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Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

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  Building institutions that can incorporate diverse perspectives, adapt flexibly to change, and keep public legitimacy is the central challenge of state capacity today.

  Their words

  Creating institutional forms that can incorporate diversity and respond flexibly to a changing environment while maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of citizens is the fundamental project of state capacity that faces us.

  programmablemutter.com

Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.

From one piece CROSSPOST: NICHOLAS GRUEN: Hobbes on Spin & Bullshit 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Much disagreement is genuinely rooted in conflicting values or contested facts, not merely a lack of institutional standing for evidence.

  Their words

  Disagreement is, often, genuinely about values or truly contested facts.

  braddelong.substack.com

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  Modern institutional speech does face adversaries, through journalism, litigation, regulators, social media, and whistleblowers.

  Their words

  it is not true that modern institutional speech faces "no adversary": we have journalism, litigation, regulators, social media pile-ons, whistleblowers, and o on.

  braddelong.substack.com

Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.

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  Dependency cooldowns are currently the best defense against supply chain attacks via compromised package publishers.

  Their words

  I guess our best defense right now is dependency cooldowns - giving new package releases a few days before upgrading to them, in the hope that supply chain attacks like this will be spotted by someone else.

  simonwillison.net

Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.

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  Manhattan Project scientists underweighted institutional responses such as second-strike forces and mutually assured retaliation when judging the likelihood of catastrophic nuclear war.

  Their words

  They tended to underweight the endogenous response of political and military institutions to the catastrophe—the emergence of second-strike forces, elaborate command systems, crisis management, and above all mutually assured retaliation.

  marginalrevolution.com

Writes Strange Loop Canon, on the intersection of technology, economics and business — "building models of the world to understand these problem areas and to define them better".

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  Aligning multi-agent AI systems is fundamentally a problem of institutional and political design, not model training.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  Multi-agent alignment is fundamentally a liberalism project.

  AIs are companies, my friendstrangeloopcanon.com

Author of Recoding America; founded Code for America and was US deputy chief technology officer from 2013 to 2014. Writes Eating Policy on why governments cannot do what they decide to do.

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  When institutional transformation keeps failing, leaders should start fresh with new entities rather than keep reforming the old ones.

  Their words

  we've both come to believe that when transformation fails repeatedly, it's time for something different, and one of the tools that leaders need to add to their tool belts (and probably use a lot more frequently than they do today), is starting fresh, creating new entities (agencies and departments, for example) and either endowing them with new authorities or transferring authorities from legacy institutions to the new ones.

  Thinking the unthinkableeatingpolicy.com

Clinical psychologist and clinical professor of psychiatry at UCSF. His 2010 meta-analysis established psychodynamic therapy as an evidence-based treatment; he has argued ever since that "evidence-based therapy" is used as a marketing term.

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  When institutions can only offer compromised care they end up calling it best practice, and the patients who do not get better conclude that they themselves are beyond help.

  Their words

  When patients don't get the help they need, they don't come away thinking, I didn't get good treatment. They come away thinking, I am too broken to be helped. They leave more hopeless and demoralized than when they came. That is harm.

  When Compromised Care Becomes "Best Practice"jonathanshedler.substack.com

Author of Recoding America; founded Code for America and was US deputy chief technology officer from 2013 to 2014. Writes Eating Policy on why governments cannot do what they decide to do.

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  Real institutional turnarounds are evidence a system only functions when normal rules are circumvented, not that it works.

  Their words

  These wins are not proof that the system works; in fact, they are clear evidence that the system only works when it is circumvented.

  North Carolina’s bold move on civil serviceeatingpolicy.com

Writer and illustrator, author of Am I There Yet? and Out of the Blue; writes the newsletter Out of the Blue on grief, joy and everyday attention.

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  The modern economy pressures nearly every kind of creative or professional worker to also become a small media company, a skill unrelated to their original craft.

  Their words

  the economy now asks every creative person to essentially become a small media company, which is a very specific skill set that has nothing to do with why most of us started making things in the first place

  On Monetizationmariandrew.substack.com

Novelist, author of twelve books including Foundry, Bandwidth and Cumulus. Sends a newsletter of monthly book recommendations.

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  Jurassic Park

  Their words

  Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton is a surprisingly weird and weirdly underrated novel given how many copies it sold and the popularity of the blockbuster franchise it spawned. The story weaves together many apparently disparate threads and there are extensive speculative digressions into the biotechnology, business interests, and institutional dynamics that make the park possible and its dissolution inevitable. If the movie is supremely entertaining, the book is supremely thought-provoking.

  eliotpeper.substack.com

Senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation; writes Second Best, and was the Niskanen Center's director of social policy before that.

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  Oil-rich Gulf monarchies are effectively post-scarcity societies, with institutions adapted to match that condition.

  Their words

  oil-rich Gulf monarchies are the closest thing to post-scarcity societies on earth today, with the institutional adaptions to match

  Notes from the UAEsecondbest.ca

Co-founder of Rockstar Games, lead writer of the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series, and founder of Absurd Ventures since leaving in 2020.

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  Commercial pressure and creative ambition point in the same direction, because the way to make an expensive game's money back is to make something great.

  ambition

  Their words

  So you have to be, in your mind, you’re spending large amounts of someone else’s money. You have to try and make it back for them. But at the same time, my argument with myself was, well, if we… The way to make it back is try and make something great. So both pressures are pointing in the same direction.

  youtube.com

CEO of Redwood Research, where he works on AI control: making sure a powerful model cannot cause a catastrophe even if it is misaligned and trying to.

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  Risk from a scheming model should be managed the way insider security risk is: assume some of them are compromised and stay safe anyway.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  We're advocating that companies handle risk from scheming models in a similar way–striving to ensure that they'll be safe even if their alignment efforts fail to prevent models from scheming.

  redwoodresearch.substack.com

Writer and consultant on technology, organizations and history; founded the blog Ribbonfarm and now writes the Contraptions newsletter.

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  Debt: The First 5000 Years

  Their words

  I don’t know about you, but I personally feel starved of ambitious sensemaking frames for recent history that aren’t quite as silly as say Friedman’s World is Flat or Harari’s Sapiens, or quite as ideologically compromised as Graeber’s Debt.

  contraptions.venkateshrao.com

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  The World Is Flat

  Their words

  I don’t know about you, but I personally feel starved of ambitious sensemaking frames for recent history that aren’t quite as silly as say Friedman’s World is Flat or Harari’s Sapiens, or quite as ideologically compromised as Graeber’s Debt.

  contraptions.venkateshrao.com

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  Sapiens

  Their words

  I don’t know about you, but I personally feel starved of ambitious sensemaking frames for recent history that aren’t quite as silly as say Friedman’s World is Flat or Harari’s Sapiens, or quite as ideologically compromised as Graeber’s Debt.

  contraptions.venkateshrao.com