Sam 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 link from December.
Blog and short links
1. I finished writing my notes about Taiwan. I am satisfied with the response. Marginal Revolution, The Browser, and Conor Friedersdorf’s Best of Journalism list.
2. Appeared on Matt Teichman’s podcast.
3. What should midsized businesses do for their computing strategy?
4. Scientific contributions of the Carlsberg beer company. Guinness from Denmark?!
5. Goodreads for academic papers is finally here. 1 As expected, Gavin Leech is already on board and makes up a significant portion of all content on the website.
6. We are currently welcoming proposals for a new magazine, In Development, focused on developing countries and inspired by our work in progress.
7. From the Fitzwilliam paper: Our essay on why most foreign aid doesn’t leave the country, which, oddly enough, is okay (so far).
8. The Guardian talks about the life of Saul Kripke. If an army of men crawled in front of a group of undergraduates, wouldn’t that make it into the obituary?
During a seminar in a lecture hall where he was recently teaching, [Kripke] It was seen crawling along the center table, reaching out to grab an umbrella, and crawling back again. When asked how he retrieved it, he said he wanted to keep a low profile. It is also worth noting that Kripke was an exception to the general rule that there are no geniuses in philosophy. Kripke taught himself ancient Hebrew by the age of 6, had read the complete works of Shakespeare by the age of 9, and published his first completeness theorem in modal logic at the age of 18.
By pure coincidence, I first learned about Kripke’s theory of causality in a philosophy of language class on the day of Kripke’s death. Later that week, I suffered the biggest burn in my career as a philosopher. When my tutor told me that if Saul Kripke had listened to my current argument, “He would come back to life, only to die again.”
9. Beauty that continually draws attention to things.
10. Best of Wikipedia: Glasgow Ice Cream Wars.
11. Harry Roe’s introduction to the history of AI and an overview of the legacy of the Dartmouth Conference. It’s so funny that Marvin Minsky was HAL’s science advisor in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
music and podcasts
1. Beyond stocks today: Why is the war on drugs responsible for the widespread availability of blueberries?
2. Hiromi, Sonic Wonderland. was discovered through her appearance on the NPR Tiny Desk Concert. My favorite song is “Up”. I haven’t been able to watch the interview with Rick Beat yet, but Hiromi’s performance is moving. You can also listen to a duet with Chick Corea. (If Wikipedia is to be believed) I met her by chance when she was 17 years old and was invited to perform with me on stage later that day.
3. Marginal revolutionaries about their favorite economic models. Listen to a good explanation of why monopoly does not, a priori, mean that the quality of goods is lower than is socially efficient. It is also questionable how many people in Ireland can accurately explain the consequences of Herberger’s general equilibrium capital tax, even though it is fundamentally the intellectual foundation of our economy.
4. Ulkar Agaiwa, Fuga Chaharga. It was my first time listening to Azerbaijani music. A piano fugue inspired by Azerbaijan’s traditional microtonal music, mugham. Urcal also has suites and string trios for cello and piano. She is very talented and I hope to attend her concert soon.
5. Wang Dan talks about what you should do if you want to be China’s leader. What I found most interesting was Sam Bowman and Peter Gallicano’s discussion of what is plaguing the European economy. It’s remarkable how competitive the U.S. banking industry is. I recently tried to open a new bank account and there were literally only three banks in the country to choose from. The experience proved so complicated and unpleasant that I eventually gave up. Meanwhile, about 80% of European companies’ financing comes from bank loans, compared to about 30% in the United States. The quality of financial services is very important.
6. Soham Sankaran talks about starting a vaccine company in India. This reminds me of many conversations I had with Akash Kulgod about his experience expanding Dognosis from Bangalore. Akash would be a great guest on this podcast.
books and articles
1. John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon, proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. This document marked the first official use of the term “artificial intelligence” and set forth the research agenda that would become the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop. 3 Is the importance of the Dartmouth Conference in the history of AI overestimated? Probably so. Are we honored to live in a time where we can read the original proposal, use the magic box to ask questions, and all the problems outlined in that proposal will almost be solved within a human lifetime? And yes, we are.
2. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels. Aside from graphic novels, plays, poetry, and autofiction, this is the only novel I read in 2025. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to read more fiction. In short, Gulliver’s Travels is A++ and probably the best novel I’ve ever read. For further thoughts you will have to wait for my post on Irish Enlightenment.
The Liberty Fund will host a virtual reading session on Gulliver’s Travels on March 4th, 11th, 18th, and 25th from 4:00 to 5:00 pm (EST). Click here for more information.
movies and videos
1. Greg Koes, The Thinking Game. A documentary about Demis Hassabis and the story of Google DeepMind. You can watch the entire episode for free on YouTube. The main new thing I learned was Demise’s role in the development of the 1994 video game Theme Park.
This resulted in a strange display. There is no mention of OpenAI, Anthropic, or ChatGPT at all. If you watch the entire movie, you might get the impression that reinforcement learning in the AlphaGo era is still the dominant paradigm. A significant part of it may equally appear in the 2017 documentary about AlphaGo, one of the best documentaries of all time.
It was also disappointing that there was no mention of Demise’s side job, which is ranked fourth in the world for the board game “Diplomacy.”
2. Edward Yang, Yi Yi (11). My first Taiwanese film, which I discovered by asking Claude Opus 4.5, “What is the best Taiwanese film of all time?” This is Yang’s last film and is a major part of Taiwan’s New Wave. The title means “one by one” and when written vertically it looks like the kanji “2”.
I think this is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. It captured the “relentlessness” of ordinary family life better than any other visual medium I can think of. I later learned that this was one of the few times Scott Sumner gave a movie a perfect score.
At one point, a character says something to the effect that movies triple our lives. We experience much more than we would otherwise. This movie is certainly a good example of that. Like almost all great movies of the 21st century, this one was released in the early 2000s. Not a good sign. I liked the wide age range of the main characters. The scene towards the end where father and daughter go on a formal date in tandem is spectacular. You can read Sam’s full December link here.
[1] Thanks to Anuja Uppururi.
[2] No, I don’t actually remember what my argument was.
[3] I also learned that the Dartmouth Conference is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
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