Sam Enright works on innovation policy at Progress Ireland, an independent policy think tank in Dublin, and runs the publication Fitzwilliam. Most relevant to us, he writes a summary of popular links on his personal blog. Below is a condensed version of his links from January.
Blog and short links
1. Henry Oliver on Literary Day 2026. Henry is also looking to hire an intern to study John Stuart Mill. I hope the intern will discuss Mill’s essay on Indian political economy and ranked voting with me. I think it’s more interesting than about freedom.
2. From my colleague Sean O’Neill McPartlin: In political debates, high rents and land prices are often blamed on “speculators,” but the use of that term is so philosophically confusing that I can’t help but think that many such arguments are wrong. Peter McLaughlin said:
Great insight Sean, I had never noticed it before. When people blame speculation for rising home prices, they are often referring to two completely different practices that actually have opposite effects. In some cases, that means buying up land, refusing to sell it, or holding out for a better deal. Or it could mean over-trading and frequent overselling due to the financialization of housing. Nevertheless, people still talk about “speculation” as if it were a unified thing and had a single effect (increase) on house prices.
3. The European Union’s “single market” is allowed to decline and disappear. I was recently talking about this blog post over drinks, and I was saddened when a Dutchman referred to me in the third person as a “self-righteous European” (as if I wasn’t European at all). Please note that the specific numbers in this post, namely that EU member states effectively impose a 45% tariff on goods and 110% on services, are extremely misleading.
4. In addition to the Great Firewall, some Chinese provinces are racing to introduce additional censorship beyond that required by the central government. Henan province is a leader in this field. It is becoming increasingly common for Chinese websites to block access from non-mainland IP addresses. A friend of mine who consults with multinational companies on business in China says he never thought in his career that it would be possible to deploy a VPN in China.
5. As befits a Tyler Cowen post about the utilitarian track record of US-backed regime change, this entire page is insane.
I can certainly think of a more dignified way to depose a dictator than a Navy SEAL rickroll.
6. Congratulations to Jamie Lambrough, who won the Gated Sydney Prize from David Brooks for his Works in Progress work on Manhattan’s elaborate network of steam tunnels.
7. Poll analysis: 12% of Americans claim to have a license to operate a submarine. Is the Lizardman constant on the rise?
8. Thomas Nagel, “What It’s Like to Be a Bat,” Psalms.
9. Introduction to the Mahabharata and Ramayana by Sam Mendelsohn. It seems best to read the illustrated version. The section cut from the final draft of my essay “Notes on Taiwan” contained some speculation (which I still don’t know) as to why Eastern classics are so long compared to Western classics. I really like this quote by AK Ramanujan.
No Indian reads the Mahabharata for the first time.
This useful comment on Marginal Revolution provides further background on Indian oral culture.
music and podcasts
1. From the Works in Progress Podcast: Anton Howes talks about how Henry VIII accidentally started the Industrial Revolution. There is a lot of significant overlap between the discussion here and Anton’s session at the Adam Smith conference.
2. Seun Kuti, Egypt 80, even heavier (laying down his uncrowned head). My favorite song is Day. I also enjoyed Radiolab explaining Fela Kuti’s important role in the history of Afrobeats. And here’s a 12-part series on fellatio excerpted from that episode. Egypt 80 (formerly Africa 70) is Fela’s band, currently led by his son Seun.
3. Dave Chappelle stands and says that if jobs moved from China to America, the price of an iPhone would go up to $9,000. He was right. The only American-made smartphone uses 10-year-old technology and costs $2,000. Not surprisingly, it’s called the Liberty Phone.
4. Charles Lloyd, Zakir Hussain, Eric Harland, Sangam. Great Indian style jazz fusion. I wrote about it in January 2025 as a criminally underrated subgenre. Dancing on One Foot is the most accessible track. See also Batson’s first explorations in Indian classical music.
5. Was Michel Foucault a liberal?As with many of the questions Rasheed Griffiths asks, I suspect that Betteridge’s Law of Headlines applies.
books and articles
1. Various benefits beyond inference: Reduce forgetting of general abilities in large-scale inference models. Read it in my AI Journal Club. This club was an experimental “wisdom of the crowd” format. We read this paper to make a collective judgment about what to bet on Gavin Leach’s market predictions about whether reinforcement learning will harm off-target capabilities before looking at market rates. Being a fair-minded centrist, I answered 50%.
I think this paper was well above my level, but I’m still at the “recognize some terms and talk about their meanings with Claude” stage. But you can learn a lot from it too. Reading a computer science paper is a very different paradigm than reading something like philosophy or history. That is, “reading” is secondary to actually implementing the techniques yourself. Claude Code is very helpful, but I’m still a beginner.
Reinforcement learning is probably one of the easiest areas of computer science for economists to learn. The basic mathematical mechanics (value functions, dynamic programming, fixed point theorems) will be familiar to anyone considering a PhD in a quantum-focused department.
“Reinforcement learning”, like inference, is also one of those terms that is being used by younger generations in a very confusing way, unlike its previous usage over the decades. Sometimes I hear people use RL as if it were synonymous with the entire post-training phase of an LLM. At least in Richard Sutton’s textbook, RL is a set of methods for learning how to maximize cumulative reward in an environment that can be modeled as a Markov decision-making process. According to this definition, it seems debatable whether reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) should be counted as real RL. We also sometimes use “RL” when talking about things like supervised fine-tuning, which is clearly not RL. So I think my contribution to this group was really that of a philosopher. The first question claimed that most people are confused by a failure to parse semantic distinctions that they find cumbersome and pedantic.
2. Andrew Brown, JD Bernal: The Sage of Science. One of the most underrated science books I’ve ever read. I believe that John Desmond Bernal was one of the great scientific polymaths of the 20th century. I have thousands of words of notes about this book and would like to someday start profiling his work at Asimov Publishing.
3. Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, The Logical Theoretical Machine. A paper resulting from the Dartmouth Summer Workshop on AI. Logic Theorist was an automated theorem proving program that ran on RAND’s JOHNIAC. In this paper, logical theorists were given 52 theorems from Chapter 2 of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, of which they were able to prove 38. In some cases, the proof is more sophisticated than Russell and Whitehead’s proof. Personally, I think this is really great. Already in the 1950s, AI was making unique contributions to mathematics, at least in terms of simplifying existing proofs. In any case, you spent countless hours reading Bertrand Russell last year, and you’ve already accomplished more than I ever expected.
movies and videos
1. Park Chan-wook, there is no other choice (어쩔수가없다). It’s from the director of Two of my favorite Korean movies, The Decision to Leave and Old Boy. This movie doesn’t stick with me as much as Park’s other movies, but it’s light and funny, and I had a good time at the preview screening. The central comedy tool of creating a strangely specialized industry seems like a much bigger problem than one that works very well economically.
The Korean Embassy in Ireland should hold some kind of memorial event for Kevin O’Rourke, the missionary from County Cavan who was the first to translate many of the Korean cultural norms into English. He became a professor at Kyung Hee University, an honorary citizen of South Korea, and the first foreigner to receive a doctorate in Korean literature. A long time ago, I knew some friends of his family from Busan. There are people really everywhere.
2. From YouTube, Amanda Askell talks about Claude’s character training and why Opus 3 was so well tuned. Welch Labs also explains the double descent phenomenon and how it goes against conventional wisdom in statistical learning theory. Finally, at NPR’s small desk are Jacob Collier and Esperanza Spalding.
You can read Sam’s full January Links here.
[1] I recently saw someone on Twitter describe J.S. Mill’s writing style as “an undergraduate with a midnight deadline,” and I probably disagree with that assessment even more than Henry.
[2] Shockingly, “the Henan Provincial Cyberspace Affairs Committee could not be reached for comment.”
[3] I got a copy of Mahabharata with DK illustrations from Mumebai for my old housemate. Perhaps my fondest memory of that apartment was exchanging cultural traits that strangely translated to “I look at your Gujarati Spider-Man and raise you to be your Irish SpongeBob.”
[4] Oddly enough, this effect is driven almost entirely by the one-quarter of Hispanic adults who claim to know how to operate a submarine (!). Are there any Latin American prank traditions I didn’t know about?
[5] I hope this doesn’t come across as sarcastic. It’s a truly amazing feat of engineering.
[6] See section 3.5 of the entry on philosophy of computation in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
