Some Links

Alice Evans on cultural transmission; Thomas Sowell's web site; me on health care regulation; Moses Sternstein and Noah Smith on the risks of an AI bubble

Alice Evans says,

I'm going to sound like a right-wing conservative, but whether something is a loser is a function of how the rest of the culture and society responds to it. If progressives do lots of think pieces in the New York Times, and there have been some in the New York Times being pretty sympathetic of people having AI boyfriends, if the New York Times and other outlets don't turn AI boyfriends into losers, then that can raise it into 15%. And then as more of your friends have an AI boyfriend, it becomes 20%.

In case you don’t get the point, she is saying that women having AI boyfriends ought to be considered losers. But high-status elements within the culture could reverse that. I think that sort of thing has happened a lot in recent years.

On his web site, Thomas Sowell writes,

In many of our most prestigious educational institutions,
you can go literally from kindergarten to the Ph.D., without
ever encountering an argument that differs fundamentally
from whatever beliefs are being indoctrinated in these
institutions. Such indoctrination has long been common in
totalitarian dictatorships. But, in recent times, it has also
become increasingly widespread in American educational,
corporate and other institutions.

…This website provides an alternative way that people can
access information and viewpoints that differ from the
prevailing indoctrination viewpoints. There are vast sources
of factual information, analysis and viewpoints that allow
people to decide for themselves what they want to believe.

…The ultimate purpose of this website is not to simply replace particular beliefs on particular subjects with different beliefs on those subjects. What is crucial, for young people especially, is to develop and exercise the ability to confront opposing beliefs and put those beliefs to tests of facts and logic.

If you visit the web site, prepare yourself for a lot of in-your-face conservatism. I am inclined to prefer his own writings to the other links that one finds there.

Here is a podcast, courtesy of The Podcast Browser, in which Sowell talks about the web site. Or watch on YouTube.

Reviewing a book by Jeffrey Singer, I write,

Singer opposes the War on Drugs.

• If the government ended its war on drugs, people would be able to purchase them from legal suppliers. They would comparison shop. They would know with confidence the drugs they are buying, the dosage, and the purity. (page 151)

With marijuana legalization, it does not appear to me that consumers have become so well informed and protected. Purity and dosage are more reliable in the case of alcohol, which is heavily regulated.

Noah Smith writes,

if we believe this basic story of when to be afraid of capex busts, it means that we have to care about who is lending money to these Big Tech companies to build all these data centers. That way, we can figure out whether we’re worried about what happens to those lenders if Big Tech can’t pay the money back.

…But what about all this “private credit”? These are the potentially scary part. Private credit funds are basically companies that take investment, borrow money, and then lend that money out in private (i.e. opaque) markets.

Moses Sternstein writes,

the molten core of this investment is coming straight from hyperscaler profits, as opposed to lots of leverage and/or bets on the farm.

In general, there just isn’t all that much private sector leverage, relative to crises past, and so cascading ‘Minsksy Cycles’ are less likely to be in the offing.

My worry is that there is bank debt that could suffer from a big stock market correction. I have no specific information, just a cynical viewpoint that when there is a bubble, banks find a way to participate.

substacks referenced above:

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AI revenue goes mobile (and why 'Will Data Centers Crash the Economy?' is the wrong question)

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Will data centers crash the economy?

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Are Men & Women Scrolling Apart? Podcast with John Burn-Murdoch