What I’ve been reading (and watching) this week ending 7 September 2025
At least five interesting things: You Can’t Just Do Things edition (#69)
“I think the recent evidence points at a deeper truth, which is that many of the social ills we believe result from low income — drug use, poor health, broken families, violence, and so on — might not be solvable by giving people more TVs, sofas, cars, and cell phones. Material goods are important, but they aren’t everything, and we should be looking for additional ways to help poor people lead happier lives.”
“American universities have transformed themselves to act as high-value training centers for rich kids and low-value diploma mills for working-class kids.”
“U.S. conservatives look across the pond at that failure, and they think “We can’t let that happen here.” They don’t understand that America is much sunnier than the UK and has a lot more land, and that green energy is therefore potentially much cheaper here than there.”
“Hakan Kara and Alp Simsek have a new paper explaining what happened when Turkey’s President Erdogan decided to take over monetary policy and force interest rates down.”
6 reasons why tariffs are a terrible way to raise revenue
- Tariffs distort consumption
- Tariffs distort both consumption and work
- Tariffs reduce productivity
- Tariffs are bad at redistribution
- Tariffs are a tax on growth
- Tariffs invite wasteful rent-seeking
A boring theory of the populist right
“If decent people decide to shun everyone who fails to embrace certain progressive cultural values, then we end up with a bunch of very indecent people winning elections and everyone standing around wondering what happened.”
Reflections — Part Two — Psych Safety
“If we really want to work on psychological safety, if we really want people to feel able to speak up in the way that works for them, then just as we would never try to “fix” someone’s accent, we also need to refrain from pathologising speech differences and trying to “fix” them. Fix systems, not people.”
Self awareness and the luck-skill gap | Seth’s Blog
“If we’ve done the reading and shown up to do the work, if we’ve built skills and muscles but haven’t succeeded yet, it’s easy to be hindered by self-doubt that might not be valid or useful. Acknowledging the luck we haven’t received yet can open the door to better decisions and more persistence.”
Why “‘no’ is a complete sentence” is dangerous advice
“There’s a popular saying that “‘no’ is a complete sentence,” and I would categorize this under “advice that sounds good in theory but is dangerous in practice.”
I’d say more that it’s advice that sounds good to novices and dumb to experienced practitioners.
Reminds me of On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit | Judgment and Decision Making | Cambridge Core
Excellence Isn’t an Accident: Mentorship as the Engine of Mastery — Lean Enterprise Institute
“Excellence isn’t an accident. It’s the byproduct of mastery, achieved by learning from those more experienced, carried forward one generation at a time; embedded in the way the work is done.”
The Neuroscience of Goals and Behavior Change — PMC
How to make a horse a friend. One cowboy’s partnership with horses
Speed versus Quickness — Slightly East of New
“It seems to me that it is important to appreciate that the difference between speed, quickness, and initiative is crucial. When it came to the OODA loop, Boyd, after considerable thought, came to view “quickness” as the crucial factor related to what many people confuse with raw speed. That is because he is describing the interaction of multiple opposing OODA loops in conflict and cooperation, and a focus on absolute speed can lead one astray.”
“If people only work for themselves rather than for the betterment of the group, society becomes less functional. Untapped potential remains if individuals are irrationally pitted against each other rather than united towards progress.”
