Jeff Rummel @jrummel79

chronicle.com/article/is-ant… Good God. Rouse genuinely thinks Fighting the Power is the essence of serious thinking, has never been questioned about it even this far into her career, and is incapable of even understanding what Lee's questions are getting at. She's not deflecting. She really has no idea how ridiculous she sounds. I became an academic out of being curious about things. Gradually realizing since the 1990s that this kind of person is ordinary in the humanities and social sciences, is routinely given awards and high administrative positions, and is beyond the reach of rational discussion has been one of the most disappointing experiences of my life.

The Road to Serfdom made simple: 1. Plan the whole economy: someone must decide what gets made and who gets what, since people don’t naturally agree on one set of priorities. Every economy is millions of simultaneous decisions. A plan requires someone to override all of them – which means someone must have the power to do so. 2. These decisions are too big and detailed for normal democratic debate, so power shifts to a smaller group who can just act – technocrats. Parliaments are too slow, too divided, too accountable. The plan needs someone who can simply decide. Emergency powers, expert committees, regulatory agencies. Democratic legitimacy becomes an obstacle to efficiency. 3. Fixed laws everyone can rely on get replaced by case-by-case rulings, because a plan needs flexibility, not predictability. Rule of law requires knowing in advance what the rules are. A plan requires adjusting them as conditions change. The moment the rules become flexible, they are no longer rules – they are instruments. 4. Dissent becomes a problem to manage, not an opinion to vote on – the plan can’t work if people are free to ignore it. Opposition stops being legitimate political competition and becomes sabotage. The language follows: enemies of progress, deniers, those who put their selfish interests above the common good. 5. Enforcing all that selects for people most willing to be ruthless — Hayek’s “worst get on top” — i.e. negative moral selection. The scrupulous drop out. The system rewards those who can enforce without hesitation, punish without guilt, and comply without question. Over time it doesn’t just attract the worst – it produces them. 6. Since economics touches everything — your job, your home, your speech, your children’s education, your access to healthcare — controlling the economy ends up controlling your whole life. There is no private sphere left, because every private decision has an economic dimension, and the economy belongs to the plan. That’s the serfdom. 7. Hayek’s insight was not that government is always wrong. It was that the logic of planning is self-compounding – each step makes the next one necessary, each power grab requires a larger one to enforce it. You don’t plan your way to serfdom. You slide, one reasonable emergency measure at a time, until the slide is the system.

Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland

2 weeks ago

Atlas Shrugged made simple: 1. Society runs on a small number of highly capable producers – industrialists, inventors, engineers – whose work everyone depends on but takes for granted. 2. The system starts rewarding need over achievement: the more capable you are, the more

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The crime they see: 15,415 litres of water to produce one kilogram of beef. Every campaign, every documentary, every leaflet through the door since about 2012. The crime they do: not reading the paper. The figure is real. It comes from Mekonnen and Hoekstra at the University of Twente, and it is careful, peer-reviewed work. What the campaigns strip out is that the same authors split that number into three parts, because the three parts are not the same thing at all. Green water is rain. It falls on the grass. The cow eats the grass. For beef, green water is about 94 per cent of that headline. Blue water is the stuff that matters. Rivers, lakes, aquifers. The stuff that gets pumped, metered, fought over in court, and does not come back. So here is the blue water, in litres per kilogram, from the same authors, same method, same units. - Pistachios: 7,602 - Almonds: 3,816 - Walnuts: 2,451 - Dates: 1,250 - Cashews: 921 - Beef: 550 Read that last line again, then go and look at what is in your granola. The 15,415 counts rain that fell on a Welsh hillside as a cost, against an animal that was standing in it, on land where nothing else grows, in a country where rain is the one thing we have never once been short of. The pistachio is drinking fourteen times more of the water that actually runs out. She is outside in the rain right now, getting blamed for it.

About 250 years ago a quirky moral philosopher named Adam Smith discovered a chain of logic whereby the selfish desires of man would result in widespread prosperity. It’s one of the greatest discoveries of all time. Here’s how it goes… 1.Selfish desire seeks wealth, status, security. No virtue required. This is the raw material, as unpromising as it sounds. 2. In a market with property rights, you can’t take, you must trade. Theft and fraud are policed, so the only legal route to someone else’s money is offering them something they want more. Self-interest is channelled through voluntary exchange. This is the crucial valve: the baker serves your bread not from benevolence, but because it’s how he gets paid. 3.Every voluntary trade creates value for both sides. Nobody trades unless they prefer what they’re getting to what they’re giving. So each transaction is positive-sum by construction. Wealth isn’t moved; it’s made. 4.Competition forces the selfish to serve better. You’re not the only one chasing that customer’s money. To win, you must offer more value, lower prices, or something new. Greed disciplined by rivalry becomes, functionally, service. The customer becomes the boss of every capitalist. 5.Prices emerge as signals of what people actually want. Millions of trades compress dispersed knowledge - scarcity, preference, urgency - into a single number. No planner needed. High prices shout “make more of this” and falling prices say “stop making this.” The cure for high prices IS high prices. 6.Profit directs capital toward unmet needs. Profit is the reward for spotting something people want but can’t get, and losses are the punishment for guessing wrong. Capital flows automatically toward solving problems and away from waste - a self-correcting search algorithm running on selfishness. The profit motive pulls the greedy person towards genuine service and efficiency. 7.The pursuit of advantage drives innovation. The only durable way to out-earn competitors is to do something new - create a better product, a cheaper process. Each entrepreneur trying to get rich makes the previous solution obsolete and the average person’s life better. 8.Specialisation and scale compound productivity. Competition pushes everyone toward what they do best; trade lets them exchange it. Output per person rises. 9.Rising productivity spreads as falling prices and rising wages. Competition doesn’t let producers keep the gains forever - they’re competed away to consumers. The luxuries of one generation (cars, flights, antibiotics, computing) become the staples of the next. The rich get richer, but the poor get richer too. 10. Prosperity becomes self-reinforcing and civilising. Wealth funds education, health, science, and even the welfare state that redistributes it. Commerce rewards trust, reliability, and cooperation with strangers (doux commerce). A system built on self-interest ends up producing the most extensive cooperation network in human history: millions of strangers coordinating to put breakfast on your table. The hockey stick after 1800: from ~$3/day for all of human history to a 30-fold rise in living standards wherever this system took hold is pure magic.

One of the simplest ways to corrupt a person is to subvert his perception of beauty. C.S. Lewis demonstrates this in That Hideous Strength, the final book of his Space Trilogy. Protagonist Mark Studdock is subjected to "training" by the sinister institute "N.I.C.E." to remove his emotional responses and his ability to recognize right from wrong. Mark is made to get used to a windowless room filled with nonsensical architecture and ugly art designed to disorient him. It is lit strangely and has unsettling proportions: too tall and narrow, a subtly wonky arched door, and dots on the ceiling positioned with such irregularity that it would be impossible to count them. On the walls are grotesque and creepy pictures, but just verging on normal. There is a hyper-real portrait of a young woman, but her mouth is filled with hair. One is a giant mantis playing a fiddle while being eaten by another mantis. Some are distortions of Bible scenes, like a painting of the Last Supper with hundreds of beetles under the table. This is Mark's first step toward "objectivity": "the process whereby all specifically human reactions were killed in a man so that he might become fit for the fastidious society of the Macrobes." Later, Mark is forced to do simple, deliberately pointless or mildly offensive acts repeatedly. The kinds of things most people would find stupid or rude. For Mark, they are meant to gradually erode his sense of anything being important. Our ability to recognize good from bad, virtue from vice, or beautiful from ugly is precisely what makes us human — our ability to make value judgments. When we spend too much time surrounded by ugliness, it has a dulling effect on this especially human part of us. Even worse is when we are forced to call these ugly things beautiful, or bad things good. If we are not careful, it will ruin our ability to properly recognize anything of value in our lives. Interestingly, Mark is ultimately won over against N.I.C.E. when he refuses to trample on a crucifix — not because he is a Christian (he isn't yet), but because it is inherently ugly and evil nonetheless. When someone intentionally creates ugly art, Lewis calls on us to call it out as such. The beauty we include in our lives is not neutral, nor is it trivial.

Ed Thorp beat blackjack. Caught Madoff seventeen years before the SEC. Predicted Buffett would be the richest man in America. Compounded twenty years without a losing quarter. He is 93. Everything he did came from one paper written in 1956. The paper is still free. Almost nobody has read it. Vegas, 1961. Thorp is 28. He walks into Claude Shannon's MIT office asking for five minutes. Shannon, famously impossible to see, gives him the five minutes and stays for two years. Together they build the world's first wearable computer to beat roulette. It works. 9:58 The Buffett lunch, 1968. Thorp reads John Kelly's 1956 sizing paper. Meets Warren Buffett once. Walks away and tells his wife Buffett will one day be the richest in America. Sixty years later, exactly that. Thorp did the math on a person applying compounding to time. Same math as Kelly. 31:20 The one thing Thorp added. Kelly's paper gives you the mathematical maximum bet. Bet Kelly, optimal growth. Bet more, you die. Thorp bet half. Half Kelly gives up a fraction of growth for a huge cut in drawdown. Full Kelly routinely produces 40-60% drawdowns. Half Kelly usually keeps them under 20%. Same edge. A fraction of the pain. Every serious quant who survives uses half Kelly or less. The ones who don't are the blowup stories. Princeton Newport, 1969-1988. Nineteen straight years. 19-20% a year. Not one losing quarter. Kelly's paper, Shannon's math, half Kelly's number, and discipline nobody else could imitate. Madoff, 1991. An investor asks Thorp to check Madoff's returns. Days later, he has proof of fraud. He hands the SEC a memo. They file it. Seventeen years later Madoff collapses. Sixty-five billion in losses. The memo had been on someone's desk since 1991. 48:10 Enough. Thorp shut down Princeton Newport at its peak in 1988. Still compounding 19% a year. He walked away. "You can have enough. And it's better than not having enough." This is the layer nobody sells. Every course, every AI swarm is built to make you want more. Thorp read Kelly, sized his bets, made his money, and stopped. Almost nobody in his field ever has. Half Kelly on the size. Full self-awareness on when to walk. That is the formula. 2026. Thorp is 93. He still writes. He still teaches. The math was the easy part, he'll tell you. The signal was never the edge. The sizing was. Half of it. The paper has been in the Bell Labs library since 1956. It's still there. It's still free. Madoff was the loudest receipt. The stack takes new tuition every quarter.

veles @velesxbt

2 days ago

x.com/i/article/2076…

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In just under 3 minutes, Nancy Duarte identified the framework for the most successful presentations both in politics and business. "the greatest communicators of all time..." She identifies the two points in time you need: 1. What is 2. What could be She goes on to say, "You need to make that gap as big as possible because there's the common place of the status quo and you need to contrast that with the loftiness of your idea". Point 1: Presentations are about creating an emotional desire in your audience. Research has backed this idea up in how human make decisions. In people who have damaged the part of the brain responsible for emotion, they can't make even the simplest decision. Point 2: People are going to resist. This is why Duarte says to go back and forth between what is and what could be. She references a sailing technique to capture the resistance that if captured right makes the ship sail faster than the wind itself. The same applies for presentations. The back and forth and back and forth is what uses that resistance to your advantage and turns resistance into buy in. Point 3: End on a poetic and dramatic high note. Duarte goes on to say how she used this tool to analyze many of the most famous speeches and presentations. MLK's "I have a dream", Steve Jobs iPhone keynote, The Gettysburg Address, and so many more. While I learned about this framework after my time as a trial lawyer, it's one of the most powerful ways that I built my opening statements and closing arguments. It's how I was able to try and win dozens of the most vicious criminal cases in Texas on murders and child abuse. Show people the future state of bliss and make them feel it, and they will do whatever you want. As Ben Horowitz says, "the story is the strategy." @nancyduarte

Almost every argument about energy comes down to one number: energy density. How much energy is stored per kilogram of fuel or material. The numbers in MJ/kg: • Wood: 15 • Coal: 24 • Crude oil: 44 • Natural gas: 54 • Hydrogen (compressed): 120 • Lithium-ion battery: 0.7 • Uranium (fission): 80,000,000 • Hydrogen (fusion): 690,000,000 Read those last two again. A kilogram of uranium contains more energy than 3,000 tonnes of coal. A kilogram of hydrogen fusion fuel contains 45 million times more energy than a kilogram of oil. This is why: • Batteries struggle to replace liquid fuels in aviation and shipping. Energy density is 60x lower. • Nuclear submarines can run for 25 years without refuelling. • Fusion, if cracked, ends energy scarcity permanently – not just for decades, but for the lifetime of the Sun. The energy transition debate isn't about ideology. It's about physics. Every energy source is competing against millions of years of chemistry packed into fossil fuels – and, eventually, against the nucleus itself. Know the numbers. The debate becomes clearer.

In 1963, Benoit Mandelbrot showed that cotton prices don't follow a bell curve. He showed it again with wheat, interest rates, stocks, and indices. Wall Street thanked him, gave him a medal, and kept using the bell curve. Every fund blowup since has been the invoice. Mandelbrot wasn't a Wall Street insider. He was a mathematician at IBM, an outsider the economics establishment spent 40 years trying to bury. Most of his career, mainstream finance journals wouldn't touch him. He was right anyway. The graveyard of blown-up funds keeps proving it. The thread above sells you a better filter. Mandelbrot spent his life on the assumption underneath every filter, the one every filter salesman needs you not to question. The assumption is that price moves cluster near the average and big moves are almost impossible. Every Sharpe ratio, every VaR, every risk model in every fund quietly runs on it. Mandelbrot proved for four decades, in papers Wall Street chose not to read, that real markets have fat tails, wild variance, and rough repeating patterns at every scale. The 10-sigma move isn't once in a hundred lifetimes. In markets, it shows up on a Tuesday. The self-similarity part is the tell. Take a crypto chart and cover the axis labels. You cannot tell if you're looking at a one-minute or a one-year timeframe. The roughness looks the same because the underlying process is the same. It does not average out at longer horizons. It just repeats. This is why every model that promises the tail is 1-in-10,000 blows up on schedule. LTCM died in 1998 and the industry called it once-a-millennium. 2008 repeated it a decade later. Crypto compresses the same lesson into weeks. 3AC, Luna, FTX, every leveraged desk that went to zero on a weekend was running on the bell curve Mandelbrot buried in 1963. The takeaway isn't that filters are useless. It's that no filter tells you how much to bet when it's right. Sizing is what survives the tail. The filter tells you where to look. Sizing decides whether you're still alive to look tomorrow. Build the filter. Build the swarm. Build the sharpest model of your generation. Just remember they're all fitting a world that doesn't exist, and the part that survives the tail, that part, you still have to bring yourself. His TED talk is from 2010. It's free. It was free in 1963 too.

Roan @RohOnChain

a month ago

x.com/i/article/2062…

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The most credentialed woman I’ve ever seen once called a headline sexist for saying men were stronger than women. She’d worked for NASA, the UN, Harvard, and Oxford. I said “It doesn’t mean all women, it’s a generalization.” She said “Generalizations are problematic,” so I responded “All generalizations, or just some of them?”

Graves disturbios en Suiza tras quedar eliminados

The Renaissance period has absolutely the best aesthetics.

Today in History @TodayinHistory

5 days ago

Which historical period had the best aesthetics?

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A third grader just scored a 5 on AP Calculus BC. The system that trained him contains no LLM. The core is a knowledge graph one man spent 250 hours encoding by hand, two minutes per edge. The platform is Math Academy. Its "AI" is an expert system that routes each student through nearly 3,000 math topics, from 4th grade arithmetic to the math behind machine learning. Every node, every prerequisite link, every weight was placed manually by a team of mathematicians. The weights alone took Justin Skycak a full month: 1,500 topics at the time, roughly 5 prerequisite links each, 2 minutes to estimate each one. 8 hours a day of pure encoding, done before ChatGPT existed to ease the load. Why go through that? Because the graph unlocks mastery learning, the closest thing education research has to a cheat code. In 1984, Benjamin Bloom showed that students with one-on-one tutoring perform two standard deviations above a regular classroom. The average tutored kid beats 98% of the lecture hall. Nobody could afford a tutor per child, so the finding sat in journals for 40 years. A prerequisite graph with a mastery gate is the workaround. The system always knows the exact next topic a specific kid is ready for, drills it until proven, then moves on. Zero time spent waiting for 29 classmates. That waiting is most of school. A year of classroom math is roughly 150 hours of instruction, and the majority goes to pacing, review, and re-teaching. Strip it out and a motivated kid covers six grade levels in one calendar year. The origin makes it better: this grew out of a math program at Pasadena High School where 8th graders were passing AP Calculus BC, back when the founders were still hand-grading the whole thing. The most effective education AI running today is a graph a few humans built by hand, one edge at a time.

Alex Smith @ninja_maths

a week ago

For anyone wondering how a third-grader can complete six years' worth of math in a single year AND score a 5 on the AP Calculus exam. This knowledge graph spans 3,000 math topics, from 4th grade to the university level, providing the perfect basis for mastery learning.

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40 out of 86 Brown students scored a perfect 100 on their midterm. Then the professor moved the final in person, and 22 of those perfect scorers never showed up again. He'd suspected AI cheating from the start. The take-home midterm was deliberately harder than usual, yet the class averaged 96 when the historical range is 65 to 80. Some answers contained odd phrasing that matched what ChatGPT produced when he ran the questions through it himself. Roberto Serrano has taught economics at Brown for 34 years. He filed no accusations. He announced the final would be in person, count for half the grade, and that if the two distributions didn't match, the final alone would determine grades. Then the exodus. 27 students never showed up. 22 of them had perfect midterms. Of the 59 who did show, 19 failed. Several signed the exam and turned it in blank. The average fell from 96 to 48, the lowest in the course's history. He never needed a plagiarism detector. The cheaters identified themselves by walking away. A grade distribution became a confession. Here's the part nobody's sitting with. Serrano proved it. He sent the distributions to Brown's dean and provost. The provost never responded. The academic committee's reply amounted to calling it "a wake-up call." The students who bailed before the final walked away clean. Every university in America is now grading two populations, students and students plus ChatGPT, on one curve. The honest kids in Serrano's class watched a 96 average get set by machines, then sat a real final against it. The cheaters lost nothing. That's the incentive structure now, and it grades itself.

Polymarket @Polymarket

7 days ago

NEW: Ivy League professor suspected AI cheating, ordered an in-person final, & saw average scores plunge from 96 to 48.

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Two countries split from the same colonial body in 1965. One picked economic freedom. The other picked handouts and racial spoils. You already know how this ended. Singapore had no oil, no farmland, no hinterland. Just a swamp and a port. Lee Kuan Yew looked at that and trusted trade, low taxes, and hard money. Central planners hate what he did. Malaysia went the other way. In 1971 Kuala Lumpur launched the New Economic Policy, a state program handing quotas, contracts, and university seats to ethnic Malays. Politicians decided who got what. A commissar fantasy dressed in liberal language. Now let's look at the numbers. In 1965 both places sat around $500 per capita. Today Singapore clears $84,000. Malaysia sits near $13,000. Same climate, same starting line, one sixth the result. The Singapore dollar holds its value because the Monetary Authority of Singapore manages it against a currency basket and refuses to print its way out of trouble. The ringgit has lost roughly two thirds of its value against the Singapore dollar since 1981. You cannot subsidize your way to wealth. You cannot redistribute what you never let people produce. Every ringgit funneled through a quota is a ringgit some bureaucrat spent on his own vision instead of a customer's. Malaysia bet on planners deciding outcomes. Singapore bet on people deciding for themselves. The gap between $84,000 and $13,000 is your answer.

powerful moments in bar chart technology

How do I know media brainwashing is real? Obama’s ICE Chief received an award for removing over 900,000 illegal aliens. Trump’s ICE chief was called a Nazi. It is the same person - Tom Homan. The difference? What the media told people to believe.

Thomas Sowell debunks the myth that the rich get rich by exploiting the poor: “If it’s true that the rich are rich because they’re keeping the poor poor, then in a country with lots of billionaires you should correspondingly have great amounts of poor people. But if you compare the actual data, there are more billionaires in the United States than Africa and the Middle East put together; and yet the standard of living of the poor in the United States is higher than that of people in Africa and the Middle East.”

🚨 Marco Rubio Predicted the Rise of ‘Democratic Socialism’ Back in 2020 “At the core of democratic socialism is Marxism. And at the core of Marxism is this fake offer that if you turn over more of your individual freedom, we're going to provide you security … and you don't get it back just because the security they promised you didn't happen. That's what we're on the verge of having to decide here in this country.”

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇲🇽 Bellingham scores twice, wins the game… then finds 17-year-old Gilberto Mora and swaps jerseys with him. That’s class. Mexico’s future is already looking dangerous. Writer: Claudio