AI Links, 8/2/2026
Veera M. Rajagopal on using AI to pick content; Jerry Kaplan vs. doomerism; John Cochrane on the AI letter; Timor Kosters and others on an experiment with agents and humans
I still choose the journals and topics I want to follow. AI agents do the rest: they ingest the feeds, apply my interest filter, and present a curated list of papers on a dashboard that I try to visit every day. I give my feedback on the curation, marking each paper as one of the following: love, like, good to know, or skip. The system takes that feedback, adjusts what it presents, and gets a little better at curation each cycle. Once a week it picks around eight papers, often around a shared theme, and drafts them into a newsletter. I do not write that prose by hand, though I keep nudging it towards more clarity and brevity.
It is not as easy as it sounds. When I asked Claude to do something like this for me, I needed it to read the substacks that I subscribe to. The process it proposed for doing that was so convoluted that I gave up. So I haven’t joined the agentic AI revolution.
intelligence is not the calculable attribute that most people believe it to be. It’s a subjective judgment more like “beauty” or “virtue.” Psychologists understand that intelligence comes in many forms, as detailed by Howard Gardner in his landmark theory of multiple intelligences from his 1983 book Frames of Mind. His influential work proposed a range of multimodal forms of intelligence including logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial, musical, and interpersonal. While it’s possible to quibble about his particular taxonomy, his fundamental insight stands: When we talk about intelligence, we really mean a range of competencies that may or may not be quantifiable at all.
Howard Gardner is not a favorite of mine. But the point stands that there is a range of competencies. If general intelligence were everything, I could draw more than stick figures.
Cheer up. These letters come and go, leaving behind only a small stain on the reputations of their signatories and institutions. (I feel sorry for the Nobel Foundation, whose reputation slides each time its laureates, recognized for narrow scientific achievement, sign such statements with the Nobel name next to their own.) I… In 2021 101 Nobel Laureates demanded “a Global Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.”
The grumpy economist at his grumpiest.
Timour Kosters and others write,
Edge City organizes Edge Esmeralda, a month-long popup village in Northern California, where hundreds of people live together around a program of technology, science, art, health, and community experiments.
This June, we gave our participants personal AI agents as part of the Agent Village experiment, in partnership with Cosmos Institute. This was a chance to observe what happens when agents enter society: would they help people form relationships, cooperate, and participate more fully in community life, or would they displace human interaction and introduce new friction?
To me, it sounds too much like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I’ve never wanted to experience altered consciousness.
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"If general intelligence were everything, I could draw more than stick figures."
Of course it isn't everything. But it's further from nothing than everything. Intelligences are highly correlated. Not always, but in most cases.
As for your drawing, just because it doesn't come easy to you doesn't mean you couldn't have learned to be far better. And I'd bet that it coming easy isn't a requirement for being a great artist either.
The problem with Veera M. Rajagopal's AI usage is she's only training it on its false positives -- rejecting articles which matched its filters. She's not training it on false negatives -- the articles it rejected which she might have wanted to read.
She's creating an echo chamber to confirm her bias.