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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

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

Chief product officer at the live-shopping marketplace Whatnot, previously chief product officer at Twitch and a product lead on growth at Twitter.

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  Agentic shopping will not take over commerce, because most shopping is low-intent — e-commerce has never passed twenty percent of American retail.

  America

  Their words

  most of commerce in America isn't actually high intent. Like how many years are we into e-commerce now? Like 30 years into e-commerce and e-commerce has never exceeded 20% of retail spend in America.

  youtube.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

Machine learning engineer and consultant focused on RAG and retrieval systems. He writes about applied AI engineering at jxnl.co and is the author of the instructor library.

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  AI has made ability nearly free, making taste the main bottleneck separating good creators from mediocre ones.

  Their words

  As AI has allowed more and more people to create things, the biggest differentiation, the biggest skill people are lacking, is taste itself.

  If You Want Taste, You're Gonna Have to Eatjxnl.co

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

• Likedrcmnd.app

  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

Writes on effective altruism, energy and the arithmetic behind arguments people repeat — including how much electricity a chatbot query actually uses.

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  The American states with the fastest electricity load growth saw prices fall rather than rise.

  data centersenergyAmerica

  Their words

  A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study found that state-level load growth from 2019 to 2024 — including growth driven by data centers, manufacturing, and electrification — was associated with lower average retail electricity prices, not higher ones.

  blog.andymasley.com

Development economist; argues that letting people move to rich countries does more for the poor than aid, and wrote Let Their People Come.

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  Public hostility to immigration comes from fusing “who may work here” with “who becomes one of us”, and separating the two dissolves it.

  immigration

  Their words

  When you separate those two questions in public dialogue, the negative attitudes disappear.

  english.elpais.com

Essayist, journalist and independent researcher on Chinese politics, strategy and cultural history; author of the blog The Scholar's Stage.

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  Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900

  Their words

  David Graff's Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900 is actually a political-institutional history of China from 200 AD-1000 AD, and is probably the best political narrative history we have for the time period.

  scholars-stage.org