Bret Swanson

“The goal is not to bring back old industries & old jobs with old capital goods [but] to help traditional industries — manufacturing, transportation, retail, healthcare, food, education, energy — to transform…using a mix of physical capital and cutting edge technology.”

The story behind the New York Times’ 1903 claim that human flight was between one and ten million years away is even worse than it looks. Once you understand the backstory, you realize that the New York Times story is not really about flight at all but about how elites and credentialed “experts” mistake their own failures for the boundaries of possibility. The New York Times did not dismiss the possibility of powered flight at random. There was a very specific reason behind it. At the time, America’s most prominent scientific authority, Smithsonian Secretary Samuel Langley, had been showered with large amounts of taxpayer funding to build an aircraft, the Langley Aerodrome. Despite all the money, institutional backing, and elite prestige, Langley and his team could not get it to fly, culminating in a series of very public failures, the last on December 8, 1903. So when the New York Times declared that flight was millions of years away, what it was really saying was that if the most credentialed and well-funded “experts” cannot do it, then it cannot be done. A mere nine days later, the elites’ proclamation of impossibility lay in ruins. Two totally unknown bicycle mechanics from Ohio achieved the first powered flight using improvised parts, a few hundred dollars of their own money, and sheer persistence. The story of flight is, at its core, a story of the triumph of American individualism over elite credentialism. The fact that it was the New York Times that inadvertently delivered the proof is the most fitting conclusion imaginable.

Best breakdown of Karpathy's "second brain" system I've seen. My co-founder turned it into an actual step-by-step build. The 80/20: 1. Three folders: raw/ (dump everything), wiki/ (AI organizes it), outputs/ (AI answers your questions) 2. One schema file (CLAUDE.md) that tells the AI how to organize your knowledge. Copy the template in the article. 3. Don't organize anything by hand. Drop raw files in, tell the AI "compile the wiki." Walk away. 4. Ask questions against your own knowledge base. Save the answers back. Every question makes the next one better. 5. Monthly health check: have the AI flag contradictions, missing sources, and gaps. 6. Skip Obsidian. A folder of .md files and a good schema beats 47 plugins every time. He includes a free skill that scaffolds the whole system in 60 seconds.

I concluded my Henry Family lecture at the University of Miami last Thursday by saying: “Two things are important right now in life: deep learning and fertility. Everything else is noise.” We are only starting to glimpse what these two forces will do to global life over the next fifty years. And they interact: deep learning will reshape demographics, and demographic collapse will reshape automation. Nearly all my posts on X (except some parochial commentary on Spanish economic policy) revolve around these two facts. So does most of my current research. Even work that does not seem directly connected turns out to be, once you look carefully. My papers on geoeconomics and international macro are about figuring out some of the consequences of deep learning and fertility. For example, my work on China focuses on its abysmal demographic future and how the U.S. is positioning itself (rightly or wrongly) to address it. And my work on political polarization and the welfare state is about the consequences of decades of low fertility in Western Europe. When people talk about political change in Western Europe, they are talking about low fertility, whether they know it or not. It is not clear that modern representative democracy can survive sustained fertility rates of 1.3. I do not say that with glee. The reason I decided to spend my life on academic work in economics is that I realized, when I was much younger, that daily events are irrelevant. The things that concern the media and 99 percent of commentary on X are largely irrelevant. One political party does better or worse in the next electoral cycle because of internal fights or a good campaign. At a fundamental level, none of it matters: the political outcome 25 years from now will not depend on those accidents. As Alexander Gerschenkron said, Clio is not a tidy housewife. The rise of any political movement is always full of advances and retreats. Social change waxes and wanes. But at the end of the day, as my favorite historian Fernand Braudel put it: “The events of history are merely surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.” or in the much better original: “Les événements de l’histoire ne sont que des agitations de surface, des crêtes d’écume que les marées de l’histoire portent sur leur dos puissant.” The tides of history today are deep learning and fertility.

My paper showing that the famous multiple-spill Pekar paper got its conclusion upside down by a math error is now published. Links below. I think that the press who covered the original should cover the real result with the opposite (single spill) conclusion.

Yes, the lab leak theory turned out to almost certainly false.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink: The "woke era" was "a failed experiment"

‘But there is a huge fracture on the Right’ (!?!)

“In engineering, you are peer reviewed by reality”. From Rory Sutherland, in this week’s Spectator.

Our history students spend 45 minutes a day voluntarily learning geography. Every break, Every lunch... Same thing... GeoGuesser. So we asked the obvious question: Why doesn't this exist for history? We built it. You watch AI footage from a time and place in history. Then you guess where and when it happened. They love it.

Yes, the lab leak theory turned out to almost certainly false.

Offhand — * Vacillation on masks, with abundant motivated reasoning in every case. * Promulgation of made-up thresholds with no evidentiary basis (e.g. 6 feet). * Authoritarian delight in nanny state intrusiveness (policing the beach and such). * 180 on many issues around BLM. * Lack of effective response from science funding bodies. * Denial of aerosolized transmission. * Changing of trial readouts so that they’d occur after the election. (Confirmed to me by senior OWS officials.) * Crazy criteria for vaccine distribution. * Adamant insistence on vaccine efficacy beyond what was supported by data. * Almost complete lack of follow-through on OWS (on pan-variant vaccines). I’m sure there are more, but those are the ones that stick out.

Great thread and one addition: Increased risk of myocarditis in young boys. The demonization of parents who asked, the denials by healthcare professionals and bureaucrats, and ultimately, the admission and subsequent FDA warning proving parents worst fears correct. It will take generations to recover from COVID authoritarianism.

A question for everyone: survey data suggests that by the end of the Covid-19 emergency trust in public health institutions had decreased significantly. If you are among the people who reacted that way, why specifically? I'm hoping for long, diverse, individualized answers.

Offhand — * Vacillation on masks, with abundant motivated reasoning in every case. * Promulgation of made-up thresholds with no evidentiary basis (e.g. 6 feet). * Authoritarian delight in nanny state intrusiveness (policing the beach and such). * 180 on many issues around BLM. * Lack of effective response from science funding bodies. * Denial of aerosolized transmission. * Changing of trial readouts so that they’d occur after the election. (Confirmed to me by senior OWS officials.) * Crazy criteria for vaccine distribution. * Adamant insistence on vaccine efficacy beyond what was supported by data. * Almost complete lack of follow-through on OWS (on pan-variant vaccines). I’m sure there are more, but those are the ones that stick out.