Samson Wong

Sam I am. Let me make you some green eggs and ham.

[Hunter Ash @ArtemisConsort]

One major reason I’m not an AI doomer is that I have a much lower estimate of the direct power of intelligence.

This might seem odd, given some of my other content, but let me explain:

All the achievements of the human mind only arrive when we cooperate at scale, and involve a lot of iteration and real-world bottlenecks. Newton’s discoveries ultimately enabled us to fly, but they didn’t give Newton the power to fly. If he were isolated, his physics would be almost entirely useless to him.

And it’s not just that he couldn’t build an airplane on his own, it’s that he couldn’t design one on his own. Powered flight was the result of tons of iteration, which is to say evolutionary computation. So was the car. Very few of the inventions that revolutionized the world were “one-shotted”. To be sure, having smart nodes in your evolutionary computation makes it faster. Rather than random search as in biological evolution, intelligence at least modestly concentrates mutation probabilities towards more fit forms. This is a big deal, but it isn’t magic.

Fundamentally, the world is just not that compressible. Golden motes of compressibility are the treasured exceptions in thingspace, not the rule. I expect the post-AGI future will look much the same. Change will be much faster, but it will still be iterative, cooperative, and bottlenecked by the messy incompressibility of physical reality.

Doom makes sense in a world with magic. If intelligence *alone* allowed you to move mountains, I would share the worries. But we don’t live in that world. Here, great things are achieved gradually, iteratively, and cooperatively. Pure IQ does not allow you to levitate or hypnotize or teleport. It makes you a better node in the distributed evolutionary process which is the layer where most of the thinking happens.

If I were to psychologize, I’d say people who define themselves by their intelligence overestimate the (direct) power of intelligence.

[Samson Wong @oneguardsam]

@scorplingg If you had god APM, you would still bane-bust. =)

[The Book of Barnett @BookOfBarnett]

Best thing about the Elam Ending is there is always a game winner shot

[Ethan Strauss @SherwoodStrauss]

The solution is staring us right in the face

[The Book of Barnett @BookOfBarnett]

Who will be the Jerry West and Bob Meyers of the rebuild?

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

I’ve always found people who bristle at “American exceptionalism” kind of… weird. Not because I lack self-awareness — I’ve spent my career cataloging every way this country fails to live up to its own rules. But that’s exactly why I love it so damn much. We built a system designed to be shamed by its own founding documents, and it still delivered one of the most spectacular, world-altering runs in human history. A genuine force for human flourishing.

I also found the argument against American exceptionalism to be historically illiterate. Here’s a sample of what we were first at:

• The first large-scale democratic republic in human history — not a city-state, not a monarchy with a parliament bolted on, but a bold continental experiment in self-rule, popular sovereignty, and ordered liberty.

• A written Constitution (1789) with separation of powers and checks & balances — still the oldest national constitution in force anywhere.

• The Bill of Rights (1791): the first time a nation wrote “the government cannot touch these” into supreme law and actually meant it. A dare the world copied — from later rights charters to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

• Public land-grant universities and mass higher education (Morrill Act), opening college to ordinary people no aristocracy would have let near the gates. (but don’t get me started about what happened after we started. Massively federally funding it.)

• Kitty Hawk, 1903 — first controlled powered flight.

• The Moon, 1969 — still the only ones who’ve been there.

• The world’s largest economy since ~1890, powering unprecedented prosperity through grit and genius.

• The assembly line, skyscraper, transistor, personal computer, ARPANET — the backbone of the modern world.

• Telephone, phonograph, GPS — connecting and powering daily life.

• Surgical anesthesia, polio vaccine — saving and transforming millions of lives.

• Jazz, blues, rock ‘n’ roll — brand new American art forms that conquered the globe.

• Hollywood’s dreams, blue jeans, bourbon, and a culture so open a kid like me could devour sushi, burritos, stuffed cabbage, and tabouli in the same week and rightfully think of it all as American.

That’s the part that fills me with genuine love and pride: not just the power or the wins, but the appetite for freedom, creativity, and reinvention. The audacity to say “We the People” and keep trying to live up to it.

What do you love most about this truly exceptional country? 🇺🇸

[George Michael Official @GeorgeMOfficial]

“How can you end WHAM! any more perfectly than in front of 72,000 people, still good friends, with a record at number one?” Today we are celebrating 40 years since George and Andrew performed their last show together at Wembley Stadium in 1986.

[s.corp @scorplingg]

Bro said My life for Aiur.

[Ethan Strauss @SherwoodStrauss]

At House of Strauss, we NEVER take a long, nuanced podcast discussion, and advertise it with a provocative, engagement-seeking clip. And certainly never one of @bomani_jones

[George Michael Official @GeorgeMOfficial]

“To me, the length of time a song survives in society is its ultimate test… and the fact these songs are still around and still being played on the radio is the absolute greatest compliment I could be paid” 🎶

[s.corp @scorplingg]

Starcraft 2

[Herm @HermNBA]

Stephen Curry top 10 career plays.

[Colin Wright @SwipeWright]

Podcasting lets people speak vaguely about a topic while creating the impression of thorough treatment. I’ve often pushed back on something a podcaster posted on X, only to be told by their fans that it was “thoroughly addressed” somewhere in a three-hour podcast.

But when I listen to the relevant section, it doesn’t deliver. It’s often just more vagueness and dancing around the issue, avoiding making direct, falsifiable claims they can be held to.

There’s a reason many podcasters don’t write articles about the topics they discuss. Writing forces them to make coherent arguments without fluff. It forces them to connect every link between premise and conclusion. It forces them to cite sources accurately instead of speaking vaguely off the cuff.

It’s also easier to be misled by smooth-talking podcasters. People like listening to podcasts because spoken language is the more natural way humans have received information throughout our evolutionary history. But that doesn’t mean it’s the best way to communicate with precision. It’s not.

Podcasters also form relationships with their audiences. They speak to them like friends, even like family. None of this is necessarily a bad thing, but it can lead people to lower their standards for accepting the claims they make.

A statement communicated verbally by a skilled orator can sound convincing, when the same statement written down plainly would seem absurd. This is why people who both write well and speak eloquently—think Douglass Murray and Christopher Hitchens—are so influential.

Podcasting also puts a moat around claims due to the effort required to extract the relevant information. Fewer people are willing to wade through long episodes, constantly hitting ⏩ to find the segment in question, and then transcribe the audio into text.

Podcasters can also more easily claim they were taken out of context, whether due to clipping or failing to have watched the previous week’s 3-hour episode that supposedly laid all the groundwork. It’s more difficult to claim this when your arguments are stated clearly and succinctly in writing.

Podcasts are great. But anyone presenting themselves as a public intellectual and making serious, high-stakes claims about the world needs to do more than talk. They need to write.

[Josh Billinson @jbillinson]

This is really exciting news for anyone who thinks the shared collective experience of live sports is actually a bad thing

[s.corp @scorplingg]

aiya

[s.corp @scorplingg]

Starcraft 2

[Samson Wong @oneguardsam]

@LombardiHimself Can you explain what's going on with the triangles and squares in your graphic? I'm assuming they represent defensive players and formations. But how exactly? #confused

[George Michael Official @GeorgeMOfficial]

"That was the first moment that I ever remember thinking, 'I could write that but better'" - George talking about being 14 years old and listening to music on a tape machine 📻

[George Michael Official @GeorgeMOfficial]

In December 1984 George was part of the 1984 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' Band Aid release 🎤