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Political scientist writing Drezner's World on international relations, American politics and the marketplace of ideas; author of The Ideas Industry.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Trump's foreign policy and national security team is staffed with incompetent people at every level.

  Their words

  Remember: when it comes to Trump's foreign policy and national security team, it's incompetents all the way down.

  danieldrezner.substack.com

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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  Elon Musk was flagrantly incompetent when he took on a government role, contradicting predictions that his business talent would translate there.

  government

  Their words

  What we do know is that the actual Elon Musk that we have to live with on this here timeline was flagrantly incompetent in government, contrary to Noah's previous predictions.

  The Acemoglu Wars Are All About AIprogrammablemutter.com

Software engineer and writer; worked on Mapbox and built Placemark and Simple Statistics, and blogs at macwright.com.

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  Decentralized networks can be both principled and mainstream-popular without giving up usability.

  Their words

  It's exciting, and shows that you don't have to accept a bad set of tradeoffs to make tech that's both principled and popular.

  Technology optimism hourmacwright.com

Economist at George Mason University. Writes Overcoming Bias on prediction markets, signalling and the far future, and wrote The Age of Em and The Elephant in the Brain.

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  The world is shaped by how consistently incompetent governance is, and competent governance would remake it

  Their words

  As an econ professor who specialized in governance, I can assure you that the world is greatly structured by the fact that we typically have pretty incompetent governance.

  My Best Idea: Decision Marketsovercomingbias.com

Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".

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  AI will let citizens make their governments legible and accountable, reversing the historical direction in which only states could read society.

  Their words

  Something I've been thinking about - I am bullish on people (empowered by AI) increasing the visibility, legibility and accountability of their governments.

  @karpathy on Xx.com

Investment researcher and engineer who runs Lyn Alden Investment Strategy, writing on macroeconomics, currency systems and equity analysis.

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  Decentralized finance mainly converts custodial risk into technical risk rather than eliminating risk altogether.

  Their words

  While there is some utility value in DeFi, it basically lets users transform custodial risk into technical risk (e.g. bridge protocol hacks), which is not a free lunch.

  Why Most Cryptocurrencies Won’t Accrue Valuelynalden.com

Economist at the Hoover Institution; wrote The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level and blogs as The Grumpy Economist.

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  Trust in institutions has fallen because the institutions have been repeatedly and spectacularly wrong.

  Their words

  Well, when the institutions are over and over spectacularly wrong, whether just incompetent, politicized, or mendacious, there is a reason for loss of trust.

  Climate turning pointgrumpy-economist.com

Economist specialising in China's economy, international macroeconomics and global trade, and author of The New China Playbook.

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  China is politically centralised and economically decentralised, and the belief that a handful of people run its economy is the West's biggest misconception about it.

  China

  Their words

  The biggest misunderstanding is somehow that a group of people or even just one person runs the entire Chinese economy. It is far from the reality. It is a very complex, large economy, and even if there is an extreme form of political centralization, the economy is totally decentralized.

  youtube.com

Programmer and streamer; was an engineer at Netflix, now teaches and argues about editors, Vim and how people learn to program.

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  Leaning on AI trades knowledge for speed, and the price may be a generation of programmers in which juniors stay juniors forever.

  Their words

  Sometimes you have to move fast at the sacrifice of knowledge, and I'm totally on board for that, but I worry that what we'll create is an entire generation of incompetent programmers who can do some amount of things well, but anything that is unique, bespoke, or requires some extra like little elbow grease, might become very difficult. It might cause a whole chasm where juniors remain juniors forever.

  youtube.com

Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.

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  Decentralisation does not explain why Spain builds subways cheaply and Britain does not: the cheap countries include Europe's most centralised ones.

  Europe

  Their words

  In truth, the UK shares high costs with more decentralized countries, and Spain shares low ones with more centralized ones.

  Low Spanish Costs are not About Decentralizationpedestrianobservations.com