over a long period of time, due to the first six being partially or wholly unsuccessful. [...]
Because Mary is listed as one of the women who supported Jesus' ministry financially, she must have been relatively wealthy. The places where she and the other women are mentioned throughout the gospels indicate strongly that they were vital to Jesus' ministry and that Mary Magdalene always appears first, whenever she is listed in the Synoptic Gospels as a member of a group of women, indicates that she was seen as the most important out of all of them.[...] That women played such an active and important role in Jesus' ministry was not entirely radical or even unique;[32][34] inscriptions from a synagogue in Aphrodisias in Asia Minor from around the same time period reveal that many of the major donors to the synagogue were women.
As witnesses:
All four canonical gospels agree that several women watched Jesus's crucifixion from a distance, with three explicitly naming Mary Magdalene as present. Mark 15:40 lists the names of these women as Mary Magdalene; Mary, mother of James; and Salome.[40] Matthew 27:55–56 lists Mary Magdalene, Mary mother of James and Joseph, and the unnamed mother of the sons of Zebedee (who may be the same person Mark calls Salome). Luke 23:49 mentioned a group of women watching the crucifixion, but did not give any of their names. John 19:25 lists Mary, mother of Jesus, her sister, Mary, wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene as witnesses to the crucifixion.
The Gospels make no mention of her skill at riding a motorcycle.
A note about the images. All of them are by ChatGPT. In the first one ChatGPT uses its default photorealistic style. I asked for a Jack Kirby style image for the second. The third is a generic graffiti style, though if you look closely you'll see Ben-Day dot patterns in the skin tones that were probably inherited from Roy Lichtenstein version that I haven't uploaded (boring). The fourth one is in the style of Salvador Dali while the last is Picasso, where I specifically mentioned Guernica.
Notice that in the Picasso version the woman is straddling the bike while she's standing next to it in the other versions. Also, she looks more directly at Christ than she does in the others and her jacket is unzipped. I didn't ask for those changes.
Cat and bird
by Enoki Toshiyuki pic.twitter.com/a3TJ9rj8Bq
— Ramin Nasibov (@RaminNasibov) May 13, 2026
Art Deco on rails
Art Deco on rails ❤️
— Muse (@xmuse_) May 12, 2026
Duchess of Hamilton, the crimson queen of the Coronation Class.
1930s British brilliance. pic.twitter.com/wsClotAkDW
Tuesday, May 12, 2026
China and America as mimetic rivals in A.I.
Yi-Ling Liu, The U.S. and China Are Hurtling Toward a Shared A.I. Future, NYTimes, May 12, 2026.
This is a long article. Are are some highly selected excerpts.
The rivalry:
The growth of artificial intelligence has been presented as a rivalry between two fundamentally different systems. America commands capital and chips while China marshals engineering talent and manufacturing prowess. America holds an edge in building software — enterprise tools and cloud platforms. China leads in hardware — humanoids and autonomous vehicles. America pushes ahead with frontier models, with its artificial intelligence labs making moonshot bets to build a superintelligence. China focuses on scale and diffusion, with its tech firms embedding A.I. as quickly as possible in every sector of society.
We’ve been told that the ultimate prize in A.I. is the achievement of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I. The country that figures this out, the theory holds, will establish world dominance through turbocharged economic and military power.
Internal division in both countries:
But looking past the headlines and the highlight reels, you can see the sharp divide in both countries brought on by A.I. Those who build and bankroll the technology speak of the future as a promise to be profited from, an opportunity to be exploited. In Silicon Valley, college dropouts talk of A.I. tackling climate change and curing disease. Researchers are courted with nine-figure salaries like N.B.A. stars, and roadside billboards call on residents to “Supercharge your A.I.” and “Stop Hiring Humans.” [...]
China’s tech hubs are driven by a similar sense of urgency. In Beijing’s Zhongguancun, known as China’s Silicon Valley, office towers stay lit deep into the night as A.I. lab employees hustle to beat their rivals across the road. Companies poach one another’s star engineers while freelance coders burn through tens of thousands of Claude tokens to vibecode products. [...]
Miming memes:
A parallel set of memes has emerged to capture the sense of powerlessness. In the United States, the Silicon Valley tech elite identify as “high agency,” while the rest of us are “bots” condemned to the “permanent underclass.” In China, ordinary workers describe themselves as shechu (“corporate cattle”) and jiabangou (“overtime dogs.”) These same workers have long used the viral term “involution” to capture the feeling of being trapped in a cycle of meaningless competition. In both countries, those disaffected by A.I. identify with the gaming meme of the “NPC” or “non-player character.” They feel like the background role in someone else’s video game, existing only to fill the world but not to shape it.
Frictionless companionship:
Outside the office, both Chinese and Americans have become enamored with A.I. as a source of frictionless companionship and emotional validation, with companies now monetizing emotional intimacy at scale. Over 70 percent of American teenagers report using chatbots as companions, nearly one in eight for mental health support.
Similarly, in China, one survey found that nearly half of young Chinese had used an A.I. chatbot to discuss their mental health. In a country where living alone is quickly becoming the norm — with single-person households expected to possibly reach 200 million by 2030 — A.I. companions have emerged as a quick fix to a growing loneliness epidemic.
Religion and spirituality:
The people of both countries are turning toward the spiritual for solace and agency in a world accelerating out of their control. The 20-somethings of America check astrology apps like Co-Star, part of a $3 billion dollar industry. Some in Gen Z are rediscovering Christianity, and religious conservatism has re-entered public life. In China, fortunetelling bars have popped up in cities, astrology apps like Cece are going viral and young people are consulting DeepSeek to predict their futures.
Nostalgia and authoratarianism:
When the future loses its promise, the past becomes a refuge. Both societies have seen a surge of nostalgia, a longing for a time remembered as simpler and more stable. Many Chinese idolize rural vloggers such as the celebrity YouTuber Li Ziqi, who rose to viral fame during the pandemic by sharing videos of her self-sufficient, pastoral life in the Sichuan countryside. You can see the same dynamics in the popularity of the tradwife Instagrammer known as Ballerina Farm, who documents her Utah homestead, milking cows and making doughnuts from scratch for her eight children. Both of those women live off the grid and embody an imagined idyll where chatbots and corporations do not exist.
Nostalgia also has a dark side, encouraging the rise of once fringe, illiberal ideas into the mainstream. This has been underway in China for years, with its influencers and ideologues rejecting liberal ideas and drifting toward a conservative centralized authority. In the United States, we see the growing influence of pundits like Curtis Yarvin, who argues that liberal democracy should be dismantled in favor of a C.E.O.-led monarchy and whose ideas have found an audience among both America’s tech and political elite, from Peter Thiel to JD Vance.
Final paragraph:
Once you step back, it’s easy to see the warping effect of the U.S. vs. China race. It’s a story used to justify sprinting ahead without guardrails in the name of beating the other. By focusing on our rivalry, we have become blind to our vulnerability. Instead of fixating on who crosses the finish line first, we must work together to lift up the people that both countries have left behind.
There's more at the link.
Trump is hell-bent on nuking America back to the Stone Age
OK, OK, I get it. That statement is exaggerated and misleading. The Stone Age is too far back, 1960 will do. He’s not using nukes, he’s using oil and coal. And he’s doing considerable damage in the process.
Thomas Edsall has a long article on the subject – all his articles are long – in today’s New York Times, “Trump Is Fighting the World’s Stupidest Culture War,” May 12, 2026. His opening salvo: “On the day our oil-stained president returned to the White House, he began an all-out assault on clean energy. Today, 16 months later, he and his party are paying a significant political price while American consumers are stuck with the bill.”
Edsall goes on:
That bill, according to one scholarly estimate, totals $1,508 per household since President Trump took office for the second time (in after-tax dollars). And as the president does not need reminding, that’s with the congressional elections six months away and the cost of living the voters’ top concern.
As if that were not enough, these same voters, when they fill up their cars, are confronting the costs of Trump’s choice to go to war with Iran, at a national average of $4.52 a gallon — that’s $90.40 for a 20-gallon tank.
Trump has severely, but not fatally, wounded the American renewable energy industry, which is falling further behind China. At the same time, he is doling out tax dollars by the millions to keep dilapidated coal-fired power plants open.
That’s Edsall’s introduction. The rest of his article adds detail upon disgusting detail.
What’s it all about? According to one expert, Leah Stokes, a professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara, it’s all about the Benjamins:
The big story here is corruption. Trump is doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry and enriching his friends because they got him elected.
I cannot fathom why else he’s keeping open these old, dirty, expensive coal plants that were otherwise slated to close in places like Michigan. Someone is getting very rich off these decisions, and everyday Americans are paying the price.
That’s how it is with Agent 47, who has inverted John F. Kennedy’s exhortation from his inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” Agent 47’s revision: “Ask not what you can do for your country – grasp greedily for all your country provide for you.”
Well into the article, Edsall reports:
...not only is the United States falling way behind China on energy, but that the United States is becoming increasingly dependent on China. As a result, Atlas continued:
The strength of Chinese manufacturing and innovation in many parts of the clean energy supply chain, including battery components and solar components, means countries are increasingly reliant on China.
Policies that discourage clean energy manufacturing and deployment in the United States risk weakening the country’s position in the global clean energy supply chain, creating space for China to consolidate its market leadership.
As the old saying goes, with friends like this, who needs enemies. To quote that great philosopher, Pogo the Possum, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Edsall’s list of depredations and stupidities goes on and on. Here’s another:
A key element of Trump’s reward to oil companies for their contribution to his and other Republican campaigns has been his effort to cripple the electric vehicle industry.
In doing so, Trump is trashing free-market principles treasured by traditional conservative Republicans. He has adopted a MAGA industrial policy that goes beyond government propping up one group of special interests to include a deliberate effort to snuff out competing industries.
Julie McNamara, federal energy policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote by email that Trump, simply on the basis of personal grievances and political ideology, “is ceding opportunity after opportunity for the U.S. to be a leader in the global clean energy transition, and all the benefits such leadership can afford.”
Edsall’s conclusion:
Where does all this leave the country?
Stuck with a president committed to policies that amount to national self-sabotage, a man driven by personal grievance and reckless promises to campaign contributors, devoid of any real concern for America’s long-term energy needs.
The power of the Presidency has allowed Trump to become a prisoner of his appetites and grievances.
Monday, May 11, 2026
AI’s New Trillion Dollar Mission (is BS)
YouTube:
This week on Prof G Markets, Scott Galloway and Ed Elson discuss the growing belief in Silicon Valley that AI won’t just replace workers, but managers too. Then, they break down the proposed pied-à-terre tax in NYC and why they believe taxing luxury second homes makes sense. Finally, they unpack why alcohol stocks are struggling while GLP-1 drugs are booming, and what that says about the future of American consumer behavior. [...]
Timestamps:
00:00 Preview
00:26 Today's number
01:04 Today's episode
05:23 AI's new mission
24:35 Ad break
26:55 The wealth tax debate is heating up
46:10 Ad break
48:41 The death of the night out
01:08:56 Week ahead
01:11:11 Scott's prediction
01:12:51 Ed's prediction
01:14:05 Credits
Starting at about 20:08, Scott Galloway:
And that is there is something to be said of and there's a balance here. I've in my companies, I'm doing some virtue signing right now. I've always said there should be two or three people and I've always had small companies, right? They they start at zero. Once we have a someone in HR or CFO, I either step step down from the CEO role or become the chairman because I I don't have those skills to scale a company and I don't want to deal with that stuff.
But until then, I've always said we should have two or three people that are one or two bad decisions away from living in their car. They're not, you know, they're they have bad judgment. They're they do stupid shit all the time. They're not what I'd call there's no way they're leaving us for Google. Let me put it that way. A little bit down on their luck maybe. And guess what? The business can be a great means of a little bit of social good.
And also the notion this is basically the notion that part of an organization if you think of stakeholders and I didn't get this. So, I always thought my goal was to pay people less than market and figure out other tricks of the trade to get them to stay and retain them. And then what you realize as you get older is that what is more rewarding is to build a profitable company and slightly overpay people. And if there's some fat in the organization and if there's a few people who quite frankly are, you know, not going to get a job anywhere else but work, you know, work hard or good people and maybe they're not, you know, amazing. Okay, that's okay too. And in some countries, the objective of a lot of the owners is to increase employment. Now, you have to balance that with making sure the organization can survive and has profitability.
But this is again this singular messiah complex that is nothing. There's only one stakeholder and it's shareholders. and I can figure out technology to replace people and we can all work singularly and then eventually the AI will take out those singular teams and replace them and then there will just be one. It'll be Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk who each own 49% of the world and do a lot of ketamine and if they're good enough they will provide UBI for all of us such that we don't uh rise up and kill them.
I I I'm not a fan, Ed. I'm not a fan of this whole line of thinking. I think it's [ __ ] and I think it's unhealthy and I think it's nihilistic.
Cultural Evolution and (Tyler Cowen’s views on) History [MR 7]
While Tyler Cowen’s monograph, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution (2026), is about intellectual history, I didn’t sense that Cowen had any overall view of history. Rather he seems to think of it as one thing after another, which it is, during which bursts of human creativity appear at irregular intervals and mostly later than they should. I decided to quiz Cowen’s AI about that. Before I present that dialog, however, I want to comment about the concept of cognitive ranks, which I have instead of a theory of history.
The idea was incubated during my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins, where I was introduced to the thinking of Jean Piaget by Mary Ainsworth. As you know, Piaget argued that children’s conceptual development happened in stages, where each stage marked the emergence of a new cognitive mechanism. I read quite a bit of Piaget and when I did so I tried to imagine how the world must seem to a child having only those capacities that Piaget was describing, operation by operation, by minute operation. At the same time I was studying perceptual and cognitive psychology which gave me other ways of thinking about how we make sense out of the “booming, buzzing confusion” – to borrow a phrase from William James. Later on, after I had finished my undergraduate education, I learned that Piaget also applied his approach to the emergence of ideas in history, as in his slender book, Genetic Epistemology. That’s what came to interest me.
In my sophomore or junior year I took a course on the Scientific Revolution, where I read Kuhn’s famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Earlier, in my freshman year, I had taken a two-semester course in art history. And I’d taken a bunch of literature courses. I couldn’t help but notice that these otherwise different topics “crossed” in a three century span. During the 15th through 17th centuries we saw the emergence of realistic depiction based on rationalized space, the Scientific Revolution, and the origins of the novel. Then I read Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (1962) in a sociology class. That same period saw the conceptualization of childhood as a specific stage of life with specific needs and capacities. Was this all just coincidence or did these separate phenomena have something in common beyond time frame?
And then there was the widespread recognition that the emergence of literary had society-wide effects on culture. Similarly, we have widespread cultural changed in the transition from the late 19th to the early 20th century. Modernism appears in the arts, music, literature, and the plastic arts, and physics undergoes a major change.
With all that under my belt I came across a slender book by Walter Wiora, The Four Ages of Music (1965). In a quick survey of the worlds’ music he argues for four stages based respectively on rhythm, melody, and harmony, with the fourth based on an eclectic use of a wide variety of techniques. I read that and wondered: Perhaps everything is like that? Is that the long course of cultural evolution?
I took that with me when I went on for my Ph. D. at the State University of New York at Buffalo. While I was getting my degree in the English Department, I spent a great deal of time in Linguistics studying cognitive semantics with David Hays. That work forced me to think about ordinary concepts, common sense knowledge as it is known, in great detail, comparable to the detail one learns in studying predicate calculus and symbolic logic, though of a bit different kind. But Hays was also interested in cultural evolution, so we started working on it. I worked out a version of the idea in my 1978 dissertation, “Cognitive Science and Literary Theory,” where I applied it to the evolution of narrative forms. The idea then lay dormant until Hays and picked it up again in the late 1980s, leading to the publication of our basic article, The Evolution of Cognition (1990), followed by other articles by me and by Hays; Hays also wrote a book, The Evolution of Technology Through Four Cognitive Ranks.
I think of the idea as a description motivated a certain conception of cognition. It’s descriptive because Hays and I don’t attempt to explain why this evolution happened; rather we observe that that is what has in fact happened. Our conception of cognition is, broadly speaking, constructivist, a term that has been applied to Piaget’s work. Ideas are constructed by cognitive mechanisms. Each cognitive rank draws on mechanisms not available at earlier ranks. In particular – and here I am drawing on Piaget’s conception of reflective abstraction – Rank N+1 treats the mechanisms and structures of Rank N as objects for examination and manipulation. Thus I am inclined to see order in the long-term history of ideas, an order based on the accumulation cognitive mechanisms, where Cowen tends to see adventitious emergence based on a local confluence of facilitating circumstances.
We look at the world in very different ways, which was the point of an earlier post, Welcome to Reality, Tyler; the AI’s got your number: Further Notes on Revolution, Marginal and AI [MR-3a]. I note, however, that I have no more use for Hegel and Marx than Cowen does.
And with that, here’s the dialog I had with Cowen’s AI. Note that, toward the end, I get around to asking about Girard. I didn’t have Girard in mind when I started this dialog, but, in thinking things over, I began to get a sense of why Girard would appeal to Cowen, though they’re very different kinds of thinkers. Cowen’s an empirical social scientist of the late 20th century whereas Girard is a 19th century grand theorist displaced to the middle of the 20th century.
* * * * *
What are Tyler’s views on history in general? I know he favors economic growth. But I don’t get any general sense of history from this book. It just seems to be that pinnacles of human creativity appear at unpredictable times that don’t seem to anything more than local order.
That's a perceptive gap to identify, and it's real. Tyler uses history throughout the book but doesn't have a philosophy of history in any strong sense. His historical examples — the slow development of botanical classification, geology, the Marginal Revolution itself spreading unevenly across decades — are deployed instrumentally, to illustrate why intellectual progress is non-linear and contingent. [See text: Ch.3 · The uneven diffusion of marginalist ideas as hi...] But he never steps back and asks what the overall shape of history is, whether it has direction, whether the peaks of creativity he identifies are connected by anything deeper than circumstance.
What you're left with is essentially a punctuated equilibrium model without the theory — bursts of insight separated by long plateaus, with the bursts explained by the convergence of multiple enabling conditions: the right institutions, the right communication infrastructure, the right social permission to think heterodox thoughts. [See text: Ch.3 · How enabling conditions converged for early eco...] That's not nothing, but it's also not a philosophy of history. It's pattern recognition dressed as explanation.
Tyler's deeper commitments, visible more on Marginal Revolution than in this book, lean toward a kind of progress studies framework associated with thinkers like Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen — the view that human progress is real, measurable, and has been accelerating, but is also fragile and contingent rather than inevitable. That's a Whiggish skeleton with the triumphalism removed. History goes somewhere, but it could easily have gone elsewhere, and the mechanisms are local and specific rather than grand and structural.
What's missing — and what your 1990 paper with Hays actually supplies — is any account of why complexity keeps increasing, why the peaks get higher even if their timing is unpredictable. Tyler sees the peaks. He doesn't have a theory of the underlying gradient that makes higher peaks possible over time. Your argument — that natural selection operates in an inherently complex universe, that greater differentiation yields more information without limit — would give him that gradient. History isn't just local order appearing at unpredictable times. It's local order appearing against a background of increasing universal complexity, which is itself directional even if not deterministic. Tyler has the observations. He's missing the substrate that would connect them.
Hegel and Marx
Interesting, especially in light of his extensive reading, which includes history of all kinds. History is just one thing after another. I wonder to what extent that might be a reaction against the grand theories of, say, Hegel and Marx. For that matter, does living historian offer some kind of grand theory? Well, there’s Pinker with his account of diminishing violence over time, though I know Tyler has expressed reservations about that somewhere in the MR blog.
Your instinct about Hegel and Marx is well-supported by the MR blog record. Tyler's relationship with grand historical theory is one of respectful dismissal — he's read enough to know why people find it compelling, and enough to remain unconvinced. [See text: Ch.4 · Tyler on empiricism defeating all the grand -isms]
On Hegel specifically: Tyler has looked at every page of the Phenomenology of Spirit but can hardly claim to have read it, and found the Master-Slave dialectic — usually considered the core — "a waste of time" he couldn't sustain attention through. That's not a refutation, it's a temperamental rejection. His bottom line: he doesn't think most people should spend much time with Hegel. So the anti-Hegelian stance isn't really argued — it's more like an allergy.
On Marx, Tyler is more engaged and more interesting. He notes that "Smith thought in terms of marginal tradeoffs" while "Marx, above all, focused on inframarginal and systematic effects." That's actually a sharp distinction — and it maps directly onto the gap in this book. Tyler is a marginalist by temperament even when critiquing marginalism. His final verdict: "marxism, as a political program, remains dangerous nonsense" and "Marx's blind spots were enormous." But he does count Marx among the great economists. So: useful diagnostician, catastrophic prescriber.
On Pinker, you're right that Tyler has expressed reservations. He prefers a weighted average of per capita and absolute measures of violence, arguing that killing six million Jews in the Holocaust is not "half as violent" if global population is twice as high — and that once you include absolute measures, the long-term trends are not nearly as favorable as Pinker suggests. More structurally, Tyler wonders whether the distribution is better described as "long periods of increasing peace, punctuated by large upward leaps of violence" — a warfare correlate to the Minsky Moment, with "great moderations" that each end with a bang. That's a genuinely different model from Pinker's, and it rhymes with your punctuated-equilibrium framing from the Hays paper.
On Enlightenment Now, Tyler's reservations go deeper: his main difference with Pinker may be that he believes there is "a certain amount of irreducible 'irrationality' in people, and it has to be 'put somewhere,' into some doctrine or belief system." That's not a Whig objection — it's almost a Burkean one. Progress doesn't eliminate the irrational substrate; it just redirects it.
Here are the relevant MR posts:
- Steven Pinker on violence (2011) Tyler's most sustained critique of Better Angels, raising the absolute vs. per capita violence distinction and the Minsky Moment analogy for warfare. The core reservations you remembered are all here.
- Enlightenment Now, the new Steven Pinker book (2018) Tyler's numbered-list response to Pinker's follow-up book, where he pushes back on Pinker's treatment of the Counter-Enlightenment and raises the "irreducible irrationality" objection.
- Steven Pinker on slavery and the Enlightenment (2019) Tyler calls himself an admirer of Pinker and a long-term optimist, but insists that "what is sometimes called progress does also have a dark side." A careful, specific critique of Pinker's historical claims about abolition.
- Hegel, or Department of Yikes (2008) The definitive Tyler-on-Hegel post. Short, direct, and tells you everything you need to know about why grand dialectical theories of history don't appeal to him.
- What is valid in Marxism? (2004) Tyler's five-point attempt to extract what's genuinely useful from Marx, including the inframarginal/systematic effects point. Worth reading alongside the book's dismissal of Marxism as a "school" that lost out to empiricism.
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