📈 first Derivative [101]
🦠 COVID postmortem—🤖 AI software & hardware—🌎 grand strategy—📚 a literary jackal
✍️ Welcome to all the new readers who found fD through my friend Emily Sundberg’s interview. If you missed it, check out the recent recap on the first 100 issues. And for anyone those of you who don’t already know about it, I highly recommend checking out Emily’s daily business newsletter—on startups, food, beauty, culture —which is as fun to read as it is informative. It’s one of the few Substacks I pay for.
🎓👻 I was up in Boston last week visiting a friend and going back to our old late night spots. Walking past Gen Z undergrads made me feel like a ghost among the living and gave me a new appreciation for the phrase “my old haunts”…
📺 About my rewatch of Band of Brothers and The Pacific, fDer Andrew S says “my classics prof once called BoB ‘pre-Iraq war WW2’ and the Pacific ‘post Iraq war WW2’”, which I think captures the difference pretty well. Apple TV+ is coming out in January with Masters of the Air (same producers Spielberg & Hanks) which is going to follow the Air Force’s 100th Bomb Group through the Second World War.
🇨🇳 A thread on the epistemological problems with the Osnos piece in fD99
🇵🇸 A thread on the origins of Hamas up to their recent attack
Good reading,
-Teddy
(n.b. still figuring out this paywall stuff but starting next issue paid subs should get the full newsletter, regular subs a preview email, and then regular subs will get the full version in their inbox a day later)
🏥🦠 Matt Yglesias wrote an interesting postmortem review of his response to COVID. Some key takeaways were:
overestimating effectivenss of vaccines in preventing transmission
I expressed erroneous overconfidence about the vaccines’ ability to block transmission. And because I overestimated vaccines’ ability to block transmission, I overestimated the case on the merits for mandatory and quasi-mandatory means to promote vaccination. A lot of conservatives see arguments for vaccine mandates as an example of Covid hawk extremism, but I think a lot of us embraced them as an alternative to Covid hawk extremism.
the overstay of mask mandates
“And the Biden administration spent months continuing to support increasingly ineffective mask mandates, only truly seizing the vaxxed and relaxed mantle when forced to do so by federal courts…
Rather than mandates, the reasonable approach would have been to combine curve-flattening with CDC advice that reflected our emerging understanding of the scientific facts: Outside is better than inside, windows open are better than windows closed, HEPA filters help, good masks help, physical fitness helps, age is the main predictor of severity, etc.”
the importance of sticking with the crisis playbook you made before
Importantly, the reason public health professionals converged on this curve-flattening idea in early March 2020 is that it’s what the pandemic response playbook written in the period between 9/11 and the swine flu scare of 2009 said we should do. Most of us did not pay a lot of attention to that pandemic planning work, but it resulted in some pretty good ideas and we should have stuck with them. I’m not 100% sure why we didn’t. But during Trump’s “15 Days to Slow the Spread,” two crucial things happened — Trump decided he didn’t actually care about slowing the spread, and the public health community flipped to something more like a Covid Zero mindset. I still don’t really know why either of those things happened.”
An fD reader working in public health told me: “it was also really frustrating because we saw in real time how covid transmission and our understanding of it was evolving, but it would take months for the CDC to approve any sort of public communications or statements. So what the public heard was always weeks behind”
Relatedly, the Cato Institute did an analysis of how Sweden handled COVID, which is better or about as well as comparable countries without adopting some of the more draconian measures that others did:
“They failed to consider a third option: that people adapt voluntarily when they realize that lives are at stake. Swedes quickly changed their behavior and mostly followed the recommendations…
The difference was that if Swedes decided, based on local knowledge and individual needs, that they had to go to work, exercise, or meet a relative or a friend, they could do that without being stopped by the police. This meant that the pandemic became less politicized in Sweden and perhaps also that people accepted the need to live under extraordinary conditions for longer than they would have if they didn’t have these individual emergency exits.”
Again, sticking to the playbook:
“For decades the World Health Organization had planned for a pandemic, and lockdowns of entire societies were never part of the discussion. Instead, plans focused on protecting the most vulnerable but trying to keep society as a whole up and running. What set Sweden apart was that it stuck to that plan, and from a Swedish perspective, it looked like it was the rest of the world that was engaging in a risky, unprecedented experiment”
On the pattern of politicians wanting to look they were doing something overriding public health authorities:
“In some other countries, public health authorities thought more along the Swedish lines but were overruled by politicians who faced a demand to show strength. For example, the Danish and Norwegian agencies were opposed to closing borders and schools, but political considerations trumped their concerns. Even in Britain, where the popular perception is that the government eventually agreed to a lockdown because scientific advisers called for it, it has been revealed that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s powerful political adviser Dominic Cummings pressed the government’s independent scientific advisers to recommend faster and broader lockdown measures.”
🤖💬 OpenAI launched a platform for anyone to create customized AI agents and sell them in the “GPT Store”.
🕹 Meanwhile, Humane, a start-up launched by ex-Apple, husband-and-wife founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno released their first product, the “Ai Pin”, a new tech device form factor that is AI-native (link to the demo here).
Their mission? No less than liberating the world from its smartphone addiction. The solution? More technology…
They’re billing the pin as the first artificially intelligent device. It can be controlled by speaking aloud, tapping a touch pad or projecting a laser display onto the palm of a hand…
The technology is a step forward from Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant. It can follow a conversation from one question to the next, without needing explicit context. It’s also capable of editing a single word in a dictated message, rather than requiring the user to correct an error by repeating the text from beginning to end, as other systems do. And it does it from a gadget that’s reminiscent of the badges worn in Star Trek.
A lot of new tech doesn’t end up changing our lives (Google Glass) or if they do, they settle into less ambitious roles (Amazon Echo). But you can also look to the iPad and Apple Watch for less than stellar initial reviews of now ubiquitous products. It may not be Humane’s AI Pin bet but something will eventually hit and bring us fully forward into the era of ambient computing. In the meantime, it is pretty cool to have something today that looks straight out of Star Trek.
🎧🌎 A stimulating podcast episode (transcript) interviewing Sarah C.M. Paine, Professor of History and Strategy at the Naval War College, that covered a number of topics including:
continental vs maritime powers think and how this explains Xi & Putin's decisions
how a war with China over Taiwan would shake out and whether it could go nuclear
why the British Empire fell apart
why China went communist
whether Japanese occupation was good for Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria
lessons from WW1, WW2, the Cold War, and the Sino-Japanese War
how to study history properly and why leaders keep making the same mistakes
My friend recommended the Dwarkesh Podcast to me saying it’s like “lex but actually knowledgeable from doing research beforehand”. I’ve never listened to Lex Fridman’s podcast so I can’t say but Dwarkesh Patel does a pretty good job of asking pointed follow up questions and not just taking everything his interviewees say at face value. This episode was pretty sweeping, in a good way like the Luttwak interview in fD98, so it was good to have an interlocutor willing to hone in on some specifics in the grand narratives. I also appreciated how many times Paine acknowledged her lack of expertise in certain areas or in applying some of her historical learnings.
📚 An interesting and provocative interview with literary agent, Andrew Wylie, known for his agressive tactics that earned him the nickname “The Jackal”, a moniker that sounds more fitting for a terrorist. I don’t think I’ve read an interview with a subject that gives such unfiltered and PR-unfriendly answers, it’s great.
Wylie, whose father was a high-level editor at Houghton Mifflin, grew up a privileged young scalawag, attending St. Paul’s School, from which he was dismissed, and Harvard, where he insulted one of his thesis advisers, and eventually moved to New York in the 1970s to become a poet and interviewer. Once there, he fell in with Andy Warhol’s crowd, behaved in various ways like a wild man and then, in 1980 and in need of steadier work, began transforming himself into a hugely successful literary agent.
Over the years, the Wylie Agency’s clients have included Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Martin Amis and John Updike. (All of whose estates, along with those of other luminaries like Borges and Calvino, are now represented by the agency.) Wylie’s roster of contemporary authors includes Sally Rooney, Salman Rushdie and Karl Ove Knausgaard among its blue-chip multitude…
Such voracious acquisition of clients at one point led to Wylie’s being called the Jackal, presumably for his ruthless pursuit of other agents’ authors. That fearsome reputation, along with actual paradigm-shifting changes in his approach to agenting (namely his focus on exploiting the value of authors’ backlists and his determination that publishers pay fat advances for work of high literary quality — even if it might not sell in the short term)
the front picture is very reflective of the theme...COVID..