Cryptocracy: Crypto Is Good for Trump but Bad for America

Dan Davies and Henry J. Farrell, Crypto Is Good for Trump but Bad for America, NYTimes, May 23, 2025.

This has been a good week for America’s crypto interests. The Genius Act, which legitimates a kind of cryptocurrency called stablecoins, advanced in the Senate, and on Thursday, President Trump held a gala dinner for the top 220 holders of his $Trump memecoin.

That doesn’t mean it’s been a good week for America. Stablecoins, as their name suggests, are crypto assets guaranteed by other assets like the U.S. dollar. Mr. Trump and his sons created one called USD1 through their cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial. Digital currencies like stablecoins are bad enough when they could potentially be used for political self-dealing. The potential problems they pose to the mainstream financial system go deeper and are much more concerning.

Their advocates claim that they will enhance U.S. financial power — Mr. Trump said that stablecoins would “expand the dominance of the U.S. dollar.”

They are likely instead to undermine it, fostering scams and sanctions evasion, generating financial risk and perhaps even allowing another currency to supplant the dollar in global trade. [...]

Crypto interests want to break down the boundary between cryptocurrencies and regulated finance by integrating stablecoins into the regular U.S. financial system. That would allow them to go back and forth between the swashbuckling world of crypto, where cryptocurrencies swing wildly in value and you can gamble on the latest meme, and the rule-bound world of regulated finance, with assets and bank accounts protected by the Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

After some argument they conclude:

Stablecoins were supposed to leverage dollars to stabilize the chaotic universe of crypto. Instead, they seem set to infect the dollar-dominated financial system with the unique combined chaos of crypto and Mr. Trump.

There's more at the link.

Not a banana in sight

How do you create a culturally coherent nation? Two cases: Singapore and the United States.

Singapore

Just around the corner, over at 3 Quarks Daily, Eric Feigenbaum has a fascinating article about Singapore: Lessons From Singapore: If You Can’t Think Because You Can’t Chew, Try A Bannana:

When I tell someone I lived in Singapore, the most common response is some variation of, “Singapore – isn’t that where it’s illegal to chew gum?”

I know a Greek couple who refuses to visit Singapore because they feel the rules are too strict and inhumane. I don’t think they know what all the rules are – but in a country that still has strong opposition to helmet laws, I suppose restrictions on chewing gum and urinating in public seem fascist.

So, no – it’s not illegal to chew gum in Singapore. It was from 1992 to 2004. Although you do have to show identification and be entered into a log at any store in which you buy gum – and the gum has to be certified to have dental value. So, it’s not exactly a chew-as-you-please policy either.

Later:

When Singapore became independent in 1965 it was a nation of migrants from the Malay Peninsula and immigrants mostly from China and Tamilnadu, India – three very different cultures that had come to coexist within a British open-port city. But co-existence and integration are two different things and the need to convert everyone into Singaporeans meant closer cooperation was needed. The problem was each culture had habits that bothered the others – including spitting and public urination.

Moreover, Singapore’s nascent leadership was also concerned about public health. Living one degree north of the equator comes with significant vulnerability to disease. Simple actions like flushing toilets, washing hands and again – not spitting – could help reduce disease transmission in a place where typhoid, yellow fever and hepatitis once ran rampant – not to mention insect-borne diseases like malaria and dengue.

Singaporean leaders quickly learned fines and enforcement got stronger results than public service announcements. Plain-clothes officers would walk around giving citations requiring fines – and often steep ones. During the chewing gum ban, a first offense could cost S$2,000 and after three citations, each offense could cost S$10,000.

Of course, we can all appreciate clean sidewalks and pleasant public restrooms. But what does this kind of enforcing do to a culture?

Then, after quoting an interview with Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first prime minister, Feigenbaum observes:

In other words, Singapore sees virtue in putting the whole before the individual. The welfare of the majority relies on individuals reasonably curbing their behaviors to create a better environment. Naturally, that means a loss of some degree of personal freedom. But if the trade-off is that shoppers can’t bring home their incredibly pungent (to me nauseating) durian fruit on the public subway, but thousands of riders don’t suffer for the needs of a few fruit enthusiasts – is that a loss? In my home state of California, you can’t smoke a cigarette on a public bus. Is that so different?

Feigenbaum finishes the article with more examples.

I made a rather long comment which I’ve placed in the next section.

* * * * *

The colonists who created the United States were culturally homogeneous. Over time, however, the nation’s developmental dynamics produced the cultural heterogeneity that’s at the root of our current crisis.

The United States of America (unravelling)

A very interesting article, indeed. I’m not at all sure what to make of it. I’m wondering what would happen if the “Singapore principle” where applied in America. What do I mean? You say:

When Singapore became independent in 1965 it was a nation of migrants from the Malay Peninsula and immigrants mostly from China and Tamilnadu, India – three very different cultures that had come to coexist within a British open-port city. But co-existence and integration are two different things and the need to convert everyone into Singaporeans meant closer cooperation was needed. The problem was each culture had habits that bothered the others – including spitting and public urination.

Solution: Enact laws that impose severe punishments for what seem like minor offenses when taken individually. Justify this by reference to Collectivism.

What’s going on in America right now? Well, for the last several decades we’ve been admitting immigrants from a wide variety of places and making America’s bounty available [to them]. A lot of people are unhappy about that and we’ve now got a government that’s trying to put a stop to that. But that’s not really what I’m talking about.

That same government has just told Harvard that it cannot enroll foreign students. That eliminates, I believe, perhaps a quarter of Harvard’s student body. That’s not good for Harvard, and it’s a disaster for those students, who now either have to find someplace else to go to school in the US or leave the country. [See this piece Steven Pinker just published: Harvard Derangement Syndrome.]

What’s the government’s problem with Harvard? They say antisemitism and DEI. I’m dismayed at the resurgence of antisemitism we’ve seen in America in the past several years, especially after Israel’s response to the awful Palestinian massacre of Israelis. But I flat-out don’t believe that the Trump administration is really concerned about that. It’s a convenient cover. The same with DEI. I think some DEI policies, at Harvard and elsewhere, are absurd and destructive. But on the whole less absurd and destructive than what the Trump administration is attempting to do to Harvard and other top-tier schools. It’s beginning to look like they’re going to do permanent damage to the country’s ability to conduct scientific research. Is that what they’re really after? Not quite, but it’s closer to the mark, I believe.

I do believe the problem is cultural coherence. But the problem originates, not because America has been cobbled together out of disparate groups of people, like Singapore, though there is a bit of that. The colonists who originally formed the nation were a fairly homogeneous group. But over time, through its own dynamics, that nation has developed a culturally heterogeneous population. And it’s that internally-generated heterogeneity that’s at the root of our current situation. Trump has managed to take a bunch of groups who feel that their needs and desires have been neglected and from that cobble together a political coalition willing to support him in his efforts to force the country to conform to his values.

What a mess.

I don’t know what your intentions were in writing this really very good piece, but I don’t think you were trying to produce an indirect justification for Trump and his apparatchiks and acolytes. For that matter, I don’t quite know why I’m writing this somewhat weird comment.

What a mess.

Anoushka Shankar - New Dawn

YouTube:

‘New Dawn’, the closing track of the Grammy-nominated album “Chapter II: How Dark it is Before Dawn”, recorded in a single take at De Singel Arts Centre in Antwerp, looped free of a click track.

Stream or download the album: https://leiter.lnk.to/BeforeDawn

Directed by Ali Clifton

Music composed and arranged by Anoushka Shankar and Peter Raeburn
Arranged for live performance by Danny Keane

Band:
Arun Ghosh: Clarinet
Pirashanna Thevarajah: Percussion
Sarathy Korwar: Drums
Tom Farmer: Bass

Crew:
Cinematographer: Jack Maddison
Steadicam: Horia Cojan
Focus Puller: Josh Tue
Sound: Julian Hepple and John Duckett
Live Mix: James Campbell
Lights: Eric Collignon
Sitar Tech: Niklaas Janssens
Tour Manager: Saloni Thakkar

outer/most Agency
leiterverlag

Special thanks to De Singel Arts Centre, Antwerp

Visit Anoushka's website: https://www.anoushkashankar.com
Subscribe to Anoushka’s YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/4fDbsMs

Friday Fotos: Hoboken sampler

Harnessing the Universal Geometry of Embeddings [the Platonic Representation Hypothesis]

Rishi Jha, Collin Zhang, Vitaly Shmatikov, John X. Morris, Harnessing the Universal Geometry of Embeddings, arXiv:2505.12540v2 [cs.LG] https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2505.12540

Abstract: We introduce the first method for translating text embeddings from one vector space to another without any paired data, encoders, or predefined sets of matches. Our unsupervised approach translates any embedding to and from a universal latent representation (i.e., a universal semantic structure conjectured by the Platonic Representation Hypothesis). Our translations achieve high cosine similarity across model pairs with different architectures, parameter counts, and training datasets.

The ability to translate unknown embeddings into a different space while preserving their geometry has serious implications for the security of vector databases. An adversary with access only to embedding vectors can extract sensitive information about the underlying documents, sufficient for classification and attribute inference.

 The conclusion:

8 Discussion and Future Work

The Platonic Representation Hypothesis conjectures that the representation spaces of modern neural networks are converging. We assert the Strong Platonic Representation Hypothesis: the latent universal representation can be learned and harnessed to translate between representation spaces without any encoders or paired data.

In Section 5, we demonstrated that our vec2vec method successfully translates embeddings generated from unseen documents by unseen encoders, and the translator is robust to (sometimes very) out- of-distribution inputs. This suggests that vec2vec learns domain-agnostic translations based on the universal geometric relationships which encode the same semantics in multiple embedding spaces.

In Section 6, we showed that vec2vec translations preserve sufficient input semantics to enable attribute inference. We extracted sensitive disease information from patient records and partial content from corporate emails, with access only to document embeddings and no access to the encoder that produced them. Better translation methods will enable higher-fidelity extraction, confirming once again that embeddings reveal (almost) as much as their inputs.

Our findings provide compelling evidence for the Strong Platonic Representation Hypothesis for text- based models. Our preliminary results on CLIP suggest that the universal geometry can be harnessed in other modalities, too. The results in this paper are but a lower bound on inter-representation translation. Better and more stable learning algorithms, architectures, and other methodological improvements will support scaling to more data, more model families, and more modalities.

For a variety of reasons I am strongly sympathetic to this Strong Platonic Representation Hypothesis. It seems to be the sort of thing one would predict on the basis of the arguments I have made about the relationship between the latent structure of an LLM and what I am calling the epistemic structure of the universe: See pp. 34-38 and 42-44 in ChatGPT: Exploring the Digital Wilderness, Findings and Prospects (2025).

Knockin' on Heaven's Door [Playing for Change]

Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door | PFC Band Tribute to Robbie Robertson | Playing For Change | Mark's Park

YouTube:

Join us as we celebrate the life and legacy of the incomparable Robbie Robertson with a special performance of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” by the PFC Band Live Outside at Mark’s Park. This tribute pays homage to our dear friend and such an immense talent whose impact and artistry will be remembered and honored for generations to come!

Written by: Bob Dylan

FEATURING:
Jason Tamba- Vocals, Guitar
Mermans Mosengo- Vocals, Guitar
Peter Bunetta- Drums
Roberto Luti- Slide Guitar
Roberto Vally- Bass

No. I've not forgotten about the irises

Chatbots tend to over generalize when summarizing scientific research

Peters Uwe and Chin-Yee Benjamin. 2025. Generalization bias in large language model summarization of scientific research. R. Soc. Open Sci.12: 241776, https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.241776

Abstract: Artificial intelligence chatbots driven by large language models (LLMs) have the potential to increase public science literacy and support scientific research, as they can quickly summarize complex scientific information in accessible terms. However, when summarizing scientific texts, LLMs may omit details that limit the scope of research conclusions, leading to generalizations of results broader than warranted by the original study. We tested 10 prominent LLMs, including ChatGPT-4o, ChatGPT-4.5, DeepSeek, LLaMA 3.3 70B, and Claude 3.7 Sonnet, comparing 4900 LLM-generated summaries to their original scientific texts. Even when explicitly prompted for accuracy, most LLMs produced broader generalizations of scientific results than those in the original texts, with DeepSeek, ChatGPT-4o, and LLaMA 3.3 70B overgeneralizing in 26–73% of cases. In a direct comparison of LLM-generated and human-authored science summaries, LLM summaries were nearly five times more likely to contain broad generalizations (odds ratio = 4.85, 95% CI [3.06, 7.70], p < 0.001). Notably, newer models tended to perform worse in generalization accuracy than earlier ones. Our results indicate a strong bias in many widely used LLMs towards overgeneralizing scientific conclusions, posing a significant risk of large-scale misinterpretations of research findings. We highlight potential mitigation strategies, including lowering LLM temperature settings and benchmarking LLMs for generalization accuracy.

Dandelions, with the sun rising over Ellis Island

That’s one of my favorite photos, ever. It’s one of my various experiments in the minimal image. Yes, the sun is obvious, as are the dandelions down there at the bottom. The rest is a blur. I took in on Sept. 25, 2011, at 06:34:04. I was on my belly in the wet grass at Liberty State Park in Jersey City.

I took this shot two photos before:

It’s a nothing photo, nothing’s in focus. But you can see the fairly high grass and the blurry dandelions. And the light’s entirely different, yet I took the shot only seconds before. Why the difference? Because I wasn’t shooting into the sun.

I took this photo immediately before the favorite shot.

Again, I’m shooting directly into the sun, but the sun is behind a cupola atop one of the buildings on Ellis Island. That tells you pretty clearly what those colored blurs are in the first shot.

As for my interest in dandelions, that’s been with me since childhood when I first saw “The Nutcracker Suite” episode of Disney’s Fantasia. Here’s a frame grab:

That wonderful image of the dew-tipped dandelion is etched in my brain.

Homo Ludens Rising: A Manifesto for the Fourth Arena

On March 27, 2025, I published Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising, at 3 Quarks Daily. It as a speculative vision of the world in 2150 when a mysterious secret society, The Mystic Jewels for the Propagation of Grace, Right Living, and Saturday Night through Historic Intervention by Any Means Necessary, would initiate the final phase of a process that would transform the world through computer technology based on technology created in the West, but shaped toward different, more humane, ends. A day later I issued a working paper under the same title, which contained the article from 3QD plus additional material. In the introduction to the working paper I announced that I was working on a book, Welcome to the Fourth Arena: Homo Ludens Rising.

Here’s the abstract from that working paper:

The advancement of AI offers us the choice between contrasting paradigms for organizing human life: Homo Economicus (where work is the defining activity) and Homo Ludens (where play is the defining activity). Drawing on Johan Huizinga's work and Kim Stanley Robinson’s speculative fiction, I propose that humanity faces a critical juncture as AI increasingly dominates economic production. The document develops a theoretical framework for a “Fourth Arena” of existence—beyond matter, life, and human culture—that emerges through human-AI interaction. Through speculative narrative (first section) and philosophical dialogue with Claude 3.7 (second and third sections), I argue that play, rather than economic utility, will become the defining characteristic of human value and meaning in an automated future. As AI systems assume utilitarian functions, humanity's capacity for non-instrumental play becomes increasingly central to our identity and contribution. The manuscript represents preliminary work toward a larger project titled The Fourth Arena: Homo Ludens Rising, which envisions play as the essential bridge into a post-economic society where human flourishing transcends productivity-based value systems.

The Kisangani material would conclude the book while the body of the book would consist of a popularized presentation of various material David Hays and I developed in a collaboration that spanned just over two decades from the mid-1970s to his death in 1995. That collaboration contains a 1990 article about evolution, A Note on Why Natural Selection Leads to Complexity, and our various works on the stepwise evolution of human culture through a series of four cognitive ranks.

By that time I had already begun working on a proposal for that book, Welcome to the Fourth Arena: Homo Ludens Rising. I imagined that it would be the same kind of work as my book on music: Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture. That book ranged widely from neuroscience, through psychology, anthropology and sociology, and cultural history. Fourth Arena would have a similar range but would instead end with a speculative vision for the future and would be on the order of 200-250 pages long rather than 300+. As I set about developing the proposal and developing ideas for the book things began to change. Work on the proposal got bogged down while the ideation, done in close conjunction with both ChatGPT and Claude, became richer and more compelling. I had begun to fear that I would finish the book before I had written the proposal.

The main problem I had with the book is simply stated: I asserted that this Fourth Arena toward which we were headed – it’s hard to tell with these things – was supposed to be genuinely new, something unprecedented in human history. If the Fourth Arena really is new, then how can I possibly say anything about it with existing concepts, concepts anchored in the old world, the one being eclipsed? But what if we have in fact already crossed the threshold into the Fourth Arena, like setting foot on a new continent, climbing the tallest tree on the tallest hill, and surveying that land before you? You can’t see very far, but you are in the new world, of that you can be certain.

I am convinced that we have crossed the threshold and can begin to think about the tasks ahead. To do that we have to perform a gestalt switch. Look at this image:

What is it? Depending on how you think about it, it’s a duck or a rabbit. We’re leaving a world rapidly filling with dead ducks and entering one filled with frisky young rabbits.

With the help of ChatGPT and Claude I have the beginnings of a way to talk about all those rabbits doing what rabbits do and multiplying to beat the band. That allows me to reconceptualized the book, hence the new title: Homo Ludens Rising: A Manifesto for the Fourth Arena. Manifestos are relatively short and they are visionary. Perhaps the best known manifesto is a 40 page pamphlet entitled The Manifesto of the Communist Party. I’m certainly going to need more than 40 pages (but perhaps not the 200 to 250 pages I mentioned above). More importantly, I can now give the whole book a visionary caste, not just the final chapter. That frees me up to be looser, more expressive, more story-like. Oh, I still intend to have some conceptual material – e.g. about complexity, the nature of meaning, the mandala vs. the memory palace – and I’m going to cover cultural evolution. But I’ll be more playful and more approachable.

We’ll see.

It’s still early days.

Hoboken Spring Festival

The drum solo of drum solos, Papa Jo Jones

Coleman Hawkins Quintet 1964 "Caravan" | Papa Jo Jones Drum Solo | Harry "Sweets" Edison | England

Coleman Hawkins - tenor
Harry "Sweets" Edison - trumpet
"Sir" Charles Thompson - piano
Jimmy Woode - bass
"Papa" Jo Jones - drums

The duplicity of rich AI bros

Andreessen says AI will take almost all jobs but his. OAI high-ups want to build bunkers to hide from ASI. AI CEOs praise UBI while ensuring they'll be trillionaires when AGI comes. AI bros exclude themselves from AI's impact. Makes you wonder if they believe the utopia they sell

— Dagan Shani (@daganshani1) May 20, 2025

Seven Year Itch [Media Notes 160]

I’ve now watched The Seven Year Itch perhaps three full times in the last two weeks. It stars Marilyn Monroe and won a Golden Globe as best actor for her co-star, Tom Ewell. Here’s the first paragraph of Wikipedia’s plot summary:

Richard Sherman is a middle-aged publishing executive in New York City, whose wife Helen and son Ricky are spending the summer in Ogunquit, Maine to escape the city's crippling heat. When he returns home from the train station with the kayak paddle Ricky accidentally left behind, he meets an unnamed woman, who is a commercial actress and former model. She has subleased the apartment upstairs while its owners are away for the summer. That evening, he resumes reading the manuscript of a book in which psychiatrist Dr. Brubaker claims that almost all men are driven to have extra-marital affairs in the seventh year of marriage. Sherman has an imaginary conversation with Helen, trying to convince her, in three fantasy sequences, that he is irresistible to women, including his secretary, a nurse, and Helen's bridesmaid, but she laughs it off. A potted tomato plant falls onto his lounge chair; the seemingly unclad attractive young woman upstairs apologizes for accidentally knocking it off her balcony, and Richard invites her down for a drink.

Notice the order of events. First Mr. Sherman sees The Girl (Marilyn Monroe, she has no name in the movie) arrive, and then he has this fantasy discussion with his wife, trying to convince her of his attractiveness to woman. (Note that in the third of these fantasies he reprises the famous “love on the beach” scene in From Here to Eternity.) Is far as I can tell, that’s the primary driving force behind his interest in The Girl. Yes, he sees that she’s beautiful, but that’s important, not because he appreciates beauty the way an artist does, or even because he takes it as an indicator of sexual pleasure; it's important because her interest in him reflects well on his manhood. If such a beautiful woman is attracted to me, then I must be a manly man indeed! I detect no interest in or awareness of sexual pleasure.

This is a very Girardian world. Total mediation.

Later on Sherman fantasizes himself seated at the piano, wearing a red smoking jacket straight out of the Playboy fashion advisor[1], and playing Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto while nattering on in a thick nondescript continental accent. When The Girl convinces him to sit down at the piano, the best he can manage is chopsticks. She happily joins him and takes it up a notch, having a lot of fun in the process while he bumbles along wondering what’s going on. The whole scene is an elaborate parody of a sexual encounter. To be sure, yes there's a bit where they work together to pop the cork on a bottle of champagne resulting in the expulsion of liquid all over the place, an obvious parody on ejaculation. But that's what it is, a parody, a simulacrum of sex that pointedly elides and mystifies the substance. The movie avoids sexuality in this most elaborate way.

There’s much more to the movie that those two scenes, other actors, subplots, complications, the famous scene of The Girl standing above the subway grate, but really, that’s it. In this movie, the beautiful blonde bombshell exists to convince the anodyne bread-earner that he’s a good man because he’s kind and sensitive. Important virtues to be sure, but also functionally asexual. They’re both effectively neutered. 

Is that middle America in the 1950s? If so, what are we to think about the state of marriage in the 1950s if a story about a typical husband's desire for an extramarital affair is grounded, not in a desire for sexual pleasure with a woman other than his wife, but for a need to feel attractive to other women? What does that imply about his relationship with his wife?

* * * * *

Note: You might want to look at this older post, where I compare this movie with Sex and the City and Madmen. 

 [1] Playboy premiered two years earlier, with Marilyn Monroe as the centerfold. The movie plays on this, with one motif being a photo of The Girl in a bikini lying on the beach.