Good tokens 2025-10-31
A very happy 🎃 Halloween 🦇 to you and yours.
Worth your time
The most American Building. My grandfather slept in it while it was unfinished in between training stops in World War 2. My father took classes in it. I went to it on field trips. It’s a wonderful building.
Preach, Nabeel, Preach. I wonder why “education” rather than “age” has been what has sorted our politics 🤔.
On relationship between growth and trust, arguing that living through periods of higher GDP growth leads to higher societal trust. On one level, this squares well with the idea that trust is a mixture of competence, commitment, and character, with societies delivering growth being seen as competent. On the other hand, I would expect higher levels of trust to also unlock opportunities for faster growth.
Things I learned
Home field advantage in the NFL is actually real and it basically disappeared in 2020 when no fans were in the stadiums. Via Crémieux.
More than 98% of new vehicle sales in Norway were EVs in September. From Elective via Anton.
Unconfirmed but from a reliable source: Amazon drivers are paid 12 cents per package delivered.
A growing share of Americans (+13%) say Religion is gaining influence in American life according to Pew. I’m not sure how to square this with the thing I learned last week, that support for declaring the United States a Christian Nation is falling amongst Christians or that the fastest growing Catholic sects are the strictest ones. Strange things are happening!
For the first time in 35 years, no rap songs are in the top 40. Rolling Stone.
Musings
Should we care about process or outcomes? Some really successful people (see Tom Brady here ) seem more to favor the process over the result while others favor the result over the process (see Phil Knight / Nike and Sam Altman). How should I make sense of this?
What would have to change for Western Society to become less individualistic? Is it possible for Western Society to become more individualistic? What would it look like to short individualism?
LLM corner
Episode 3 of Dangerously Skip Permissions is next week: LLM pricing is broken, but not in the way that you think with my friend Anjali Shrivastava.