What am I up to now?
September 1, 2025
September, 2025
Contents
Updates
Hello from DC! I am here until the 12th, and in New York City the 13th-15th, before heading back to San Francisco. If you’re in any of these places, please say hi! And sorry for getting this up a few days late, especially to QM and ZR who both texted to ask if I’m alright.
My wonderful girlfriend and I have a new apartment in San Francisco, two minutes from the nearest BART and 52 minutes from Evans Hall, where I’ll be spending the winter and spring semesters as a visiting student. The apartment is large and bright, and it will soon be furnished with a jungle/Mid-Century Modern vibe. The second bedroom will be an office for MWG and an occassional guest room for anyone passing through!
This is what Gemini made, based off of the jungle/MCM vibe and a picture of our living room with only a couch.
I spent much of August in the South Bay. First, I did a few hikes around Portola Redwoods State Park, west of Palo Alto, which has for my money the best redwoods in the Bay Area. The Peter’s Creek loop, which I sweated out in three hours, was completely empty on a sunny Friday afternoon, and ended in a deep dark confluence of three creeks around a lush redwood grove. Arriving here was sudden, a much more dramatic reveal than any other grove I’ve visited.
Then I spent the last two weeks at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab, for a summer course on AI run by my friends Phil Trammell and Zach Mazlish. The highlight was the attendees: I learned a lot about how young economists are thinking about the potential of AI. The upshot from the course material is that economic models predict massive change and uncertainty across economic indicators. So there are two possibilities: either things are about to get weird, or the models are wrong.
The general view among the people at this course is that the only thing that can stop this process now is AI capabilities slowing down. Maybe we’ll run out of data on which to train the models, or training won’t be as efficient at scale, or the potential for mass unemployment will lead government to step in and force a slow down. Maybe you think a slow-down is imminent; maybe you think the tech is moving so fast it’ll blast through any obstacle.
One attendee remarked that, in traditional debates of macroeconomics (business cycles, monetary policy, etc.), we just have to resign ourselves to never knowing the right answer. Not so in the economics of AI: in a year or three, we’ll know who was right and who was wrong.
Elsewhere in AI+Joseph news, I’ve been awarded an “Asterisk AI Blogging” fellowship. I’ll be writing a few posts on this blog and elsewhere about the role of AI in poor countries. The rest of the cohort (to be announced soon!) is really cool, and I’m excited to work with all of them.
Reading
Three favorites this month.
Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, Katherine Rundell
Rundell is now solidly on my “read-anything-they-write” list. I loved her Golden Mole, and her children’s fiction, and now her biography of 17th century English poet John Donne. Borges called Donne “a truly great poet,” even if he had only written these lines:
License my roving hands, and let them go Behind, before, above, between, below! O my America! My new-found land! My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned.
Rundell provides a more thorough argument, a full biography, with considerations of the love and erotic poetry, the defense of self-homicide in Biathanatos, and the sermons. Donne as lover, polticker, clergyman, and friend.
I thank him for, upon meeting an elephant in London, calling it “The only harmless great thing.”
Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War, Perry Anderson
A fun historiography of the couses of WWI, with biographies of six leading historians who wrote on the topic. Anderson is a Marxist historian and has no use for counterfactuals.
Indigenous Continent, Pekka Hämäläinen
I had previously read his Lakota America.
The focus of this is on the agency of Native Americans in the colonial story of North America. The author makes some leaps in narrative, which leaves questions – a common path across the book is: look how well this confederation was doing, the English or the Dutch or the French are on the run and then! “In a sudden reversal”, all the indians are dead. Hämäläinen is definitely on the side of the indians; who wouldn’t be.
Links
The Panama Playlists are musical selections from celebrities and politcians’ Spotify accounts. “The Panama Papers revealed hidden bank accounts. This reveals hidden tastes.”
A silly but fun analogy of the Mamluk rule in Egypt to AI takeover.
Where are the [AI] models that :
- • have a knowledge cut-off of 1950?
- • are just trained on the best books?
- • are trained only on open CCTV cameras?
- • are just trained on books and youtube?
- • just on Pulitzer winners and the Criterion collection?
A lot of the bloggers I’ve followed for years are now having kids. Freddie Deboer has always been a kinda embarassing read for me; too polemical, too petty, and focused on the news of the day. If he would only write about things he loved every daylike I linked to last month instead of things he’s annoyed about…
So I’m very glad he’s had a kid, because how he writes about love.
I loved the movie High Fidelity.
Dan Wang’s new book has been all over my internet recently, telling you a bit about where I hang out. In his interview with Statecraft, Wang mentioned he’d re-read every issue of the CCP’s theory magazine, Qiushi. The title comes from the phrase “Seek truth from facts”, a favorite of Mao’s. MWG got me a tea mug with this slogal on it, probably due to my Bayesian past; it’s my favorite mug.
A sad and mouth-watering article about drug addict day-laborers in Las Vegas.
Everything they say is as impermanent as steam. One minute they are madly petting each other like teenagers. The next they are screwing other people, breaking bonds like they are toothpicks, finding the soft spot in the other and poking at it until it bleeds.
The coolest sports video I watched this year. If anyone knows a channel which posts these (from different teams, sports, venues), I would immediately subscribe.
Previously
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