Perfect Days (2023)

 Grad Life.

"Poor Charlie's Almanack" by Charles T. Munger (2023)

The book is a compendium of Munger's talks. The final talk summarises it all. The remaining talks are incomplete drafts thereof. The omissions do not constitute a bug. When addressing a restive audience, it is wise to say less. As Munger observes in a Q&A session after one of the talks, he criticises psychology without saying how exactly psychology should be done because any such revelation would do little for the listener. The lesson will stick only if the listener stumbles upon it himself. Munger's only job is to make the audience curious and sceptical.

These are generalists who succeed in business. Extrapolating from this, Munger finds it hard to understand specialisation in academic departments. Specialisation is liable to generate economies of scale from working on the same topic and favours a status hierarchy that persuades academics that they are better off being paid with status rather than cash. This is a great deal for society. Munger is right, however, in that most students are not going to become academics and, therefore, would benefit from a more generalist perspective than that which universities nudge them into.

Munger is also right about the diminished role that social status plays in social science: economics, politics, and psychology. The final talk in the volume summarises what else is missing from academic psychology. The greatest omission, though, is the lack of a unifying, general-equilibrium theory.

"1923" Seasons 1–2 (2022–2025)

1923 is a soap opera tempered by the dignified presence of Harrison Ford. The story has two subplots, which are never destined to connect. This is an opportunity missed. In one subplot, white man steals land from Indians. In the other subplot, a rich man steals land from a rancher. Parallels could have been explored (and characters could have been intertwined across the subplots), but they never were.

Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025)

The entire franchise is a startup, and Tom Cruise is its founder. He understands the potential for his brainchild to become timeless and, with it, the responsibility to make it so.

F1 (2025)

Brad Pitt (and the team just shy of a thousand people) have pulled off another work of art. The market is a powerful force for keeping politicking out of entertainment. Politicking in entertainment amplifies the loudest and most organised voices at the expense of the plurality of those who care most and who like to proceed with nuance. The market gives entertainment a chance to morph into art.

Brad Pitt is old (in a good way). Yet he is the one to draw the crowds. For one, he is a better actor than (almost) anyone else. He has had the movie-star experience---something scarce. Moviegoers are also getting older on average, with both a higher tolerance for and a higher appreciation of older characters.

"What Technology Wants" by Kevin Kelly (2010)

Humans and technology co-evolve. There is no stopping it. Subcultures can survive with little technology as long as other, early-adopter subcultures support them by trading with them. Markets furnish the freedom to choose to be Amish or to live on an Italian island, traditionally yet comfortably. Country size enhances this freedom to the extent that markets are more vigorous within a country than across countries. Amishness is a matter of degree: all curate which technology and how much technology to consume.

Kelly is an optimist. He believes technology emerges in response to problems, of which it solves more than it creates.

Kelly views innovation as a funnel. The existing state of technology suggests the next obvious steps to all who would listen. It is easy to invent a lightbulb once the technological conditions are ripe, and many do. What is hard to do is to see a project through from an idea to implementation. That is where the true genius of technological innovation lies.

"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. 

Much Ado About Nothing

(Theatre Royal Drury Lane, 20 March 2025)

What makes a production authentic is not a meticulous attachment to irrelevant paraphernalia but striving for whatever is required in order to replicate the audience’s reaction at the premiere. This striving may accommodate much of the original plot and text while nevertheless calling for cuts and alterations. The present production of Much Ado About Nothing manages to remain authentic in spite of retaining the plot and the text in their entirety. The original songs and dances, if any, had to go. Good riddance.

Shakespeare’s populist genius lies in addressing multiple audiences at once by writing in layers.

The Years

(Harold Pinter Theatre, 17 March 2025)

Europe is a different country. The 1970s French theatre is a different country.

It is difficult to begin a play. The audience is not accustomed to thespian delivery. The audience has no past to relive or to latch on to, and no future to anticipate. The Years struggles.

The Years continues to struggle.

A cheerful disposition is the engine of an advanced civilisation.

Edvard Munch Portraits

(The National Portrait Gallery, 15 March 2025)

Pre-1908 Munch saw himself in the men and the women he painted. Post-1908 Munch saw the men and the women he painted in the men and the women he painted.

The Face Magazine: Culture Shift

 (The National Portrait Gallery, 15 March 2025)

Little is known about what happened in the 1980s, except that it was necessary in order to enable the 1990s. The 1990s were when modern fashion photography was born, in The Face magazine. With the ascent of Anna Wintour at Vogue and the retention of Peter Lindbergh, the establishment's takeover of the revolutionary had been complete. The raison d'être for The Face vanished.

Zona Maco 2025

 (Centro Citibanamex, 8 February 2025)

It is truly inspirational how much atrocious art there is---this year especially. Whatever one does, one is bound to be in the top ten per cent---at least as long as one brands oneself an artist rather than an artisan.

A commodity is something that each of a hundred people are willing to pay ten dollars for. A piece of art is something that one in a hundred is willing to pay a thousand dollars for. To succeed, an artist must invest in searching for that one dream customer. This investment subtracts time and resources from the artistic endeavour and breeds charlatan mediators.

The winner of this fine-art fair is AI. Guided by Antonio Uvalle, AI seems to remember better than humans do what it is that humans crave: humanity. Well, maybe next year.

Then Chuchito Valdés walked in, sat at the piano, and showed that humans still do humans better than AI does.

"Deep Utopia" by Nick Bostrom (2024)

It is refreshing to read a book written if not by a human, then at least by an entity that is not the same condescending ghost-writer who appears to be authoring a bulk of big- and small-name popular science books that mix uncredited academic ideas with the irrelevant personal anecdote. Indirectly, the book argues for not caring very much about "us" in the faraway utopian future, for these won't be us anymore. The spotlight thus pivots to the immediate present: a snapshot of a mortal college don, clever and eloquent, caught anxious at the crossroads of history. The moment is fleeting, fragile, and beautiful. And it is gone.

Peter Lindbergh: On Fashion Photography (2020)

Portrait photography bares the soul. The soul is the sitter's or the photographer's. Some souls look most bare when the body is nude. Some bodies look more naked when dressed. Fashion photography relies on clothes to enhance nakedness.