"On Democracies and Death Cults" by Douglas Murray (2025)

The book traces out the empirical implications of a country's policy that puts an arbitrarily high weight on the lives of one's own citizens. The punishment inflicted on the adversary is rather discontinuous. The consequences to the adversary from miscalculating the threshold at which the discontinuity occurs are disastrous.

The book engages with neither theoretical nor empirical implications of the premise that one is dealing with an adversary who values death more than life. The book does articulate this premise, though.

Can it be immoral to do the morally right thing? Perhaps it can be, if the moral act is so traumatic that it will impair one's ability to act morally in future. Is it immoral to refrain from doing the morally right thing in order to preserve the ability to act morally in future? The book rightly refrains from exploiting a human tragedy as fodder for philosophy porn. The book's focus is the recent history of the ongoing conflict.

Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)

People have agency.

Problems can be solved.

One saves many by saving few.

American optimism.

"Zero to One" by Peter Thiel with Blake Masters (2014)

In Zero to One, Peter Thiel argues that being a generalist is overrated. The generalist refuses to commit. The generalist assumes that progress will take care of itself, and that all he must do is to simply show up. Schools are designed to churn out generalists. This is not how one succeeds. One succeeds by leaning into one’s comparative advantage, one’s passion, one’s desperation. One must spread oneself out thinly. One must not diversify.

According to Thiel, there are two kinds of optimism: the belief in better future through intelligent design and the belief in better future through evolution. The 1970s witnessed a vibe shift in the nature of optimism, away from the former and towards the latter. The latter is unsustainable because it essentially consists in evoking a miracle by holding one’s fingers crossed. The way one usually holds one’s fingers crossed is by getting a law degree.

Optimism through evolution sets one up for a failure, says Thiel. People ought not to think of themselves as random quantities bereft of agency, which is what optimism-through-evolution would have one believe. One cannot start a business and hope that evolution will make it succeed. Entrepreneurship via evolution consists in designing a minimal viable product and then listening to the market for ways to improve it. Nothing great has ever come out of this approach---not in business and not in art. Says Thiel.

(Is ChatGPT an intelligent-design optimist or an evolutionary optimism? In 2020 one would have bet on the latter. In 2025, it is wise to bet on the former. Thiel wrote From Zero to One in the seriously pre-ChatGPT times. While the book does not explicitly specify a position on the matter, when writing, Thiel seems to have bet on the latter as revealed by his belief that AI would complement human skills instead of replacing them.)

Just as the strategy of iterating on the minimal viable product is doomed in business, it is doomed in politics, says Thiel. He hopes that one day polls lose their significance (be it by design or by accident), and politicians have no choice but to design policies intelligently. The grounds for believing that polls vanish are unclear. Nor is it clear that the qualities that compel a political candidate to seek an office and help him win it are the same qualities that would make one a visionary policy designer. At best, the qualities conducive to running and winning are conducive to reading the room and iterating on an idea. Furthermore, while to promote wild entrepreneurial visions is what society would want a startup to do, society ought to be rather more cautious about encouraging the same behaviour in a statesman. Most visions are terrible and fail.

Thiel points out, correctly, that the competitive paradigm in economics is used to make both literal and metaphorical points, with the metaphorical points being the most valuable ones while inconsistent with the competitive paradigm’s assumptions. Unfettered markets will lead to prosperity through innovation, goes the metaphorical point. But innovation requires monopoly rather than perfect competition.

It is hard not to admire someone who advocates for, and succeeds at, creating immeasurable value for society by inventing something entirely new (“from zero to one”). Government regulations and taxes tend to catch up with the inventions that improve the products that are already there (“one to n”). In a well-designed polity, the government cannot regulate or tax that which does not yet exist.

"American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson" by Joseph J. Ellis (1998)

What makes America exceptional is the fact that it had founders. America was a startup, and the Founders have given it a head start. Thomas Jefferson was concerned about America's ability to continue operating in the founder mode. He feared that, as the country developed, its government would swell and would eventually catch up with its European counterparts in size and the degree of tyranny.

For Jefferson, territorial expansion was a safety valve, a check on the uncontrolled growth of the powers of the Federal government. Territorial expansion would bring competition, as citizens would flee westward in search of freedoms. The threat of citizens voting with their feet and the competition from neighbouring states would keep American governments in check, Jefferson thought.

Jefferson's belief in the escape valve that is the West is echoed in the Silicon Valley ethos. Once it became impossible to move westward physically, American businesses and many of America's denizens moved into the tech sector, in search of novelty and in the hope that it would take time for the regulatory state to catch up.

America will remain exceptional as long as there always remains another frontier to settle.

2025 Rav4

One feels like a fat man in the street. There is too much car on the outside and too little on the inside. The car is too tall to effortlessly slide in and out of. The car is too tall for its footprint; the driver is liable to disassociate from the road. 

The dashboard is graced by a blinding white screen, which is especially vicious at night. Surely there is a way to disengage it, but it would not be wise to look for this way while on the go, when the urge to disengage is strongest. The driver's door and the tailgate require more effort to shut than the other doors. The failure to shut engages the beeping-alert component of the entertainment system.

"The Creative Act: A Way of Being" by Rick Rubin (2024)

Craftsmanship is the mastery of gradient descent, which does well at zeroing in on local optima. Creativity is the ability to reliably find global optima. One interpretation is that artistic life consists in daring to seek the global optimum of the only function one knows: one's felicity function. The artist excels at controlling the tuning parameter: first, searching for the optimum globally, broadly, and then becoming a craftsman and searching locally, finely. This description of the artistic life misses the social aspect of creativity, however.

Suppose instead that an artist is but a node in a neural net, an ever-evolving activation function, an ever-shifting perspective. He filters other artists' outputs, art, through his perspective and passes it on, for other artists to soak up. One is not an artist if one refuses to output, to share art. But then, is everyone an artist? And what is the objective that is being optimised, that is, what is the task that the neural net is learning to perform? And where does the training algorithm come from? Who is in charge of it? 

"We are like the dreamer, who dreams and then lives inside a dream. But who is the dreamer?" Perhaps, it is the Ultimate Artist himself.

"The Lives of Lee Miller" by Antony Penrose (2021)

The story is a sad one, for it ends in death, the death of its protagonist. It did not have to be that way. Perhaps the author did not see the need for letting Lee Miller's story continue, for he himself is the story's legitimate continuation.