📈 first Derivative [82]

April 7, 2023

via Midjourney

📚One of my resolutions this year was to read more novels after a few abysmal years of barely any fiction. Just finished up #4 this year, Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, and I’m thinking of tackling Mating next or whatever book my book club picks. Let me know if you have any recs.

📺 I’ve also been rewatching Mad Men (in the middle of season 2 now) for the first time since college. It’s been long enough that I’d forgotten most of the plot and watching it now after some years of corporate work and also working in writers’ rooms (which at times Don’s creative meetings feel like a thinly veiled stand-in for), I’m kind of amazed by how different the show feels. Don certainly comes off like less of an antihero and other characters that I used to not understand or be annoyed by are so much more sympathetic, as are their workplace dynamics.

😎👔🥃 And I’m reminded of how sartorially influential Mad Men was when it was airing. Who knows if it’s true but it feels like that show singlehandedly brought back Clubmasters, Old Fashioneds, and the whole Mid-century modern revival. Speaking of which, I’ve been reading a few pieces lately on the return of prep and just started listening to this podcast series on it, if you want to join me.

🤖🎨 Another thing that’s been on my mind lately is generative AI and its use for making art. I’ve had a lot of fun making the images for fD on Midjourney and I’ve seen a lot of really cool stuff like this short clip, “Balenciaga Star Wars”. In the short to medium term, I think AI tools are going to radically lower the amount of labor and money required to create movie-quality effects. But in terms of what’s out there now, I think we already have the tools in place to create entirely AI-created works of storytelling comparable to something like La Jétee, which is really just still photos with narration (full film here). Really excited for ambitious filmmakers to start adopting and mastering these tools to create impressive artistic works in their own right. By the way, if you really want to hear something that’ll blow your mind, check out this “Jay-Z” song.

📩 If you enjoy reading fD, please consider sharing it with someone person you think would like it.

🙏🏼 Happy Passover, Easter, Eid, and Coachella to all who observe, and happy reading :)

-TK

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🇺🇸📉 Putting some numbers on what we’ve all probably felt in our own lives, a new poll measures the dramatic decline in traditional American social values such as patriotism, religion, having children, etc. (WSJ | Aaron Zitner | Mar 2023)

The changes since the late 90s, especially in patriotism, are pretty stark. For me, the poll dates almost neatly align with my conscious life, with my earliest memories just barely including 9/11 but I do remember the surge of patriotism right after.

Bill McInturff, a pollster who worked on a previous Journal survey that measured these attitudes along with NBC News, said that “these differences are so dramatic, it paints a new and surprising portrait of a changing America.’’ He surmised that “perhaps the toll of our political division, Covid and the lowest economic confidence in decades is having a startling effect on our core values.’’

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😇🤷🏻‍♂️😈 My friend and fD reader Keyon, sent me this excerpt I had forgotten from that New Yorker article on the death of the English major:

I’ve probably met more effective altruists (EA) in the past year than before and I’m always reminded how influential EA is, and how popular it’s become, especially in tech and especially in AI circles. But as someone who remains highly skeptical of EA, it was pretty disappointing to read that.

But on that note, my friend Matt Mandel, recently wrote a great piece that I think is well worth reading, interrogating some of the philosophical underpinnings of EA by clearly responding point by point to arguments made by, William MacAskill, one of the more well-known champions of EA. (Substack | Matt Mandel | Aug 2022)

I think EAs should care more about debates around which ethical theory is true and why. The EA community is really invested in problems of applied consequentialist ethics such as "how should we think about low probability / high, or infinite, magnitude risks", "how should we discount future utility", "ought the magnitudes of positive and negative utility be weighed equally", etc. The answers to questions in population ethics and other applied ethical areas, which are largely accepted by EAs as important questions, turn on what the rest of your ethical stack looks like (ie on your metaethics and normative ethics). You can't determine how many points you get for scoring without resolving whether you're playing basketball or football. EA needs more clarity on the most foundational questions in order to answer downstream questions. The answer to “how should we discount future utility” depends on what you think we “should” do generally.

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🕵️‍♂️👩‍💻🗳 Jacob Siegel penned a contemporary history of disinformation and its dangerous evolution into a justification for our national security state and tech companies to work together closely to not only surveil but shape the thoughts of the American public. (Tablet | Jacob Siegel | Mar 2023)

With contemporary history, you have to take the good with the bad. Of course, it’s harder to be objective without enough distance for perspective, not to mention you need time for all the relevant information to become clear and available. That being said, I still think it’s useful for making sense of the maelstrom of the moment. Siegel’s essay is polemical, sometimes disjointed, and at times borders on paranoid, but then again maybe with good reason. I’ve really appreciated the quality of his writing and thinking before and that’s why I’m including this. Not to mention I think his subject is an objectively important one that calls for active consideration. It’s always easier to miss observing changes when they’re happening to the lens.

At companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Amazon, the upper management levels had always included veterans of the national security establishment. But with the new alliance between U.S. national security and social media, the former spooks and intelligence agency officials grew into a dominant bloc inside those companies…

By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning weapons of war against Americans citizens. It turned the public arenas where social and political life take place into surveillance traps and targets for mass psychological operations…

Together they operated an industrial-scale censorship machine in which the government and NGOs sent tickets to the tech companies that flagged objectionable content they wanted scrubbed. That structure allowed the DHS to outsource its work to the Election Integrity Project (EIP), a consortium of four groups: the Stanford Internet Observatory; private anti-disinformation company Graphika (which had formerly been employed by the Defense Department against groups like ISIS in the war on terror); Washington University’s Center for an Informed Public; and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab. Founded in 2020 in partnership with the DHS, the EIP served as the government’s “deputized domestic disinformation flagger,” according to congressional testimony from journalist Michael Shellenberger, who notes that the EIP claims it classified more than 20 million unique “misinformation incidents” between Aug. 15 and Dec. 12, 2020. As EIP head Alex Stamos explained, this was a work-around for the problem that the government “lacked both kinda the funding and the legal authorizations.”

I do think there’s been a subtle but powerful shift here. If the post-9/11 security state established surveillance to discover dangerous elements in our society, there now seems to be an overt use of domestic defense to justify an effort to shape how we think. In the first phase, we had a press that was alert to and skeptical of the spying programs under Bush and Obama and there was at least nominal outrage. But that doesn’t seem to be the case now.

Of course there are violent extremists in America, as there have always been. However, if anything, the problem is less severe now than it was in the 1960s and 1970s, when political violence was more common. Exaggerated claims about a new breed of domestic extremism so dangerous it cannot be handled through existing laws, including domestic terrorism statutes, is itself a product of the U.S.-led information war, which has effaced the difference between speech and action.

I think this is one of the weak spots of Siegel’s argument. It doesn’t do enough to address the reality of Jan 6, which to me at least, is a strong piece of evidence that maybe there is an unprecedented domestic threat fed by an organized effort to misinform and agitate a significant portion of the American public, a threat that maybe does require a proportional toolkit and response.

What is coming into being is a new form of government and social organization that is as different from mid-twentieth century liberal democracy as the early American republic was from the British monarchism that it grew out of and eventually supplanted. A state organized on the principle that it exists to protect the sovereign rights of individuals, is being replaced by a digital leviathan that wields power through opaque algorithms and the manipulation of digital swarms…

The human art of politics, which would have required real negotiation and compromise with Trump supporters, was abandoned in favor of a specious science of top-down social engineering that aimed to produce a totally administered society.

I’m sympathetic to this. fD could be summed up as what developments I think an active citizen (American or global) has a responsibility to keep up with. So a state and culture that nudges us to be passive consumers of material and political experience is definitely a concern. And I think this is a larger point that goes beyond the mechanisms and changes that Siegel covers.

It may be impossible to know exactly what effect the ban on reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptops had on the 2020 vote, but the story was clearly seen as threatening enough to warrant an openly authoritarian attack on the independence of the press. The damage to the country’s underlying social fabric, in which paranoia and conspiracy have been normalized, is incalculable.

I’m no Trump supporter but I do think the Hunter Biden laptop story was overtly suppressed like nothing I’ve ever seen, where the New York Post’s Twitter account was taken down and you couldn’t even post the story. I think it’s important to not forget that 1) that happened and 2) the details of the story have largely been corroborated, certainly to the point where it should have been up for public discussion in an election year. At the very least, the public and reputable media outlets should have had as much interest in the story of potential corruption as they did when it concerned Jared Kushner, instead of accepting the manufactured consensus that it was Russian disinformation. My concern is less with Hunter Biden here and more with the kind of unprecedented response it provoked and the lack of interest in an appropriate post-mortem.

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💰📈🇰🇷 Activist investing is on the rise in South Korea, challenging sleepy managements and tightly controlled family companies. (FT | Song Jung-a | Mar 2023)

A rising number of activist investors are targeting Korea, with domestic players taking on the old guard to unlock higher share prices. The country’s companies are among the cheapest in the world, with the Kospi index trading at a price-to-book ratio of about 0.91 times, close to a 20-year low.

The number of companies targeted by activist investors increased six-fold over the past three years to 47 in 2022, according to analytics company Insightia. That makes Korea the fifth-largest activist market in the world.

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🏗🏙📉 Another data point in the ongoing commercial real estate troubles where distress is impacting even the high-end properties: (WSJ | Konrad Putzier | Mar 2023)

Close to 19% of all high-end office space in Manhattan was available for lease in the fourth quarter of 2022, according to brokerage Savills, up from 11.5% in early 2019.