Nikita S

@rSanti97 @dagsen Yay! Congratulations Santi. Thrilled for you and the Anthropic team

Some professional news: I'm joining Anthropic's editorial team! I'll be leading the team's work on economics and policy, and working closely with the Anthropic Institute (about which more here: x.com/AnthropicAI/st…). Dramatic AI progress is coming in the next two years, and researchers+policymakers+the public alike will need the best information available about that shift. It's a big new challenge, and I can’t wait to get started. [Some important housekeeping: I’ll keep running Statecraft at @IFP as a Nonresident Senior Fellow! And will remain on the board at Recoding America/ as a journalist-in-residence at @johnshopkins School of Government and Policy. I start at Anthropic in a few weeks.] The move from frontier think tank to frontier lab is bittersweet. I’ve been at IFP for three years, and it’s been the most formative professional experience of my life. In a short period of time, IFP has become one of the most effective institutions in DC, generating a truly shocking amount of counterfactual policy impact (not all of it public). Being on this team has permanently raised my ambitions. I'm very grateful.

TIL PETA and its founders were some of the earliest vaccine skeptics

@sjsweett That’s the simplest defense but if a state relies on its citizens losing money on parlay bets to pay for healthcare, roads, and schools, the incentive is actually to keep people gambling for a balanced budget Literally the opposite of promoting a healthy, productive society

@singareddynm Isn’t that the point of taxes? To discourage whatever is being taxed?

2026-2027 state budgets are increasingly being funded by “sin taxes”. In deficit, states like Illinois, Maryland, Tennessee, Michigan, Ohio have nearly doubled taxes on vapes, nicotine, and (sports) betting per wager We’ve clearly lost our way, picking vices over productivity

Just waiting for the fitness girlies to pivot into chess

There’s a massive opportunity for AI to completely leapfrog in healthcare. In Kenya, mobile finance emerged because there was no traditional banking system to work around or through. Medicaid's infrastructure is so dated that it effectively functions like "no infrastructure" for the people trying to use it most - many of whom are mobile-first today. Great chat with @singareddynm of @hifortunahealth and @flottobrasil of @CedarNY about what could emerge when you leapfrog the broken system entirely and build something better with AI. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rai…

The military is known for seeding modern computing… but little known for its concerted projects in user experience and human-centered design

@soontechnology @RainmakerCorp yesss @dagsen

Introducing: Soon. A new media company covering the machines, minds, and subcultures of tech's new frontier. Here's a preview of what's to come. Our first documentary, featuring never-before-seen access to @RainmakerCorp's weather modification tech, drops Friday.

In prediction markets, it’s not about winning the future because no one controls outcomes… but someone can be less wrong than someone else. Participation is a thin form of agency to position yourself correctly.

I find this to be remarkably similar to the popularity of prediction markets. Players find themselves without agency AND their institutions don’t seem to have a monopoly on forecasting and shaping the future either: the future becomes something you trade on, not build toward.

Whenever the “rules” of economic organization change, we create parallel games to make sense of them. Chess in Persia trained hierarchy and bureaucratic planning; card games mirrored probability, credit, and insurance; and poker emerged with 19th-century frontier speculation and weak regulations

In the 1950s, AT&T Bell Labs sent technicians to 10 months of humanist education at UPenn (to instill liberal democratic values). IBM taught ethics and public speaking. Tech today promotes empty and prosaic culture of 996, founder mode, etc. Imagine if we more seriously experimented with educating the “organizational man”

Upon further reading… 58.8% of homes in low-income countries have soil, palm, or thatch floors and walls. Cheap concrete flooring - instead of the billions we spend in economic aid - would have a massive ROI on sustainability improving health and economic growth.

I am so serious that there remain many ways to improve the world that are low cost, low hanging fruit. See Mexico and cement:

Whenever I start to believe the world is ugly, meaningless, trite, etc I think of what Rilke wrote to Kappus: "If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches"

@paulinaVEVO !!!! Congratulations you two

Fiancés 😀

One of those days when I am grateful for love - and being in love with my favorite person @danielhavir

@gerstenzang Another example of this is Egyptians being great at squash (strong coaching culture/pipeline since the 1930s)

One thing I continue to be fascinated by: the role of culture in quality. Why are Iranians and South Koreans so good at filmmaking? Why is the food in Montreal great but not in Seattle? It is a set of standards held by craftspeople and reinforced by audience who comes to expect it - not wealth or technology.

Olga Tokarczuk on death of reality:

The infant brain is intentionally “overbuilt” with 100 billion neurons. At 2–3 years old, children have twice as many synapses as an adult! Then their brains go through tremendous cell death for precision rewiring. So every baby... is actually Boss Baby